European Thought Research Articles

Stefanie Stockhorst (ed.) (2010), Cultural Transfer Through Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

Book Review: Stefanie Stockhorst (ed.) (2010) Cultural Transfer Through Translation : The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation

A Theoretical approach to the contradictory role of the cultural feeling of love in the inequality of the Spanish woman

The has replaced the being as the main category in European thinking. In philosophy, the awareness of this triumph of the becoming has ultimately given rise to two main paths, drawn by Kant and Hegel, respectively. So much so that sociologists, despite our attempts to move from the philosophical reading to the sociological one, are also forced to think about permanence and change in our research object. That dispute between structure and change, so complex and possibly endless, is deeply and inseparably linked to the one that opposes structure to action, another traditional sociological debate. After all, changes are driven by the significant actions of individuals that determine the success or failure of the transformation, as well as its scope, through the interaction with social structures. Our sociological tradition has equally taught us that we must also bear in mind that socio-cultural structures are visibly full of fractures, diverse change rates and contradictions. For all these reasons, my intention here is to explain that the situation of women in Spanish contemporary society, the object of the present study, can be better understood in the light the context of the debates on the link between structure and change and between structure and action. of the two debates mentioned above and the contradictions that they present.

‘Realpoetik’: Revolution by Other Means in European Romantic Restoration Thought

Summary This essay speculates about the degree to which a counter-image of Europe imagined by Romantic period writers showed them to be transforming an inherited idea of the republic of letters for political purposes. While Anglophone romanticists recognise that the French Revolution is an indisputable agent in shaping the contemporary English literary imagination, they then usually ignore the role played by the Restoration which followed. Romantic criticism can perhaps learn an appropriate sensitivity here from the work of critics of English Restoration writing of the seventeenth century. That epochal uncertainty, when the regicides beheaded the King and then wondered what to do politically, was succeeded in the Restoration by a kind of Dissenting determination to continue under or memorialise that uncertainty, not as a dilemma but as the experience of political opportunity. A similar pattern of pursuing revolution by other means is visible in the political revisionism and literary experimentation of post-Revolutionary Romantic radicals. In my picture, then, the Romantic transformation of the republic of letters recovers an older literary republicanism. In what is here dubbed Realpoetik the battle for what is to be political reality is fought on a rhetorical field whose free speech is exemplary of what politics should be like.

Du handicap revisité au handicap psychique : un nouveau concept qui pourrait faire date ?

This article aims to demonstrate that the use of the term “psychic handicap” as enshrined in the last set of French legal guidelines on disability, needs to be seen as part of a wider movement: namely that of attitudes to disability in general, following successive social policies and as expressed through international disability classifications. The law of February 2005, which caused the rush in France, maybe has given too much hope. This is the main issue this article seeks to address. For in reality, it is abundantly clear that this law is a thoroughgoing administrative list of disabilities, and whilst it may offer a definition of disability, it remains descriptive and limited to the adaptive and socio-behavioural repercussions of individual deficiencies. Moreover, the actual text of this law doesn’t use the compressed term “psychological disability”. This results largely from an interpretation of the spirit of the law based on its antecedents. This article intends to throw into relief the differences between the law itself and the debates, which preceded it, to release « the best » of dispositions on the “psychic handicap”, in particular its contributions for the sick persons. It seems that the 2005 law was influenced by scientific and medical thinking. It thus takes its inspiration from American disability terminology (CIH-1980 and CIF-2001) from which it attempts to combine contributions both between them and with those taken from international nosographies of mental health issues. Moreover, although it takes into account expert opinion–albeit from the great figures of traditional French psychiatry–the law continues to be influenced by American psychiatry which has, over the last few decades, given way to a quantitative, cognitivist and biological hegemony, to the detriment of the psychopathology of the afflicted subject. The tide is turning, but this will take time… Another important issue is that parliamentary reports made prior to legislation are driven by French political forces, and therefore addressed to the public to which they are answerable. In this regard, they are on the one hand largely inspired by current European thinking on disability, which may well be based on a fiercely egalitarian ideology, but which also recognises the subjectivity of those individuals in situations of psychological disability. On the other hand, these preparatory texts are clearly steered by user and family groups, as well as professionals within the medico-social sector who, for once, speak as one. It is perhaps paradoxical, but it seems that today, when it comes to psychological disability, it is generally the educational establishment which embodies psychodynamic thinking, whilst it is within the community clinic with those termed “mental” patients, that the qualitative approach to psychological problems, exiled from the hospital and healthcare sector, currently finds refuge… Moreover, whilst the term “psychological disability” is ultimately only useful as a catch-all term to help the wider public understand the various aspects of psychiatric patients’ socio-affective relations, the article highlights the deception of a broken promise: i.e. that a new concept opens up a new epistemological field which allows us to extend our practical and theoretical thinking on the issue. The article concludes that nevertheless, as with disability issues in general, our inability to conceptualise the intuitive compressed term “psychological disability” should lead us to admit that it is the usage of the term which will make it exist, make sense, condense…

