Ideological Polemics Research Articles

Thin Squeak of a Sparrow. The Case of Hieromonk Hieronymus of Solovki as a Manifestation of an Internal Ideological Conflict in Russia at the Beginning of the Reign of Nicholas I (1829–1830)

Introduction. By the time of Alexander I’s death in November 1825, the internal ideological conflict in Russia had reached its peak. The Decembrist Uprising proved that liberal reforms had put the country on the brink of revolution. In this regard, the aim of the article is to show the chaotic situation in which the new emperor, Nicholas I, had to develop and affirm in the public consciousness different versions of state policy from the previous ones. Methods. The research methods are the case study method, which consists in analyzing the documents deposited in the State Archives of the Russian Federation on the investigation in the Third Department of His Imperial Majesty Chancellery of the case of Hieromonk Hieronymus of the Great Tikhvin Monastery, as well as classical methods of analysis, primarily the method of historical anthropology, which shows in this example the reaction of representatives of different social groups in Russia to the crisis. This subject has not yet been studied in Russian historiography. It is studied on the basis of unpublished documents of the State Archives of the Russian Federation. Analysis. At the beginning of the 19th century, Russian society was in a state of constant upheaval. The representatives of the highest authorities were not confident that they could count on the support of the nobility as a single corporation or the foreign servicemen who occupied responsible posts. But the danger of the situation also lay in the fact that the authorities could not and did not want to rely on representatives of the underprivileged strata of society, to which Hieronymus belonged. Results. The article concludes that the extreme centralization of government was a forced step by Nicholas I in order to stop any ideological polemics that were destroying the state. This affected many, including even those who, like Hieromonk Hieronymus, who had certain fame in religious circles and among the laity, could create public sentiments that would contribute to the future perception of the famous ideological triad of Nicholas’s reign (the theory of official nationality).

Образ власти в трагедии на сюжет славянской истории «Венцеслав» (1647) Ж. де Ротру

The example of the tragedy “Venceslas” is instrumental in defining the nature of the late work of J. Rotrou. The paper analyzes he play the context of classicist poetics, taking into account the evolution of Rotrou’s dramatic writing and ideological polemics with the Corneille theater of the 40s, whose influence largely initiated the overcoming of Rotrou’s dependence on mythological models, conditioned by the connection with ancient and humanistic drama especially noticeable in early tragedies, and bringing political issues to the fore. It is the specifics of revealing the image of power that most clearly shows the originality of Rotrou’s thinking. In discussing the power’s image, the author proceeds from the peculiarity of unfolding of the discursive-rhetorical structure of the play and semantic mobility of signs and images associated with the manifestation of power. The multiplicity and active interaction of meanings that organize the statements of the main actors and define them in a political, role-playing and at the same time personal, relative, sets the contradiction, mobility, uncertainty of their characters and relationships. The need for official implementation together with the right to personal, the significance of the state interest along with the actualization of the individual — such value-semantic ambiguity is observed throughout the dramatic action, not excluding the finale. Rotrou managed to deeply connect the authority of impersonal power and vulnerability, the “imperfection” of the private, to show the inevitable presence of the human, giving dubious relativity to any absolute meaning.

“It is Sad that Lackeys Have Power...” (Unknown Letters from the Archive of B.V. Tomashevsky)

The article is devoted to the epistolary heritage of the legendary philologist of the XX century — Professor Boris Viktorovich Tomashevsky (1890—1957) and his relations with the leading scientists in the context of historical, literary, linguistic and ideological polemics mainly of the 1930s and 1950s. The paper emphasizes the contribution of the scientist to the development of world science in the era of cultural upheavals. Special attention is paid to the publications of unknown epistles to B.V. Tomashevsky by domestic and foreign philologists: I.L. Andronikov, G.O. Vinokur, D.S. Likhachev, A. A. Reformatsky, B. Unbegaun, M. Vasmer, R. O. Jakobson. The published letters describe the situation in science of that period: they show the difficulties in working on the publication of Pushkin’s “Complete Works”, reveal the polemics around controversial issues of the theory and practice of the text, express the attitude of cor-respondents to the facts of ideological pressing on science, describe the difficulties of wartime, etc. B. V. Tomashevsky’s epistolary is also considered in the context of the role of Soviet linguistic personality in creating scientific tradition. The relevance of the study is due to the use of archival mate-rials in the paradigm of the humanities to clarify poorly studied facts of the 1930s and 1950s.

