Revolutionary Ideology Research Articles

A Forgotten Beginning: Hella Wuolijoki’s Philosophic Play Dr. Lucius and the Poet

The article proposes to revise critically the work of the Estonian-Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki created in her mother tongue, Estonian. The main Estonian researcher of Wuolijoki’s work, the late writer and critic Oskar Kruus did not attribute any importance to the play Dr. Lucius ja Luuletaja (Dr. Lucius and the Poet), which indeed was destined to remain in manuscript for about 80 years. As is claimed in the present article, the play, on the contrary, could be considered as a significant attempt to create a philosophic-symbolist drama in the Estonian language. From her early student years in Helsinki, Hella Wuolijoki became under a strong influence of socialist and feminist ideology. However, the main ideas of the play should not be identified as much with the offshoots of revolutionary ideologies of the start of the 20th century as with the spirit emerging from the work of some of the greatest poets-thinkers of Europe and the world, among whom was Juhan Liiv (1864–1913) – Luuletaja (the Poet) in Wuolijoki’s drama.

Commentary About the Assertion and Impact of the New Left Movement in America in the 1960s

The New Left movement in America in the 1960s made a violent attack on the human oppression and devastation brought by the developed industrialized society and arouse intense echo among the post-war American young people. The New Left movement took on a tint of keen idealism and a tendency of anarchism, and was more a cultural and ideological revolution than an economic revolution. This movement had a great impact on America: It compelled the American troops to withdraw from Vietnam; It shook the traditional values in America; and it advanced the reform in the American society.

Jewish Identity and the Russian Revolution: A Case Study of Radical Activism in the Russian Empire

The article deals with Jewish revolutionaries in the Russian Empire from the 1880s until the October Revolution of 1917, approaching them through the prism of their identity crisis during a period of transition. The author's aim is to uncover the cultural and psychological mechanisms of Jewish radical motivation and to elucidate the factors which led to the formation of a radical consciousness and to growth in radical activity. Some of these mechanisms are universal, while others specifically characterize Jewish society in Russia. Equally essential are the modes of transformation of traditional Jewish concepts into the specific elements of revolutionary ideologies.

Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico

This new volume of essays arrives at a propitious time, as Mexico grapples anew with the problem of broad military influence in public life that was seemingly laid low at mid-century. While the new administration in Mexico City must again deal with the competing demands of robust public security and effective civilian control of the armed forces, the essays presented in this volume edited by Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley look back to an earlier time when the military was perhaps the cardinal factor in Mexican political life. Fallaw and Rugeley have brought together a range of scholars to address a series of pressing questions about the essential nature of militias and the military in Mexico. Chief among these questions are two of the most basic but complicated ones: How did the armed forces, regular or irregular, affect daily life? And how did they affect long-term developments in the social, economic, political, and cultural spheres? The editors and contributors quite consciously utilize the methods of the new military history in answering these questions, concerning themselves not so much with top-tier leaders as with “the men who followed them, or . . . the women they left behind, or . . . the nature of life in the barracks” (p. 1). In this, they are engaged in a task of primary recognition, demonstrating that an institution with a pedigree as long as that of the Catholic Church in Mexico obviously had much to say about the relative quality of governance in the country.A central mode of analysis here is the close examination of “brass cacicazgos,” aptly defined as “patrimonial statelets” (p. 15). These political arrangements relied on several factors, including the personal prestige of the leader (personalism), that leader’s military rank and competence, and his political savvy in negotiating with the political center. These zones of influence are critical to most explanations about regional politics in the modern period, but many local authorities have received precious little study. One correction to this is Ben Fallaw’s precise and intriguing examination of the postrevolu-tionary career of Eulogio Ortiz, a second-tier general who nonetheless set the stage for Joaquín Amaro’s reform of the military and Plutarco Elías Calles’s dominance of the state (p. 136). Ortiz’s tasks were simple: enforce revolutionary ideology, weed out the opposition, and destroy the bases of Cristero support in the 1920s. Fallaw very convincingly demonstrates that men like Ortiz effectively used their military standing to deeply influence the daily life of anyone in their orbit, as classic (and important) an argument of the new military history as there is. Ben Smith and Paul Gillingham demonstrate the methods that regional caciques Heliodoro Charis Castro and Alejandro Mange Toyos contrived to acquire, enhance, defend, and, when necessary, use power. They relied on not only very old traditions of regionalism but also newer strategies that appropriated both revolutionary and bureaucratic discourses to legitimate their sometimes tenuous positions. Stephen Neufeld, in a very different approach, recovers the lived experience of the presidential guards surrounding Porfirio Díaz and explains how these volunteers became “a model for how Mexico was to enter modernity” (p. 82).The volume is greatly enriched by David Nugent’s very thorough concluding essay, which appraises the volume’s theoretical contributions. Nugent sees how fundamentally “violence was embedded in the social order, even as force was used variously to defend, undermine, or transform the status quo” (p. 241). He also directly discusses what each essay analyzes to a greater or lesser extent: the legitimation of power. This wide-ranging analysis, especially coming on the heels of such varied and provocative essays, is perhaps the most powerful segment of the collection. Among other conclusions, Nugent argues that there was an essential utility of the brass cacicazgos for the postrevolution-ary leadership in Mexico, which watched as “the organs of the central administration were systematically cannibalized by regionally based elites and locally oriented interests” (p. 249). Symbiosis as governance seems an appropriate way to understand the complex links between a centralized state lacking local dominance and the myriad regional caci-ques lacking legitimacy.The fascinating contributions within this volume and the space limitation of this review do not neatly mesh: there is much more to this book than can be remarked upon here. For scholars interested in state formation broadly conceived, both within Mexicanist circles and without, it will be of great use in thinking about what the state does, and does not, do.

