Intellectual Revolution Research Articles

Protocols of liberty: communication innovation and the American Revolution

The fledgling United States fought a war to achieve independence from Britain, but as John Adams said, the real revolution occurred the minds and hearts of the people before the armed conflict ever began. Putting the practices of communication at the center of this intellectual revolution, Protocols of Liberty shows how American patriots - the Whigs - used new forms of communication to challenge British authority before any shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. To understand the triumph of the Whigs over the Brit-friendly Tories, William B. Warner argues that it is essential to understand the communication systems that shaped pre-Revolution events in the background. He explains the shift in power by tracing the invention of a new political agency, the Committee of Correspondence; the development of a new genre for political expression, the popular declaration; and the emergence of networks for collective political action, with the Continental Congress at its center. From the establishment of town meetings to the creation of a new postal system and, finally, the Declaration of Independence, Protocols of Liberty reveals that communication innovations contributed decisively to nation-building and continued to be key tools in later American political movements, like abolition and women's suffrage, to oppose local custom and state law.

La tragédie de la culture matérielle selon Maximilian Volochine

The Tragedy of Material Culture according to Maximilian Voloshin. Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932) often reflected on the consequences of technological progress and the increasing influence of material values on spiritual life. In his “ Ways of Cain” (1923) he retraced this evolution and meditated on symbols such as the fist, the sword, gunpowder, steam, and the machine. All of these are envisaged as landmarks in the rise of a “ culture of fire”. According to Voloshin, the acceleration of technological progress reinforces the devastating effects of human violence. His observations about the ravages of explosives led him to foresee the nuclear age. In his opinion, far from being liberating, technological progress transforms people into slaves of the very machines they themselves have created. This visionary poet also predicted the emergence of consumerist society, in which the world becomes a “ huge stomach”. After outlining his pessimistic vision, Voloshin calls for an intellectual revolution. In his view, humankind must break free from the deadlock to which the “ culture of fire” has led. If people embrace spiritual values once again, they will witness the dawn of the “ culture of explosion”. With his views strongly inspired by his Slavophile heritage, the poet believes that Europe’s destiny is irremediably linked to the “ culture of fire”, while through its inclination towards revolt, the Russian nation carries within itself the “ culture of explosion”, whose rise Voloshin clearly expects.

The Rise and Global Significance of the First “West”: The Medieval Islamic Maghrib

Evidence exists that the first historically verifiable use of the term “West” as a self-ascriptive political construct occurred in the medieval Almohad Muslim empire that united al-Andalus (Iberia) and North Africa in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Known as the Maghrib in Arabic, this hegemonic label served successfully as a strategic synecdoche for the Almohads’ ideological reformulation of their African-European society. While surrounding polities admired and imitated the Almohad West, its philosophical underpinnings created an intellectual revolution that threatened both Islamic and Christian elites and ultimately undermined Islamic toleration of Christian and Jewish subjects. Comprehending the Maghrib’s complex role in the creation of Western civilization clarifies the dialectical relationship of its two political heirs, modern Islamic North Africa and Christian Europe.

Sola Scriptura and Western Hyperpluralism: A Critical Response to Brad Gregory’s Unintended Reformation

This paper discusses Brad Gregory’s claim that the Reformation era’s principle of sola scriptura is the ‘most important distant historical source of Western hyperpluralism’. After an explication of Gregory’s argument, the paper employs three counter arguments to Gregory’s claim. Firstly, it is argued that late medieval Europe was not a unified institutionalised society as Gregory suggests, but was characterised by doctrinal controversy, power struggles with the church and social discord. It would therefore be incorrect to regard the sola scriptura principle as the main historical origin of the fragmentation of Western society. Secondly, a series of intellectual revolutions from the 11th to 15th centuries played a pivotal role in the fragmentation of medieval Western society and the rise of individualist patterns of thinking. The rise of theological schools and universities, the discovery of printing and questions about the reliability of the Vulgate translation were three key factors that fractured medieval society. The sola scriptura principle was a partial phenomenon within this much larger intellectual environment. Lastly, it is argued that the sola scriptura principle was neither an invention of the Reformation, nor a novel idea, and that the Reformers did not employ the sola scriptura principle in the individualist sense that Gregory appears to belief. In the end it is a highly artificial and reductionist argument to describe the Reformation’s sola scriptura principle as the ‘most important distant historical source of Western hyperpluralism’.

