‘Human and nothing but human’: How Schmittian is Hannah Arendt's critique of human rights and international law?

Recently legal theorists have pointed out that whereas members of their profession often assume that post-war scholarship had broken with the past completely, political theorists have paid far more attention to questions of influences and continuities in their discipline. This also holds regarding the legacy of Carl Schmitt whose case both as a jurist and political writer is particularly pressing not only for intellectual historians, but also for discussants across a broad range of fields in law and political science. It is in this context that my paper examines Hannah Arendt's immediate critique of the Declaration of Universal Human Rights in 1948. I will juxtapose Schmitt's and Arendt's critiques, arguing that these display more than superficial parallels and yet conflict in their basic contentions. I also hope to show that discussing Arendt's critique in conjunction with Schmitt's allows us to pose some more general questions about the relevance and meaning of intellectual backgrounds and influences.     

When the Moral Mentors Lapse: A Comparative Study of Estonian and Belarusian Clergy Jokes

Abstract

The religious sphere has inspired much humour, but there are not many historically and culturally contextualized comparative studies of humorous tales and jokes about the clergy. This article aims to compare Estonian and Belarusian joke lore, outline the main topics of clergy jokes, and show their interconnectedness with and dependence upon their respective political, cultural, and ideological mainstreams. We claim that the jokes highlight the incongruity between the normative and the real world order. We position our interdisciplinary study within Christie Davies’s models of joke target choice. Davies’s aim was to produce a theory that could be applied to different corpora of jokes throughout times and cultures. Testing the theory against our data shows that it has wider implications and a high potential for analysing various forms and targets of humorous folklore from a comparative and historical perspective.     

“The New World” of Karl Barth: Rethinking the Philosophical and Political Legacies of a Theologian

ABSTRACT

It is only recently that a few histories of interwar European political thought have come to acknowledge that its discursive framing of ethical and social crises was closely interwoven with upheavals in the ways Europeans rethought and debated God. The first aim of the present article is to restore to Karl Barth (1886–1968) a central place in promulgating a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach to twentieth-century European ethical and political thought. Secondly, it seeks to correct the commonplace association of Barth’s theological revolution with radical and authoritarian political ideologies by exploring his early political thought and activities, whilst focusing on several of his most politically and intellectually influential ideas. The article concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of rethinking Barth’s role in intellectual history.