Absolute Monarch Research Articles

Political Biography: A Polemical Review of the Genre

My "polemic" deals with the biographies of statesmen who operated in the context of established systems of law, conventions, and accountability, and not with dictators and more or less absolute monarchs. I argue that unless abiographer contextualizes his/her subject in order to deal with (a) problems of vaUdation; (b) the counterf actual problem of dispensability; and (c) connections between the "life" and the achievements, then the genre is not useful for understanding poUtical institutions, historical change, and the role of statesmen in history.

Why Shakespeare Was Not a Relativist and Why it Matters Now

The extremes of sectarian fanaticism and Machiavellian relativism were both prominent in Shakespeare's day. It was an era of religious strife, incipient nationalism, growing monarchical absolutism, and also of “liberated” Machiavellian cynicism and “will to power”—no “golden age” of moral certainty and equanimity. Somehow, the literary genius of Shakespeare not only avoided these extremes or heresies but implicitly or explicitly critiqued them all, providing a permanent legacy of vivid moral commentary, exhortation, and illustration. This legacy has had an incalculably great ethical influence on the thought, sensibility, and education of English-speaking peoples across four centuries and several continents. Particularly in its nondenominational critique of relativism, it is a precious educational resource that eloquently affirms the fundamental reality of ethics for the person who would be truly human. Ordered liberty is always imperilled by its counterfeit and competitor—licentious libertinism. Shakespeare loved the former and hated the latter, with enduring effect.

What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions

Reviewed by: What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions Géza Von Molnár James Schmidt, ed. What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. 563. $50.00 cloth, 24.95 paper. Over two hundred years ago, the question that stirred many of the foremost minds in German-speaking lands was the one to which the title of this book refers. Its potential readers will easily recognize it, and most will also instantly associate with it Kant’s classic answer. How right they are in doing so is contained in the pages before them. Whatever answers may have been forthcoming since that central question was posed, Kant’s statement remains the explicit or implicit referent for all further debate. Characteristic for this debate is the profusion of differing opinions long current in all matters regarding the Enlightenment, and since these differences have recently surfaced with unusual intensity over a broad range of animated discussions inside of academe and out, it is high time to take stock, as the editor of this volume does, and ask again: “What is Enlightenment?” James Schmidt succeeds in fashioning a well-ordered chorus from the clamor of voices received in reply by presenting them in three distinct groupings that comprise: “The Eighteenth-Century Debate,” “Historical Reflections,” and “Twentieth-Century Questions.” All of this is preceded by an expert “Introduction,” which brings every contributor into clear focus, from an overall perspective and within each respective group. Quite generally speaking, one must, indeed, keep in mind that the question and the debate as to what Enlightenment is bears a distinctly German stamp. As the “Introduction” makes clear: “For reasons that defy explanation, neither French philosophes nor Scottish moralists (to name only the two most likely parties) were as concerned as their German-speaking colleagues of what enlightenment was” (ix). The texts that follow, however, make evident that much of the debate beyond its most initial phase takes place against the background of events in France and rapidly assumes a critical dimension of political self-definition. The historical record, even beyond the confines of this volume, would indicate that deliberations on the question “What is Enlightenment?” actually become implicitly ever more concerned with the question of what is German. Since the editor justifiably contends that these as well as other aspects of the debate on Enlightenment “came to be determined by the stance one took toward the Revolution” (15), the differing critical positions that have arisen since then hold only their ignorance in common “of the enlightenment’s own efforts at self-definition” [End Page 537] (16). The contributions assembled in part 1, “The Eighteenth-Century Debate,” are to furnish this missing link and thus do so successfully by introducing material generally unfamiliar to an English speaking reading public. For that matter, some of the authors who are cited here will not be all that familiar to German scholars. This part 1, which takes up a good third of the volume, constitutes a remarkable editorial achievement from which students of cultural history will benefit for a long time to come. The translations are to be equally commended for rendering texts that are not especially readable in the original into readable English. Among the most difficult are the selections by Hamann, but it may be the challenge his manner of writing presents that will, at times, lead scholars to read too much into the text. Part 2 presents “Historical Reflections” on the intellectual panorama that has been unfolded for us in part 1, and Hamann is made the subject of one of the articles. In it, he is referred to as “proto-Marxist” (296–97) and praised in very modern terms for his opposition to political oppression by absolute monarchs like Frederick II (296 ff.). Of course, he is nothing of the sort; he is a Christian, foremost and last, and if contemporary vocabulary is to be employed, he is a born-again Christian with political attitudes to fit. His basic objections are directed against a government so powerful that it can be dismissive of religion. His point of attack is consequently the base of power that...

