Social Genealogies Research Articles

Social Genealogy of the Polish Intelligentsia

The text is a reprint of the second chapter of Józef Chałasiński’s essay Społeczna genealogia inteligencji polskiej [Social Genealogy of the Polish Intelligentsia], originally published in 1946.

Hume on the social construction of mathematical knowledge

Mathematics for Hume is the exemplary field of demonstrative knowledge. Ideally, this knowledge is a priori as it arises only from the comparison of ideas without any further empirical input; it is certain because demonstration consist of steps that are intuitively evident and infallible; and it is also necessary because the possibility of its falsity is inconceivable as it would imply a contradiction. But this is only the ideal, because demonstrative sciences are human enterprises and as such they are just as fallible as their human practitioners. According to the reading suggested here, Hume develops a radical sceptical challenge for mathematics, and thereby he undermines the knowledge claims associated with demonstrative reasoning. But Hume does not stop there: he also offers resources for a sceptical solution to this challenge, one that appeals crucially to social practices, and sketches the social genealogy of a community-wide mathematical certainty. While explaining this process, he relies on the conceptual resources of his faculty psychology that helps him to distinguish between the metaphysics and practices of mathematical knowledge. His account explains why we have reasons to be dubious about our reasoning capacities, and also how human nature and sociability offers some remedy from these epistemic adversities.

Historias de familia. El marco ampliado de las historias de vida

El artículo explora qué es y cómo fue usado el método historias de familia (Bertaux, 1995; Miller, 2007) en la investigación doctoral “Experiencias de crianza en contextos de conflicto armado en Colombia”. El texto expone cómo se ubica este método en los debates contemporáneos sobre investigación cualitativa y su articulación epistemológico-metodológica. Luego muestra la relación de este método con la tradición biográfico-narrativa de la investigación social. Después, explica cómo surgió el método a partir de lo que Bertaux (1995) llama historias de familia desde la genealogía social comparada y comentada (gscc). Más adelante, describe los criterios conceptuales y procedimentales de las historias de familia a partir del modelo sugerido por Miller (2007). Por último, se incluyen algunos ejemplos de la investigación doctoral que ilustran el uso del método.

СОЦИАЛЬНАЯ ГЕНЕАЛОГИЯ ПЕРВОГО ПОКОЛЕНИЯ СОВЕТСКИХ ИНЖЕНЕРОВ 1930-х гг.: ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ ПОВСЕДНЕВНОСТИ

СОЦИАЛЬНАЯ ГЕНЕАЛОГИЯ ПЕРВОГО ПОКОЛЕНИЯ СОВЕТСКИХ ИНЖЕНЕРОВ 1930-х гг.: ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ ПОВСЕДНЕВНОСТИ

Grupos familiares y redes sociales en la carrera militar. Los oficiales de origen vasco y navarro en el ejército y la marina, 1700-1808

During the 18th century, some Basque and Navarre families had a remarkable position within the prestigious officers of the Spanish army and navy. Those military posts were important since they combined not only a military, but also a political status, holding transcendent government events in all over the Spanish empire. A “social genealogy” analysis is developed in the following paper in order to explain how those Basque and Navarre families managed such a social promotion, which rooted in trade activities and in the collective nobility of their homeland. Their “relational capital” is shown in different strategies such as children sponsorship, recommendations or practical formation carried out inside their family networks. The social relations such as decisive friendships formed through the future officers’ training, will be also analysed as part of that social capital that seems particularly intriguing to explain the continuity of different generations of those families in the most prestigious posts of the Monarchy.

