What is hospitality? Who is it addressed to? Hospitality aims at welcoming those who arrive; it demands giving space and time and sharing our own resources with others. In view of the current global migration crisis and in the midst of the social debates and a critique of the failure of affluent countries and Western democracies to respond in solidarity to those in need, this article attempts to re-consider the space for hospitality drawing from the ethical and the political as (...) the two fundamental pillars of social architecture. In an effort to discuss collective grassroots reactions to this general lack of hospitality, I address the Catalan social platform Volem Acollir in their request to the state to open up the borders for the reception of a larger number of migrants. Far from being an individual choice, or an optional political decision, hospitality confronts us with the moral dilemma of the human response to our cultural others. (shrink)

This study investigates the significant relationship between mental health and academic motivation among graduating students. Thus, the study employed a correlational design to determine if there is a significant relationship between mental health and academic motivation among 150 graduating college students. Hence, the Mental Health Inventory 38 (MHI-38) and Academic Motivation Scale (AMS-C28) were employed to measure the study variables. Moreover, statistical analysis reveals that the r coefficient of 0.35 indicates a low positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of (...) 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision to reject the null hypothesis. (shrink)

This contribution argues, first, that pre-national forms of state were not displaced or supplanted by a new, national form. What we call the nation-state was not the successor to imperial or city-states but was itself a form of the European imperial city-states that had driven the expansion of capitalism in previous centuries. It argues, second, that national states emerged only after 1945 and only in a handful of states where, through welfare reforms and market and industry regulation, investment and production (...) were made to serve the expansion and integration of national markets. Third, with the dismantling of Keynesian policies in these states, pre-national (pre-Keynesian) structures are resurfacing. What scholars describe as the emergence of ‘post-national spatialities’ and of ‘global cities’ and city regions represents the resurgence of a durable and historically dominant form of state: the imperial city-state form. The ‘re-scaling’ of nation-states and growing prominence of ‘global cities’ and ‘city regions’ are heralding the end of the brief history of actually existing nation-states and the re-deployment of the imperial city-state model. (shrink)

Imperial Plato presents new translations of three introductions to Plato's thought from the second half of the second century CE: the Introduction to Plato by Albinus of Smyrna, Dissertation 11 of Maximus of Tyre, and On Plato and his Teaching by Apuleius of Madaurus. These three presentations of Plato's ideas--one a Greek dialectic introduction with a suggested reading order for Plato's dialogues, another a Greek speech in the sophistic style of the time, and one a lengthy doxological study in Latin--are (...) examples by three distinct authors using divergent methods of the assorted ways in which Plato and Platonism were understood and discussed during the revival of Hellenism and Greek Philosophy, and the period of the Roman Empire often referred to as the Second Sophistic. (shrink)

While there has been a surge in scholarship on Imperial Way Buddhism (kōdō Bukkyō) in the past several decades, little attention has been paid, particularly in Western scholarship, to the life and work of Ichikawa Hakugen (1902–1986), the most prominent and sophisticated postwar critic of the role of Buddhism, and particularly Zen, in modern Japanese militarism. By way of a thorough and critical investigation of Ichikawa’s critique, Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics by Christopher Ives (...) seeks to provide answers to a number of important questions regarding Zen ethics in the context of modern Japan. Particularly fruitful is Ives’ discussion, in chapter 7, of the .. (shrink)

We can now survey the ruins of a Babelian tower of discourse about cosmopolitanism. We speak of “elite travel lounge,” “Davos,” “banal” as well as of “reflexive,” “really existing,” “patriotic,” and “horizontal” cosmopolitanisms. Here, an attempt is made to extract what is normative and ideal in the concept of cosmopolitanism by foregrounding the epistemic and moral dimensions of this attitude towards the world and other cultures. Kant, in a rather unexpected way, is profiled as the exemplification of what is here (...) called “imperial” cosmopolitanism, which is both blind and dismissive of its own material conditions of possibility. Then, through a discussion of the works of Nussbaum, Appiah, Mignolo, Butler, Benhabib and Beck the author elaborates a version of cosmopolitanism that is grounded, enlightened, and reflexive, which corrects and supersedes Kant’s own Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. We do not live in an age of cosmopolitanism, but in an age of cosmopolitization. Democratic iterations that are jurisgenerative are matched at the global level by cosmopolitan iterations that are both jurisgenerative and affect generating. (shrink)

