Civic Order Research Articles

Justifying graffiti: (Re)defining societal codes through orders of worth

Graffiti is often defined through the broken window theory that states areas with graffiti will be riddled with other types of crime. This concern continues at a time when some graffiti writers are gaining recognition and viewed as serious artists in certain art circles. This paper looks at US news coverage of graffiti in 2012 to investigate how graffiti is being framed in a public arena. The typical framing is that graffiti is a crime and this is justified through a civic order of worth that fits with the broken window theory. There are, however, instances of graffiti being framed as something else. The various justifications are analyzed to better understand the broader portrayal of this art form.

Calvin's legacy for contemporary Reformed natural law

AbstractRecent scholarship has done much to uncover a continuous tradition of distinctively Reformed natural law reflection, according to which knowledge of the natural moral law, though not saving knowledge, is universally available to humanity in its fallen state and makes a stable secular order possible. A close look at Calvin's understanding of natural law, and in particular of conscience and natural human instincts, shows that Calvin himself did not expect the natural law to serve as a source of substantive action-guiding moral norms. First, Calvin held that conscience delivers information concerning the moral quality even of individual actions. But he also thought that we often blind ourselves to the deliverances of conscience. Second, he argued that our natural instincts predispose us to civic order and fair dealing insofar as these are necessary for the natural well-being or advantage of creatures such as ourselves. But he also carefully distinguished the good of advantage from the good of justice or virtue. The modern natural lawyers eroded Calvin's careful distinction between conscience as revealing our duty as duty, and instinct as guiding us towards natural advantage. They also turned away from Calvin's insistence on the moral incapacity of unredeemed humanity. The modern natural lawyers saw their task as one of developing an empirical science of human nature to guide legislation and shape international law, bracketing questions of whether this nature was fallen and in need of redemption. When Scottish Presbyterian Reformed thinkers, such as Gershom Carmichael and John Witherspoon, tried in diverse ways to restore eroded Reformed commitments to the science of human nature, about which they were otherwise so enthusiastic, they were not particularly successful. A science which could derive moral norms from an examination of human instincts, and a conscience which could deliver universal moral knowledge, proved too attractive to decline simply because of the transcendence of God or the fallenness of humankind. Those who wished to preserve an account of natural law which remained faithful to a fully robust set of Reformed theological commitments could do so only by refusing to regard the natural law as a positive source of moral knowledge.

Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517–1648: “Printed Poison & Evil Talk” by Allyson F. Creasman (review)

Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517–1648: “Printed Poison & Evil Talk” by Allyson F. Creasman (review)

Censorship and civic order in reformation Germany, 1517–1648. Printed poison & evil talk. By Allyson F. Creasman. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.) Pp. xi+291 incl. 4 ills. Farnham–Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2012. £65. 978 1 4094 1001 0

Censorship and civic order in reformation Germany, 1517–1648. Printed poison & evil talk. By Allyson F. Creasman. St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.) Pp. xi+291 incl. 4 ills. Farnham–Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2012. £65. 978 1 4094 1001 0

Allyson F. Creasman. Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517–1648: “Printed Poison and Evil Talk.”

Allyson F. Creasman's book studies the flow of ideas during the German Reformation from the formative years of urban reform to the confessionalized atmosphere of the Thirty Years' War. At one level, it “aims to reassess the Reformation's spread by examining how censorship impacted public understanding of reform” (p. 3). This requires close study of the publishing industry and its control in the urban environment, which Creasman does using archival materials and regional literature from the imperial cities of Augsburg and Nuremberg. But the book is more than just a case study in the history of print. Creasman, mindful of both the nature of communication in the early modern period as well as the recent concerns of Reformation historiography, defines her terms very broadly. She does not just study the printing and censorship of texts but undertakes a nuanced exploration of how these texts interacted with other forms of communication, from neighborhood rumor and communal readings to public debates and ritual action, and thereby “created a filter through which the reform message was understood” (p. 78). Rather than focus on how censorship worked (or failed to work) to place restrictions on the publication of texts or limit the free circulation of ideas (though the book does examine these practical issues), Creasman adopts a notion of censorship that makes it a dynamic element in the communication process. Censorship was not just the top-down imposition of order; it was part of a dialogue—“as much a product of public opinion as a force acting upon it” (p. 227)—that not only prescribed and enforced notions of civic order but was itself shaped by the energy of communal opinion.

