Enlightenment Model Research Articles

Problem attribution and intervention. The interpretation of problem causations and solutions in regard of Brickman et al.

Typologies of problem perception are of great importance for the reconstruction of social workers’ professional ideologies. The best-known typology has been provided by Brickman et al. who differentiated between a medical, moral, enlightenment, and compensatory model. The article discusses this typology on a conceptual level and indicates its central flaws. An empirical study is presented in which an alternative attempt to develop a typology is tested. The evaluation refers to a wider spectrum of perceptions of problem causes and solutions than the typology of Brickman et al. The resulting typology comprises a ‘social’, a ‘workfare’, a ‘pathology’, and an ‘education’ type.

The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England Carrie Hintz D. Bruce Hindmarsh . The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press 2005. x, 384. US $110.00 The Evangelical Conversion Narrative offers a stimulating 'biography of a genre' from its seventeenth-century origins through its decline in the nineteenth century, with emphasis on the conversion narratives of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival. Drawing on hitherto unexplored archival sources, D. Bruce Hindmarsh offers critical insight into the way that laity and clergy alike framed their spiritual lives in narrative form. The book traces the cultural changes that shaped the conversion narratives of this period, including technological and social change, [End Page 246] and the reasons why individuals turned to religious community as a means of shaping their lives. After a brief exploration of the early modern origins of the conversion narrative, Hindmarsh offers a useful exploration of the transatlantic evangelical revival in the 1730s, with an emphasis on 'how plastic religious identity had become by the mid-eighteenth century.' This chapter also argues for the social dimensions of conversion 'to stimulate parallel experience and allow the formation of a narrative community.' Much of the book is given over to a consideration of how the doctrinal, cultural, and social differences between religious groups might have shaped the kinds of narratives produced by individual believers, whether the evangelical Presbyterians of the Cambuslang revival in Scotland, moderate Calvinists within the Church of England, or Moravians. Hindmarsh's rich account covers a wide cross-section of people in the period, in large part because of his impressive work with archives and primary sources. As one example among many, he recognizes the 'special significance' of a collection of letters to Charles Wesley in the John Rylands Library, which contains 'the diverse testimony of women and men, those literate and barely literate, and persons of higher and lower ranks in society.' Hindmarsh offers powerful analysis of the interaction of self and community in the period, noting that conversion narratives were 'located at the cusp of modernity but also sharing all the assumptions of a fading Christian hegemony,' thus involving 'both creativity and discovery, both individuation and discovery.' With this expansive understanding of life narratives, it is regrettable that Hindmarsh does not draw on contemporary life-writing theorists who work on 'relational autobiography' (such as Paul John Eakins, Richard Freadman, and Nancy K. Miller), although he uses classic theorists of individualistic autobiography (such as Georges Gusdorf and James Olney) very effectively. Any scholar of the eighteenth century might productively consult this book as an alternative to secular Enlightenment models of the self. In writing the 'biography of a genre' Hindmarsh takes on a challenging task. With historical sensitivity, deep research, and engaging writing he brings to life not just the conversion narrative genre but the thousands of people who turned to it to recount their experiences. Carrie Hintz Queens College, CUNY Copyright © 2008 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Flânerie for Cyborgs

As a literary figure or conceit, Haraway’s cyborg is kin to Dumas’ and Balzac’s flâneur. As a social science fiction, crossing and mixing categories, the cyborg is an abject quasi-body who does not fit the Enlightenment model of the political subject and actor. The ‘Manifesto’ has a geography of sites - Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital and Church - which this article updates and to which it adds the Body and the Web. However, Haraway’s ‘cyborg-analysis’ directs attention to the nanotechnological scale of biotechnology. The spatialization implied in the ‘Manifesto’ is more like a surface, a site of regeneration, not a space of the body or of rebirth or the space of institutions such as the Market or School. The cyborg cannot be an Enlightenment political actor, but challenges the traditions, scale and space of the public sphere even as she carries ethical qualities and potentials for less normative forms of politics.

