Suchergebnisse

Paul Bushkovitch, Urban ideology in medieval Novgorod: an iconographic approach.
This article is an attempt to define the ideology of the merchant class of medieval Novgorod by using the evidence of a fourteenth-century icon. It concentrates on the cult of St. Paraskeva Piatnitsa and other saints depicted on the same icon. The vitae of these saints show that urban ideology developed in two stages. In the twelfth century the merchant class began to have its own peculiar cults and thus express its separateness, but at the same time it found its ideals in the rulers of Novgorod society — boyars and clerics. In the fourteenth century social unrest and the appearance of heresy provoked a response of conservatism.

Vladimir Plotkin, Dual models, totalizing ideology and Soviet ethnography.
Conceptual differences between Western and Soviet social sciences go far deeper than disagreement on any formal social theory. They arc rooted in two separate intellectual traditions. From the medieval times, Russian culture has been marked by the persistence of totalizing and monistic forms of ideology, and a strong polarity of values (dualism). The paper explores the impact of this ideology on Russian/Soviet Marxism, as well as on the character of social theory in Soviet ethnography.
It suggests that the current debate between the fundamentalists and the innovators will remain inconclusive without the critical reevaluation of the Russian intellectual tradition.

Over the last six decades, a significant number of Western scholars approached the Legion – Archangel Michael as one of the most popular and yet inconsistent variant of European fascism, and portrayed it as too mystical, religious, fanatic, violent, irrational, rabid anti-Semitic, obsessed with an atavistic cult of death and the idea of sacrifice. The article aims to point out that
the Legion, a variant of European fascism in its epoch, only made politics religious, supplied
(some of) the Romanians with a new political ideology but also with a new religion, political and quasi-secular, that took birth from disillusions and despair as to give men (and women) energy and hope, a religion that encapsulates the European spirit of that time and has less to do with Romania's Christian Orthodox heritage.

In his book Histoire de l'extrême droite en France (A history of the extreme right in France), the French historian Michel Winock shows how difficult it is to give a simple, accurate definition of the extreme right, which he presents as 'a hard political tendency but a soft concept'. However, one of the characteristics which are common to most extreme right-wing parties is that they tend to inscribe their discourse on identity (not only from a political point of view but also from a cultural or even biological point of view) inside a marginal space and even a space of marginality, a domain for marginal personalities.We shall see that those organisations choose to place themselves deliberately into the margins of the political landscape and that they do it in both senses of the term: first because their discourses sound scandalous to democratic parties and secondly because those speeches often reflect their will to exclude themselves from the political game. Indeed, extreme right-wing theorists and politicians frequently refuse to exercise power because they consider that such an activity is almost inevitably tainted with compromise and corruption. So they prefer resorting to verbal – or even physical – violence in order to attract voters eager to protest against the supposed unfairness of the establishment. That is why extreme right-wing factions have to face a difficult situation in which they need to be marginal and scandalous to exist, but in which democratic, governmental parties can easily use their marginal character to turn them into political scarecrows and ensure their own dominance in an even surer way.