Radical Political Ideas Research Articles

상상력과 사랑

This paper reads P. B. Shelley’s unfinished poem The Triumph of Life (1822), which recounts the poet’s visionary experience of beholding the triumphal procession of Life, in relation to his claims about imagination and love in A Defence of Poetry (1821). For Shelley, imaginative faculty forms the basis of a feeling of sympathy for others, which develops into love. This notion of sympathetic imagination appears to be the key to understanding the poem, especially the significance of Rousseau who guides the narrator through the apocalyptic vision. The principal purpose of this article is to elucidate the role of Rousseau in the Triumph, whom Shelley considers to be essentially a poet, i.e. a man of imagination. To Shelley’s way of thinking, Rosseau is proven highly imaginative in developing radical political ideas which had their roots in his fervent desire to remedy the ills of the world, and which profoundly impacted the outbreak of the French Revolution. However, Rousseau’s encounter with the vision of the “shape all light,” a malevolent spirit who offers him the cup of nepenthe, blots out his memories of the past, hence trampling the spark of imagination in his mind. For his ability to imagine ideal conditions for human existence is based upon his criticism of the harsh realities of the world—criticism being an act of remembering the past. However, Rousseau’s liberation from the chariot of Life is attained by his unswerving loyalty to democratic ideals, which holds true for Shelley.

«Красная ржавчина» vs «Желтая ржавчина»: метаморфозы текста советской пьесы на Бродвее

The study focuses on the adaptation of a politically engaged dramaturgical work from Bolshevik Russia — Vladimir Kirshon’s and Andrey Uspensky’s play Konstantin Terekhin (Rust) — to the specific requirements of Broadway, the commercial theater of the USA, and the textual changes of the Soviet original associated with it. The basic principles of the Broadway theater creative and organizational model, drastically different from the repertory theater of post-revolutionary Russia, are defined — the primacy of commerce over artistry, the absence of state support and censorship, a respectable audience that does not accept radical political ideas. On the American stage the Soviet play was produced in 1929, with the changed title (Red Rust), and the text subjected to changes and distortions. The paper considers these changes in the context of American socio–economic life of the Red Thirties. The discrepancy between the original dramaturgical material and the specific requirements of the American commercial theater is analyzed. The free handling of the text from Bolshevik Russia in the US theater is due to the absence of copyright regulations between the two countries. The process of exporting the play to the United States — via Paris and London — is being reconstructed. Three sources that have carried out the textual transformation of the Soviet original are characterized: the authors of the French-language adaptation from Russian (Fernand Nozière and Vladimir Bienstock), British translators from French into English (Virginia and Frank Vernon) and Broadway stage director who previously visited Moscow and sought to introduce into the text what, in his opinion, Soviet censorship would not allow (Herbert Biberman). The study is based on the materials from the Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts collections (Yale University), as well as documents from the Houghton Library (Harvard University), the New York Public Library for Performing Arts, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Moscow), and the museum of the Mossovet State Academic Theater (Moscow). The study is aimed at expanding the understanding of the stage history of the Russian drama in America.

“Find Your Own and Feel Comfortable…”: Communicative Space of Russian Officials of the Resettlement Administration as a Factor of Professional Adaptation (Late 19th – Early 20th Century)