REHABILITANDO HISTÓRICAMENTE AL PORFIRIATO: UNA DIGRESIÓN NECESARIA ACERCA DEL RÉGIMEN DE PORFIRIO DÍAZ. MÉXICO 1876-1910

The Porfirian Age was a hard time of mexican historiography. The revolution of 1910 ended the time of Porfirio Diaz, and it contempted the dictator figure. The revolutionary ideology was interested in accrediting the modern period of Mexico to the revolution. This article c1aims that the Porfirian age was a funtamental period of mexican history.

Iranian methamphetamine and Turkey: an emerging transnational threat

Traditionally, Turkish security officials were engaged with state-level threats from Iran. Their primary concerns were export of revolutionary ideology, sponsorship of terrorism, proliferation of nuclear weapons and energy blackmail. In the recent years, however, the nature of the threat has changed and diversified. Non-state actors, mainly transnational crime syndicates, have begun to pose a significant threat to both Turkey and Iran. Iranian drug networks (IDNs) have become the primary actors in heroin and methamphetamine trafficking through Turkey. The IDN threat transcends the jurisdictions of the two states and casts a debilitating impact on the Asia-Pacific countries. Despite a plethora of enacted initiatives, high profits sustain large-scale trans-regional methamphetamine trafficking. Retail prices in the Asia-Pacific markets approach hundred-fold profits over the production costs of methamphetamine in Iran. In this context, Turkish law-enforcement agencies report increasing amounts of methamphetamine seizures since 2009. The upsurge in seizure quantities is coupled with an escalation of cases and arrests. This paper investigates dimensions of the methamphetamine threat in Turkey, profiles of the actors, shipment routes, and modus operandi of the trafficking syndicates. It provides insight into a non-traditional non-state threat coming out of Iran. The inferences are based on an analysis of 183 methamphetamine case files and 81 provincial questionnaires of the Department of Anti-Smuggling and Organized Crime (KOM).

A Dissonance in Mao's Revolution: Chinese Agricultural Imports from the United States, 1972-1978

Following President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972, U.S.-China trade increased almost ten-fold within three years, of which China’s agricultural imports represented the largest category. This trade created unprecedented opportunities for the Chinese pragmatists to pursue economic modernization, and sharpened the conflict between them and the radicals who adhered to Mao Zedong’s ideological crusade. Drawing on both English and Chinese sources, this article examines the fluctuations of China-U.S. agricultural trade between 1972 and 1978. It focuses on the process of trade management in an ideologically charged environment, specifically, the interactions between the pragmatists and radicals under the dominance of Mao. It argues that this trade brought tremendous pressure on the very framework of that Chinese system, tested the boundaries of Mao’s revolutionary ideology, and encouraged a fundamental change of course in China.

