Showing papers on "Intellectual history published in 2005"

Happiness: A History

Abstract: Today, human beings tend to think of happiness as a natural right. But they haven t always felt this way. For the ancient Greeks, happiness meant virtue. For the Romans, it implied prosperity and divine favor. For Christians, happiness was synonymous with God. Throughout history, happiness has been equated regularly with the highest human calling, the most perfect human state. Yet it s only within the past two hundred years that human beings have begun to think of happiness as not just an earthly possibility but also as an earthly entitlement, even an obligation. In this sweeping new book, historian Darrin M. McMahon argues that our modern belief in happiness is the product of a dramatic revolution in human expectations carried out since the eighteenth century.In the tradition of works by Peter Gay and Simon Schama, "Happiness" draws on a multitude of sources, including art and architecture, poetry and scripture, music and theology, and literature and myth, to offer a sweeping intellectual history of man s most elusive yet coveted goal."

Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution

Abstract: Introduction Judgements of Value Knowledge and Value The Quest for Absolute Values The Negation of Valuation Determinism and its Critics Materialism Dialectical Materialism Philosophy of History The Concept of Historical Individuality Historicism The Challenge of Scientism Psychology and Thymology Meaning and Use of the Study of History The Epistemological Features of History Philosophical Interpretations of History Present-Day Trends and the Future.

A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society

Abstract: A first-hand account of the genealogy of the discipline, and of the rise of a new era of social history, by one of the leading historians of a generation Using his own intellectual biography as a narrative device, Geoff Eley tracks the evolution of historical understanding in our time from social history through the so-called "cultural turn," and back again to a broad history of society. A gifted writer, Eley carefully winnows unique experiences from the universal, and uses the interplay of the two to draw the reader toward an organic understanding of how historical thinking (particularly the work of European historians) has evolved under the influence of new ideas. His work situates history within History, and offers students, scholars, and general readers alike a richly detailed, readable guide to the enduring value of historical ideas

Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance

Abstract: Foreword by Albert O. Hirschman Preface Chapter 1. Introduction and Overview Chapter 2. Internal and External Motivation: Beyond Homo economicus Chapter 3. The Indirect Approach Chapter 4. Indirect Approaches: Intellectual History Chapter 5. Autonomy-Respecting Development Assistance Chapter 6. Knowledge-Based Development Assistance Chapter 7. Can Development Agencies Learn and Help Clients Learn? Chapter 8. Case Study: Assistance to the Transition Countries Chapter 9. Hirschmanian Themes of Social Learning and Change Chapter 10. Conclusions Appendix. Eight Thinkers on the Five Themes Notes Bibliography Index

Is history fiction

Abstract: The relationship between history and fiction has always been a controversial one. Can we ever know that a historical narrative is giving us a true account of what actually happened? Provocative and fascinating, this book is an original and insightful examination of the ways in which history is - and might be - written. It traces History's doubleness and divided nature, beginning with its founding figures, Herodotus and Thucydides, right up to the key figures of historical reflection, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Hayden White. The authors explore the challenges posed by postmodernism to history and the literary conventions of most historical writing. In this second edition they bring their history of history up to the present in their study of the History Wars and new approaches to world history and environmental history.

The Cambridge School and Leo Strauss: Texts and Context of American Political Science

Abstract: Over the past quarter century, the Cambridge School of Intellectual History has had a profound influence on the study of political theory in the U.S. The scholarship of historians such as John Dunn, Quentin Skinner, and John Pocock has almost single-handedly defined the terms with which political scientists understand early modern thought, and consequently liberalism and its alternatives. In this essay I analyze Quentin Skinner's “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” as the seminal argument for the Cambridge School's interpretive strategy. In particular, I note the degree to which Skinner attacked the scholarship of Leo Strauss in order to establish the Cambridge approach. Contrary to Skinner, I argue Strauss too has a concern for genuine historical understanding. I conclude with a re-reading of Strauss' Persecution and the Art of Writing in order to show that Strauss' interpretive strategy ultimately comes much closer to the “historicity” claimed by Skinner and others.

