The awkward years: defining and managing famines, 1944–1947

Abstract

Famines in the years immediately after World War II occurred during a period of global flux, as international famine response evolved from its ambitious, early twentieth century goals toward more modest, technocratic objectives during the second half of the century. For economists, social scientists and politicians immersed in the world of emergency food aid, these were uncertain, awkward years for famine relief. Herbert Hoover’s idealistic large-scale projects of famine relief that had dominated the first three decades of the century had been proven to be expensive and of limited efficacy, but Cold War loyalties had not yet taken over as the primary logic behind large-scale humanitarian assistance projects. Ultimately, when faced with famine conditions between 1944 and 1947, states and experts balanced a call to action against pragmatism that recognized famines were also politically expedient events that could weaken rural resistance to governance and simplify wartime and postwar administration. Ultimately, both science and humanitarian concerns learned to orient themselves toward economic expediency in these awkward years.     

梁启超早年新史学思想考源

梁启超早年新史学思想主要内容是取"家谱"说以批判"君史",倡导"民史",而"家谱"说和"君史"、"民史"概念的形成又与西方史学存在学缘关系。斯宾塞的史学理论构成梁氏早年新史学思想的核心,而他又直接受康有为思想的启示,康在梁早年新史学思想形成中具有重要地位。在康有为的教导下,万木草堂的学生或许都有与梁相似的新史学主张,只是没有像他那样见诸于文字。     

Philology and Presence

Various scholars have argued that the rise of modern information technology over the past century has coincided with a steady decline of traditional methods of learning and interpretation, and has contributed to the general sense of “worldlessness” or anomie. In the words of Paul Ricoeur, “we are overwhelmed by a flood of words, by polemics, by the assault of the virtual, which today create a kind of opaque zone.” Philology, the ancient discipline that grew in the past two centuries to encompass literary study, linguistics, and intellectual history, was originally conceived as a return to the past with the aim of retrieving the knowledge of bygone times. While the recent revival of interest in philology recognizes its importance to the humanities, it remains unnamed as such. The aim of my exploration of the history and practices of philology is to suggest how it can reinstate the presence of the past. With its attentiveness to language—undertaken in the silent spaces of private study, archive, and library—philology not only confirms the presence of the dead but also enacts a more fundamental return to “world.”     

进化之调律:斯宾塞与清末的种群竞争论述

斯宾塞学说构成清末种群进化和竞争论述的主要外在资源。斯宾塞以进化的哲学思维来缀合威廉·卡彭特、查尔斯·赖尔所代表的动物生理学和生物历史知识,回应马尔萨斯的人口论。19世纪50年代以来在中国译介和流行的正是卡彭特所代表的生理学著述片段或与其相似的种群差别认知。知识界对斯宾塞的翻译,意味着中国在戊戌时期发生了类似的理论缀合过程。清末知识人以种分贵贱、黄白同为贵种调整了斯宾塞的种群进化位阶表述,抵制欧洲人歧视东亚黄种之心。同时,他们却强化了贵贱种之间的等级关系,营造"退化""灭种"的焦虑意识和压迫感,警告需积极参与生存竞争来提升种群的心智和自律性,从而为政治变革酝酿社会气氛。     

Did Herbert Spencer Have Reading Epilepsy?

Herbert Spencer, the nineteenth-century philosopher, has frequently been dismissed as a “fantastical hypochondriac” (as his most recent biographer, Mark Francis, terms him). Yet he left a record in his Autobiography of symptoms that suggest a very different diagnosis. Abruptly at age 35, he found that the activity of reading, previously indulged in without difficulty, triggered paroxysmal episodes of disturbing “head-sensations” including “giddiness” (so Spencer described them); these severely curtailed his ability to carry out his philosophical studies. Of all possible explanations for such episodes, none seems as likely as reading epilepsy. Enduring preconceptions about Spencer's presumed neurosesmay have kept modern historians from appreciating that Spencer suffered from a legitimate, if esoteric, neurological malady.     