Cultural Transfer through Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation

Cultural Transfer through Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation

Eric Nelson. The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought

No abstract is available.

The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought. By Eric Nelson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. $27.95 cloth

The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought. By Eric Nelson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. $27.95 cloth

”Luonnollinen”, konventionaalinen, kulttuurinen

The “Natural”, the Conventional, the Cultural: Problematics of Narration and Sense-giving in the Modernism of Thomas Mann In this article, I appraise the relevance of the narratological distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” narration in the analysis of a specific narrative (such as a novel) by comparing it with Thomas Mann’s understanding of the ”natural”, the cultural and the conventional – especially as they appear in his novel Doctor Faustus. It will be shown how these concepts play a crucial role not only in Thomas Mann’s thinking in general, but also the manner in which he constructs (“composes”) his novels. For Thomas Mann, narration in a realist novel is only apparently natural; in actuality, there is no way of organizing a novel’s materials which could be considered as “natural”. In a sense, the most “artificial” manner in which the entire novel is constructed as a “musical” composition of themes comes closest to the irrational basis of human existence that precedes culture and its conventions: that is, Nature. As a whole, Thomas Mann’s concepts of nature and the natural, the conventional and the cultural are much more complicated and much more deeply attached to German and European thinking in philosophy, the arts, history, politics and religion than the abstractly defined narratological concepts of “natural” and “unnatural” narration which prove to be of little relevance in the interpretation of his complex novels.

Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel - By Cary J. Nederman

Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel - By Cary J. Nederman

‘Ni droite, ni gauche’? - Debatten over het Franse fascisme

Was France during the Interwar period ‘immune’ to fascism, or should it be considered one of the centres of fascist thinking in Europe? Was fascism in France fundamentally anti-bourgeois and ‘left wing’, or was it strongly related to traditional conservatism? These kinds of questions are still pivotal within the scolarly debate on French fascism, but at the same time research is also taking new directions. Through an overview of the historiographical debate on French fascism, this article analyses the development and the themes of an old discussion that is still raging strongly. Though the barriers between English and French language historians are far from gone, more mutual understanding must be possible. After all, only research taking into account political and intellectual history, programs of radical movements as well as ideas of non-conformist intellectuals, can provide meaningful answers to the big questions on French fascism.

Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel, by Cary J. Nederman. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009. 375 pp. $39.95 (paper)

<i>Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel</i>, by Cary J. Nederman. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009. 375 pp. $39.95 (paper)

A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1400-1700 by Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green Power, Piety and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna by Nuria Silleras-Fernandez Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England by Ral

A History of Women's Political Thought in Europe, 1400-1700 by Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green Power, Piety and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna by Nuria Silleras-Fernandez Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England by Ral

The Irish Contribution to European Scholastic Thought. Edited by James McEvoy and Michael Dunne. Dublin: Four Courts, 2009. 320 pp. $70.00 cloth.

The Irish Contribution to European Scholastic Thought. Edited by James McEvoy and Michael Dunne. Dublin: Four Courts, 2009. 320 pp. $70.00 cloth.

