Perfect Society Research Articles

Reclaiming the Utopian imaginary in IR theory

AbstractThis article aims to reinvigorate the utopian imagination as a vital and necessary component in IR theory. Since the First Great Debate between the Realists and the Utopianists (or more accurately, the Liberal-Internationalists) the utopian tradition has been viewed as being both subjective and arbitrary, leading to its dismissal as vain idealism in world politics. This article re-interrogates the arguments of Carr and Morgenthau and finds that they have relevance today only as against closed systems of utopia and have little bearing against the open-dialectical utopianism which is advocated here as a viable alternative to the sterility of realism. The article also examines the historical nexus between realism's dismissal of utopianism and the wider movements in political philosophy via a critical engagement with the works of Popper, Berlin and Arendt. Finally, after exploring the limitations of Booth's idea of ‘Utopian Realism’, the article argues that utopianism should no longer be assumed to be a blueprint for a future, perfect society, a tradition fraught with the danger of proto-totalisation, but as a critical imaginary that acts as a heuristic device to reveal the fissures in existing reality and as an ideational motivating force for progressive change in world politics.

The Anti-Semitic Origins of Henry Ford's Arts Education Patronage

Henry Ford (1863-1947) was a complex man. Perhaps the greatest irony of his life was the contrast between his ushering in modern urban America through mass produced gasoline-fueled automobiles and his deeply held philosophy that all Americans should live as the their forbearers did. Henry Ford saw twentieth century cities as a pestiferous growth and contrasted the unnatural, twisted, and cooped up lives of city people with the wholesome life of independence and sterling honesty that the agrarian life offered. (1) Ford was noted for editorializing in his personal newspaper, the Dearborn Independent (published in Dearborn, Michigan, his hometown and headquarters of Ford Motor Company), real United States lies outside the cities. (2) As historian Roderick Nash puts it, nostalgic, backward looking Henry Ford repeatedly deplored the very conditions that Ford the revolutionary industrialist did so much to bring about. (3) Ford's mass production methods drove prices down for all sorts of goods, including musical goods. Music was increasingly available on the radio and on phonograph records. The widespread availability of popular music of the early twentieth century alarmed Henry Ford. Richard Peterson states, Rather than see the auto and mass production as having any part in the changes, he saw the problems as stemming from alcohol, tobacco use, and sexual license--all three fostered in the atmosphere created by jazz dancing. (4) In Ford's mind, the people responsible for damaging society were those who promoted jazz music and dance: African Americans, recent immigrants, and particularly people who Ford often termed the international Jew. (5) If the problem was simple, then the solution was equally simplistic. Henry Ford's cultural solution was to create and promote the music and dance of nineteenth century agrarian America. Many people shared this view that old-time music was morally superior to music of the present. The purpose of this historical investigation is to propose that Henry Ford was a propagandist of American folk arts education and an arts educator for selective audiences. His well-documented anti-Semitic beliefs and writings influenced his promotion of early American folk music and dance. Like his inventor contemporaries, Ford enjoyed experimenting in chemical laboratories. But he also engaged in sociological experiments. He had a vision, based on anti-Semitic beliefs, about creating a more perfect society through arts education. With his financial wherewithal along with his own passion and determination to reintroduce to Americans a better and simpler way of life, Henry Ford was on a mission to promote, to the extent of propagandizing, American folk dance and music. This active promotion evolved into a culminating project in his life, in the rural South, in an agrarian, coastal Georgia community. Research Questions Given the purpose of this historical investigation, three research questions are posed. These questions are concerned with understanding the nature and beliefs of Henry Ford to help explain his motivations in promoting American folk arts education. The questions are: (1) What was the nature of Henry Ford? (2) What were the reasons behind Ford's interest in promoting folk arts education? (3) What were the motivations behind Ford's philanthropy in the rural South? Politics and Anti-Semitic Beliefs Throughout his life, Henry Ford enjoyed spending time in nature, primarily watching birds. His love of nature shaped his belief that people living in modern society needed to respect wildlife and the land in its natural state. Ford and Thomas Edison both held the view that society's rapid modernization was creating a population of people who did not respect nature nor share their views on conservation. As the human population grew in the 1910s, songbird and geese populations decreased. Noting this, Ford became involved in the politics of conservationism. …

The Prairie West as Promised Land (review)