The End of a Political Identity: French Intellectuals and the State

Starting with a discussion of the crisis of French national identity that became fully apparent in the 1980s, this article examines the historical paradigm that conditioned the birth of French universalism and ultimately spelt its demise. Identifying as the determining experience the reification/deification of power performed by monarchical absolutism, it examines the evolution of what can be termed after Marcel Gauchet the French `political-intellectual system', with its exclusive emphasis on the ideological legitimacy of power, and highlights the crucial role played by intellectuals in its formation, be it on an oppositional mode. Looking back to the 17th century, it thus identifies in Montaigne's essays and their complex dialectic of order and revolt the fundamental paradox within which French intellectual culture evolved right up to post-structuralism, which, whilst it attempted a most radical critique of the French intellectual mystique, ultimately remained prisoner to its underlying statism. Post-structuralism is thus to be seen as the first manifestation of a profound crisis of French intellectual culture, triggered in the 1970s by the crisis of French republicanism, in the wake of the worldwide decline of national sovereignty. What characterized French political and intellectual culture from its inception was indeed the reductive absorption of the notion of society into that of state, and the concomitant belief in a rational vanguard. However, whilst post-structuralism belongs to a tradition of resistance to the republican legacy of the French Enlightenment, it remains deeply conditioned by the pessimism of its distant Augustinian and Jansenist origins: unable to conceive of any effective social action outside of the state, it condemns itself to the marginality of counter-culture. Rather than a total deconstruction of French universalism, post-structuralism must thus be identified as its last, contradictory manifestation.

Coriolanus and the Failure of Performatives

Coriolanus and the Failure of Performatives John Plotz Young people today can be said to be in a situation where ordinary common sense no longer suffices to meet the strange demands life makes. Everything has become so intricate that mastering it would require an exceptional intellect. Because skill at playing the game is no longer enough; the question that keeps coming up is: can the game be played at all now and what would be the right game to play? (welches ist das rechte Spiel?) —Wittgenstein 1 I. Introduction: Whose Tragedy? Neither the tragedy “of a people that has lost its hero” as Brecht argues, nor simply that of the lone figure of Coriolanus himself, Coriolanus is the tragedy of the gap that looms between the private “true” Self and a public realm of tacitly accepted opportunistic mendacity. 2 The public world in Coriolanus is—very like that of Richard III—characterized by language deployed solely for future effect. When Coriolanus proposes that words and deeds ought to flow directly from the soul of the speaker, and be weighed by how well they correspond with that speaker’s (true) inner being, his challenge only uncovers an unease already inherent in this linguistic model. The idea that truth can derive only from inwardness—that authentic interiority is a viable alternative to shallow public life—must already be present in a world view that imagines the public sphere to be inherently deceitful. The play’s truth-free political realm contains the seeds of tragedy before Coriolanus has even earned his name. Franco Moretti has pointed out that Shakespearean tragedy ultimately “disentitles the absolute monarch to all ethical and rational legislation,” but Coriolanus suggests that the impetus to “absolute” monarchy is the need to counteract an equally abhorrent condition, the state of “absolute freedom” of language. 3 The two states—“free [End Page 809] politics” and “absolute monarchy”—are seen as mirrors to each other. And, as Moretti’s observations on the banality of the endings of Shakespeare’s tragedies suggest, no “third way” of finding authoritative, satisfying meaning in the world is capable of replacing this mutually abhorring, yet complementary dyad. Coriolanus’s criticism uncovers a hamartia that society would just as soon ignore—but his criticism cannot work as a cure. Yet the very fact of his rebellion launches a corrosive assault on a world that is not entirely alien to our own. All the characters in Coriolanus are aware, underneath, that the linguistic games they are playing are fraudulent, that their talk is half to deceive others and half to keep themselves comfortably numb to their own motives: only Coriolanus says out loud what others keep under their hats. Admittedly, this turns out to be an irrational course of action in a world in which the dominant view of language is that it ought to be used to achieve one’s interests, and that the nagging sense of an “integral” man beneath the words ought to be suppressed. But, as Adorno said, in an irrational world the irrational response may be the only rational one. 4 It may seem absurd to argue that Coriolanus is no worse than the world around him, because he is certainly no saint. A prickly monster (that is, a marvel, as well as a horror) who won’t hear himself flattered, who loathes the plebeians (as well as the patricians) of his own city, Coriolanus sees no need to concede, explain, or negotiate in any of his dealings. He famously cannot even hear himself banished, but must—taking the “true” Rome into himself—respond “I banish you” to the “real” Rome outside and around him. 5 What could it mean to recuperate this man, to turn the blame for the tragedy back onto Coriolanus’s polis, his family, finally onto the whole structure of the play? Coriolanus’s fault is the most glaring in the play; surely that means the fault is all his? So two important recent critics of the play argue, influentially and extremely revealingly. 6 But I want to ask what happens if we take seriously the critique of Coriolanus’s universe implied in his words, evaluate his response to what he...

