War veterans as transnational actors: politics,alliances and networks in the interwar period

Historians have often considered the international veterans’ organizations which came into being after World War I as proof of the pacifist, internationalist orientation of the majority of the Great War ex-combatants. However, veterans active in these organizations were often inspired by specifically national and partisan objectives that belie any simplistic equation between altruistic transnational activism, international cooperation and pacifism. Conceiving of war veterans as transnational actors, this article explores the origins and decline of the veterans’ transnational sphere in the interwar period. It singles out four shades of competing veterans’ internationalism and describes the crucial differences that separated actors such as Henri Barbusse, René Cassin, Henri Pichot and Carlo Delcroix, among others. The article argues that both the veterans’ organizations and their protagonists, while reaching out across national borders, remained embedded in specific constellations of personal trajectories, political partisanship, nation-state interests and inter-state alliances. Their political and social activities also tried to reshape, and were subjected to, existing or emerging spatial configurations such as Great Power alliances and wider internationalist projects. Thus, the article shows that there was no homogeneous transnational sphere in international veteran politics; it was rather the competition between different internationalist practices and projects which shaped veterans’ transnational activities.     

A fragile political sphere

The Italian political sphere is characterized by an endemic fragility whose origins can be traced back to the post-unification practice of trasformismo and the ensuing system originally summarized by Paolo Farneti as ‘monopolist coalition’. Here, through shifts in alliances and personal agreements, a powerful centre coalition permanently holds power and blocks the opposition from becoming a possible alternative government. The ruling class fails to function as a party and uses parliament and the government as organizational tools of its hegemony. As a consequence, the functioning of the democratic system is distorted and the role of the public sphere inhibited. From the Risorgimento, through fascism, to the First and Second Republics and Berlusconism, this article assesses the fragility of Italy's political sphere as a recurrent constant in the history of the nation and the result of ‘tare storiche’ that remain unhealed.     

Nineteenth-Century London in William Godwin's Diary

The Leverhulme-funded editing of William Godwin's diary aims to ‘to construct a picture of London's literary and extra-parliamentary political life’, following the diary's ‘remarkably detailed map of radical intellectual and political life in the turbulent period of the 1790s’ <http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/godwin_diary/>. However, this map also extends far beyond the 1790s, with the diary's total span reaching from 1788 until Godwin's death in 1836. Critics and biographers have long assumed that Godwin's radical phase was over by 1800, and London to him was only ever a meeting point for free-floating, alienated intellectuals. By contrast, this paper presents new evidence showing his immersion in the material conditions and popular politics of nineteenth-century London. Following Godwin's movements in 1810 from his home and shop in Skinner Street, his perambulations around the city, and visits to dine with fellow radicals and publishers the article examines his immersion in the material conditions and popular politics of nineteenth-century London. It sees him campaigning against the abominable conditions in nearby Smithfield market; joining street protests to demand the release of Burdett from the Tower; and meeting Cobbett in Newgate. Godwin's circulations, recorded in his diary, bring to our attention the cross-fertilization between philosophic and popular radicalism and compel us to re-think the relationship between the conversations at private dinners and the protests in the streets in order to locate and better understand the nineteenth-century metropolitan critical public sphere.     

Becoming public: public pedagogy,citizenship and the public sphere

This paper explores the question what kind of educational work can be done in attempts to reclaim or reinvigorate the public sphere. Through a discussion of the intersection of public sphere and public space, it engages with the work of Hannah Arendt in order to outline a conception of the public sphere as a space for civic action based on distance and the conservation of a degree strangeness rather than on commonality and common identity. The discussion of the educational work that can be done to support the public quality of common spaces and places focuses on three interpretations of the idea of public pedagogy: that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy for the public, that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy of the public and that of public pedagogy as the enactment of a concern for the public quality of human togetherness. The latter form of public pedagogy neither teaches nor erases the political by bringing it under a regime of learning, but rather opens up the possibility for forms of human togetherness through which freedom can appear, that is forms of human togetherness which contribute to the ‘becoming public’ of spaces and places.     