Reviewed by: The Prairie West as Promised Land Mary Ellen Kelm The Prairie West as Promised Land. R. Douglas Francis and Chris Kitzan, eds. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007. Pp. 500. $54.95 The media report new hope for Prairie renewal. In May 2008, Saskatchewan boasted the highest consumer spending and wholesale trade rate in Canada. Energized, in part, by the demand for bio-fuel, Saskatchewan farmers, it seems, have new opportunities. But the sidebar stories indicate that some farmers, faced with the expense of adapting to bio-fuel production, are selling off their heavily mortgaged farm equipment and renting out their land, too undercapitalized to make the shift themselves. As always, the Prairie West is both the land of promise and of promises unfulfilled. This new volume, Prairie West as Promised Land, probes the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the view of the Prairies as a land of opportunity. The eighteen essays are organized along five themes: Visions of the Promised Land, Settling the Promised Land, The Prairie West as the Perfect Society, The Construction of a Promised Land for a 'Chosen People,' and Readjusting the Vision of the Promised Land in the Modern Era. At the core of the volume is the shifting, dialectical relationship between vision and reality. Almost all of the essays, however, deal more with ideas about the Prairies and less with the material conditions and the structural forces that helped construct life in the various regions within the Prairies. The first section returns to familiar ground by examining the changing views of the Prairie West held by expansionists in Canada (both before and after Confederation) and Great Britain. Mentally transforming the region from wilderness to agrarian hinterland in the minds of would-be developers, promoters, and settlers overlay a deeper process by which Euro-Canadian visions displaced Aboriginal connections to the land. First Nations relationship with agricultural modernity begins the next section with a reprise of Sarah Carter's work on Aboriginal farmers. This section deals with the struggle to turn Prairie dreams into reality. While First Nations were subject to what Carter calls a 'policy of deliberate arrested development,' others too, including utopian communities and individual settlers, found the process of bringing their ideals to fruition fraught with difficulty. The processes by which individuals and families struggled to keep the dream alive and came to interpret their own histories in the light of their hopes attest to the power of the image of the Promised Land. Taking that reality and refashioning it into new sanguinity occupied the subjects of the third and fourth sections. Whether it was dealing [End Page 160] with the contradictory impulses associated with the Prairie city, or the disheartening effects of the First World War, social reformers of the Prairie West worked tirelessly to remake the place in the image of their ideals. While much of this was intellectual labour and political work, emotions played a special role, a point that Randi Warne makes in her skilful analysis of Nellie McClung. That the visions of some meant hardships and restrictions for others is the subject of the fourth section. Land-holding law and settlement patterns made the Prairie West 'no place for a woman,' but so did the ways that many people thought about the West, ways that had more in common with imperial outposts than with Canadian farming. Chris Kitzan's chapter on Bishop Lloyd offers a timely corrective to any lingering view that Sifton's policies were embraced universally. In a chapter reminiscent of recent events, Steve Hewitt makes plain the restrictive power of the state in determining who was and who was not to partake of the promise of the West. The volume returns to the process of visioning the Prairie West in the latter half of the twentieth century through art, commemoration, consumption, and the search for new myths. Returning ultimately to the realm of ideas is fitting in a book that is, in many ways, an intellectual history, though not only of intellectuals, political leaders, or social reformers. Given the unifying theme of the Promised Land and the use of material already published, this volume is at times repetitious and covers familiar topics...

Atomism and holism in the understanding of society and social systems

Throughout its history, reflection on human society has been torn apart by the opposing views of atomism and holism. Traditional societies, the city state of ancient Greece as well as the medieval perfect society apparently resemble a whole with its parts. Early modernity continued this holistic inclination for a while, but soon reverted to atomistic theories of the (hypothetical) social contract. Modern humanism dominated the subsequent views articulated in terms of the dialectical tension between nature and freedom (science ideal and personality ideal) – including mechanistic and vitalistic approaches as well as the more recent acknowledgment of irreducibly complex systems (Behe, 2003). In Wiener’s (1954; 1956) “technologicism” human responsibility and freedom are sacrificed. An alternative view is advanced in terms of the normativity of societal life as well as its many-sidedness. It is shown that theories of social systems increasingly tend to explore avenues transcending the limitations of the atomistic additive approach and the boundary-leveling whole-parts scheme entailed in social systems theory. This development is used as a starting point for the classification of social interaction and for underscoring the scope of the principle of sphere-sovereignty for a multidisciplinary understanding of social systems.