Based on the published memoirs of the employees of the Migration Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the article reconstructs the communicative space of the Russian bureaucracy, which was responsible for organizing population migrations to the eastern outskirts of the empire in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The research identifies the actors, conditions and channels of communicative actions of managers, who belong to the formed in the post-reform period generation and performed their duties under the influence of socio-cultural transformations of the second half of the 19th century. It has been proved that the main features of the identity of the new type of imperial bureaucracy were: breadth of views and a democratic style of behavior within a professional group, a sense of responsibility towards society and the state, a categorical rejection of radical political ideas and ways of their manifestation. The research demonstrates that the cultural and historical background of organizing the communicative space of resettlement officials was a qualitative rethinking of the tasks of the “resettlement case”, which became an important element of the colonial policy in the eastern parts of the country. The concernes of the authorities on the agrarian issue gave the resettlement movement a priority status in the domestic policy of Russia. In this aspect, the significance of the bureaucracy that was involved in solving problems related to the organization and regulation of the resettlement process has also changed. The article establishes that, in contrast to the bulk of Russian officials, the employees of the resettlement department were characterized by greater mobility and intensity of contacts with various class categories of the empire’s population, primarily with the peasantry. It was the communication with the peasantry that named the considered category of officials “resettelers”, which eventually determined their identity as specific, different from the identity of other groups of the Russian bureaucracy. Thus, within the space of official and informal interaction of resettlement
 officials, the principles of paternalism and partnership underlied the communicative action, which contributed to the “soft” professional adaptation of young employees of the department, the collective adoption of conventions of mutual understanding, cooperation and maintenance of comfortable conditions for activity. All this, taken together, increased the efficiency of the work of the empire's representatives on the colonized territories, and raised the prestige of the Russian state in the Trans-Ural regions.

Countering terrorism or criminalizing curiosity? The troubled history of UK responses to right-wing and other extremism

The growth of right-wing extremism, especially where it segues into hate crime and terrorism, poses new challenges for governments, not least because its perpetrators are typically lone actors, often radicalized online. The United Kingdom has struggled to define, tackle or legitimate against extremism, though it already has an extensive array of terrorism-related offences that target expression, encouragement, publication and possession of terrorist material. In 2019, the United Kingdom went further to make viewing terrorist-related material online on a single occasion a crime carrying a 15-year maximum sentence. This article considers whether UK responses to extremism, particularly those that target non-violent extremism, are necessary, proportionate, effective and compliant with fundamental rights. It explores whether criminalizing the curiosity of those who explore radical political ideas constitutes legitimate criminalization or overextends state power and risks chilling effects on freedom of speech, association, academic freedom, journalistic enquiry and informed public debate—all of which are the lifeblood of a liberal democracy.

VISUAL STREET ART: MESSAGES OF RIGA STENCIL GRAFFITI

The modern urban space is inevitably the site of different striking messages from advertisement to graffiti. The last are used as an alternative medium of subculture, even if majority of the public fails to notice it or else interprets it, contrary to culture’s ordered world of meanings, as chaotic “dirt” more closely related to nature than culture. The discourse of messages found in the public space - on the façades of surfaces forming urban space, can be interpreted in a countercultural code and is for the subculture of graffiti itself, a battle taking place for the aesthetization of the public space. This is the answer provided by the rebellious sons to the “fathers of the city”, who possess money and power with which to design urban public space using architectural means. The generation of sons, who are excluded from this real estate discourse due to a lack of means, put into play the only thing they own, i.e. their body, which they subject to the danger of imprisonment, because graffiti is an illegal activity, which in legal terms is interpreted as vandalism, a view that also prevails within the mass media. In this paper we analyze the meaning of visual messages of Riga stencil graffiti using social semiotics' methodology (Kress & Leewen, 1996; Jewitt & Oyama, 2004). We find that the utilization of the street as an alternative and independent medium in the form of civil disobedience manifested through the translation of radical political ideas, thus to a certain extent performing the work of propaganda, is an example of creative idealism.

The The Critique of Technocracy in Riga Stencil Graffiti

The utilization of the street as an alternative and independent medium for transmission of radical political ideas is a form of civil disobedience manifested thus to a certain extent in a work of propaganda and is an example of creative idealism. In this case graffiti can be regarded as a non-violent protest that was theoretically described by Henry David Thoreau in the treatise on “The Duty of Civil disobedience”, a work that has become an essential part of anthologies of political and social philosophy. To a certain degree, in its visual format, graffiti is a continuation of the “samizdat” tradition dating back to the Soviet era, both in the sense of a socially critical message and in the use of an alternative medium. Proposing a new, tactical usage of technology critically directed against technocracy of contemporary society youth of the city is trying to occupy it’s public space by specific type of aesthetization and, in the same time, is delivering clear message. The goal of this paper is the reading and interpretation of messages of the images and texts in stencil – graffiti in Riga in the context of interplay between counter cultures, different minor social groups and their ideologies. The method used is social semiotic analysis. The results show that the criticism of technocratic capitalism, consumerism and the oppression of life and the nature are most important issues taken up by the authors of stencils.

