Political Pamphlets Research Articles

God and State Above All

Abstract This article explores how politically active Polish women starting in the late nineteenth century until the start of World War II viewed themselves and their duties vis-a-vis the Polish nation. It traces the women's movement in Poland from the first calls for women's right to work, to their eventual enfranchisement under a newly independent Polish state in 1918. Challenges to women's equality took many forms: men from both sides of the political spectrum viewed women's entry into the salaried workforce and the public sphere as largely undesirable and deployed a variety of arguments to reinforce traditional gender hierarchy. Yet many educated Polish women, even from conservative, Catholic perspectives, viewed their engagement in the public sphere as necessary work for the good of the Polish nation. This article uses letters, political pamphlets, and published works to explore how modern Polish women attempted to strike a balance between breaking and preserving traditional notions of gender in order to secure new rights for themselves in a volatile political atmosphere. While Polish women's groups differed on their vision of the ideal Polish state, they generally agreed that women's roles as mothers provided the moral legitimacy required to act in the public sphere. They successfully carved a space for themselves in the new Polish state of 1918 but remained marginalized in a separate and unequal status in the interwar period.

Waltoniana Extensa: A Previously Unidentified Political Pamphlet by Izaak Walton

Waltoniana Extensa: A Previously Unidentified Political Pamphlet by Izaak Walton

Unfulfilled Promises and Desires: The British South Africa Company (BSAC), Settler Politics and the Development of Southern Rhodesia’s Fiscal System, 1890–1922

This paper examines how the British South Africa Company (BSAC; the Company), the founding administrator of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, navigated the creation of a fiscal system of the colony from 1890 to 1922 and how the fiscal system shaped political decisions regarding the colony’s administrative structure. It casts light on the early efforts of the colonial state-making process under the BSAC and how it established its administrative structure. Once occupation was completed, the Company’s ability to finance the cost of governance and administration was the most critical factor facing it. Whereas earlier scholarship has discussed various aspects of Southern Rhodesia’s early economic endeavors and political evolution, this paper demonstrates the significance of the fiscal system in shaping both the economic and political trajectories of the early administration. Through analyzing the Company’s revenue collection and expenditure patterns, the paper reconstructs the contours of shifting notions of what constituted the Company’s commercial and administrative revenue. It argues that the BSAC’s fiscal and budgetary administration approach was gradual, experimental, and sometimes ad hoc, resulting in continuous conflicts between the Company administration and the settlers. The paper relies on a wide range of sources that include the BSAC annual reports, historical manuscripts, Legislative Council debates, newspapers, and other political pamphlets to unpack the tensions between the Company government and white settlers over the fiscal and administrative evolution of the colony.

The Legal and the Literary: Cultural Perspectives on Brexit

The essay introduces a special issue on Brexit. Instead of merely focusing on its legal implications, this issue undertakes an examination of the UK leaving the EU from a law-and-humanities perspective. The legal analysis is therefore complemented by a broader assessment of the social and cultural features of Brexit, also extending over the complexity of the present and the incertitude posed by its future. Brexit is also a matter of reimagination; constitutional and literary issues thus coalesce towards a transdisciplinary dialogue. To this extent, the collected essays engage with Brexlit, i.e. novels and essays, political pamphlets, and other writings prompted by Brexit. The aim is to explore the doubts, fears, and threats that still haunt the UK after leaving the EU, paying particular attention to the development of new narrative strategies and forms capable of reflecting and giving expression to the new Brexit identities.

‘A Symptom of an Underlying Condition’. Law, the Humanities, and a Non-formalistic Approach to Brexit

The essay addresses Brexit as a constitutional and jurisgenerative moment. It provides an alternative reading to that traditionally used to assess its impact on the Anglo-British constitution. Politics and legalism have trapped Britain in a formalistic approach without offering innovative responses to the challenges posed by Brexit, persuading the public that there are no alternatives to an out-of-Europe approach. The essay adopts a different stance, exploring Brexit with less formalism and more attentiveness to its impact on British society. It uses novels and essays, political pamphlets, and other writings prompted by Brexit to examine the conditions underlying this event. Their analysis may nurture the productive imagination needed to support Britain’s constitutional creativity during the post-Brexit scenario.

