Enlightenment Ideals Research Articles

Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: Jewish Bureaucracy and Policymaking in Late Imperial Russia, 1850–1917 by Vassili Schedrin

Reviewed by: Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: Jewish Bureaucracy and Policymaking in Late Imperial Russia, 1850–1917 by Vassili Schedrin Victoria Khiterer Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: Jewish Bureaucracy and Policymaking in Late Imperial Russia, 1850–1917 By Vassili Schedrin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016. xii + 292 pp. After the fall of communism and the opening of the Russian archives, many books and articles devoted to the Jews of imperial Russia were published. However, the book of Vassili Schedrin brings to light the semiforgotten and little researched topic of the work of the Russian Jewish bureaucrats "known as uchenye evrei (learned Jews or expert Jews)." The monograph is based on rich documentary materials from the Russian archives and incorporates all available scholarship and memoirs. Schedrin shows that the attitude toward expert Jews in traditional Jewish society was quite negative, because they were perceived as the agents of the government. But, according to the author, expert Jews were motivated by the [End Page 142] ideals of Jewish Enlightenment and, like the Russian authorities, believed in the necessity of the modernization of traditional Jewish life. Schedrin writes that the imperial Russian policy toward Jews was "motivated by raison d'état rather than by the personal Judeophobia of the tsar and the bureaucracy." The Russian government was motivated by raison d'état (with some exceptions) at the time of the Great Reforms in Russia (the 1860s–1881). But with assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the establishment of state anti-Semitism under Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, the policy toward Jews drastically changed from rapprochement of Jews with the gentile population to their isolation and intensified discrimination. The position of expert Jew was established in 1850 and functioned until the February 1917 Revolution. Each governor-general was supposed to appoint two or three expert Jews. Expert Jews were appointed to the seventeen Russian provinces of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, the two city administrations of Odessa and Nikolaev, and to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. "Within seven decades, a total forty-eight expert Jews were appointed to these twenty bureaucratic offices." The expert Jews had "a broad social mission of cultivating loyalty among the Jews and eradicating Jewish fanaticism by applying their moral influence." The Russian authorities considered that the majority of Russian Jewry—Orthodox Jews were religious fanatics and believed that their way of life should be modernized through military service and education. The major function of expert Jews was implementation of the government policy on Jewish questions. They advised the governors-general on religious affairs and translated Jewish texts, documents, and correspondence from Hebrew and Yiddish to Russian. Expert Jews often were used "to perform a variety of police functions aimed at the prevention of subversive political activity." They worked as translators for interrogation and courts. Sometimes, expert Jews worked also as censors of Jewish books and press. By the order of the Russian authorities, expert Jews also traveled on inspection tours of the various cities and towns of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, and reported about Jewish economic, social, and religious life. To efficiently perform all these varied functions, Jewish bureaucrats needed special preparation and education. The first generation of Jewish bureaucrats had a traditional Jewish education. But later, expert Jews typically got their education either at the Vilna or Zhitomir rabbinical seminaries or at Russian or foreign universities. The work of Jewish bureaucrats was very well [End Page 143] paid. Schedrin writes that "the compensation of expert Jews became comparable to salaries of Russian bureaucrats in the rank of the IX class." They were also often awarded medals, orders, and other signs of honor. Many expert Jews worked at their positions for 20–30 years. They believed that they "toiled both for the sake of the government and for the sake of the Jews." However, while implementing the policy of the Russian government, expert Jews often undermined and harmed traditional Orthodox Jewish society. For example, when the expert Jew German Barats traveled to the southwestern region of Russia (Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia provinces) to popularize "the enrollment of Jewish children into government-sponsored Jewish schools" the Hasidic Jews of Kamenets-Podol'sk threw stones at him. The purpose of...

British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason by Timothy Michael

