Intellectual Disciplines Research Articles

What Price Interdisciplinarity?: Crossing the curriculum in environmental higher education

The received understanding of interdisciplinarity in environmental higher education depends on constructions of the environmental agenda which tacitly privilege positivistic assumptions associated with the physical and biological sciences. If, however, we take seriously the heuristic force of the key humanities disciplines in regard to our environmental situation, precisely this privileging will be at issue. This suggests that collaboration across the full range of intellectual disciplines is needed not just to solve but to frame environmental problems. This requirement, however, may have to be met at the institutional level rather than at that of individual teachers and learners.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to a Critical Incident Course

Today's rapid social change, explosion of new technologies, and overwhelming amount of multidisciplinary knowledge have required journalism to be more flexible and interdisciplinary (Atwater, 1993; Iorio & Williamson, 1995: Rakow, 1993). In an era when disciplinary boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred and knowledge is widely considered to be interdisciplinary, researchers and educators must place greater emphasis on the interconnection of the external world and the need for cooperation among disciplines. Journalism educators should be no exception to this trend. They have to borrow frequently from other disciplines and understand the interconnectedness to achieve integrated solutions. They should also have contributions they offer to students in other disciplines who need a fuller understanding of the role journalism plays in the post-modern era. Over the past decade several journalism programs have stressed the necessity of mutual understanding and cooperation with other disciplines. According to the report of the AEJMC Vision 2000 Task Force, for example, the Roy Park School of Communications at Ithaca College (N.Y.) tried to achieve its mission a program that is both integrative and holistic one which introduces students to the inteLlectual traditions and disciplines of communications and links these traditions and disciplines the rest of higher education (AEJMC, 1994, p.8.). In addition, Northwestern University's master's program offered several interdisciplinary courses that require students to cut across disciplines (Blanchard & Christ, 1993). In the master's program, three schools and two departments such as speech/telecommunication, journalism, management, and even engineering were joined. Moreover, the University of Iowa has formalized the interdisciplinary approach to a communication department (Blanchard & Christ, 1993). In coauthoring studies with other faculty on campus in varied disciplines, faculty of the department have identified many such linkages that can and should be made at the undergraduate level(Blanchard & Christ,1993, p.112). The community of journalism and mass communication, even if part of the liberal arts tradition, has nonetheless lacked an interdisciplinary understanding of the human world with holistic perspective (Beniger, 1993; Shoemaker 1993). Shoemaker (1993) said that, so far, journalism studies have not built linkages with other intellectual disciplines. She argues that the intellectual connections with other disciplines on campuses were necessary for journalism researchers and educators to enrich broad contextual knowledge. That knowledge be developed through exposure to the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Demonstrating a rethinking of the status quo in journalism teaching and research, Atwater (1993) commented in his AEJMC presidential address: We should be more involved in interdisciplinary pursuits, trans-collegiate programs, and inter-departmental curricular offerings that build bridges between our programs and others and create a stronger academic image for our units as academic citizens (p. 75). Fortunately, in our field there are some recent attempts to turn journalism's intellectual attention toward a variety of disciplines to produce more flexible and holistic thinking. These efforts are actually perceived as beneficial for students' intellectual growth. The Incidents course, offered at Michigan State University, is just such an example. The course, which received support from the Critical Incidents Analysis Group (CIAG)' and the Dart Foundation2, takes an interdisciplinary approach as a way to analyze major critical incidents3 (e.g., the California earthquakes, the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City, and terrorism in the Middle East). The purpose of this article is to introduce the course as a part of a series of approaches to the interdisciplinary road, and ultimately to argue why journalism educators' participation in such a course in the larger university, as well as one centered in the J-school, is indispensable for the future of journalism. …

The Disciplines of International Law and Policy

This article considers the idea that the professional and intellectual disciplines which have developed in the United States to advance insight into international affairs also have characteristic blind spots and biases which leave professionals and intellectuals working within them more sanguine about the status quo than they might otherwise be. I am particularly interested in blind spots and bias which emerge from interactions among the disciplines of public international law, international economic law, comparative law, and international relations. Although internationalists in the United states working in these disciplines have broadly divergent methodologies and political ideologies, they share a sensibility which narrows the range of concerns and the scope of political possibilities which seem plausible to professionals and intellectuals concerned with international law and policy.

Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (review)

Book Reviews 149 relatively high level of decorum." The second were the celebration rituals—the bonfires , the fireworks, the drinking bouts, even fighting and rioting, which sanctioned "exuberant releases of energy," where "strict decorum is set aside" (16). While today we mark the holiday with plenty of celebration—cookouts, fireworks, a day of play at the beach—perhaps we should lament that we attend less enthusiastically to the ceremonial rituals of the Fourth of July. For while Washington's visage is exploited to advertise a weekend sale at the mall, and while we, like our ancestors, seem willing to consume our share of celebratory alcohol, we are in danger of losing sight of the meanings of Independence Day that made the Fourth of July such an important holiday in the early republic. Celebrating the Fourth by Len Travers reminds us of the possibilities for investing our national holidays with more than commercial and recreational significance. James M. Farrell University of New Hampshire Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought. By James W. Ceaser. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997; pp. χ + 390. $30.00. James Ceaser's study of the creation and growth of "symbolic America" is a sharp and clear light that pierces through the murky postmodern fog enveloping many discussions of American identity. Professor Ceaser unites scholarly insight with the passion growing from his belief in fundamental democratic principles in a masterful examination of the genealogy of "symbolic America": the image of America as the embodiment of all that is wrong in the world—a source of oppression and a cultural wasteland, simultaneously evil and vacuous. Hoping to "free the real from the symbolic America," Ceaser states that he aims to "liberate a country from the mastery of a metaphor and the tyranny of a trope" (5). In trying to distinguish the "real" from the image, Professor Ceaser realizes that "to use the term 'real' is almost a provocation," in some intellectual quarters, but he goes on to assert that "not being a teacher of philosophy, I can perhaps be permitted the latitude of using "real' in its ordinary sense to refer to what the average person has in mind when talking about a country—that is, the physical place organized under a certain form of government " (16-17). This book is certainly not a patriotic paean, nor is it an apologia. It is a careful investigation of the roots of a pernicious idée fixe among European, and recently American, intellectuals that depicts America as, in the words of Heidegger, "the emerging monstrousness of modern times" (9). This is an extremely important issue. Professor Ceaser, as a political scientist, refuses to "cede a monopoly of commentary on American discourse to the spokespersons of the various cultural disciplines" since "any powerful symbol, in particular one designed with a political objective in mind, must have an effect on a society's way of thinking and on the well-being of its political system" (7). The 150 Rhetoric & Public Affairs American political system and American culture have not lacked for defenders in the past; Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were quick to refute the "arrogant pretensions of the Europeans." In the contemporary intellectual climate, however , it takes some courage and a determined integrity to take on, as Professor Ceaser does, "the presiding intellectual disciplines of literary criticism and ironist philosophy". . . . and to challenge the pretensions of "too many of our thinkers [who] still play the part of good colonials, obsequiously bowing and scraping before their fashionable Continental masters." "It is a lamentable spectacle," Ceaser writes, "to see so many of our best minds rushing to deconstruct all things American while failing to turn that method on those who gave them their marching orders" (18). Ceaser's study should serve as a model of the diachronic analysis of a symbol. One sees in this work an articulate and insightful scholar carefully and persuasively explaining the archeology of an image in ways that dwarf tentative rhetorical probes of "ideographs," and with a clarity of thought and argument not present in all rhetorical studies of such matters. Beginning with the French philosopher/scientists of the eighteenth century, Ceaser explicates the foundations of...

The invisible substrate of information science

The explicit, above-the-water-line paradigm of information science is well known and widely discussed. Every disciplinary paradigm, however, contains elements that are less conscious and explicit in the thinking of its practitioners. The purpose of this article is to elucidate key elements of the below-the-water-line portion of the information science paradigm. Particular emphasis is given to information science’s role as a meta-science—conducting research and developing theory around the documentary products of other disciplines and activities. The mental activities of the professional practice of the field are seen to center around representation and organization of information rather than knowing information. It is argued that such representation engages fundamentally different talents and skills from those required in other professions and intellectual disciplines. Methodological approaches and values of information science are also considered.

Cooperation: the foundation of improvement.

