Nineteenth-Century Thought Research Articles

Reconceptualising Shared Services

Endeavours to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of local government have been a persistent theme both of politicians in higher tiers of government and of interest groups, especially business. The two contenders for improvement which receive most coverage both in the research literature and in popular discussion are amalgamation and shared services. Arguments from the literature have generally favoured shared services over amalgamation. Bish (2001) in a comprehensive review of North American research dismisses the argument for amalgamation as a product of flawed nineteenth-century thinking and a bureaucratic urge for centralized control. He does so making the very reasonable point that the presumed economies of scale which will result from amalgamation are a function not of the size and scale of individual local authorities, but of the services for which those local authorities are responsible, and the point at which economies of scale will be optimised will be very different for different services. The case against amalgamation is also reinforced by the absence of any significant post-facto evidence that amalgamation achieves either the promised savings or the anticipated efficiency gains (McKinlay 2006).

"From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought," by Karl Löwith, trans. David E . Green

"From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought," by Karl Löwith, trans. David E . Green

Six Views of the Russian Revolution

IF a central problem for any nineteenth-century thinker was that of defining his attitude toward the French Revolution, a central one for contemporary man is his appraisal of the Russian Revolution. The latter problem is even more critical, for nearly one billion people explicitly claim to be heirs and defenders of the Russian Revolution. Forces called into being by the upheaval of 1917 are even more forcefully mobilized and tangibly powerful than those called into being by the French Revolution of 1789 and the “age of the democratic revolution.” Thus, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution of 1917 and the volume of writings threatens to reach avalanche proportions, it might be well to take a critical look at the historical studies and reflections that have been called forth in what might well be called the age of the totalitarian revolution.

From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought. By Karl Löwith, Translated from the German by David F. Green. (London: Constable, 1965. Pp. xiii and 464. Price 55s.)

From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought. By Karl Löwith, Translated from the German by David F. Green. (London: Constable, 1965. Pp. xiii and 464. Price 55s.) - Volume 41 Issue 155

Lord John Manners and the Young England Movement: Romanticism in Politics

NE IMPORTANT BY-PRODUCT of the Romantic Movement was the nineteenth century's persistent tendency look back at the Middle Ages with a wistful nostalgia. Confronted with the tremendous social, political, and religious dislocations which accompanied the industrial revolution, many nineteenth-century thinkers longed for the stability and unity which they thought characterized medieval life. Contrasts of the medieval with the modern the former always found preferable were common; and the work of Cobbett, Southey, Digby, Pugin, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, name only a few, abundantly testify the vitality with which the resurgence of interest in the Middle Ages asserted itself. At its best, as in the work of Ruskin and Morris, this medieval enthusiasm led toward a liberal, even radical, political orientation; at its worst, as in Southey, it led toward sheer reaction. This paper will describe the impact of the new interest in the Middle Ages upon Lord John Manners and, through him, upon the Young England Movement, a parliamentary experiment in romanticism which created considerable stir during the eighteen-forties. Born in 1818 a noble family dating back the Norman Conquest and heir the Dukedom of Rutland; raised in Belvoir Castle, a restored Norman Gothic structure; educated at Wick House, Eton, and Trinity College, Cambridge; Manners was an aristocrat, a high churchman, and a Tory. At the age of sixteen he read through the three volumes of Hallam's Middle Ages,' the work which, according historiographer Peardon, was one of the first historical attempts to give a more adequate sense of the spirit and character of the Middle Ages. 2 With his college friends, Alexander Cochrane-Baillie and George Smythe, both of whom were destined sit with him in Parliament as the Young England party, Manners read and discussed works favorable the feudal principle. They ... bowed a willing knee, wrote Manners' biographer, before the lofty seat whereon Sir Walter Scott sat enthroned. 3 Southey they accepted as a champion,4 and Manners' later The Monastic and Manufacturing Systems indicates the special debt which he owed the laureate's Colloquies, a work which pleaded not only for the establishment of Protestant nunneries and monasteries, but also painted an attractive picture of the kindly feelings and ennobling attachments of the feudal structure.5 From Carlyle they learned to deplore the excessive worship of mere wealth and machinery that prevailed