Of Victorians and vegetarians: the vegetarian movement in nineteenth-century Britain

Nineteenth-century Britain was one of the birthplaces of modern vegetarianism in the west, and was to become a reform movement attracting thousands of people. From the Vegetarian Society's foundation in 1847, men, women and their families abandoned conventional diet for reasons as varied as self-advancement, personal thrift, dissatisfaction with medical orthodoxy and repugnance for animal cruelty. They joined in the pursuit of a perfect society in which food reform combined with causes such as socialism and land reform, stimulated by the concern that carnivorism was in league with alcoholism and bellicosity. James Gregory provides a rich exploration of the movement, with its often colourful and sometimes eccentric leaders and grass-roots supporters. He explores the rich culture of branch associations, competing national societies, proliferating restaurants and food stores and experiments in vegetarian farms and colonies. Of Victorians and Vegetarians examines the wider significance of Victorian vegetarians, embracing concerns about gender and class, national identity, race and empire and religious authority. Vegetarianism embodied the Victorians' complicated response to modernity in its hostility to aspects of the industrial world's exploitation of technology, rejecting entrepreneurial attempts to create the foods and substitute artefacts of the future. Hostile, like the associated anti-vivisectionists and anti-vaccinationists, to a new 'priesthood' of scientists, vegetarians defended themselves through the new sciences of nutrition and chemistry. Of Victorians and Vegetarians uncovers who the vegetarians were, how they attempted to convert their fellow Britons (and the world beyond) to their 'bloodless diet' and the response of contemporaries in a variety of media and genres. Through a close study of the vegetarian periodicals and organisational archives, extensive biographical research and a broader examination of texts relating to food, dietary reform and allied reform movements, James Gregory provides us with the first fascinating foray into the impact of vegetarianism on the Victorians, the history of animal welfare, reform movements and food history.

The Doctrine of the People of God and Hierarchical Authority as Service in Latin Church Legislation on the Local Church

* Catholic Theological Faculty, University of Erfurt, Germany. 1 Pope Benedict XVI prefers to speak of a “hermeneutic of reform” and not of “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.” See his address to the Roman Curia as Christmas greetings on December 22, 2005: published as Ansprache von Papst Benedikt XVI. an das Kardinalskollegium und die Mitglieder der Römischen Kurie beim Weihnachtsempfang am 22. Dezember 2005, Verlautbarungen des Apostolischen Stuhls, Nr. 172 (Bonn: Sekretariat der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz, 2006) 10ff. 328 The Jurist 68 (2008) 328–349 THE DOCTRINE OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD AND HIERARCHICAL AUTHORITY AS SERVICE IN LATIN CHURCH LEGISLATION ON THE LOCAL CHURCH Myriam Wijlens* More than forty years after the council and almost twenty five years after the promulgation of the Code of Canon Law it seems rather appropriate to investigate the contribution that post conciliar juridical structures have made to the reception of the teaching of Vatican II in the Latin Church. Or to phrase this in the form of a question: what contribution did the legislation of the Church make so that the council could shape the lives of people and the life of the Church? To investigate such a question implies working on the basis of three presumptions: first, that legal structures can make a contribution to the reception of the council or by the same token could also hamper it; second, that there is an intended connection between the council and the post conciliar juridical life of the Church; and third, that a modality can be found allowing for a secure way to judge the reception of Vatican II. It will be necessary to attend to these presumptions before we can address the central question of this contribution. That central question finds its origin in the great reform1 in the ecclesiology of Vatican II vis-à-vis the pre-Vatican II ecclesiology, namely to see the Church not so much as a perfect society with a strong focus on the hierarchical structure, but more as the people of God and hierarchical authority as service. When this doctrine is taken as a hermeneutical criterion , two questions may be raised: first, how well was the doctrine received in the legislation of the Church? And second, what role does and should it play today not only in the interpretation but also, and in particular , in the application of the legislation, that is, when law and life meet? Whereas the former question can be answered by attending to the promulgated legislation and thus might produce a reliable and verifiable answer , the latter one will be more speculative in nature, because it is more 2 For a reflection on the application of the law see Myriam Wijlens, “Das zweite Vatikanum als Fundament für die Anwendung des Rechtes: Hermeneutische Reflexionen und praktische Konsequenzen,” Theologie der Gegenwart 50 (2007) 2–14. 3 The papers reflecting the first results of the investigation conducted by the members of the Peter and Paul Seminar are published in The Jurist 64 (2004) 1–360. 4 In the previous research project this author focused on the cooperation of bishops in supra national or continental structures. See Myriam Wijlens, “Exercising Collegiality in a Supra-national or Continental Institution such as the FABC, CCEE and ComECE,” The Jurist 64 (2004) 168–204. This study revealed that the different juridical responses to the nature of the power exercised by these institutions depend very much on one’s ecclesiological point of departure. If one starts from membership in the college of bishops without too much attention being paid to the connection of the bishop to the local church, this will imply that such cooperation is considered to involve only a few members of the college and thus cannot be given too much weight, since the few cannot speak for the whole college . If, on the other hand, one starts from the perspective that membership in the college and responsibility for a local church are concurrent, this implies that the bishop is to be a pontifex between the local church and the universal Church and vice versa. Both these perspectives reflect the weakness of the fact that they still start from the perspective of bishops and not from the local...

