Bourgeois Liberalism Research Articles

Dewey's Concept Of Community: A Last Third Of The Twentieth Century Perspective

John Dewey belongs to a tradition in the west whose members have attempted to explain how the breakdown of community has occurred. Although Dewey is not a romantic nor a conservative, he acknowledges his debt to their nineteenth century analyses. Dewey argued that the school and the greater society are inextricably one; therefore, the kind of school he favored was dependent upon the building of a democratic community. Dewey's analysis of the disintegrative power of bourgeois liberalism and its inability to replace the synthesis of medieval civilization goes a long way toward explaining the educational, social, political and moral crises which afflict much of the modern industrial west, and especially America.

Decadence and the Reinvention of Modernismthe Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley

Decadence and the Reinvention of Modernismthe Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley

The theme of civilization in Manning Clark’s History of Australia

This article reinterprets Manning Clark’s A History of Australia as a critique of European civilization in Australia. Clark was preoccupied with the idea of civilization; it was the central theme of his six-volume History. Civilization in Australia was originally composed of three beliefs imported from Europe: Protestantism, Catholicism and the Enlightenment. Their conflict and interaction would shape Clark’s narrative account of Australian history, which he told as the coming of civilization to a barbarous land. However, Clark’s ‘Whig’ view of history was plagued by internal contradictions. Although Clark accepted the inevitability of progress, he was deeply sceptical of its benefits. Clark’s doubts about material progress were most fully realised in his critique of bourgeois liberalism, especially its civilizing mission to recast Australia as a provincial Britain.

Dialectical libertarianism: the unintended consequences of both ethics and incentives underlie mutual prosperity

In Bourgeois equality, Deidre Nansen McCloskey argues, as advertised in the book's subtitle, that Ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world (2016). This ambitious historical project takes its position in opposition to the political left and right. McCloskey understands the left to reflect the opinion that accumulated capital enriched the class by exploiting the working class who will only be included in the capitalist vision of perpetual accumulation as a result of state mandated redistribution. She understands the right to be the contemporary neo-institutionalists who argue that economic growth will be achieved with the appropriate incentives to reward rational action. McCloskey's argument is primarily historical. It spans the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, focusing on the European invention of capitalism and what she argues are the attendant virtues of prudence, temperance, and justice (p. 189). The strength of the project is its re-visitation of the ideals and development of classical liberalism. Its weakness is McCloskey's failure to engage with or recognize that markets and rationality are historically contextualized cultural forms. Hence latter day late-twentieth century political economy represents a different set of challenges to an advocate of bourgeois liberalism than did early modern nobility. The preeminence of rational choice social science threatens the bourgeois that McCloskey seeks to defend as the basis for a prosperous capitalist global order and it provides the most compelling contemporary rationale for markets and politics.In view of the current preeminence of neo-institutionalism and game theory, I find Bourgeois equality particularly illuminating for reminding readers of the theoretical principles characterizing modern liberal market theory such as those evident in Adam Smith's Theory of modern sentiments (1982 [1759]). Thus, in focusing critical attention on contemporary neo-institutionalism, McCloskey provides the means to clarify the distance between contemporary markets and their classical liberal predecessors. One reward for achieving this understanding is to grasp the significant differences between contemporary market ideology and that of early liberalism. Another is to fruitfully pose the question of whether McCloskey is correct: perhaps, beyond incentives, the motivating ideas and animating virtues of agents are directly correlated to whether a market society generates inclusive prosperity?In this review, I quickly rehearse McCloskey's historical argument that modern capitalism is best understood as a period of 'Great Enrichment'. i discuss her core thesis that ideals concerning human dignity are fundamental to inclusive economic growth. After this I address McCloskey's particular intervention in rejecting what she takes to be the left's assertion that redistribution is essential (e.g., Thomas Piketty), and the right's focus on institutional structures to facilitate economic growth and inclusive prosperity (e.g., Douglass C. North). I make the following points. First, I agree that McCloskey is correct in arguing that the neoliberal institutionalists concentrate on incentives to the exclusion of ethical reasons for action. Second, I suggest that the neoliberal institutionalists are more accurately viewed as extending from the right to the left sides of the political spectrum. Finally, I investigate whether perhaps the position McCloskey develops may best be characterized as 'dialectical libertarianism' because both ethical ideals and prudential incentives are fundamental to inclusive free market prosperity. Thus, I invite McCloskey to consider whether on the one hand theorists from both the left and right could endorse ideals alongside with prudential incentives. On the other hand, I ask McCloskey to take a position on whether ideals should be accompanied with a commitment to a minimal safety net, to ensure the inclusion of the least well-off in the opportunities for development. …