Aerial Nationalism: A History of Aviation in Thailand by Edward M. Young

644 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE of the genre: a dense, dry writing style and a clumsy chapter struc­ ture. He includes antiaircraft missiles in the subtitle, but his treat­ ment of that complex topic is completely inadequate, as it is con­ fined to one section in the last chapter, with backtracking to cover the earlier history. It would have made more sense to mention these missiles only in passing. Finally—and he cannot really be blamed for this—Schabel missed sources for the mid-1930s origins of rocket aircraft in Army Ordnance/Peenemunde records in the Bundesarchiv /Militararchiv Freiburg. These show that, contrary to Heinkel’s memoirs, it was the Air Ministry that started an energetic program in 1935 to develop reaction-propulsion systems for high-speed flight, which explains why Ministry officials so quickly took up the turbojet idea once they found out about it in 1938. These caveats should not, however, be allowed to obscure the im­ portance of this book to all those interested in the “turbojet revolu­ tion” in Germany. MichaelJ. Neufeld Dr. Neufeld is a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. His history of Peenemunde and the V-2, The Rocket and the Reich, has now appeared in paperback with Harvard University Press. Aerial Nationalism: A History of Aviation in Thailand. By Edward M. Young. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Pp. xxix+330; illustrations, maps, tables, appendixes, notes, bibli­ ography, index. $55.00. Aviation is acknowledged as one of the most important influences on 20th-century culture, and a great deal has been written about its genesis and development in North America and Europe. Historians of colonialism will also be aware that aviation played an important part in maintaining colonial power in the interwar period, partly through the development of colonial air forces and pardy through the development ofcommercial airways linking colonial possessions. Very little has been written, however, about the use of aviation by non-Western nations or its local effects. Edward Young’s AerialNationalism describes and analyzes in detail the development of aviation in Thailand from 1912 to the end of the Second World War and deals in more cursory fashion with the postwar period. Thailand is perhaps atypical of the majority of na­ tions in the non-Western world because it preserved its indepen­ dence from colonizing powers and so its use of aviation took place against a background ofnational needs rather than colonial develop­ ment. These circumstances have, however, given us an opportunity to see something which was probably unique for this period, a coun­ try which had not made a technical innovation and did not have the technical skills to contribute to the development of that technologi- technology and culture Book Reviews 645 cal form, but still used it in a developed form to suit its own needs as far as possible. Thailand managed to retain its independence between two colo­ nizing powers, France and Britain, but remained wary of their inten­ tions. When aviation developed, the Thai governments—at first a very supportive absolute monarch and later an even more supportive military government—became interested in aviation as a way of de­ veloping sufficient military strength to deter threats to Thailand’s sovereignty and as a way of developing a national spirit. A military Aeronautical Service was established which was entirely Thai, em­ ploying no foreign advisers and making a point of being as selfsufficient as possible. Thais travelled the world to learn of overseas developments and to select new designs, but there was a continuing emphasis until the late 1930s on construction in Thailand and on the development of a completely indigenous air force, which might study overseas developments but did not rely on overseas help and advice. As a result a highly effective air force developed within the restrictions of resources available to it. The Thai Air Force was al­ most entirely defensive, intended to deter colonial aggressors. It was successful when it finally fought a war of that nature, but when it was drawn into the Second World War those resources were insufficient. The development of commercial air services originally took place under the control of the military service...

Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union

The history of the Soviet Union is unique in that it began in 1917 with a major revolution that eventually changed the mode of production, and ended in 1991 in another major revolution that is again changing the mode of production. For a major country, this is an amazing history, offering a very clear case of social evolution. To analyze this evolution, one needs a framework and a theory. Here, a Marxian approach is used, though it is very much restructured away from the alleged Marxism that was official in the Soviet Union. Society is divided into the economic structure and the social structure. The social structure comprises all ideas and noneconomic institutions, while the economic structure includes the relations of production (class relationships in the economic process) and the forces of production (land, labor, capital, and technology). The revolution of 1917 The first Soviet revolution took place in 1917. It resulted from the weakness and inadequacy of tsarist political-economic institutions to meet either economic or military needs. Tsarist Russia was an underdeveloped capitalist country, with a mostly very poor, illiterate, rural population - with many remnants of feudalism and a fairly absolute monarch. These class relations and political institutions held back the progress of the forces of production, so that Russia was far behind other large capitalist countries. Under German assault, tsarist institutions proved inadequate and were overthrown by a bourgeois-democratic revo

The Crystallization of a New Narrative Form in Experimental Reports (1660–1690)

The ArgumentThis essay describes the emergence and stabilization in French and English experimental accounts, in second half of the seventeenth century, of the narrative sequence: X did (some process in the laboratory) and X saw (something happen), where X stands for a pronoun, I or we in English,je, nousoronin French. Focussing on the French case, it shows how the use of the collective pronounonin the experimental accounts registered in the files of the Académie des Sciences is directly related to the will of this newly created institution to assert a collective authority on the production and legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact produced in the laboratory. It is argued, through the case of the discovery of the blind spot in the eye by Mariotte, that this new narrative form imbeds a construal of the experiment as a public spectacle, and of the proof as a witnessing event, which eludes the Academy's attempts to monopolize the process of fact validation and favors the diffusion and display of experiments in front of larger audiences. The question of whether a privileged witness such as the King of France who patronized the Academy could not have constituted by himself a suitable audience to ensure a full legitimization of experimental matters-of-fact while remaning within the bounds of academic practices is addressed. It is answered in the negative by providing evidence for the lack of interest of the absolute monarch in experiments. On the other hand, the outdoor practices of observation and measurement are shown to interfere in a constructive manner with the absolutist power and to capture the attention of the absolutist monarch, where laboratory experiments had failed. It is proposed that natural philosophers in the early modern period bear the burden of proof in buying credibility for the phenomena they try, by paying a tribute to the standing of the patrician elites that witness their experiments. This makes sense in a straightforward manner of the lack of interest of the King of France in a practice which exalts the power of the very group he is trying hard to control through the absolutist structure of power.

Between Either/Or and More or Less: Sovereignty Versus Autonomy Under Federalism

The concept ofsovereignty arose with the appearance ofthe modern state. It has survived because the state has survived as the seemingly necessary basis for political order. The persistence of cultural and ethnic nationalism and international anarchy has given the state a new lease on life. Countertendencies, including a reaction against the monarchical absolutism associated with sovereignty, have given rise to federal systems offering a flexible, if less certain, combination of government on a large scale with relative autonomy on a smaller, local scale. Given modern realities promoting interdependence and making autarky both difficult to sustain and a threat to the rights of minorities, it may be better to settle for the more or less offederalism and autonomy than the either/or of the state and sovereignty.

Party Turns? Or, Whigs and Tories Get Off Scott Free

The Restoration period has attracted renewed scholarly interest in recent years, with the result that many of our commonly held assumptions about politics in the reign of Charles II have come under increased critical scrutiny. Nowhere is this more true than for the Exclusion Crisis and the subsequent Tory Reaction. For a long time we thought we had the dynamics of this period worked out: the Exclusion Crisis gave birth to two parties—the Whigs and Tories—with the Whigs being the anti-Catholic, exclusionist, and Parliamentarian party, who carried with them the support of the people out-of-doors, and the Tories being the party of divine-right, absolute monarchy, anti-populist in their outlook, putting their belief in the sanctity of the hereditary principle before the interests of the people. The Whig challenge was essentially defeated with the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681, and thereafter the 1680s saw a drift towards monarchical absolutism, until this trend was defeated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89.