Closing Reflections: Confronting contradictions in biographies of nations and persons

The biography of a nation is not the same as the biography of a person. That much is simple. One is about a single person's life history and the other is about the formation of a community of persons. On the other hand, analytically describing how a biographical method can be used for both persons and nations is not straightforward. The central crossover occurs in the concept of 'the social'. An individual identity, like the projection of a national identity, is a social identity. Thus, biographies, whether of persons or of nations, are specific social genealogies, social histories, social mappings - call them what you like - graphic narratives of the bios or 'ways of life' of a person or community of persons. In this understanding, 'the social' is thus not just a background context, nor is it just another dimension to be considered among others. The social does not act as the stage on which characters walk around. The social is us - as persons and communities. In this sense, the 'social context' is a complex metaphor that describes our interrelations with others and with nature, including particular spatial configurations, specific organisational contexts and distinctive self-andother understood histories, whether they be personal or national. The notion of a 'social context' can thus be a useful metaphor, but it is too often abused.

Raphaël Lemkin, creator of the concept of genocide: a world history perspective

Genocide is one of those rare concepts whose author and inception can be precisely specified and dated. The term was created by the brilliant PolishJewish and later American jurist Raphael Lemkin (1900-59) in 'Genocide' in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress, published in the United States in 1944.2 Lemkin was also the prime mover in the discussions that led to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The concept was immediately recognised worldwide as of contemporary significance and future importance, for it called attention to humanity at its limits. It is a major concept in international law, for its framework of group experience and rights challenges both a stress on the individual as the subject of law and the exclusive jurisdiction of modern nation-states.3 Lemkin as an intellectual figure and the concept of genocide have been a preoccupying interest for me since 2001 when I co-edited a special series of essays for the journal Aboriginal History called 'Genocide? Australian Aboriginal history in international perspective'.4 The spectre of genocide as a feature of Australian history in relation to its Indigenous peoples had, only a few years before, been raised by the Australian Human Rights Commission's 1997 Bringing Them Home report, which argued that the Aboriginal child-removal practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fell within the definition of genocide used in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.5 In 2003, Ann Curthoys and I researched Lemkin's papers in the American Jewish Historical Society in New York and the New York Public Library, where we were especially eager to pursue the suggestions in his definition linking genocide with settler colonialism.6 I think that Australian scholars are at the forefront of world genocide studies because historical investigation of settler colonialism is so intense, sustained and interrogative in Australia.7 Inspired by Lemkin's work, the new genocide studies asks: are settler colonies inherently or constitutively genocidal?8 And, if so, what does this say of the ethical character of post-1492 European settler colonialism and empires? After such knowledge, what honour?9 My essay will be in two parts. Part one will offer a sketch of Lemkin's life, outlining his ideas about genocide in his published and unpublished writings. My approach is influenced by Hannah Arendt 's Men in Dark Times, which says we can best understand a thinker in terms of biography, sensibility, anecdote and social genealogy.10 I am also influenced by Janet Abu-Lughod's world-history approach. Abu-Lughod suggests that the writing of significant historical narrative entails a number of qualities: it should be conceived in an anti-Euro-centric spirit, it should involve a 'synthetic imagination or vision' and it should engage in what the philosopher Hans Gadamer in Truth and Method refers to as a capacity for 'reflexivity and self-conscious awareness'. Historical reflection should also include an element that is extremely personal; indeed, Abu-Lughod values a mode of personal vision that is inspired by eccentricity and idiosyncrasy - the kind of vision, she feels, that leads to the finding of a particular pattern in history.11 In part two, I offer some possible criticisms of Lemkin. In particular, a question mark hangs over his attitude to African Americans and indeed to Africa and Africans, raising disturbing questions that also haunt Arendt scholarship. I wish in turn to bring to the fore a more general problem: European or Europeanderived intellectuals, so committed to cosmopolitanism and inclusive notions of humanity, yet revealing a distressingly familiar Euro-centric failure of critical consciousness and reflexivity. 1 . Raphael Lemkin's life, contexts and the concept of 'genocide' Lemkin was born on 24 June 1900 in Bezwodne, a village near Wolkowysk (now Vaulkovisk), a small city in what is now Belarus. …

Lenz (review)