Poole, DeWitt Clinton Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner (review)

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 762 is best to end by saying that this fine, thought provoking book gives us new insights into the civil wars while opening up many issues for further discussion. George Mason University Rex A. Wade Poole, DeWitt Clinton. An American Diplomat in Bolshevik Russia. Edited by Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2014. xxiii + 332 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $26.95 (paperback). Arguably, every memoir is an exercise in self-justification and glorification. However, in this instance, American diplomat DeWitt Clinton Poole (1885– 1952) largely avoids boastfulness while dancing around his more controversial activity. Poole’s claim to fame is that he served as US consul in Moscow during the tumultuous and fateful year between late 1917 and late 1918. Besides being a keen and thoughtful observer, Poole was a direct participant in some of these events. Poole has also been aptly described by espionage historian Svetlana Chervonnaya as a ‘spymaster […] and an expert in anti-Communist propaganda and psychological and political warfare’ (DocumentsTalk.com). To find that in this volume, one will have to look very closely and usually between the lines. The origins of this book lie in taped interviews of Poole conducted in early 1952 by the Columbia University Oral History Research Office. The editors, Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner, have limited the current volume to 1917–20, with four of the seven chapters, about two-thirds of the book, focused on the critical months of 1917–18. The remaining chapters deal, respectively, with Poole’s activities as American consul in Archangel, his observations of the Paris Peace Conference, and his subsequent duties as head of the State Department’s Russian Division. Lees is a professor of History at Old Dominion University and a specialist in Yugoslav-American relations, and Rodner is a professor of History at Tidewater Community College in Virginia specializing in British studies. They have done an excellent job in annotating Poole’s recollections; indeed, the annotations comprise maybe a third of the total text. They correct many of Poole’s assorted misstatements and, more importantly, identify the multitude of people he mentions, often only in passing. Poole was describing people and events from more than thirty years prior and his memory, while remarkably good, definitely was not perfect. He is frequently mistaken on details, especially dates, for example, misstating the 1918 Armistice as 7 November as opposed to the 11th (p. 216). He also erroneously credits Maria Spiridonova with the attempted REVIEWS 763 assassination of Lenin (it was Fania Kaplan or, at least, not Spiridonova) and puts the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1941, not 1939 (p. 162). For anyone familiar with the people and events, these are petty errors, but for the initiated the notes will be a tremendous help. Both Poole and the editors quote extensively from State Department correspondence, and Poole often cites letters he wrote to his sister and others. The son of an Army officer descended from old Yankee stock, Poole was a sterling example of the early twentieth-century American liberal bourgeois. Priding himself on a democratic attitude and sense of fairness, he also evidences naïveté, snobbery and sentimentality, perhaps what he meant by ‘my American provincialism’ (p. 80). In his dealings with Bolsheviks he was more put off by their shabby dress than by their ideology. A true diplomat, Poole rarely says anything negative and was evidently willing to work in a civil manner with just about anyone. He took a particular shine to Georgii Chicherin, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, perhaps because the ‘dapper’ Chicherin looked and acted as Poole believed a government representative should (pp. 86–87). Poole claims that the timorous Chicherin later lived in mortal dread of Stalin poisoning him (p. 90). Overall, Poole says less about what was actually happening in Russia than what he and others thought or hoped was happening: a diplomacy of lost opportunities. There is frequent repetitiveness, mostly due to the interview format, but there are points Poole seems determined to make again and again. One is his assertion that American diplomatic actions were based overwhelmingly on the wartime exigencies of...

