Suchergebnisse

More than a quarter of century after the end of the war in 1975, the Lao leadership is still in search for a compelling nationalist narration. Its politics of culture and representation appear to be caught between the rhetoric of preservation and the desire for modernity. Meanwhile, originating from the periphery where ethnic minorities had hitherto been symbolically, politically and administratively confined, the participation of some of their members in the Indochina Wars (1945-75) exposed these individuals to socialization and politicization processes. This rigorously researched and cogently argued book is a fine-grained analysis of substantial ethnographic material, showing the politics of identity, the geographies of memory and the power of narratives of some members of ethnic minority groups who fought during the Vietnam War in the Lao People's Liberation Army and/or were educated within the revolutionary administration. No study has ever been conducted on the latter's views on the national(ist) project of the late socialist era. Their own perceptions of their membership of the nation have been overlooked. Post-War Laos is a set to be a landmark study, and an original contribution which refines established theories of nationalism, such as Anderson's 'imagined community', by addressing a common weakness: namely, their tendency to deny agency to individuals, who in fact interpret their relationship to, and place within, the nation in a variety of ways that may change according to time and circumstance

The role of narratives in legal contexts has been explored in multidisciplinary research for several decades. A common claim in this research is that the understanding of narratives is crucial to the understanding of any legal process, especially to most representations of the facts in a criminal case. It seems justified to say that law's cultural foundations and presuppositions are always in some way or another manifested in its narratives and acts of narration. The research conducted within the field of law and narrative helps to expand our knowledge of the multiple ways in which legal thinking and decision-making rely on narrative, in both senses of the term. It also enhances our understanding of how narratives are put to use as rhetorical tools, both in the courtroom and in the court's written judgments. The contributions to this volume present the field of law and narrative as it exists today and expand the area of inquest into fields like text linguistics, speech act theories, ordinary language theory, public international law, artificial intelligence and various media transformations of law stories.

This dissertation is a history of an idea, a retelling of a simple story about an idea as a complicated one, and an explanation of the effects of believing the simple story. From 1869 to 1985, to be an Indian in the eyes of the Canadian state – to be a "status Indian" – a person had to have a status Indian father. The Canadian government registered a population of Indigenous people as status Indians and decided that Indian status passed along the male line. If an Indian man married a non-Indian woman, his wife gained status and their children were status Indians. In contrast, if a status Indian woman married a non-Indian man, she lost her Indian status, and her children were not status Indians. This rule exiled women from their families of birth and tore them from the political fabric of their communities. The Indian status system is a keystone in Canada's colonizing governance of Indigenous life. The rules in the Indian Act for the transmission of Indian status came under heavy criticism and, in 1985, the federal government amended the law. Because the 1985 amendments perpetuated sex discrimination by conferring an advantage to those who traced Indian status along the male line, the rules for Indian status were the object of decades of subsequent campaigning and litigation. In 2008 and 2015, landmark judgments in McIvor and Descheneaux declared the rules to be in breach of the gender equality guarantees in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.In overturning the Indian Act's status rules, the courts have relied on the government's explanation of the history of these rules. The legislative history told by the government mirrors commonly held views about the history of the 1985 amendments to the Indian Act. According to this canonical history, the core explanation for the Indian Act amendments is a tension between individual rights to gender equality and collective rights to Indigenous self-governance, embodied in a conflict between Indigenous women and Indigenous communities (often represented by male Indigenous leaders). According to the canonical history, the opposition between these groups yielded an intractable political stalemate – a Gordian political knot that could only be sliced by the equality rights offered in constitutional and international human rights law. This dissertation unseats the canonical history by advancing an alternative account, one with both a wider aperture on the political and social context and a sharper focus on detail, complexity, and contingency. The dissertation asks how individual equality rights and Indigenous self-governance became juxtaposed to one another in a relationship of tension and dichotomous opposition and explains the discursive, political, and social forces that came together to create this idea of opposition. It situates the history of the Indian Act amendments in the context of negotiations for the re-founding of Canadian sovereignty and the passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Indigenous demands for recognition as a third order of government in Canada's federal state, changing understandings of equality in Canadian law, and shifts in the categorization of the problem of Indian women's loss of status as a political, social, or cultural problem. It traces the role of Indigenous political organizations, Indigenous women's political organizations, and the white-led women's movement in shaping the debate. It tracks how an issue transformed from a political problem into a question of fundamental rights.Debates about amending the Indian Act showed a consensus among Indigenous people about the importance of Indigenous self-governance and the need to end sex discrimination in the Indian Act. Conflict among Indigenous groups arose about the mechanisms for recognizing Indigenous self-governance and the definition of self-governing polities. Rather than a pitched battle among Indigenous people, the central threads running throughout the history of reforms to the Indian Act are the federal government's steadfast refusal to recognize inherent Indigenous self-governance and a desire to limit government spending on status Indians, all in service of a project of constructing and defending Canadian sovereignty. The dissertation exposes the government's share of responsibility in creating a conflict between gender equality rights and Indigenous self-governance. It reveals the law's hand in shaping the discourses of rights through which this idea of tension became articulated, labeling those rights as fundamental, pitting those rights against one another as intrinsically opposed, and then balancing them in the name of justice and fairness.In contemporary litigation over the Indian Act, the Canadian government deploys a story about competing interests of Indigenous women and Indigenous communities as a justification for continued discrimination in the Indian Act. In doing so, the government's retelling of history omits its own active role in shaping and exacerbating the idea of a fundamental conflict of rights. This omission does more than distort history. Through this narration of a partial history and its repetition by the courts, the words uttered by the Canadian state aim to achieve a perfected, completed sovereignty, one that has already silenced the eruptive speech of rival sovereignties. The telling of history by the court tames the wilder moments of the past, when neither the possible nor the likely outcomes were clear. The dissertation aims to make the present readable as just one of many alternatives among the past's futures.