Imperfect Men in Perfect Societies: Human Nature in Utopia

Imperfect Men in Perfect Societies: Human Nature in Utopia

Inheriting Vice, Acquiring Virtue: Hereditary Disease and Moral Hygiene in the Medicine of the French Enlightenment

This essay examines the medical debates over hereditary disease and moral hygiene in France between 1748 and 1790. During this time, which was marked by two formal academic exchanges about pathological inheritance, doctors critically studied the existence of hereditary diseases--including syphilis, arthritis, phthisis, scrofula, rickets, gout, stones, epilepsy, and insanity--and the problems that heredity might pose for curing and preventing these diseases. Amid public debate, doctors first treated heredity with formal skepticism and then embraced the idea. Their changing attitudes stemmed less from epistemological or cognitive reasons than from new cultural beliefs about gender, domesticity, and demographic policy. Fearing moral degeneracy and demographic decline, they argued that a number of social pathologies were truly hereditary and that these diseases spread within the family itself. These beliefs were seemingly confirmed by new clinical studies on tuberculosis. Though doctors conceded that hereditary diseases might limit Enlightenment hopes to perfect society, they also suggested that sexual hygiene and physical education could cure hereditary degeneracy and transcend genealogy and descent. Consequently, they stressed that physical regeneration was a dynamic process, one that stretched from the conjugal bed to weaning and beyond. Rather than accepting the accidents of birth, physicians believed that their patients could self-consciously overcome inherited defects and thus regenerate themselves and even all of society itself. Heredity thus gave doctors an idiom with which to diagnose a felt social crisis and to prescribe appropriate hygienic responses.

Ideology and sociology: Reflections on Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia

Ideology was a favourite and much-discussed concept for many sociologists in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Undoubtedly this was mainly connected to Marxism, but Karl Mannheim—as a critic of Marx—had his part to play in this too. Ideology, and with it Mannheim's work, fell into disfavour with the retreat from Marxism in the 1980s and 1990s. But one could argue that much of what Mannheim discussed under the heading ‘ideology’ can now be found under other labels in sociology, such as ‘social constructionism’ and ‘discourse analysis’. Mannheim's treatment of utopias suffered an analogous fate to his treatment of ideology, being caught up in a general suspicion of utopian thinking among professional sociologists. Utopian scholars, for their part, were unhappy with Mannheim's rendition of utopia as revolutionary or messianic social movements rather than the realized picture of the perfect society that they found in the literary utopia. There are many calls for the revival of utopian thought at the present time, but they fail to specify—as Mannheim was always at pains to do—what social and political conditions are likely to favour such a revival.

"Model Mamas": The Domestic Partnership of Home Economics Pioneers Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer

"Model Mamas": The Domestic Partnership of Home Economics Pioneers Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer Megan Elias Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York In 1925, at an event honoring Martha Van Rensselaer, cochair of the Department of Home Economics at Cornell University, an alumna of the department commented to the assembled crowd that "she it is, with the partner she came to love and who came to love her, who has imparted to every girl who has had the great privilege of spending four years with them, an ideal of womanhood in service to mankind." 1 The partner Van Rensselaer came to love, her cochair of the department, was Flora Rose. Together the two women created the department at Cornell and stewarded its transition into an independent college of the university (also in 1925), simultaneously serving as pioneers and leaders in the home economics movement. The love between the two, as all who knew them acknowledged, went far beyond the collegial. The two women lived together from around 1908 until Van Rensselaer's death in 1932 and were so inseparable that they were often referred to collectively as Miss Van Rose. Their relationship was treated by friends as both a model for and representative of other same-sex relationships within the home economics movement. Their partnership merits attention because of the complex truth noted in the celebration for Van Rensselaer above, that home economists defined and propagated "an ideal of womanhood in service to mankind." This service might be narrowly defined, in that female students in home economics departments were educated to provide ideal homes to the men they married, but it might also be understood more broadly, even heroically in the movement's own terms, in that the proper management of domestic matters both within and outside the home could bring about a more perfect society. [End Page 65] Emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, the home economics movement sought to rationalize housework and to create new opportunities for women to work outside the home, largely in fields related to domesticity such as dietetics, interior design, and institutional management. By effecting changes both inside and outside the home, leaders of this movement attempted to change the social status of housework, raising it to the level of a profession. Early in the movement there were some who saw its potential as a means for training servants, but this group was quickly eclipsed by a larger number of people, mostly women, who saw the field as a way to improve society rather than simply to solve the "servant problem." The majority of professional home economists envisioned a home in which the woman of the house did most or all of the work, aided not just by new technologies but also by a new theorization of housework in which domestic labor could be interesting and fulfilling. 2 While the early leaders of the home economics movement built academic departments and developed a disciplinary field, they simultaneously created a community of like-minded activists. This community had a strong character of its own that stood in a complex and important relationship to the field and the ideals of the movement. While researching the history of the movement's first generation, I was struck by how many close female relationships emerged from archival materials and how many of the women involved in the home economics movement shared homes. Although significant figures in the movement such as Ellen Richards, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the acknowledged mother of the movement, and Agnes Fay Morgan, of the University of California at Berkeley, did marry, far more of the women lived with other women in arrangements that seemed to go beyond the economically convenient. 3 Indeed, each time I ventured into a new archive, another of these relationships emerged. The partnerships revealed themselves in many sources, including professional correspondence between colleagues...