Lactantius and “ressourcement”: Going to the sources of religious liberty in the civic order

Laktancjusz, jako uznany retor, piastował urzędowe stanowiska w okresie pa­nowania Dioklecjana (284-305) i Konstantyna (306-337). Był również obecny w Nikomedii, gdy zimą roku 302/303, Dioklecjan wezwał do rozwiązania „pro­blemu chrześcijaństwa”. Szyderstwa i pogarda, które docierały do Laktancjusza, skłoniły go do napisania wielkiej chrześcijańskiej apologii – Divinae Institutio­nes. Atmosfera prześladowania, która towarzyszyła powstaniu Institutiones bez wątpienia skłoniła apologetę do dyskusji o wolności religijnej, nie tylko jako ogólnym prawie chrześcijan, ale jako podstawowym prawie osoby ludzkiej. Pre­zentowany artykuł ukazuje argumenty Laktancjusza za wolnością religijną w po­rządku świeckim oraz dowodzi, że wiara Laktancjusza w potrzebę wolności do­konywania czynności religijnych determinuje jego afirmację wolności religijnej jako takiej. Artykuł analizuje także użycie pism Laktancjusza w katolickiej nauce społecznej i stwierdza, że soborowe nauczanie Kościoła katolickiego na temat wolności religijnej jest przykładem nie tylko rozwoju doktrynalnego, ale auten­tycznego powrotu do nauczania Ojców.

The Purposes of Playing on the Post Civil War Stage: The Politics of Affection in William Davenant’s Dramatic Theory

This article situates William Davenant’s writings on dramatic poetry from the 1650s within the context of political debates about the role of the passions in effecting political action. His proposal to the Interregnum government for the revival of the dramatic arts in the kingdom’s turbulent capital, as well as his preface to his epic poem Gondibert, reflect and negotiate contemporary seventeenth-century anxieties over the affective dimensions of political obligation prompted by the transformations of ideas of sovereignty during the English Civil Wars. Davenant’s discussions of dramatic poetry’s wider civic functions can thus also be read as contributions to post-civil war redefinitions of public government and the proper emotional constitution of a stable civic order.

Walter Raleigh, through John Milton, according to William Carlos Williams

Walter Raleigh, through John Milton, according to William Carlos Williams Angelica Duran The US-American poet, writer, and self-fashioned country doctor William Carlos Williams expressly refers to the also eclectic Walter Raleigh (1552–1619) in two works: in the chapter “Sir Walter Raleigh” in his early collection of historical essays In the American Grain (1925) and in his mid-career lyric “Raleigh Was Right,” published in two typographically different versions, first in 1940 and then in The Wedge (1944). Of significant consequence to Williams’s representations of Raleigh is that he grafts John Milton (1608–74) onto them both times, overtly in the form and voice in the first work; unobtrusively but no less powerfully, through an image and its overriding tone, in the second.1 My aim is to show that Williams’s epitomizing of the figure of a Miltonic Raleigh demonstrates a form of modernism that does not as much radically break from but rather eagerly reconceives of traditional modes of social organization. Just as Raleigh’s and Milton’s works contributed to the long-awaited emergence of a great English literature in the seventeenth century, Williams worked deliberately to help build a strong US-American literature that finally came into its own in the twentieth century. In the American Grain compiles distinctivelymodulated chapters on American explorers from Norway, Spain, France, England, and the Americas, and in the Raleigh chapter, Williams conveys the epic nature of England’s unexpected and sharp rise in the settlement of the Americas, and consequently in international standing. To provide a new sense rather than a historic account of Raleigh’s chaotic explorations, Williams does not adapt, for example, Raleigh’s historiographer’s voice from his most popular long work History of the World, but rather the much more familiar epic voice of the fiercely British “John Milton, Englishman.”2 When Williams returns to Raleigh, and Milton, again in his [End Page 15] mid-career lyric “Raleigh Was Right,” the conversation still concerns significant national themes and aims. But Williams’s touch is lighter; and his poem joins with theirs in the pastoral mode to create a modernist stance that breaks from traditional form but maintains its concern for civic order, and to attend to the difficulties of defining much less achieving one. Together, Williams’s two works capture the capaciousness of the Raleigh legend and the arguments it can bear. In In the American Grain, the Miltonic Raleigh represents a formidable, successful European precursor for those etching out a US-American nation and literature. With “Raleigh Was Right,” Williams posits a Raleigh and a Milton—chronological and national Others—as fellow human voices, as he offers one alternative to coming to terms with the bearing that individual acts and limitations have on vast, enduring human needs. In the American Grain’s Epic Raleigh Williams’s visionary and revisionary history In the American Grain is a sweeping representation of a slow, painful but necessary dismissal of the transatlantic diaspora by Old World settlers in the New World for the sake of national and eventual universal self-identity.3 The work is a subtle but strong manifesto that sets out to intervene in American cultural formation at the beginning of the twentieth century. That formation is multifarious, which Williams represents by adeptly using multiple voices and allusions. For example, Williams seamlessly weaves word-for-word quotes from Christopher Columbus’s journals into his second chapter “The Discovery of the Indies”; he uses a disjointed narrative voice bordering on Latin-American magical realism for “De Soto and the New World”; and he assumes a frontier voice for “The Discovery of Kentucky,” focused on Daniel Boone. The epic voice of “John Milton, Englishman” for the narrator of the chapter “Sir Walter Raleigh” participates with those other voices in creating a European literary and political vocal system leading to the last two US-American figures of the book, Edgar Allan Poe and Abraham Lincoln. The images of the multiple seeds and eventual flowerings throughout the work powerfully figure hybridity as a desirable telos of American settlement rather than a foisted concession to Old World purity.4 This history is a progressive one: Williams’s mimicking...