Bernard Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition by Julian B. Kaye (review)

204 MODERN DRAMA September In addition to prolix passages of this kind, there are a half dozen instances of careless editing. (pp. 70, 105, 127, 139) This study of Shaw's views on educational matters leaves a reader with no doubt as to Shaw's deep and constant concern for education and with increased understanding of the appropriateness of Shaw's references to his own plays as "drama of education ." (p. 129) GEORGE WAGGONER A GLOSSARY TO THE PLAYS OF BERNARD SHAW, by Paul Kozelka, Columbia University (New York, 1959),55 pp. Price $1.50. Mr. Kozelka's purpose is to assist the struggling undergraduate reader of Shaw by providing a glossary of difficult words and unusual references that are not clear from the context of the plays. The 862 entries are more than enough. Many of the listings such as "coxcomb," "William Morris," "fudge," "Balaam's Ass," and "tete-a-tt~te" are found in most dictionaries. A few entries are misleading: "mobled" (in The Admirable Bashville) is defined as "muffled, veiled," but the definition obscures Shaw's farcical reference to Hamlet; "nuciform sac" (Doctor's Dilemma), Mr. Kozelka suggests, might refer to the appendix, a supposition which, again, overlooks the humor in a situation. I question whether a reader will find much need for a glossary to the plays of Shaw. Shaw's peculiarly British phrases and slang terms, most of which are contemporary, are usually clear from the context. Even when a word or phrase is obscure, one seldom finds the entire sentence incomprehensible. On the other hand, the glossary may occasionally prove a convenient reference for those words which an American reader would be unlikely to know: "spalpeen," "Hoxton," "arra musha," "mumchance," etc. At present, the glossary is of limited value to most readers. Optimistically, Mr. Kozelka has intended it for "typical" college students, an audience which, to my knowledge, has never yet been known to use a glossary.·STANLEY SOLOMON BERNARD SHAW AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRADITION, by Julian B. Kaye, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1958, 222 pp. Price $4.00. Julian B. Kaye's useful study brings home once again a point which writers on Shaw have been making more insistently of late: that G.B.S. was very much a child of. his century, and that his century was the nineteenth and not the twentietll. (Howard Mumford Jones has stated this position succinctly in an impressive review-article on "Shaw as a Victorian" in Victorian Studies, December, 1957, pp. 165-172.) However , Mr. Kaye goes beyond his predecessors in two respects. It is his thesis that Shaw's grotesque esteem for twentieth-century dictators was a result of his continued adherence to nineteenth-century values which became outmoded or irrelevant after 1914; also, he attempts to document more extensively than any previous student of G.B.S. has done Shaw's indebtedness to such nineteenth-century thinkers as Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Mill, Comte, Arnold, Butler, Bergson, William James, Nietzsche, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Blake, Shelley, Henry George, Jevons, Marx, Bellamy, Ibsen, Wagner, and Morris. The result is a book that is always informative but occasionally irritating. 1959 BoOK REvrEws 205 Some of its less happy features may perhaps be explained by its origin as a doctoral dissertation (Columbia, 1955); and let it be said at once that Mr. Kaye has triumphed over the limitations of that particularly intractable medium more resoundingly than most of his colleagues. Of necessity, the Ph.D. candidate takes for his province a more or less restricted subject; anything lying beyond is either ignored or dismissed in glittering generalities. Thus, Mr. Kaye's initial chapter, five pages long, grandiloquently titled «The Nineteenth-Century Tradition," makes rather painful reading. The author, whose closing footnote reveals that he is a hit embarrassed about the whole thing himself, propounds a highly simplified view of what he takes to be the three stages of nineteenth-century intellectual history: the "tradition," he says, proceeded from romanticism to materialism to a synthesis of the two apparently antithetical positions, of which synthesis Shaw was an eloquent spokesman. Possibly; but the case needs a much fuller exposition than Mr. Kaye is able to give here. When he settles...

Grillparzer's Position in Nineteenth-Century Thought

Grillparzer's Position in Nineteenth-Century Thought