Taking the Measure of National Greatness: Georg Brandes’s Condemnation of German Imperialism

In numerous public speeches and essays published around the turn of the 20 th century, the Danish intellectual Georg Brandes (1842–1927) criticized Germany’s imperialistic behavior, in particular its oppressive treatment of the Danish minority in Slesvig-Holstein, as incompatible with true national greatness. In Brandes’s view, many of the same traits and actions that bolstered Germany’s national pride and international might violated human rights and compromised human dignity, thus diminishing Germany’s moral and cultural stature. Grounded in the traditions of bourgeois liberalism, Brandes’s brand of cosmopolitan nationalism privileges the “universal” conception of the nation as a civic union in which the rights of heterogeneous ethnic groups must be protected by the state to which they belong, regardless of that state’s dominant linguistic and ethnic identity. His defense of oppressed minority groups against the economic and military might of German imperialism exemplifies his privileging of the universal over the national. (JKA)

The anti-dialectical signification of Erzulie Danthor and Bois Caiman of the Haitian Revolution

This work focuses on how and why the purposive-rationality of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at Bois Caiman is an anti-dialectical, as opposed to a dialectical, movement against enslavement as offered by traditional interpretations of the Revolution. The author concludes that the intent, as reflected in Boukman’s prayer, of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman) was not for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with whites by reproducing their norms and structure, as in the case of the Affranchis under the purposive-rationality of the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois blacks, but for the reconstitution of a new world order or structuring structure ‘enframed’ by an African spiritual and linguistic community, Vodou and Kreyol, respectively, grounded in, and ‘enframing,’ liberty and fraternity among blacks or death. In fact, the author posits that it is the infusion of the former worldview, liberal bourgeois Protestantism via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, on the island by the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free persons of color, Affranchis, looking to Canada, France, and America for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition that not only threatens Haiti and its practical consciousnesses, Vodou and Kreyol, contemporarily, but all life and civilizations on earth because of its dialectical economic growth and accumulative (neoliberal) logic within the finite space and resources of the earth.

Justice et vengeance ?

Justice or vengeance ?Thanks to the Kastner train, the Hungarian writer Bela Zsolt made it to Switzerland. He then chose to go back to Hungary in the summer of 1945. Amidst the ruins of the capital of the new “democratic” Hungary, which was occupied by the Soviets, he started a weekly by the name of Haladas (The Progress). He did so on behalf of the Radical party, which is to say the Hungarian left-minded bourgeois liberals, but he also involved friends with Socialist convictions. Together with a number of like-minded intellectuals, many of whom were survivors, Zsolt shaped a utopian liberal Hungary, which had very little chance of being reflected in the historical trends in place on the eve of the Cold War. This article examines the journal’s criticism of another group of writers, the nepiek, during its first two years of existence. The attitudes of most of the nepiek, from the passing of the first anti-Jewish law to the extermination period, were practically indifferent at best, if not supportive. The much-expected purges among the intellectual class never really took place in Hungary and the biased promotion of certain nepiek during the postwar period both enraged and paralyzed the intellectuals associated with The Progress. A lonely voice in the postwar literary milieu, the journal called for an examination of Hungarian intellectuals’ share of responsibility in the extermination of their fellow Jewish citizens. That call would barely be heard and the debate would be put to an end in 1948.

The African-Americanization of the Black Diaspora in Globalization or the Contemporary Capitalist World-system

This article puts forth the argument that people of African descent in the contemporary capitalist world-system under American hegemony, that is, globalization, are ever so slowly becoming African-Americanized because of the ideological and material influence of the black underclass via hip-hop culture and work and the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism promulgated throughout the diaspora by black American charismatic liberal bourgeois Protestant preachers like TD Jakes, Creflo Dollar, etc. The latter, representatives of the black bourgeoisie, given their material wealth, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination in black America, and are seeking to do the same in the African diaspora. I am, therefore, suggesting that contemporarily the evolution of black diasporic practical consciousness in the capitalist world-system under American hegemony has to be examined against the backdrop of this class dualism as well as the cultural and religious heritage of the black American people responsible for its inception in globalization or the contemporary capitalist world-system under American hegemony.