Teacher Attitudes toward Muslim Student Integration into Civil Society: A Report from Six European Countries

The convergence of Islam and national and cultural identity in Europe, exacerbated by external events like a murder, assassination, riot, embassy bombing or even a satirical cartoon, has the potential for disrupting civic order and eroding movements towards cultural assimilation and national integration. Clearly, fundamentalism in any religion, Jewish, Christian, Sikh or Muslim, can turn a few radicals into fanatics who seek the death of those whom they believe are infidels. Revealing the sources of cultural dissonance between Islamic faith and national identity can have a profound influence on how societies prepare for Muslim immigrant problems throughout Europe and even America. This social science inquiry involving six European countries (Denmark, Norway, Belarus, Austria, Finland and Belgium) provides a modicum of evidence for the depth and level of educator attitudes regarding the Muslim student population beliefs about integration into civil society and about violence.

Central Park against the streets: the enclosure of public space cultures in mid-nineteenth century New York

The industrialization of New York and its rise to economic dominance brought about a major restructuring of street life and unleashed an array of contradictory everyday urban cultures. In a still under-regulated environment, the commoning of public space became a key sociospatial capital that helped the working classes resolve their reproduction in a way the elite found disturbing and far removed from the civic order they were trying to instil. This article draws on recent theorizations of the commons/enclosure dialectic to develop a comparative analysis of the cultures of public space use vis-à-vis the practices prescribed by Central Park in its attempt to reform everyday spatialities. The park is understood here as an early episode in the project of imposing new social relations through the enclosure of public conduct—a first effort to tame the urban commons and prevent the subaltern appropriation of public space. Following a preliminary discussion of the economic and social determinants and configuration of the material cultures of public space use in Manhattan, the article studies the park's strategies as a special type of enclosure, consisting not of the usurping of common land for private profit but of the mobilization of public space to shift behaviors from one regime of publicity to another.

Lautsi v. Italy: English Translations of Italian Trial and Appellate Decisions

Lautsi & Others v. Italy, App. No. 30814/06 (Eur. Ct. Hum. Rts. - Mar. 18, 2011).What follows are English translations of the administrative trial and administrative appellate court decisions in Lautsi and Others v. Italy, the case in which the European Court of Human Rights upheld the decision of the Italian government to post crucifixes (but not other religious symbols) in the classrooms of Italian public elementary and middle schools.The administrative trial court decision, Sentenza N. 1110/2005, Ric. N. 2007/02 (Tribunale Amministrativo Regionale Veneto - Sezione III Mar. 17, 2005), concluded that the crucifix is properly posted in public school classrooms because it symbolizes Christianity in general (and not just the Roman Catholic Church), as well as the Christian roots of Italian liberal democracy and culture.The administrative appellate court decision, Decision No. 7314, Reg. Ric. No. 556/06 (Consiglio di Stato Feb. 13, 2006), adopted a version of the second of the meanings imputed by the trial court to the crucifix, concluding that it is properly posted in public schools because it represents the “religious origin of the values of tolerance, mutual respect, regard for the individual, the affirmation of his or her rights and regard for his or her liberty, freedom of conscience against authority, human solidarity, prohibition of every discrimination, all of which characterize the Italian civic order.”Neither decision has been previously translated in English.

