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Drawing on the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, David Lindenfeld illuminates the practical imagination as it was exhibited in the transformation of the political and social sciences during the changing conditions of nineteenth-century Germany. Using a wealth of information from state and university archives, private correspondence, and a survey of lecture offerings in German universities, Lindenfeld examines the original group of learned disciplines which originated in eighteenth-century Germany as a curriculum to train state officials in the administration and reform of society and which included economics, statistics, politics, public administration, finance, and state law, as well as agriculture, forestry, and mining. He explores the ways in which some systems of knowledge became extinct, and how new ones came into existence, while other migrated to different subject areas. Lindenfeld argues that these sciences of state developed a technique of deliberation on practical issues such as tax policy and welfare, that serves as a model for contemporary administrations.
Studies in the history and archaeology of the ancient and Islamic Near East greatly expanded and matured during the first half of the 20th century. Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948), a pioneer in the archaeology, art history, and Persian language studies, significantly shaped this development. He excavated such key sites as Samarra, Paikuli, and Persepolis, and helped to define prehistoric and Islamic art. He became the world's first professor for Near Eastern archaeology in Berlin, adviser to Persia's government, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Scholars from a variety of disciplines reassess Herzfeld's wide-ranging contributions and situate them in their intellectual, academic and political frameworks. The book provides new insights into the historiography of archaeological and historical interpretations of the Near East, especially Iran, the German academic-political milieu of the first half of the 20th century, and the controversial figure of Ernst Herzfeld.
Deconstructing Dinosaurs takes a fresh look at the history of the German Tendaguru Expedition (1909–1913), using recently uncovered sources to reveal how Berlin’s Natural History Museum appropriated and extracted 225 tonnes of dinosaur fossils from land belonging to modern-day Tanzania. It examines the colonial conditions under which the area’s inhabitants located, excavated, and prepared the finds and carried them out of the country’s interior to the coast. Once in Berlin, the fossils were transformed into valuable scientific assets and prize exhibits, foremost among them Giraffatitan brancai. This specimen, a prominent subject of provenance and restitution debates, is used to explore the colonial legacy of natural history collections and the social and political responsibilities of the museums that hold them.
Basing his research on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Rehmann provides a comprehensive socio-analysis of Max Weber’s political and intellectual position in the ideological network of his time. Max Weber: Modernisation as Passive Revolution shows that, even though Weber presents his science as ‘value-free’, he is best understood as an organic intellectual of the bourgeoisie, who has the mission of providing his class with an intense ethico-political education. Viewed as a whole, his writings present a new model for bourgeois hegemony in the transition to ‘Fordism’. Weber is both a sharp critic of a ‘passive revolution’ in Germany tying the bourgeois class to the interests of the agrarian class, and a proponent of a more modern version of passive revolution, which would foreclose a socialist revolution by the construction of an industrial bloc consisting of the bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy. © 1998 Argument Verlag GmbH, Hamburg. Translated from German “Max Weber: Modernisierung als passive Revolution. Kontextstudien zu Politik Philosophie und Religion im Übergang zum Fordismus”.
Offers a penetrating, contextual interpretation of German philosopher and social thinker Georg Simmel's ideas on modernity and modern civilisation.
Does science work best in a democracy? Were 'Soviet' or 'Nazi' science fundamentally different from science in the USA? These questions have been passionately debated in the recent past. Particular developments in science took place under particular political regimes, but they may or may not have been directly determined by them. Science and Ideology brings together a number of comparative case studies to examine the relationship between science and the dominant ideology of a state. Cybernetics in the USA is compared to France and the Soviet Union. Postwar Allied science policy in occupied Germany is juxtaposed to that in Japan. The essays are narrowly focussed, yet cover a wide range of countries and ideologies. The collection provides a unique comparative history of scientific policies and practices in the 20th century.
Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (1958–1966) was an authoritarian modernizer and a true representative of the Age of Extremes. How did the “Architect of Apartheid” grow his ideology of racial segregation into a comprehensive system and a policy for the future? The Anxieties of White Supremacy: Hendrik Verwoerd and the Apartheid Mindset explores his intellectual development and academic career prior to entering politics.
How Paris, London, Chicago, Berlin, and Tokyo created modernity through science and technology by means of urban planning, international expositions, and museums. At the close of the nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization marked the end of the traditional understanding of society as rooted in agriculture. Urban Modernity examines the construction of an urban-centered, industrial-based culture—an entirely new social reality based on science and technology. The authors show that this invention of modernity was brought about through the efforts of urban elites—businessmen, industrialists, and officials—to establish new science- and technology-related institutions. Internat...
An important examination of the colorful histories of urbanization and social reform in Imperial Germany