Beyond the Politics of Identity: The Left and the Politics of Caste and Identity in Tamil Nadu, 1920–63

Wedged uncomfortably between the gathering pan-Indian nationalist movement and the locally resonant and divisive anti-Brahman, Tamil ethno-nationalist movement, Left leaders in the Tamil region in India were faced with a difficult and complex set of political choices and challenges in the early twentieth century. These political challenges brought to the fore the social and political contradictions between an anti-colonial Indian nationalism led mostly by upper-caste liberal–bourgeois leaders and an equally entrenched and locally resonant ethno-nationalist movement which, despite its social reformist and anti-Brahman platform, was led by dominant non-Brahman caste leaders committed to the continuation of British rule. In this paper, we will be looking at two of the most prominent Tamil Left leaders who attempted to work with and bridge these contradictory movements in Tamil society. M. Singaravelu (1860–1946) and P. Jeevanandam (1907–63) were prominent Left leaders and intellectuals in the Tamil region and were well known for their close engagement with and sensitivity to issues of social reform, caste and linguistic and cultural hegemony. Both joined various political movements including the Indian National Congress, the Dravidian movement and the Indian communist party in different phases of their careers. It is their participation and engagement with such diverse and contradictory movements that make their intellectual interventions unique and a close study of their work valuable for providing a window into how the Left attempted to deal with such thorny issues as the politics of caste and language in India.

Happiness Studies and Wellbeing: A Lacanian Critique of Contemporary Conceptualisations of the Cure

Criticising the discourse of happiness and wellbeing from a psychoanalytic perspective, this article is in five parts. The first offers a brief philosophical genealogy of happiness, charting its diverse meanings from ancient Greece, through Medieval Scholasticism and on to bourgeois liberalism, utilitarianism and neoliberalism. The second contextualizes contemporary happiness in the wider milieu of self-help culture and positive psychology. The third explores the growing influence but also methodological weaknesses of the field of Happiness Studies. The fourth then focuses specifically on the notion of wellbeing and the impact it has had on changing definitions of health itself, particularly mental health. The fifth and final section then turns to psychoanalysis, its Lacanian orientation especially, to explore the critical resources it offers to counter today’s dominant therapeutic cultures. It also emphasises psychoanalytic clinical practice as itself an ethico-political challenge to the injunction to be happy that lies at the heart of consumer culture.

The Six Essential Components of Sustainable Socialism: From Building the Productive Forces to Combating Bourgeois Liberalization

A sustainable socialist society has six essential components: (1) an economic system that builds the productive forces and promotes common prosperity in a steady, sustainable manner; (2) a political system that supports a vigorous people's democracy focused on implementing the people's political agenda; (3) a strong, united, and fully sovereign socialist homeland; (4) a progressive socialist culture; (5) resource management policies that promote a flourishing natural environment while meeting the people's economic needs; and (6) successful resistance to bourgeois liberalization. Sustainable socialism is the result of successfully constructing, managing, and preserving the six components. In order to prevent contradictions, the components must be scientifically harmonized in a way that is appropriate to national conditions. In addition to harmonization, dynamic, highly organized, and vigilant political leadership is necessary for launching and organizing the drive for sustainable socialism and protecting the gains of socialism from reactionaries. The communist party working through the instrument of the people's democratic dictatorship provides these organizing, harmonizing, and protective functions. Thus, the leading role of the communist party becomes the overarching principle that guides the construction, implementation, and scientific harmonization of the six components of sustainable socialism.