Evidence-Based Planning

This paper aims to conceptualize the upsurge of governmental interest in evidence-based policy in Britain by drawing on two models of policy-evidence interface; the instrumental and the enlightenment model. It argues that much of the drive behind the enthusiasm for evidence is rooted in the linear and utilitarian view of research which is broadly based on three interrelated misconceptions about the nature of evidence, the role of experts, and the influence that these can have on policy. By drawing on examples from the UK planning systems, the paper explores the mismatch between the use of evidence in the “ideal” and the “real” worlds of planning and policy process. It is argued that the assumption made under the positivist view of planning in the 1960s and 1970s are similar to those made under the instrumental view of the policy-research interface.

The eighteenth-century jeremiad and progress-piece traditions in anna barbauld's “eighteen hundred and eleven”

Anna Barbauld's use of the progress-piece genre in “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” suggests that her reliance on an Enlightenment model of progress serves mainly as an almost elegiac means of witnessing the regression of western Europe during the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon. Indeed, she places the only hope for the continuation of Western Enlightenment progress in America. Yet this seemingly pessimistic flight of progress may also respond more critically, and in a cautionary way, to the predominantly male progress-poem tradition. Barbauld's use of an anachronistic Johnsonian, neo-Juvenalian verse form may be viewed as a sign of resistance against the supposed “naturalization” of the progress poem by such contemporaries as Coleridge, and against the futile gestures of isolation in mid- to late eighteenth-century poets such as Gray, Collins, and Cowper. She thus positions her view of progress, which recovers earlier cyclical models of civic humanism, more centrally in a public, cosmopolitan forum than did the first-generation Romantics or the Sensibility poets, who relied on the progress piece as more of a vehicle for private reflection or as separation from a corrupt public sphere. She recovers the traditional moral authority of, for instance, Pope's epistles by forsaking another questionable form of “progress”: poetic movements towards naturalized diction, affective lyrical voices, and even the nominal “feminization” of such public genres. Rather, she adopts the more openly artificial modes of Augustan verse to deliver a highly stylized prophecy of cultural extermination for the English nation's complicity in warfare. Such apparently anachronistic verse is germane to Barbauld's aim of relocating this genre in the center of commercial, political, and civic life, rather than allowing it to remain in the isolated, remote retreats of her male contemporaries and immediate predecessors.

Herder: culture, anthropology and the Enlightenment

The anthropological sensibility has often been seen as growing out of opposition to Enlightenment universalism. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is often cited as an ancestor of modern cultural relativism, in which cultures exist in the plural. This article argues that Herder’s anthropology, and anthropology generally, are more closely related to Enlightenment thought than is generally considered. Herder certainly attacks Enlightenment abstraction, the arrogance of its Eurocentric historical teleology, and argues the case for a proto-hermeneutical approach which emphasizes embeddedness, horizon, the usefulness of prejudice. His suspicion of the ideology of progress and of associated theories of stadial development leads to a critique of cosmopolitanism and, particularly, of colonialism. But a comparison with a central Enlightenment figure like the natural historian Buffon (1708-88) reveals shared anthropological assumptions: human beings are characterized by the flexibility of their relationship to their environment, and by their ability to transmit and receive social knowledge. Herder’s critique of progress is thus an unstable one: culture [ Kultur] as the process through which humanity develops can also be called Enlightenment [ Aufklärung]. Herder’s definition of culture is much closer to a unitary Enlightenment model of civilization than is frequently suggested. Herder’s relativism is thus open to question: he holds on to certain universal criteria for transcultural judgements. This reassessment of Herder’s place in Enlightenment anthropology raises questions of contemporary relevance regarding cultural relativism on the one hand, and modernization and globalization on the other.

