Radio Experts and State Authority in the Era of the Second World War

Sin and Redemption in the <i>Hours of François I</i> (1539–40) by the Master of François de Rohan

The Swiss welfare state has an odd position in comparative welfare state research. Little is known about it, in particular about its historical development as the few high quality and internationally available studies have tended to focus on reforms in recent decades. In addition, the Swiss welfare state is often misunderstood. Its peculiar public-private mix, the role of non-state actors and its fragmentation bedevil international comparisons. No wonder scholars struggle to agree whether the Swiss welfare state is to be classified as conservative, liberal or social democratic in Esping-Andersen's famous welfare state typology. Some countries simply defy easy classifications. In parallel, but largely unnoticed by the academic community, the Swiss welfare state has become a blueprint for reform in recent years, in particular with regard to old-age pensions. The three-pillar doctrine, developed in Switzerland in the late 1960s and early 1970s, influences pension reforms across the globe today and is advocated by powerful international organisations such as the World Bank and the OECD. Matthieu Leimgruber's wonderful book provides many answers for this simultaneity of obscurity and popularity. It traces the historical development of public and private provision of old-age pensions in Switzerland from its origins in the late 19th century until its (final) maturation in the late 20th century. The book is organized in four chapters that document the development of old-age pensions chronologically and that are complemented by an introduction, an epilogue and a conclusion. The introduction presents the Swiss welfare state with its puzzling features such as its peculiar public-private mix and the belated development. Leimgruber, an economic historian, has an impressive knowledge of social science accounts of welfare state development, as the large number of works discussed in the introduction, including the influential contributions by Jacob Hacker, Christopher Howard, Isabela Mares and Peter Swenson, proves. Although Leimgruber does not develop an explicit theoretical argument, he uses these theoretical lenses to structure and inform his narrative of the politics of Swiss old-age pensions. The first chapter, “The dress rehearsal for pension politics (1890–1914)”, reports the history of the 1911 federal law on sickness and accident insurance (KUVG). This chapter, although not about old-age pensions, is important to understand the development of the three-pillar doctrine as it foreshadows the politics that were to give the Swiss old-age pension system its peculiar shape; hence, the chapter's title “dress rehearsal” (Leimgruber, by the way, is a wizard with titles). It shows how the Swiss institutional setting, the combination of federalism and referendum politics, gave the business community in general and the insurance industry in particular the means to prevent ground-breaking legislation in the fields of accident and health insurance. The resulting KUVG paled in comparison with legislation in neighbouring countries. Leimgruber turns to old-age pensions in the second chapter, entitled “Laying the foundations of a divided pension system (1914–1938)”. Here he documents the unequal development of public and occupational provision of old-age pensions. Occupational pensions rapidly developed outside public scrutiny and were spurred by tax exemptions. In parallel, the political project of public pensions endured a conflict-ridden and protracted policy-making process. Fought by business in general and the increasingly powerful insurance industry in particular and lacking support from the labour movement (that was strongly influenced by mutualism), the so-called Lex Schulthess was finally defeated in a referendum by a large majority in 1931. Nevertheless, this period laid the foundation for the divided welfare state as occupational pensions became too large to be easily replaced by a public scheme, while among insurers the idea gained ground that abandoning basic benefits to public schemes would enable private providers to focus on supplementary pensions. The failure of the Lex Schulthess was a clear signal that policy-makers had to respect the existing occupational pension schemes. Hence, when public support for a public old-age pension scheme reached a new peak during World War 2, the government drafted a new act, which, however, was not supposed to be a “monster like the Beveridge Plan” (a quote by federal councillor Walther Stampfli and the title of the third Chapter). Rather, the law was drafted in collaboration with the most powerful employers' associations and envisioned a divided system that left only the provision of basic benefits to the public scheme. Nevertheless, the proposal, the Alters- und Hinterlassenenversicherung (AHV), was challenged by a referendum in 1947. According to Leimgruber, it was the skilful leadership of Stampfli (a manager at the manufacturing company Von Roll before his election to the government) that kept the employers' associations in line and secured the government proposal's victory in the referendum campaign. The creation of the AHV in 1947, however, did not establish the today world-famous three-pillar model. Rather, the development of the three-pillar doctrine was the political response to a challenge by the far left. Demanding the expansion of public social insurance, the far-left Labour Party sponsored an initiative that requested the creation of a generous people's pension. The political establishment, including the Social Democratic Party and its responsible federal councillor Hans Peter Tschudi, countered this proposal by a plan that aimed to anchor in the federal constitution the three-pillar doctrine. The story of this political conflict is told in the fourth chapter, entitled “The three-pillar doctrine and the containment of social insurance (1948–1972)”. Again crucially influenced by the insurance industry and in particular Peter Binswanger, a director at the insurance company Winterthur Life, the federal government drafted a counterproposal to the people's pension that satisfied most business interests by containing public social insurance and leaving ample room for occupational pensions to grow. Given its broad political support, the government's counterproposal had no trouble defeating the Labour Party's people's pensions. In the epilogue, Leimgruber briefly summarizes the development of the three-pillar model to the present. He also engages in contemporary debates on the financial sustainability of the Swiss welfare state and points to the enduring power of business interests in shaping politics and discourse. This section, however, might be the least helpful as it is rather short and tends to simplify some of the complexities of contemporary debates. While it is certainly true that dramatic inequalities persist, Leimgruber is too quick to characterize warnings of public social insurance's downfall as “fear-mongering” (p. 277). In this chapter, he does not always do justice to the arguments of neoliberal critics of welfare state expansion. Leimgruber's book is an important and very welcome contribution to the scholarship on the Swiss welfare state. Overall, there is little to criticize. In addition, much criticism might be unfair given that he is a historian. It is a pity that Leimgruber does not discuss the diffusion of the three-pillar doctrine to other countries and international organisations, although he analyses this process in a separate publication (see Leimgruber 2012). The book could be made (even) more reader-friendly by providing a concise summary of the argument at the beginning. Maybe most importantly, the book could have benefitted from a more explicit discussion of the theoretical arguments. Clearly, Leimgruber's work is inspired by the power resources approach, but he also relies on historical institutionalism and ideational approaches. He emphasizes the crucial roles of individual actors (e.g. Binswanger, Stampfli, Tschudi) as well as of epistemic communities. His work is stimulated by insights from the varieties of capitalism literature, but also highlights Swiss particularities. Leimgruber discusses some of these arguments, but he never ties them together to provide a parsimonious theoretical argument. I guess it was never his goal to provide such a ‘neat’ theoretical argument. Hence, it is probably unfair to criticize him for its absence. Nevertheless, some more theoretical guidance might have helped the reader to follow his interesting and insightful analysis. These few critical comments, however, should not stop anybody from reading this book. Leimgruber has managed to unearth a lot of new empirical evidence and to shed light on the complicated, but fascinating historical development of the Swiss welfare state. This great book is an essential read for anybody interested in Swiss politics or welfare state development.