The Development of Dialectical Thinking As An Approach to Integration

Abstract: This article offers a description of dialectical thinking as a psychological phenomenon that reflects adult intellectual development. While relating this psychological phenomenon to the various dialectical philosophical perspectives from which the description is derived, the article conceptualizes dialectical thinking as a form of organization of thought, various aspects of which can be identified in individual adults' approaches to conceptualizing a range of problems, rather than as one particular stream of intellectual history. The article provides a range of examples of dialectical analyses, contrasting them with more formalistic analyses, in order to convey the power, adequacy, and significance of dialectical thinking for the sorts of challenges that this journal embraces. It suggests that events in all areas of life demand recognition of the limitations of closed-system approaches to analysis. Approaches based instead on the organizing principle of dialectic integrate dimensions of contradiction, change and system- transformation over time in a way that supports people's adaptation when structures under girding their sense of self/world coherence are challenged. Higher education and psychotherapy are considered as examples of potential contexts for adult intellectual development, and the conditions that foster such development in these contexts are discussed. The article as a whole makes the case for consciously attempting to foster such development in all our work as an approach to integration.

The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Abstract: Few books have had as great an impact on intellectual history as Kant's The Moral Law. In its short compass one of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy attempts to identify the fundamental principle 'morality' that governs human action. Supported by a clear introduction and detailed summary of the argument, this is not only an essential text for students but also the perfect introduction for any reader who wishes to encounter at first hand the mind of one of the finest and most influential thinkers of all time.

The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic

Abstract: LACK community and literary formation in the 178os and 1790s constitutes a distinctive intellectual history of the early Republic. Historians Joanne Pope Melish, Patrick Rael, Shane White, and Craig Steven Wilder have contributed to our understanding of the social, legal, and political histories of free blacks in the early national era. However, we have yet to understand how blacks theorized and enacted through print culture their presence in the early Republic. More than a decade ago, Michael Warner virtually dismissed the possibility of early black print culture in his landmark Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. "For obvious reasons, historians know little about what colonial blacks thought about print," Warner wrote. "The texts of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley are the exceptions that prove the rule, since they define their public voices as white, even if only proleptically. They understand their literacy to prefigure their celestial assimilation." His account uncritically assumes the racialized structuring assumptions of the privileged public sphere he documents: that "printing constituted and distinguished a specifically white community," that "printed artifacts" were "property" and "thus inappropriate to blacks and Indians," and that Hammon, Wheatley, and other black authors who attempted to establish a print presence did so as an expression of desire for the privileges of whiteness.1

Tradition as Invention: The 'Traditions Tradition' and the History of Ideas in International Relations

Abstract: Although they have been a central feature of the disciplinary history of International Relations, little attention has been paid to the historical and epistemological implications of designating certain sets of writers and their ideas as belonging to particular `traditions of thought'. In light of this, this article is concerned with the theoretical conceptualisation of the term `tradition', its historical connotations, and its specific application to the history of IR scholarship. Relying heavily on Michael Oakeshott's philosophy of history, it argues not only that traditions are inherently `invented' phenomena but that the purposes for which they are invented — that is, whether they are historical or practical in orientation — is central to the analysis of their contents. Having established a theoretical understanding of `tradition', the article discusses the works of John G. Gunnell and Brian C. Schmidt as providing a number of useful ways in which traditions, thus conceived, might be analysed before d...

Ideas : A History from Fire to Freud

Abstract: In this hugely ambitious and exciting book Peter Watson tells the history of ideas from prehistory to the present day, leading to a new way of telling the history of the world The book begins over a million years ago with a discussion of how the earliest ideas might have originated Looking at animal behaviour that appears to require some thought - tool-making, territoriality, counting, language (or at least sounds), pairbonding - Peter Watson moves on to the apeman and the development of simple ideas such as cooking, the earliest language, the emergence of family life All the obvious areas are tackled - the Ancient Greeks, Christian theology, the ideas of Jesus, astrological thought, the soul, the self, beliefs about the heavens, the ideas of Islam, the Crusades, humanism, the Renaissance, Gutenberg and the book, the scientific revolution, the age of discovery, Shakespeare, the idea of Revolution, the Romantic imagination, Darwin, imperialism, modernism, Freud right up to the present day and the internetI DEAS: A HISTORY concentrates on the activities and achievements of philosophers, writers, artists, scientists, inventors, religious thinkers, poets, historians, jurists and dramatists, investigating how their ideas have shaped our lives and thinking

East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History

Abstract: Designed for the East Asian history course, this text features the latest scholarship on the region and offers a range of cultural, political, economic and intellectual history. Coverage is balanced among East Asian regions, with approximately 20 per cent of the text focused on Korea, an area that has become increasingly important in East Asian courses and in world politics. Special attention is devoted to coverage of gender and material culture - themes that are reinforced through the text's pedagogical features. Colour inserts illustrate the rich artistic heritage of East Asia and bolster the coverage of material culture.