Modernism and Christianity by Erik Tonning

Reviewed by: Modernism and Christianity by Erik Tonning Jack Dudley (bio) MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY, by Erik Tonning. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xviii + 149 pp. $85.00 cloth; $25.00 paperback. Because modernism has been thought to mark a radical break from religion, particularly western Christianity, modernist studies have only begun to respond to the renewed critical interest in religious history and theology. Erik Tonning’s Modernism and Christianity provides the best case for drawing together these two ostensibly opposed terms while also generously pointing the way forward for new avenues of study. As a general introduction and overview to the relationship between modernism and Christianity, Tonning’s book is a remarkable success, one that will be of great value for both graduate students and junior scholars as they engage in the burgeoning interest in this hybrid area of study. While Tonning’s point of departure is the standard narrative of modernism as crisis, he rightly notes that such an account would necessarily entail “some confrontation” with Christianity (2). To provide background for his work, Tonning draws on appropriate studies of modernism such as Roger Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, as well as on the most important study of modernism and religion in the past decade, Pericles Lewis’s Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel.1 Tonning selects a few central modernists for his study—James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound—as well as incorporating a “minor” modernist in the British poet and painter David Jones. Tonning then traces their literary treatments of religion through the century into the writings of W. H. Auden and Samuel Beckett. In doing so, his work not only recasts the meaning of the often pejorative term “dogma” for these writers but also revises the standard “crisis of faith” narrative about modernism in favor of a more historically accurate reading of a broader “crisis of authority” (100-101). The neglect of any women in this picture, however, is puzzling. Tonning treats Virginia Woolf at some length, but the religiously curious poetry of H.D. or the idiosyncratic Catholic elements of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood would have provided complex variations for his study.2 His third, and most effective, chapter, “Old Dogmas for a New Crisis? Hell, Usury and Incarnation in T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden,” remarkably moves from Eliot’s “dogmatic rearmament” (69)—a term used to describe his views against what he saw as anemic, bourgeois liberalism—to Pound’s “private orthodoxy” (81)—built from a pagan-inspired and deplorably anti-Semitic reevaluation of Christianity’s European and Greco-Roman roots—to Auden’s emergent sense that a liberal democracy must be informed by the Absolute and modeled on the ecclesia. His studies of these writers [End Page 224] stand out for their historical and biographical precision. Rather than generalize their beliefs, Tonning pinpoints particular positions at specific historical moments, such as Pound’s “1930s rapprochement” with the Roman Catholic Church, partly inspired by his attraction to Fascist Italy (82). He skillfully combines this historical analysis with new readings of the poetry that emerge from that history. Unfortunately for Joyce scholars, Tonning’s chapter on Joyce, “Catholic Modernisms: James Joyce and David Jones,” lacks this level of sophistication largely because it relies on a dated and one-sided view of Joyce as a materialist, atheist, and secular writer, a reading based on Geert Lernout’s 2010 book, Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion.3 Tonning fails to connect the stridently secularizing picture drawn by Lernout with more balanced appraisals such as Roy Gottfried’s Joyce’s Misbelief,4 Mary Lowe-Evans’s Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company,5 or Lewis’s chapter on Joyce from Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. While Tonning accurately sketches the relationship between modernism and Catholicism through appropriate sources like the 1907 anti-modernist encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis6 and does well to combine Joyce with Jones, he treats Joyce’s views of religion as unchanging and fails to apply the historical precision his treatment of Eliot, Pound, and Auden employs. Like most standard secular accounts of Joyce, Tonning opens with the 29...

The Rise of Danish Agrarian Liberalism

In the literature on European history, World War I and the interwar years are often portrayed as the end of the age of liberalism. The crisis of liberalism dates back to the nineteenth century, but a er the Great War, criticism of liberalism intensified. But the interwar period also saw a number of attempts to redefine the concept. This article focuses on the Danish case of this European phenomenon. It shows how a profound crisis of bourgeois liberalism in the late nineteenth century le the concept of liberalism almost deserted in the first decades of the twentieth century, and how strong state regulation of the Danish economy during World War I was crucial for an ideologization of the rural population and their subsequent orientation toward the concept of liberalism.