This article analyses the narratives of impact-driven transition research in the field of sustainability studies. It reconstructs patterns of narrations at a discourse level. Departing from the understanding that narrating is a fundamental mode of communication and education, this contribution is ultimately driven by the commitment to understand how narrativity can be improved in order to reach more effective rhetoric for sustainability research. The article starts by describing the dilemma sustainability researchers might find themselves in regarding their position vis-à-vis society and politics. This dilemma seems to shape the narratives researchers use for describing their work. After conceptualizing narratives on a structural level, findings from a comprehensive qualitative interview study are presented and discussed. We find that sustainability researchers can be clustered in five different types, depending on their affinity or distance to real-world sustainability processes, their propensity to either incremental reforms or transformative change and the relationship between environmental and social concerns in the context of the sustainability concept. Furthermore, we find that critical-constructive transformative research encounters challenges when narrating about its position vis-à-vis society and policy-making in the process of formulating goals and working towards them. We identified a tension between leaning stronger either towards independent, critical goal formulation or towards an engagement with actual political processes. Maintaining the ability to change roles between the process-involved and the process-observing sustainability researcher might be a promising way out for those dedicated to workings towards sustainability transitions.

"Der Vortrag wird dem Wandel der Tier-Mensch-Grenze mit dem Aufkommen und der Verbreitung der Evolutionstheorie im 19. Jahrhundert nachgehen. Im Zentrum steht hierbei, dass mit der Auflösung der Tier-Mensch-Grenze neue Grenzen gezogen und evolutionstheoretisch begründet werden. So stehen von nun an Tiere wie der Affe dem Menschen näher als Personen wie der 'Wilde', der Verbrecher oder die Frau. Denn mit der für das späte 19. und frühe 20. Jahrhundert maßgeblichen teleologischen Interpretation der Entwicklungsgeschichte wird eine hierarchisch strukturierte 'Stufenleiter' etabliert, auf der bestimmte, durch eine Serie von Merkmalen (physiologische, psychologische, soziale, u.a.) charakterisierte Personen zugeordnet werden können. Aus der evolutionstheoretischen Begründung des Sozialen folgt damit, dass bestimmte 'Menschen' nur bedingt bzw. überhaupt nicht als soziale Personen angesehen werden. Diese Konzeption der Entwicklungsgeschichte liefert nun den Rahmen oder anders gesagt: das Narrativ für die Humanwissenschaften um 1900. Denn in diesen werden Personen wie Verbrecher, Hysterikerinnen, Kinder oder 'Wilde' zu aus dem Sozialen ausgeschlossene Figuren, über welche die Wissenschaften vom Menschen ihr Wissen produzieren. Wesentlich für die evolutionstheoretischen Grenzziehungen ist, dass die zeitliche Achse in eine räumliche bzw. figurale Achse übersetzt wird. So wird der Verbrecher nicht nur aus dem Bereich des Sozialen ausgeschlossen, weil er für dieses schädlich ist, sondern weil er als Repräsentant der Vergangenheit des Menschen (d.i. der weiße und männliche Europäer), aus dem Bereich des Sozialen schon ausgeschlossen ist. Diese Übersetzung von Zeitlichkeit in Räumlichkeit zeigt, dass die jeweiligen Grenzziehungen zwischen sozialen und nicht-sozialen Personen über narrative Verfahren erfolgen, genauer und mit Michail Bachtin