The Political Economy of Farmland Taxation in Colonial and Postcolonial Zimbabwe, 1914–32 and 1980–c. 2018

This article contributes to the existing literature on the political economy of Zimbabwe by focusing on a hitherto understudied area, land taxation. While scholars have written extensively on the political economy of land in general, not much is available on debates around its taxation. Those that have written on the land question have paid less attention to its taxation. Similarly, recent works on the colony’s fiscal system lack the scope for a detailed examination of the land taxation question. By analysing how different governments of the country operating within distinct historical contexts approached the question of land taxation reinserts land taxation in conversations around the political economy of both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, particularly how politics and economics intersected in shaping policy formulation and implementation. During the colonial period, the main idea behind the imposition of land tax was to force absentee landowners and those who occupied land for speculative purposes to sell their land or develop it; however, the situation changed following the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in 2000. At that stage, the main objective for land taxation shifted from encouraging the selling of land for redistributive purposes to making resettled farmers utilise their land. In either case, land taxation and contestations around it provide another way of looking at the dynamics of state making in settler colonial and post-settler colonial contexts. The article relies on a wide range of sources that include parliamentary debates, newspapers, archival sources, and other political pamphlets and documents. A close analysis of archival sources shows how arguments for and against land taxation changed or persisted across the colonial and postcolonial historical epochs.

WAR EXPERIENCE AND ITS REFLECTION IN GEORGES BERNANOS’ POLITICAL WRITING AND NOVELS

The article analyzes the reflection of the 20th century’s war experiences both in fictional writing and political pamphlet of Georges Bernanos, a representative of the Catholic Literary Revival movement in French interwar literature. A chronological classification of the entire writer’s heritage connected with the subject of war is offered and divided into three periods. The most representative texts are proposed for each. Further research attention is devoted to the early period, namely the experience of the First World War, in which the author participated as combatant, and the problems of the first novel «Under the Sun of Satan» (1926). The novel, which does not directly talk about the war in its plot, is nevertheless classified as warlike. Metaphysical evil and the deterioration of the human soul are regarded as the main ideological constants through the images of the two protagonists of the novel. Emphasis is made on the animalistic image of evil rooted in the biblical tradition and the creation of the image of saint is, according to Bernanos, the only answer to the triumph of evil, which he saw with his own eyes during the war. The explicit manifestation of the Civil War in Spain 1936-1939, witnessed by the author, reinforced by the eschatology and prophetic nature of the narrative, as well as the use of biblical archetypes to denote the nature of violence, is analyzed on the base of the political pamphlet «The Great Cemeteries under the Moon» (1938). It is this war that becomes a turning point in the biography of Bernanos, who as a right-wing nationalist and Catholic discovers for himself the illogical impossibility of supporting the Franco regime, because of the terror. This very problem of mass violence and the propensity of human nature to evil were analyzed using the theory of mimetic violence by the French anthropologist R. Girard.

The Phenomenon of Imperial Patriotism in German Political Pamphlets of the 1670s – 1680s

During the reign of Leopold I, the Holy Roman Empire faced serious foreign policy challenges: the wars of the Ottoman Empire and the wars of Louis XIV. Both threats were reflected in German journalism. German publicists came out in defense of the Empire, as a result, a huge number of works with pro-imperial motives appeared. Speaking from the standpoint of imperial patriotism, German publicists strove to create an image of a common danger that threatened not only the entire Empire, but every German. Imperial patriotism was manifested in three topical subjects of German political journalism of the last quarter of the 17th century: French politics, the struggle against the Ottoman Empire and uprisings in Hungary. All three plots were presented from the position of a threat to the existing order. An important component of the negative image of France was its desire to seize the imperial throne and destabilize the internal situation in the Empire. The successes in the struggle against Turkey were demonstrated as the successes of the Empire and the Emperor. The Hungarian uprisings were condemned as a betrayal of the emperor, and therefore of the Empire. The surge in imperial patriotism was beneficial to the imperial power, which used it to strengthen their authority within the Empire.