AFFECT AND REARTICULATING THE RACIAL “UN-SAYABLES”

I approach the question of whither race studies in the context of teaching a firstyear seminar here at Duke, “Prison, the U.S., and the Citizen”: a course that has, as part of its curricular mission in Duke-specific institutional terms, ethical inquiry. This course has driven home for me in particular ways the inability of general public discussion—what my students are aware of in abundance but which they understand as “natural”—to accommodate elaborated and unelaborated discourses for cathected critical engagement, e.g., white supremacy and its connection to prison, the history of the U.S. state, and the idea of the citizen. If those of us who participate in teaching, research, and public intellectualism frequently take as our object of critique the limitations of the liberal bourgeois subject, we must also run up against the difficulty of moving our students from that hegemonic subjectivity to something more specifically critical. But this semester, I have run into another form of difficulty. Since there seems to be no location for even the much-derided liberal bourgeois subject to exist, the obstacle looms before me of helping to move my students from their internalization of the dominant narrative that explicitly and implicitly structures their active and passive acceptance of the massive carceral state, to a position of awareness: first, that they are living out such a state of affairs; and then, a realization that this state of affairs is in no way natural or inevitable; i.e., I nostalgically long for the simple presence of a liberal bourgeois subjectivity as a starting point in the classroom, as an

History of the Historiography of Spanish Textbooks and Treatises on International Law of the 19th Century

The bibliography of Spanish international law textbooks is a good indicator of the evolution of the historiography of international law. Spanish historiography, with its own special features, was a recipient of the great debates concerning naturalism v. positivism and universalism v. particularism that flourished in European and American historiography in the nineteenth century. This study is articulated on four principal axes. The first states how the writings of the philosophes continued to dominate the way in which the subject was conceived in mid-nineteenth century Spain. Secondly, it explores the popularization and democratization of international law through the work of Concepcion Arenal and the heterodox thought of Rafael Maria de Labra. Thirdly, it examines the first textbooks of international law with their distinct natural law bias, but imbued with certain positivist elements. These textbooks trawled sixteenth century Spanish history, searching for the origins of international law and thus demonstrating the historical civilizing role of Spain, particularly in America. Fourthly, it considers the vision of institutionist, heterodox reformers and bourgeois liberals who proclaimed the universality of international law, not without some degree of ambivalence, and their defence of Spain as the object of civilization and also a civilizing subject. In conclusion, the article argues that the late development of textbooks was a consequence of the late institutionalization of the study of international law during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the legacy of the nineteenth century survives in the most progressive of contemporary polemics for a new international law.

A Poet's reich: politics and culture in the George circle

Stefan George (1868-1933) was one of the most important figures in modern German culture. His poetry, in its originality and impact, has been ranked with that of Goethe and Holderlin. Yet George's reach extended beyond the sphere of literature. In the early 1900s, he gathered around himself a circle of disciples who subscribed to his vision of comprehensive cultural-spiritual renewal and sought to turn it into reality. The ideas of the George Circle profoundly affected Germany's educated middle class, especially in the aftermath of the First World War, when their critique of bourgeois liberalism, materialism, and scholarship (Wissenschaft) as well as their call for new forms of leadership (Herrschaft) and a new Reich found wider resonance. The essays collected in the present volume critically re-examine these ideas, their contexts, and their influence. They provide new perspectives on the intersection of culture and politics in the works of the George Circle, not least its ambivalent relationship to National Socialism. Contributors: Adam Bisno, Richard Faber, Rudiger Gorner, Peter Hoffmann, Thomas Karlauf, Melissa S. Lane, Robert E. Lerner, David Midgley, Robert E. Norton, Ray Ockenden, Ute Oelmann, Martin A. Ruehl, Bertram Schefold. Melissa S. Lane is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Martin A. Ruehl is Lecturer in German Thought and Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge.

The Scholem Brothers and the Paths of German Jewry, 1914-1939

The First World War and the Weimar Republic opened new opportunities for Jews in Germany, but they also complicated the Jews' situation. Significant antisemitism accompanied illiberal antirepublican sentiment, and the Jews' place in German society was increasingly called into question. Faced with this challenge, German Jews saw four options available to them: the Jewish particularism of Zionism, the universalism of Marxism, an embrace of German nationalism and minimization of Jewish identity, and bourgeois liberalism. These four positions found representation in the four Scholem brothers: Gershom (born Gerhard), Werner, Reinhold, and Erich. An examination of their lives and their relationship to Judaism and German politics elucidates the options that German Jews considered available in this era and the decisions they made.