Cooperation--working together to produce mutual benefit or attain a common purpose--is almost inseparable from the quest for improvement. Although the case for cooperation can be made on ethical grounds, neither the motivation for nor the effects of cooperation need to be interpreted solely in terms of altruism. Cooperation can be a shrewd and pragmatic strategy for accomplishing personal goals in an interdependent system. Earlier papers in this series have explored the conceptual roots of modern approaches to improvement, which lie in systems theory. To improve systems, we must usually attend first and foremost to interactions. Among humans, "better interaction" is almost synonymous with "better cooperation." Physicians have ample opportunities and, indeed, an obligation to cooperate with other physicians in the same or different specialties, with nurses and other clinical workers, with administrators, and with patients and families. Many intellectual disciplines have made cooperation an object of study. These include anthropology; social psychology; genetics; biology; mathematics; game theory; linguistics; operations research; economics; and, of course, moral and rational philosophy. Scientifically grounded methods to enhance cooperation include developing a shared purpose; creating an open, safe environment; including all who share a common purpose and encouraging diverse viewpoints; negotiating agreement; and insisting on fairness and equity in the application of rules. These methods apply at the organizational level and at the level of the individual physician. This paper describes the application of these methods at the organizational level and focuses on one especially successful example of system-level cooperation in a care delivery site where interactions matter a great deal: the modern intensive care unit.

The 1997 Wilkins lecture: Erasmus Darwin, the lunaticks and evolution.

Long ago, I suggested that Erasmus Darwin ‘achieved more in a wider range of intellectual disciplines than anyone since’. This remark has not yet been contradicted; and that is perhaps enough to justify the choice of Erasmus Darwin as the subject of the Wilkins Lecture for 1997. I shall run quickly through his varied talents, comment on his personality and then outline his life and achievements. As an addition to the life story, I shall include glances at those of his many friends who together formed the Lunar Society of Birmingham, so called because it met at the time of the full moon; they are of course the ‘Lunaticks’ of my title. To conclude, I shall look more closely at one of his many interests, explaining how he came to believe in biological evolution (as we now call it) and then had to keep quiet about it for 20 years before eventually championing it in public.

System Dynamics: Toward a Language of Comparative Law?

Goals and methods define intellectual disciplines and the communities associated with those disciplines. Where are we going? and How can we get there? are central questions that structure such communities and their activities.1 The two questions are, or should be, related. Presumably at least, those within the community assume that what they are doing will actually lead to where they want to go. Yet what happens when there is a disjuncture between goals and methods when there are incentives to achieve new objectives, but the tools that have been fashioned to achieve existing objectives have little relevance to the new goals? I suggest in this essay that this is what has happened in comparative law a developmental disjuncture has occurred in the relationship between objectives and methods.2 Certain traditional objectives of those thinking about and using comparative law have shaped its current methods, but new objectives have emerged and others have become more pressing, and current methods often have limited value for achieving them. Focusing on the analytical and cognitive aspects of this disjuncture may, therefore, lead us to more effective strategies for responding to it. The lack of a language of comparative law symbolizes and thematizes the situation of comparative law. Comparative law has no language! It can point to a small set of specialized nouns as its own, but nouns do not make a language. A language develops where members of a community seek to explain aspects of the data or reality with which they deal.3 Physics has a language; sociology has perhaps

The black box in somatization: Unexplained physical symptoms, culture, and narratives of trauma

Stimulated by our clinical work with patients who manifest unexplained “somatoform” symptoms in the primary care setting, this article addresses a theoretical black box in our understanding of somatization: how does culture mediate severe stress to produce symptoms that cannot be explained by the presence of physical illness? Despite various problems in his explanation of hysteria, Freud broke new ground by emphasizing narratives of traumatic experiences in the development and treatment of unexplained physical symptoms. Except in anthropologically oriented cultural psychiatry, contemporary psychiatry has traveled away from a focus on narrative in the study of somatization. On the other hand, recent interest in narrative has spread across many intellectual disciplines, including the humanities and literary criticism, psychology, history, anthropology, and sociology. We operationally define narratives as attempts at storytelling that portray the interrelationships among physical symptoms and the psychologic, social, or cultural context of these symptoms. Regarding somatization and trauma, we focus on the ways that narrative integrates the cultural context with traumatic life events. In explaining the black box, we postulate that extreme stress (torture, rape, witnessing deaths of relatives, forced migration, etc.) is processed psychologically as a terrible, largely incoherent narrative of events too awful to hold in consciousness. Culture patterns the psychologic and somatic expression of the terrible narrative. Methodologically, we have developed some techniques for eliciting narratives of severe stress and somatic symptoms, which we illustrate with observations from an ongoing research project. In designing interventions to improve the care of somatizing patients, we are focusing on the creation of social situations where patients may feel empowered to express more coherent narratives of their prior traumatic experiences.