Time and Heritage

Abstract: As a historian studying what can be considered a form of intellectual history, I have slowly come to adopt Michel de Certeau’s observation made at the end of the 1980s that ‘objectifying the past, for the last three centuries, has undoubtedly left unconsidered time within a discipline that has continued to use it as a taxonomic instrument’. To a certain degree, time has become commonplace for the historian who has preserved or instrumentalized it. It is not considered because it is inconceivable, but because we do not think of it or, more simply, we do not think about it. As a historian attempting to pay attention to the time I’m living in, I have thus, like many others, noticed the swift development of the category of the present until it has become obvious that the present is omnipresent. This is what I refer to here as ‘presentism’.

Cities in Global Context: A Brief Intellectual History

Abstract: The article presents information on cities and towns in global context. Use of the concept global city did not necessarily figure in the early writings on cities, but international market connections and trade linkages did. In its initial incarnation, American urban sociology was remarkable for its failure to contextualize urban questions in larger political and economic processes be they global or otherwise. This may have owed partly to the peculiar geographical circumstances of their home nation. The extensive size of the U.S. and the decentralized character of American politics meant that scholars who were interested in connecting the growth of cities to trade or market dynamics generally studied them in a regional or even sub-regional context, a set of concerns that were articulated through the development of central place theory, among others. The historical legacies of colonialism do more than shed light on the timing of much of this literature in the period of post-colonial independence; they also help explain why, in contrast to their American counterparts, few European urbanists sought to blame poverty and underdevelopment in third-world cities on personal pathologies or cultural attributes.

Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment

Abstract: Katerina Deligiorgi develops a framework for the interpretation of Kant's conception of enlightenment that is compatible with his broader philosophical project of a critique of reason. She identifies the theoretical and practical commitments that enable us to view the achievement of rational autonomy as an ongoing project for the realisation of a culture of enlightenment. Grounding her central thesis in a detailed analysis of a broad range of Kant's works and those of his contemporaries, she challenges twentieth-century revisionist interpretations of the Enlightenment, she shows that the 'culture of enlightenment' is not simply a fragment of our intellectual history but a live project.

Un Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice

Abstract: "UN Voices" presents the human and moving stories of an extraordinary group of individuals who contributed to the economic and social record of the UN's life and activities. Drawing from extensive interviews, the book presents in their own words the experiences of 73 individuals from around the globe who have spent much of their professional lives engaged in United Nations affairs. We hear from secretaries-general and presidents, ministers and professors, social workers and field workers, as well as diplomats and executive heads of UN agencies.Among those interviewed are noted figures such as Kofi Annan, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Alister McIntyre, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Javier Perez de Cuellar, and Kurt Waldheim, as well as many less well known UN professional men and women who have made significant contributions to the international struggle for a better world. Their personal accounts also engage their contributions in dealing with such events and issues as the UN's founding, decolonization, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, human rights, the environment, and September 11, 2001.Thomas G.Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science at The CUNY Graduate Center and Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, where he is co-director of the United Nations Intellectual History Project and editor of Global Governance. His latest books are: "Ahead of the Curve? UN Ideas and Global Challenges" (Indiana University Press, 2001), author; "The Responsibility To Protect: Research, Bibliography, and Background" (ICISS, 2001), author; "Military-Civilian Interactions: Humanitarian Crises and the Responsibility to Protect" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 2nd edition; and "The United Nations and Changing World Politics" (Westview, 2004), 4th edition, author; and "Terrorism and the UN: Before and After September 11" (Indiana University Press, 2004), editor.Tatiana Carayannis is Research Manager of the United Nations Intellectual History Project and former adjunct instructor in Political Science at CUNY. Some of her recent publications include "The Democratic Republic of Congo: 1996-2002" in Jane Boulden ed., "Dealing with Conflict in Africa: The Role of the United Nations and Regional Organizations", "London: Palgrave", 2003, and "The Network Wars of the Congo: Towards a New Analytic Approach," "Journal of Asian and African Studies", 2003. She is currently completing a doctoral dissertation in Political Science on networks, multilateral institutions, and the Congo wars.Louis Emmerij is Senior Research Fellow at The CUNY Graduate Center's Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, where he is co-director of the United Nations Intellectual History Project. Among his recent books are: "UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice" (Indiana University Press, 2004), author; "Ahead of the Curve? UN Ideas and Global Challenges" (Indiana University Press, 2001), and author; "Economic and Social Development into the 21st Century" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).Richard Jolly is Senior Research Fellow at The CUNY Graduate Center's Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, where he is co-director of the United Nations Intellectual History Project, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex. Publications to which he has contributed include: "UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice" (Indiana University Press, 2004), author; "Ahead of the Curve? UN Ideas and Global Challenges" (Indiana University Press, 2001), author; and "Development with a Human Face" (1998), author.