Comments on Nationalism & Democracy

Comments on Nationalism & Democracy Francis Fukuyama (bio) Ghia Nodia's essay is comprehensive, nuanced, and filled with insights large and small. Even though Nodia believes himself to be disagreeing with much that I have written, we actually concur about many things. There are a number of points where we are in complete harmony: First, it is true that nationalism and democracy (understood as distinct from liberalism) are not mutually exclusive, but are in fact two sides of the same coin. This becomes evident if one looks at both phenomena from a historical or sociological perspective. In Western Europe, nationalism played a vital role in liberating various countries from monarchical absolutism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 was equally German-nationalist and democratic, just as democratic and French-nationalist ideas were very strongly associated during the French Revolution. In our own day, nationalism is serving as an agent of liberation from communist dictatorship in a similar way. When viewed sociologically, nationalism and democracy can be seen to have emerged out of the same process of industrialization. In this respect, Nodia may have misunderstood Ernest Gellner's observations about the relationship between nationalism and industrialization. Gellner did not mean to say that nationalism had a primarily economic function or represented the interests of certain economic actors; his point was that the economic process of industrialization created certain conditions under which nationalist ideas could flourish. Industrialization breaks down the old class lines typical of traditional agricultural societies, and necessitates the laying of a common linguistic and cultural groundwork upon which [End Page 23] a national economy can be built. It is thus no accident that nationalism, in the modern sense of the word, did not exist prior to the Industrial Revolution. There was ethnicity, racial feeling, and the like, but not the belief that homogeneous cultural-linguistic groups should be organized into sovereign states. Democracy, similarly, springs out of that same historical process by which illiterate and inert peasants were turned into increasingly educated, urbanized workers. Nodia is also correct when he asserts that the major contradiction lies between nationalism and liberalism, rather than democracy. More precisely, liberalism combined with democracy implies the principle of universal recognition or universal individual rights. If, as I have argued elsewhere, liberalism is about the universal and equal recognition of every citizen's dignity as an autonomous human being, then the introduction of a national principle necessarily introduces distinctions between people. Persons who do not belong to the dominant nationality ipso facto have their dignity recognized in an inferior way to those who do belong-a flat contradiction of the principle of universal and equal recognition. A further point on which we agree is that many proponents of liberal democracy do not understand the ways in which moderate nationalism can contribute to the success of democracy as a matter of practical politics. On an abstract level, the logical result of the principle of universal recognition is a universal homogeneous state where national borders disappear. (There is no reason, for example, why Canada and the United States should be separate countries.) But in the real world national distinctions do persist, and it is very hard to imagine stable democracies existing outside of these national contexts. In Western Europe, liberal democracies were constituted primarily within relatively homogeneous linguistic and cultural communities such as France, England, and later, in the twentieth century, Germany. Even in those developed, stable democracies, liberal democracy coexists with national identity, and national identity, despite the growing unification of the European Community, is at little risk of disappearing from Europe. It is really only in lands of new settlement, like the United States and Australia, that national identity can escape its ethnoracial aspect and become rooted in the principle of the liberal democratic regime itself. But in many other democracies like Japan or France this is not the case, and there is an intimate, continuing connection between democracy and a strong national identity. Finally, I commend Nodia's rejection of the dogmatic liberal notion [End Page 24] that all manifestations of nationalism are bad. As Nodia suggests, Mikhail Gorbachev has recently been a major promulgator of this particular idea. His use...

The State, Modernity, and the Fate of Liberalism in Prewar Japan

The Political Histories of Western Europe and the United States over the past three hundred years illustrate powerfully how the evolution of fully functioning liberal democratic politics has been linked intimately to the presence of vigorous thinkers and activists dedicated to the pursuit of a liberal polity. The social contract theory of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the constitutionalism of Baron Charles de Montesquieu, the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith, and the reflections of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton on the challenges of competitive politics all helped to lay the groundwork for the achievement of liberal democratic politics in France, England, and the United States. Particular strains of political thought found in these and other thinkers help to account for the similarities and differences among the world's historic experiments in bourgeois democracy. French liberalism, which had no Thomas Hobbes seeking eloquently to defend monarchical absolutism, ultimately could not accommodate royal prerogative to democratic politics; and, lacking an Adam Smith to assert the primacy of economic laissez-faire, it showed no fundamental antipathy to the centralized state in its political practice. A more dramatic contrast is afforded by the fragile and short-lived democracy of Weimar Germany, nurtured in soil where G. W. F. Hegel's organic conception of the state and the doctrines of state sovereignty that legitimated the regime of Otto von Bismarck overwhelmed the contributions of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt to liberal theory. In the final analysis, to be sure, the presence or absence of absolutism and its defenders, of laissez-faire economics and its rationalizers is attributable to other factors deep in the history and culture of each society. Yet, in all these cases, the historical relationship between thought and politics is clear and striking.

Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef's American Strategy and the Diplomacy of North African Liberation, 1943-61

The literature on the diplomacy of decolonization is state-centric, focusing on the interaction between colonial and anti-colonial powers. Often ignored is the diplomacy of nationalists who sought and used foreign support to facilitate the liberation process.' This paper tries to strike a balance between the diplomacy of nationalists and nation-states by focusing on the American diplomacy of Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef V and assessing its impact on the decolonization of Morocco and Algeria. Mohammed V was ideally placed greatly to influence Moroccan diplomacy. He paid special attention to foreign affairs and was keenly aware of Morocco's bargaining position arising from international treaties. Because of his popularity with Moroccans, and the fact that, as an absolute monarch, he was not constrained by a bureaucracy or legislature, foreign powers also found it useful to deal with him.2 Although the Sultan did not secure overwhelming United States support for North African liberation, his skilful diplomacy and moderate views elicited much sympathy from Washington. Consequently, the State Department gently prodded France to reform its imperial structures in North Africa and opposed French attempts to depose Mohammed V for his nationalist activities.

Exponents of Sovereignty: Canonists as Seen By Theologians in The Late Middle Ages

One of the outstanding characteristics of the Church in the late Middle Ages consisted of its highly developed juridical structure. For the first time the Church was a strictly ordered legal body with, at the top, an absolute monarch. With its commandments and prohibitions it dominated all living creatures, from the highest to the lowest, both the whole community and the individual. It represented a closed, strictly disciplined, and organized corporation, with a highly developed system of law, a ‘state above the states’, in which the laymen were the ruled and the clerics were the rulers.

Soviet Military Doctrine and Western Policy

1. The Empire, its Frontiers and Structure and the Spirit of Particularism 2. The Emperor and the Estates 3. Religion and Enlightenment 4. Germany's Social Structure and Economic Conditions 5. Political Thought in the 187th Century 6. G. W. Leibniz 7. The Epoch of Louis XIV and the Rise of Monarchical Absolutism 8. The Conquest of Hungary by the Turkish Empire and its Consequences 9. Emperor Leopold I and his Policy 10. Hungary's Liberation and Austro-Hungarian Relations 11. The War of the Spanish Succession and its Consequences 12. Emperor Charles VI 13. The Principal German States Until about 1740 14. Christian Wolff and Enlightenment 15. Prussia Becomes a Great Power 16. Frederick II, his Personality, Thought and Work 17. Maria Theresa and Joseph II. Their Personality, Thought and Work 18. The Smaller German States in the Age of Enlightenment 19. Political Ideas in the Age of Frederick II and Joseph II 20. The French Revolution and German Public Opinion 21. The End of the Empire

Les Nouvelles ecclésiastiques au seuil de la Révolution (1788-1790)

Robert Favre : The Nouvelles ecclesiastiques at the beginning of the revolution (1788-1790). In 1788-9, the Jansenist paper the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques seemed uninterested in events, being only concerned with their opposition to Molinist thought. The only indication of their favourable attitude towards the new ideas is their denunciation of the «despotism » of the bishops and the Pope (called an «abso lute monarch »). After Christmas 1789, they began to mention the Revolution, but mainly in order to express their approval of the National Assembly's religious policy, which they saw as a way to force churchmen to return to evangelical poverty. However, they kept to traditional positions, condemning usury, the marriage of priests or the Deputies' toleration of actors, Jews and Protestants. Thus the N.E. only showed partial and selective support for the Revolution.

Power, Status and Precedence: rivalries among the provincial élites of Louis XIV'S France

During the past thirty years most historians have acknowledged that it is anachronistic to describe Louis XIV as an absolute monarch. Many of them have turned their attention towards the various elite groups whose power and privileges coexisted with those of the crown in the very different, and sometimes fiercely separatist, provinces which formed the kingdom of France. A few have attributed such great influence to local nobles and institutions that the royal government seems to have been reduced to impotence. This impression, clearly too extreme, has been created first by a preoccupation with those issues and periods where the crown was in conflict with many, or in the case of the Frondes with almost all, of its leading subjects, and a disregard for the more numerous occasions when the king and at least some élite groups had identical or compatible purposes. Secondly, it has arisen from a neglect of the informal channels of communication which were often more important than the formal administrative structure for linking the court and the provinces, and for conducting the everyday routine of government. The most important of these was the network of ‘brokers’, often influential governors and bishops, by which provincial requests for highly prized royal patronage—whether titles, orders, offices, privileges or pensions— were conveyed to the ministers and to the king himself. The possibility of personal advancement was a vital consideration for members of the upper social échelons as they calculated their responses to ministerial instructions and enquiries.