Milton Friedman and the Road to Monetarism: A Review Essay

Emile Zola's 1886 novel of the art world, L'Œuvre, has for some time been understood as a fairly fractured account of one of the most famous historical narratives of Western art: the challenge pose...

Serendipity: "the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident" (Oxford English Dictionary, 2000). I begin this review with a reference to the word "serendipity" for a reason. While I was doing preliminary research on an historical paper that contains a section on the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), I received a copy of this book to review. More perfect timing I cannot imagine. Reading through a variety of books and papers on the history of the BNF and its royal antecedents, I had come across several mentions of Pierre and Jacques Dupuy, known as two of the greatest builders in that institution's history. Their contributions to the Royal Library were so appreciated that in other histories their portraits are included as illustrious "fathers of the BNF" (see Simone Balayé, La Bibliothèque nationale, des origines à 1800 [1988]).

Work rehabilitation in France during the Great War 1914–1918?

This testimony-text is intended to be a contribution, in two ways, to the study of the constitution of literary archives. As a scholar specialized in the works of André Schwarz-Bart since the defence of my doctoral dissertation in 1976, I had begun to build on a personal archive on the man and his work, as early as 1968, which I continued to develop. Twelve years went by between the death of the writer in 2006 and the entry in 2018 of a large part of his archives at the BnF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) in Paris, known as the « Fonds Schwarz-Bart ». However, between December 2010 and February 2016, I had the privilege of making five long stays in Guadeloupe during which I was able to work on the writer's papers, documents and library, in his private office. I will testify here to the process I adopted to sort and classify each piece of document, as well as to the motivations that drove me to do so.