ВОСПРИЯТИЕ Ф. М. ДОСТОЕВСКОГО В ПУБЛИЦИСТИКЕ ДАЛЬНЕВОСТОЧНОЙ ЭМИГРАЦИИ

The article introduces rare and archival materials on F. Dostoevsky’s personality and creative work published in the Russian émigré periodicals in Harbin (China) into scientific use. The paper aims to identify the specificity of perceiving F. M. Dostoevsky’s personality and creative work in the Russian émigré community in China. Among the basic tendencies in the perception of Dostoevsky’s personality and creative work in the Russian émigré community in China, the author identifies the following ones: attempts to reveal the essence of Dostoevsky’s “Russian idea”, accent on “meaningful aesthetics” when interpreting the writer’s works, appeal to Dostoevsky’s authority in ideological polemics with the Soviet opponents.

Отражение творчества М. Е. Салтыкова-Щедрина в исследованиях В. И. Семевского о крепостном праве и крестьянском вопросе в России

The study of the literary and journalistic image of serfdom and the peasant question in the works by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, conducted by the prominent historian of the Russian peasantry V. I. Semevsky, is considered. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that it is devoted to the analysis of the first attempt to study the anti-serfdom content of the works of the outstanding Russian satirist and publicist as a historical source on the history of the Russian peasantry. The long-term process of V. I. Semevsky’s work on this topic is covered. It is shown that M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s consideration of the peasant question is connected with the acute internal political struggle in the course of preparation and implementation of the peasant reform. The authors dwell on V. I. Semevsky’s assessments of the socio-cultural image of the Russian peasantry and nobility in the “Poshekhonskaya starina.” The proximity of the world outlook positions of the historian and the writer is revealed. Special attention is paid to the legal status of peasants in the process of preparation and implementation of the peasant reform. It is concluded that the brochure and articles by V. I. Semevsky about M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin can be regarded as tools of ideological polemics with representatives of the conservative community, who sought to form nostalgia for pre-reform mores in Russian society and to rehabilitate them to some extent.

Colonizing Pepe: Internet Memes as Cyberplaces

This article explores the Pepe the Frog Internet meme through a spatial approach that targets the ways in which netizens attempt to repurpose it, so as to build a communal space in which meaning is constantly negotiated and hijacked. We argue that Pepe the Frog and other memes can be interpreted as “cyberplaces” defined as computer environments that display the ideological polemics between netizens as they struggle to build a sense of community. Moreover, the rhizomatic stratification of such cyberplaces reveals a more nuanced view of meme dynamics, one that takes into account the agency of users as they efface and impose meanings on memes, not unlike the process of deterritorialization enacted on places.

Public-Private Partnerships in Developing Countries: The Emerging Evidence-based Critique

Advocates of public-private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure services in developing countries have long battled criticism of these arrangements by civil society groups. The view among PPP advocates generally has been that these criticisms are mostly ideological polemics that mix opinion with selected but often misinterpreted facts. But over the last two decades, as the experience with PPPs has increased in both developed and developing countries, a different kind of critique has emerged, one that is based on non-ideological empirical research, and is sometimes expressed by PPP advocates. These studies often focus on individual aspects of PPPs, and usually do not claim to be “PPP evaluations” or express opinions on the overall value of PPPs. Taken together, a powerful, evidence-based critique of PPPs is emerging, but one that is more measured than much of the criticism of the last two decades. This new critique recognizes many cases in which PPPs have not been successful, but also some situations in which PPPs can generate value for money. Because of its critical tone, some of this research is now regularly cited by the civil society critics of PPPs, giving their arguments more weight than was the case a decade ago. This paper attempts to summarize some of the most compelling examples of this kind of emerging critique, and uses the summary to assess the practicality of the G20’s recent advocacy of large, “transformational” PPPs as tools for dealing effectively with infrastructure challenges in low-income countries.

I racconti della diossina. Laura Conti e i corpi di Seveso.

What is a narrative agent and what are the political effects of a material narrative? This essay addresses such issues by considering the case of Italy’s first big ecological disaster, occurred in Seveso in 1976. A cloud of dioxin burst out from an industrial site, poisoning people and territory, killing livestock and domestic animals, causing miscarriages and fetal malformations, and producing strong political and ideological polemics over women, their bodies, and their right to self-determination. Laura Conti, scientist, writer, and environmental activist, witnessed and narrated the catastrophe in both its ecological and political dimensions. Analyzing her works, and focusing on dioxin as a posthuman narrative agent, namely, as a revealing agent that interlaces both materiality and its discursive reverberations, I reflect on how feminist ecocriticism may act as an epistemological tool for an ethics and politics of liberation. This study situates itself in the broader horizon of a feminist theory of material ecocriticism, one that investigates the representations of the body, of inter- and trans-corporeality, multiple causality, complexity and agentic entanglements of matter and discourse.