Документы из Государственного Архива Омской Области

SUMMARY: In the archival section of this issue, Ab Imperio presents materials pertaining to the history of the Omsk region ( oblast ’), a peculiar administrative unit on the fluctuating frontier of the Russian empire, an episode in the history of the Russian empire’s territorial expansion and integration of newly acquired realms. The publication of these materials was prepared by Elena Bezvikonnaia who also wrote the foreword. In her foreword, Bezvikonnaia places the history of the Omsk region in the context of the development of the Russian imperial administration, which was characterized by flexible policy toward regional diversity. The imperial administration, on the one hand, was imbued with the desire to rationalize government following Enlightenment models that presumed the demarcation of a clear state border/ frontier, but, on the other hand, encountered insurmountable difficulty in mapping the state’s territory in a southeastern borderland made up of a few sedentary inhabitants (Cossacks and Russian city dwellers) and the nomadic population of the Middle Horde (now known as Kazakhs). The result was a compromise expressed in the form of the Omsk region which was established in 1822, lacked clear-cut frontiers and was entrusted with the task of creating an administrative framework for dealing with the nomadic population of the steppe and for further expansion of the empire in Asia. Bezvikonnaia provides a brief historical sketch of this administrative formation and an analysis of frontier developments on that part of the imperial borderland rim. She approaches the history of the Omsk region from the perspectives of central and regional bureaucrats (which often proved to be at odds with one another) and their views on the nature and functions of the state frontier. She also extends the analysis of the Omsk region to the concept of the frontier as a meeting point between different socio-economic structures, in this case between the sedentary population (often settlers brought to the region by empire’s advance) and the native, nomadic population. Bezvikonnaia concludes that the complex history behind this frontier episode may best be conceptualized in the concept of the “Eurasian frontier” and within the context of the Russian empire as a peculiar type of organization of political space. The archival documents include “Proposals as to the Establishment of the Omsk Oblast’,” correspondence between different administrative bodies of Siberia and internal documentation of the Omsk regional government. The published documents provide an insight into the semantics and machinery of the imperial administration in the borderland as well as report on the social and cultural profile of one of the Russian empire’s regions.

From Industrial Relations to Investor Relations? Persistence and Change in Japanese Corporate Governance, Employment Practices and Industrial Relations

The international drift towards corporate governance reform changed into a higher gear in the latter half of the 1990s. As the process of corporate governance reform unfolded, it brought into sharp relief contrasts between three different models of corporate governance: the classical model, the enlightened shareholder value model and the pluralist model.The corporate governance reforms envisaged by the Keizai Doy0kai and Nikkeiren employers' associations can be classified under the pluralist model. However, the findings of an extensive questionnaire survey conducted on executive managers of large firms suggest that the enlightened shareholder value model seems to be supported by one out of every three executive managers in Japan. Spurred by reforms of the Commercial Code and other laws relating to corporate governance, major firms are increasingly looking to establish a system of consolidated management encompassing the entire corporate group, with emphasis on maximizing capital efficiency.Taking place in parallel with this development are changes in employment practices. Although long-term stable employment practices are not likely to be changed drastically in the foreseeable future, it is highly likely that the seniority system will be further eroded, wage differentials will widen, terms of employment and working conditions will become individual-specific, and remuneration systems will be diversified. However, labour unions are failing to find ways of coping with these prospects, and are continuing to lose influence.

Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (review)

