Social structure,psychoanalysis, and collective aggression

This article considers Kierkegaard's contribution to our understanding of the political. Building on previous scholarship exploring the social dimensions of Kierkegaard's thought, I argue that for Kierkegaard the modern understanding and practice of politics should be understood as ‘despair’. Thus, whilst Kierkegaard's criticisms of politics might have been produced in an ad hoc fashion, this article argues that there is an underlying principle which guides these criticisms: that politics is subordinate to, and must be grounded in, spiritual or religious selfhood. In this way the modern phenomena of democracy, liberalism, the press, and the crowd can all be seen as representative of a form of community which falls far short of the potential that human beings can and should achieve. Such a community would see individuals recognising themselves and each other as spiritual beings, and taking responsibility for themselves and others. That modern politics fails to understand the human being as an essentially spiritual entity related to others through God can only lead us to conclude that, from Kierkegaard's point of view, modern politics suffers from the sickness of despair. Whilst Kierkegaard might be criticised for failing to provide us with a more detailed picture of a polity shaped by the religious contours he promotes, he clearly offers an intriguing and suggestive contribution to our understanding not only of the limitations of politics, but also the relationship between a normative human and political ontology, with the former providing the basis for the latter.     

Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A cultural history

This article examines Ernest Belfort Bax's interpretation of the French Revolution and traces the impact that his idea of the Revolution had on his philosophy and his political thought. The first section considers Bax's understanding of the Revolution in the context of his theory of history and analyses his conception of the Revolution's legacy, drawing particularly on his portraits of Robespierre, Marat and Babeuf. The second section shows how the lessons Bax drew from this history shaped his socialist republicanism and discusses his support for Jacobin methods of revolutionary change. The third section of the article looks at the ways in which Bax's reading of revolutionary history affected his internationalism and shows how his ‘anti-patriotism’ led him to support the Anglo-French campaign in 1914. I argue that the Bax's understanding of the French Revolution gave body to his philosophy and greatly influenced his understanding of the socialist struggle. Bax believed that socialists had history on their side, but was so emboldened by the idea of the Revolution that he was led to advance a view of socialist change that undermined the historic values that socialism was supposed to enshrine.     

Colonial emulation: sinophobia,ethnic stereotypes and imperial anxieties in late eighteenth-century economic thought

In 1799 Dirk van Hogendorp published a Report on the Current Conditions of Dutch Possessions in the East Indies, a document that has garned comparisons to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) for its condemnation of the Dutch East India Company and for its insistence on the importance of property rights to economic growth. The text is also an anti-Chinese diatribe, castigating the supposedly inveterate avarice of Java’s Chinese minority. Hogendorp’s advocacy of colonial reform and sinophobia intertwine in his use of the term ijver, then the standard Dutch translation of ‘emulation’, a keyword of eighteenth-century political economy. Read against the status of emulation in European thinking, Hogendorp’s employment of the ijver offers an opportunity to re-examine emulation’s fraught, ambivalent quality, which has been noted by scholars like Istvan Hont and Sophus Reinert concerned primarily with a division between benevolent domestic emulation and dangerous international emulation. The colonial sphere, neither wholly domestic nor wholly foreign, was a discursive site wherein the tensions of emulation were worked out in new ways.     

The Swiss foreign service and Bernese reform politics in the late eighteenth century

The political system of Berne during the enlightenment era was dominated by landowning patricians who represented a “republican type of gentry.” These landowners promoted agriculture, traded in grain, wood, wine, invested in cottage industries, and also were involved in foreign military service. In the debates about republican political economy in the 1760s, there was a cleavage within the Bernese aristocracy. On one side, conservatives defended the mercenary service as part of existing political obligations, above all towards France. Against this, the Economic Patriots combated corrupting influences from abroad and censured military service. Socio-moralistic principles, condensed in the term “civic virtue,” ranked higher in the patriots’ eyes than economic or political interests; in a virtuous and frugal republic, there should have been no place for mercenaries. The paper reconstructs these arguments over key decades in the eighteenth century.     

Artifacts of the neurosciences: A resource guide to museums and collections

ABSTRACT

Medical museums and collections care for important artifacts relating to the history of the neurosciences across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. This essay highlights the collections and galleries of greatest interest and worth a visit. It also provides a list of online directories of medical museums and bibliography of related publications.     

Perkins’s patent metallic “Tractors”: Development,adoption, and early dissemination of an eighteenth-century therapeutic fad

ABSTRACT

The metallick Tractors were patented by Elisha Perkins, a Connecticut physician, in 1796, for the treatment of various ailments, particularly those associated with pain. They were subsequently rapidly and widely disseminated on the basis of testimonials and aggressive marketing tactics. Dissemination was facilitated by endorsements from prominent physicians, politicians, and clergy, by quasi-theoretical explanations of efficacy based on then-current experiments of Galvani and others, and by the apparent simplicity and safety of the procedure. Abandonment of this ineffective therapy was later prompted by the application of blinded placebo-controlled trials using sham devices.