gesagt, über die Etablierung von Chronotopoi. Diese leisten mit der Vergegenwärtigung des Vergangenen die Begründung der Grenzen des Sozialen und Normalen. Abschließend wird der Vortrag am Beispiel von Robert Müllers Roman Tropen einen der wichtigsten Chronotopoi betrachten: die von so genannten 'Wilden' bewohnten Tropen. Müllers Roman wiederholt keineswegs nur das teleologische Schema der Entwicklungsgeschichte, sondern destruiert dieses, indem er deren Chronotopoi als das analysiert, was sie sind: narrative Strategien, die nicht nur illustrierende Funktion haben, sondern Grenzen des Sozialen allererst herstellen." (Autorenreferat)

This contribution discusses the pragmatic effects of different rhetoric strategies conveying evidence of past ingroup violence after a long lasting social denial (Cohen, 2001). In particular, a case study is presented on the making of a civic discourse on controversial historical past: war crimes committed by the Italian Army during the colonial invasion of Ethiopia (1935-36). Although very well proved (Del Boca, 2005), these facts were only recently inserted in Italian history textbooks (Leone & Mastrovito, 2010; Cajani, 2013). In this same period, evidence of these crimes was officially presented during discussions of the Italian Parliament. In spite of these recent acknowledgments of the Italian responsibilities for these crimes, a social myth is still widely shared by the public opinion, representing Italians as good fellows (Italiani, brava gente: cfr. Del Boca, 2005), unable to be cruel both in everyday life and in wartimes (Volpato et al., 2012). This specific situation, denying even the reality of facts happened, has been defined literal social denial, i.e. the deepest among the three possible states of denial (literal, interpretive, implicative: cfr. Cohen, 2001). The issue of literal social denial of past ingroup violence is at the intersection among theories on narratives on national past (László, 2003), social representations of history (Liu et al., 2014), conflict ethos (Bar-Tal et al., 2012; Kelman, 2008), group-based emotions (Allpress et al., 2010; Leone, 2000) and intergroup reconciliation processes (Nadler et al., 2008). Namely, understanding how a social denial could break down implies the theorization of human mind's reflexivity as grounded on historical awareness (Ortega y Gasset, 1930), and the notion of social change as primarily rooted in natality, i.e. the fact that each birth represents a new beginning (Arendt, 1958). Drawing on this theoretical background, we will present an ongoing research program (Leone, in press) on the literal social denial (Cohen, 2001) of war crimes committed by the Italian army during colonial period and on the pragmatic effects of different kinds of communication on this controversial past. In order to address this issue, we will particularly focus on the concept of parrhesia as defined by Foucault (1983): the communicative choice of «frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, [...] the moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy » (Foucault, 2001, p.19). Studies we conducted in this line tested the change in beliefs and the emotional reactions of young citizens confronted with mild or parrhesiastic descriptions of socially denied war crimes (Leone & Sarrica, 2014, 2012). Empirical evidence will be discussed in order to reflect on our core idea: that a parrhesiastic communication is a risky tough necessary pragmatic move to break long lasting denial of ingroup wrongdoings, to trigger critical civic discourse in the place of social myths and to start reconciliation processes.