РОЖДЕНИЕ АНТИЧНОГО ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОГО ПАМФЛЕТА: СТЕСИМБРОТ ФАСОССКИЙ

The genre of political pamphlet, which reached a high flourishing in Greece in the 4th century B.C. (Isocrates and others), appeared in the previous century. Usually scholars begin its history from the “Athenian Constitution” of Pseudo-Xenophon (420s B.C.). However, the article deals with an earlier (evidently, simply the earliest) pamphleteer, Stesimbrotus of Thasos, who wrote in the time of Pericles. His fragmentarily preserved treatise “On Themistocles, Thucydides and Pericles” represented a very lively written tendentious pamphlet (of mainly invective a tone) with some features of memoirs. The article analyzes biographical testimonies on Stesimbrotus and extant fragments of his principal work. As it represents leaders of radical democracy, Themistocles and Pericles, in negative light, but Cimon, a statesman from the opposite camp, is represented in it more positively, the author makes a conclusion on generally antidemocratic political orientation of the pamphlet, and that corresponds with the prevalent position of Greek intellectuals if the period in question.

Entre la censura y la impugnación pública. La fundación de “El Defensor de la Religión” en Guadalajara (1827)

This article analyzes the causes of the establishment of El Defensor de la Religión (1827–1833, Guadalajara, Jalisco), one of the most important Mexican catholic newspapers of the first half of the 19th century. I demonstrate that this newspaper was founded by Pedro Espinosa y Dávalos (1793–1866) in order to counteract the influence of impious and regalist ideas that circulated in Mexico through pamphlets, newspapers, and banned books in the 1820s. I examine, on one hand, how the ecclesiastical sector was frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the religious censorship regime, and, on the other, the first attempts of Guadalajara’s clergy to contest the presumed impiety by financing political pamphlets. I ultimately argue that El Defensor de la Religión was founded in response to the need to have a newspaper that would allow the clergy to refute in a systematic and constant way all the publications that criticized or proposed to reform the Church.

Passive Tolerance versus Political Engagement. Antistius Constans, Koerbagh, Van den Enden, and Spinoza

This article investigates the contribution of Spinoza and authors of his circle (Antistius Constans, Van den Enden and Koerbagh) on the modern conception of tolerance. In his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), Spinoza launches the libertas philosophandi-question integrating two kinds of freedom between which there is a tension: freedom of thought and speech and freedom of religious conscience. As freedom means living and acting in society in light of one’s own interests, tolerance becomes a political issue that depends from political perspectives and priorities. This insight leads Spinoza to bringing together the control of political authority on religious affairs and a political regime of religious plurality and toleration. These ideas seem to be reminiscent of texts published in his immediate circle: the anonymus De jure ecclesiasticorum (1665); the political pamphlets Kort verhael (1662) and Vrye Politijke Stellingen (1665) of his teacher Van den Enden; the subversive dictionary Een Bloemhof (1668) and the systematic philosophical Een Ligt (1668) of Koerbagh. In these texts the question of religion and religious authority shifts to the question of the nature and origin of political authority. The authors all criticize the abuse of power in light of the idea that there is no freedom without equality and no equality without freedom. Together with Spinoza’s Tractatus politicus (1677), they thereby form an anomaly within the anomaly of the Calvinist Low Countries that regards specifically this radical democratic view. They are not so much talking about tolerance but about everyone’s active participation in political life which is necessary for the rescue of the republic.

Reading in Crisis: Francis Russell's Reading Records and the Beginnings of the Thirty Years’ War

AbstractThis essay discusses the reading records of Francis Russell, 1587–1641, later 4th Earl of Bedford. Drawing from a previously unstudied manuscript notebook from 1620 to 1622, the author demonstrates the importance of Russell's private archive at Woburn Abbey as an important repository for political, literary, and cultural history in the early Stuart age. The notebook evidences how a nobleman of Russell's wealth, stature, and influence prepared for political office, and more broadly, how he educated himself. The notebook contains a wide variety of texts, among them histories, sermons, poetry, political pamphlets, treatises, news, and gossip, much of which Russell brought to bear on the acute political Bohemian crisis then emerging, and on its consequences for domestic politics (for example, the 1621 Parliament). The notebook's contents also reveal more about early modern reading practice and the organization of knowledge and suggest the many networks of circulation through which Russell acquired his books, manuscript tracts, and oral information.

Peddling and Politics: Russian Itinerant Traders in the Russo-Finnish Conflict, 1899–1900

Abstract This article explores the ways in which Russian itinerant traders in the Grand Duchy of Finland became involved in the Russo-Finnish political conflict that followed the issuing of the February Manifesto in 1899. Building on portrayals of the peddlers in Russian and Finnish newspapers and political pamphlets, including the underground press that emerged in the late summer of 1900, it traces the creation of an enemy image of mobile Russians, the role that the Finnish Constitutionalists’ strategy of passive resistance ascribed to the “peddling question,” and the reactions to this strategy in Russian nationalist circles. The analysis contributes new knowledge on the position of Russian peddlers in Finland and on the use of political propaganda in the Russo-Finnish conflict, and more generally on the mechanisms through which mobile groups of people can become utilized as political tools in times of political tension. The article also shows that the Russian peddlers did not remain passive in the conflict but exploited the turmoil by filing petitions with the Governor General's Office that aimed at strengthening their legal position in the grand duchy.

