1. PRÉCIS IMAGES OF HISTORY: KANT,BENJAMIN, FREEDOM,AND THE HUMAN SUBJECT

My fundamental motivation in writing Images of History was to avoid some forms of hubris and despair that trouble contemporary philosophy and to develop instead a picture of human life in historical time. According to this picture, we live amid institutional and practical inheritances we can address but can never fully stabilize and perfect. In different ways, Kant and Benjamin each accept this thought, and they each develop a picture of philosophy as historically situated, open criticism of existing practices and institutions. Each emphasizes the priority of the practical over any fixed metaphysical‐theoretical stance. I survey each of their general theories of critical historical understanding, and I pay special attention to the texts in which they each provide detailed, specific accounts of Western social‐historical development or circumstances: Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Benjamin's One‐Way Street. Where Kant's philosophical criticism is reformist, liberal, and casually dismissive of non‐Christian religion, Benjamin's is modernist, erotic, and improvisatory. Their respective images of history according to which we achieve orientation are both complementary and fundamentally opposed—not readily combinable into a consistent whole. Drawing on the work of Jonathan Lear, I end with a picture of maturity and practical self‐unity as centrally a matter of developing the skill of modulated alternation between these two orientation‐affording images.     

Nationalism,party political discourse and Scottish independence: comparing discursive visions of Scotland's constitutional status

This article critically examines the predominant narratives which emanated from party political discourse in relation to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Utilising a methodological approach centring on political discourse analysis (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012), this paper analyses party manifestos and constitutional policy documents produced by the three largest political parties represented in the Scottish Parliament, namely, the pro‐independence Scottish National Party, and two pro‐union parties, Scottish Labour and the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party. The emergent discourse of each party is interrogated by drawing upon pertinent theoretical concepts from previous academic analyses of Scottish nationalism, with particular attention given to those which have deployed modernist and ethnosymbolist theoretical approaches when analysing the Scottish context. This facilitates a critical reflection on the contrasting and nuanced narratives of the Scottish nation's past and future espoused by each political party vis‐à‐vis modernist and ethnosymbolist theory, illustrating the ways in which contrasting theorisations of nationalism are empirically tangible within political discourse and are thus not simply theoretical abstractions.     

High modernism in the Arctic: planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik

This paper considers Frobisher Bay and Inuvik, two Canadian Arctic towns, as examples of the high-modernist planning that swept the globe during the middle decades of the twentieth century, but also Cold War projects reflecting a sudden interest in the Arctic as a region of military significance. Building on the framework provided by James Scott in Seeing like a State (1998), the paper details the connections between modernization theory and Cold War militarism before turning to the strikingly parallel case studies. In each instance, federal officials proposed ambitious urban models designed to simultaneously overcome the hostility of a northern environment and catapult native northerners into conditions of modern living. While the limits and failings of such schemes varied by location, both sites were also laboratories for social scientists employed by the federal government to document and analyze the modernization of the Arctic. The work of these scholars represents a particularly rich and complex record of governmental interventions, tied variously to Cold War imperatives, in northern lives and landscapes at a time of great faith in the transformative power of modern engineering.     

The disillusionment of Robert Dell: the intellectual journey of a Catholic socialist

ABSTRACT

This article considers attempts in the late nineteenth century to bring about a confluence of Catholicism and Socialism in Britain by examining the writing and correspondence of one man, the art critic and Fabian socialist Robert Dell. Beginning with Dell’s involvement as a young man in London-based radical politics, the article examines his efforts to bring his socialist politics and Catholic faith together. Dell attempted this through stressing a narrative of Catholic collectivism, under the aegis of a benevolent Church, contrasted with a post-Reformation Protestant individualism leading to the inequities of capitalism. The appeal of Catholicism in a Victorian Britain undergoing a collective crisis of faith is addressed. The second part of the article documents the failure of these attempts and Dell’s disillusionment with the Catholic hierarchy that by 1908 had led to a complete break on Dell’s part with the Catholic establishment. The catalyst for this break was the brutal treatment of Catholic Modernists such as George Tyrrell, Maude Petre and St George Mivart by the Vatican and the English Catholic leadership. Dell’s final rejection of organised Catholicism is charted through pamphlets, newspaper articles and personal correspondence. Ultimately, the article considers how Dell’s early political and theological career reflects on the relative positions of Catholicism and socialism at the turn of the twentieth century, and more broadly the dynamics of personal belief and political allegiances.     

Crisis,challenge and choice: recent theoretical trends of anti-modernism and Western studies in Chinese history

During the last three decades, so-called “postism” (a Chinese non-professional, invented referent to postcolonialism, postmodernism and poststructuralism) has powerfully criticized and challenged the hegemonic ideology of the long-standing Euro–American centralism and the authoritative discourse of modernism in Western intellectual and academic circles, albeit it with various different resonances in Chinese and other non-Western societies. By tracing the trajectory of Western conceptual ideas from classical “rational” interpretations of history, this article tries to construct the inner connections and evolution between these conceptions and ways of thinking, and to summarize their impacts on and reactions from the field of Chinese historical studies. This article suggests that these new trends have definitely cast light on macro ideological and perspective concerns but have been less fruitful in concrete historical studies.     

光明城与广亩城的哲学观对照

本文采用诠释学文本解读的方法,通过对20世纪两位现代主义建筑大师-赖特和柯布各自提出理想城的语境与文本进行分析,解释了光明城与广亩城的城市形态结构与建筑师各自的世界观与思维方式的内在关系。光明城反映了柯布的二元辩证思维观。广亩城反映了赖特的有机整体观。文章最后对二者的乌托邦式规划理论进行了哲学批判,分析了其中的矛盾性主要在于对城市、市民及二者关系的认识论缺陷。     

Modern witnesses: foreign correspondents, geopolitical vision, and the First World War

The First World War was the first modern, mediated conflict. In this paper I argue that British correspondents on the Western front attempting to accurately witness the war encountered a crisis of representation and visuality. They occupied a particularly unstable position between the many sites and points of view within a cubist landscape of shattered geographies and unstable boundaries. Their writings, though rich in masculinist and nationalistic accounts of heroism, also contain a newer perspective characterized by the failure to fit these older narratives into the inhuman, incomprehensible spaces of modern war.     

Nationalism as legitimation: the appeal of ethnicity and the plea for popular sovereignty

Walker Connor is seemingly both a primordialist and a modernist: Nations emanate from basic human sentiments but emerged in late modernity. Is this not an aberration, a contradiction both conceptual and causal? Connor, a champion of academic clarity, obviously thought not, and he was right. What accounts for Connor's unique take on nationalism, and why, for many, does it still seem odd? The answer to both quandaries, I argue, lies in Connor's own unique splice: He effectively delved into, and fused, two thorny matters that most scholars shy away from, let alone try to bring together: human nature and legitimation. Both underpin his remarkable scholarship and its solitude standing. I explore both facets: first, Connor's take on human nature; then, more extensively, his analysis of legitimation – via ‘popular sovereignty’ and ‘self‐determination’.