Teaching Chaucer and Popular Culture:

This essay is inspired both by an increasing disciplinary contention that Chaucerians engage with popular culture and by a refreshed critical interest (reflected in the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in sharing pedagogical innovations and interests with peers within a public forum.2 Notwithstanding lingering professional suspicions about the value of the popular, engagement with popular culture involves the need both to better communicate Chaucer’s aesthetic distinction to the culture at large and to embrace the popular in our teaching. This essay offers a brief meditation on the value of the popular and offers two theoretical approaches that one might use to introduce the study of Chaucer’s popular constructions into the classroom. I suggest, in short, that Chaucer’s reproduction in popular culture has both pedagogical and critical value—both as interpretations of his poetry as it is adapted to

:Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517–1648. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History

:<i>Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517–1648. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History</i>

Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517-1648: 'Printed Poison and Evil Talk'

Censorship and Civic Order in Reformation Germany, 1517-1648: 'Printed Poison and Evil Talk'

The Hut on the Garden Plot

In Berlin, self-built huts and sheds were a part of the urban fabric for much of the twentieth century. They started to proliferate after World War I and were particularly common after the Second World War, when many Berliners had lost their homes in the bombings. These unplanned buildings were, ironically, connected to one of the icons of German orderliness: the allotment. Often depicted as gnomeadorned strongholds of petty bourgeois virtues, garden plots were also the site of mostly unauthorized architecture and gave rise to debates about public health and civic order. In The Hut on the Garden Plot: Informal Architecture in Twentieth-Century Berlin, Florian Urban argues that the evolution and subsequent eradication of informal architecture was an inherent factor in the formation of the modern, functionally separated city. Modern Berlin evolved from a struggle between formal and informal, regulation and unruliness, modernization and lifestyles that appeared to be premodern. In this context, the ambivalent figure of the allotment dweller, who was simultaneously construed as a dutiful holder of rooted-to-the-soil values and as a potential threat to the well-ordered urban environment, evidences the ambiguity of many conceptual foundations on which the modern city was built.

In This Issue

In This Issue

Standing Still and Cutting in Line

The queue, or the line, is a defining feature of modern life. This paper examines this ubiquitous form in India as a species of comportment. It offers an ethnographic assessment of queues in Delhi. They are grouped into two types: the ‘massified’ queue, drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s work; and the ‘interactional’ queue, framed by Erving Goffman’s writings. The paper discusses heavily policed queues, whose linear and serial character is produced by institutional authority. These forms suggest that elites engineer such comportment as a sign of rational distribution and civic order. The paper then illustrates the interactional dynamics of queues from within. Queues are shown to be sites of subtle signalling, where social entitlements are contextually processed. The queue’s enforcement via external authority is thus leavened by auto-generated adaptations. By offering a fine-grained description of how queuing unfolds, the paper seeks to illuminate political norms and public conduct in a postcolonial democratic milieu.