The article is devoted to the subject of the 1150th anniversary of the Russian Statehood celebrated in September 2012. It was the liberal political commentary writings accompanying the original model of the jubilee celebrated in 1862 that was used as the point of reference of the rhetoric of the celebrations' initiator, the President of Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev. This made the president of Russia to refer very often to the "epoch of the Great Reforms" (the 1860s, and 1870s). The article describes the course of the jubilee celebrations with accompanying information campaign in the public mass media, as well as a failed legislative action to make the symbolic anniversary of the origins of the Russian Statehood a National Day. In the conclusions, the author distances himself from the absolutisation of political causes (­customary in the Polish writing blaming of the low political culture of the power elite) of the jubilee's failure. In the author's opinion, the main reason for the fiasco of the analysed enterprise resides in difficulties to create a coherent historical narration which would combine various political traditions and their fundamental values. ; The research, making the fundamentals of the text, inscribe into the interdisciplinary studies ‒ flourishing in Poland these days ‒ of collective memory and identity. The research perspective chosen by the author makes it possible to enrich traditionally understood political history and history of ideas with the most recent achievements of historical anthropology. The purpose of this is to present not only a cultural context of symbolic dimension of ars regendi (with the problem of legitimization of power at the lead), but also to discover the sources for the ­durability of symbols as invisible bonds tying the political community. ; p. 167-195 ; Summary in English. ; Text eng. ; The article is devoted to the subject of the 1150th anniversary of the Russian Statehood celebrated in September 2012. It was the liberal political commentary writings accompanying the original model of the jubilee celebrated in 1862 that was used as the point of reference of the rhetoric of the celebrations' initiator, the President of Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev. This made the president of Russia to refer very often to the "epoch of the Great Reforms" (the 1860s, and 1870s). The article describes the course of the jubilee celebrations with accompanying information campaign in the public mass media, as well as a failed legislative action to make the symbolic anniversary of the origins of the Russian Statehood a National Day. In the conclusions, the author distances himself from the absolutisation of political causes (­customary in the Polish writing blaming of the low political culture of the power elite) of the jubilee's failure. In the author's opinion, the main reason for the fiasco of the analysed enterprise resides in difficulties to create a coherent historical narration which would combine various political traditions and their fundamental values. ; The research, making the fundamentals of the text, inscribe into the interdisciplinary studies ‒ flourishing in Poland these days ‒ of collective memory and identity. The research perspective chosen by the author makes it possible to enrich traditionally understood political history and history of ideas with the most recent achievements of historical anthropology. The purpose of this is to present not only a cultural context of symbolic dimension of ars regendi (with the problem of legitimization of power at the lead), but also to discover the sources for the ­durability of symbols as invisible bonds tying the political community. ; s. 167-195 ; Tekst ang. ; Streszcz. ang.

Totalitarianism has been an object of extensive communicative research since its heyday: already in the late 1930s, such major cultural figures as George Orwell or Hannah Arendt were busy describing the visual and verbal languages of Stalinism and Nazism. After the war, many fashionable trends in social sciences and humanities (ranging from Begriffsgeschichte and Ego-Documentology to Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis) were called upon to continue this media-centered trend in the face of increasing political determination of the burgeoing field. Nevertheless, the integration of historical, sociological and linguistic knowledge about totalitarian society on a firm factual ground remains the thing of the future. This book is the first step in this direction. By using history and theory of communication as an integrative methodological device, it reaches out to those properties of totalitarian society which appear to be beyond the grasp of specific disciplines. Furthermore, this functional approach allows to extend the analysis of communicative practices commonly associated with fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, to other locations (France, United States of America and Great Britain in the 1930s) or historical contexts (post-Soviet developments in Russia or Kyrgyzstan). This, in turn, leads to the revaluation of the very term "totalitarian": no longer an ideological label or a stock attribute of historical narration, it gets a life of its own, defining a specific constellation of hierarchies, codes and networks within a given society.