BOOK REVIEWS 293 feminist theory. While Robinson’s literary catalogue of women’s writing certainly works to revise women’s literary reputations, one can’t help but wonder what kind of future-looking ecriture feminine Robinson’s unique post-Della Cruscan style might sketch. Cross importantly explores how Robinson’s tactics of gendered author­ ship could be expressed as a more full-blown theory of Romantic gender. Robinson’s loquacious dialogues bridge gender with voices that play and intertwine regardless of or underneath bodily difference, even while they implicate the socio-political and economic structures that instantiate gender normativity. What is more, we might extend the implications of this model—obviating gender difference while valorizing its role in instigating poetic acts—to suggest that gender becomes an essential motor of Roman­ ticism. As a theory of poetics, Robinson’s tropic play throws authorial dif­ ference into relief even as it retroactively alters the very grounds ofpoesis for all Romantic poets. Kate Singer Mount Holyoke College Timothy Michael. British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Pp. 283. $54.95. In British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason, Timothy Michael argues that crises of political knowledge are not aberrations in modernity but, instead, one of its foundations. After the bloody turn taken by the French Revolution, writers and artists from across Europe had to cope with widespread failure of Enlightenment ideals—rationalism, secular gov­ ernance, and the rhetoric of liberation—to live up to their utopian prom­ ises. One name for this coping strategy was Romanticism, the aesthetic and political movement whose figures, Michael says, had to undertake “an as­ sessment of what [could] be rescued from Enlightenment models of ratio­ nality and an evaluation of how what remains of them might be deployed in postrevolutionary political contexts” (3). According to Michael, the models of knowledge that Romantic writers rescued after the breakdown of Enlightenment politics were numerous. They included the preservation of reason (now tempered by sensation and pleasure), a conservation of the idea of the “autonomous” poet by placing her in the messy cultural condi­ tions in which she lived, and a recommitment to a style of inwardness that accommodated history and institutions (instead ofavoiding them) (5). If all of this sounds very Burkean, then the governing thesis of British Romanti­ cism is more radical. Michael argues that, at root, questions of political knowledge inevitably become in the Romantic imagination questions of SiR, 56 (Summer 2017) 294 BOOK REVIEWS freedom (5). The critique of existing models of understanding—be it a hard-nosed English empiricism or “the dream of pure reason”—could still be in the service of liberation (38). Michael’s book participates in a long tradition in Romantic studies that sees Romanticism as a negotiation—and not an outright repudiation—of Enlightenment rationalism and secularization. It includes texts such as James Engell’s The Creative Imagination, Frances Ferguson’s essays and book on Romantic-era utilitarianism, and Colin Jager’s work on religious thought and institutions after the disenchantment brought on by a secular age. However, if British Romanticism reframes the epistemology of political thought in this transitional period, it’s also an unusually old school book: Michael constructs a traditional intellectual history that avoids the cultural materialist methodologies that we’ve come to expect in most first mono­ graphs written under the rubric of the New Historicism. Instead, Michael concentrates on ideas themselves, as well as the fertile connections between them. While reading, I regularly thought about historians ofRomantic ide­ ology from the early to mid-twentieth-century, such as A. O. Lovejoy and Isaiah Berlin, by whom Michael admits to being influenced (19). But Mi­ chael’s analyses are less linear and more dialectical than Lovejoy’s or Berlin’s. He is not telling a story about the evolution ofideas, but building a network out of their recurrence and reappraisal. Indeed, Michael’s em­ phasis on pure concepts—his “commitment to the history of philosophy, especially philosophies of mind and knowledge”—seems to echo the re­ constructed idealism of the authors whose work he analyzes (24). In other words, the intellectual history of the late-eighteenth and early...

Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum Portraits, 1782 to 1827

This essay discusses the eighteenth-century Philadelphia Museum of artist Charles Willson Peale, and particularly the numerous portraits, including those of French military commanders, painted for it. Inspired by eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals celebrating humankind’s capacity to learn and use new information, Peale conceived his Philadelphia Museum. In it Peale intended the works of man and nature to co-exist for the edification of all. The Philadelphia Museum, Peale said, served “to instruct the mind and sow the seeds of Virtue” in the new, American republic. During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Peale and his family filled the museum with hundreds of painted portraits, thousands of natural history specimens, minerals, models, Asian and American Indian artefacts, archaeological objects, life-sized wax figures, fossils and curiosities, all exhibited to an international public.

The Enlightenment and Its Legacy in Victorian Fiction

The Enlightenment movement of the Eighteenth century was second to none in bringing the powers of reason into use in the name of science, progress and civilization; yet hardly could the Victorians find in the Enlightenment a perfect programme for the troubling world. In fact, all sorts of rational judgment that aspire to provide absolute truth tend to remain something to be ever further articulated, understood and comple mented. This being so, to know that one`s own knowledge is nothing short of false projections is a first step to, if any, genuine enlightenment. Through a case study of selected Victorian novels, which were vehicles for registering such Enlightenment ideals as education and equality, this paper aims to explore implications that the Enlightenment assumed for poor people, women and non-Europeans. It argues that, with a willingness to understand the idea of the critical use of reason, Enlightenment think ing should have taken a self-reflexive action to introduce fractures into imperialist masculine ideologies that were evidently bolstered by a sense of sexual, racial, class superiority. This paper presents an effort to suggest a way of overcoming the innate limitations of the Enlightenment which was white male-only logocentric affairs.

Resilience in ruins: the idea of the ‘arrested dialectic’ in art after resilience’s failures

ABSTRACTThis article questions the relevance of the concept of ‘resilience’. It traces the origins of this optimistic social variant of an ecological process that itself can be questioned for its belief in ultimate recovery. In the socio-spatial context, although this is seldom admitted, much of the modern space economy has been abandoned, lays derelict with city fabric often in ruins. The insights of Art History are drawn upon to expose this ‘dark side’ of past urban and regional development. This is because just as art thrives in propitious economic conditions, so it also declines when the money runs out. Certain unpleasant events can be traced to the exhaustion of Utopian practice, Enlightenment ideals and a weakness of states. This led to a fascination with the apparent decay of long-established values formerly expressed in western culture that now share more nihilistic elements with contemporary eastern culture. A proposal that a better interaction between the late capitalist ‘arrested dialectic’ of long-term stasis and the exhaustion of Art’s wellsprings is that a new purpose can be found in fashioning an ‘Art of Warning of Incipient Disaster’.

