Between Disagreement and Consensus: Unravelling the Democratic Paradox

The idea of a rational consensus has become an increasingly controversial dimension of recent democratic theory as radical democratic theorists have challenged the ways in which liberal democracies deal with political disagreement and contestation. As a result, several theorists within the liberal tradition have attempted to incorporate models of dissent in their democratic arguments but this paper contends that they tend to result in forms of majoritarianism or proceduralism which reflect the original limitations that inspired the radical democratic critique. A more useful approach is one that recognises that contestation is inherent to democratic politics and understands that the paradox of democracy is the need to embrace the impossibility of establishing rational consensus in democratic practice.     

The art of link-making in global labour history: subaltern,feminist and Eastern European contributions

Benefiting from the ‘global’ and ‘trans-national’ turns in the larger historiography, labour historians in the past two decades have greatly expanded their geographical scope, developed new methodologies, refashioned categories of analysis and largely abandoned teleological assumptions. In this context, the history of labour in Eastern Europe still constitutes one of the least-globalized research topics in the field, even though the region attracted an array of excellent labour historians both before and after the collapse of state socialism in 1989/91. This introduction to the Dossier on labour history and Eastern Europe reflects on the reasons for the apparent mismatch between Eastern European labour history and the new global labour history. It does so by situating this large question within a discussion of some more or less successful examples of how scholarship on a particular theme in labour history has contributed or attempted to contribute to the conceptual and empirical enlargement of labour history in the past few decades. Focusing on particular aspects of the debates on class analysis, the peasant question, the history of gender, and the history of labour under state socialism, the authors address key questions in the international development of the history of labour. These questions, the authors argue, are at the core of the contributions on Eastern Europe assembled in the Dossier. Situating the four historiographical studies contained in the Dossier in this larger context, the introduction discusses the varied reception of scholarship on aspects of the history of labour emerging in and from different contexts and asks how this scholarship has contributed or might contribute to the development of a more inclusive global labour history.     

‘On mind‐blindness (optic agnosia)’, a classical clinico‐pathological report,and its author Wilhelm von Stauffenberg (1879–1918)*

Abstract

Two photographs from the beginning of our century still instructively illustrate the phenomenon of visual agnosia: the perplexed face of an old lady confronted with objects clears after touching them. This patient with bilateral posterior cerebral infarction was followed for seven years at the Munich Medicine Department of Friedrich von Müller (1858–1941) who had a strong interest in neurology. His assistant Wilhelm von Stauffenberg (1879–1918) reported the case in great detail, including anatomical analysis performed under Constantin von Monakow (1853–1930). Promoted to “Privatdozent”; in 1913 on the basis of this report, Stauffenberg's work included several additional, similarly extensive clinico‐anatomical case studies but was not limited to problems of cerebral localisation. Under the influence of the Burghölzli group in Zürich he started to practice psychotherapy. Stauffenberg, deeply interested also in the arts and in literature, was the physician of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) from 1914. He succumbed to pneumonia in 1918.