Samuel Richardson (review)

REVIEWS 69 The last two chapters, though they stop short of special pleading, do perhaps overstate a case, though they do so with aplomb. Nonconformist domesticity and plainness, its realistic celebration of common human affection, are defended against the polite literature of the court with its urge to power and manipulation. But by this time the old Puritan plainness had become in the eyes of their opponents far from plain, a special dialect. Samuel Parker's attack on dissenting style was really an attack on ideas, on the doctrine of grace expressed in a language that was confessional rather than explicatory. Keeble concludes with reflections on some of the major themes of Nonconformist mythography: the exodus, wayfaring and pilgrimage, adventure, and the wilderness of this world. This is a distinguished and important book, and the attempt to connect the individualism and realism of the Nonconformist ethos with specific literary techniques is brave if not always consistent. Keeble convinces us that this was a vital movement, not a moribund one, but he does not seem to face the question whether separation from the national core was ultimately impoverishing: perhaps it was, to that core too, as well as to the dissenters. Roger Sharrock King's College, London Jocelyn Harris. Samuel Richardson. British and Irish Authors. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1987. xii + 179pp. US$39.50 cloth; US$11.95 paper. Samuel Richardson's distinction as a novelist now is, properly, so axiomatic that Cambridge naturally included him in its Introductory Critical Studies of British and Irish authors. The choice of Jocelyn Harris for such a work was a happy one. She approaches her subject with respect but without hagiography, and with tactful use of modem critical approaches but without being used by them. We see, for example, Richardson's concern with Pamela's concerns—the British young woman's right to control her own property, here her virginal body, against the absolutist infringements of her master Squire B. In Clarissa Richardson deals with a related but vastly more complex political and sexual matter—the Lockean Clarissa resisting the Filmerian Lovelace. Alternatively, Clarissa is like Eve, the ravaged but noble Lucretia, and the queenly Elizabeth. Lovelace is like Don Juan, Faust, Milton's Satan, and an un-British absolute monarch. The growth from Pamela to Clarissa is a growth in epistolary sophistication and in Richardson's need to answer his critics, to make plain that it is neither a joke nor a matter indifferent for a man to victimize a socially inferior woman. He also must make plain that in one respect his critics were correct: marriage to a presumably reformed rake is not the reward for sexual virtue. Clarissa, however, compounded his problems, for misreaders grew 70 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION with the size of Richardson's audience, some of whom read key portions of his great work in manuscript. Richardson thus needed to conduct ongoing dialogues with the Lady Bradsheighs of the world, those who thought Clarissa too fussy, Lovelace all too attractive, and the benevolent Hickman all too tepid. What better way to correct such errors than by writing anotíier novel, in which Sir Charles Grandison evokes an Edenic world whose brave aristocratic man is a virgin, and whose beautiful female virgin remains so until marriage? What better way to discuss true modern Christian heroism than to show it in action through the varied moral choices available to the men, women, and Italians of that novel's dramatic personae? Jocelyn Harris is especially good at showing the continuity among these novels, their strengths and weaknesses, and their role as artifacts in constant change. I suspect that we never will have a "definitive " edition of Clarissa; Richardson himself never decided what his final version would be, for he never adequately controlled his unruly readers' responses, and never stopped trying to find ways to anticipate or correct their errors. Harris negotiates these straits well, and though she offers much plot synopsis for the novice, she also offers substance for the advanced student. She is good, for instance, concerning one chief reason for Clarissa's death, her awareness that she has seen Lovelace as heart of darkness, as vice itself (pp. 92...