STUDI ISLAM: KONSEPSI, KEMUNCULAN POLEMIK-IDEOLOGIS DAN FILSAFAT ILMU PENGEMBANGANNYA

Islamic studies have developed from its birth time of the early Islam to nowadays time. Unfortunately, the phenomena of ideological polemics of epistemological groups of Islamic thought can still be strongly found in today’s moslim’s life. The polemics, of course, limit the human freedom of thought in order to progressively develop the Islamic knowledge. The article intends to study causes of the emergence of ideological polemics and conflicts of Islamic epistemological groups. And then it tries to give the philosophical way to make the Islamic studies continuously in the progress. The writing uses the analysis method of philosophy of science to answer the problems. The writing found that the causes of the ideological polemics are the political dominance, the idolization, and truth claim of Islamic thought or the product of Islamic studies, and to have the progressiveness of Islamic studies, the only way is to change the logic of dominance, idolization, and truth claim become that of mutually discursive communication.

The Cultural Negotiation of Publics–Science Relations

Understanding the intersections of science and publics has led to research on how diverse publics interpret scientific information and form positions on science-related issues. Research demonstrates that attitudes toward science, political and religious orientation, and other social factors affect adult interactions with science, which has implications for how adults influence K-12 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. Based on a statewide survey of adults in Idaho ( n = 407), a politically and religiously conservative western state, we demonstrate how attitudes toward science, measured through a composite measure “orientation toward science,” and other social factors are correlated with support for STEM education. Results show that “orientation toward science,” along with political orientation and respondents’ perceptions of feeling informed about science, predicts behavior intentions to support STEM education. Our findings suggest that a nuanced and localized approach to fostering support for K-12 STEM education would resonate with populations regardless of political orientation, and they illuminate new ways of thinking about how political orientation more generally impacts thinking about science in the context of complicated “socio-scientific relations.” In exploring how people think about science in a politically and religiously conservative state, we provide insights on potential outcomes in other states, should conservative ideology spread. We argue that the publics’ relationship with science and, by extension, support for science education, is more fluid, as many of us suspect, than ideological polemics suggest.

“Islamofascism”. Remarks on a Current Ideologeme

The term “Islamofascism” for quite some time has had currency in polemical, but also in sober political discourses. However, it is clear that Islamic fundamentalism has very little, if anything, in common, in either origin or in form, with the historical phenomenon of fascism. If fascism is understood as what developed in certain historical constellations in Italy, Spain, and Hungary or as a specific exceptional form in German National Socialism, then it is something quite different from the movements of radicalized Islam. Islam, as a religion, is driven by different factors and follows goals very different from those of political fascism. One has to rigorously empty the political-scientifically established term “fascism” of content if one wants to make out superficial similarities. This must not be misunderstood: of course there is a modern (sometimes fanaticized) Arab nationalism; but as such it is not a substrate of Islam and thus does not substantially derive religiously from Islam. The Nazi (racial-biological) concept of the “national comrade” (Volksgenosse) has connotations different from those of membership in the Islamic Umma, which neither has anything do with an ideology of “blood” or race nor is determined by territorial presence, but rather includes Muslims living in the Diaspora—and in this respect is much more closely related to the Jewish-religious concepts of nation, people, and Diaspora than to the categories of the fascism that genuinely arose from Western modernism. It can therefore be assumed that the use of the term “Islamofascism” has little to do with an interest in analytical knowledge, but all the more with ideological polemics and political indoctrination.