This is a wonderful new translation, and a very handsome book. Cut-flush binding with a richly textured carton, it indeed fits into one hand, and thus affords the sensation of reading one's palms, the left one for the German text, the right one for the English translation. This gesture of self-reading is certainly not alien to readers of Lenz from Canetti to Deleuze—everybody confronting the text, and in this case the translation, experiences almost bodily the disorientation issuing from it, a sensation that threatens to overwhelm any attempt at comprehending this short marvel in prose. The philological establishment has sought to neutralize this threat by naming it madness, more specifically: schizophrenia. Archipelago publishers (we hear in the name the title of a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, another mad poet translated by Richard Sieburth) seem to support this attempt by calling the piece "a case study of three weeks in the life of a schizophrenic" (cover text); but the translation undoes the claim to illustrative purposiveness, and releases the text again into its restlessness and wandering. The disorientation radiating from Lenz is not the result of a tropological affectation, of compassion, say, for the sorry poet, or of indignation over the heartlessness of a society that first creates misfits and then drives them into madness. Trapped in the paradigms of scriptural exegesis, Büchner's champions have often sought to found their claim for his canonical importance on the moral sense of his writings, and have understood morality exclusively as partisanship for the oppressed. The belief in a social genealogy of mental illness in general, and of schizophrenia in particular, was an inevitable consequence of this conviction. In the squalid Germany of the 1970s and 80s, bereft of any legitimate political perspective beyond the relentless defensiveness of the state, the schizophrenic became a messianic figure, spiritualized in equal measure by Hölderlin interpreters and editors, anti-psychiatry activists, and avant-garde artists. Werner Herzog's Woyzeck film, but even more so Jean-Marie Straub's mesmerizing Lenz visualized this searing tendency towards the truth of madness, as did many a rousing production of Büchner's plays, and—inversely—Peter Schneider's novella Lenz from 1973. Behind this politico-psychiatric genealogy of madness and civilization lurked a biographical genealogy, namely Büchner's own development from revolutionary pamphleteer to political playwright, and [End Page 774] finally to the prose portrait of Lenz, in which all these stations seem to be implicated. There were canonical allegories as well to be deciphered in this constellation: just as the historical Lenz went mad because Weimar society, represented by Goethe, had excluded him, so was the novella Lenz, and its author Büchner, excluded from the German canon which was dominated by the works of Goethe and Weimar classicism. It is difficult to argue against these powerful forces shaping the reading of Lenz, but in the end, content-fixated absorptions of Büchner's novella lose much more in aesthetic power than they can ever hope to gain in moral conviction. The aesthetic audacity of Büchner's text is best measured by holding it against the generic limitations against which his work constantly chafes. Bianca Theisen, in discussing Thomas Bernhard's ambivalence between comedy and tragedy, has shown that comedy can be understood as the second-order observation of a tragic plot, whereas tragedy, however violently it seeks to extricate itself from the immanence of its action, remains condemned to repeat its own limitations (leaving the observer position, one assumes, to the spectator who is partly immersed (through fear and compassion), and partly distanced (in catharsis)). The genre to observe comedy and indeed all other genres is the narrative text, in particular the novel as it is conceived in Romantic literary theory.1 Büchner's slim œuvre is intensely preoccupied with finding ways to circumvent these limitations. Dantons Tod eludes the dialectics of tragedy by having the heroes re-cite 'improper' text at diegetically...

Genealogies of Soft Law

The relatively recent blossoming of multiple soft law tools and the calls for a soft harmonization of European private law have invited reflection on the genealogy of soft law. Genealogical arguments have come to play a critical role in the heated European soft law v. hard law debate. While some find the ancestors of soft law in the medieval legal regime and particularly the lex mercatoria, others link soft law to a prolific strand of 19th and early 20th century theories of social law and legal pluralism. At times explicitly invoked, more often implicitly alluded to, the neo-medieval genealogy and the social genealogy perform a crucial ideological function, legitimizing different political and professional agendas of soft harmonization and obfuscating their failures and distributive consequences.