Towards an ethically-oriented curriculum: resisting the growth of instrumentalism

Abstract Instumentalism is a growing disposition of thought in authorised theory. It is detrimental to education because it enfeebles the curriculum's ethical orientation. Instrumentalism reflects an that is based on five myths: (i) society causes goodness: (ii) individuals are radically free; (iii) individuals can handle this freedom; (iv) a perfect society is a rational possibility; and (v) experts ought to be in charge. The ethical orientation in needs urgently to become a focus. It can be summarised as five assertions: (i) questions of purpose are crucial: (ii) knowledge and identity are framed by backgrounds of significance that cannot entirely be made foreground, (iii) self-identity is primarily ethical; (iv) creative thinking requires an ethical/aesthetical sensibility; and (v) know-how is ethical. Introduction People acquiesce to power in the form in which they encounter it. The 9-year-old avoids the neighbourhood bully. The adolescent drifts with the in-group. The teacher complies with the manager's circumscribing rules. There are differences in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook. People adopt fads in their most prevalent form. Teenage girls express identity by wearing jeans on the hip. Public sector administrators distrust their staff. Curriculum managers value the precision of the outcomes-based curriculum. There are differences in social context, but none in ethical orientation. This article looks at the main ways in which the growing acceptance of instrumentalism in the is leading to a corresponding decline in the ethical. (1) We could say a great deal more on this topic, but space is limited; this is just a start. This discussion focuses primarily on the ethical dimension of curriculum. Where I have drawn on other dimensions--such as the political, sociological and psychological-I have done so only to articulate the ethical. (2) Overall, I will attempt to highlight the ethical poverty of authorised theory: that singular strand of theory, backed by national and state apparatuses, that has recently led to the so-called education reforms in a number of countries. This is an urgent task, on which the survival of education depends. Without an ethical orientation, there is nothing to distinguish education from other activities, however noble or debased, such as training for the labour market. If instrumentalism becomes supreme--and, regrettably, we are heading in this direction--education is dead. A growing disposition of thought I am not aware of any that is completely instrumental. Nevertheless, there is reason to think that instrumentalism is becoming an incontestable form of thought in modern societies. Instrumentalism is becoming naturalised. This is a trend. Trends imply and require opposing influences; a snowstorm today is a present reality, but global warming is the trend. The is on an instrumental course, but it still exhibits features that are not instrumental. Each trend needs to be evaluated on its individual merits. To show learners increasing respect; to view learners as future commodities in a transnational, neo-capitalist marketplace; to focus on the development of self-esteem while at the same time neglecting to foster esteem for things other than self; these are three current trends. As such, they need to he evaluated differently. The first should be encouraged, the second, resisted; the third, modified. In my early years of teaching I rarely heard talk of objectives, assessment, or standards. production function, provider capture, competencies, and curriculum outputs were unknown. Things have changed. Like all naturalisation processes, this one has meant that certain ideas and practices have become taken for granted within a small domain, to spill over into wider fields of application--in this case, the institutions of Western culture. …