A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. Raúl Coronado. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. x+574.

<i>A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture</i>. Raúl Coronado. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. x+574.

Offline: The urgent need to rehumanise science

Over dinner last week, a friend turned to the subject of methods (pitiable, but true). He had just been lecturing about how to make epidemiology more meaningful. The two-by-two table was a wonderful creation, but it may not be well adapted to understanding the hypothetical causes and associative consequences of poverty, war, or climate change. Making connections between seemingly disparate settings and events—in other words, interpreting the complexity of the world—was the chief challenge for the health sciences today, he suggested. Describing our world as truthfully as one can (and using those descriptions to accelerate its change) is one of the founding ideals of the scientific Enlightenment. The notion of a “scientific method” is core to that ideal. Anyone motivated by a wish to use science for public good should therefore be obsessed by method. But the science of health and wellbeing has evolved into an often arid, brutalising, and inhuman force (notwithstanding my friend's efforts), devoid of understanding about the experiences of communities and lacking sensitivity to explain the predicaments of individuals. The recent deaths of two writers illustrate the need to reanimate science with the authenticity of humanity. Michael Herr died on June 23, 2016. Between 1967 and 1969, he was a war correspondent for Esquire magazine. His most important book was Dispatches (1977), which more than any other piece of writing changed the way Americans viewed the dexedrine-driven, “psychotic vaudeville” of the Vietnam war (“that silent tolerance for misery that made so many Americans uneasy”). His subject was death, “which of course was really what [Vietnam] was all about”—death's impersonality and the way the press “never found a way to report meaningfully” about it. Herr anatomised death in ways few other writers, let alone scientists, have done: “the grey-blue fishbelly promise of death that would spread upward from the chest and cover the face”; “some horrible light that seemed to recede, vanishing through one layer of skin at a time and taking a long time to go completely”. Elie Wiesel died on July 2, 2016. He reflected that if in his lifetime he could have written only one book, it would have been Night (1958), an account of his journey from the Hungarian ghetto through Auschwitz-Birkenau to Buna, and finally to Buchenwald. His subject too was death, and the indifference of the world to it—”How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent?” His story is short, but succeeds in conveying the extraordinary slowness with which depravity unfurled itself. Every page is a new scene of horror, of “damned souls wandering through the void”. “Death enveloped me, it suffocated me. It stuck to me like glue. I felt I could touch it. The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me.” “Death, which was settling in all around me, silently, gently.” “I tried to distinguish between the living and those who were no more. But there was barely a difference.” Neither Herr nor Wiesel were physicians or scientists. Yet both were concerned about the use of writing—the descriptive testimony of someone who was there—to change attitudes towards their subject. For Herr, “I was there to watch”. That position as observer held acute ethical duties—”You were as responsible for everything you saw as for everything you did.” Herr's conviction was that standard war reporting (“that uni-prose which all news magazines and papers maintained”) “would somehow be lost in the wash of news”. “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history.” Wiesel put it this way in his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere…I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.” Science and its methods have made incalculable contributions to human welfare. But their increasingly desiccated forms are widening the gap between human reality and public understanding. This disconnection between science and humankind has stripped the moral urgency from scientific inquiry. Reading Herr and Wiesel reminds us why writing (and scientific writing too) matters—to illuminate the darkest corners of human injustice and to offer tentative prospects for remedy and redemption.

Popolo, nazione e patria nelle prime opere polacche (1778-1794)

At the end of the eighteenth century, the concepts of people, nation and homeland influenced the first Polish operas, whose topics were set in the countryside. Librettos and music incorporated authentic elements drawn from the speech and folk songs of different regions. In particular, King Stanislaw August Poniatowski promoted the Enlightenment ideals of “rural opera”, connected with the improvement of the wretched social conditions of the peasantry (i.e., the people or nation). Moreover, the concept of the fatherland is recognizable in Kantata w dzien inauguracji statui krola Jana III (Warsaw 1788).

Cyborg Writing as a Political Act: Reading Donna Haraway in Organization Studies

Extending the works of scholars who have elucidated writing as the quintessential site for social transformation, the aim of this article is to locate the myriad possibilities for actualizing Donna Haraway's concept of cyborg writing in the field of organization studies. I contend that cyborg writing functions as a discursive mechanism by which to disrupt Enlightenment ideals of Cartesian duality, objectivity and rationality. These ideals inform the very structure of masculine privilege that emerge from having a society that is organized along androcentric values. Situating the scholarship of Jo Brewis, a contemporary scholar in the field, I illuminate how cyborg writing can be practised effectively, whereby greater richness is imparted into conceptualizations of, and theorizing on, organizational and management phenomena. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of cyborg writing, and with the identification of two trajectories that scholars can pursue in future studies. Progress along these two paths will move towards actualizing the feminist project for gender egalitarianism.