Cultivating, Designing, and Teaching: Jewish Women in Modern Viennese Garden Architecture

Most of the very few women working in garden architecture in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s came from liberal bourgeois Jewish families. Yella Hertzka founded the first advanced horticultural school for women within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1913. About 10 years later, Grete Salzer, a graduate from Hertzka's school, and Dr Paula Fürth, a plant physiologist, established their own businesses in the same Viennese upper-class district as Yella Hertzka, each consisting of a perennial nursery, a garden architecture studio and a horticultural school. Hanny Strauß ran a nursery in her radically modern house, designed by Josef Frank in 1914, and Helene Wolf, another graduate from Hertzka's school, operated a nursery and a garden architecture practice near Vienna. All four garden architects created modern gardens in and around Vienna and cooperated with designers and architects from the Austrian Werkbund. Their violent expulsion in 1938–39 left a significant gap in Austrian garden architecture in the early twentieth century.

Candida Rifkind. Conrades and Critics: Women, Literature, & the Left in 1930s Canada

CANDIDA RIFKIND Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, & the Left in 1930s Canada Toronto, Buffalo, London; University of Toronto Press, 2009. viii + 268 pp. Recipient of the Ann Saddlemyer scholarly book award at the 2010 conference of the CATR/ACRT, Candida Rifkind's Comrades and Critics expands the vital field of scholarship that is rewriting our knowledge and our analyses of left-wing Canadian modernism. In the 1930s, Canadian women writers and cultural workers including Dorothy Livesay, Ruby Ronan, Anne Marriott, Irene Baird, Toby Gordon Ryan, Mildred Goldberg, Elsie Park Gowan, Minnie Evans Bicknell, Mary Reynolds, and Jim (Jean) Watts made crucial contributions to English-Canadian communist and social democratic journalism, poetry, fiction, and theatre. Rifkind surveys this work in historical context and addresses its place in national cultural memory and its reception in English-Canadian literary history. An introductory chapter on the Encounter points to the double duty of the English-Canadian literary left, to give creative expression to socialism and overturn the dominant literary (4), and goes on to frame the book's most original insights, which have to do with the gendered terms of the Socialist-Modernist encounter and its impact on the period's women artists and on their work. I would say, in my second-wave sort of way, that this book exposes the pervasive sexism of the most progressive discourses of English Canada in the 1930s. As Rifkind explains, the problem was not only that gender issues were explicitly subordinated to class and other struggles during the Comintern period, and then subordinated again in relation to the fight against fascism during the period of the Popular Front, although this did happen and it needs to be remembered. (My own view, and I know that I am not alone in this, is that one of the most important lessons of the twentieth-century revolutions is that we humans must not ever again leave our humanity behind in order to storm the barricades and expect to be able to pick it up again on the other side. But I digress.) The problem is more acute because the explicit sidelining of gender issues in the 1930s was exacerbated by the discursive and symbolic linkages between rugged masculinity, socialist progress, and modernist aesthetics, on one hand; and femininity, a decadent and despised bourgeoisie, and bad art, on the other: Women on the political left often had to subordinate questions of gender to those of class and ethnicity, and by the 1930s the gains made by pre-war socialist feminists and the suffrage movement of an earlier generation faltered (Newton 171). Across the Canadian left by the end of the 1920s, women's issues were being subordinated to class struggle and then, with the rise of European fascism in the early 1930s, fighting racisms and anti-Semitism at home and overseas. Women who were both socialists and modernists in 1930s Canada had to consequently find ways to accommodate themselves to the downplaying of women's issues in leftist politics and the contempt for any aesthetic perceived as feminine in modernist literature. Each of the women I foreground in this book struggled to do this in a different way; what unites them is an attempt to disassociate their female identities from the feminine metaphors and images typically used to criticize conservative artistic tradition as well as liberal bourgeois politics. (11) Add to this the fact that real economic and political power was concentrated in the hands of men, and the discouragements and detours performed by these women artists seem merely inevitable. …