The ‘Bourgeoisie Seconde’: Social Differentiation in the Parisian Municipal Oligarchy in the Sixteenth Century, 1500–1610

Abstract Today, political or religious movements are not generally considered to have had social origins. However, this study points to a major shift in Parisian society during the sixteenth century. The bourgeoisie, which represented a unified juridical status that transcended any distinctions within the municipal notability (royal officials, liberal professions and wealthy merchants), experienced a radical process of differentiation: the magistrates and financiers tended to base their social position on privileges other than those of the ‘bourgeoisie’. Remaining faithful to the old municipality, those bourgeois who had not yet trodden the path to royal office joined together in a huge protest movement, which culminated in the formation of the Catholic League. The method used to test these hypotheses is the reconstitution of numerous social genealogies, in as complete a fashion as possible, covering the long sixteenth century. One clear conclusion emerges as a result: at the heart of the municipal oligarchy of the years 1500–1610, the incidence of decline is just as significant as a process of social ascent. One cannot establish a direct link between these trends on the one hand, and the political crisis of the Wars of Religion, on the other, but at the very least they determined the context in which the ‘troubles’ were to develop.

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Narrative Ned Curthoys . . . authoritative discourse . . . demands our unconditional allegiance ... It is indissolubly fused with its authority—wiüi political power, an institution, a person. . . . One cannot divide it up—agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part. ... A playing with distances, with fusion and dissolution, with approach and retreat, is not here possible ... (authoritative discourse in prose) is by its very nature incapable of being double-voiced; it cannot enter into hybrid constructions ... (t)here is no space around it to play in, no contradictory emotions—it is not surrounded by an agitated and cacophonous dialogic life ... —Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Uprising of the anecdotes. . . . The constructions of history are comparable to instructions that commandeer me true life and confine it to barracks. On the other hand: the street insurgence of the anecdote. The anecdote brings things near to us spatially, lets them enter our life. It represents the strict antithesis to die sort of history which demands 'empathy', which makes everything abstract. .. . The pathos of nearness, the hatred of die abstract configuration of human life in epochs, has animated the great skeptics. —Benjamin, The Arcades Project JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 32.3 (Fall 2002): 348-370. Copyright © 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. Hannah Arendt and the Politics of narrative 349 ... the public realm, as the common world, like every in-between , relates and separates men at the same time. —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition With these words Hannah Arendt issued a vibrant challenge to the "unworldliness " she felt had pervaded the mass society of late industrial capitalism , establishing the conditions for the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1950) Arendt connects unworldliness to a condition of uprootedness and superfluousness , the lack of a place in the world "recognized and guaranteed by others ". For Arendt, such loneliness in the individual is a "common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government" (475, quoted in Benhabib , 67). In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt suggests that the common world we share is manifested in the spaces between us and the media which connect us, analogous to a table which both relates and separates us, gathers us together and yet prevents us falling over each other (The Human Condition, 50-52). In this essay I explore Arendt's interest in forms of worldliness that can be granted recognition in narrative representation , through biography, anecdote, vignette, and social genealogy. I discuss Arendt's fascination with what Deleuze and Guattari have termed "conceptual personae" (What is Philosophy? 73). These are characters and personalities who immerse thought in the abundance and inconsistencies of worldly existence, and are deeply disdainful of sectarianism and orthodoxy . Conceptual personae 'figure' thought as disposition and praxis, an engaged mode of existence rather than an authoritative or monologic discourse . Evoking Arendt's polysémie worldliness, I hope to put her work in a triangular conversation with Bakhtin's theory of the cacophonous, multiform carnivalesque and Benjamin's philosophy of history. Both Arendt and Benjamin seek to undermine the transparency, utility, and consistency of received traditions and homogeneous metanarratives. Arendt's conceptual personae revive the importance in political life of a public ethos, a disposition to communicate and deliberate rather than indoctrinate , to act spontaneously rather than surrender the language of politics to impersonal historical and material forces. Arendt, I argue, is inter- 350 JNT ested in the genres of writing which illuminate a vital ethos, in particular intellectual biography, and its episodic and anecdotal forms of reportage. Her conceptual personae recover a republican language of politics, which emphasises heroic participatory virtues and individual duties to the polis, an enthusiasm for the political arena as open theatre and spectacle. Throughout her oeuvre, Arendt counterposes individual political virtues to the abstract, mechanistic, and teleological political ideologies that have dominated modernity since the nineteenth century. I focus, in this article, on two Arendt texts, firstly the The Human Condition , which stresses the importance of discursive qualities, particularly rhetorical ability, for the vitality of a political arena. I then discuss Men in Dark Times (1970), a collection of intellectual-biographical essays, which provide examples...