TRENDS OF FRENCH PERSONALISM BY THE EXAMPLE OF PORTRAITS OF J.-D. RACHETTE. SCULPTURAL PORTRAIT OF FRENCH ROSSIKA IN THE END OF THE XVIII - BEGINNING OF THE XIX CENTURIES

Ideas of personalism is one of the most characteristic features of the sculptural portrait of French Rossika. Personal image is an element of enlightenment ideals and aesthetic concepts of French art. An important place in portrait of French Rossika takes the question of expressional images of the individuality. J.-D. Rachette is a major French sculptor who has made a significant contribution to the heritage of Russian art. He opens the metaphysics of the space of the Russian social world in the classical artistic canons and in the modeling of traits of personality. French sculptural portrait assumes a certain canons of the description of public life, social designation of the person. Trends of personalism revealed the idea of the representation of individuality in society in the context of the construction of the secular ideals. Rachette conveys the idea of the personal life and human activities in the cultural space of Russia. Sculptor attached great importance to the intuitive perception of the personality characteristics model and the high level of performance.

Cartas apologéticas that Cracked the Espelho crítico: Gertrudes Margarida de Jesus and Enlightenment Proto-feminism in Portugal

IN January of 1761 the Lisbon editorial house Antonio Vicente da Silva published an anonymous work titled Espelho critico, no qual claramente se vem alguns defeitos das mulheres, fabricado na loja da verdade pelo Irmao Amador do Dezengano, que pode servir de estimulo para a reforma dos mesmos Defeitos. (1) The folheto de cordel purported to be a broadside assault on the feminine sex, focusing on the plentiful shameful female attributes. Less than three months later, Dona Gertrudes Margarida de Jesus responded strongly to the accusations of Amador do Dezengano, the pseudonymous author of Espelho critico, with two public letters in folheto that defended the feminine sex against the misogynist. (2) Her Primeira (and subsequently, Segunda) carta apologetica em favor e defensa das mulheres, escrita por Dona Gertrudes Margarida de Jesus, ao Irmao Amador do Dezengano, com a qual destroe toda a fabrica do seu espelho critico, was approved by the Santo Oficio's censors and published on March 4, 1761. In this article, I analyze Jesus's two Cartas in response to Dezengano's Espelho critico not only as a challenge to the unequal educational status quo for women in the period, but more importantly as an early proto-feminist manifesto. As I will demonstrate, her cartas distorted the male gaze in the mirror and provided Portuguese women with a public document that reflected and celebrated their actual and potential intellectual value in Enlightenment Portuguese society. I borrow the term proto-feminism from political scientists Eileen Hunt Botting and Sarah L. Houser, who viewed American philosopher Hannah Mather Crocker's advocacy as a conceptual precursor to modern feminism (265), to explore what historian Karen Offen has called feminist concerns in the European Enlightenment (27), particularly relating to women's education and freedom. Little is known about Jesus's biography except that she was a nun, although she was certainly not the first Portuguese woman to write about her mistreatment by men. Most notably, the much-debated Lettres Portuguaises (Cartas portuguesas), originally attributed to Mariana Alcoforado but perhaps written by the Frenchman Comte de Guilleragues in 1669, decried the mistreatment of a disillusioned Portuguese woman by her French suitor, the Marquis de Chantilly. However, Jesus was unique in that, unlike Alcoforado's traditional epistolary lament, her Cartas stood out as an intellectualized defense of women that counterattacked using the same classical rhetorical tools and sources as the misogynist Dezengano. Moreover, Jesus borrowed the apologia trope, which had a long tradition as a defense or justification (Torres Feijo 226), but instead used it as an advocacy tool to demonstrate women's intellectual capacity, despite not having access to the same formal education as men. To understand better the debate spurred by Espelho critico and the ensuing Cartas, we must also consider the reform-minded socio-historical context of Enlightenment Portugal. Before the Dezengano/Jesus polemic of 1761, enlightened ideas had been slow to arrive in Portugal from Northern Europe. However, beginning with the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which destroyed most of the city's infrastructure, the literal rebuilding of the Portuguese capital made the small, peripheral European country ripe for social and political reforms driven by Enlightenment ideals from abroad. As Estela Vieira argues, in the earthquake's aftermath, [w]hile the epistemological distance turned the catastrophic events into cultural topoi of critical and political relevance, the universal aspirations of Enlightenment discourse eclipsed regional forms of coping and creating (115; original emphasis). Consequently, the destruction and almost complete reconstruction of Portugal sped up European Enlightenment trends in Portuguese society. Without a doubt the most influential figure of the post-earthquake period, even more than King Jose I, was the future Marquas de Pombal, Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho e Melo, King Jose's prime minister, who was named Count of Oeiras in 1759. …

