tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15388504386392994612024-03-06T00:30:39.058-05:00learning curveUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger205125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-69523875279835983012023-09-11T13:48:00.002-04:002023-09-11T13:48:45.738-04:00Considerations on Western LiberalismSamuel Moyn, Liberalism Against
Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Yale, 2023. Our intellectual landscape is
shaped still by the ruins of the Cold War – here moss-covered but visible,
there only suggestions underground, in a few places still habitable after
appropriate renovation. Sam Moyn’s new book urges us finally to have done with
this ruin, but not by Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-82057585874991795432023-07-09T12:10:00.004-04:002023-07-09T12:10:36.999-04:00Halévy, liberty against democracyDaniel Halévy’s 1931 Décadence
de la liberté begins with the confession or boast that the author has only
voted once in his life (in 1919). It ends with a funny story about Orientals. The
emperor decides that a particular man will be executed by the best, most
skilled executioner there is. This marvelous man arrives, the condemned man
kneels and watches the executioner flourish his sword. Very Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-30621383501062973922021-05-20T16:57:00.002-04:002021-05-20T19:12:32.216-04:00Computer games & historyThe American Historical Review is now taking an interest in games. In the most recent issue, Andrew Denning provides “an autoethnographic journey through recent presentations of the Nazi era in video games” (182). This essay, together with a three-review subsection on Assassin’s Creed games, might be taken as an official entrance of historical game studies into the profession. The attention is Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-8923022724311980042016-08-25T12:42:00.002-04:002016-08-25T12:42:29.852-04:00Reading Péguy
Some people—even Anglophones—do still read Charles Péguy. Even write about him. Antoine Compagnon champions him, which is perhaps enough to locate Péguy
in the contemporary field. Although see here. And why people do not
read him is perhaps obvious. He’s so Catholic, a mystical
nationalist—practically a fascist, it will be said, or a reactionary or
conservative antimodernist, others will Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-10500276436365074222016-08-13T23:27:00.002-04:002016-08-13T23:28:49.109-04:00French Liberalism, Historiography New and Old<!--[if gte mso 9]>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-47694543123665827442015-07-11T14:46:00.002-04:002015-07-11T14:46:36.451-04:00Rancière & La parole ouvrière
In 1976 Jacques Rancière published (together with Alain
Faure) a collection of texts by workers from between 1830 and 1851 under the
title La Parole ouvrière. His short
introduction to this collection, appearing as it does well before La nuit des prolétaires, his own thèse
on the same material, is a good (and concise!) starting place for understanding
what Rancière is up to in this early Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-31078223640146726372015-07-10T11:48:00.000-04:002015-07-10T11:48:47.426-04:00My Brilliant Friend
“My return to Naples was like having a defective umbrella
that suddenly closes over your head in a gust of wind.” (chapter 116)
This wonderful, arresting metaphor comes at the beginning of
a short chapter near the end of Story of
a New Name, the second volume of
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. So
far I have only read these first two. I’ll pick up the third soon, and perhaps
even finish itUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-69727746079345961672015-06-20T22:23:00.000-04:002015-06-20T22:23:21.125-04:00Lilti contra Gordon
I want to tackle the next two pieces in RMEIH as a pair. They are, in order, Peter Gordon on “Contextualism
and Criticism in the History of Ideas” and Antoine Lilti’s “Does Intellectual
History Exist in France?” At the end of Lilti’s text, he responds to Gordon’s
essay. (I am, incidentally, curious about how this sort of exchange is managed
practically speaking). Gordon, Lilti writes,
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-12458730404560496552015-06-18T23:09:00.001-04:002015-06-18T23:09:54.465-04:00Lovejoy revived
"Return of the History of Ideas?"
When I began graduate school, I was very interested in
method. Theoretical and methodological discussions about historiography seemed
weighty, important. As I progressed with my own project, I became less
interested in discussing method. It came to seem to me that most methodological
questions were simply badly posed, or really hid (and then not very well) Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-74084334333660764202015-05-28T15:27:00.000-04:002015-05-28T15:27:02.946-04:00Maintenant
Here is a poem by Louise Michel. This is a picture of a
microfilm reproduction (hence the low quality) of its appearance in Le libertaire, in the Dec 28-Jan 4
(1895-6) issue. This was an anarchist newspaper, which Michel had co-founded
together with Sebastien Fauré earlier that year. Born in 1830, Michel would have been in her
middle 60s. She had spent a significant amount of her life in Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-11279341592722029252015-05-20T16:43:00.000-04:002015-05-20T16:43:09.229-04:00Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Victor Serge’s Memoirs
of a Revolutionary (NYRB 2012) left me with the strong urge to write. Indeed among its
strongest implicit lessons is that writing is a moral and political task. In
the final, hurried chapter Serge defines “intellectual work” as “understanding
and expression” (437)—the clarity and force of this makes me think it must be a
well-worn line drawn from some classic author Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-55593814737227447432015-05-10T13:38:00.002-04:002015-05-10T13:38:29.013-04:00Mannheim"Historical questions are always monographic, either because of the limited manner in which the subject is conceived or because of the specialization of treatment. For history this is indeed necessary, since the academic division of labour imposes certain limitations. But when the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-10526902708117195442015-05-01T15:11:00.000-04:002015-05-01T15:11:16.649-04:00Paul Lapie. "La justice pénale"
A colleague recently pointed me to a short essay, “La justice pénale,” by Paul Lapie in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. It’s from the March 1898 issue of the journal
and this colleague came across it because the Union pour l’action morale reprinted and distributed it. Lapie, and
the Rmm, have figured in my work
before. So I read with interest and finally could no resist writing a little
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-46282911609223224022015-04-29T15:31:00.001-04:002015-04-29T15:31:55.039-04:00What was liberalism?