Reviews 175 beginnings or experiences. They invariably present a linear, causal development, which invokes a 'narcissistic bond with an assumedly rational cosmos' (p. 171). In repeatedly showing the fragility ofthis bond, Davis concludes, that 'The poem, or Milton, has thoroughly accepted the challenge to restricted conceptions of rationality which thought of Chaos poses' (p. 184). Stories of Chaos is a thought-provoking study of the tensions between rationality and disorder in the years prior to the consolidation of Enlightenment models of uniform process and practice. Davis situates his readings of these literary works within changing philosophical, ethical and scientific contexts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Yet he is, in closing, careful to emphasise the importance of tales of chaos and order to 'political-historical and ethicalpsychological ' experience (p. 189). These works recount 'a poetic cosmology . . . whose proper sense is action, suffering and desire on the human scene' (p. 189). Lloyd Davis School ofEnglish, Media Studies & Art History University of Queensland Dean, Ruth J., with the collaboration of Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (Anglo-Norman Text Society, Occasional Publications Series 3), London, Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1999; cloth; pp. xviii, 553; R.R.P. £35.00 members, £49.00 non-members; ISBN 0905474384. Anglo-Norman literature refuses to go away. Those of us who work in medieval English studies, unnerved by dim memories of our struggles with the vagaries ofFrench grammar and pronunciation when w e were about 16, are often reluctant to come to grips with it. But wherever w e turn, there it is, whether w e work on Middle English secular, scientific or religious texts. For one cannot balk the fact that medieval England was a tri-lingual society, its socio-linguistic pecking order for centuries Latinfirst,Anglo-Norman second, and English trailing somewhere in the distance. And yet modern scholarly attention exactly reverses this medieval state ofaffairs. To be fair, the study ofAnglo-Norman has not been made any easier by the lack of accessible reference books. There have been no equivalents of the Index of Middle English Verse, Index of Middle English Prose, or Hartung's 176 Reviews Manual of Writings in Middle English. But brace yourselves. You won't have that excuse any longer, now that the long-awaited revision of Johan Vising's slim but pioneering 1923 volume, Anglo-Norman Language and Literature, has finally appeared. (The last copy of Vising to pass through m y hands was falling apart from the use it had received over the last three-quarters of a century by four generations of students.) With the same title, but refined by its subtitle 'A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts', Professor Dean's revision is more thanfivetimes the length of its original: over 500 pages, with 986 entries and six indices. A m o n g these alone indices of manuscripts, incipits, titles (in French, English and Latin), medieval authors, sources, and patrons - one could happily amuse oneself for days. Looking through the entries themselves, one is struck by just how much detailed scholarly work has been done in this area. But it seems to have made little cumulative impact on wider Middle English studies and Anglo-Norman studies continue to be perceived as a scholarly terra nullius. This book has been long in the making: Dean has devoted her life to this project. One is awed and astonished to read that she studied under Mildred K. Pope and corresponded with Vising himself She was already publishing in the 1930s and this volume is a monument to scholarly selflessness and persistence. But as she modestly says in her Introduction, 'Thefieldis not exhausted, nor is the need for additions, corrections and new approaches'. And in response I should like to offer a few supplementary notes to those entries where I have some direct knowledge of the texts. Other readers will surely want to make their own contributions and perhaps this book could become the foundation of a database. W e do not want to wait another 75 years to benefit from new work in this field. No. 643: Ancrene Riwle is no longer dated as early as 'the end of the twelfth century...

Peoples’ SpaceTimes in Global Processes: The Response of the Local

The great American sociologist C. Wright Mills noted in 1959 that “in our time the problems of Western societies are almost inevitably universal problems” (Mills 1959:164-180). He already spoke of “postmodernity” and pointed his ?nger to one of the foremost characteristics of contemporary globalisation: the tension between Reason and Liberty. According to Mills, this tension caused malaise and a certain indifference that led to the formation of a “happy robot” in contrast to the Enlightenment model of a creative human being.

The Nose Knows: Bodily Knowing in Isaiah 11.3

While some recent studies have enlarged our knowledge of the olfactory world of ancient Israel, exploration of the relative value of olfaction as a means of knowing has been largely neglected. Isaiah 11.3 is a passage modern exegetes have reconstructed or expurgated because its literal sense has the Messiah discerning good from evil by smell: an impossibility to the Enlightenment model of reality. But recent anthropology informs us of extraordinary olfactory discernment in African religion and the Islamic world. A brief history of exegesis confirms that Jewish commentators accepted an olfactory Messiah, but interpretation since the mid-nineteenth century, and even more prominently in the twentieth, has sought to reconstruct a hypothetical ‘original’ text, evidencing a modern ocularcentric bias.

