East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the Zionist vision?

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement or a Western‐civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement.     

Missionaries,Healing and Sorcery in Melanesia: A Scottish Evangelist in Ambrym Island,Vanuatu

Melanesian people have recently become highly occupied with history as an arena for moral scrutiny and causal explanations for contemporary failures. On the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, this form of ontological worry goes back to the first missionaries on the island, the Murray brothers. This article takes us back to events in the 1880s when the missionaries were active on Ambrym, and searches into their social position. Drawing on the diary of Charles Murray, the main argument unfolds around his involvement in the realm of men's ritual powers, how he himself played his part as a highly knowledgeable magician and how his downfall came about by challenging a manly realm of knowledge and power and his wider inclusion of women and lesser men in his church.     

Chiang Kai-shek’s faith in Christianity: the trial of the Stilwell Incident

Chiang Kai-shek’s faith in Christianity has long been a controversial issue. Some have held that his faith was genuine while others have claimed that it was merely a posture to curry favor with the Americans. Now that the Hoover Institution has released Chiang Kai-shek’s diaries, historians are in a better position to explore this long-ignored part of Chiang’s life. This paper will examine Chiang’s faith as it developed during the Stilwell Incident, the most serious crisis of US–China military cooperation during World War II. While facing American pressure to grant military command to General Joseph W. Stilwell, Chiang reveals in his diaries how he relied on his faith in the Bible, how he interpreted the Bible, and how he applied his understanding of the Bible to his political decision making. An examination of Chiang’s diary during this crisis will help us understand his practical relationship with Christianity, which in turn will provide insight into Chiang’s attitudes and methods in dealing with the Stilwell Incident.     

Saussure and his intellectual environment

SUMMARY

The present study paints the intellectual environment in which Ferdinand de Saussure developed his ideas about language and linguistics during the fin de siècle. It sketches his dissatisfaction with that environment to the extent that it touched on linguistics, and shows the new course he was trying to steer on the basis of ideas that seemed to open new and exciting perspectives, even though they were still vaguely defined. As Saussure himself was extremely reticent about his sources and intellectual pedigree, his stance in the lively European cultural context in which he lived can only be established through textual critique and conjecture. On this basis, it is concluded that Saussure, though relatively uninformed about its historical roots, essentially aimed at integrating the rationalist tradition current in the sciences in his day into a new, ‘scientific’ general theory of language. In this, he was heavily indebted to a few predecessors, such as the French philosopher-psychologist Victor Egger, and particularly to the French psychologist, historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, who was a major cultural influence in nineteenth-century France, though now largely forgotten. The present study thus supports Hans Aarsleff's analysis, where, for the first time, Taine's influence is emphasised, and rejects John Joseph's contention that Taine had no influence and that, instead, Saussure was influenced mainly by the romanticist Adolphe Pictet. Saussure abhorred Pictet's method of etymologising, which predated the Young Grammarian school, central to Saussure's linguistic education. The issue has implications for the positioning of Saussure in the history of linguistics. Is he part of the non-analytical, romanticist and experience-based European strand of thought that is found in art and postmodernist philosophy and is sometimes called structuralism, or is he a representative of the short-lived European branch of specifically linguistic structuralism, which was rationalist in outlook, more science-oriented and more formalist, but lost out to American structuralism? The latter seems to be the case, though phenomenology, postmodernism and art have lately claimed Saussure as an icon.     

Leviathans Old and New: What Collingwood Saw in Hobbes

Summary

R. G. Collingwood presented his major work of political philosophy, The New Leviathan, as an updated version of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. However, his reasons for taking Hobbes's great work as his inspiration have puzzled and eluded many Collingwood scholars, while those interested in the reception of Hobbes's ideas have largely neglected the New Leviathan. In this essay I reveal what Collingwood saw in Hobbes's political philosophy and show how his reading of Hobbes both diverges from other prominent interpretations of the time and invites us to reassess Hobbes's complex association with the origins of liberalism. In doing so, I focus on Collingwood's science of mind, his ideas on society and authority, and his dialectical theory of politics, in each case showing how he engaged with Hobbes in order to elucidate his own vision of civilisation. That vision is based on the development of social consciousness, which involves people coming to understand the body politic as a joint enterprise whereby they confer authority upon those who rule.     