La genèse sociale du sujet. Les formes fétichisées de l’individualité dans la socialité moderne

The social genesis of the subject. Fetishized forms of individuality in modern sociality The article endeavours to point out that the subject is the fetishized form of individuality within the scope of capitalist social relations. To be more specific, the article tries to register that individuality is the result of all kinds of fetishism composing capitalist sociality. The successive examination of the latter forms a sort of social genealogy for the subject-form. At the same time, this examination underscores the multiple contradictions of this form like that one between autonomy and heteronomy which is an essential one. Eventually, individuality beyond its subject-form seems to be an irreducible residue of the reification process, the starting point from which one could view the subversion of this process.

Descendance and Social Genealogies: Toward an Evolutionary Conception of Economic History

Descendance and Social Genealogies: Toward an Evolutionary Conception of Economic History

Social Genealogies Commented on and Compared: An Instrument for Observing Social Mobility Processes in the `Longue Durée'

Social Genealogies Commented on and Compared: An Instrument for Observing Social Mobility Processes in the `Longue Durée'

Families and mobility: The European experience

Abstract This paper introduces a new method—Social Genealogies Commented and Compared—for observing how social trajectories of individuals and families are shaped. The basic features of this method—its focus on families rather than individuals, the flexibility of interviewing, the comparison of case studies of families’ histories—make it complementary to survey research. It is argued that the contention of survey research to be the only scientific method of studying social mobility rests upon a Newtonian conception of science that has become obsolete even in the natural sciences. Surveys work best in societies which have stable social structures and a large degree of social homogeneity nation‐wide, and where individual achievement, not family ties, is the key factor in shaping individual trajectories; this is not the case for most European societies. Techniques for collecting and analyzing Social Genealogies are described. Issues such as representativeness and generalization, family legends and the breakdown of nuclear families are briefly dealt with. The pedagogical usefulness of this form of data collecting is stressed.

THEIR `OWN PECULIAR WAY': KARL MANNHEIM AND THE RISE OF WOMEN

Mannheim's published works do not prepare scholars for the importance he attached to the study of women; and his origins in an intellectual milieu attracted to metaphysical dualisms adds interest to his attempted rapprochement with liberal feminism. This study explores a surprising parallel drawn by Karl Mannheim as teacher in the 1930s. Despite vital differences in their social genealogies, women and intellectuals both exemplify groups constitutive of social structure without fitting in the Marxist scheme of social classes. Both groups are in crisis owing to a disproportion between their objective social situations and the conceptions by which they orient themselves. Sociology provides a method, and crisis provides the impulse for both to gain clarity about themselves and their situations. The ensuing group consciousness enables each of them to counter socially oppressive power without abandoning valuable qualities in their distinct social identities for the sake of revolutionary mass mobilisation. Mannheim's thesis requires a conception of constitutional negotiation of group divergences, but his sociological legacy of holistic change and organic integration denies him the political resources to realise such a vision. He fascinates gifted students, but both politicised male intellectuals and independent women treat his design as only a point of departure. The three dissertations by women students reviewed here - one of them a novel enquiry into families of a special kind and two of them pioneering works, respectively, in German and English women's studies - document three different bargains with Mannheim, each of them reserving important intellectual and emotional space from his influence.