Shelley's Cosmopolitan "Discourse": Ancient Greek Manners and Modern Liberty

When he headed for Italy in spring, 1818, Percy Shelley left behind at Marlow life-sized plaster casts of Belvedere Apollo and Medici Venus which had presided over his reading of Plato and his writing of Laon and Cythna (MWS Letters 1: 38, 38n and White 1.505). Reading A. W. Von Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature on way to Italy, a work that describes Greek classical drama as fundamentally analogous to sculpture, he anticipated a less bookish, more direct encounter with sculpture and architecture of classical civilizations (MWS J 16-21, march 1818). Like his modern Greek protagonists in Laon and Cythna, he sought to regenerate from Mediterranean culture material ruins of a classical Greek of civic liberty. Halting for summer in cool retreat of Bagni di Lucca, however, Shelley continued to analyze Greek culture through its texts--first working on a translation of Plato's Symposium and then, in late July, drafting his second try at an introduction to dialogue (Weinberg 21; Jones, xiii). This essay, which he titled on Manners of Antient Greeks, opens a cosmopolitan defense of classical Athenian manners in love--that is, of their practice of homoeroticism. Homophobia had blocked modern British readers from accepting Plato's portrayal of love between men as a desire for ideal beauty & equal to that in Phidias' and Praxiteles' sculpture. In this essay, then, Shelley attempts a sympathetic explanation of that difference in sexual orientation; and he mediates that explanation through an appeal to beautiful forms of sculpted human figure. Yet, as he works through drafts of essay in two different notebooks, his argument becomes a different sort of cosmopolitanism, one that would in his view be more inclusive and egalitarian. For Greek homoeroticism, he argues, mars otherwise perfect society of ancient Greece because it excludes a heterosexuality based upon intellectual and civic liberty of women. (1) The mediating, persuasive form of his argument is loveliness--the desirable beauty--of human form. Shelley begins drafting this preface in a small notebook (Bod. MS. Shelley adds. e. 11) just after fragment On Love. In that essay, which Donald Reiman and Steven Jones suggest was his first try at writing an introduction to Symposium translation (Jones xiv, xx n. 8; Reiman, SC VI, 638-47), he analyzes idea of epipsyche or mental projection of an version of self as an object of desire. Having explored consequences of pursuing such an ambiguous in Alasto, his reading of Phaedrus on August 4-5 would have grounded this concept more firmly in Athenian culture (MWS Journal 217-18; Halperin, Diotima 269, citing Phaedrus 255c-e). Following On Love in notebook, Discourse also associates loveliness with an idealizing image-making by lover. Though pages of these drafts include scarcely any of his characteristic visual sketches, his verbal text immediately evokes this visuality, first, with graphically expressive title, written with a flourish, and then with content. Shelley opens his Discourse by asking, What was combination of moral & political circumstances which produced [unc] unparallelled a progress ... in literature & and why it so soon recieved a check are problems left to ... posterity to wonder over, as the ruins of a fine statue obscurely suggest to us grandeur & perfection of whole (17-18). This powerful simile of sculpture as bridging time even in its ruined state leads into a consideration of original and interdependent grandeur of all arts practiced in classical Greece. Though little evidence of their painting remains except for verbal description, Their sculptures are such as we in our presumption assume to be models of truth & beauty & ^to which with all no artist of modern times can produce anything com forms in any degree comparable (18). …

Nietzsche’s interpretation of his sources on Darwinism: Idioplasma, Micells and military troops

While he did not believe in the idea of a perfect society and humanity, for Nietzsche development [Entwicklung] implied growth and intensification of the will to power of a single organism or a social organism. Development has no fmal goal or ‘purpose’. Nietzsche interpreted ‘struggle’ differently from Darwin as evidence of the most basic sustaining quality of all life: ‘Herrschaft’ [rule, government] or ‘Macht’ [power]. Nietzsche’s genealogical approach would contend that structural alterations in societal considerations are illusions, since the foundation, the genealogy, remains the same. Nietzsche’s reception of Darwin through the work of C. von Nägeli allows us to understand how his philosophy interacted with one of the most important scientific theories of his time.

Dutch scholars on Muslim Spain

This paper deals with Dutch scholarship on Muslim Spain during three periods of Dutch history: the Reformation, Romanticism and the last quarter of the twentieth century. The interest of Dutch scholars in Muslim Spain is related to general preoccupations of each of these periods. The popularity of Ibn ufayl's ayy ibn Yaqān among Dutch readers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century is linked to the contemporary debate on the relationship between reason and religion. The interest of nineteenth century scholars as Reinhart Dozy in al‐Andalus is related to a general European trend: Romantic interest in the Middle Ages and the Orient. Most attention is devoted to Dutch scholars of Muslim Spain of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Their conclusions are evaluated in the light of the popular Dutch notion of al‐Andalus as a perfect multicultural society.

Challenges and Opportunities for Higher Education

The builders of the modern university expected that the research conducted within it would solve moral problems. The research would provide authoritative instruction on how to live and how to shape a more perfect society. But within a generation, it became clear that this expectation would not easily be fulfilled. Indeed, many of the faculties housed in these new universities were ready to wash their hands of moral concerns. The university faced a crisis: Did it serve to advance morality? And if so, how? The success of the university in producing knowledge and training skilled professionals has compensated for and masked the moral crisis. But nonetheless, the problem of morality continues to plague American higher education. Universities have been unable either to fully incorporate morality or to comfortably abandon a moral mission. This is the unresolved legacy of the creation of the modern research university. (Reuben, 2000, pp. 72–73)

Tissue typing for bone marrow transplantation: an ethical examination of some arguments concerning harm to the child.