The article is dedicated to the Sermon on Law and Grace as a coherent and well-composed work. The purpose of the article is to outline the probable rhetorical strategy of Metropolitan Ilarion, taking into account the historical, political, and socio-ecclesiastical challenges related, in particular, to the figure of Grand Prince Volodymyr counted among the saints of the Kyivan Church. The research methodology focused on the use of tools of hermeneutics and phenomenological methods, as well as elements of the structural approach. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the analysis of categories of classical rhetoric - ethos, logos, pathos - to interpret Ilarion's choice of genre, themes, and methods of narration as a solution of an experienced speaker who skillfully implemented the suggestive tasks of the sermon. Conclusions. Metropolitan Ilarion, having a practical goal, tried to combine the content and form of speech to achieve optimal impact on recipients. To convince the audience of the sanctity of Prince Volodymyr, he elaborates on the theme of the Old Testament Law and Grace - the new Christian "law" of salvation, which seems somewhat absurd by human standards. The listeners trust the speaker due to his spiritual authority of the preacher, and due to the abundant citation of the Holy Scriptures. Speaking of the contender for canonization, Ilarion likens Volodymyr to the Apostle Paul and Emperor Constantine, and at the same time, emphasizes the belonging of the Kyivan Church to the apostolic and Byzantine traditions. Ilarion weaves parts that are rhythmically close to liturgical poetry into the usual form of the sermon.

Despite ideological rhetoric to the contrary, identity changes and authenticity depend on social experience – the lived interactions of individuals as well as the broad range of political‐economic, historical, and personal factors that shape those interactions. Because governments influence social experience, they can shape identities of their populations. Plains Aborigines in colonial Taiwan became Han Taiwanese after Japanese authorities banned footbinding. Local Han became Tujia, and Prmi became both Pumi and Tibetan in China's nation‐wide ethnic identification project. However, deliberate attempts at manipulation do not always succeed. The social experience of daily discrimination countered colonial authorities' efforts to make Han Taiwanese into Japanese, contrary to the claims of more recent nostalgic narratives. Narratives of unfolding – partisan stories about the development of a people over time – push the notion, useful to contemporary political authorities, that ethnic identities are fixed because they are based on culture and ancestry and that their authenticity is an ontological absolute derived from origins in antiquity. Analytic distinction of ideological rhetoric from the social experience of individuals allows a better understanding of the socially constructed processes of identity formation and authentication.RésuméBien que la rhétorique idéologique soutienne le contraire, les changements d'identité et l'authenticité dépendent de l'expérience sociale, autrement dit des interactions vécues aussi bien que de nombreux facteurs politico‐économiques, sociaux et personnels qui donnent forme à ces relations. En influant sur cette expérience, les gouvernements peuvent modeler l'identité de leurs populations. Les aborigènes des plaines de Taiwan sont devenus des Han quand les autorités coloniales japonaises ont interdit le bandage des pieds. Les Han locaux sont devenus des Tujia, et les Prmi sont devenus aussi bien des Pumi que des Tibétains dans le projet d'identification ethnique national chinois. Les tentatives de manipulation ne sont cependant pas toujours couronnées de succès. L'expérience sociale d'une discrimination quotidienne a battu en brèche les efforts des autorités coloniales de transformer les Han de Taïwan en Japonais, quoi qu'en disent les récits nostalgiques postérieurs. Les récits de déploiement, narrations partisanes du développement d'un peuple dans le temps, avancent la notion (utile pour les autorités politiques contemporaines) que les identités ethniques sont fixées parce qu'elles se fondent sur la culture et les ancêtres et que leur authenticité est une vérité ontologique absolue, liée à leurs origines antiques. En distinguant par l'analyse la rhétorique idéologique et le vécu social des individus, on peut mieux comprendre les processus, socialement construits, de formation et d'authentification de l'identité.