Duncan Bell. “What is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42(6), 682-715, 2014.
It is tempting to regard liberalism as a ‘sick signifier,’
a term that may now have polemical value in certain situations, but the meaning of which is so poorly determined
as to make use counter-productive. A
temptation, I think, worth resisting. Bell’s useful article attempts an answer
to its titular question, althoughUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-72776910628316712772015-04-28T22:37:00.002-04:002015-04-28T22:37:10.653-04:00SFHS 2015. Part Two of Two.
Here is the promised second post on the SFHS. I’ve delayed
long enough that these papers aren’t really fresh in my mind any longer, but I
want to get this off my plate. Apologies for any misrepresentations! I’ll say
only that these papers deserve a more thoroughgoing treatment than I’m able to
give them here.
Saturday morning, at a little after 8:30, the panel “Beyond
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-82895503597139353442015-04-20T15:07:00.000-04:002015-04-20T15:07:26.420-04:00SFHS 2015. Part One of Two.
This past weekend was the meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies at Colorado College. I saw a number of excellent papers and
some quite cohesive panels. I’m going to do brief write-ups of only two of
these panels. The first, here, is a panel titled “Education, Religion,
and Laïcité in Republican France,” with papers by Linda Clark, Eleanor Rivera,
and Rachel Hutchins.
Linda Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-39179794210292490442015-04-14T13:10:00.000-04:002015-04-14T13:10:33.256-04:00Dubois on the historiography of Haiti's 19th century<!--EndFragment-->
Dubois,
Laurent. “Thinking Haiti’s Nineteenth Century.” small axe. 2014. 18.2. 44: 72-79.
Since it is
still the first half of 2015, I’m not egregiously too late in reading Laurent
Dubois’ “Thinking Haiti’s Nineteenth Century” from last year. Probably it’s
best to consider this short essay an historiographic postscript to Dubois’Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-71397489917507653182015-04-10T22:11:00.001-04:002015-04-10T22:11:32.462-04:00Goldstein in the AHR
Goldstein, Jan. "Toward an Empirical History of Moral Thinking: The Case of Racial Theory in Mid Nineteenth-Century France." AHR Feb 2015.
How should
historians approach moral evaluation of positions that operate in fields which
we now broadly agree are morally reprehensible? Given that historians cannot
avoid and ought not reduce their work to moral judgment on their subjects, Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-3264178733698863102014-12-29T21:39:00.000-05:002014-12-29T21:39:56.752-05:00Césaire marxisant
In the
summer of 1935, the 22 year old Aimé Césaire published a short essay called
“Conscience raciale et révolution sociale” in what was only the second and
would be the last issue of L’Etudiant
noir. By chance, I recently came across this essay—republished in 2013 by Les temps modernes—looking for a short
piece of prose from Césaire suitable for anglophone undergraduates. “Conscience
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-9063908462078192932014-11-21T23:34:00.001-05:002014-11-21T23:34:47.351-05:00Notes on Korsch on Non-Dogmatic Marxism.
Karl Korsch is an appealing figure for any number of
reasons. For me, not least important is that he was perhaps the German Marxist
with the most consistently positive view of Georges Sorel. A reference to
Korsch’s “A Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism,” in which Korsch reproduces a
chunk of Sorel’s writing from 1902, caught my eye earlier today. I wanted to
set down a few points about it.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-21557158193302506852014-11-21T11:54:00.000-05:002014-11-21T11:54:14.826-05:00Aron and Schmitt
The new issue of MIH contains a number of interesting
pieces. I want to offer now only a brief remark on the basis of one of them:
Steinmetz-Jenkins’ essay on Raymond Aron and Carl Schmitt, the full title of
which is “Why Did Raymond Aron Write that Carl Schmitt Was Not A Nazi? An
Alternative Genealogy of French Liberalism.” In brief, Steinmetz-Jenkins wants
to show how, over the course of the Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-66148852007837985752014-11-17T22:08:00.000-05:002014-11-17T22:08:17.028-05:00The Western
Although it has not been my practice, I have decided to do a
brief write-up of some of the panels I attended at the Western Society for
French History this past weekend in San Antonio. I was, for various reasons,
able to attend relatively few; and this is not so much a comprehensive report
as a set of impressions.
I will begin, because it is thematically distinct, with a
panel from Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-358364463466158442014-11-10T22:04:00.000-05:002014-11-10T22:04:54.373-05:00Graphic history
Getz and Clarke. Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History. Oxford 2012.
How to introduce undergraduates to new perspectives on the world? How to present 'minor' and distinctly subaltern lives in all their human texture, in a way that is historically accurate, inviting, and perhaps also suggestive--especially to students today (whatever that means). Using "a graphic history" toUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-62615903083159696432011-12-22T00:42:00.000-05:002011-12-22T00:42:35.939-05:00Distinctions generate meaning"The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it." $26 from the *Enquiry*
And that's why I'm enjoying Hume.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1538850438639299461.post-71802552535528846132011-09-01T15:00:00.000-04:002011-09-01T15:00:41.752-04:00the hard problemL’Élève: la République a donc le droit d’intervenir dans les conditions du travail et dans le règlement des prix et des salaires?
L’Instituteur: Sans doute, elle a ce droit. Elle l’exerce au nom du Peuple. Que serait, que pourrait un industriel ou un négociant sans le travail du peuple et sans la protection de la République? La République, en assurant au commerce et à l’industrie leur liberté,Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0