What Enlightenment Is

It is both awkward and appropriate that an essay on the Enlightenment today, or on its legacy, begin by invoking Kant's 1784 essay, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?' It seems appropriate because the essay is often treated as emblematic of the Enlightenment as a whole despite the sharp differences between Kant's model of enlightenment and other representative models of enlightenment, such as Lessing's, or those of the philosophes, or of the German popular Enlighteners, and despite the fact that its purported representative status is actually a late nineteenth century invention.2 But it is also awkward to invoke this essay partly because I am one of the few academics I know who unambiguously likes, and not only likes, but is inspired by Kant's essay. I have found a way to include it as the opening text in probably half of the courses I have taught at the university level, whether in seminars and lecture courses on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, in courses on media criticism, German film, or in introductory courses in the Humanities for

Agrarianism: A Critique of Colonial Modernity in Korea

In Rescuing History from the Nation, Prasenjit Duara challenges the repressive power of the nation-state to frame historical narratives in modern China and India. According to Duara, dominant narratives in both countries have been based on a linear, evolutionary, Enlightenment model of history that stresses national progress toward modernity, whether through idealist evolutionism, anti-imperialism, or even Marxism. As a result, he argues, such narratives have excluded other important discourses on political community that rejected the modernist mode of thought. In order to provide a “multiplicity of historical representations of political community,” he examines a series of alternate narratives like federalism, which promoted goals other than the nation-state, or which expressed critiques of modernity through the promotion of “Asian values.” With this, he attempts to “rescue” historical narratives from the dominant, repressive power of the nation-state, by writing “histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress toward modernity.”Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminacy (review)

Book Reviews Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminacy. Edited by John M. Sloop and James P. McDaniel. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998; pp. vii + 263. $59.00. At century's end, scholars of rhetoric and public affairs are trying to sort out the relationship between the heritage of classical rhetoric—with its characteristic themes of prudence, decorum, and practical reasoning—and the theorists of postmodernity —with their themes of anxiety, pleasure, and indeterminacy. Neoclassical rhetoricians share with postmodernists a rejection of Enlightenment master narratives based on the certainty of progress, the promise of fully transparent communication , and universal standards of moral and political judgment. Neoclassicists and postmodernists have obvious surface differences in style and tone, but differ most of all in their competing views of the res publica— public affairs. Neoclassicists are anxious about the fragility of republican memory, and about the survival of pedagogic practices and ways of reading threatened by the new technocratic university. Postmodernists are anxious, too, but rather than looking back to an idealized republican past, they look to the present, daunted by the task of assembling meaning from cultural fragments. Judgment Calls is a ragged, incomplete text which resists easy paraphrase, but for scholars in search of a starting point for "articulating" the classical and postmodern stances toward rhetoric, I can think of no better introduction. The book makes unusual demands on the reader, not because the essays are badly written—in fact all the essays refute the common perception that postmodern theorists are stylistically challenged—but because the synthesis of the neoclassical and postmodern stances toward judgment is simultaneously affirmed and canceled, as if under the Derridean sign of "erasure." The introductory essay by Sloop and McDaniel provides a brisk and lucid overview of the challenge recent European thought poses to both classical and Enlightenment models of judgment. Baudrillard, for example, teaches us that the © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 2, No. 3, 1999, pp. 507-528 ISSN 1094-8392 508 Rhetoric & Public Affairs basis of social life is imaginary: "We live, suffer, enjoy, and die in a cartoon cool world, where the 'toons' are more real than us" (2). Derrida deconstructs judgment as "madness in the garb of 'good reasons'" that evade their own instability. Foucault "revels in the undecidable, the 'unjudgable,'" as a way of eluding the grip of Power, if only temporarily. Lyotard "finds in the gaps between judgment and justice a revolutionary force—in the unspeakable (différend )" (3). And the mad genius Nietzsche, the Sophistic preacher redevivus, proclaims the gospel of "the rhetoricity that abides between subject and object, self and world, renders all judgments contingent, partial, and consequently shaky" (3). But the quest of the authors of the volume is, finally, to propose another way of answering that very classical question: "How shall I live my life?" Their goal is "to locate and reflect on the profound instability which gives rise to their questioning, and to propose better ways of life in light of such reflections" (4). The instability of the postmodern moment is not, as often caricatured, a self-indulgent play with the ruins of Western culture. Rather, as Sloop and McDaniel put it: "Judgment is the passion of our human enterprise: an activity rhetorically carried out in the face of contingency, with countless uncertainties, and incredible consequences" (4). The first section of the book consists of five theoretical essays. Each interrogates a tradition of moral and political judgment. Michael Calvin McGee writes an audacious rhetorical criticism of the debate between Gadamer and Habermas over the nature of tradition and practical wisdom. His most useful insight is that Gadamer identifies the phronimos as a person, "working sometimes as a teacher instructing the polis about moral lessons available in the tradition, and at other times as a political advisor or leader persuading the polis to a particular course of right action." Habermas, on the other hand, finds the phronimos not in a person or set of traditions or institutions but in actual or potential social consensus. McGee refuses the way of synthesis: a grafting of the rhetorical onto the theory of communicative action, but rather points toward further reflection by the reader. K. E. Supriya, like McGee, uses a set...