At the beginning of cinema, in his early twentieth-century research the Soviet director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein developed his theory of associative montage "1+1=3." Nowadays, new methods have been added to this theory. These variables include the creative re-use of allusions to film history. In contemporary cinema, when a new archive film uses sequences from cinema heritage, it quotes from the past and can activate visually and content-wise complex cultural memories. In these films, the successive placement of two sequences, beyond their association, creates new associative meaning, thus, it calls forth metacinematic associations. This additional meaning is the imprint of cinematic heritage. Final Cut by György Pálfi and Péter Lichter's works make use of the archives of cinematic heritage through a reinterpreted film language, attempting to create independent, innovative works of art. They use the same starting point, based on a directorial concept, but the two attempts resulted in completely different motion pictures. Due to the approach at the basis of their conception, these films illustrate both the linear, i.e., the archetypal narrative film representation and the nonlinear narration. However, these films are not only defined by the scenes they are compiled of, but also bear the particularities of the original motion pictures, referring to and going far beyond the individual characteristics of the scenes themselves. Despite being linear narrative films, the cinematic rhetoric of neither motion picture is continuous but associative - they bring into play layers of film culture. Overall, Eisenstein's formula can be extended in the following way: 1 afs (archive film sequence) + 1 afs (archive film sequence) = 3 mca (metacinematic associations).

In letter 56, Spinoza does not recognize ancient philosophers' authority and urges Hugo Boxel to follow only his reason in order to acquire knowledge. Notwithstanding this radical stance, Spinoza quotes, makes references and gives examples which are mostly excerpted from Roman historians; he takes Tacitus', Sallut's , Quintus Curtius Rufus' words and histories seriously to the point that he says, in the TP, that "no one that knows Histories" – the Histories by Tacitus – "can ignore" the rightness of his argumentation. In this work, my aim is to address this apparent contradiction. Articulated in four sections, my dissertation shows how Spinoza uses his sources and which role they play in formulating his political philosophy.Each section focuses on a different aspect of this relationship: the first one is devoted to Spinoza's education, to his cultural background and to Early modern's forms of quoting. In the second one, I highlight the existence of a monarchist political current, Tacitism, which makes a consistent use of ancient historian's quotes; Spinoza confronts this tradition, giving to the ancient writers' words and maximes a completely different sense. Nevertheless, Spinoza quotes not only for a polemical purpose. In contrast, the references and the exemples seem to fulfil four functions: rhetoric, argumentative, polemic and anthropologic. The last one indicates that thr Roman historians' words and stories are an integral part of Spinoza's political philosophy. Finally, in section four, I identify the roles that narrations and stories play in a political philosophy whose aim is to be, at the same time, scientific as well as pragmatic. ; Dans la lettre 56 Spinoza ne reconnait pas l'autorité des anciens, incitant son interlocuteur à raisonner par soi-même, ne suivant que sa raison. Toutefois, face à cette prise de position radicale, Spinoza cite, fait référence et propose des exemples, dont la plupart sont extraits des historiens latins; il semble prendre au sérieux les mots de Tacite, Quinte-Curce, ...

In letter 56, Spinoza does not recognize ancient philosophers' authority and urges Hugo Boxel to follow only his reason in order to acquire knowledge. Notwithstanding this radical stance, Spinoza quotes, makes references and gives examples which are mostly excerpted from Roman historians; he takes Tacitus', Sallut's , Quintus Curtius Rufus' words and histories seriously to the point that he says, in the TP, that "no one that knows Histories" – the Histories by Tacitus – "can ignore" the rightness of his argumentation. In this work, my aim is to address this apparent contradiction. Articulated in four sections, my dissertation shows how Spinoza uses his sources and which role they play in formulating his political philosophy.Each section focuses on a different aspect of this relationship: the first one is devoted to Spinoza's education, to his cultural background and to Early modern's forms of quoting. In the second one, I highlight the existence of a monarchist political current, Tacitism, which makes a consistent use of ancient historian's quotes; Spinoza confronts this tradition, giving to the ancient writers' words and maximes a completely different sense. Nevertheless, Spinoza quotes not only for a polemical purpose. In contrast, the references and the exemples seem to fulfil four functions: rhetoric, argumentative, polemic and anthropologic. The last one indicates that thr Roman historians' words and stories are an integral part of Spinoza's political philosophy. Finally, in section four, I identify the roles that narrations and stories play in a political philosophy whose aim is to be, at the same time, scientific as well as pragmatic. ; Dans la lettre 56 Spinoza ne reconnait pas l'autorité des anciens, incitant son interlocuteur à raisonner par soi-même, ne suivant que sa raison. Toutefois, face à cette prise de position radicale, Spinoza cite, fait référence et propose des exemples, dont la plupart sont extraits des historiens latins; il semble prendre au sérieux les mots de Tacite, Quinte-Curce, ...