Shelley's ‘cancelled cycles’: Huttonian Geomorphology and Catastrophe in Prometheus Unbound (1820)

In an important recent study of the theories of the eighteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton, Tom Furniss has read Hutton’s 1788 text as ‘Romantic science’, arguing that Hutton’s depiction of the earth as a ‘self-sustaining. . . organism whose design bears witness to the wisdom and goodness of nature itself’ offers a model of nature that finds parallels in Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Romantic theory. Demonstrating how Hutton’s text participates in the formation of Romantic culture, Furniss explores the continuities between Hutton’s ostensibly Enlightenment science and Romantic sensibilities. Building on Furniss’s argument, this paper reads Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) as a text that responds to both the empirical and Romantic character of Huttonian earth science, and crucially, as a text that uses the mechanisms of geological change Hutton posits in order to figure a characteristically Shelleyan revolution. It is a commonplace to read Shelley’s ideal model of socio/political reform as a gradual, non-violent and ideological revolution in which the values of the intellectual elite are filtered down and assimilated into the social body over generations. However, with regards to Prometheus Unbound, the structural mechanism through which Shelley figures this transformation has not been fully identified. I argue that a more coherent picture of the Shelleyan revolution emerges once the drama’s Huttonian deep structure is brought into relief, and that the geology of Shelley’s text, which has been read in terms of Georges Cuvier’s descriptions of the effects of serial geological catastrophe, can only be fully understood once the drama as a whole is framed within the wider cycles of Huttonian geological theory. Shelley’s depiction of sequential tyrannies – of ‘cancelled cycles’ and the ‘wrecks . . . of many a city vast’ (4.289, 296) – evokes Constantin Francois Volney’s The Ruins: or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1791), a text that Shelley knew well and that resonates in much of his politically charged poetry, and one that offered a powerful indictment of a world denied moral and intellectual maturity. That The Ruins made a ‘deep . . . impression upon Shelley’, and that ‘echoes of it are to be found in Prometheus Unbound’, has long been recognised. Also well known is Shelley’s adherence to the Godwinian view that political reform should ‘take place in a mild and gradual, though incessant advance, not by violent leaps’. In A Philosophical View

“A Genuine Republican”:

“A Genuine Republican”:

Dos documentos relativos a la formación filosófica de Hidalgo

Based on two documents: the Dissertation of Hidalgo and the Letter of Praise from Dr. Pérez Calama, published in 1784; the article gives account of some aspects of Hidalgo’s theological and philosophical thought. It highlights the rich ideological context surrounding the academic life of Hidalgo, especially during his stay in San Nicolas College in Valladolid (today Morelia). Hidalgo in his Dissertation proposes the renewal of the theology teaching method: it supports the idea that students should leave the ergotism (speculative scholasticism) and opt for the argumentative method of positive theology. Based on the Gerson ideas, Hidalgo criticizes the bad methods that prevail in classrooms, and proposes the union of positive method with Thomas Aquinas. In order of importance, his method suggests: relying on the sources, clarifying the meaning of the words so that they are consistent with the doctrine of the tradition, studying ecclesiastical history, locating the study in history and geography, and finally, it emphasizes the use of criticism. After the analysis, we can infer that in Hidalgo there is an ideological revolution prior to the Revolution of Independence.

Una codificazione del Kemalismo come ideologia negli anni '30: il movimento “Kadro”

Abstract This study is focused on Kadro, a political movement gathered around the monthly review of the same name published between 1932 and 1934 in Turkey. Composed by former communists as Şevket Süreyya Aydemir alongside with prominent nationalist writers such as Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, the movement aimed to develop Kemalism as a revolutionary ideology. The article analyses some of Kadro’s basic ideas and their impact on the debate within the ranks of Republican People’s Party.

SELF-RECOVERY AND VIOLENCE AS A FORM OF RE-HUMANIZATION: KENZABURO OE, THE SILENT CRY (MAN’EN GANNEN NO FUTTOBORU, 1967)

This study attempts to demonstrate the ambivalent role of violence, which, as suggested in the Japanese novel, is simultaneously destructive and constructive. The history of mankind, which is in constant metamorphosis, appears to be defined, both from a mythical and socio-political perspective and from an intellectual or psychological vantage point, as struggle and violence. This is one of the reading interpretations proposed by the Japanese novel, in which the dialectics of violence targets more than an ideological revolution or political transformation, since, by acquiring the connotations of sacredness and rebirth, it finally bears witness to a process of self-recovery and re-humanization. Admixing elements of real history in a fictional trauma, Kenzaburō Ōe’s novel amounts to what might be called a fiction of the real. In order for the history of this seemingly lost present not to fall prey to ideology and political abuse, the Japanese author proposes a return to myth, without idealising it; though the appeal to logos demands the rethinking of tradition according to the future it may give rise to. Humanism has been interrogated