Art in an Age of Civil Struggle 1848-1871. A Social History of Modern Art. Volume Four

Published barely four months before the author’s death in November 2008, one of a projected six-volume social history of western art from the Ancien Régime to the First World War stands, at least provisionally, as an epitaph to one of the most influential and productive careers in post-war art history. A seminal figure in opening up the discipline to other areas of historical enquiry, Albert Boime was central to the vigorous debate initiated during the 1970s by scholars such as Robert Herbert, Linda Nochlin, and T. J. Clark out of which art history emerged re-invigorated as a more theoretically aware and politically engaged field of enquiry. The importance of nineteenth-century French studies within this radical re-evaluation is reflected in the overall balance of Boime’s gargantuan survey (currently totalling some 3000 pages). Begun in 1987, and seemingly growing in scope and ambition with each successive volume, this final offering has reached what might be regarded as the symbolic departure point of the intellectual revolution to which it attests: Nochlin’s work on Courbet, Herbert’s research on Millet, and Clark’s publications on Courbet, Manet, and the art of the Second Republic all stand as particularly authoritative antecedents in the study of Realism and Impressionism that dominates Boime’s current instalment. Beyond this, over the course of an unusually prolific career, Boime himself published widely on mid-century culture, not only in France, but also in nations traditionally less often considered in the art-historical literature, notably Italy, Germany and the United States. If whole chapters of Art in an Age of Civil Struggle have a familiar ring, this is because Boime draws upon his prodigious back-catalogue of books and articles covering a myriad of artists and themes from the Second Republic to the Commune.

The Boro Intelligentsia: It’s Role in the Change and Transformation of the Boro Society

Scholars of ethnicity and nationalism observe that a society undergoing modernization and industrialization creates alongside a class of elites which takes major decisions bringing change and transformation in the society. In the multi-ethnic societies, spurring of elites involve inter and intra elite competitions for the sharing of the developments and fewer employment opportunities. The growth and development of an ethnic community often depends on the situations around and the kind of inter elite competition they are pressed into. The Boro society too began undergoing modernization with the spread of modern education in the early decades of the 20 th century. In the beginning they were meagre in number, but as time passed by, they grew in number and strength and by 1930s they emerged as one of the formidable political force of the state proving themselves as the king makers of that time. As saying goes, intellectual revolution precedes political revolution; the Boro intelligentsia of the early decades of the 20 th century was also more

Religion, Race, Rights: Landmarks in the History of Modern Anglo-American Law. By Eve Darian-Smith. Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2010. 332 pp. $38.00 paper.

Religion, Race, Rights: Landmarks in the History of Modern Anglo-American Law. By Eve Darian-Smith. Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2010. 332 pp. $38.00 paper.The English explorer Sir Francis Drake arrived in the San Francisco bay on June 5, 1579 bearing characteristic, eventually parodic markers of modern European civilization. Ignoring the names given to the region its Miwok Indian inhabitants, Drake declared it Nova Albion (New England) because the bay's chalk-white cliffs reminded him of the famous white cliffs of Dover. After less than a day spent communicating by signs with the local people, Drake was self-satisfied on multiple fronts. He had clothed their naked, savage bodies; offered to them the sacred word of his Christian God (by which they were greatly affected); and, most importantly, secured from the Miwok king the right and title of the whole land, turning the Miwok people themselves into subjects of the British Crown. Drake memorialized his triumphant day planting in the California soil a plate, nailed upon a fair great post, whereupon was engraved her Majesty's name, the day and year of our arrival there, with the free giving up of the province and people into her Majesty's hands. He then set sail, leaving behind, we can imagine with the benefit of hindsight, a bemused Miwok people (Gunn 1994: 75-77). True: the seamless weaving of the modern discourses of religion, race, and rights according to which Drake's conquest was consecrated was, as the contemporary British comedian Eddie Izzard has it, unrelentingly absurd and even selfparodic. But, as Eve-Darian Smith's Religion, Race, and Rights persuasively argues, that weaving was neither unprecedented nor has it been played with any regularity for comic effect: the prerogatives of modern European civilization, well entrenched in colonial practice a century before Drake's arrival in California and always partially in character, have transformed the world in frequently brutal ways.Darian-Smith's book canvasses the entire span of modern times and is organized chronologically, in three parts, around rich and provocative examinations of eight legal landmarks-broadly events, sometimes court cases, that illustrate prominent moments in the tangled history of religion, race, and rights. Darian-Smith presents the first of these landmarks-Martin Luther's 1517 posting of the 95 Theses of protest against the Vatican on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany-in a manner representative of the book's method: Luther's protestation amounts to a historical condensation point in which key transformations in matters spiritual, racial, and coalesce and become apparent. Luther's intellectual revolution yoked anti-hierarchical Christianity to ethical citizenship and, eventually, to a new, protodemocratic vision of the proper relations between governments and citizens in which reigned the new logic of natural and individual rights. …

