A legal theory for the nation state. Pasquale Stanislao Mancini,Hegelianism and Piedmontese liberalism after 1848

ABSTRACT

This article aims to shed light on the Italian liberals’ contribution to the post-1848 European debate on nationality, representative government and the theory of the state, through focus on the political thought of Pasquale Stanislao Mancini. Building on Vico and Hegel’s philosophies of law and history, Mancini developed a sui generis tradition of national liberalism that founded representative government on a theory of the state that identified freedom and nationality. Far from being the passive and provincial adaptation of Anglo-French currents of liberalism, Mancini’s political thought, while engaging with the contemporary European debates on freedom and constitutional government, nurtured an original constitutional theory that connected conflicting ideas of cosmopolitan freedom and national patriotism.     

THE DIALECTICS OF JAMESON'S DIALECTICS

This review essay attempts to understand the book under review against the background of Jameson's previous writings. Failing to do so would invite misunderstanding since there are few contemporary theorists whose writing forms so much of a unity. Jameson's book can be divided into three parts. The first and most important part deals with dialectics, the second with politics, and the third with philosophy of history. In the first part Jameson argues that dialectics best captures our relationship to the sociocultural and historical world we are living in. The second part makes clear that Jameson is not prepared to water down his own Marxist politics in order to spare the liberal sensibilities of his political opponents. In the third part Jameson develops his own philosophy of history, mainly in a dialogue with Ricoeur. Dialectics is his main weapon in his discussion with Ricoeur, and it becomes clear that the Spinozism of dialectics allows for a better understanding of history and of historical writing than does Ricoeur's phenomenological approach. The book is an impressive testimony to the powers of dialectical thought and to its indispensability for a proper grasp of historical writing.     

Imperial reproductions: The circulation of colonial images across popular genres and media in the 1920s and 1930s

The Fascist phase of the Italian colonial experience was characterized by the diffusion of colonial discourses and imagery across Italian culture. Significantly, it was frequent for the same people to produce texts belonging to diverse genres, often cutting across different media and irrespective of distinctions between elite and popular audiences. Concentrating on representations of the East African territories which were eventually to constitute the Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI) , the article analyses the way in which a selected number of images of the colonies spread across different genres and media, arguing in favour of an interdisciplinary approach to colonial processes of representation. Textual and visual mappings of Africa inscribed its territories with European symbols, value systems and signifiers. Geographers and travel writers, in particular, had a fundamental role in creating not only the physical but also the mental space for colonization. They enacted the transformation of East Africa from the dangerous and unmapped setting of the heroic acts of individual explorers to the stage for a collective colonial effort. In their footsteps there followed the discourse of tourism and the tourist industry, which was meant to integrate the image of the colonies with that of the peninsula.     

Max Stirner, Hegel and the Young Hegelians: A reassessment

Max Stirner is generally considered a nihilist, anarchist, precursor to Nietzsche, existentialism and even post-structuralism. Few are the scholars who try to analyse his stands from within its Young Hegelian context without, however, taking all his references to Hegel and the Young Hegelians as expressions of his own alleged Hegelianism. This article argues in favour of a radically different reading of Stirner considering his magnum opus “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” as in part a carefully constructed parody of Hegelianism deliberately exposing its outwornness as a system of thought. Stirner's alleged Hegelianism becomes intelligible when we consider it as a formal element in his criticism of Bauer's philosophy of self-consciousness. From within this framework it becomes quite clear what Stirner meant with such notions as “ownness” and “egoism”. They were part of his radical criticism of the implicit teleology of Hegelian dialectics as it found according to him its highmark in Bauer. In short, this article puts the literature on Stirner into question and tries for the first time in 30 years to dismantle Stirner's entire undertaking in “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” by considering it first and foremost a radical criticism of Hegelianism and eventually the whole of philosophy while fully engaged in the debates of his time.     

Max Stirner,Hegel and the Young Hegelians: A reassessment

Max Stirner is generally considered a nihilist, anarchist, precursor to Nietzsche, existentialism and even post-structuralism. Few are the scholars who try to analyse his stands from within its Young Hegelian context without, however, taking all his references to Hegel and the Young Hegelians as expressions of his own alleged Hegelianism. This article argues in favour of a radically different reading of Stirner considering his magnum opus “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” as in part a carefully constructed parody of Hegelianism deliberately exposing its outwornness as a system of thought. Stirner's alleged Hegelianism becomes intelligible when we consider it as a formal element in his criticism of Bauer's philosophy of self-consciousness. From within this framework it becomes quite clear what Stirner meant with such notions as “ownness” and “egoism”. They were part of his radical criticism of the implicit teleology of Hegelian dialectics as it found according to him its highmark in Bauer. In short, this article puts the literature on Stirner into question and tries for the first time in 30 years to dismantle Stirner's entire undertaking in “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” by considering it first and foremost a radical criticism of Hegelianism and eventually the whole of philosophy while fully engaged in the debates of his time.     

Secularisation: process,program, and historiography

ABSTRACT

Today's dominant academic use of the term ‘secularisation’ refers to an epochal process that transformed a society based on Christian faith to one grounded in human reason. This paper argues that ‘secularisation’ had not been used in this sense prior to the 1830s, and that no such process has been shown to have taken place in early modernity. This new use of the term was in fact internal to rival secularising and sacralising programs. The notion of an epochal rationalisation of society was thus invoked by secularists seeking to turn a factional campaign into an historical process. Their sacralising opponents employed the same strategy when they claimed that this process contained a desecularising counter-current, or that secularisation was secretly grounded in an alienated religion whose de-alienation held the promise of a post-secular age. This suggests that until they can adduce evidence of an epochal rationalisation of society in early modernity, histories of secularisation should be regarded as disguised program-statements for rival cultural-political factions in the present.