Economic and Social Thinking at the UN in Historical Perspective

Abstract: This article begins to examine the history of economic and social ideas launched or nurtured by the United Nations (UN). In 1999, the United Nations Intellectual History Project was initiated, to analyse the UN as an intellectual actor, and to shed light on the role of the UN system in creating knowledge and in influencing international policy-making: this article is based on the first five books and the oral histories from that Project. The starting point is that ideas may be the most important legacy of the UN for human rights, economic and social development, as well as for peace and security. For the authors, this ‘intellectual history’ provides a way to explore the origins of particular ideas; trace their course within institutions, scholarship, and discourse; and in some cases evaluate the impact of ideas on policy and action.

The Oxford Companion to Canadian History

Abstract: This indispensable new guide to Canadian history is comprehensive, authoritative, and--above all-- companionable. It the essential guide to the significant events, issues, institutions, people, and places that have shaped Canadian life from earliest times to the late twentieth century. In more than 1,700 entries, the country's leading historians describe and analyze events in political, military, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual history, drawing on the latest scholarship. Topics such as gambling, potlatches, abortion, hockey, capital punishment, jackatars, and shipwrecks find a place alongside more traditional entries like prime ministers and suffragists, exploration and fur trade, railways and responsible government. Politicians, soldiers, scientists and industrialists, feminists, social activists and religious leaders, all make an appearance. Vikings and Basque whalers, Jesuits and filles du roi, the Huron Feast of the Dead, privateers, charivaris, the Acadian grand derangement, the Metis buffalo hunt, rebellions, the On-to-Ottawa trek, bunkhouse men and bush pilots, the battle at Vimy Ridge, gold rushes, Spanish influenza, Frontier College, corvettes, trade unions, midwives, Automatistes, the Mad Trapper, La Bolduc, free trade and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, all contribute to the fascinating story which is Canada's history. Entries are arranged from A-Z and fully cross-referenced, with a complete index to guide readers to related topics. This new companion provides learned, accessible, and up-to-date studies of the key subjects and personalities in Canadian history.

Is our history of educational philosophy mostly wrong?: The case of Isocrates

Abstract: There are two very different accounts of the history of educational philosophy and ideas presently available. One account is the work of historical scholars and classicists, and is based on thoroug...

Camus & Sartre : the story of a friendship and the quarrel that ended it

Abstract: Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre first met in 1943, during the German occupation of France. Intellectual as well as political allies, they grew famous overnight after Paris was liberated. But East West tensions began to strain their friendship as they evolved in opposing directions, disagreeing over philosophy, the responsibilities of intellectuals, and what sorts of political changes were necessary or possible. And while Sartre embraced violence as a path to change, Camus sharply opposed it, leading to a bitter and very public falling out in 1952, after which they never spoke again. Ronald Aronson chronicles this riveting story while demonstrating how Camus and Sartre developed first in connection with and then against each other, each keeping the other in his sights long after their break. Combining biography and intellectual history, philosophical and political passion, Camus and Sartre will fascinate anyone interested in these great writers or the world-historical issues that tore them apart.

The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England

Abstract: Though the political and intellectual history of mapmaking in the eighteenth century is well established, the details of its commercial revolution have until now been widely scattered. In "The Commerce of Cartography," Mary Pedley presents a vivid picture of the costs and profits of the mapmaking industry in England and France, and reveals how the economics of map trade affected the content and appearance of the maps themselves. Conceptualizing the relationship between economics and cartography, Pedley traces the process of mapmaking from compilation, production, and marketing to consumption, reception, and criticism. In detailing the rise of commercial cartography, Pedley explores qualitative issues of mapmaking as well. Why, for instance, did eighteenth-century ideals of aesthetics override the modern values of accuracy and detail? And what, to an eighteenth-century mind and eye, qualified as a good map? A thorough and engaging study of the business of cartography during the Enlightenment, "The Commerce of Cartography" charts a new cartographic landscape and will prove invaluable to scholars of economic history, historical geography, and the history of publishing.