Authors' Responses to Commentaries

I should begin this response by thanking MAQ editor Gay Becker for the opportunity to have my article enriched by the insightful commentaries provided by Beth Conklin and Marina Roseman. I am also pleased to find my own contribution joined here to that of Cecilia McCallum, whose work among the Cashinahua has been a model of ethnographic depth and theoretical sophistication. Readers of MAQ may not appreciate the nice coincidence: Cecilia and I are the only anthropologists to conduct major research in this very remote site, the Area Indigena Alto Purus, and it is a pleasant and unexpected surprise to find ourselves in the same issue of MAQ. I am in the somewhat embarrassing position of having been treated more kindly by my commentators than I might have been justified in expecting, but the generosity of their remarks offers an opportunity to expand on one or two points. Roseman and Conklin offer complementary perspectives: Roseman addresses a set of general theoretical issues that she graciously finds at least implicit in my framing comments and analysis, while Conklin explores the contribution to these issues made by other work in indigenous lowland South America. Roseman focuses on my opening remarks, a somewhat cranky diatribe against the Body business that has become one of the most profitable growth industries in late capitalist social science and humanities (Featherstone et al. 1991). Roseman points to the important role of feminist scholarship in opening conceptual space for the body, and I should underscore the point that all our discussions are cast at least in part upon a rich background of feminist theory. At the same time, those of us who read Foucault along with the emerging feminist anthropology in the early 1970s may wonder if the Body was already taking shape in scholarly consciousness in ways that were also represented in feminist scholarship and poststructuralism, as well as in a variety of popular and public Body movements (Synnott 1993). Terence Turner's work (1994, 1995), in particular, invites us to consider the historical changes in Euro-American political economy that altered the position of the Body in this period. My first inclination in such a case is to make the Weberian assumption that a variety of social changes and cultural moments in postwar Euro-American political economy, popular culture, and intellectual disciplines converged in mutually reinforcing ways to resonate around the material signs of identity that we have since converted into the trope of the Body (B. Turner 1991). Roseman chides me gently for engaging in unwarranted typification: crystallizing researchers such as Lock, Kleinman, Good, and Csordas in the midst of their own ever-refining trajectories. She is right; the individuals she cites produce work that is more nuanced than I had space to acknowledge and discuss. Indeed, of this Gang of Four only Csordas has focused so exclusively on a particular

Pragmatism and the cognitive and neural sciences.

Two prominent intellectual disciplines dominate the discipline of psychology, the cognitive and neural sciences. Separate departments for both are now commonplace at major universities across America. I suggest, however, that the discipline of psychology asks key questions about experience, mind, or central states not found in other disciplines. Psychology is embodied in both the cognitive and neural sciences, and an important common thread is the Jamesian-Deweyian emphasis on experience. The Jamesian-Deweyian tradition emphasized the sense of experience in problem-solving and functional adaptations. The pragmatists' sense of experience is the way by which one engages the world, is inherently cognitive, and orchestrated by central states of the brain. Any attempt within the neural and cognitive sciences to capture human experience will need to resurrect this tradition.

Mutual Misunderstanding: Scepticism and the Theorizing of Language and Interpretation

Do others understand we say or write? Do we understand them? Theorists of language and interpretation claim to be more concerned with questions about what we understand and how we understand, rather than with the logically prior question whether we understand each other. An affirmative answer to the latter question is apparently taken for granted. However, in Mutual Misunderstanding , Talbot J. Taylor shows that the sceptical doubts about communicational understanding do in fact have a profoundly important, if as yet unacknowledged, function in the construction of theories of language and interpretation. Mutual Misundertanding thus presents a strikingly original analysis of the rhetorical patterns underlying Western linguistic thought, as exemplified in the works of John Locke, Jacques Derrida, Gottlob Frege, Jonathan Culler, Noam Chomsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, H. Paul Grice, Michael Dummet, Stanley Fish, Alfred Schutz, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Harold Garfinkel, and others. This analysis reveals how, by the combined effect of appeals to commonsense and anxieties about implications of relativism, scepticism has a determining role in the discursive development of a number of the intellectual disciplines making up the human sciences today, including critical theory, literary hermeneutics, philosophy of language and logic, communication theory, discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and linguistics. Consequently, this provocative study will be of value to readers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

On the Relationship Between Trade Theory and Location Theory

AbstractInternational trade theory and location theory deal with many of the same issues, yet have evolved as almost completely distinct intellectual disciplines. This paper summarizes the main distinctive features of each field and suggests how we can try to generate a new discipline that combines insights from both.