A Russian Version of Christian Realism: Spiritual Wisdom and Politics in the Thought of S. L. Frank (1877–1950)

Christian realism is a concept normally associated with the US theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr. However, Niebuhr was not alone in warning Christians of the dangers of utopianism and trying to promote a religiously inspired political realism; thinkers from a number of countries had similar aspirations. In this context, the Russian philosopher Semyon Liudvigovich Frank (1877–1950) deserves particular attention. A Marxist in his youth, Frank became disillusioned with revolutionary ideas before and after the 1905 revolution, and was drawn away from politics to philosophy. However, he remained interested in political questions, both while he was in Russia and after he was forced into exile in 1922. This found expression in the 1940s in a form of Christian realism. Frank rejected the doctrine ‘the end justifies the means.’ But he was a gradualist in his approach to social change, believing that politicians needed to have a pragmatic attitude of mind. A distinctive feature of Frank's approach was the connection he made between spiritual inwardness on the one hand and effective decision-making on the other, although he also saw spirituality as arising in a social context. Ultimately, there was a mystical dimension to Frank's Christian realism that was absent in Niebuhr's doctrine.     

The Idea of a Good and Bad Gemeinschaft in William Bloke Modisane’s Autobiography,Blame Me on History

William Bloke Modisane, the African writer and journalist, attracted wide notice with his autobiography, Blame Me on History, which was banned in South Africa in 1963, the year in which it received its first publication. The sociologist's interest in Modisane's autobiography can be located in several basic themes (among these can be counted the problem of his cultural dilemma as a member of the African middle class), but for present purposes, we need to note only one aspect of the book which I think has been constantly ignored, namely the sociological tradition that informs the meaning of his concept of the community— Sophiatown. The name “Sophiatown” carries a profoundly important meaning in Modisane's autobiography. I will argue that in the sociological sense in which the Drum writer uses the name, he articulates the central notions of what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies regards as a Gemeinschaft social order. There is a different, though related, point that needs to be made about Modisane's use of the term “community”: if we read his book carefully, we can see that it contains two different narratives about Sophiatown, a positive one which appears to have been slightly romanticised, and a negative one, which focuses on the community's darker side, showing it up to have been a Gemeinschaft in an unusual way. It is through this binary opposition that Modisane creates in his autobiography that he shows his ambiguity with regard to his Gemeinschaft community.     

Reconsidering John Sergeant's Attacks on Locke's Essay

The Catholic polemicist John Sergeant published three major works of philosophy towards the end of his literary career, The Method to Science (1696), Solid Philosophy (1697) and Metaphysics (1700). They were highly critical of what Sergeant saw as the idea‐grounded epistemology of the Cartesians and John Locke, whom he labelled ‘ideists’. Previous scholars have interpreted Sergeant's texts as manifestations of his lifelong obsession with certainty, as initially developed in his Restoration polemics against Anglican divines. Using a previously neglected autobiographical letter, it is demonstrated that Sergeant's intentions were very different. Like Edward Stillingfleet and other critics, Sergeant saw Locke's philosophy as inspiring contemporary heterodoxy. The article identifies the specific channels by which Sergeant saw Lockeanism seeping into irreligion. Moreover, unlike Locke's Anglican critics, Sergeant resorted not to polemical accusations, but to abstract philosophy. This must also be explained contextually: Sergeant wished his works to become textbooks at the universities, concerned as he was by the pedagogical impact of the Essay. A premise of this article is that reception history is less useful for elucidating on the meaning of the received text than for telling us something about the intentions of the receiver, and about the intellectual culture in which the process of reception occurs. With this in mind, the article finishes by recontextualizing Sergeant's works within a broader narrative: his was an attempt to reassert the place of philosophy as a propaedeutic to theology in an age when such a conception of philosophy's social role was coming under intense scrutiny.     

Roland Barthes's Soirées de Paris : An alternative view of Parisian night life

This article concerns Roland Barthes's posthumously published Soirées de Paris , a text comprising a series of diary entries dating from the period shortly before the author's death. The article discusses the critical reception of this work in terms of two extreme positions; the first is that the publication of this text is an immoral act of voyeurism, whilst the second is that this text reveals the 'true' homosexual Barthes who was for so long repressed. The article does not concur with either of these views, but argues instead that Barthes's Soirées de Paris does not break radically with his previously published works, but rather develops and continues many of the main themes of his earlier writings, in particular the autobiographical preoccupations to which he had recently turned.     