In letter 56, Spinoza does not recognize ancient philosophers' authority and urges Hugo Boxel to follow only his reason in order to acquire knowledge. Notwithstanding this radical stance, Spinoza quotes, makes references and gives examples which are mostly excerpted from Roman historians; he takes Tacitus', Sallut's , Quintus Curtius Rufus' words and histories seriously to the point that he says, in the TP, that "no one that knows Histories" – the Histories by Tacitus – "can ignore" the rightness of his argumentation. In this work, my aim is to address this apparent contradiction. Articulated in four sections, my dissertation shows how Spinoza uses his sources and which role they play in formulating his political philosophy.Each section focuses on a different aspect of this relationship: the first one is devoted to Spinoza's education, to his cultural background and to Early modern's forms of quoting. In the second one, I highlight the existence of a monarchist political current, Tacitism, which makes a consistent use of ancient historian's quotes; Spinoza confronts this tradition, giving to the ancient writers' words and maximes a completely different sense. Nevertheless, Spinoza quotes not only for a polemical purpose. In contrast, the references and the exemples seem to fulfil four functions: rhetoric, argumentative, polemic and anthropologic. The last one indicates that thr Roman historians' words and stories are an integral part of Spinoza's political philosophy. Finally, in section four, I identify the roles that narrations and stories play in a political philosophy whose aim is to be, at the same time, scientific as well as pragmatic. ; Dans la lettre 56 Spinoza ne reconnait pas l'autorité des anciens, incitant son interlocuteur à raisonner par soi-même, ne suivant que sa raison. Toutefois, face à cette prise de position radicale, Spinoza cite, fait référence et propose des exemples, dont la plupart sont extraits des historiens latins; il semble prendre au sérieux les mots de Tacite, Quinte-Curce, ...

In letter 56, Spinoza does not recognize ancient philosophers' authority and urges Hugo Boxel to follow only his reason in order to acquire knowledge. Notwithstanding this radical stance, Spinoza quotes, makes references and gives examples which are mostly excerpted from Roman historians; he takes Tacitus', Sallut's , Quintus Curtius Rufus' words and histories seriously to the point that he says, in the TP, that "no one that knows Histories" – the Histories by Tacitus – "can ignore" the rightness of his argumentation. In this work, my aim is to address this apparent contradiction. Articulated in four sections, my dissertation shows how Spinoza uses his sources and which role they play in formulating his political philosophy.Each section focuses on a different aspect of this relationship: the first one is devoted to Spinoza's education, to his cultural background and to Early modern's forms of quoting. In the second one, I highlight the existence of a monarchist political current, Tacitism, which makes a consistent use of ancient historian's quotes; Spinoza confronts this tradition, giving to the ancient writers' words and maximes a completely different sense. Nevertheless, Spinoza quotes not only for a polemical purpose. In contrast, the references and the exemples seem to fulfil four functions: rhetoric, argumentative, polemic and anthropologic. The last one indicates that thr Roman historians' words and stories are an integral part of Spinoza's political philosophy. Finally, in section four, I identify the roles that narrations and stories play in a political philosophy whose aim is to be, at the same time, scientific as well as pragmatic. ; Dans la lettre 56 Spinoza ne reconnait pas l'autorité des anciens, incitant son interlocuteur à raisonner par soi-même, ne suivant que sa raison. Toutefois, face à cette prise de position radicale, Spinoza cite, fait référence et propose des exemples, dont la plupart sont extraits des historiens latins; il semble prendre au sérieux les mots de Tacite, Quinte-Curce, ...