DO FLOODS HAVE PERMANENT EFFECTS? EVIDENCE FROM THE NETHERLANDS

This study investigates the short‐ and long‐run impact on population dynamics of the major flood in the Netherlands in 1953. A dynamic difference‐in‐differences analysis reveals that the flood had an immediate negative impact on population growth, but limited long‐term effects. In contrast, the resulting flood protection program (Deltaworks), had a persisting positive effect on population growth. As a result, there has been an increase in population in flood‐prone areas. Our results suggest a moral hazard effect of flood mitigation leading to more people locating in flood‐prone areas, increasing potential disaster costs.     

Fédération et/ou confédération

A concern to pin ideological labels on Morris has obscured the continuing importance of romanticism and Protestantism for his socialist politics. Romanticism led him to seek self-realisation in an art based on naturalness and harmony, and Protestantism led him to do so in the everyday worlds of work and domestic life. From Ruskin, he took a sociology linking the quality of art to the extent of such self-realisation in daily life. Even after he turned to Marxism, he still defined his socialist vision in terms of good art produced and enjoyed within daily life. Moreover, his over-riding concern to promote a new spirit of art, not his dislike of Hyndman, led him to a purist politics, that is, to look with suspicion on almost all forms of political action.     

L'europe sans illusions

In his doctoral dissertation—The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, finished in 1919 and published as a book in 1920—Walter Benjamin explores the epistemological and aesthetic foundations of the concept of criticism expounded by the early German Romantics Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Many of the themes in the dissertation recur in his later work, which has led scholars to believe that much of Benjamin's thought is directly influenced by the Romantics. However, a detailed investigation of the origins and development of the dissertation reveals that the picture is much more complicated. Reading the dissertation alongside the biographical material now available, this article argues that the major themes which preoccupy Benjamin in The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, including his theories of language and knowledge as well as his messianic philosophy of history, in fact predate his study of the Romantics. As well as being a potential entry ticket to an academic career, the dissertation constitutes Benjamin's first sustained attempt to develop and consolidate his own epistemology and aesthetics in a more or less systematic way. He does so through a series of ‘judicious interpretations’ of the Romantics, whose work he reads selectively, anachronistically and creatively to provide a vehicle for his own thought.     

The uses of memory in African studies

Since the 1950's, African specialists have used memory both as a tool and as an object of research.

Anthropologists were finally becoming aware that all social interaction inherently contains ambiguity and conflict and were coming to terms with the impact of colonialism. They started taking a productive interest in what societies, in their present practice, had to say about and make of their past. Roger Bastide (Les religions africaines au Brésil) made collective memory and its functioning the heart of a rich sociological study, situated in a long historical context.

At the same time, historians were starting to write the history of Africa, an effort largely made possible by a tradition of oral transmission. The first consideration was the documentary usefulness of this oral tradition, more or less institutionalized. Historians evaluated these oral sources according to technical criteria, in order to write source critiques. But the nature of the work led to a changed focus. Historians reduced their emphasis on the gathering of factual data and started treating that data with greater skepticism. They also started to strongly repudiate the implicit model of written sources and archives. They became, instead, more concerned with the various forms of memory and fascinated with the analysis of the workings of memory itself in society, and with what new historical information lay hidden in people's memories. Life histories, and personal memories are also used today.