Tissue typing (TT) is a recent and controversial scientific advance. Whilst its current applications can easily be described as pro-therapeutic and within the realms of preventative medicine, its specificity and potential are often characterized as the tip of the eugenic iceberg: undermining the very basis of individual autonomy and identity in an inevitable march towards the perfect society. In addition to arguments concerning societal harms flowing from TT, significant concerns have also been raised concerning harms to the future child born as a result. In the context of current legislation and policy, this article examines two aspects of arguments concerning harm to the future child: those relating to psychological harms, and those arguing that TT is contrary to the future child's best interests. The article examines the moral basis for arguments concerning harm to the future child. It proposes that arguments concerning psychological harm may overlook or minimise the potential benefits flowing from the broader social, familial context into which the child is born. These arguments may be countered, or at least balanced, by considering the future child in this context. In relation to arguments that TT is contrary to the future child's best interests, the paper examines a non-standard consideration of best interests. It argues that this standard should be used in considering whether or not TT for bone marrow transplant is harmful to the future child, thereby extending moral consideration of interests to intra-familial interests and outcomes. On this basis, it can be argued that TT is not contrary to the interests of the future child. The paper concludes by noting a potential tension between the first guiding principle of the Infertility Treatment Act 1995 (Vic) and the current Victorian policy on TT.

Challenges and Opportunities for Higher Education

The builders of the modern university expected that the research conducted within it would solve moral problems. The research would provide authoritative instruction on how to live and how to shape a more perfect society. But within a generation, it became clear that this expectation would not easily be fulfilled. Indeed, many of the faculties housed in these new universities were ready to wash their hands of moral concerns. The university faced a crisis: Did it serve to advance morality? And if so, how? The success of the university in producing knowledge and training skilled professionals has compensated for and masked the moral crisis. But nonetheless, the problem of morality continues to plague American higher education. Universities have been unable either to fully incorporate morality or to comfortably abandon a moral mission. This is the unresolved legacy of the creation of the modern research university. (Reuben, 2000, pp. 72–73)

Challenging Policy Analysis to Serve the Good Society

This symposium is an outgrowth of the continuing struggle within the social sciences over what analysis is and what it should be, and thus how to teach it and how to practice it. We sought to bring the peculiar concerns of PEGS, with its focus on the search for practical new visions of the good society, to bear on this struggle. We asked contributors to consider what new and distinctive conceptions of analysis might be bet ter suited to the achievement, maintenance, and enhancement of the good society. The essays reveal a remarkable set of intellec tual alignments. First, although few of the authors attempt an explicit charac terization of the good society, a reasonably consistent concep tion is evident across the essays. In contrast to the diversity of good society conceptions that have appeared in the pages of this journal, the contributors to this symposium envision the good society as plainly and simply democratic, most likely with a sys tem of representative government. The contributors do see this good society enjoying a much greater degree and breadth of cit izen participation in governance and engagement in public affairs than is evident in the United States, which is their implicit, and sometimes explicit, reference point. Further, the contributors see this greater level of democracy closely intertwined with a much more bottom-up, community-based system of economic and social management than the centralized, bureaucratized, liberal capitalist system evident among advanced industrial states today. Finally, the good society is not nirvana. It comes with many of the warts, weaknesses, and willfulness of the human spirit, and thus will require continued efforts at repair and improvement. In short, it is the good society, not the perfect society, and it will require something like analysis in its service. Second, analysis is, and will remain, primarily a prac tical, problem-solving enterprise. To be so, however, it cannot be oriented only or even principally toward addressing discrete problems and finding programmatic solutions. It cannot, fur thermore, only serve the currently powerful and the alter natives they prefer, and it cannot just pursue a superficially neu tral evaluation of alternatives. Instead, while adhering to certain standards and methods, analysts must orient their efforts toward evaluating alternatives with the express purpose of maintaining and enhancing democratic governance. For several of the contributors, this means that analysis must commit to greater experimentation with types of policies and forms of delivery, that it must broaden its measures of assessment of alternatives and consequences, and that it must devote greater attention to developing the analyti cal capacities of citizens as well as elites. This broader concep tion of analysis, several contributors claim, is true to the vision of reforming democratic governance through better informed decision-making that Harold Lasswell and others artic ulated at the founding of the policy sciences. It promises to make policies more legitimate while increasing social capital in ways that satisfy both the values of civic capacity-building and efficiency. Third, analysis as currently taught and practiced is not merely inconsistent with its founding vision?it is incapable of helping us move closer to our aspirations for the good society. The deficiencies the contributors identify are legion, but several stand out as particularly severe: Policy analysis is insufficiently attentive to significant shifts in the way public affairs are conducted, including

Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages, by Eugen Weber

Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages, by Eugen Weber. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1999. 294 pp. $26.50 U.S. (cloth), $17.95 U.S. (paper). It is not easy to get this book under control. Weber's apocalypses, so many and so varied, are impossible to arrange chronologically, theologically, or socially on a single spectrum. At numerous points in the book the question arose: Should this really be included as an apocalypse or millennial vision? But again and again the author convinces. Weber begins with a discussion of chronologies, how in various human societies time was reckoned, a survey of how we inherited the Western system of time, and with reflections on why, for instance, millennial years and the 33rd year of the century have been important apocalyptic points of time. Chapters Three to Eleven are an eloquent verbal tour of the great variety of religious, social, secular and scientific apocalyptic and millennial exhibits from the first to the twentieth century. The author works with a broad but clear definition of his subject. Apocalypse is about the world's progress to an appointed end. The expected consummation implies a new beginning (p. 232). Weber goes against the stream of much modern writing on western civilization by underscoring the importance of the Bible as the source of apocalyptic and millennial visions, not only for the fundamentalist right, but for virtually the whole story he tells. Even the secular romantic writers of the nineteenth century found their inspiration there. Today's tendency is to deny the Bible its role as an important cultural catalyst because it is not quite intellectually decent to acknowledge that religion has been and continues to be a cultural power to be reckoned with. A salient feature of Weber's treatment is that, contrary to Norman Cohn, apocalyptic and millennial visions were developed and promoted not by the oppressed and disinherited of the earth, but by elites in every period. In early Christianity there were educated leaders like Irenaeus and Lactantius, in the Middle Ages bishops and scholars in the universities, during the Reformation the Reformers (exceptions were Zwingli and Calvin), church leaders of all stripes during the Puritan revolution, and the same thing was true in the Enlightenment. The year 1484 was an acknowledged axial apocalyptic year because of a major planetary conjunction. Philip Melanchthon, humanist reformer, made the attempt to show astrologically that Luther was born in that year rather than in 1483, which was in fact Luther's birth year. A horoscope for 1484 would indisputably have made of Luther an apocalyptic figure. Weber makes a special point of insisting that Isaac Newton, scientific luminary, had a life-long interest in end-time lore, and particularly that he pursued it in his prime and not in his dotage. All the major literary figures of the nineteenth century were persuaded of the senescence of the world and that its days were numbered. Robert Owen and his fellow utopians in Britain and America are included by Weber because of their millennial belief that they were working toward a perfect society. The religious as well as the secular scientific apocalypse from Paracelsus to the Silent Spring of Rachel Carson and the doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists are Weber's evidence of how deep the apocalyptic mindset has gone into the consciousness of the West. The author does not neglect the more exotic apocalyptic and millenarian episodes. The Montanists of the second century, the movement of Cola di Rienzo in fourteenth-century Rome, the Anabaptist Kingdom of Muenster in the 1530s, the apocalyptic preoccupations of the Emperor Alexander I of Russia, the millennial visions of the Metis leader Louis Riel, and the twentieth-century People's Temple of Jim Jones and the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, and many more are described. …

Forming Canada 's Ethnoracial Identity: Psychiatry and the History of Immigration Practices

Although most Canadians agree that theirs is not a perfect society, they see it as capable of perfection and take comfort in knowing that it is certainly better than most. The conservative implications of such a position are quite clear, and this is the basis on which we describe Canada as a nation in denial. It is a denial based on the myth of classlessness and general refusal to acknowledge the existence of systemic or structured inequalities along gender, racial, and many other lines. Our principal focus is the issue of racial inequality in the history of Canada 's immigration policies and practices, and we contend that denial is an intrinsic aspect of the national mythology of Canada as a benign, innocent country comprising the Great White North. We take a critical look at immigration entry restrictions that were aimed at ensuring a certain racial and ethnic purity in the new nation, what we call sanitization. To this end both the profession of psychiatry and psychiatric practitioners were enlisted. Thus, it was common to find that "lunacy and idiocy "were invoked as justifications for eliminating certain categories of potential immigrants. To this end psychiatry, eugenics, and "sanitary science "were closely connected, and their collective effect was to intensify boundaries of nation, citizen, and health. Social issues were transformed into personal defects associated with entire races through the use of terms like feeble-mindedness and degeneration. The seemingly unconscious infiltration of religious, color or moral polarities in the theories of the "new sciences "likewise became embedded in racist government policies, which served to inform the emerging national identity.