Since de Gaulle’s return to power in June 1958, the increasingly important role of radio and television was the focus of a heated debate; the Fifth Republic was accused of having exercised a suffocating monopoly on the audiovisual system. Though this can hardly be denied, it is important to note that this monopoly had strong roots in the past. Since 1944, the absolute monopoly of the State over radio and television had been enshrined in law. Moreover, this monopoly had been the traditional practice adopted by the government since the end of the Second World War, more precisely ever since Gaston Defferre, Secretary of State for Information under Felix Gouin’s administration (January–June 1946), reorganised the radiophonic system. This was deprived of its own statute and put under the control of the executive. As noted in earlier chapters, in 1947 de Gaulle had been ostracised from the media by Prime Minister Ramadier, a ban which continued for the following 21 governments until he returned to power. During the Fourth Republic, despite political instability, French radio was known as “the most disciplined radio in Europe”. Later, following the political victory of the Republicans and Guy Mollet’s instatement as Prime Minister at Matignon in 1956, the continuation of the Algerian crisis and the disastrous Suez campaign led to stricter political control over television and the press. Though, the press was not directly subjected to the control of the State, there were attempts to “domesticate” it through sanctions and confiscations. In this context, the theory according to which the Fifth Republic marks the beginning of the subjugation of the media to political power appears to be a myth without sound historical foundations.

Complaining in May 1946 that the French airwaves were polluted with 'this vile froth from the cafe-concert, these endless songs sung by floozies and hoodlums', the writer Jean Schlumberger asked, 'Why must our entertainment broadcasts be of such a humiliating vulgarity? To radio critic Jean Thevenot, however, French radio in 1946 suffered from 'numerous artistic broadcasts based on a snobisme of the obscure, the exclusive, the pretentious', and he called the national network 'a heavy network crushing all of France with boredom'.2 Although arguments such as these have appeared in debates over culture and the mass media throughout the twentieth century in France, the debate over radio in 1945 and 1946 featured a particular urgency and intensity. With most of the country's radio system having been destroyed by the departing German army, and with the new Resistance-led government seeking to distance itself from the pre-war and Vichy approaches to broadcasting, many French leaders saw a rare opportunity to redesign the structure of the country's mass media, creating a centralized state radio system that would unify, enlighten, and entertain the entire nation. As with many other aspects of reconstruction in France, however, the reconstruction of radio had to proceed with severely limited financial and material resources. Even after requisitioning all remaining privately-owned broadcasting equipment in November 1944, the French government had only enough equipment and money for one national network and one smaller Parisian network, both of which it placed under the control of the Radiodiffusion francaise (RDF), a largely autonomous branch of the Ministry of Information.3 Gathering all of the