Интеллигенция vs образованщина: родовые болезни русской интеллигенции

In the article the author studies the formation process of Russian intelligentsia analyzing its «birth marks», such as nihilism, estrangement from native soil, West orientation, infatuation with radical political ideas, Russophobia. The author examines the causes of political radicalization of Russian intelligentsia that grew swiftly at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries and played an important role in the Russian revolution of 1917.

Social and Institutional Trust in Times of Crisis: Greece, 2002\u20132011

Focusing on 2002–2011, we analyse levels of trust in Greece and compare them with 17 other European countries. During this period, Greece endured a serious economic crisis. Signs of increasing mistrust in all societal institutions became evident and the nation witnessed extreme phenomena, such as violent demonstrations, the surfacing of radical political ideas, parties with nationalistic and racist characteristics, and noncompliance with rules, regulations, and taxes. However, little is known about generalised social trust, i.e. interpersonal trust between individuals, during the crisis. We analyse data from the European Social Survey Rounds 1, 2, 4, and 5 to test whether the crisis affected the levels of various forms of trust among Greeks. In addition to social trust, we distinguish between trust in political institutions (e.g. politicians and the national parliament) and impartial institutions (e.g. the police and legal system). The results reveal that the level of trust people show towards political and impartial institutions decreased substantially in Greece. Surprisingly, however, interpersonal social trust did not collapse; rather, it remained stable or even slightly increased concurrently with the notable decrease in political trust. This suggests that during an economic crisis, people do not deterministically lose their trust in other individuals; instead, in the Greek case they appear to lean on each other when both political and impartial institutions fail. Moreover, it is possible that shared experiences of nearly overwhelming adversities in Greece during the crisis increase a sense of togetherness among individuals, which in turn contributed to the robustness of social trust.

Sam Nahem: The Right-Handed Lefty Who Integrated Military Baseball in World War II

Sam NahemThe Right-Handed Lefty Who Integrated Military Baseball in World War II Peter Dreier (bio) Sam Nahem was a so-so pitcher who logged a 10-8 win-loss record and a 4.69 earned run average (ERA) in four partial seasons with the Dodgers, Cardinals and Phillies between 1938 and 1948. Despite this unremarkable record, Nahem was a remarkable Major Leaguer in many ways. He was the only Syrian and one of the few Jews in the Majors during that period. Nahem not only had a college education—a rarity among big league players at the time—but during off-seasons he also earned a law degree, which he viewed as his fallback job in case his baseball career faltered. He was also an intellectual who loved classical music and American, Russian, and French literature. He was also one of the few—and possibly the only—big league pitcher who threw exclusively overhand to left-handed batters and exclusively sidearm to right-handed hitters. In his Major League Baseball (MLB) career, he was inconsistent—occasionally brilliant, but mostly unexceptional—on the mound. Nahem was a right-handed pitcher with left-wing politics. He may have been the only Major Leaguer during his day who was a member of the Communist Party (CP). After his playing days were over, Nahem worked for twenty-five years in a chemical plant where he became a union leader. During the Cold War, his political activities caught the attention of the FBI, which put Nahem under surveillance. But most important in terms of his baseball career, Nahem was key player in a little-known episode in the battle to desegregate baseball. Like many other radicals in the 1930s and 1940s, Nahem fervently believed that baseball should be racially integrated. While serving in the army during World War II, he challenged the military's racial divide by organizing, managing, and playing for an integrated team that won the US military championship series in Europe in [End Page 184] September 1945, a month before Jackie Robinson signed a contract with the Dodgers that broke MLB's color bar. early days Samuel Ralph Nahem's parents—Isaac Nahem and Emilie (nee Sitt) Nahem—immigrated to America from Aleppo, Syria in 1912. Born in New York City on October 19, 1915, Nahem, one of eight siblings, grew up in a Brooklyn enclave of Syrian Jews. He spoke Arabic before he learned English. Nahem demonstrated his rebellious streak early on. When he was thirteen, Nahem reluctantly participated in his Bar Mitzvah ceremony, but refused to continue with Hebrew school classes after that because "it took me away from sports." To further demonstrate his rebellion, that year he ended his Yom Kippur fast an hour before sundown. Recalling the incident, he called it "my first revolutionary act."1 The next month—on November 12, 1928—Nahem's father, a well-to-do importer-exporter, traveling on a business trip to Argentina, was one of over one hundred passengers who drowned when a British steamship, the Vestris, sank off the Virginia coast. Within a year, the Great Depression had arrived, throwing the country into turmoil. With his father dead, Nahem's family could have fallen into destitution. "But fortunately we sued the steamship company and won enough money to live up to our standard until we were grown and mostly out of the house," Nahem recalled. He remembered how, at age fourteen, he "used to haul coal from our bin to relatives who had no heat in the bitterly cold winters of New York." So, despite his family's own relative comfort, "I was quite aware of the misery all around." That reality, Nahem remembered, "led to my embracing socialism as a rational possibility."2 brooklyn college: athletics and activism Education was Nahem's ticket out of that insular community and into the wider world of sports and politics. While Nahem was still a teenager, an older cousin, Ralph Sutton, as well as his younger brother Joe and first cousin Joe Cohen, exposed him to radical political ideas. Sutton also mentored Nahem to appreciate Shakespeare and classical music. In 1933, in the midst of the Depression, Nahem entered Brooklyn...

