HISTORIA MAGISTRA VITAE,INTERRUPTING: THUCYDIDES AND THE AGONISTIC TEMPORALITY OF ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

In this essay I discuss Koselleck's thesis on the dissolution of historia magistra vitae in modernity with a view to exploring how the modern historiographical engagement with Thucydides entails qualifications of this argument. Focusing on Barthold Georg Niebuhr's contextualization of Thucydides in a new temporality of “ancient and modern history,” I examine how modernity is caught between conflicting notions of its own prehistory, and that this conflict suggests that the forward‐leaping qualities of Neuzeit were co‐articulated with other temporal notions, and particularly an idea of historical exemplarity associated with historia magistra vitae. This plurality of times highlights an agonistic temporality linking antiquity and modernity: a model of conflicting times inscribed in a dialogue through which modern historiography interrupted the “useful” history of antiquity, while simultaneously being itself interrupted by it. By following this dialogue, I seek to test two interrelated hypotheses: a) that modernity produced a multitemporal scheme in which the ideas of differential time and the future were intertwined with a notion of historia magistra vitae as meaningful and sense‐bearing time; and b) that contradictions in this scheme arising from the modern confrontation with Thucydides's poetics challenges the opposition between historia magistra vitae and modern historical sense and configures a temporality that is self‐agonistic in the sense that it confronts historical actors before and beyond the terms through which they may be able to give it meaning. Formulated as a poetics of the possible, this notion is approached as a corrective alternative to the modern consideration of the future as distanced from the space of experience, but nonetheless as grounded in actuality and therefore largely mastered by human knowledge and action.     

Reports of the Cook voyages in the Hamburgischer Correspondent

The beginnings of a racialised order in Oceania, and of German involvement in such, reach back a long way. In this article, the author traces elements of this racialisation back to the years before the first formal European settlement on the Australian continent. She examines important aspects of the German journalistic reception of James Cook’s voyages to the Pacific by focusing on one particularly highly networked and very widely distributed newspaper and its reporting in the period 1768–1787. She uses this to show how the editors, and especially London-based German-speaking correspondents, consciously leveraged an Anglophilia that was typical of the Hanseatic city of Hamburg in a way that encouraged their German-speaking readers, wherever they might be, to closely identify with British exploration and even claim ownership of these events themselves. Anglophilia and the German-language reporting of the Cook voyages, therefore, supplied raw materials for an entangled sense of imperial identity.     

Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard John Neuhaus on Religion and Democracy in the United States

Abstract

Richard John Neuhaus, like Reinhold Niebuhr before him, understood the vital civic role that religion plays in democratic society. As pastors and public intellectuals, both men were committed to public or civil forms of religion that, at their best, could inform, inspire, or chasten American political thought and action. There are crucial differences, nevertheless–between Niebhur’s and Neuhaus’s historical contexts, theological outlooks, political positions, and attitudes toward the American project–that help to explain their distinctive legacies and different receptions within the academy. However much Neuhaus admired Niebuhr, these differences suggest why Neuhaus was not the Reinhold Niebuhr of his day.     

Responsibility,Humility, and Intervention

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of The Responsibility to Protect that is rooted in the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. R2P rests on three central claims: sovereignty ought to be understood in terms of responsibility rather than control, the just cause criterion for war should include humanitarian protection, and rightful authority ought to be relocated to multilateral institutions. In turn, Niebuhr’s Christian realism proposes a dialectic of responsibility and humility that shapes our understanding of justice and coercion. While examining R2P through a Niebuhrian lens shows some compatibility between the two moral frameworks, it also reveals the insufficient understanding of humility with respect to human motivations and limitations that underlies R2P’s criteria.     

Corpus cartographique pour l'histoire de Damas,Syrie, à la fin de la période ottomane (1760–1924)

Abstract

De manière générale, la cartographie des villes de l'empire ottoman est peu abondante. Au dix‐neuvième siècle, malgré plusieurs réformes administratives, l'autorité publique ne recourait pas à des documents cartographiques pour organiser les travaux d'édilité tandis que les étrangers rencontraient les plus grandes difficultés pour établir des représentations de ces villes. Damas constitue une exception à ce tableau. On dispose de plusieurs cartes antérieures à l'établissement du mandat français (1920) qui sont de qualité inégale. Les auteurs étrangers sont les plus nombreux et les plus fiables; le plus souvent archéologues ou historiens, ils ont dressé des documents partiels par toujours faciles à évaluer. Cependant, et malgré la faiblesse de son volume (sept documents), le corpus des premières cartes de Damas constitue une source essentielle pour l'histoire du développement spatial de la ville entre le milieu du dix‐neuvième siècle et l'établissement du pouvoir mandataire.     

Hope,Cynicism, and Complicity: Worldly Resistance in Reinhold Niebuhr's Criticism of Karl Barth

This paper seeks to investigate the relationship between hope, cynicism, and despair in the stakes of a well-known dispute between Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr accuses Barth, and those who adopt Barth's central doctrinal and political positions, of quietism: in the name of religious perfectionism, such Barthians are not disposed toward incremental but necessary social reforms. For Niebuhr, this is a sure sign of “Barthian pessimism,” the despair that results from a conscience oversensitive to the absolute demands of God's righteousness. This paper seeks to show that a certain form of Barthian political theology is defensible as an ethical disposition since it need not fall victim to the helpless despair that Niebuhr fears, and simultaneously that a defensible account of what I call “total complicity” reflects the self-awareness and self-criticism that often become deformed into cynical despair and reshapes them toward repentant engagement with the world.     

How Theological is Political Theology? The Case of Twentieth-Century American Protestantism

ABSTRACT

How theological is political theology? Twentieth century American Protestantism illustrates that the answer depends on more than the extent to which a political theology is theological. For example, Walter Rauschenbusch and subsequent emancipatory political theologians understand theology's political significance very differently than John Howard Yoder and other political theologians influenced by the Radical Reformation. Nevertheless, both groups conceive the Christian gospel as a politics and so concur that Christian theology is essentially political. By contrast, Reinhold Niebuhr interpreted the gospel as disclosure of God's mercy and therefore denied that Christian theology is primarily a politics--for society or the church. Hence, although all three of these political theologies are thoroughly theological, they are not political in the same manner or for the same reasons. Accordingly, in addition to quantitative considerations, ascertaining theology's place in political theology involves discerning how a political theology is theological and why a theology is political.     

Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard John Neuhaus

Abstract

The passing of Richard John Neuhaus in 2009 elicited a wave of comparisons to the renowned public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr. The two men share many interesting biographical similarities and intellectual continuities (to the chagrin of some liberal disciples of Niebuhr). Indeed, during one encounter between them, Niebuhr supposedly dubbed Neuhaus “the next Reinhold Niebuhr.” The comparisons between these two influential figures of twentieth century American life, however, may be less important than their differences. By way of introducing this special issue devoted to the lives and legacies of these two public theologians, this essay considers what contending interpretations of Niebuhr and Neuhaus tell us about religion and American public life in the twenty-first century.     

“The Pull of Love”: Mutual Love as Democratic Virtue in Niebuhrian Political Theology

Although Reinhold Niebuhr's account of democracy aims to protect marginalized communities by restraining sin through the diffusion of power, the conceptions of sin and love that inform his political theology have anti-democratic consequences for members of these communities. I address this inconsistency by revisiting his under-developed idea of mutual love and clarifying his account of sin. Mutual love occupies crucial terrain between agape and justice for Niebuhr, and therefore enables moral agents to achieve democratic goals. Given the nature and importance of mutual love, I clarify Niebuhr's account of sin by making his position on “self-love” more moderate than it often appears.