Theodor De Bry's Voyages to the New and Old Worlds

Illustrated by more than six hundred plates and comprising twenty-seven volumes published over a span of nearly half a century by Theodor de Bry and his family from 1590 to 1634, the India Occidentales and India Orientalis series comprise a collection of European travels to the rest of the world that has offered a goldmine to scholars seeking material for the study of Europe's attitudes toward foreign others. Only quite recently, however, has any study been devoted to the compilations' complicated history as a book in and of itself. Yet the India Occidentales or America was probably the single most important influence on European thinking about the Americas at the dawn of the seventeenth century. This special issue explores two fundamental questions about the collection as a very influential whole. First, the essays look at how the volumes on the voyages to the West have influenced European perceptions of the voyages to the East. Secondly, the essays examine the impact that the visualizations for which the collection was so famous had on other texts of the period, specifically on how racial difference was registered in terms of skin color, clothing,and writing itself. The essays keep the focus on De Bry's volumes as they form part of a series that builds a sense of the entire world from the point of view of its northern European readership. In this way, the essays underscore the global effect of the collection, a positioning of northern Europe not merely with respect to the New World but also to the entire globe.

現代ロシアにおける民族理解についての一考察

Contemporary Russia is considered one of the most multiethnic countries in the world. Consequently, questions such as “how to recognize ethnicity?” can give rise to serious problems. The Russian census is the focus of this discussion. When the first All-Russian Census was conducted in 2002, a number of groups demanded that their ethnicity be recognized. The second All-Russian Census was conducted in October 2010. Similar to the previous one, although on a smaller scale, this census process caused a controversy regarding the recognition of ethnicity. The governments of ethnic republics, especially Tatarstan, widely appealed for the integration of the nations. The director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow, V. Tishkov, emphasized the respect toward self-definition. Moreover, he insisted that a double-ethnic affiliation like “tatar-bashkir” should be recognized as an answer to the census. In this way, he attempted to adhere to every person’s opinion. However, in recent years, Tishkov has been actively arguing the importance of the unification of the “Russian nation [Rossiiskii narod]”. Contrary to Tishkov’s ideas, ethnic intellectuals such as Tatar historian D. Iskhakov have attempted to prove the validity of the unification of the nation. He insists that the integration and formation of the Tatar nation was completed on the basis of high culture, which was developed in the context of the standardization of Tatar language, rising rates of literacy, and activization of transmigration from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. He regarded each group’s movement for independence from the Tatar nation as a process of the nation’s breakdown and a result of the Soviet legacy. In reviewing these ideas, we can see that they both, at first, denied the Soviet ethnic policy. Tishkov criticized it by stating that the Soviet ethnic policy created a fixed ethnic framework and the hierarchies in it. Iskhakov considered the Soviet ethnic policy to be a way for the central government to suppress the ethnic minorities. Later, they actively publicized the European ethnic idea. At the same time, when we consider what they say, we find that the Soviet ethnic idea is reflected in their way of thinking. Iskhakov’s idea is, in principle, based on a fixed understanding of ethnicity. This tendency resembles the Soviet understanding. On the other hand, Tishkov often refers to the 1926 census as the ideal one. Moreover his emphasis on the “Russian nation” brings to mind the idea of a “Soviet people [sovetskii narod]”. When we pay attention to the reactions from ordinary people, we also find the Soviet ethnic policy being reflected. When they are asked about their ethnic affiliation, most of them refer to the name of an ethnic group that was written in the internal passports during the Soviet era. In Russia today, the understanding of the nations is contradictory. Most intellectuals have attempted to overcome the Soviet idea of nations and introduce European thinking. However, on the other hand, we see a continuation of Soviet ideas on the basis of their arguments.

Jacqueline Broad &amp; Karen Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400-1700

Jacqueline Broad &amp; Karen Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400-1700

Before Bell: The Roots of Error in the Scots Law of Contract

An examination of the development of the doctrine of error in Scots contract law focusing on the connections between Scottish and Continental European thinking on the subject.

The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought

The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought

Ambient Thinking: Or, Sweating over Theory

Ambient Thinking: Or, Sweating over Theory

Rhythm as the Architecture of Being: Reflections on a Black Soul

This article explores the circumstances under which Léopold Sédar Senghor, poet‐philosopher and first president of Senegal, developed a theory of racial belonging, situating the black soul within experiences of modernity. This article addresses the distinctiveness of Senghor’s Negritude, focusing attention on the complex, uneasy relationship between often racist European thinking on Africa and the means by which Senghor, as a pan‐Africanist and a modernist, chose to re‐evaluate African ways of being in the world. To many, Senghor’s reliance upon the coloniser’s views made his thought (and the patronage and arts scene that followed) primitivising. Others have read his assertions as part of a necessary historic moment of postcolonial cultural and racial reaffirmation and reclamation.