Republicanism and imperialism are typically understood to be located at opposite ends of the political spectrum. In Imperial Republics, Edward G. Andrew challenges the supposed incompatibility of these theories with regard to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions in England, the United States, and France. Many scholars have noted the influence of the Roman state on the ideology of republican revolutionaries, especially in the model it provided for transforming subordinate subjects into autonomous citizens. Andrew finds an equally important parallel between Rome's expansionary (...) dynamic — in contrast to that of Athens, Sparta, or Carthage — and the imperial rivalries that emerged between the United States, France, and England in the age of revolutions. Imperial Republics is a sophisticated, wide-ranging examination of the intellectual origins of republican movements, and explains why revolutionaries felt the need to 'don the toga' in laying the foundation for their own uprisings. (shrink)

In this article, I explore how the twin forces of imperial and entomological power allowed Britain to shape locust research and control across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia from the 1920s to the early 1950s. Imperial power came from the size of the formal and informal empire, and alliances with other colonial powers to tackle a common threat to agriculture and trade. Entomological authority came primarily from the work of Boris Uvarov and his small team of museum and (...) fieldworkers based at the Imperial Bureau of Entomology (IBE), later the Imperial Institute of Entomology (IIE). I begin by discussing how Uvarov's phase theory of the origin of swarming changed the prospects for the control of locust plagues. The imperial gaze and networks of the IBE and IIE were suited to a problem that was transnational and transcontinental. In the 1930s, Britain was drawn into plans for international cooperation on locust organizations that met the needs of science, to give better sharing of knowledge, and the needs for science, to secure the resources for research and control. However, such organizations were only created during the Second World War, when new plagues threatened military operations, as I show in relation to the measures taken to control the red locust and desert locust. In the final section, I follow the fate of the wartime cooperation in initiatives to establish permanent control organizations. It is a story of the decline of British political power in locust affairs as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and regional agencies took over. My account of British locust research and control reveals a neglected aspect of histories of entomology and imperial/colonial science, especially their international relations and the continuing importance of metropolitan research centres. (shrink)

This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary journal, published in post-World War I Calcutta. It uncovers a historical pattern of Bengali intellectual life that marked the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, whereby an imperial imagination was transformed into an international one, as a generation of intellectuals born between 1885 and 1905 reinvented the political category of . Hermeneutics, as a philosophically informed study of how meaning is created through conversation, and (...) grounded in this essay in the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, helps to reveal this pattern. While translocal vistas of intellectual life were always present in Bengali thought, the contours of those horizons changed drastically in the period under study. Bengali intellectual life, framed within a center (the foreign) and tik (international), as opposed to bilāt (England, or the West), to name the world abroad. The world outside empire increasingly became a resource and theme for artists and writers. Major changes in global geopolitical alignments and in the colonial politics of British India, and the relations between generations within Bengali bhadralok society, provide contexts for the rise of this international youth imagination. (shrink)

“It may be thought that I am prejudiced. Perhaps I am. I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.” 1 When Mark Twain undertook correspondence for San Francisco’s Alta California on a $1250 trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 he had an established reputation as a humorist and was on the cusp of making the transition from journalist to author. Innocents Abroad, “an unvarnished tale” 2 published in 1869 and sewn together with questionable regard for (...) coherence or thematic consistency, sold thirty-one thousand copies in one year. Only Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done better, as Twain himself noted. What made his work such a success? “This book is the record of a pleasure trip” , Twain declared, yet there had already been innumerable pleasure trips and by more established authors than he. The multiplicity and seemingly contradictory narrative stances in Innocents makes any essentialist reading hard to establish and what one stance purports is as likely and easy to prove as any other. In the main though, two bodies of criticism have prevailed hitherto, one seeing the text as flawed by internal discontinuities, the other perceiving that disjointed narration need not preclude a unified authorial consciousness. It is my contention that Twain most likely wrote with at least five entirely separate purposes in mind, none of which coexisted simultaneously: i. The profit, reputation and contractual fulfilment to be had in writing c. 1500 words to newspapers daily. ii. The demonstrable acquisition of high society vocabulary and cultural regard commended by Mrs. Fairbanks and Olivia Langdom. iii. An arrant attack upon Presbyterianism. iv. A break with the codified genre of travel writing. v. The promotion of Twain as healer of a wounded nation. Point v) has gone largely neglected by critics. Yet Twain’s role as a unifier in post Civil-War society, as projector of national identity abroad for the benefit of domestic patriotism, and as healer of war-torn America is a cornerstone to our understanding Innocents. As shall be seen, shades of mental/national injury coexist in the text, alongside a humorous denigration of foreigners. The resultant implied superiority of America and Americans, notwithstanding Twain’s passing jabs at them and in spite of their bloody internecine conflict, is what I term “imperial therapy.”. (shrink)