Politics, Ethnicity, and the Mission of the University: The Kenyan Example

The vulnerability of the education sector to the risks of political instability became clearly evident during the flare-up of violence following the disputed 2007 presidential elections in Kenya. Whereas universities especially in the developing world have often been seen as breeding grounds for radical political ideas and student activism, the post-election violence in Kenya directly affected university education, on a scale no other event has in the country's history. And, for the first time, the crisis facing education generally, and higher education specifically, showed clear ethnic manifestations.

Introduction to the Story of Hong Gildong

Introduction to the Story of Hong Gildong Minsoo Kang (bio) The importance of Hong Gildong Jeon (The Story of Hong Gildong) to Korean culture is hard to exaggerate. As a prime example of soseol (prose fiction) written prior to the modern period, it has the advantage over more esoteric works like Kim Manjung’s Nine Cloud Dream in featuring an exciting story of a righteous outlaw hero who has often been described as the Korean Robin Hood. In the twentieth century, his narrative has been retold, revisioned, and updated so many times in fiction, films, television shows, and comic books that his place as the most famous icon from classical literature is rivaled only by Chunhyang. Even the vast majority of modern Koreans who have never actually read the original work are familiar with the story of the illegitimate son (traditionally called seoeol, or a secondary child) of a nobleman and his lowborn concubine who leaves home in frustration at his inability to pursue his ambitions through government service, becomes the leader of a band of outlaws who dedicate themselves to robbing from the rich and the powerful, and eventually leaves Joseon to become a king of his own realm. Scholarly study of the work, however, has been hampered by certain misconceptions about its origin and significance that have also been firmly established in the public consciousness through repetition in school textbooks. The most prevalent of the [End Page 221] misconceptions include the following: 1. Hong Gildong Jeon was written by the Joseon dynasty poet and statesmen Heo Gyun (1569–1618). 2. Hong Gildong Jeon is a narrative manifesto of Heo Gyun’s radical political ideas. 3. Hong Gildong Jeon is the first work of prose fiction to be originally composed in the native phonetic script of hangeul. These ideas appeared in the pioneering work Joseon Soseolsa (History of Joseon Prose Fiction) by Kim Taejun which was first serialized in the newspaper Donga Ilbo from 1930 to 1931, and was collected into a book in 1933. It is the first full-length study of the subject that laid the foundation for all future study of classical fiction, but recently scholars have had to grapple with numerous mistakes, unsupported assertions, and ideological interpretations in the work that have solidified into standard readings through decades of uncritical acceptance. As a nationalist and a communist, Kim Taejun presented a subversive reading of Hong Gildong Jeon in which he portrayed Heo Gyun as a proto-socialist who wrote the work to criticize the feudalistic order of Joseon and who planned a revolution to overthrow the kingdom in order to create a more egalitarian state in its place.1 The sole basis for the attribution comes from the writings of Yi Sik (1584–1647), who was once a student of Heo but turned against him for reasons of court politics. In a rather unflattering portrait of his former teacher, Yi claims that Heo and his closest friends were such admirers of the Chinese bandit epic Water Margin that he wrote Hong Gildong Jeon in imitation.2 Because Yi Sik emerged as one of the most important literary figures of the late Joseon dynasty, his assertion that Heo Gyun wrote a story about the historical [End Page 222] bandit (there are a few records in the royal records of an outlaw named Hong Gildong who was captured in 1500) was repeated numerous times by various writers. There is, however, no evidence that Yi Sik had actually read or even seen the work, and none that can demonstrate that the work supposedly written by Heo Gyun in the seventeenth century is related in any way to the extant work of that title. In fact, when one considers the entire history of Joseon prose fiction that has recently emerged from numerous necessary corrections of Kim Taejun’s view on the subject, it seems highly improbable that a work of that nature, one composed originally in hangeul no less, could have been written that early. Under the able leadership of the eighteenth-century monarchs Yeongjo and Jeongjo, Joseon enjoyed a prolonged period of peace and prosperity that also created the conditions necessary for the development of a market for...