Review Article: Communities of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment model of social life is a seductive one. It depicts rational (or anyway reasoning) individuals choosing goals and plans and projects for themselves, with those autonomous individuals then coming together, of their own volition, in pursuit of shared interests and common goals. This founding fiction of the modern social world is well captured in the words of one Renaissance writer, who has God saying to Adam:

Medicine in the Enlightenment (review)

Reviewed by: Medicine in the Enlightenment. Clio Medica, vol. 29 Günter B. Risse Roy Porter, ed. Medicine in the Enlightenment. Clio Medica, vol. 29. Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1995. x + 399 pp. Ill. $36.50; Hfl. 55.00 (paperbound). In spite of a growing focus on the medical achievements of our century, the Enlightenment continues to attract numerous practitioners of our historical craft. This collection of fifteen papers is based on a 1992 symposium organized by the Wellcome Institute in London. As the editor accurately informs us, we can no longer subscribe to a simple model of medical Enlightenment portraying a coherent set of ideas and practices that transformed—even revolutionized—European society. Indeed, the various contributions in the volume offer fragmented and often contradictory views about the genesis and impact of ideas concerning such issues as vitalism, medical practice and education, midwifery, mind/body relations, mental illness, public health, and surgery. Thus, with the help of new archival and written sources, and subjected to a closer analysis, medicine comes to share in the dilemmas and paradoxes of the age of Enlightenment. The range of subjects is quite broad, and the volume lacks a particular theme and geographical boundaries. Among the more extensive contributions are two [End Page 328] dealing with French medicine. In discussing France’s medical reform program, Laurence Brockliss disputes previous accounts by arguing that it was led by physicians, rather than surgeons, with the purpose of securing and extending their professional power. Greater control of the marketplace and monopoly of medical education—primarily compulsory clinical training in hospitals—were the results. Ludmilla Jordanova, for her part, reviews Cabanis’s 1795 Coup d’oeuil or Sketch of the Revolutions and Reform of Medicine, a veritable manifesto of the sensualist school. His visual epistemology conceives the physician as an artist surveying and learning from the rich clinical scenes created in hospital wards. Jordanova also stresses Cabanis’s efforts to merge medicine with literature and art, and the employment of history as a cultural resource for medical reform. Two papers address mental health problems. Jonathan Andrews’s contribution on the politics of committal deals with Bethlem, considered a state institution. Bethlem’s flexible boundaries between asylum, prison, and house of correction during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are placed within the context of England’s laissez-faire, heterogeneous localism, in contrast to France’s centralized, bureaucratic approach toward social control. In turn, Roy Porter’s article focuses on the role of England’s small private asylums, arguing that their foundation was encouraged by an ideology of “moral”—addressing the mind rather than merely the body—management. The individualized rather than routinized approach to the mad became a method of treatment designed to achieve control over their disordered minds and lives. Environmental control through segregation from family and friends could be important, but the critical factor was the ability of particular healers to impose their discipline and authority. Frequent contacts and the close observation of lunatics converted asylums into experimental laboratories, allowing for the flexible testing of therapeutic modalities, that ranged from conversation to the employment of swing chairs. Regarding practice, a paper by Isobel Grundy featuring Sarah Stone’s tales from the birthroom, the Complete Practice of Midwifery (1736), contradicts the usual historical clichés of gendering this subject. Stone’s impressions from her early practice in rural Somerset followed by another in urban Bristol provides a much more nuanced picture that denounces midwife ignorance and lack of control because of insufficient anatomical knowledge, while also decrying the man-midwife’s excessive employment of the forceps. Mary Lindemann, for her part, presents a contextualized example of a German physicus in action, stressing the blurred boundaries between being an enlightened healer and a good neighbor. Finally, Andrea Rusnock follows the work of James Jurin, secretary of the Royal Society, who in 1724 published a book attempting to demonstrate the success of smallpox inoculation using numerical arguments. In sum, Porter’s collection offers a wealth of new information, forcing us to further refine and revise our picture of eighteenth-century medicine. Günter B. Risse University of California, San Francisco Copyright...