“More Human Than Human”: “Flattening of Affect,” Synthetic Humans, and the Social Construction of Maleness

We're all schizophrenic, with defective emotional lives--flattening of affect, it's called. What I've done ... that's become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self. Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In Philip k. dick's novel, androids are unable to empathize with or feel for others. Their absence of spontaneous emotional response to hypothetical scenarios is the diagnostic used to distinguish them from humans. Androids' disconnection from others and lack of response constitute the affective to which Pris, an android, refers, understood in Dick's novel as a defect that, when unattributable to mental illness, marks one as other than human. Thus, above, Pris lies to her human interlocutor, misattributing the cause of her flattening in order to provide a human explanation for the feature used to identify androids, who are subject to being retired, a euphemism for their summary execution. In this deficit and its implications for human identity, Pris and her fellow androids (andys) are hardly alone. Dick's novel, Ridley Scott's film adaptation, Blade Runner, and (writer) Ronald Moore and (producer) David Eick's recent Battlestar Galactica television series are a few examples of a trend that proliferates from the 1950s onwards. (1) In such science-fiction texts, humans build and often come into conflict with beings that have been created by humans or have evolved from those created by humans. These beings are almost indistinguishable from humans, except, of course, for that all-important lack of emotional connection: that necessary flattening of affect. While critics generally frame such texts as questioning the nature of the human, (2) they represent specifically gendered anxieties. Synthetic humans are distinguished from humans by a particular form of emotional insufficiency. While they usually do feel, they generally lack abilities to know and understand their feelings, feel in relation to others, and/or empathize with or understand the feelings of others. Commenting on the historical shift in the attributes characterizing synthetic humans, Despina Kakoudaki argues that If for Descartes ... automata differ from people because they have ... no reason, by the early twentieth century artificial people differ from real people because all they have is (181). Andys, replicants, and Galacticas Cylons can all have implanted memories, which means that characters can be synthetic without knowing it. Given that the shift Kakoudaki identifies undermines modernity's ideal of the human-as-rational-subject, it is unsurprising that the Galactica character who most persistently questions whether or not he is a Cylon is Gaius Baltar, whom we initially meet as a scientist with an important role in the human Colonies' defense system and who places great stock in his own rationality. Both Baltar's investment in rationality and his sex are relevant; given white, Western maleness's (and normative masculinity's) association with logic, reason, and denying and flattening affect and femaleness's (and normative femininity's) with emotionality, emotional intelligence, and empathy, any sense that emotionality defines the human has gendered implications. Modernity's rational subject, associated with Enlightenment ideals and the Classical traditions they draw on, is one whose maleness, Westernness, and whiteness has historically been used as the measure against which disenfranchised groups, including women, people of colour, and the colonized, have fallen short, judged insufficiently rational and overly emotional. It is therefore his identity that comes into question when reason is no longer a guarantor of human identity. As Alison Jagger notes, The western tradition has not seen everyone as equally emotional. Instead, reason has been associated with members of dominant political, social, and cultural groups and emotion with members of subordinate groups. …

Frank Roney and the Fenians: A Reappraisal of Irish Republicanism in 1860s Belfast and Ulster