O processo emancipatório do indivíduo na educação técnica profissional sob o olhar da arte e a concepção de pensamento criativo

Este artigo propõe uma discussão sobre a importância do pensamento criativo na construção da emancipação do aluno da educação técnica profissional, a partir do pensamento rancieriano. A análise de conteúdos sob enfoque qualitativo adota a pesquisa bibliográfica e documental para promover investigação acerca da temática. Inicia-se o texto apresentando um breve resgate histórico sobre a educação técnica profissional e seu compromisso com a formação dos mais pobres, ligada ao desenvolvimento econômico e sua necessidade de mão-de-obra. Segue-se com a discussão sobre a emancipação, pautada no pensamento de Jacques Ranciére sobre igualdade como ponto de partida, destacando a potência individual e as inteligências dissociadas das relações hierárquicas de saber. Busca-se uma aproximação com o devir do pensamento de Gilles Deleuze e com o olhar artístico de Pablo Picasso para entender o processo emancipatório do indivíduo, compreendido na complexidade do pensar, do criar, como algo transformador, que não deseja sujeitar-se a ninguém, nem tão pouco sujeitar alguém a si mesmo, numa relação de liberdade. Liberdade de expressão e interpretação, de estabelecer conceitos e inventar novas verdades, novas realidades. A pesquisa aponta para a importância do professor no processo de emancipação do aluno, no sentido de despertar o mesmo para a vontade de potência, mas o emancipar-se, contudo, cabe ao indivíduo. A revolução intelectual invoca a superação de si mesmo, numa relação entre pensamento e criatividade.

Stefanos Geroulanos, 'An Atheism that is not Humanist emerges in French Thought'

An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. By Stefanos Geroulanos. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2010. xi + 423 pp. ISBN: 978 0 8047 6298 4. Stefanos Geroulanos’ study is inspired by an insight of Emmanuel Levinas’ about a so-called ‘atheism that is not humanism,’ more precisely ‘the exaltation of an obedience and a faithfulness that are not obedience or faithfulness to anyone’. Following this suggestion, Geroulanos contends ‘From World War I through the 1950s, a philosophical and intellectual revolution in France created a new kind of atheism, demolished the value of humanism, and altered the meaning of ‘the human virtually beyond recognition’. He thinks this is the result of a conceptual reorganisation that mainly occurred from 1925 until 1950, and that a decade later had acquired the name of ‘antihumanism’ as almost the official face of French thought. This is an antihumanist perspective for which, unlike, say Feuerbach, who jettisons God to hold on to man, there is neither God nor man. In Geroulanos’ reading of the evolution of recent French thought, the supposed shift away from so-called classical atheism and humanism runs along three interrelated tracks. There is, first, what he detects as the rise during the 1930s and 1940s of an atheism that is not humanist since it is mistrustful of so-called secular, egalitarian and transformative commitments. Next there is the emergence of a negative philosophical anthropology, which turns away from the possibility of defining what is strictly human. And finally there is the rise of a critique of humanism after the First World War.

The power of chameleonic ideas in the policy decision-making process: the case of the ‘students' revolution' in Chile

Chile is facing a major intellectual revolution: organised college students are arguing for the most significant educational reform since the period of dictatorship (1973–1990). Thousands of high-s...