Reaction to Henry VII's style of kingship and its contribution to the emergence of constitutional monarchy in England

London was no exception to the general tendency for the cities of ancient and medieval Europe to serve, at least sporadically, as forcing houses for radical political ideas and constitutional experiments. By 1485 the city had developed a constitution in which the rights of the governed were recognized and there were clearly-articulated notions about what constituted ‘proper’ government. Consequently, Henry VII's ‘arbitrary’ style of kingship – in particular a tendency for his ministers not only to share roles among themselves but to usurp other men's, and the serious challenge this posed to the authority of London's governors – generated a strong reaction at his death which found a voice in the writings of Londoners such as Thomas More. These writings were not only part of an ancient debate about how to bridle the essentially ungovernable wills of English kings, but helped to move the debate on from attempts to persuade kings to exercise self-control to attempts to deprive them of real power.

Auguste Laurent. Radical and radicals

Auguste Laurent (1807-1853) was one of the most important chemists of the nineteenth century. He discovered and synthesized a large number of aromatic organic compounds, among them naphthalene derivatives, anthracene, phenanthrene, stilbene, benzil, phthalic acid, phthalic anhydride, and pyrene. His theories about equivalents and radicals were fundamental for destroying the dualistic approach and establish the modern approach of organic chemistry. He proposed a new rational method of organic classification based on the functional groups present in the molecule that became the basis of the Geneva nomenclature for organic chemistry adopted in 1892, His radical political ideas and his acrid commentaries on the opinion and errors of fellow chemists curbed his academic progress and were an important reason for the poor reception of his advanced ideas during his lifetime.