Frank Roney and the Fenians: A Reappraisal of Irish Republicanism in 1860s Belfast and Ulster* Kerby A. Miller (bio) and Breandán Mac Suibhne (bio) Did you ever hear that proverb, “There are none so blind as they who do not wish to see?” John Rea, 1864 This essay is a preliminary reassessment of the Fenian movement in Ulster, especially in Belfast and its hinterland, during the 1860s. It is based largely on contemporary published sources, with Frank Roney’s neglected memoir, which inspired the inquiry, as a central focus. One key contention is that certain claims in Roney’s memoir—for example, about the numerical strength, military efficacy, and denominational composition of northern Fenian circles—which have caused many historians to dismiss it as exaggerated or unreliable, are corroborated by other contemporary printed sources, some of which are well known and widely available. Similarly, some initial probing of newspapers and extensive manuscript collections, notably the Chief [End Page 23] Secretary’s Office Registered Papers (hereafter cited as CSORP) in the National Archives of Ireland, suggests that further research will significantly change historians’ understanding of northern Fenianism. The presentation here of our preliminary findings and conclusions is intended to encourage such research on Fenianism not only in the North but also elsewhere in the country. In 1904 Ira Cross, California’s pioneer working-class historian, first met Frank Roney, age sixty-three, the impoverished and largely forgotten elder statesman of organized labor in the San Francisco Bay area. “I felt myself,” Cross later wrote, “in the presence of one who had found the world filled with misery, poverty, and selfishness, and had tried unsuccessfully to shape it more nearly to his ideals of what it ought to be.” Over the next several decades Cross interviewed Roney many times, and the two men corresponded regularly. Roney, Cross discovered, was “a veritable mine of data concerning [the California] labor movement during the period 1876–86, in which he had played . . . a leading part.”1 Equally important, Roney was also a mine of information about the Irish Republican Brotherhood—the IRB or Fenian movement—in the Ireland and especially the Belfast and Ulster of his youth. Surprisingly, however, few Irish historians have used, or considered reliable, the long memoir that Cross persuaded Roney to write in his last decades. Cross minimally edited Roney’s memoir and published it in 1931, six years after its author’s demise, as Frank Roney, Irish Rebel and California Labor Leader: An Autobiography. In the introduction Cross described Roney as a “born leader” and a meticulous organizer whose life had been fired by a hatred of poverty and injustice. This hatred was based partly on his youthful religious beliefs but primarily on the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals that had inspired the United Irishmen and the early British trade-union, Chartist, and antislavery movements. Cross also marveled at what he called Roney’s “remarkable memory,” which, without records or notes “to guide him, could recall so many events so accurately” and even “place dates with such uncanny exactness.” Roney himself attributed his powers [End Page 24] of memory to his early habit of avoiding written records owing to the absolute secrecy required by his Fenian activities.2 Francis or Frank Roney was born in 1841, the eldest of eight children. His father William was a self-educated and highly respected master carpenter, builder, and trade-union leader. He was also a devout Catholic and a member of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association; like O’Connell, William Roney was loyal to the crown and hence hostile to Young Ireland and to physical-force nationalism generally.3 By contrast, Roney’s mother was a staunch Irish republican. Although a convert from Presbyterianism to her husband’s religion, she was a “hereditary Covenanter,” and her forebears were unrepentant United Irishmen.4 Her father, later a wealthy tobacco merchant, had fought under Henry Munro at Saintfield and Ballynahinch in 1798 and always regarded the Orange Order “as the foulest blot upon the country.” Likewise, her aunt, who lived in the family home at Saul, near Downpatrick, Co. Down, never rose in the morning or retired at night without praying for the...

Das bittere Brot: H. G. Adler, Elias Canetti und Franz Baermann Steiner im Londoner Exil by Jeremy Adler

Reviewed by: Das bittere Brot: H. G. Adler, Elias Canetti und Franz Baermann Steiner im Londoner Exil by Jeremy Adler William Collins Donahue Jeremy Adler, Das bittere Brot: H. G. Adler, Elias Canetti und Franz Baermann Steiner im Londoner Exil. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015. 117pp. Das bittere Brot is a slim volume that is divided into three parts: The first is a very general treatment of the plight of exiled poets and thinkers, with a focus on Germans and German Jews forced into American and British diaspora by the Nazis. The second is what one might have expected from the book’s title: a hands-on exploration of the fascinating relationships among the figures named in the subtitle. The third is a passionate, if partisan, apologia for H. G. Adler mounted by his son, Jeremy. Each part might have become a book in its own right, and, in the case of the latter two, probably needed that kind of space to make their case adequately. Still, this little book is one that gets progressively better. So let’s begin at the end. Without warning, part 3 veers off from the émigré triumvirate announced in the book’s title into another, unexpected, but nevertheless quite interesting direction. The sense of disjuncture is not accidental: This is a German translation of an essay that appeared fifteen years ago under the title “Good Against Evil? H. G. Adler, T. W. Adorno, and the Representation of the Holocaust.” No matter, it remains of interest today. The younger Adler—who for some reason never identifies himself as his subject’s son—offers a convincing explanation as to why H. G. Adler (and other authors like him) would have been not only overlooked but also actively marginalized by the high priests of Holocaust representation. Jeremy Adler makes Adorno the chief culprit but adds Lawrence Langer and Saul Friedländer into the mix. These are the best-known exponents of an orthodoxy that, he says, esteemed nihilism and the impossibility of representation as the Holocaust’s ultimate “lesson” (when of [End Page 172] course no lesson whatsoever was to be gleaned from the camps) and actively belittled as trivializing any mode of aesthetic representation that hinted at transcendence, hope, or even partial recovery from the great catastrophe. All that kind of thing, Langer warned, was a cheap form of “mental comfort,” part of the “culture of consolation” threatening to undermine the “true” Holocaust narrative of ultimate despair. But this view—one that indeed dominated academic discussion for several decades but did not much affect broader arenas of popular culture—leaves little room for one Hans Günther Adler, who survived internment in both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz and gradually began to reflect on those formative years in a rich array of poetry, novels, and, of course, the massive sociological study Theresienstadt 1941–1945 while in his postwar British “exile.” The author is right to point out that it is not simply a matter of personal sentiment (H. G. Adler remained committed to Enlightenment ideals, ethics, and a spiritual conception of the human being even after the Holocaust) but also of philosophical consistency. If we were to take seriously some of the nihilistic Holocaust scholarship of the time, he says, we would deprive ourselves of the very underpinnings that permit us to see it as an immoral genocide: “Besäßen wir nämlich nicht genau diese [philosophischen] Kategorien, hätten wir keine Möglichkeiten, überhaupt zu beurteilen, dass ein Verbrechen stattgefunden hat, geschweige denn ein Verbrechen dieses Ausmaßes.” All to the good. Jeremy Adler is at his best, I think, when he explains why the work of his father, which includes one hundred poems written during his internment in Theresienstadt, was bound to be ignored or undervalued, given the regnant academic paradigms of the day. He is poignant in his defense of H. G. Adler’s narrative efforts to return dignity to Holocaust victims and absolutely convincing in his argument about the unintended consequence of the so-called aesthetics of nihilism—namely, the effective disenfranchising of “dissident” survivor poets and thinkers such as his father. Making the positive case, however, is more of a challenge. He argues that...