Roman emperors were at the pinnacle of society. They were supreme commanders of the armies, the highest priests and the ultimate source of law and justice. These three roles were made clear to the inhabitants of the empire from the reign of Augustus onwards through a variety of media. Public ceremonies showed emperors leaving the city for campaigns, and returning in triumph, at sacrifice, or sitting in judgement. Inscriptions likewise indicated the main roles of emperors through titulature or narrative. The (...) military and the religious leadership of emperors were also made abundantly clear through public monuments and on centrally issued coinage. Yet, throughout Roman imperial history these last two types of source material are surprisingly silent on the emperors’ legal role. (shrink)

This article traces the association between the European overseas empires and the concept of sovereignty, arguing that, ever since the days of Cicero—if not earlier—Europeans had clung to the idea that there was a close association between a people and the territory it happened to occupy. This made it necessary to think of an “empire” as a unity—an “immense body,” to use Tacitus’s phrase—that would embrace all its subjects under a single sovereign. By the end of the eighteenth century it (...) had become possible, in this way, to speak of “empires of liberty” that would operate for the ultimate benefit of all their “citizens,” freeing them from previous tyrannical rulers and bringing them under the protection of more benign regimes. In such empires sovereignty could only ever be, as it had become in Europe, undivided. The collapse of Europe's “first” empires in the Americas, however, was followed rapidly by Napoleon’s attempt to create a new kind of Empire in Europe. The ultimate, and costly, failure of this project led many, Benjamin Constant among them, to believe that the age of empires was now over and had been replaced by the age of commerce. But what in fact succeeded Napoleon was the modern European state system, which attempted not to replace empire by trade, as Constant had hoped, but to create a new kind of empire, one that sought to minimize domination and settlement, and to make a sharp distinction between imperial ruler and imperial subject. In this kind of empire, sovereignty could only be “divided.” Various kinds of divided rule were thus devised in the nineteenth century. Far, however, from being an improvement on the past, this ultimately resulted in—or at least contributed greatly to—the emergence of the largely fictional and inevitably unstable societies that after the final collapse of the European empires became the new states of the “developing world.”. (shrink)

The paper discusses the historical roots of the political cultures of Japan and China by examining the principal characteristics of their traditional Imperial systems. Comparison of the logic of legitimacy in each case, namely divine lineage in Japan in contrast to the awesome but demanding Mandate of Heaven in China, highlights the philosophical difference between reigning and ruling, and the consequences of this for modem politics in each country. A sacral aura still surrounds the Japanese system tending to insulate authority (...) from the kind of pressures that could lead, in China, to the loss of the Mandate, most recently based on socialist ideals. The power of continuity in both systems, surviving into the present in different forms, remains a serious possible impediment to the further political development of modem Asia. (shrink)

The so-called War on Terror has given rise to a virulent discourse that demonizes all those who allegedly seek to do harm and kill Americans. A veritable bestiary of demonic and bestial creatures has been thus ensembled, constituting what one cannot but call an “imperial bestiary.” Here we do not so much consider the contents of this imperial bestiary, as much as seek to analyze its grammar, that is, the way it operates on certain moral assumptions that have very pernicious (...) moral consequences. Reconstructing the work of some recent critical philosophers, a possible way to dismantle all bestiaries, whether imperial or colonial, is elaborated. The work of Mary Midgley, Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway are brought together to develop what has been here called a politics beyond monsters, beasts, roguish animals, and infesting vermin that must be at best domesticated, and at worst exterminated. (shrink)

This article discusses the poem written by Joseph Brodsky shortly after the proclamation of Ukrainian independence in the early 1990s. It compares this poem with other pieces by the same author that deal with the paradigm of “independence vs. imperial unity.” These poems present a difference, which is striking at first glance: Brodsky welcomes Lithuanian independence, while simultaneously denying the same rights to Ukrainians and Aztecs. As for Afghanis … his disdain is even more palpable. The proposed explanation is the (...) concept of “Cultural Empire,” which the poet considers to be the ultimate good. This article briefly mentions the general problem of de-imperializing classical Russian literature in the context of post-colonial studies. (shrink)