The Inner Self in the Renaissance and Shakespeare's Tragic Characters

Despite postmodern literary critics’ anti-essential conception of man in the Renaissance, Renaissance thinkers and artists believed in the nature of man and embodied such a belief in their works. Staying away from our contemporary ideological polemics on the human nature, this paper examines the inner self in the Renaissance in relation to Shakespeare’s four tragic characters: Hamlet, Cordelia, Romeo, and Juliet. The inner self was not a new concept in the Renaissance period. What was new was the attitude and direction of the concept. As a political power became concentrated on the kings of the modem nations, prudence seemed to be the courtiers’ best policy for political survival. The Reformation also put extra pressure on the contemporaries, who sometimes had to conceal their religious convictions for the sake of personal safety. On the other hand, disillusioned by dissembling in the court and the Reformed world, people desired the virtue of sincerity, which was also strongly supported by the Reformers who believed in the human emotion overt reason. Keenly aware of the differences between inner and outer, Shakespeare’s tragic characters criticize dissembling, a strategy of prudence as a representation of the self. And they also give priority to ‘that within.’ Their sincerity as an inner power looks insignificant, but it eventually causes the corrupt society to fall down and helps the society to recover a healthy state thanks to their tragic sacrifice. Postmodernists’ idea of the self in the Renaissance is a projection of their own self-image. The completely autonomous self demystified by the postmodern literary critics was the idea of man espoused by liberal humanism, which was actually unknown to the Renaissance men. A study of the inner self in the Renaissance as related to Shakespeare allows us to discover truth in its own historical contexts and to reflect on our modem or postmodern life.

The Concept of Friendship: From Princes to States

The present article seeks to draw attention to and explicate the concept of friendship in a discipline which has long ignored it: International Relations. It examines the ways in which major political thinkers and international treaties addressed the concept in the process of the emergence of the Westphalia state system. The article traces correlative changes between the shift from vertical to horizontal friendship and the emergence of internal and external princely sovereignty which signified the new era in international politics. It argues that the recognition of formally equal statuses of political friends prepared the grounds for the regime of external sovereignty. It also suggests that friendship was a key concept describing political order, included or not in the friend/enemy antithesis, in early Modernity. The subsequent ambiguity of the modern concept of friendship in international politics springs from its constant reinterpretation in the context of royalist and republican ideological polemics.

Whitney T. Perkins

Once in a long while some of us are blessed to encounter a person whose character is so special that it deeply affects us for the rest of our lives. Such is the case for me—and for many alumni of the Brown University international relations program—with regard to Whitney T. Perkins, the faculty member who guided the program for decades and who died earlier this year. In an academic world filled with pomposity and pretense, he stood out as a beacon of humility. In an academic world filled with ideological polemics, he stood out as a beacon of balance. In an academic world filled with politically motivated jostling for power and control, he stood out as a beacon of integrity. In an academic world filled with self-promotion and hyperbole, he stood out as a beacon of restraint and understatement.

'Puttane a Brigate': The Topos of Prostitution In Early-Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry

Representations of prostitution emerge as a prominent and recurring element in the work of a range of poets in early-twentieth-century Italy. Following a brief review of historical and cultural contexts (including French art of the late nineteenth century), this article considers different treatments of the image of prostitution in relation to shifting modes of poetic expression in the period. From the work of Lucini to that of the Futurist mainstream, to Palazzeschi and other more isolated voices, representations of the prostitute are used in a variety of ways: for their ability to shock and titillate, as vehicles for ideological polemics, or as icons of urban modernity itself (with all the possibilities for irony and insincerity inherent in the image). Through the wide range of its formal treatments, the image of prostitution is presented as a paradigm of the evolution and cross-fertilization of poetic styles and the anti-lyrical, de-sublimatory tendencies of these years.

Union security and the right to work: A comprehensive bibliography

From scholarly treatises to ideological polemics, more has been written in the past 50 years about union security and the right to work than almost any issue in labor law. It has been a profitable source of study for academics in several disciplines, and practitioners from both sides of the labor bar have contributed generously to the literature. For persons doing current work in the field, this vast accumulation of research and analysis provides an invaluable point of departure. Unfortunately, these materials are often somewhat difficult to find. Combing the traditional indices of legal and periodic literature is a time-consuming task, and a specialized bibliography has heretofore been lacking. Hopefully, this will supply the need. Notwithstanding my best efforts at thoroughness in compiling this bibliography, I will admit that I use the term “comprehensive” with great trepidation, for it is in the nature of things that persons who make such claims are soon taught their folly. Given the scope and popularity of the topic, it is inevitable that I overlooked some worthy books and articles. The bibliography is divided into broad and sometimes overlapping categories, and where a book or article was placed was often a close decision. Within each category, the materials are listed in chronological order.