Nationalism, Comparatively Speaking

Abstract This paper is offered as an extended exploration of the common sense mythologies of modem nationalism. Using Fijian dualism as a point of comparison, it argues that nationalist ideologies of unity rest on a historically contingent principle of social order: namely, that societies are (normatively) distinct sets of like individuals. Nationalist movements use this principle to delineate and construct various ‘nations.” To illustrate this approach, the paper compares the unification of France to the disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire, and asks why a singular nation was invented in France, and a plurality of nations in the Empire. The paper suggests that these very different histories can be explained by considering the relationship of these nationalist movements to the hierarchical orders of monarchical absolutism and colonial subordination.Our current definitions and conceptions stem from our own modern culture, even when anthropological experience … has modified them to some degree. This is not enough in the way of including ourselves ‐ our own culture ‐ in the picture, as true comparison requires. For our current definitions express our own culture, and our own culture … embodies an exceptional development. Any sociological generalisation must integrate it for what it is: an exception, an eccentric phenomenon. It follows that the general sociological model can in no case be modern, or modern with mere modification: it must be such a reflection of the wide experience of mankind that the modern exceptional development is clearly formulated and accommodated in it.

Political Crime and Bureaucratic Monarchy: A Chinese Case of 1768

Vol. 8, No. 1 Late Imperial ChinaJune 1987 POLITICAL CRIME AND BUREAUCRATIC MONARCHY: A CHINESE CASE OF 17681 Philip A. Kuhn "Arbitrary" and "Routine" Power in Chinese Politics Study of the Chinese political system under the late empires has produced two largely distinct literatures: research on the structure, personnel and values of the administrative bureaucracy;2 and on the development of the imperial institution, particularly on imperial communication.3 The past two decades have produced a more sophisticated view of officaldom as a way of life, and a view of the ruler that has moved far beyond simple concepts of "despotism." I wonder, however, whether we have yet reached a point where the machinery of bureaucratic routine can be related effectively to the exercise of arbitrary monarchic power. In describing such an integrated "system," if one existed, we would have to avoid the temptation to reason away the arbitrary component of autocracy by asserting any of the following: (1) that what seems to be "arbitrary" is actually the conventionalized activity of a monarch who is himself a mere instrument of the rules, or of conventional values; (2) that monarchs were largely manipulated by their advisory staff, who presented them with few real options for independent action; or (3) that monarch and bureaucrat were products of a single social system, so that any apparent contradiction between their roles is illusory. We lack an adequate theoretical description of how arbitrary power interacts with bureaucratic routine so that both are accounted for as functioning parts of a single system. What we have instead are descriptions in which the two are inversely related: the more of one, the less of the other; 1A Chinese version of this paper was delivered at the Conference on the Sixtieth Anniversary of the First Historical Archive of China, Beijing, October, 1985. I am grateful to the authorities of that archive for their generous cooperation, and to the National Academy of Sciences' Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China for support during a year in Beijing. I am indebted to Daniel Bell for reading and commenting on the present article. 2For instance, Watt 1972; Metzger 1973; Li 1975; Ocko 1983. 3Among others, Spence 1966; Wu 1970; Zhuang 1979; Bartlett 1979. 80 Political Crime and Bureaucratic Monarchy81 as one grows, the other shrinks. The tendency of social analysis since Max Weber is in fact to show the inevitable decline of arbitrary power (whether of patrimonial or charismatic origin) relative to routinized bureaucratic procedure. Weber, in his celebrated description of the Chinese polity, actually avoids confronting the issue of how arbitrary and routine power interact. Instead, he characterizes the Chinese monarchy as incompletely centralized and its operational norms as uncodified. The limitations of his data shielded him from a view of either arbitrary power or codified routine. The emperor himself is a shadowy figure in Weber's treatment of Chinese bureaucracy. Under the "average ruler," authority was not "centralized."4 Weber presumably believed, however, that the characteristics of Chinese bureaucracy would render it powerless when faced with a «on-average ruler because it lacked specialization (only modern "bureaucratic experts" can compete effectively with the "absolute monarch," whom they can dismiss as a "dilettante").5 Although he uses the term "bureaucracy" in referring to the Chinese system, Weber does not actually include that system under "Bureaucracy," a subject-heading he reserves for the specifically "modern" type. Instead the Chinese case falls under "Patriarchal and Patrimonial Domination."6 Just as shadowy is Weber's notion of the codified routine through which the Chinese bureaucracy was disciplined and controlled . Though the "patriarchal" monarchy was able to achieve an "authoritarian and internalized bondage" of the officials by transferring them frequently and thereby keeping them from forming regional powerbases ,7 the "patriarchal character of the political association . . . was opposed to any development of formal law."8 "Formal law," for Weber, must have included administrative codes by which the bureaucracy itself might be regulated. Although for these reasons Weber could not pose the problem sharply in the context of the Chinese state, his historical logic suggests that he saw arbitrary and routine power as incompatible, and visualized a historical process that tended to...