"Mit śródziemnomorski" a "polityka śródziemnomorska" Alberta Camusa

In this article, the author presents how Albert Camus opposed the totalitarian harmony of Mediterranean and Nordic disharmony. A. Camus gives to the myth of Mediterranean much political and ideological overtones and shows how far away it is from the idealistic and revolutionary ideology of northern Europe. The writer argues that the struggle between south and north is permanent, even though Europe for centuries tried to forget the ideals of the south, destroying itself by doing so and moving towards of self-degradation. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that A. Camus does not ignore modern Europe, because his intention is only making clear to the reader that the modern world can no longer dispense without the idea of the Mediterranean world.

Santo Domingo’s Slaves in the Context of the Peace of Basel: Boca Nigua’s Black Insurrection, 1796

This article analyzes the black insurrection of Boca Nigua’s sugar mill in Spanish Santo Domingo in 1796, to show that any slave rebellion must be regarded as a direct consequence of the slaves condition, though external circumstances might favor them. I highlight the importance of those events, which must be identified as the first echo of Saint-Domingue’s revolution, in the eastern part of Hispaniola. First, I describe the theoretical framework of my research. Then, I study the penetration of news of Saint-Domingue’s revolution, and of the French revolutionary ideology in Santo Domingo since 1795. Third, I describe two black uprisings prior to Boca Nigua’s rebellion, as well as the situation within that plantation before the cited events. Finally, I analyze the development and outcome of the rebellion, focusing on the slaves’ plans, on the desertion of one of their leaders, and on the violent repression by colonial government.

Searching for a New Cultural Identity: China's soft power and media culture today

The paper argues that China's global expansion and calls for its use of soft power are provoking an ideological crisis which is becoming one of the most critical challenges of the present time. Revolutionary ideology legitimated the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for 60 years, but it has become increasingly at odds with the rapid socio-economic development that began 30 years ago. This paper examines four aspects of contemporary Chinese culture: first the discrepancy between the CCP's ideological rhetoric and its pragmatic policies; second, the fragmentation of the state, the intellectual elite, and the grassroots population in terms of cultural expressions and values; third, the consumer culture which has unleashed materialistic desires; and finally, the emergence of a ‘post-80s’ generation urban youth culture amidst these tension and contradictions.

King Faisal and the Challenge of Nasser's Revolutionary Ideology

The purpose of this article is to examine the relations between Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the time of King Faisal's rise to power until President Nasser's death, via various events that shaped the Middle East. The article will also examine the main points of disagreement between the two countries, as well as the threat to the stability of the Saudi regime posed by the Egyptian President during those years. Finally, the research will examine the influence of President Nasser's death on Saudi–Egyptian relations and on the Middle East in general.

Middle Eastern Constitutional and Ideological Revolutions and the Rise of Juristocracy

Middle Eastern Constitutional and Ideological Revolutions and the Rise of Juristocracy

Revolutionizing Antigone: A Puerto Rican Adaptation of Sophocles’ Tragedy

This article focuses on Luis Rafael Sánchez's La pasión según Antígona Pérez (1968, The Passion According to Antígona Pérez), an adaptation of Sophocles’ seminal tragedy, and examines the manners in which the Puerto Rican dramatist reinscribes the Greek play into his contemporary sociopolitical context to redefine cultural identity. This study analyzes how the play blends motifs borrowed from Christianity and ancient drama for the purposes of promoting a revolutionary ideology. The article also challenges the existing scholarship on this rewriting of Antigone and contests some of the common assumptions made by the critics of La pasión, particularly with regard to its performative strategy and gender representation. It seeks to reveal why, in spite of a whole range of Brechtian devices built into the text of the play, the actual performances of the latter often fail to produce the effects essential to Brecht's concept of epic theater. The claim that La pasión disrupts a patriarchal narrative is, likewise, subjected to criticism: notwithstanding its counterhegemonic stance, the play applies the same topos of casting a female character as the dispensable “other” that is typical of the dominant discourse.

Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880 (review)

Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880. By Daniel R. Mandell. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. 343. Cloth, $57.00; Paper, $35.00.)Reviewed by Joanne Pope MelishDaniel Mandell's history of the Native peoples of southern New England between 1780 and 1880 focuses on the struggles of Native groups to maintain their autonomy, identity, and cultural values, both as Indians and as particular tribal groups, within the dominant economic and political structures of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. He is interested in interpreting the way Indians' lives, the relationships of their with state governments, and whites' perceptions of Indians changed over the course of the century and shaped New England identity and history. For the most part he has succeeded admirably, drawing upon an immense collection of archival sources to fashion an extremely detailed and nuanced story.The book is organized into six chapters, each focusing on paired aspects of Native experiences in southern New England, followed by an epilogue that explores the effects of state termination of tribal status and the subsequent emergence of pan-Indian and revitalization movements in the 1920s. Land and Labor establishes the key elements of Native identity - connection to legally protected tribal reserves whose land and resources were managed in common, and participation in transient wage labor near the reserves and in towns, cities, and ports. Indians worked as whalers, farmers, servants, peddlers, basket makers, and herbal doctors, participating marginally in the emerging regional market economy while maintaining subsistence ways and communal values.The reserves served as reservoirs of antimarket forces (36); but this made them attractive to poor whites and blacks uncomfortable with the impersonal market economy. Community and Family focuses on the increasing rates of (usually informal) marriages of Indians to whites and especially African Americans in nearly every Indian community. In the emerging racist climate of the 1820s, whites began to distinguish real Indians from mongrels. While some Indians condemned exogamous marriages and made racist statements about blacks, Mandell argues that most were really concerned about foreigners of whatever race; race became significant among Indians largely as a useful code for speaking to white men. He notes that only . . . Mohegans and Narragansetts adopted rules that seem to echo American racism, and those rules were rarely followed or enforced (53). But the many examples of racial antipathy that follow suggest that Mandell is understating the case. He also argues against the claim of scholars such as Ruth Wallis Herndon, Ella Sekatau, and myself that the reassignment of Indians to categories of black and negro by town officials in the early republic exaggerated the numbers of exogamous relationships and their offspring, citing figures recorded by Anglo-American men who worked closely with Native communities that reflect the reality of the increasing rates of exogamous marriages rather than racist distortions (48). But why should such men be more immune than town officials to the unconscious changes in their ways of seeing wrought by ideology?Chapter 3, Authority and Autonomy, describes how Mashpee and other Indian combined Revolutionary ideology and radical evangelical religion to challenge the political and religious authority of the guardians and orthodox clergy assigned by state governments to manage them at the end of the Revolution. The successful revolt of the Mashpee community in 1834 that abolished their guardianship and ousted their assigned Congregationalist minister essentially marked the end of elite demands for moral order and deference from Native groups. …

World revolution knocking at the heavenly gate: Kang Youwei and his use of geming in 1898

After 1895 as the Manchu monarchy failed to deal with the national crisis created by China's loss in the first Sino–Japanese War, the ideology of revolution won a foothold. A paradigm shift in Chinese revolutionary discourse, radicalized by way of Japanese translations and symbolized by Sun Yat-sen's self-proclaimed “revolutionary party,” embraced the view of the rising masses as masters of history. It was during the age of world revolution that Kang Youwei shaped his worldview. While juxtaposing the French Revolution with the anti-Manchu revolution, he betrayed his background in the New Text Confucian canon by lending legitimacy to the rebels. In analyzing Kang's memorials of 1898, this paper reveals how his reform theory and practice were framed by his vision of world revolution, and how the words bianfa, weixin and bianzheng were interwoven with the unseen geming, rhetorically mixing the history of world revolution with the Tang–Wu tradition. This paper asserts that the geming discourse in Kang's use inscribed with a radical blueprint for China was actually an imposition of modernity onto the Qing court rather than empowering its legitimation in a traditional Confucian way. In scrutinizing these keywords in transnational contexts, the analysis crosses not only the fields of language, politics, Classical study and intellectual culture, but also the subtle layers of intertextual verification, psychological complexity and political and cultural intensities, and attempts to open new dimensions for the study of Kang Youwei and the 1898 reform movement.