Merchant activity was a central element in the networks and webs of relationship over the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. When closely analyzed, however, daily merchant practice does not fit easily into regional categories, whether Atlantic or imperial. Merchant life was heavily dependent on the building of chains of trusted correspondents, who would both be able to guarantee adequate quality and satisfactory pricing upon acquisition or sale of the goods traded, and willing to extend credit in a trading world in (...) which all operations included long time lags before final payment. For each trading center, the addition of such chains of correspondents constituted networks both supra-regional, covering the entire world, and sub-regional, specializing in some areas more than others according to prevalent political-imperial pressures. It is argued that the common element in all these networks, i.e. merchant development, is best identified as a worldwide, but Europe-dominated social process underpinning much of what is usually meant by “Atlantic” history. (shrink)

A study of the road to modern problem solving in China, winding between a traditional Confucian style of inquiry and one associated with science.

This review focuses on Pekka Hämäläinen’s characterization and analysis of the Comanche empire as a spatial category in The Comanche Empire and discusses how this work relates to broader discussions about space and power in borderlands and imperial histories. Although empires have long been central actors in borderlands histories, “empire” has not necessarily been a category of spatial organization and analysis and certainly not one used to describe spaces controlled by Native peoples. By contrast, while Hämäläinen emphasizes the imperial characteristics (...) of the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of Comanche history , he also uses “empire” to characterize Comanche dominance spatially. Hämäläinen helps us to rethink the spatial dynamics that both shaped and were produced by the encounters between Comanches and Spaniards, French, Mexicans, Americans, and other Native peoples in the Great Plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By analyzing how Comanches came to control vast stretches of the southern plains, The Comanche Empire challenges our assumptions about how Native polities and imperial powers thought about territorial claims and how they employed more nuanced spatial strategies to assert their authority, extend their cultural influence, and control trade and resources. (shrink)

The founding of the Han 漢 dynasty by a man of common birth, Liu Bang 劉邦, precipitated a new awareness that class boundaries had become more fluid than in prior generations. New fashions threatened the established social order as wealthy individuals pretended to status that they had not yet achieved. To respond to these concerns, Jia Yi 賈誼 proposed a new sumptuary code regulating a range of luxury goods from apparel to accessories to ritual wares. This sumptuary system was designed (...) to bolster the authority of the imperial throne and to distinguish members of the Han government and the imperial family from other elites. This essay will present an overview of Jia Yi’s sumptuary code and consider its relationship to earlier theories of ritual reform. It will argue that his system combined Lord Shang’s 商 theory of circumstantial advantage with a new scheme of imperial publicity. The final section of this study assesses the implementation of Jia Yi’s recommendations by using jade as a case study. Based on recent archaeological evidence, I argue that Jia Yi’s ideas about jade in the context of his sumptuary guidelines have a contemporaneity with the revitalization of jade craft in the early Western Han. (shrink)

Over the first decades of the twentieth century, the fragmentary remains of a huge prehistoric ungulate were unearthed in scientific expeditions in India, Turkestan and Mongolia. Following channels of formal and informal empire, these were transported to collections in Britain, Russia and the United States. While striking and of immense size, the bones proved extremely difficult to interpret. Alternately naming the creature Paraceratherium, Baluchitherium and Indricotherium, paleontologists Clive Forster-Cooper, Alexei Borissiak and Henry Fairfield Osborn struggled over the reconstruction of this (...) gigantic fossil mammal. However, despite these problems, shared work on the creature served as a focus for collaboration and exchange rather than rivalry between these three scientific communities. Not only did the initial interpretation and analysis depend on pre-existing connections between British and American paleontological institutions, but the need for comparative material, recognition and contacts brought British and American scholars into communication and exchange with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This article examines these processes. It first uses these excavations as a comparative case-study of different manifestations of colonial science in this period, examining how scholars in the Britain, the Russian Empire and the United States used formal and informal colonial links to Asia to pursue new research. It then moves to examine how the common problem of reconstructing this giant animal drew metropolitan scientific communities together, at least for a time. The construction of the Baluchitherium and Indricotherium illustrates the drives to expand research both imperially and internationally in the early-twentieth century, but also the continual problems in resources, institutionalization, transport and communication that could run up against scientific work. (shrink)

