Suchergebnisse

Social rights are essentially rights to the betterment of life. And because of this, they lack any internal principle of limitation. Socialist governments recognized social rights as the core of human rights and therefore as legal rights, the implementation of which was a matter of obligation rather than policy. However, since the governments commanded limited resources, they had to limit the implementation of social rights. The article describes the ad hoc limitations on the implementation of social rights, developed by the Bulgarian Communist Party, which brought forth their transformation into instruments of government, and their appropriation by different forms of counter-conduct.

Abstract
The paper claims that conspiracy theories in Bulgaria are organized as a milieu rather than as a genre, and that, depending on their intensity, conspiracy theories can perform heterogeneous functions, which range from justification of political claims and popular mobilization to entertainment. Building on that conceptual framework, the paper illustrates the most prominent functional types of Bulgarian conspiracy theories. The higher-intensity theories are exemplified by the narratives of corruption and of the afterlife of the former communist secret services. The lower-intensity theories are illustrated by the fortunately short-lived question if the president of the United States has been abducted by aliens. The impact of the Bulgarian conspiratorial milieu on global theories is represented by the example of the Bulgarian modifications of the traveling narrative of the conspiracy of Jewish bankers. The emancipatory potential of the conspiracy theories is demonstrated by the example of the 2011 anti-GMO protests, motivated by narratives of conspiracy between the government and transnational corporations, which derived their energy from the associated milieu of ecological concerns.

The paper presents the findings of two studies on the current transformations of philosophy of history. The paper claims that those transformations outline a research field more appropriately defined as historical knowledge studies, and focused on the conditions of possibility, operation, structure, institutional praxis, critical potential and political relevance of our knowledge about history. The study provides an outline of the emergence of new problems and topics in philosophy of history based on an analysis of the contents of a prominent journal crucial to the development of the field, History and Theory, which has hosted many important debates on historical knowledge since the 1960s and whose editorial policy is recognised for its pluralism. This account of the transformation of the research field is supplemented by the findings of a study of the institutional localisation and geographic distribution of university courses in philosophy of history.

"This edited collection contributes to the study of conspiracy culture by analysing the relationship of literary forms to the formation, reception, and transformation of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are narratives, and their narrative form provides the structure within which their 'readers' situate themselves when interpreting the world and its history. At the same time, conspiracist interpretations of the world may then be transmediated into works of literature and import popular discourse into narrative structures. The suppression and disappearance of books themselves may generate conspiracy theories and become co-opted into political dissent. Additionally, literary criticism itself is shown to adopt conspiracist modes of interpretation. By examining conspiracy plots as literary plots, with narrative, rhetorical, and symbolic characteristics, this volume is the first systematic study of how conspiracy culture in American and European history is the consequence of its interactions with literature. This book will be of great interest to researchers of conspiracy theories, literature, and literary criticism"--