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Guest Editor’s Introduction Adam Mendelsohn (bio) Why study Jews and the Civil War? The outcome of the conflict would have been no different if every Jewish recruit had proven as adroit in evading the recruiting sergeant as antisemites later alleged. Even if the more generous estimate of 12,000 Jewish soldiers is accurate, and encomiums to Jewish heroism unadorned, it is improbable that a single battle would have been altered by their absence. Certainly an earlier generation of historians, seeking to counteract the idea that Jews were interlopers with shallow roots in America, found it necessary to prove that Jews had stood “shoulder-to-shoulder” in the ranks with their Christian comrades, buff the reputation of Judah P. Benjamin as the “Brains of the Confederacy” (an antisemitic slight transmuted into a term of praise), and construct a Jewish cult of Lincoln.1 Although today some within the Jewish public still hunger for a celebratory narrative of Jewish involvement in the Civil War—an appetite hopefully sated by a new documentary on the subject—an emphasis on affirmation alone provides thin gruel for scholarship.2 Perhaps the most convincing reason to reexamine this subject is provided by a fertile harvest of new research that has begun to provide richer and more complex insights into the behavior of both Jewish men and women during the Civil War. Old chestnuts have been pruned to reveal nuance and texture; new turf has been turned to uncover fertile soil for further study.3 As happened fifty years ago, it has taken an anniversary to rekindle sustained interest in Jewish participation in America’s bloodiest war. This special issue of American Jewish History is the direct product of a conference organized by the College of Charleston in May 2011 to mark the sesquicentennial of the conflict. Historians of American Jewry have also been encouraged by a broadening of Civil War scholarship beyond the battlefield to encompass themes—the home front, memory, [End Page ix] mourning and commemoration, and the experience of minorities—more felicitous to their interest in social and cultural history. The majority of this new writing recognizes that Jewish matters were not central to the conflict. After all, even the best known wartime episode that had direct ramifications for Jews—Grant’s General Orders #11—merits only glancing attention in leading works of Civil War history. 4 Nonetheless Jewish responses to the war provide a useful point of comparison, for example, with recruits from other distinct religious and ethnic backgrounds.5 Unlike the majority of their compatriots, Jews were religious outsiders in armies that made few allowances for their differences: rations were heavy on pork, and troops were rallied with exhortations that often framed the conflict in Christological terms. On the home front, Jewish women often created their own sewing circles and charity committees to aid the war effort. Moreover, current historians maintain that the transformative conflict and its aftermath exerted considerable influence on American Jewish history. The United States was home to fewer than two-hundred thousand Jews in 1860 but the community was soon remade by waves of newcomers. Several have argued—myself included—that the war facilitated this mass immigration.6 Others have proposed that the war was an essential waypoint on the American Jewish march toward acceptance and integration. These arguments must be deployed with care and nuance. At the remove of one hundred and fifty years it is all too easy to gloss over the misery of a brutal war that cost over six-hundred thousand lives by drawing uplifting and ennobling lessons, or glibly saluting the sacrifices of both sides. Two of the articles in this special issue offer a counter-narrative that suggests that the messy aftermath of the war created new political and economic opportunities for Jews, but did so by upsetting a pre-war racial and civic order in the South that had provided them with an unusual degree of stability and inclusion. The already complicated legacy of the war for Jews was further complicated by the infusion of an often racialized strain of antisemitism into the American body politic during and after the conflict. The articles by Anton Hieke and Stuart Rockoff illustrate...

Marriage and the Law: Politics and Theology in Measure for Measure

In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare portrays a clearly political problem: a city whose citizens are so unable to govern themselves that only the most severe legal punishments appear capable of restoring civic order. Yet the play's conclusion, for all its dramatic fireworks, does not obviously resolve this problem. All that happens, it appears, is that everyone gets married. Understanding marriage's political significance, therefore, is key to unraveling the play's political teaching. By carefully framing marriage within Pauline language of sin and grace—and in particular by using the image of death and rebirth through baptism—Shakespeare offers a theological as well as a political image of a kind of self-government capable of easing the city's legal dilemmas and reconciling justice with mercy.

Listening to Emerson's “England” at Clinton Hall, 22 January 1850

Ralph Waldo Emerson's delivery of his essay “England” at Manhattan’s Clinton Hall on 22 January 1850 was one of the highest-profile of his performance career. He had recently returned from his triumphant British speaking tour with a radically revised view of transatlantic relations. In a New York still in shock from the Anglophobic urban riots of the previous winter, media observers were prepared to find a great deal of symbolism in both Emerson's new message and his idiosyncratic style of performance. This essay provides a detailed account of the context, delivery and conflicting newspaper readings of this Emerson appearance. Considering the lecture circuit as part of broader performance culture and debates over Anglo-American physicality and manners, it reveals how the press seized on both the “England” talk itself and aspects of Emerson's lecturing style as a means of shoring up civic order and Anglo-American kinship. I argue for a reexamination of the textual interchanges of nineteenth-century oratorical culture, and demonstrate how lecture reports reconnect us to forgotten means of listening through texts and discursive contests over the meaning of public speech.