Cultural studies questionnaire

The people I find myself going back to are Eric Mottram (Blood on the Nash Ambassador and many other essays), Marshall McLuhan (The Mechanical Bride), Robert Duncan (The HD Book) and ways of working I particularly admire include those of Josefina Ludmer, Yolanda Salas, Julio Ortega, Alberto Flores Galindo and Jesus Martin-Barbero. One of the things that brought me to cultural studies is the necessity of finding out where one is, that that involves investigating a large field of information. The sensation of entering a big process of discovery—I think I first got the sense of that reading Eliot's The Waste Land at school. It wasn't on the syllabus and I don't remember how I heard about it. Pound I first heard of reading the Sunday Times—in around 1960: you won't find major modern poets there now! At school I read Thompson's Aeschylus and Athens and was fascinated by how one could discover a deep relationship between the form of literature (e.g. how many actors there were on the stage in Greek tragedy) and major changes in the society. Over time, Pound's sense of learning how to navigate different cultures (he used the word periplum) became important to me. Teaching in Peru for 2 years in the 1960s was crucial: to understand that environment meant getting hold of new types of explanation (Marxism and also the work of younger Peruvian poets, such as Pablo Guevara and Antonio Cisneros, whom I started to translate). At that time I also began to find out about anthropology—later I studied Andean song and did some fieldwork. Anthropologists in Peru, like Alejandro Ortiz and Juan Ossio, introduced me to new ways of understanding the culture. Back in the UK, I did a PhD on Jose Maria Arguedas, with Jean Franco as my supervisor, so the challenge was always to read literature alongside social and political urgencies! Some classes she gave on Cesar Vallejo affected me a lot: we were discussing those prison poems in Trilce and how they are a type of modern—condensed and fragmented—epic. I have always felt the necessity to work out the relation between forms and history. At first I found it very difficult and did a lot of short-circuiting— collapsing differences (which Pound calls making 'a series of indefinite middles') so as to produce sentences, because it's in the writing that the problem became tangible. I have found Angel Rama, Roberto Schwarz and Julio Ortega very useful for this, all of them in different ways, of course. But I would also say it's the works of literature that often help one most to begin to move through a large and complex field: I am thinking here of say La casa verde or El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. I am giving a paper in Bogota, at the Conference on Cultural Studies in Latin America organized by Carlos Rincon, on the place of the literary work and the problem of intellectual disciplines in cultural studies, because that's one of the issues that most preoccupies me: not

Deterministic chaos and the sciences of complexity: psychoanalysis in the midst of a general scientific revolution.

A combination of new concepts and the enormous powers of computation now available have created the beginnings of a major new scientific revolution. It does not have to do with psychoanalysis per se, but with some basic assumptions among the sciences generally. The result is already showing in new visions of nature variously called "deterministic chaos," "nonlinear dynamics," or "sciences of complexity." For the first time it is possible to study complex systems in process, over time. This paper, especially attending to issues of separation and integration, focuses on two components of the new understandings, fractal geometry (part of the mathematics of topology) and deterministic chaos (the tendency of nonlinear systems to oscillate toward and away from absolute chaotic disorganization). In a diverse group of intellectual disciplines, it is now possible to describe systems in operation in detail, in terms of nonlinear differential equations. From these, computer models of multiple variables in interaction can be produced. In turn, this allows experimentation on the models by altering variables. At this time, psychoanalysis can only use deterministic chaos and fractals metaphorically, but in the future, especially if psychoanalysis is seen in terms of process or organismic theory, it is likely that such models can be produced.

Say it with documents: British policy overseas, 1945–1952.