Reconsidering Palmer <scp>v</scp> Thompson

Reviewed by: Converts to the Real. Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy by Edward Baring Stephen Schloesser and S.J. Converts to the Real. Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy. By Edward Baring. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 504. $49.95, £39.95, €45.00. ISBN 978-0-674988-37-8). In this monumental work of transnational intellectual and institutional history, Edward Baring maps the Catholic network that made possible the diffusion of phenomenological thought and hence the making of Continental philosophy. This network of schools, scholars, conferences, and publications grew in response to Pope Leo XIII’s mandate for an international neoscholastic revival in Aeterni Patris (1879). The Catholic quest for the “real,” both epistemological and ontological, soon led to exchanges far beyond creedal boundaries. Neoscholastics (and later, Christian existentialists) made common cause with similar quests by German thinkers. As a result, argues Baring, “The Catholic reception of phenomenology was a subterranean but massive structure, linking many of the most important developments in the history of twentieth-century philosophy”—“the first continental philosophy of the twentieth century was Catholic. (p. 20). Baring’s archeological and genealogical method meticulously excavates innumerable places, persons, and events. In the 1880s, new establishments included the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (1887), the Theological Faculty in Swiss Fribourg (1889), and the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in Louvain (1889). The “topology of Catholic intellectual networks made Louvain a model for progressive neo-scholastics around the world,” including the United States, Brazil, Spain, Bohemia, Germany, and especially Milan’s Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. (p. 36) National compositions of student bodies grew increasingly diverse. At the Great War’s outbreak in 1914, foreign students in Louvain made up one-sixth of those taking the baccalaureate, and a third of doctoral students. By 1930, fifty-seven of Louvain’s 160 students came from abroad, including those from Bengal, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. [End Page 816] As institutional establishments catalyzed publishing ventures, neoscholastic reviews arose in Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Spain. These journals formed a transnational network in various ways, including publications (frequently translated) by foreign authors. (Baring’s study required an impressive linguistic diversity of primary sources.) For example: Léon Noël’s Francophone work on the German Edmund Husserl traveled from Louvain to neoscholastic centers in Milan and Madrid before arriving in German speaking Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Multilingual migration “suggests that the transnational bonds linking one neo-scholastic to another were often more robust than those linking them to secular philosophers writing in the same language” (p. 53). The exchange was also transatlantic. The Modern Schoolman, founded in 1925 by Jesuit philosophy students at Saint Louis University, reached out to Munich for a contribution from fellow Jesuit Erich Przywara, editor of Stimmen der Zeit. Przywara’s essay appeared in 1934 (in English) as “Edmund Husserl.” In 1937, another article on Husserl appeared in The New Scholasticism founded ten years earlier by the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Its author, Kurt F. Reinhardt, a German-born student of Husserl and a Catholic convert, had emigrated to the U.S. and started teaching at Stanford University in 1930. In 1939, Alberto Wagner de Reyna, having earned his doctorate at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and become one of Latin America’s most prominent Christian existentialists, published La Ontología fundamental de Heidegger in Buenos Aires. Neoscholastic networks also provided venues for women scholars. In 1916, Edith Stein completed her doctoral dissertation under Husserl, joined the faculty at Freiburg and served as his teaching assistant until 1918. In 1922, Stein was baptized Catholic, having been drawn by phenomenology and scholastic thought to conversion. Her 1929 contribution to Husserl’s seventieth birthday Festschrift (edited by Martin Heidegger) became the “most famous and influential confrontation between Husserl and scholasticism” (pp. 74–75). In 1932, at Milan’s Cattolica, Sofia Vanni Rovighi reviewed the international Société Thomiste meeting held outside Paris in Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica, Six years later, she published La Filosofia di Edmund Husserl. In 1933–34, the German Hedwig Conrad-Martius— Edith Stein’s baptismal godmother—published her argument connecting Heidegger...

Reviewed by: Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques Vincent Benitez Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques. By Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone. (Land marks in Music since 1950.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. [xii, 128 p. ISBN-10: 0754656306; ISBN-13: 9780754656302. $69.95.] Compact disc, music examples, appendix, bibliography, discography, index. In their book Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques , Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone examine a pivotal stage in Messiaen's compositional development when he turned to birdsong as a primary resource of musical material during the 1950s. Although Messiaen had incorporated stylized versions of birdsong in his music of the 1930s and 1940s, he rendered birdcalls with greater accuracy in subsequent decades. Messiaen became increasingly preoccupied with birdsong after World War II. He began a systematic study in the early 1950s, which was aided by consultations with the French ornithologist, Jacques Delamain. As Messiaen scholarship informs us, the composer sought refuge in the world of birdsong after the composition of the Livre d'orgue (1951–52), the culmination of his so-called experimental period, because he was experiencing a creative dead end in his response to post-war European serialism. In other words, Messiaen overcame a compositional crisis by assimilating birdsong into his music, a turning point in his development as a composer. That is why Oiseaux exotiques (1955–56) is so significant in Messiaen's oeuvre, for it was the first work to integrate birdsong successfully into his musical language. Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques is an important study for three main reasons. First, it outlines the evolution of Messiaen's compositional ideas in Oiseaux exotiques by directly linking the transcriptions found in his birdsong cahiers (notebooks) to his musical language. Because of the opportunity given to them by Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen to examine Messiaen's cahiers in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Hill and Simeone shed new light on Messiaen's music during this pivotal stage of his career. Second, the book offers a unique perspective on Oiseaux exotiques through recorded material provided on an accompanying compact disc. The disc consists of audio examples of American birdsongs taken from an anthology of six 78 rpm records titled American Bird Songs (1942), recorded for Cornell University's Laboratory of Orni thology. Messiaen transcribed these birdsongs and used them while composing Oiseaux exotiques. The compact disc also includes examples of Peter Hill playing Messiaen's transcriptions on the piano, as well as a recording of the world premiere of Oiseaux exotiques at the Petit Théâtre Marigny, Paris on 10 March 1956, taken from the original Véga recording (Véga C30A65, Accord/Universal 476 9209). Third, in order to provide a historical and musical background to Oiseaux exotiques , the book considers the origins of the Domaine musical concerts spearheaded by Pierre Boulez, as well as Messiaen's Réveil des oiseaux (1953). In particular, it supplies hitherto unknown information about Messiaen's involvement with the Domaine musical, along with an examination of Réveil des oiseaux that reveals how it actually belongs to the period of experimentation exemplified by Mode de valeurs et d'intensités (1949) because of its rule-based aesthetic rather than to Messiaen's later bird style (pp. 27–28). [End Page 743] But Hill and Simeone's book is not without its problems. Aside from minor editorial errors, such as the spelling of Klaus Schweizer's name as "Schweitzer" in a footnote (p. 4, n. 12), the listing of Antoine Goléa's Rencontres avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris: René Julliard, 1960) as "Entretiens avec Olivier Messiaen" in the bibliography (p. 118), and the lack of diacritical marks in some French words such as "Église" (p. 18), the book's biggest shortcoming is its analytical commentary. Instead of the type of discourse currently practiced on both sides of the Atlantic, Hill and Simeone offer extravagant imagery that, although engaging at times in its descriptions of Oiseaux exotiques's continuity and texture, contributes little to a substantial theoretical understanding of the music. Let us now turn to an examination of the book's contents where Hill and Simeone discuss the context, genesis, structure, and reception of Oiseaux exotiques, along with the work's relationship to Messiaen's later music. Chapter...