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are now seen as a moment when the ‘second’ British Empire arose from the ruins of the ‘first’ one. One witness to, and participant in, the convulsions of the age was Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the first governor-general of Bengal. Hastings’ career in India, his trial in parliament, and his imperial afterlife all have received fulsome attention. Yet his retirement years have been overlooked, owing to the misperception that they were uneventful. This article introduces (...) and presents a series of letters written by Hastings, late in life, to Governor-General Lord Moira. These letters, published here for the first time, show that Hastings remained an astute observer of British Indian politics. They provide a rich account of the ways in which Britain’s Indian empire evolved in the decades around 1800. Moreover, they reveal that one of that empire’s founders expressed a profoundly critical view of its progress. (shrink)

The political shockwaves from the partition of India and Pakistan were felt far beyond the local tragedies that followed in its wake – not least in British imperial politics, where the two new Dominions and the subsequent reorganisation of the Commonwealth drastically altered the character of the imperial machinery. This article covers the first decade of Pakistan’s and India’s independence through the activity of the Commonwealth journal The Round Table. Through studying the interaction between the local correspondents and the English (...) editorial staff, it argues that the inclusion of these new members, whose political class did not primarily stem from settlers, pressed the journal to transform its character. Thus, the journal went from facilitating imperial discussion, in which a homogenous group of contributors sought agreement, to transnational debate, in which a heterogeneous set of national perspectives were contrasted without any substantial reconciliation. As such, this meant the breakdown of the journal’s vision of a united, disinterested imperial truth and in its place spawned a multitude of parallel national views. (shrink)

The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. By Stephen J. Shoemaker. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 260. $59.95, £52.

Imperial Power and Maritime Trade: Mecca and Cairo in the Later Middle Ages. By John L. Meloy. Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, University of Chicago, 2010. Pp. xiii + 305. $59.95.

This article elucidates the spatial order that underpins the politics of the Anthropocene – the ecological nomos of the earth – and criticizes its imperial origins and legacies. It provides a critical reading of Carl Schmitt’s spatial thought to not only illuminate the spatio-political ontology but also the violence and usurpations that characterize the Anthropocene condition. The article first shows how with the emergence of the ecological nomos seemingly ‘natural’ spaces like the biosphere and the atmosphere became politically charged. This (...) challenges the modernist separation between natural facts and political norms. It then underlines the imperial origins of this nomos by introducing the concept of air-appropriation understood as the colonization of atmospheric space by CO2 emissions. Instead of assuming that the ecological nomos represents a transition from a colonial to an ecological and cosmopolitan world order, focusing on air-appropriation highlights forms of ecological imperialism that go along with the new nomos. Accordingly, the article calls for a just redistribution of ecospace that takes into account the imperial legacies and ongoing effects of air-appropriation. (shrink)

The Imperial Web and the War on Terrorism: U.S. Military Bases and Empire. The attacks of September 11,2001 and the subsequent global War onTerrorism directed by the United States have made it clear that the world is now dominated by an American Empire, which extends far beyond the British Empire of old. The extent of U.S. imperial ambitions is perhaps best understoood in terms of the history of its military bases, which are now located in around 60 countries. These bases (...) are not to be understood as a purely military phenomenon but as part of a larger system of economic, political and military power rooted in the hegemonic position of U.S. capitalism in the world economy as a whole. [Article adapted from the March 2002 issue of Monthly Review, vol. 53, no. 10]. (shrink)

According to the written sources, the Iconoclast controversy was all about the veneration of icons. It started in the late seventh century, after most iconodule provinces had been lost to Byzantine rule, and lasted until the turn of the millennium or so, when icon veneration became generally established in the remaining parts of the Byzantine Empire. However, as far as material evidence and actual images are concerned, the Iconoclast controversy centred on apse images and other, equally large and monumental representations, (...) none of which were ever venerated. Prior to Iconoclasm, such images had not been customary at Constantinople, where the early Christian tradition had been largely aniconic and focused on the symbol of the cross. Thus, the introduction of monumental Christian imagery to Constantinople appears to have been a major aspect of the Iconoclast controversy. This paper asks why and finds that the images in question, whilst not for veneration and therefore not essential to the theological debate, stood out for imperial propaganda. They led to close visual integration of the emperor and the church that had previously been kept apart, because aniconic traditions used to limit imperial presence inside Constantinopolitan church buildings. It seems, then, that the Iconoclast controversy, although conducted in religious terms, was partly driven by a hidden agenda of imperial appropriation and power play. (shrink)

An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815. Edited by Lawrence Stone (London: Routledge, 1994), 374 pp., £40.00 cloth.

