Descriptions Of People Research Articles

JENNINGS, JEREMY. Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-820313-1. Pp. ix + 548. $185. The title and subtitle of this book are somewhat misleading, for Jennings does not focus only on the thought of what today are called political scientists or on such active politicians as Guizot or Thiers, but he also examines the works of the intellectuels, such as Chateaubriand and Camus. In the process he acquaints us with much modern scholarship. The result is an impressive treatment of the varieties of political, social, and cultural ideas that well serves all who teach French Studies. The book’s central theme is the response to the questions raised by the 1789 Revolution’s rejection of the institutions of the Old Regime, e.g., where does sovereignty reside and how can it be exercised without a return to the despotism of the Bourbons, a Napoleon, or Jacobinism? Here the answer is a republican form of government. Or, what is liberty and what are the rights of the citizen and how can they be preserved and fostered? Among the answers given is Jules Ferry’s defense of the Third Republic (105), though Jennings describes its Chamber of Deputies as “a mirror in which France did not recognize itself” (107). It is clear from the “Conclusion: Citizenship, Multiculturalism, and Republicanism,” which deals with the polemics about such modern challenges as Marxism and Islamism, that these are questions still debated. Jennings opted for Pierre Rosanvallon’s “conceptual history of politics” (27) and has arranged this work in such topical chapters as “Rights, Liberty, and Equality,” “Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction” or “Positivism, Science, and Philosophy.” Jennings surveys changes in these concepts from the Eighteenth Century (and earlier) in a more or less chronological order that takes into account such events as the Revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1870 or the Dreyfus Affair. Thus we meet some thinkers in different chapters; this we expect for Montesquieu, Rousseau or Napoleon, but perhaps not for Benjamin Constant, Mme de Staël, or Tocqueville as well as many lesser figures. An important criterion for inclusion is their view of the 1789 Revolution revealing their political philosophy. Among pre-eighteenth-century antecedents are the 1688–89 English Glorious Revolution as analyzed by Pierre Jurieu (72–73) and the ensuing polemic with Bossuet. John Locke’s writings are also referred to in several places. Another is the sixteenthcentury debate on the right of resistance (301), though Jennings, emphasizing its Calvinist origins, overlooks the fact that it also justified the murder of two Catholic kings by Catholic clerics. The topical organization and Jennings’s dialectical presentation amount to a real tour de force. Sometimes an alternate association of concepts like “Luxury, Commerce, and Utopian Socialism” appears more logical than the choice of “Sovereignty, the Social Contract, and Luxury” or “Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy,” but on the whole the author acquits himself well. Although some authors like Voltaire and Tocqueville looked with favor on Anglo-Saxon models, others like Flora Tristan in her 1842 Promenades de Londres were critical and in the late nineteenth-century Anglophobia revealed itself in the celebration of Joan of Arc (442). Montesquieu too was aware of the shortcomings of the English system (155–56) and Tocqueville had reservations as well (189); today the perception of political correctness as the “tyranny of a minority” is used to show that multiculturalism is un-French (521). I wonder about the usefulness of some of Jennings’s descriptions of people: Constant is Rousseau’s “fellow Reviews 589 Swiss Protestant” (123) as well as Mme de Staël’s (315); there is also the collaborationist Drieu La Rochelle’s “imperfection as a disembodied subhuman”(484) where “collaborationist” would suffice. The first page of the “Chronology” has three errors (531). As the bibliographical information in the footnotes is often incomplete, the absence of a “Bibliography” is inexcusable. Ursinus College (PA), emeritus Derk Visser PANH, RITHY, et CHRISTOPHE BATAILLE. L’élimination. Paris: Grasset, 2012. ISBN 9782 -246-77281-1. Pp. 333. 19 a. Le cinéaste cambodgien Rithy Panh livre pour la première fois un témoignage...

Reviewed by: From History to Theory by Kerwin Lee Klein Mason Tattersall From History to Theory. By Kerwin Lee Klein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 224 pp. $39.95 (cloth and e-book). Kerwin Lee Klein’s excellent book of essays, From History to Theory, presents a collection of histories of key words and clusters of terms as they were used in the American historical world in the past century. Klein’s individual chapters stand alone as use-based semantic histories, exploring “habits and traditions” (p. 11), yet the whole here is much more than the sum of its parts. Each of the individual essays contributes to a broader understanding of the “poetics, rhetoric, and logic of academic discourse on history in the twentieth century” (p. 3), and the organization of the essays presents a coherent narrative that leads the reader from a discussion of the way we think about issues surrounding the philosophy of history, history and theory, theory and praxis, and so forth to a consideration of the ways in which uncritical use of language can be damaging not only to academic discourse but to society as a whole. From History to Theory is a book that problematizes the standard story of the development of twentieth-century historiography, particularly the standard narrative of the so-called linguistic turn. Chapter 1 looks at “The Rise and Fall of Historiography,” noting [End Page 947] both the ambiguities of the term and the strengths and weaknesses that enabled its rise and precipitated its fall. Klein notes that “historiography” was initially an expansive term, coming to mean both the practice of historical writing and theoretical reflection. Historiography’s fall began in the 1960s, precipitated by a lack of satisfaction with this marriage and a growing sense that these were two separate endeavors. Klein characterizes this as “a story of the inability of scholarly discourse to develop a third term that mediates theory and praxis” (p. 33). Klein argues that the waning of historiography was particularly “untimely,” noting that it occurred during the “upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, post-colonialism, and multiculturalism—[that] hit campus just as departments of history eliminated the one place in the curriculum that seemed especially adaptable to engagement with such a variety of topics” (p. 31). The second chapter, “From Philosophy to Theory” focuses on the development of philosophy of history between the Second World War and 1960 and the changing perceptions of its ability to function as a proper philosophical discipline in light of midcentury developments in Anglo-American philosophy that gave philosophy aspirations of becoming a rigorous science and led to philosophy of history’s decline. The chapter also weaves in the rise of history and theory as a substitute that lacked the connotations with older-style universal history and had a greater degree of consonance with a scientistic outlook. Chapter 3, “Going Native: History, Language, and Culture” corrects the standard interpretation of the birth of the New Cultural History and the Linguistic Turn. Klein points to the early influence of anthropology and analytic philosophy on the humanities in America that set the stage for the importation of French thought, which found a receptive audience that had already taken a “linguistic turn.” Klein shows his readers that American academia had already begun to focus on language and culture long before these terms became associated with a new, imported discourse. Chapter 4, “Postmodernism and the People without History,” will be of most interest to readers of this journal. In Klein’s own words, “chapter 4 unpacks the claims of certain strains of postmodern or post-structural discourse to engage global history without falling back into the sort of universal history that had been practiced by Hegel or Marx” (p. 15). Klein clearly shows the ways in which new attempts to deal with the histories of marginalized peoples drifted into polarized “either-or” narratives that ended up replaying Hegel’s description of people with and without history in different words. Klein looks at the employment of concepts of local and master narratives, particularly [End Page 948] by Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and James Clifford, and likewise finds these well-meaning...

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