Suchergebnisse

A good deal of the late-twentieth-century commentary on Kant's 'Perpetual Peace' essay accepted its author's view that his conception of cosmopolitan justice had superseded the law of nations, some of whose leading exponents-Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel-Kant characterised as 'miserable comforters'. Focusing on the case of Vattel, in this paper I begin to subject Kant's claim to an historical investigation, asking whether his 'Perpetual Peace' did indeed supersede Vattel's Law of Nations in terms of the actual uses of the texts in a variety of historical contexts. In pointing to an array of evidence against Kant's widely accepted claim, I develop a different and more historical way of assessing the relation between the two writers. Kant, I argue, should be approached as a political metaphysician whose conception of cosmopolitan justice formed part of a factional theological and philosophical attack on the law of nations tradition. Vattel, however, was a diplomatic official whose text operates within the horizon of the European state ensemble and functioned as a summative abstraction of a wide variety of post-Westphalian public-law treaties and diplomatic rules and conventions. This accounts for the wide distribution, use, and influence of Vattel's work in a variety of Anglophone contexts from the late eighteenth century through to the end of the nineteenth, where Kant's text was marginal to discussion. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylor's philosophical history of secularization, as presented in hisA Secular Age. I do so by situating it in relation to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on developments in the German Empire. Considering how profoundly conceptions of secularization have been bound to competing religious and political programmes, we must begin our discussion by entertaining the possibility that modern philosophical and historiographic conceptions of secularization might themselves be outcrops of this unfinished competition. Peter Gordon has rightly observed that Taylor's philosophical history of secularization is a Catholic one, and that this is bound up with a specific (neo-Thomist) view of secularization as a theological and ecclesiological "disembedding" of rational subjectivity from its prior embodiment in a sacral body, community (church), and cosmos. Taylor delivers this history in his "reform master narrative": that certain fundamental religious and cultural reforms or changes in early modern Europe wrought the secularization responsible for a modern epoch of "unbelief".

A striking feature of Barry Hindess' political thought is its unflinching application of theoretical reason to concrete problems. In recent discussion of terrorism, Hindess thus argues against the restricted application of the term to nonstate actors and for its expansion to cover the political violence of territorial states. This self-consciously polemical argument displays Hindess' commitment to theoretical reason and his preparedness to assess historical politics on this exacting basis. In this article, I argue for a more "timid" form of political analysis, that gives more room to compromised historical–political norms, and that has greater sympathy for the restricted application of the notion of terrorism.

Although history is the pre-eminent part of the gallant sciences, philosophers advise against it from fear that it might completely destroy the kingdom of darkness—that is, scholastic philosophy—which previously has been wrongly held to be a necessary instrument of theology.

Since Dilthey's template study of 1890, the Prussian state's attempt to censor Kant's religious writings has typically been seen as the work of a reactionary politics bent on imposing religious orthodoxy as a bulwark against the spread of Aufklärung. This essay offers a revisionist interpretation, arguing that the attempted censoring was a by-product of a set of a long-standing Religionspolitik designed to achieve religious toleration through a system of regulated public confessions. Reaffirmed in the Religious Edict (1788) and the Censorship Edict (1788), Prussian policy required acceptance of a plurality of public confessions whose stability was preserved through the restriction of public proselytizing and the acceptance of private religious freedom. In breaking with this religious settlement, through their public advocacy of a true "religion of reason", the Protestant religious rationalists of the theological Aufklärung breached the embargo on public proselytizing, leading eventually to government's attempt to censor Kant's own "pure moral religion".

This consideration of how innovation was exploited in primary processing industries during the period of the second industrial revolution draws on case material from frozen-meat and dairy-processing industries in New Zealand between 1880 and 1910, examining how entrepreneurial networks successfully created commodity chains for the exportation of produce to U.K. markets. Latin American commodity chains are considered as a counterpoint. What is suggested is that despite the absence of large-scale firms and significant foreign capital, New Zealand producers, relying on network-based organizational forms, successfully entered overseas markets, capitalizing on information sharing, rapid diffusion of technology, and loose alliances that exploited complementary skills and assets.