A.F. Pollard*

A.F. Pollard is now better remembered for founding the Institute of Historical Research than he is for his scholarship. In his heyday, however, Pollard was a formidable and prolific historian, primarily of parliament and the Tudor period. Pollard has been characterised both as a modernist and as a whig historian. Rejecting romantic invocations of liberty, he extolled instead the sovereign nation state, pinpointing the 16th century as the moment when it was achieved. Pollard rejected anachronistic accounts of parliament's development: for him, the assembly had grown by accident (out of the medieval king's council), rather than by design. This adaptability had ensured parliament's longevity and would preserve it into the future. Pollard revered the English parliament all the more for its embodiment of this national good fortune. Pollard helped to professionalise the discipline of history, but his own writings could be found wanting when measured against the standards that he had advocated. Criticism of his approach and assumptions comes easily now. Yet, upon reacquaintance, historians of parliament may find enduring interest in Pollard's shrewd and extensive work.     

An Anglican Clergyman on the Frontier: Benjamin Glennie on the Darling Downs 1848–1860

Benjamin Glennie was an Anglican clergyman on Queensland's Darling Downs from 1851 to 1876. From 1848 until 1860 he kept a diary of his ministry. Using this diary as its primary source, this article considers how Anglicanism was fostered in a frontier society. It argues that being a clergyman in a frontier society was arduous work. Environmental and social conditions made clerical work considerably more challenging than in places were the Church of England enjoyed the privileges of Establishment. Furthermore, the attitude towards religion on the part of frontier settlers is examined. Religious practice was compromised by the exigencies of frontier life, and adherence to religious forms and rituals did not always conform to clerical expectations.     

Wives,Children … Husbands: Supporting Roles

In 1965, Hugo L. Black asked his wife, Elizabeth, to host a dinner party. The purpose: to help him persuade Carolyn Agger, wife of Washington attorney Abe Fortas, to allow her husband to accept President Lyndon B. Johnson's offer of a seat on the Supreme Court. A tax lawyer at the same firm as Fortas, Agger was displeased that the move would mean a big cut in his salary; she thought he should spend a few more years in his lucrative private practice before becoming a judge. After all, he was only fifty‐five. Elizabeth Black described the tense occasion in a diary entry:     

Le statue di marte e venere nel tempio di marte ultore sul foro di augusto 1

This paper explores the question of whether any circumstances, events or activities can be identified that may have made Cicero feel that he and / or other people were experiencing a moment or period of happiness in their private or public lives. By reviewing meaningful excerpts from a variety of Ciceronian works, this contribution presents examples of possible conditions and instances of happiness in Cicero's life (as far as it is possible to discover the feelings of an individual exclusively on the basis of their writings to other people). While Cicero hardly ever mentions preconditions for his own ‘happiness’ or states explicitly that he is ‘happy’, it can be inferred that he took pleasure in a range of situations that are generally regarded as blessings for human beings, such as having a family or a comfortable home. His special intellectual capability and his political career presented Cicero with further possibilities of winning success and satisfaction. Yet Cicero's feelings of happiness in all respects seem to have a basic component oriented towards community. Because Cicero's personal life is so intertwined with his public life and he has also considered the issue philosophically, his emotional disposition in ‘normal’ and ‘extraordinary’ moments is of a particular quality: he was able to derive joy from beliefs such as that he had saved the Republic, beyond the ordinary pleasures of all human beings such as conversations with good friends.     

Lincoln and Chiriquí Colonization Revisited

Abstract

This article looks at Abraham Lincoln's pursuit of colonization in the Chiriquí region of Colombia (now Panamá), conventionally known as one of just two places that he seriously considered with respect to his policy of relocating African Americans. Challenging the standard account of the scheme's demise around October 1862 due to vehement Central American protest, this piece questions whether such a development really took the president by surprise. The two weak threads running through the Chiriquí proposal were its scope for diplomatic upset and the embarrassment that might arise from its corrupt proponents’ links to the administration. The author argues that Lincoln was aware of both issues from an early date – even if they each became more complicated than he had initially realized – but that he made persistent attempts to address them. The administration was also more concerned about the ramifications of divisions within Colombia than the widespread isthmian outcry at colonization. Lincoln accordingly tried to place colonization policy on a sounder diplomatic and legislative footing as it became apparent that his contract with a domestic businessman also carried international implications. Yet ultimately, it was the Chiriquí venture's corruption that killed it when the president discovered that it went all the way to the cabinet.