Arguing for Wisdom in the University: An Intellectual Autobiography

For 40 years I have argued that we urgently need to bring about a revolution in academia so that the basic task becomes to seek and promote wisdom. How did I come to argue for such a vast, wildly ambitious intellectual revolution? It goes back to my childhood. From an early age, I desired passionately to understand the physical universe. Then, around adolescence, my passion became to understand the heart and soul of people via the novel. But I never discovered how to tell stories in order to tell the truth. So, having failed to become a physicist, and failed to become a novelist, I studied philosophy at Manchester University and then, in 6 weeks of inspiration, discovered that the riddle of the universe is the riddle of our desires. Philosophy should be about how to live, and should not just do conceptual analysis. I struggled to reconcile the two worlds of my childhood ambitions, the physical universe and the human world. I decided they could be reconciled with one another if one regarded the two accounts of them, physics and common sense, as myths, and not as literal truths. But then I discovered Karl Popper: truth is too important to be discarded. I revised my ideas: physics seeks to depict truly only an aspect of all that there is; in addition, there is the experiential aspect of things—the world as we experience it. I was immensely impressed with Popper’s view that science makes progress, not by verification, but by ferocious attempted falsification of theories. I was impressed, too, with his generalization of this view to form critical rationalism. Then it dawned on me: Popper’s view of science is untenable because it misrepresents the basic aim of science. This is not truth as such; rather it is explanatory truth—truth presupposed to be unified or physically comprehensible. We need, I realized, a new conception of science, called by me aim-oriented empiricism, which acknowledges the real, problematic aims of science, and seeks to improve them. Then, treading along a path parallel to Popper’s, I realized that aim-oriented empiricism can be generalized to form a new conception of rationality, aim-oriented rationality, with implications for all that we do. This led on to a new conception of academic inquiry. From the Enlightenment we have inherited the view that academia, in order to help promote human welfare, must first acquire knowledge. But this is profoundly and damagingly irrational. If academia really does seek to help promote human welfare, then its primary tasks must be to articulate problems of living, and propose and critically assess possible solutions—possible actions, policies, political programmes, philosophies of life. The pursuit of knowledge is secondary. Academia needs to promote cooperatively rational problem solving in the social world, and needs to help humanity improve individual and institutional aims by exploiting aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the real progress-achieving methods of science. We might, as a result, get into life some of the progressive success that is such a marked feature of science. Thus began my campaign to promote awareness of the urgent need for a new kind of academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping humanity create a wiser world.

In Praise of Natural Philosophy: A Revolution for Thought and Life

Modern science began as natural philosophy. In the time of Newton, what we call science and philosophy today – the disparate endeavours – formed one mutually interacting, integrated endeavour of natural philosophy: to improve our knowledge and understanding of the universe, and to improve our understanding of ourselves as a part of it. Profound, indeed unprecedented discoveries were made. But then natural philosophy died. It split into science on the one hand, and philosophy on the other. This happened during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the split is now built into our intellectual landscape. But the two fragments, science and philosophy, are defective shadows of the glorious unified endeavour of natural philosophy. Rigour, sheer intellectual good sense and decisive argument demand that we put the two together again, and rediscover the immense merits of the integrated enterprise of natural philosophy. This requires an intellectual revolution, with dramatic implications for how we understand our world, how we understand and do science, and how we understand and do philosophy. There are dramatic implications, too, for education, and for the entire academic endeavour, and its capacity to help us discover how to tackle more successfully our immense global problems.

The Life and Times of Thomas Willis and his Impact on Contemporary Medicine

Thomas Willis made numerous contributions to the neurosciences that were broad in scope. In an age of scientific breakthroughs and intellectual revolutions, Willis bestowed upon medical research the clinical rigor that set the stage for subsequent medical breakthroughs. In Cerebri Anatome, Willis introduced a measure of empiricism hitherto unknown in medieval times. By coupling the delineation of brain and neural anatomy with functional studies, Willis brought the science of clinical neurology into fruition. Psychiatry, too, benefited from Willis' elucidation of mental illness and intellectual disability, and modern behavioral psychologists claim Willis as one their early, most ardent champions.

Chilean University Students’ Call for Participation and Engagement in What Matters to Them: Is It Possible to Achieve a Shared Decision Making Process in Education Policy?

Chile is facing one of its major intellectual revolutions in the last century: organised high school, college and university students have led the most salient educational reform since the one that took place during the dictatorship period. This phenomenon is a pacific revolution based on the power of sound, evidence-based, clear and robust ideas. The purpose of this short essay is to reflect some ideas on the conceptualisation of a shared decision making (SDM) process and how they could be transferred to the current students’ educational revolution in Chile. It provides a reflection on how SDM might concretely contribute to this educational reform and on what future steps could be taken to truly achieves a “participatory” democracy in Chile. According to the authors, this debate illustrates the extent to which the level of participation must rely not on particular individuals but on the establishment of a partnership between parties.