SUMMARY During the retrospective conversion of its printed and card catalogues, the Bibliothèque nationale de France was confronted with the existence of old bibliographic records without corporate body headings, because this concept was unknown when the books were catalogued. The Library launched two programs aimed at creating authority records for specific fields important for access to the national bibliographic heritage, respectively named COFAR–for the official corporate bodies, mainly national and preceding the French Revolution–and CORELI–for the religious corporate bodies (parishes, dioceses, confraternities, orders and congregations, etc.). The 2,550 records created by the COFAR and CORELI programs have been included in the authority file of BN-OPALE PLUS; so they are visible either via the online catalogue or separately with other authority records. They give librarians an extra tool for identifying entities. They also represent a valuable source of information accessible to anyone who takes an interest in the history of French government institutions or religious entities.

The traditional philosophical historiography is used to present Karl Jaspers as an «apolitical» scholar with no sense of reality until 1945. Against this image the following paper explains Jaspers’ political thought under the sign of continuity and states that Jaspers’ interest in politics has its deepest origin in the peculiar Jaspers’ idea of philosophy. From the persuasion that philosophy has to be a Lebenspraxis addressed to fulfil the requirement of freedom and dignity that the human nature sets forward, it follows that the relationship between philosophy and politics is necessary and mutual: «There is no great philosophy without political thought». Without overlooking the deep difference between Jaspers’ political meditation before 1933 and the one after 1945, the following essay shows that Jaspers’ interest in politics dates back to the time of the First World War. In 1917 Karl Jaspers gave a lecture at a meeting of a political club, of which he was member, formed in Heidelberg during the First World War: Politische Stimmungen. This is the first Jaspers’ political writing, remained nearly unknown until it was transcribed and published for the first time in 1999 in Germany. The heavy influence of Max Weber is clearly recognizable both in the use of ideal type system and in Jaspers’ approach to political world, that is possible to call as realistic. The same approach appears in the essay Die geistige Situation der Zeit (1931). But the intellectual categories of the Existenzphilosphie and in particular the ontological antinomy between Dasein and Existenz taint Jaspers’ political analysis and prevent it from being efficacious and persuasive. The realistic paradigm still remains abstract and unable to make out the concrete happenings and dangers of reality. The Second World War and the horror of National Socialist dictatorship will bring to full maturity the philosophical attitude showed by Karl Jaspers toward the human being and all the aspects of his existence, from medicine up to politics.

Nikolas Rose