It has not been easy for those in the relatively new field of international relations to find an intellectual niche, and a great deal of ink has been spilled in debates about the nature, sources and role of the discipline. The most basic area of the debate is between the largely British-based historical traditions and the North American behaviourist and ‘scientific’ schools. No doubt many international historians have winced at the vague phrase ‘history shows us that...’, which still appears in some textbooks. And no doubt international relations theorists have despaired of international history monographs in which the author appears to fail to draw any general conclusions after years of painstaking study in the archives. In institutions of higher education the professionals continually struggle to get the balance right between the different elements of an international relations degree, and the paucity of departments devoted solely to international relations is witness to the still ambiguous place of the discipline in the academic world. despite unrelenting student demand—but it also shows that the discipline is very much alive, vigorous, developing and innovative. It is also fairly obvious that intellectual disciplines do not have to be mutually exclusive, and perhaps one of the closest, even symbiotic, relationships is the key one between the study of international history and international relations, particularly foreign policy analysis.

Western conceptions of the individual

This is a comprehensive study of the varying conceptions of the human subject in the Western intellectual tradition. Although informed by an anthropological perspective, the author draws on material from all the major intellectual disciplines that have contributed to this tradition and offers biographical and theoretical vignettes of all the major Western scholars. By scrutinizing the classical texts of the Western tradition, he succeeds in delineating the differing conceptions of the human individual which emerge from these writings, and gives a guide to the most important ideas in Western cultural traditions.

From Aphorisms To Theoretical Analyses: the Birth of Human Sciences in the Fifth Century B.C

Often it is useful, if one wishes to understand how major transformations in intellectual disciplines came about, to examine the manifestations of these transformations in specific details. But it is necessary that these be facts sufficiently well attested to to constitute probative indicators. This condition is fulfilled with regard to the use of general reflections among the authors of ancient Greece. Their presence is indeed one of the characteristic features of Greek literature, in particular from the Seventh to the Fourth centuries B.C. However, we can observe that their nature clearly changes in the last third of the Fifth century, precisely at the moment when, in an abrupt surge of rationalism, we suddenly see born in Athens a whole series of areas of research on man that Western civilization would later take up once more and develop further. This coincidence cannot be accidental; and it is permitted to think that there is an indicator here capable of revealing in greater detail the manner in which this development, so important for the history of thought, occurred.

Erasmus Darwin, man of ideas and inventor of words.

Dr Erasmus Darwin, F.R.S. (1731—1802), probably achieved more in a greater range of intellectual disciplines than anyone since his time. Yet he is relatively little known, because the very variety of his talents has ensured that his total achievement is consistently underrated in our age of specialization. He also had the misfortune to possess the same surname as his grandson Charles, with the result that Erasmus’s own illuminating exposition of biological evolution (as we now call it) is difficult to discern behind the glare created by Charles’s shining light

THe Fear of Falling: British Politics and Imperial Decline Since 1900

TO an outsider historians must sometimes seem perversely obsessed with decline. Certainly when it comes to dealing with empires, his-torians betray a fascination with decay that is almost pathological—and often not simply with the nature and causes of decline but with the exact moment when it began—a somewhat futile enterprise if an enjoyable parlour game. Of course the appeal of decay to the his-torical imagination is not simply the outgrowth of contemporary nostalgia for lost worlds and past times. In the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries the intellectual habit of ‘historical-mindedness’ and the particular tendency to search for a pattern of origins, growth, maturity, decline and fall were extremely influential over a wide range of intellectual disciplines and we might suppose helped to shape the world-view of those who managed the external affairs of Britain and the other powers. The search for historical laws of civilisation and decay was a characteristically Victorian intellectual preoccupation and an essential part of the way in which Europeans tried to make sense of the other civilisations into which they crashed during the nineteenth century. But how far were the leaders of the European imperial states and the circles of informed opinion in which they moved willing to turn on their own empires the analysis of growth and decay they had fashioned for the states and cultures they had overthrown? To what extent should we see the makers of British policy in the first half of this century as (in Gibbon's famous phrase) ‘musing in the ruins of the Capitol’? Was the Marquess of Lothian's remark that ‘sooner or later empires decay partly because they become rigid and rotten at the centre…’ a recognition that if history was the graveyard of empires, British imperialism had certainly reached retiring age? Or did Lothian and others like him assume that Britain's peculiarities made her exempt from such generalizations?