试析埃里克·霍布斯鲍姆的世界史观

本文在简单陈述“西方中心论”的渊源与流变基础上 ,试图分析当代英国马克思主义史学家埃里克·霍布斯鲍姆的世界史观 ,探讨其史学研究和史学思想的全球视野与全球历史观的内涵和特点。特别指出 ,他的全球历史观无力避免传统西方中心论的影响 ,在某种程度上 ,其欧洲中心主义情结是一种显在的和隐蔽的西方中心论结合形态     

HISTORY,THEORETICISM, AND THE LIMITS OF “THE POSTSECULAR”1

In this collection of critical essays, Dominick LaCapra, with characteristic verve, takes on a variety of authors who have addressed issues relating to intellectual history, history generally, violence, trauma, and the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra offers two types of criticism—of historians for ignoring or misappropriating theory, and of theorists for engaging in “theoreticism,” a theorizing that rides roughshod over historical specificity and context. The present essay focuses on LaCapra's discussion of the theoreticism of the critical theorists Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj ?i?ek, and in particular on their and LaCapra's attempts to engage with the “issue of the postsecular.” Although Agamben, Santner, and ?i?ek highlight some important and provocative issues, this brand of critical theory provides too limited a base for coming to an understanding of current debates over the relation between religion and secular perspectives. Instead, one must approach “postsecularity” with attentiveness to the larger “secularization debate,” and to the way the term postsecular is used by such writers as Jürgen Habermas and John Milbank. LaCapra rightly draws attention to the recent emergence of a discourse of “the postsecular.” Both the term and the concept now cry out for a deeper, more critical, and more historical examination than has so far been attempted.     

Screening Singapore: The Cinematic Landscape of Eric Khoo's Be With Me

This paper investigates the mutually constitutive relationship between the context of film production and the composition and content of images produced. Singapore film director Eric Khoo is central to our investigation, and his 2005 film Be With Me is a key example of how Singapore's ongoing urban redevelopment to become a world city reflexively shapes the style and appearance of the city‐state projected in the film. Singapore's history as a developmental state, its pervasive influence on the public and private spaces of its citizens, and recent state‐led initiatives to nurture the arts and media sectors all make it an ideal site to examine the relations between the cinema and space. Be With Me also lends itself to spatial analysis as its mise‐en‐scène is a geography of the life course: particular parts of the city are ‘cast’ as spaces of youth, middle, and old age. We elaborate how the landscapes deployed in the film are simultaneously constituted through state policies, mise‐en‐scène, and gender/age/class considerations. In so doing we show how Khoo's vision of the city‐state has altered since his emergence as a film director in the 1990s: from an oppressed site of hyper‐modernity to a more ambivalent ‘globalised’ built environment in which marginalised or liminal urban spaces for sensuous life and hope for human connection can be experienced.     

Leo Fouché and history at Wits University, 1934–1942

Leo Fouché, the first Professor of History at Pretoria University, was the surprise choice to replace W.M. Macmillan, the first Professor of History at Wits University, following his resignation in 1933. Fouché served at Wits from 1934 to 1942, departing to take up the post of chairman of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. His tenure at both Pretoria and Wits was assessed negatively in the official histories of the two universities. In Ad Destinatum: Gedenkboek van die Universiteit van Pretoria 1910–1960, A.N. Pelzer ignored Fouché’s major contribution in building up history at Pretoria and focussed instead on his failure to serve the Afrikaans movement. In Wits: The Early Years, B.K. Murray represented the conservative Fouché as a major disappointment, both as a researcher and as a teacher, following his productive and progressive-minded predecessor. In this article, an attempt is made to present a more detailed and rounded assessment of his tenure at Wits. While he published little, and his syllabus changes, with their narrow focus on white South African history, did not outlast him, his tenure was generally a positive one for the Department of History. Student numbers grew substantially, an additional staff post was secured, and postgraduate research was actively promoted. Three of his postgraduate students went on to distinguished academic careers in history.     

Lurching through Public Law: The Unsteady State of the Subfield

Abstract

David Walsh is a student of Eric Voegelin's political thought, and this essay evaluates the influence of Voegelin's work on Walsh, while also suggesting how Walsh deviates from Voegelin's philosophy. The analysis is performed in terms of several key concepts from Voegelin's work, including Gnosticism, metaxy, luminosity, equivalences of experience, and history. It is argued that Walsh makes extensive use of Voegelin's ideas of metaxy, luminosity, and the equivalences of experience, but that he transforms these concepts as he moves beyond Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness and turns to a philosophy of existence that is not subject to the epistemological problems that continue to challenge Voegelin's thought. Finally, it is suggested that, in so doing, Walsh is actually continuing Voegelin's philosophical project, rather than undermining it.     

Eric Bogle’s No Man’s Land and the grave of Willie McBride at the Somme

ABSTRACT

Eric Bogle wrote No Man’s Land in 1975. When it was released as The Green Fields of France by Davey Arthur and the Fureys in 1979 the song topped the Irish charts, while as far away as Australia it was declared one ‘of the most striking musical essays yet written on the futility of war.’ Yet No Man’s Land has been associated with controversy too: branded a rebel song in Ulster during The Troubles, singled out by Tony Blair as a ‘peace anthem’ and prelude to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and controversially chosen by the Royal British Legion for the Poppy Day appeal in 2014. In addition to exploring the ‘complex relations between cultural and political history’ in Ireland, this article also looks at the making of the documentary film ‘Eric Bogle: Return to No Man’s Land’ (by Dan Frodsham) in which Bogle returned to the grave of Willie McBride on the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme to recite his poem to the now famous Inniskilling. To Bogle’s surprise the grave had become a pilgrimage site for this, an entirely fictional, Irish martyr created then immortalized in his own composition written four decades earlier.     

BEFORE THE BREAKDOWN OF THE SALTSJÖBADEN SPIRIT OF LABOUR MARKET COOPERATION: The Swedish Employers’ Confederation and workplace democracy in the 1960s

The 1976 Swedish landmark law on workplace democracy, Medbestämmandelagen (MBL), has traditionally been regarded as a victory of social democracy over recalcitrant employers. In contrast, this article shows how, in fact, before the law, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) was the main driver behind Swedish research on work life reform, and the main promoter of employer-union dialogue on the matter. Crucially, in the 1960s, SAF endorsed the internationally pioneering thinking of economist Eric Rhenman, who argued that conflict within the firm between managers and unions was unavoidable, healthy, and could be good for business if framed in a productive manner. Today, this line of management thinking is termed the Scandinavian Cooperative Advantage.

However, in the early 1970s, Swedish social democracy radicalized abruptly. The SAF board initially interpreted the new radicalism as a masquerade to appease activists. SAF assumed that, behind the scenes, the Swedish spirit of consensus-oriented labour market dialogue would prevail, as it had since the 1938 Saltsjöbaden agreement. And assuredly, the actual effects of the MBL law proved to be considerably less radical than advertised, and broadly compatible with Rhenman’s thinking. Still, social democracy’s new ideological rhetoric helped prompt SAF’s late 1970s shift from cooperation to conflict.