Art as a diagnostic: assessing social and political transformation through public art in Cairo,Egypt

Since January 2011, Egypt has undergone several waves of political upheaval in order to craft a new form of governance. Central to this process has been the role of art. This article argues that artistic interventions that engage with the idea of public space and that take place in the public space of the city engender interactions that illuminate the complexities and difficulties currently facing Egyptian society. More so than serving as documentation of what has taken place or as acts of protest, public art can serve as a diagnostic of issues that simmer underneath the surface of national politics. Based on interviews, focus groups, and observations conducted between 2011 and 2013 with Cairo-based artists and arts advocates, the paper explores the way in which public art has signaled tensions regarding class, gender and increasing political polarization. By exploring the relationship between art, artists and urban space, this paper extends analyses on political transitions to take account of the effects produced by forms of artistic expression within the public sphere.     

述论古典时期雅典城市的公共空间

本文主要论述古典时期雅典城市依托于公共建筑所形成的三类公共空间,即宗教性公共空间、市政性公共空间和文体性公共空间.雅典城市公共空间为城邦公有,向公众开放,是真正意义上的公有和公用空间,是城邦公共活动的中心.公共空间的形成和发展是希腊古典文化繁荣的重要基石.     

‘Applied science’ in nineteenth-century Britain: public discourse and the creation of meaning, 1817–1876

‘Applied science’ has long been a competitor with the concept of technology for the space between theory and praxis. This paper explores how the concept emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Britain through public sphere discussions in a cycle of rhetoric that linked the press, the development of new educational institutions and the interpretation of industrial change. The recounting and reprinting of heroic narratives of achievement served to cement alliances between ‘practical men’ and ‘men of science’ by proclaiming a respectable subject of common interest to which both could be associated. Narratives of applied science were drawn on in the process of institutional change. A key role was played by editors and business proprietors in local contexts; their interest in applied science stimulated the formation of new universities aimed at providing new forms of technical education. The use of the concept of ‘applied science’ to describe the space between science and practice challenged the traditional notion of ‘rule of thumb’ as a characterisation of shop work. With its connotations relating to both past and future, the term served to structure time as well as science.     

ON THE MANY WAYS OF SAYING MEMORY

This essay examines the concept and the discourse of collective memory in view of interpreting the novel function with which it has been endowed in recent decades and the problematic character of its interpretation. To this end, it focuses on the recent book by Manuel Cruz, On the Difficulty of Living Together: Memory, Politics, and History, which examines the contemporary functions that collective memory has assumed in recent decades and takes into account interpretations of it elaborated in a number of seminal works that have set the framework for contemporary ways of understanding it. My investigation engages critical analysis of the psychological approach to collective memory that Cruz adopts, which, in interpreting recent public preoccupation with collective memory as an expression of trauma occasioned by the Holocaust and other horrific twentieth‐century events, assumes that analogous psychic mechanisms govern forms of remembrance in the public sphere and memory in personal and small‐group interaction. By taking into account alternate possibilities of interpretation, suggested above all by the public function of the mass media, I seek to widen the scope of enquiry to scrutinize in a broader perspective the contemporary role of collective memory and its political significance in the public realm.     

Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere: Augustan Historiography from Post-Namierite to the Post-Habermasian

This article attributes the relative lack of attention to the 'public sphere' in Geoffrey Holmes's work to the pervasive influence of Lewis Namier and the Namierite conception of political history. Holmes's British Politics can be understood as a product of what might be called the revisionist's dilemma. Because the main thrust of the argument of this work was to challenge the Namierite interpretation of the structure of politics in Anne's reign, Holmes could not fail but to replicate the structures of the original Namierite paradigm. Nevertheless, Holmes's demolition of the Namierite view of Augustan politics also opened up new possibilities for further research; it ultimately widened our understanding of the 'political' and it prepared the ground for the remarkable interdisciplinary dialogue between literary historians, intellectual historians, and political historians. The article concludes with a discussion of how Holmes's successors began to build on his work in ways that can help explain why the Habermasian public sphere paradigm emerged to the foreground of current scholarship in a field where it had been ignored for three decades. Historians are now beginning to build a detailed post-Habermasian understanding of the ways in which the public sphere affected the structures of politics in later Stuart Britain. Work along these lines may well finally help explain the transformation of British politics from an age of Stuart revolutions to the age of Hanoverian oligarchy.