Suchergebnisse

How far can a spiritual journey take you?

Hans Morgenthau's Scientific Man vs. Power Politics appeared in 1946, one year after he received tenure at the University of Chicago. Thus, the monograph demarcates the beginning of Morgenthau's career in the United States, to which he had emigrated nine years earlier. Three main aspects seem important for understanding this work. The first is Morgenthau's bewilderment about American political culture and, as he perceived it, its cheerful optimism about the betterment of politics, society, and humanity in general. The second aspect is the nature of the argument: Scientific Man is a dogmatic tract, an attempt to hammer home certain philosophical positions—positions that were largely unpopular in the U.S. social sciences in the 1940s (and later)—rather than a reflective scholarly elaboration of certain philosophical commitments. The third is Morgenthau's place between two academic cultures: Morgenthau's language in his American writings partly stems from, but also tries to leave behind, his European academic socialization. The monograph thus reflects the author's peculiar situation, as he inhabits two sometimes crucially different semantic and cultural contexts, but fails to bridge or broker them.

Extract: Dr. Tatiana Andreeva's reflection (Andreeva, 2013) on the diversity of approaches to public health problems (in this issue) strikes very close to the heart of my own research. Her assertion that "contrasting paradigms [of public health] that dominated in the former Soviet Union and in Western countries may include … certain pathologies, which are not recognized as such in other societies" rings particularly true. I have been researching public health responses to HIV and IV drug use in Ukraine since 2007, and I have been involved in harm reduction efforts in my home country, the United States, since 2003. Throughout the last decade, I have sought to better understand how society's perception of drug use (or, perhaps, I should say how different perceptions of drug use that emerge in different societies) shape social and medical responses to drug use and how those responses affect the lives of addicted persons.

This article draws upon archival sources, architectural trade publications and contemporary social science to trace the design and reception of the 'cell', a functionalist, rational apartment that was the building block of apartment complexes that sprung up all over France during the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that French Modernist architects, shaped by both professional and socio‐political concerns, believed their streamlined interiors to be key to building a classless society and restoring French greatness and thus rejected the dwelling preference and expertise of French homemakers when designing their homes. Nevertheless, Frenchwomen tried to ignore architectural dictates when it came to homemaking, and ultimately, in a changed political climate, their preferences convinced the national housing ministry to redefine its norms and standards for apartments.