While Judith Butler’s concept of the heterosexual matrix is dominant in gender and sexuality studies, it is a curiously aspatial and atemporal concept. This paper seeks to re-embed it within space and time by situating its emergence within colonial and imperial histories. Based on this discussion, it ends with three lessons for contemporary work on gender and sexuality and a broader theorization of sex-gender-sexuality regimes beyond the heterosexual matrix.

The New Imperial Order : the Globalization of the U.S. Empire. It took the U.S. one century to extend their « manifest destiny » from North America to the whole world. In the aftermath of the Cold War, there still seemed to be a red line that the U.S. global empire could not tread easily, represented by the former boundaries of the ex-USSR. After September 11, this red line has been wiped out: U.S. military bases have been established in the (...) heart of the former Soviet Union. The U.S., which acts as the enforcer of capitalist globalization, has widened the gap between its military power and the rest of the world. Thus it can now envisage to establish a quasi-direct colonial rule in Baghdad in contrast with 1991 when it allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power under embargo and scrutiny for lack of an alternative suitable to its interests. (shrink)

Britain's pre-Victorian overseas expansion stimulated Roman comparisons. But imperial Rome was a warning as much as an inspiration to future empires, a harsh and uncomfortable model for Britain as a former Roman colony. Roman dignity was claimed for British monarchs and achievements by Dryden and others. But there were mixed feelings about identifying expanding Britain as a second Roman Empire. In the eighteenth century the British freedom-fighter Caractacus, defeated by the Romans, appealed far more to popular taste than Virgil's Aeneas (...) or the Emperor Augustus. Sustained unease about imperial Rome, going right back to Tacitus, anticipated the liberal critique of imperialism of some Victorian and Edwardian commentators. (shrink)

It is inherent in the concept of a terrorist act that it aims at an effect very much larger than the direct physical destruction it causes. Proponents of what used to be called the 'propaganda of the deed' also believed that in the illuminating glare of terror the vulnerability of a corrupt ...

The Imperial Web and the War on Terrorism: U.S. Military Bases and Empire. The attacks of September 11,2001 and the subsequent global War onTerrorism directed by the United States have made it clear that the world is now dominated by an American Empire, which extends far beyond the British Empire of old. The extent of U.S. imperial ambitions is perhaps best understoood in terms of the history of its military bases, which are now located in around 60 countries. These bases (...) are not to be understood as a purely military phenomenon but as part of a larger system of economic, political and military power rooted in the hegemonic position of U.S. capitalism in the world economy as a whole. [Article adapted from the March 2002 issue of Monthly Review, vol. 53, no. 10]. (shrink)

This work is a historical study of the philosophical writings emerging from Imperial Russia's theological "academies" – Orthodoxy’s higher educational institutions that ran parallel to the secular universities – from their inception to the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Unlike with nineteenth century Russian revolutionary thought, there are few secondary studies of the philosophical works stemming from the academies. These philosophical works focused on ontology and, as such, stand in sharp contrast to the shift toward epistemology in that century as (...) happened in Germany. Another feature of the "academy" philosophies was the continual and explicit attempt to set themselves apart from the pervasive "subjectivism" of Western philosophical systems, although a largely unacknowledged influence persisted. At no time did the academy philosophers look to rational inquiry for more than an assist in understanding their theology. Instead they appealed to tradition and to an alleged direct insight into religious truths at the expense of logic and rational argument. The ultimate result was the pecular historical insularity of their community and concomitantly a subservience to the political state, traits that persist to this day. (shrink)

The boy-emperor Leo II has bequeathed us more than his share of chronological puzzles. He was only seven years old when he died in 474 but he had possessed imperial authority for nearly half his short life. There is uncertainty about the date of his birth, and most of his career as emperor with his grandfather Leo I. If we still had the chronicle of Nestorianos which actually terminated at the death of Leo II we would probably be fully informed (...) on these matters. Instead, several of the relevant documents have been consistently misconstrued, that is, they have been made to fit a predetermined interpretation or order of events. Moreover, one important text has been ignored altogether. The chronology of the boy-emperor's career depends on Seeck's Regesten which has inevitably shaped the coverage in the standard accounts of Bury and Stein. The authority of Seeck also underpins the entry in the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire which sets out the following chronology of Leo's brief life and imperial career: 467 – birth; 473 – elevated to Caesar by Leo I, October; 474 – elevated to Augustus by Leo I, before 18 January; 474 – death, November. This investigation is designed to show that the multiple phases in the imperial rule of Leo II have never been properly disentangled. To do so not only brings greater precision to the sequence of events, and to Leo's short career, but also casts light on the wider context of these turbulent few years. (shrink)