Le gaucher boiteux par Michel Serres

acerbic rhetoric of the Front national. Now that the colonial legacy has penetrated the mainstream, Ruscio sees an opportunity to“débloquer l’histoire,”a process that could enable French society to be free from the demons of its past. University of Maryland, Baltimore County Zakaria Fatih Serres, Michel. Le gaucher boiteux. Paris: Pommier, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7465-0695-5. Pp. 280. 22 a. Despite the potentially misleading nature of its rather peculiar and comical title, this book is one of the most rigorous and thought-provoking essays that Serres has written during the latter part of his career. In this sequel to his most commercially successful work Petite poucette (2012), which landed the philosopher on the bestseller list in France, Serres probes the conditions that facilitate invention. As the aforementioned title unequivocally suggests, Serres posits that one serendipitously stumbles across or discovers novelty when straying from the well-worn epistemological paths that stifle innovation. For Serres, every great feat of human ingenuity has always been the result of a bifurcation that eventually led to unexpected and unpredictable discoveries. The philosopher maintains that the process of knowledge formation is a journey whose final destination cannot be entirely predicted from the outset.As in Le tiers-instruit and other texts, Serres also outlines his encyclopedic conception of wisdom that entails weaving connections between different ways of knowing. For those who are familiar with Serres’s vast œuvre, the philosopher covers some familiar ground in Le gaucher boiteux. One of the most salient features of this essay is the litany of direct intertextual, or rather “autotextual” references, that Serres makes to his earlier works. The purpose of these mise en abîme techniques soon becomes apparent. In Le gaucher boiteux, Serres attempts to link together all the interdisciplinary theories that he has been honing for nearly half a century. The philosopher’s overview of the philosophical importance of the archetypical characters that have fueled his imagination, such as Hermès,Pantope,Le tiers-instruit,Atlas,Le parasite,L’hominescent,L’incandescent, Arlequin, and Petite poucette, illustrates that these artistic creations are all a reflection of the same cohesive, ecocentric worldview that Serres has been articulating since 1968. Moreover, this self-referentiality is an apology in the classical sense of the term aimed at silencing the philosopher’s many detractors who lashed out at him after the publication of Petite poucette. To those who have dismissed his philosophy as being too “literary” to be taken seriously by the mainstream philosophical community, Serres points out that the disciplinary boundaries between literature and philosophy have always been fuzzy at best in the French tradition. Noting that many other respected philosophers before him have conceived literary characters to explain the paradoxes and nuances of complex philosophical issues, Serres reveals,“la philosophie de langue française pullule ainsi de personnages, du Malin Génie à l’Ego cartésiens, de Zadig à 226 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 227 Jacques le Fataliste” (42). For those who are well-versed in Serresian philosophy, Le gaucher boiteux still has a lot to offer. It is in this text that Serres fully develops his biosemiotic vision of communication. This new essay makes an invaluable contribution to the emerging cross-disciplinary field of biosemiotics. The rigorous nature of Serres’s biosemiotic, communicative theories demonstrates that his philosophy is just as bold and cutting-edge as it has always been. Mississippi State University Keith Moser Tackett, Timothy. The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-674-73655-9. Pp. 463. $35. The bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989 provoked considerable debate among historians as well as the general public about how to consider the Terror: as a violent but inevitable aberration in the glorious narrative of the emancipation of the French people under the aegis of Enlightenment ideals of freedom and democracy,or as an integral part of a revolutionary dialectic that also drew on the Enlightenment ideals of absolute equality fostered by Rousseau’s most notorious disciple,Robespierre?Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton had asked the same question back in 1983, inviting spectators to move beyond the inevitably reductionist framework of conventional wisdom...