Philosophical Perspectives on the Politics and Crisis of Sustainable Development in Africa

Philosophical Perspectives on the Politics and Crisis of Sustainable Development in Africa

Mourning sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution

This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror and its impact on Germany. Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel was struck by the seeming parallel between the political upheaval in France and the upheaval in German philosophy inaugurated by the Protestant Reformation and brought to a climax by German Idealism. Many thinkers reasoned that a political would be unnecessary in Germany, because this intellectual revolution had preempted it. Having already been through its own cataclysm, Germany would be able to extract the energy of the Revolution and channel its radicalism into thought. Hegel comes close to making such an argument too. But he also offers a powerful analysis of how this kind of secondhand history gets generated in the first place, and shows what is stake. This is what makes him uniquely interesting among his contemporaries: he demonstrates how a fantasy can be simultaneously deconstructed and enjoyed. Mourning Sickness provides a new reading of Hegel in the light of contemporary theories of historical trauma. It explores the ways in which major historical events are experienced vicariously, and the fantasies we use to make sense of them. Comay brings Hegel into relation with the most burning contemporary discussions around catastrophe, witness, memory, and the role of culture in shaping political experience.

A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the ThinkerShakespeare the Thinker. A. D.Nuttall. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+428.

But this is precisely where Shakespeare the Thinker saves itself from trivializing Shakespeare. Yes, Nuttall thinks Shakespeare has lots of fascinating ideas about the way things are; and yes, he himself, as a brilliant and erudite scholar-teacher, quite obviously and properly cherishes wit and cleverness as characteristics of civilization. But civilization and refinement (as refined, civilized people often notice) can be overesteemed; and the cleverest and subtlest authors are not infrequently suspicious of these very attributes (think of James's picture of Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady [1880–81]). Nuttall believes Shakespeare disliked the unwholesomeness that often attends mere ingenuity and style: Troilus and Cressida shows us a world “sick with intelligence” (207); and in numerous places Nuttall notices how Shakespeare shows wit and “stylish language” can become “glittering cage[s]” that “act as a screen, cutting [characters] off from reality” (222, 225). He launches out on the highly speculative and deeply interesting thesis that Shakespeare himself was “oppressed” by his own astonishing “verbal facility” (94). And there is—isn't there?—occasionally something faintly nauseating (as well as magnificent, exhilarating, wondrous, and so on) about the unstoppable Shakespeare Language Machine. According to Nuttall, in the most fascinating strand of argument in the book, Shakespeare repeatedly shows himself to be on his guard against “premature articulateness” (99), “glittering, vacuous formalism” (109), and “glittering cleverness” (203). “Thought,” observes Nuttall, “is making Hamlet ill” (202). Shakespeare preferred reality to ideas (which preference, I suppose, is strictly speaking an idea, though not one we would need to go to an intellectual for; it is rather an intuition about what is important in life that many a nonthinker must have stumbled upon). What Nuttall's account suggests is that Shakespeare had an almost Dostoyevskian fear of thought unanchored in simple kindness, goodness, and feeling for reality. King Lear shows us what universal horror an intellectual revolution—such as that which occurs in those very clever persons Goneril, Regan, and Edmund—can result in when unconnected to ordinary fellow-feeling.

When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990 (review)