The deviousness of the dialectic

While the highly visible and vocal political and social debates of the 1960s have receded into the shadows, the political and social realities which provoked those debates are still with us. War, poverty, discrimination, economic crises, inequalities of power, and the question of the quality of life are still with us. The failure of political and social theory to provide adequate understanding and direction for dealing with these issues is still with us. For many, this has resulted in despair and resignation. For others, particularly academic social scientists, it has resulted in a renewed impulse to the development of the empirical theories and the research studies which they believe will eventually produce a truly scien? tific understanding of society, and which allow rational solutions to social problems. Within this orientation there have been raging debates about what methodologies, theoretical models, and kinds of data are necessary for achieving this understanding, but there has been little consensus with regard to these issues and the gap between theory and practice has not been lessened. It is to this situation that Richard J. Bernstein's The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory is directed. Addressing himself directly to social scientists schooled in the Anglo-American naturalistic tradition, Bernstein wants to argue that the last twenty years of debates within and about social science have not been simply ideological polemics and metaphysical obfuscations. He argues that what happened in those debates, and what is still happening, if the story of those debates is read and written correctly, is the emergence of a sensibility and an argument which could lead not only toward a fruitful restructuring of the foundations of the social sciences, but also toward a renewal of primary questions about the nature of human beings, about knowledge of society and politics, and about the relation of theory and practice.

Thomas Brasch: A Storyteller after Kafka

Less than three weeks after the news of Wolf Biermann's expatriation by the GDR made international headlines in November, 1976, Thomas Brasch was granted an emigration visa and quietly moved his official residence from the center of the East German capital to West Berlin a distance of a little over a mile. With this an entirely new public identity was assumed by a writer who hitherto had been virtually unknown. The case of Thomas Brasch, among the first of over fifteen of the leading intellectuals of the GDR to leave that country in the wake of the Biermann affair, was quickly exposed, explored and exploited by the West German media, and in the following weeks and months Brasch himself granted a number of interviews, the most consequential of which was with the widely-circulated liberal magazine, Der Spiegel. 1 Entitled I'm not responsible for anyone but myself (a quote from the text), the printed interview was embellished by three photographs and captions (again with quotes lifted from the text): the first a close-up of a quizzical Brasch (Author Brasch: 'Making a new start in another country'); the second a GDR street scene with people walking aimlessly and riding bicycles (Industrial society GDR: 'Pain that can't be resolved'); the third an action shot of Biermann polemicizing with guitar (Banished GDR citizen Biermann: 'Saddled with ideology'). The message was clear: the return of individualism to its free and natural fold; the integrity of art and humanity surviving their ideological trappings. While the media were having their problems in glorifying an exiled Biermann who still called himself a communist and growled about capitalist pigs, they found in Brasch a transmitter who would speak their own language on the surface at least. In point of fact, the text of the Spiegel interview gave evidence of a resistance toward media cooptation that was much more rigorous and fundamental than Biermann's frequent attacks on reporters and long-winded diatribes on how he was misused and misunderstood. Where Biermann described cooptation and proselytized, Brasch demonstrated the problem by refusing to participate in ideological polemics. Indeed, the issues of cooptation, reification and ideological instrumentalization were central to the content of the Spiegel interview as well as to its form, and Brasch insisted repeatedly on being taken for his person rather than foi his ideological use value. Asked whether there was not something symptomatic about his move to the West, he responded: been made into a political phenomenon long enough, I've had it. People looking me in the eyes and instead of seeing me, seeing the problem they were interested in at

The Concept of Power: A Critical Defence

Power is one of the most central and yet problematic concepts in sociological theory. It forms the cornerstone of the conflict model of --or more accurately set of assumptions about-society, one of the two major models in sociological theory. For conflict theorists see power as restraining men from destroying society in their competition to satisfy individual needs and wants; it is the 'functional equivalent' of function in integration theory.' Yet, despite widespread use, power remains a slippery and problematic concept. There is little agreement upon basic definitions, individual theorists proposing their own more or less idiosyncratic terminology, and surprisingly little consideration of the implication of alternative usages. Only crude attempts have been made to progress from terminological exegesis and conceptual model building to the formulation of empirical hypotheses; the attempts that have been made have often failed to progress beyond the level of the a-social small group, or have disappeared into the jungle of game theoretic formulae and failed to re-appear, or have degenerated into ideological polemics. In short, theorizing about power has often been confusing, obscurantist, and banal. It is not surprising that March concluded that 'on the whole power is a disappointing concept'.2 This judgement may reflect accurately the utility of the concept of power in the analysis of complex mechanisms of social choice, March's major concern, but is inappropriate elsewhere. The concept of power is more than a Marxist talisman: it can be used to form the basis for