Creativity, Wicked Problems and the Contemporary PhD

In this paper, I survey the challenges the creative and contemporary PhD make to the academy. I look at the scholarship entailed in creative production and in identifying and working with wicked problems as having similar attributes contributing to the need to create new PhD models. Traditionally, the PhD has been a preparation for a career in the academy, with scholars undertaking it so as to show their capacity to identify a research gap in their area, to develop a research question from that and to build a major and new contribution to knowledge in a written submission of some 100,000 words. This traditional model is based upon the certainties of scholarship within enlightenment ideals of science. These have delivered us great strides in many areas of medicine and science and have also come, because of their productivity, to dominate the arts, particularly the social sciences and psychology. Whilst its value should not be debased, this enlightenment model has been challenged from such different areas of scholarship as creative production and wicked problems. The core ideas in this paper are how we might utilise creativity and emerging ideas of wicked problems to debate the importance of understanding the contemporary PhD.

The Heirs of Archimedes: Science and the Art of War through the Age of Enlightenment

The integration of scientific knowledge and military power began long before the Manhattan Project. In the third century BC, Archimedes was renowned for his research in mechanics and mathematics as well as for his design and coordination of defensive siegecraft for Syracuse during the Second Punic War. This collection of essays examines the emergence during the early modern era of mathematicians, chemists, and natural philosophers who, along with military engineers, navigators, and artillery officers, followed in the footsteps of Archimedes and synthesized scientific theory and military practice. It is the first collaborative scholarly assessment of these early military-scientific relationships, which have been long neglected by scholars both in the history of science and technology and in military history.From a historical perspective, this volume investigates the deep connections between two central manifestations of Western power, examining the military context of the Scientific Revolution and the scientific context of the Military Revolution. Unlike the classic narratives of the Scientific Revolution that focus on the theories of, and conflicts between, Aristotelian and Platonic worldviews, this volume highlights the emergence of the Archimedean ideal--in which a symbiosis exists between the supply of mechanistic science and the demand for military capability.From a security-studies perspective, this work presents an in-depth study of the central components of military power as well as their dynamic interactions in the political, acquisitional, operational, and tactical domains. The essays in this volume reveal the intellectual and cultural struggles to enhance the capabilities of these components--an exercise in transforming military power that remains relevant for today's armed forces.The volume sets the stage by examining the innovation of gunpowder weaponry in both the Christian and the Islamic states of the late medieval and Renaissance eras. It then explores such topics as the cultural resistance to scientific techniques and the relationship between early modern science and naval power--particularly the intersecting developments in mathematics and oceanic navigation. Other essays address the efforts of early practitioners and theorists of chemistry to increase the power and consistency of gunpowder. The final essays analyze the application of advanced scientific knowledge and Enlightenment ideals to the military engineering and artillery organizations of the eighteenth century. The volume concludes by noting the global spread of the Archimedean ideal during the nineteenth century as an essential means for resisting Western imperialism.

Narrating (Im)Maturity: The Progressive Popularization of Enlightenment Principles in Wielands Geschichte des Agathon and Engels Herr Lorenz Stark

This article argues for scholarly attention to so-called ‘trivial literature’ as a site of the development of Enlightenment ideals of self-reflection and critical thinking. After establishing the bifurcation of the ‘canonical’ and the ‘trivial’ in literary scholarship, it traces 18 th -century philosophical concern with spreading enlightenment in essays by Kant and Herder. It then turns to analyses of a canonical work of literature—Christoph Martin Wieland’s History of Agathon —and an exemplar of trivial literature—Johann Jakob Engel’s Herr Lorenz Stark —to assert that these novels, their significant differences in difficulty or accessibility notwithstanding, both depict processes of enlightenment and induce these processes in their readers via distinctive thematic and formal means. Trivial literature becomes a first step toward processes of individual maturity—and more difficult reading. I thus argue that it makes sense to move beyond the trivial/canonical bifurcation and investigate the literary world of the late eighteenth century as a malleable continuum.

American terror: the feeling of thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville

American terror: the feeling of thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville

Upplysning och gränsdragning

Enlightenment and boundary work: a study of the first-generation Swedish analytical philosophers from a sociology-of-philosophy perspectiveThe history of Swedish analytical philosophy begins with the writings of Ingemar Hedenius, Anders Wedberg, and Konrad Marc-Wogau, who introduced the country to a new style of thinking that was to become the dominant mode of academic philosophizing in it from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. The article presents a sociological analysis of how that hegemonic position was claimed and established for it in Swedish philosophy departments. In particular, the critique that Hedenius, Wedberg, and Marc-Wogau levelled in their popular writings against continental philosophy is looked upon in detail. Drawing upon Thomas Gieryn’s theory of boundary work, it is shown how the three strove for epistemic authority by demarcating their own ‘scientific’ enterprise from the ‘unscientific’ philosophy of their competitors. This quest for authority, however, was pursued not solely for its own sake: Hedenius, Wedberg, and Marc-Wogau were also all firmly committed to the ideals of enlightenment and cultural radicalism shaping the Swedish society of their time.