The Oficina Botanica (1788-1835): an institution dedicated to the study of American plants

By this work we pretend to analyze the reasons for the failure of the scientific enlightened politics, utilizing as example the study, from the beginning until the final of its existence, of a scientific institution, the Botanical Office. Created in full process of decadence of the political and economical enlightened model, it was capable of carrying out a great economical and organizational effort and on the botanical expeditions to the Spanish America, but it didn't undertake, in an effective way, a following step, to show to the world the natural wealth of the American possessions.

How far does research influence policy?

This paper argues that there are ways of making research more amenable to the needs of policy makers and policy makers more sympathetic to the needs of researchers by investing in greater analysis of the links between research and policy. It shows how many in public health hold contradictory conceptual pictures of the research process, assuming a rational ratherthan enlightenment model of the policy process. By acknowledging the barriers to research affecting policy it becomes easier to build strategies around the dissemination of research so that it becomes more accessible to policy makers. Thus, researchers need to take into account the extent to which politics may affect how much notice policy makers take of research findings, they need to consider how far scientific uncertainty leads to distortion or inaction in policy making and they need to consider issues around timing and communication of research results, recognizing policy makers' short-term horizons and the need for clear presentation of scientific findings. The paper ends by arguing that those in public health need to pay far more attention to the policy environment, looking not just at policy content, but also at the processes of policy. By using a policy analysis framework it is possible to identify and overcome the barriers to research influencing policy.

Organization Studies as a Scientific and Humanistic Enterprise: Toward a Reconceptualization of the Foundations of the Field

Recent critiques of social science have emphasized their ties to the concerns of academic disciplines usually labelled as humanities. Building on this literature, this paper argues that organizational studies must be reconfigured as science and humanities. Substantive examples are drawn from the links of organizational theory to history, the use of semiotics, rhetorical analysis and narrative approaches to policy choices. Reconfiguring the field also has implications for applied work leading to an enlightenment model.

Repression in the child's conception of the world: A phenomenological reading of Piaget

Abstract The present article undertakes a psychological reading of The Child's Conception of the World as a cultural artifact in which genetic psychology's naturalistic and positivistic assumptions reflect an Enlightenment model of science, and Piaget figures as an agent of technological rationality. A phenomenological analysis of the text reveals how Piaget's research engages in an active repression of specific dimensions of childhood experience. Young children's ‘adualistic’ conceptions of thought, self and language are deemed ‘confused’, and thereby discounted, by virtue of the fact such children do not ‘correctly’ dichotomize experience in accord with the cultural norm of mechanistic rationality. Piaget's numerous associations of the child's ‘primitive’ views and the (childish) thought of the pre‐Socratics are briefly explored.