Filling in, adding up, moving on: Criminal Justice History in Contemporary Britain

Abstract: This is a bibliographical essay discussing the developments in the history of criminal justice history since the early 1990s. It describes how the shift from the 'social' history of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the current interest in the history of crime was developed, to 'cultural' and gender perspectives has influenced research. It notes current areas of interest and points to significant lacunae.

Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970

Abstract: From lagging book sales and shrinking job prospects to concerns over the discipline's "narrowness," myriad factors have been cited by historians as evidence that their profession is in decline in America. Ian Tyrrell's "Historians in Public" shows that this perceived threat to history is recurrent, exaggerated, and often misunderstood. In fact, history has adapted to and influenced the American public more than people - and often historians - realize. Tyrrell's elegant chronicle of the practice of American history traces debates, beginning shortly after the profession's emergence in American academia, about history's role in school curricula. He also examines the use of historians in and by the government and whether historians should utilize mass media such as film and radio to influence the general public. As "Historians in Public" shows, the utility of history is a distinctive theme throughout the history of the discipline, as is the attempt to be responsive to public issues among pressure groups. A superb examination of the practice of American history since the turn of the century, "Historians in Public" uncovers the often tangled ways history-makers make history - both as artisans and as actors.

Writing the History of Sexuality and "National" History in Quebec

Abstract: This article examines the ways that historians write about sexuality. It finds that Quebec historians, like their English-Canadian counterparts, have embraced attempts to integrate the history of sexuality and national history. Unlike those English-Canadian historians who write about sexuality to disrupt traditional national narratives, however, Quebec historians write about it in ways that tend to reinforce traditional assumptions about national history. Pointing to the risks that can arise when the history of sexuality is harnessed too closely to national history, the author argues that the history of sexuality in Quebec has come to reflect the priorities of national history in ways that have deprived it of the influence it has earned elsewhere, and stripped it of the ability to challenge the dominance of national history.

Historics: Why History Dominates Contemporary Society

Abstract: Introduction: Getting at What is Behind History: The concept of historics Part 1: A Sense of History: Variations on a theme from Nietzsche 1. Theme: A sixth sense - a sense for history 2. Var. 1 History and the senses 3. Var. 2 History as Apprehension 4. Var. 3 History as Prosthesis 5. Var. 5 Making Sense of History Part 2. The work of History: Living in a historicized world 6. The Faith of Fallen Jews: Trauma, remembrance and reptition-compulsion 7. Homo Studiosus: Homo oeconomicus: History as a vocation 8. History as Product and Representation: The past as a commodity 9. History as Symbolic Form

Kosmopolitismus: Weltbürgerdiskurse in Literatur, Philosophie und Publizistik um 1800

Abstract: The cosmopolitan discourse in German and European literary history and history of ideas of the 18th century is the focus of this study. The book discusses the concept and history of 'cosmopolitanism' according to theories by Koselleck, Luhmann, Derrida, Habermas, Gumbrecht, etc., and reconstructs this important discourse of the European enlightenment based on the works of Rousseau, Kant, Wieland, Schiller, Jean Paul, Schlegel and Eichendorff against the background of European literary and intellectual history.

Intellectual History in a Global Age

Abstract: The history of ideas is an interdisciplinary field that began as an offshoot of the history of philosophy and was transformed by notions of perspective and cultural context drawn from the tradition of historical studies. The result is the practice of intellectual history, which has been carried out between the poles of inquiry commonly known as internalist and externalist, corresponding to mental phenomena and collective behavior in cultural surroundings. These are not opposed but rather complementary methods, and intellectual history may be seen as the inside of cultural history and cultural history as the outside of intellectual history, the intellectual historian's task being to bring the two into alliance.

Gendering the story: change in the history of education

Abstract: I should like to thank Richard Aldrich, J. Goodman and J. Martin for reading a draft of this paper and for their helpful comments. Giving this presidential address for the History of Education Soci...