The Event in John Latham and Bob Cobbing

ABSTRACT

This article documents some examples of the event-responsive poetry of the British poet Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) and compares it to the unique theory of the event structure developed by British sculptural and conceptual artist John Latham (1921–2006). It establishes points of intersection between their practices, and particularly at the level of aesthetics where very little comparative work exists. While both men are best known for their experimental 1960s work (Cobbing in relation to sound and concrete poetry, and Latham in relation to conceptual art) this article focusses on their earlier work as being preparatory to their later, more developed practice. Artistic affinities are contextualized in relation to World War II, the dialectic of romantic and classical art, and the institution of welfare-capitalism. How poet and artist both visually represented time (drawing on scientific discourses to do so) is further identified as a link between their practices.     

‘Continuous abuse’ or ‘a unanimous blessing’? Reassessing the Conservative Party’s stance on the 1951 Festival of Britain

The 1951 Festival of Britain has long been seen as both a key turning point in the country’s post-war history and an event which was delivered, by Clement Attlee’s Labour Government, in the face of formidable political (and media) opposition. This article considers the Festival’s status as a pivotal moment in modern British history but focuses primarily on the Conservative Party’s approach to the project. In doing so, its draws on previously neglected evidence to suggest that successive works on the subject have greatly exaggerated the extent to which the festivities were the subject of partisan campaigning and political contention.     

Reading for Difference in the Archives of Tropical Geography: Imagining An(Other) Economic Geography for Beyond the Anthropocene

This paper is based on the 2016 Neil Smith Lecture presented at St Andrews University. It honours the work of a geographer whose pioneering work on uneven development and the complex relations between capitalism and nature shaped late 20^th century thinking inside and beyond the discipline of Geography. Today the collision of earth system dynamics with socio-economic dynamics is shaking apart Enlightenment knowledge systems, forcing questions of what it means to be a responsible inhabitant on planet earth and how, indeed, to go onwards “in a different mode of humanity”, to quote eco-feminist philosopher Val Plumwood (2007; Australian Humanities Review 42:1). “The Great Acceleration” since the 1950s of trends in key aspects of earth system health and socio-economic change highlights powerful dynamics that have shaped a new geological epoch, contentiously named the Anthropocene—or more perhaps to Neil’s liking, the Capitalocene. In this paper I ask how might we do geographic research in these times? I reflect on this question by drawing on the feminist anti-essentialist thinking strategy of reading for difference developed by J.K. Gibson-Graham. I attempt to open up new ways of working with uncertain possibilities. I do so with reference to field research into place-based knowledges of resilience in Monsoon Asia—a region that is experiencing increasingly uncertain and extreme “natural” events that signal Anthropogenic climate change. I return to “area studies” scholarship of Monsoon Asia conducted in the 1950s when the engines of economic change were starting to rev, fuelled by dire predictions of population explosion and the fear of communism. Like Neil, I am interested in the genealogy of geographical scholarship and the institutional contexts in which it developed and was influential. I look back to see how local knowledge was described and appreciated by two of our geographic forefathers and I consider how reading against the grain of capitalocentrism might play a role in making other worlds possible.     

The Later Jefferson and the Problem of Natural Rights

Abstract

The late Jefferson presents a puzzle to scholars. In his last years the author of the Declaration of Independence strongly opposed the Missouri Compromise and set important precedents for the political strategy of the antebellum South. This essay argues that these problematic aspects of Jefferson's career are more closely linked to his natural rights doctrine than is generally recognized and extend tendencies already present in Jefferson's draft of the Declaration. Unlike previous scholars who explain Jefferson's problematic politics by his racism or the inherent selfishness of Lockean natural right, I argue that the core flaw in Jefferson's natural rights doctrine is the encouragement it gives to self-righteousness. Because he responded to the problem of slavery in a spirit of angry self-defense, Jefferson's understanding of natural rights blinded him to the ways in which his actions strengthened slavery and undermined his own most cherished political achievements.     

Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the Presentation of the Henrician Reformation in his Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth

Abstract

It was no coincidence that Charles I commissioned a study of the life and reign of Henry VIII in the 1630s as he proceeded with controversial anti-Calvinist religious reforms in the face of Puritan opposition and suspicion that he was a closet Catholic. Lord Herbert of Cherbury's willingness to undertake the laborious scholarly task is initially more surprising but can be explained by his commitment to the eradication of religious conflict and his realization that it would enable him to disseminate his own rationalist, reunionist and Erastian views on religious belief, the organization of religion and the location of religious authority.