Europe—An historian's view

The late John Burrow, one of the most stimulating promoters of the distinctively interdisciplinary enterprise that is Intellectual History, was a vital member of what has become known as the ‘Sussex School’. In exploring the resonances of his singular and richly idiosyncratic contribution, this article places his unique historical sensibility within a series of interpretative contexts, demonstrating the vitality of writings that will continue to inspire and inform scholarship in the field for decades to come.     

Lügen ist überhaupt das Kennzeichen unserer. Zeit Über einen unveröffentlichten Briefwechsel zwischen Max Born und Friedrich Herneck

The East Berlin marxist Friedrich Herneck and Max Born, Nobel Price winner in physics, exchanged more than 140 letters in the years between 1958 and 1970. In the beginning they discussed problems of the history of science, especially Born's personal memories of the development of physics in the 20th century. In later years they discussed political and social problems too. Only in these letters Born expressed clearly his attitude to communism and the social system of East Germany.     

“Fabelhafte Dinge”: Arzneimittelnarrative zu Coca und Cocain im 19. Jahrhundert

“Fabulous Things”. Drug Narratives about Coca and Cocaine in the 19th Century. This contribution focuses on the history of Coca leaves and Cocaine in the second half of 19^th century Europe. Even though, to date, no direct link has been established between the activities of the Milano physician Paolo Mantegazza, and the Göttingen chemist Friedrich Wöhler, it is not a mere coincidence that both published their findings in the same year, namely, 1859. Mantegazza authored the first treatise claiming that Coca had psychoactive qualities and touted its broad therapeutic faculties; he claimed that it should be introduced into European pharmacotherapy. In Wöhler's laboratory, cocaine was isolated from leaves by his pupil Alfred Niemann; later, Wilhelm Lossen refined and corrected Niemann's results. Narratives about medicinal drugs often streamline history into a story that starts with multiple meanings and impure matters and ends with well‐defined substances, directed at clear‐cut diseases and symptoms. In the case of Coca, however, the pure substance triggered no such process well into the 1880s, whereas the leaves continued to circulate as an exotic, pluripotent drug whose effects where miraculous and yet difficult to establish.     

Pietism and medicine in the first half of the 18th century

In the beginning of the 18th century Halle Pietists tried to establish a specific approach to sickness and healing. They constructed close links between physical illness on the one hand and the religious concept of individual piety, penance and rebirth on the other. This new' pietist medicine largely depended on Georg Ernst Stahl's medical theory, which was not pietist in itself, but was adopted and simplified by pietist physicians. Although conclusive and rhetorically present in programmatic texts, pietist medicine turned out to be less influential on medical practice than expected.     

Progress,decline and redemption: understanding war and imagining Europe, 1870s–1890s

Abstract

The aim of this article is to shed light on the ways in which ideas of and discourses about Europe were influenced by some readings of war and war violence from the 1870s to the 1890s. This aim is pursued by considering the dichotomy progress/decadence, a crucial opposition for grasping images and notions of Europe as well as interpretations of warfare violence. The article focuses on the works of Max Nordau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the young Paul Valéry at a time when, in intellectual and academic circles, there was an increasing fear of European decadence and degeneration.     

Minimal State Theories and Democracy in Europe: From the 1880s to Hayek

Summary

This article deals with laissez faire arguments as distinguishable in Europe between the final decades of the nineteenth century and 1914. The focus is on Herbert Spencer and the British ‘Individualists’, the Italian Vilfredo Pareto, and the Frenchman Paul Leroy-Beaulieu. Analysis concentrates on the relationship between laissez faire formulations and democracy, the latter amounting to the impact of the extension of the franchise on representative government. All the mentioned authors blamed the mechanisms of democratic government for the contemporary growth in state functions. While Spencer focused on the threat of a new class legislation after the demise of aristocratic power, Pareto and Leroy-Beaulieu viewed the pressure of lobbies and parties as the chief cause of the extension of state interventions. This article also aims to detect similarities and differences with more recent formulations. It is argued that Friedrich Hayek's achievement was to reconcile, against earlier perspectives, laissez faire with democracy. The reconciliation rested on a conceptualisation of democracy as a valuable method or procedure, onto which no values should be grafted.     

THE ALLURE OF DARK TIMES: MAX WEBER,POLITICS, AND THE CRISIS OF HISTORICISM

This article argues that realist invocations of Weber rely on an unrealistic reading of Weber's realism. In order to escape the allure of Weber's dramatic posture of crisis, we place his seminal lecture on “Politics as a Vocation” (1919) in its historical and philosophical context of a revolutionary conjuncture of dramatic proportions, compounded by a broader crisis of historicism. Weber's rhetoric, we argue, carries with it not only the emotion of crisis but is also the expression of a deeper intellectual impasse. The fatalistic despair of his position had already been detected by some of his closest contemporaries for whom Weber did not appear as a door‐opener to a historically situated theory of political action but as a telling and intriguing impasse. Although the disastrous history of interwar Europe seems to confirm Weber's bleakest predictions, it would be perverse to elevate contingent failure to the level of retrospective vindication.     

From Dionysus to the Anti-Christ

Abstract

This essay is a reconstruction of Rene Girard's Christian apology in “I saw the Devil fall like Lightening.” It develops Nietzsche's antithesis between Christ and Dionysius which Girard identifies as the antithesis of modernity as such. Against Girard's own alliance with Carl Schmitt the essay adopts the Trinitarian point of view suggested by the author, in order to show that it is Erik Peterson's “Trinitarian” critique of Carl Schmitt's political theology of sovereignty which could fulfill the “true” aim of the author in fact much better.     

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger as a Philosopher of Time**

When Hans-Jörg Rheinberger proposed the concept of epistemic things, he drew inspiration from the art historian George Kubler, who had considered the aesthetic object as resulting from problem-solving processes in The Shape of Time (1962). Kubler also demonstrated that a sequence of objects could retrace the progress that led to a solution that was afterwards accepted as the most classical. Parallel to Kubler, Rheinberger demonstrates how temporally extended activities of experimentation are condensed in the object, revealing the moments of innovation that lead to it. In the history of science as well as in art history, various trajectories can thus be grasped in the materially given. Rheinberger conceives of an object as a network of heterogeneous time strings. However, these are manifold: they cannot be thought of as making up a homogeneous temporality encompassing all the others as a temporal container and synchronizing them within it. Since the discovery of the Anthropocene, we no longer separate natural from cultural time, and no hegemonic historical narrative can be taken as unifying all the others. Historical epistemology as proposed by Rheinberger will be read as a contribution to constructing new models of natural as well as of cultural time.