Martin Berger

Bio: Martin Berger is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Nazi Germany & Music education. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 9 publications receiving 91 citations.

The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism, 1859–1914

Abstract: David Stack has two ambitions in The First Darwinian Left. First, to show that nineteenthcentury socialists did not use Darwinism as a tool of opportunity, or to give a scientific veneer to a pre-existing politics. Rather, they developed their thinking out of a ferment of open Darwinian and socialist discourses, and were often Darwinists before they were socialists. Second, to warn against the “folly” of a “growing movement to use Darwinism as the foundation for a new politics of the left” (p. vii), represented especially by Peter Singer and his book A Darwinian Left (1999). In meeting his first, historical ambition, Stack is brisk, readable and theoretically savvy. He is particularly convincing, for instance, on the way in which Alfred Russel Wallace drew on Darwinian, socialist and spiritualist discourses in his contributions to nineteenthcentury debates about race, about the distinction between humans and (other) animals, and about stages of sociability distinguishing ‘savages’ from the ‘civilised’, on the various ways in which socialists including Jack London, Annie Besant and Ramsay MacDonald read and appropriated the apparently uncongenial work of Herbert Spencer; and on the subtleties of socialist involvement in eugenicist ideals. Stack concludes that a loosely understood Darwinism formed the “constitutive metaphor” (p. 119) of socialism between 1859 and 1914, and resulted in a Labour party, under MacDonald, which put its faith in a gradual, inevitable evolution of society towards socialism. Stack makes some good points against Singer’s naïve historical understanding of the left. But overall he is unconvincing in meeting his second, polemical ambition, for two reasons. First, he adopts the rhetoric of a conspiracy theorist: as he fulminated against “the disarmingly plausible Helena Cronin” (p. 3) of the Darwin@LSE group, and accused Singer of “reducing humans to a set of bestial impulses and desires” (p. 4), I began to wonder who would be found in the book depository, and who on the grassy knoll. Second, and more importantly, Stack’s argument against a biologically-informed left is weak. He claims that “to follow Singer’s advice, and once again make Darwinism the discursive space in which... socialism is constructed... would strip the left of its belief in the capacity of humans to change themselves and society” (p. 122). I do not see why. As Stack helps to show, Darwinian meta-

Companion to Historiography

Abstract: Introduction: The Project of Historiography Section 1: Beginnings - East and West Introduction 1.1 Asian Historiography: Two Traditions 1.2 Historiography and Greek Self-Definition .3 Re-Reading the Roman Historians 1.4 The Historiography of Rural Labour 1.5 Towards Late-Antiquity Section 2: The Medieval World Introduction 2.1 The Historiography of the Medieval State 2.2 Saladin and the Third Crusade 2.3 Family and Household 2.4 The Medieval Nobility 2.5 Armies and Warfare 2.6 Popular Religion Section 3: Early-Modern Historiography Introduction 3.1 The Idea of Early Modern History 3.2 The Scientific Revolution 3.3 Intellectual History 3.4 The English Reformation 3.5 Popular Culture in the Early-Modern West 3.6 Revisionism in Britain Section 4: Reflecting on the Modern Age Introduction I: Revolution and Ideology 4.1 The French Revolution 4.2 The Soviet Revolution 4.3 National Socialism in Germany 4.4 Fascism and Beyond in Italy 4.5 Orientalism London: II Area Studies 4.6 China 4.7 Japan 4.8 India 4.9 Africa 4.10 North America 4.11 Latin America Section 5: Contexts for the Writing of History I: Hinterlands 5.1 History and Philosophy 5.2 History and Anthropology 5.3 History and Archaeology 5.4 History of Art II: Approaches 5.5 The Historical Narrative 5.6 The Annales School 5.7 Marxist Historiography 5.8 Women in Historiography 5.9 Comparative World History 5.10 Archives and Technology

Urban Cultural Strategies and Urban Regeneration: A Case Study and Critique

Abstract: More and more cities have launched urban cultural strategies in the United Kingdom over the past decade. As a result, this has become an interesting and important area of policy innovation. In this paper the author looks at the broader context within which these strategies have emerged, looking at changes in national state policies towards the arts, changes in patterns of cultural consumption, local opposition to central government, and economic restructuring and interurban competition. The author then goes on to illustrate the ways in which these broader processes have interacted with more localised factors to shape the development of recent cultural strategies in Bristol. The paper concludes with some more general comments and criticism on cultural strategies as a whole.

Every Citizen a Statesman: Building a Democracy for Foreign Policy in the American Century

Abstract: Every Citizen a Statesman Building a Democracy for Foreign Policy in the American Century