American Political Pamphlets 1917-1945 at the British Library

American Political Pamphlets 1917-1945 at the British Library

The Sewing Machine and Spectral Presences: Connolly, Shaw, and O’Casey

The Sewing Machine and Spectral Presences: Connolly, Shaw, and O’Casey

The Interrelation of Politics and Confessionalism in a 17th-Century British Polemical Writing

The study intends to investigate a political pamphlet written by the famous, nevertheless, in Hungary rather neglected Presbyterian minister and diplomat, Robert Baillie. In this work of his he tries to refute the ecclesiological tenets of the Independents also known as Congregationalists. The latter had a good share in shaping "the New England mind", i.e. they were very influential in 17th-century Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The author does not refrain from making fun of the "Canterburians", the "Faction" he blames throughout the polemical writing for all the "problems" arising with the new "sects". The study is meant to illustrate that theological and political issues were closely intertwined in the 17th century.

Review: Apocalyptic Geographies: Religion, Media, and the American Landscape, by Jerome Tharaud

Review: <i>Apocalyptic Geographies: Religion, Media, and the American Landscape</i>, by Jerome Tharaud

The Concepts of Universal Monarchy and Balance of Power in Charles Davenant’s An Essay Upon The Ballance of Power (1701)

In the 17th century – especially in the period after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) – more and more treatises were published about the European balance of power, which clearly appeared against the concept of universal monarchy (monarchia universalis) by this time. The balance of power principle became a prominent element of 18th-century state politics and political journalism, as well as one of the key concepts of the emerging theory of interstate relations. The term became part of the official language of diplomacy with the Peace of Utrecht (1713), becoming part not only of political thought, but also of the official political practice, and developed into one of the fundamental milestones of English foreign policy and political thought in the 18th centuries. This paper analyses the contemporary incorporation of the balance of power concept into English political thought with the analysis of English economist and political writér Charles Davenant’s (1656–1714) An Essay Upon The Ballance of Power (1701). The analysis is trying to point out how the principle of balance of power began to play an increasingly important role in European great power politics as well as in English domestic and foreign policy in the decades before the Peace of Utrecht (1713), and how Charles Davenant’s political pamphlet can fit in this context.

Mapping institutional changes in higher education: the comparative analysis of the effects of democratic backsliding

The world has witnessed democratic decline in 23 countries worldwide during the last decade (Freedom House, 2019) in the context of rising nationalism and right-wing populism (Fraser, 2017; Robertson, 2018, 2020). The political importance of this topic is rooted in the fact that higher education is one of the most crucial public goods (Marginson, 2007, 2017) and governments tend to exercise tighter control over HEIs while democratic conditions worsening (Perry, 2015). Although many studies have examined the effects of the transition to democracy on higher education globally (O’Donnell et al., 2013; O’Donnell et al., 1986, Salto, 2020), very few have studied the reverse trend – democratic backsliding. Given that university autonomy is a wider term that encompasses the practises undertaken by universities to operate, researching its aspects, and assessing the true implications of democratic backsliding on universities represents an important field for current and future research.&#x0D; My research investigates the impact of democratic backsliding on the university autonomy, by examining the cases of Turkey, Hungary, and Poland. These countries were considered democracies until the 2010s, but they are increasingly moving away from democracy (Freedom House, 2020). The study draws on an extensive analysis of publicly accessible government laws and regulations, university decrees, mission statements, political pamphlets, online media sources and interviews, and grey literature to analyze institutional responses as well as field work and interviews. I employ neoliberal authoritarianism and historical institutionalism as a framework to investigate the critical junctures and institutional changes affecting appointive (hiring, promotion, and dismissal of staff), financial (funding levels and criteria, preparation and allocation of the university budget, and accountability), and academic (access, curriculum, degree requirements, and academic freedom) autonomy (Ordorika, 2003).

A New Political Pamphlet by Mary Astell

A New Political Pamphlet by Mary Astell