Suchergebnisse

This book is intended as a set of essays examining the value of the recent works of Michel Foucault for social theory and social history. Foucault's works written since 1968 (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality and numerous shorter pieces) contain some important advances in social theory and in the writing of social history. My purpose is to separate out those advances from other features of Foucault's thought which I find less beneficial. I am not attempting to give an assessment of Foucault's work as a whole but to focus on and analyze certain features of it.

chapter INTRODUCTION -- chapter I THE STATES OF EUROPE, THEIR DIPLOMACY AND WARS -- chapter II KINGS AND MINISTERS: THE CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION OF DIPLOMACY AND CREATION OF FOREIGN POLICIES -- chapter III AMBASSADORS -- chapter IV SECOND CLASS DIPLOMATS: LOW IN PRESTIGE, HIGH IN IMPORTANCE -- chapter V A TYPICAL EARLY MOderN EMBASSY -- chapter VI INFORMATION: IMPORTANT OBJECTIVE OF DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITY -- chapter VII THE VARIETY OF DIPLOMATIC DUTIES -- chapter VIII CONCLUSION.

Lloyd Gartner presents, in chronologically-arranged chapters, the story of the changing fortunes of the Jewish communities of the Old World (in Europe and the Middle East and beyond) and their gradual expansion into the New World of the Americas. The book starts in 1650, when there were no more than one and a quarter million Jews in the world (less than a sixth of the number at the start of the Christian era). Gartner leads us through the traditions, religious laws, communities and their interactions with their neighbours, through the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and into Emancipation

For centuries the role of the library was defined as a warehouse of books. Now, in the 21st century, the library is facing perhaps the biggest challenge – its physical survival. The role of librarians is re-branded to reflect their expertise as curators of content and reliable navigators in an evergrowing ocean of information - in any format they might exist. The future libraries shall be open to all the new ideas on how to work better and accept the new technologies. On the one hand, they must recognize the need to change their methods, but on the other hand - to preserve the continuity of their objectives and mission. The new era requires modern models of learning and the attractiveness of the curricula, that is, a modern education system that shall adapt the curricula to the needs of modern society and reconcile centuries of man's need for knowledge, reading books and education in general with the new technologies.

This fascinating book examines Western perceptions of war in and beyond the nineteenth century, surveying the writings of novelists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, poets, natural scientists, and journalists to trace the origins of modern philosophies about the nature of war and conflict.Daniel Pick compares philosophical and historical models of conflict with fictions of invasion and biological speculation about the nature and value of conquest. He discusses the work of such familiar commentators on war as Clausewitz, Engels, and von Bernhardi, and examines little-known writings by Proudhon, De Quincey, Ruskin, Valery, and many others. He explores nineteenth-century English fears of French contamination through the Channel Tunnel and the widespread continuing dread of German domination. And he analyzes the history of the widely-shared European belief that war is beneficial or at least functionally necessary.A central theme of the book is the disturbing relationship between machinery and destruction. According to Pick, relentless technological progress and the irresistible rise of the military-industrial complex risks turning conflict into little more than a sophisticated game played out by high-precision automata. Shorn of human agency or responsibility, war could become technologically unstoppable, a flawless mechanism for human slaughter

This article revisits what has often been called the "naive presentism" of Voltaire's historical work. It looks at the methodological and philosophical reasons for Voltaire's deliberate focus on modern history as opposed to ancient history, his refusal to "make allowances for time" in judging the past, and his extreme selectiveness in determining the relevance of past events to world history. Voltaire's historical practice is put in the context of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, and considered in a tradition of universal history going back to Bossuet and leading up to nineteenth-century German historicism. Paradoxically, Voltaire is a major figure in the history of historiography not in spite of his presentism (as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay have argued), but because of it.