Reviewed by: When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990 Victoria Freeman When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990. Emma Laroque. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010, Pp. 218, $39.95 When the Other Is Me is a discursive analysis of Native resistance writing in Canada, which Metis Native Studies scholar Emma LaRoque defines as the Native response to the 'war of words' that historically has grossly misrepresented and dehumanized Indigenous peoples in this country. Citing the 'overwhelming presence of Eurocentric and hate material in Canadian archives, histories, literatures, school textbooks, and contemporary cultural productions' (5) as the colonial ground that sparks Native resistance literature, LaRoque argues that expressing anger and speaking in one's own voice are rhetorical strategies of liberatory potential. Aesthetics has not been the primary concern of Native resistance writers, she contends; theirs is an intellectual revolution, only just begun. LaRoque calls for a humanist literary criticism over reductionist political interpretations that once again treat Indigenous peoples only as a mass. In her view, literature offers the best medium for countering dehumanization, since it recognizes the uniqueness of the Native individual. LaRoque characterizes 'civilisation confronting savagery' as the master narrative permeating Canadian culture and forming the basis for colonizer psychology and institutions. Drawing primarily on anti-colonial writers Albert Memmi and Franz Fanon, the book explores colonial language, Western intellectual imperialism, and Indigenous writers' tactics of resistance, such as humanizing Indigenous people by depicting their 'faces and feelings' (4), reaffirming the vitality of Indigenous cultures, and disproving or reversing charges of savagery. While many of these dynamics are observable in other anti-colonial or Indigenous literatures, the value of this study is its focus on Indigenous expression in Canada. Despite its subtitle, the book is not an in-depth historical study; rather, its primary focus is on the discursive strategies of selected Indigenous writers from the 1970s to 1990s, with some reference to earlier writing by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors as context. LaRoque argues that Native writing did not become a significant collective expression until after 1970, when Harold Cardinal's [End Page 378] The Unjust Society characterized the widespread Canadian belief that 'the only good Indian is as non-Indian' as cultural genocide, and writers such as Howard Adams, Maria Campbell, Beatrice Culleton, Daniel N. Paul, Chief Dan George, Jeannette Armstrong, and Ruby Slipperjack gained a wide audience. LaRoque's discussion of nineteenth-century resistance discourse is thus highly selective, particularly in its treatment of Native writing in eastern Canada. LaRoque mentions Catherine Sutton, Shingwaukonse, George Copway, and Pauline Johnson, but gives very short shrift to the significant and complex writings of the Rev. Peter Jones, the principal author of numerous petitions to protect Mississauga lands as well as The History of the Ojebway Indians. While largely correct in depicting the period from 1870 to 1970 as a time of Native voicelessness, with no visible cultural or political representation, she ignores the contributions of Oronhyatekha and Peter Edmund Jones to public debates and the significant publication of the Indian newspaper in 1886, which was reviewed in mainstream newspapers. LaRoque's most interesting arguments concern the uses and perils of the rhetoric of cultural difference, and the 'deep, convoluted, and abiding connection between notions of Native cultural difference and the noble savage' (135). Here she critiques both Indigenous historians such as Georges Sioui for their utopianized traditional cultures and non-Indigenous historians such as Cornelius Jaenan, Sylvia Van Kirk, and Jennifer Brown for their overuse of ethnographic explanations 'treating Aboriginal history and contemporary cultural productions as only or largely as ethnological expressions' (139). While acknowledging that the Native emphasis on cultural difference reflects a strategic decolonizing response to the problem of Western scholarship's continuing practice of universalizing Western experience and knowledge, she warns against stereotypical notions of cultural differences as binary essentialisms. These lead 'back to the very stereotypes we are resisting' (139), particularly the civilisation/savagery construct and a primitivist romanticism that disallows Native cultural change and restricts authenticity to 'elders' and 'traditions.' Noting the economic exploitation of a commodified Native culture, LaRoque asks, 'Whose interest does it serve that we be different? What if we were...

A zeptospace odyssey: a journey into the physics of the LHC

It is at this very moment that the most ambitious scientific experiment of all time is about to begin, and yet its precise aims are rather poorly understood by the general public. This book provides an everyman's guide for understanding and following the discoveries that will take place within the next few years at the LHC project at CERN. This book shares an insider's view of the world of particle physics and allows for an appreciation of a true intellectual revolution that is about to take place. The technological innovations required to build the LHC constitute not the least among the many astonishing aspects of this scientific adventure, and they too are described here as part of the LHC story. The book culminates with an outline of the scientific aims and expectations at the LHC. Does the mysterious Higgs boson exist? Does space hide supersymmetry or extend into extra dimensions? How can colliding protons at the LHC unlock the secrets of the origin of our universe? These questions are all framed and then addressed by an expert in the field.

Iran’s Intellectual Revolution

Iran’s Intellectual Revolution, by Mehran Kamrava, offers an overview ofthe three major political orientations that have evolved in Iran since theIslamic revolution of 1979, especially since the death of Khomeini in 1989.The first chapter examines the silent, and often not-so-silent, revolution that has taken place in Iran over the past few decades; the second and third chapterscontextualize these emerging Iranian discourses; and the fourth, fifth,and sixth chapters focus on the religious conservative, religious reformist,and secular-modernist discourses.Chapter three surveys the religious conservative discourse of Khomeini,Khamenei, Montazeri, Mesbah Yazdi, Rafsanjani, and Amoli. The authorfocuses on issues of interpretation, emulation, and the rule of the jurist (bothconditional and absolute), all of which are essential if one wishes to understandthe country’s current internal conflict and the varying conceptions ofIslamic government that exist ...