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This book deals with the reception of Italian elitism in the United States, identifying its key protagonists, phases, and themes. It starts from the reconstruction of the scientific and political debates aroused in the United States by the works of Mosca, Pareto, and Michels, and moves on to define their theoretical influence in the American scientific and academic contexts. The analysis takes into consideration the period from the first contact between elitists and American academia in the early 1920s to the publication of The Power Elite by Mills, in 1956, which marks the emancipation of American elitism. After introducing the fundamental principles of elite theory, the first part of the study reconstructs the debate that it aroused beyond the Atlantic. The second part examines the original American reworking of the elitist lesson, concentrating on the works of the authors most strongly influenced by it: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Harold D. Lasswell, and Charles W. Mills. The book aims to shed light on the contribution of Italian elitism to the development of American political thought.
The European Union, we are told, is facing extinction. Most of those who believe that, however, have no understanding of how, and why, it became possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe might be united in a single political community. The Pursuit of Europe tells the story of the evolution of the 'European project', from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the earliest creation of a 'Concert ofEurope', right through to Brexit. The question was how, after centuries of internecine conflict, to create a united Europe while still preserving the political legal and cultural integrity of each individual nation. The need tofind an answer to this question became more acute after t...
The period between 1917 and 1957, starting with the birth of the USSR and the American intervention in the First World War and ending with the Treaty of Rome, is of the utmost importance for contextualizing and understanding the intellectual origins of the European Community. During this time of 'crisis,' many contemporaries, especially intellectuals, felt they faced a momentous decision which could bring about a radically different future. The understanding of what Europe was and what it should be was questioned in a profound way, forcing Europeans to react. The idea of a specifically European unity finally became, at least for some, a feasible project, not only to avoid another war but to avoid the destruction of the idea of European unity. This volume reassesses the relationship between ideas of Europe and the European project and reconsiders the impact of long and short-term political transformations on assumptions about the continent's scope, nature, role and significance.
The Shaping of French National Identity casts new light on the intellectual origins of the dominant and 'official' French nineteenth-century national narrative. Focussing on the historical debates taking place throughout the eighteenth century and during the Restoration, Matthew D'Auria evokes a time when the nation's origins were being questioned and discussed and when they acquired the meaning later enshrined in the official rhetoric of the Third Republic. He examines how French writers and scholars reshaped the myths, symbols, and memories of pre-modern communities. Engaging with the myth of 'our ancestors the Gauls' and its ideological triumph over the competing myth of 'our ancestors the Franks', this study explores the ways in which the struggle developed, and the values that the two discourses enshrined, the collective actors they portrayed, and the memories they evoked. D'Auria draws attention to the continuity between ethnic discourses and national narratives and to the competition between various groups in their claims to represent the nation and to define their past as the 'true' history of France.
Given the destruction and suffering caused by more than four years of industrialised warfare and economic hardship, scholars have tended to focus on the nationalism and hatred in the belligerent countries, holding that it led to a fundamental rupture of any sense of European commonality and unity. It is the central aim of this volume to correct this view and to highlight that many observers saw the conflict as a 'European civil war', and to discuss what this meant for discourses about Europe. Bringing together a remarkable range of compelling and highly original topics, this collection explores notions, images, and ideas of Europe in the midst of catastrophe.
The Comintern and the Global South: Global Designs/Local Encounters studies the relations and productive tensions between the Third International, intellectual histories of racial justice and anti-imperialism, as well as other forms of internationalism. Building on extant institutional histories of the Third International, it moves in new directions by focusing on the points of intersection – often conflictual and short-lived – with anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and nationalist organizing, making the Third International a site of encounter between a global political project and more local and regional contexts. Due to the broad range of geographic and linguistic expertise of the contrib...
Global Perspectives in Modern Italian Culture presents a series of unexplored case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, each demonstrating how travellers, scientists, Catholic missionaries, scholars and diplomats coming from the Italian peninsula contributed to understandings of various global issues during the age of early globalization. It also examines how these individuals represented different parts of the world to an Italian audience, and how deeply Italian culture drew inspiration from the increasing knowledge of world ‘Otherness’. The first part of the book focuses on the production of knowledge, drawing on texts written by philosophers, scientists, historians and numerous other first-hand eyewitnesses. The second part analyses the dissemination and popularization of knowledge by focussing on previously understudied published works and initiatives aimed at learned Italian readers and the general public. Written in a lively and engaging manner, this book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern and modern European history, as well as those interested in global history.
Three decades ago, François Furet famously announced that the French Revolution was over. Napoleon's armies ceased to march around Europe long ago, and Louis XVIII even returned to occupy the throne of his guillotined brother. And yet the Revolution’s memory continues to hold sway over imaginations and cultures around the world. This sway is felt particularly strongly by those who are interested in history: for the French Revolution not only altered the course of history radically, but became the fountainhead of historicism and the origin of the historical mentality. The sixteen essays collected in this volume investigate the Revolution’s intellectual and material legacies. From popular culture to education and politics, from France and Ireland to Poland and Turkey, from 1789 to the present day, leading historians expose, alongside graduate students, the myriad ways in which the Revolution changed humanity’s possible futures, its history, and the idea of history. They attest to how the Revolution has had a continuing global significance, and is still shaping the world today.
Europeanising Spaces in Paris, c. 1947-1962 examines the myriad urban, political and cultural forms in which ideas of Europe, and of what it meant to be European, were represented in Paris in the post-war era.
An exciting account of how government statistics in developing countries are social artefacts dynamically shaped by political and economic contexts.