Stalin, Man of the Borderlands

Soviet policy toward the borderlands was largely the work of Lenin and Stalin. But it was Stalin, a product of that milieu, who completed the structure in his own image. He was raised, educated and initiated as a Marxist revolutionary in the South Caucasus, a borderland of the Russian Empire. At the time of his birth in 1878, the region had become a crossroads, intersecting the movement of people and ideas from Western Europe, Russia and Trans Caspia. In his youth Iosif or “Soso” Dzhugashvili filtered elements of all these currents into a revolutionary ideology of his own making and tested it in its unique kaleidoscopic social and ethnic setting. In his youth, the circulation of European and Russian books in translation, students from imperial universities to the region and the migrations of seasonal workers from Iran helped to spread radical political ideas among the small Armenian, Georgian and later Azerbaizhan intelligentsia. The economic life of the region was also undergoing significant changes. Burgeoning pockets of industrialization formed around the oil industry in Baku, textiles and leather manufacturing in Tiflis (Tbilisi) and Batumi, and mining in Kutais. A small proletariat was emerging in a multicultural environment. Dzhugashvili's first experiences as a revolutionary agitator were played out in three of these cities: Baku, Tiflis and Batumi where he encountered the complexities of class and ethnic strife. Already as a seminary student in Tiflis, the young Soso, like many of his contemporaries, identified himself with several strands of this borderland 10culture. Woven together, they helped to shape his beliefs, attitudes and politics. In the process he constructed an identity that combined native Georgian, borrowed Russian and invented proletarian components. While many of his contemporaries in the revolutionary movement forged their careers and spent their lives in the South Caucasus, Stalin, as he began to call himself in 1912, projected himself onto the all-Russian stage, bringing with him as he rose to power trusted comrades from his early days as a labor organizer and propagandist. Along the way he propagandized a vision of the state that mirrored his presentation of self as a representative of three interlocking identifications: an ethno-cultural region (Georgia) as a territorial unit, Great Russia as the center of political power, and the proletariat as the dominant class.

To the other shore: the Russian Jewish intellectuals who came to America

This is the story of a small but influential group of Jewish intellectuals who emigrated to the US from the Russian Empire between 1881 and the early 1920s - the era of mass immigration. This group abandoned their Jewish identity, absorbed the radical political ideas circulating in 19th-century Russia and took these theories with them to America. When they became leaders in the labour movement in the United States and wrote for the Yiddish, Russian and English-language radical press, the generally retained the secularized Russian cultural identity they had adopted in their homeland, together with their committment to socialist theories. This group of Jewish intellectuals included: Abraham Cahan, long-time editor of The Jewish Daily Forward and one of the most influential Jews in America during the first half of the 20th century; Morris Hillquit, a founding figure of the American socialist movement; Michael Zametkin and his wife, Adella Kean, both journalists and labour activitists in the early decades of the 20th century; and Chaim Zhitlovsky, one of the most important Yiddish writers in modern times. These individuals were part of the generation of Jewish intellectuals that preceded the better-known New York Intellectuals of the late-1920s and 1930s - the group chronicled in Irving Howe's World Of Our Fathers.

Praxis and Poiesis: Toward an Intellectual Biography of Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979

The affluent, assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie of pre-World War I central Europe has proved to be an almost predictable source of some of the century's most radical political ideas: the elder Lukaics managed the largest bank in Szeged, Walter Benjamin's father was a wealthy Berlin art dealer, Horkheimer's was a prosperous member of the Stuttgart textile trade, and the list goes on. From rather modest beginnings, Carl Marcuse (the name, incidentally, is genealogically identical to that of Karl Marx) also established himself in the flourishing German textile industry, but prudently transferred his holdings to real estate before the war. The Marcuse family moved from Berlin to the fashionable suburb of Charlottenburg, and Herbert Marcuse, like so many of his future colleagues, grew up in circumstances which enabled him to take for granted the material achievements of industrial capitalism and set his sights elsewhere. Herbert Marcuse's early education also followed a familiar pattern: the humanistic, civic and religious ideas of the Prussian and Jewish cultures were presented in their: official form, purified of their subversive or transcendental content, only to return with vengeance later in his life. Even at that time, however, a rebellious instinct could be discerned: his rabbi once took it upon himself to assure Herbert that it was most unlikely that he would ever become a productive member of society (not a bad prophecy), and the public Gymnasium instruction in the German classics was being undermined his early attraction to the writers of the French avant-garde (especially Gide), the esoteric works of Stefan George and his circle, and the early novels and stories of Thomas and especially Heinrich Mann. When his interests began to outstrip the means of a schoolboy to satisfy them, Herbert negotiated an elaborate system of credits with his father, which he would be permitted to forego his place at the family's sumptuous supper table in return for money with which to buy books. His one early link with the Marxian proletariat: he was indeed driven to his work by the lash of hunger.