Explore the vast range of titles available.

\"In this wide-ranging work, Caspar Hirschi offers new perspectives on the origins of nationalism and the formation of European nations. Based on extensive study of written and visual sources dating from the ancient to the early modern period, the author re-integrates the history of pre-modern Europe into the study of nationalism, describing it as an unintended and unavoidable consequence of the legacy of Roman imperialism in the Middle Ages. Hirschi identifies the earliest nationalists among Renaissance humanists, exploring their public roles and ambitions to offer new insight into the history of political scholarship in Europe and arguing that their adoption of ancient role models produced massive contradictions between their self-image and political function. This book demonstrates that only through understanding the development of the politics, scholarship and art of pre-modern Europe can we fully grasp the global power of nationalism in a modern political context\"-- Provided by publisher.

In this wide-ranging work, Caspar Hirschi offers new perspectives on the origins of nationalism and the formation of European nations. Based on extensive study of written and visual sources dating from the ancient to the early modern period, the author re-integrates the history of pre-modern Europe into the study of nationalism, describing it as an unintended and unavoidable consequence of the legacy of Roman imperialism in the Middle Ages. Hirschi identifies the earliest nationalists among Renaissance humanists, exploring their public roles and ambitions to offer new insight into the history of political scholarship in Europe and arguing that their adoption of ancient role models produced massive contradictions between their self-image and political function. This book demonstrates that only through understanding the development of the politics, scholarship and art of pre-modern Europe can we fully grasp the global power of nationalism in a modern political context.

Intellektuelle sind die lebendigsten Totgesagten der Geistesgeschichte. Gerade in der Wissenschaft schien ihre Zeit mit der Allgegenwärtigkeit von Experten abgelaufen. Nun, im Zeichen ökonomischer Ungleichheit, sozialer Spannungen und populistischer Politik, ist ihre Stimme wieder gefragt. Führenden Vertretern der Wirtschaftswissenschaften aus den Vereinigten Staaten kommt dabei eine bedeutende, wenn auch nicht unproblematische Vorbildfunktion zu. Allerdings unterscheiden sich die strukturellen und kulturellen Bedingungen ihres öffentlichen Engagements stark von jenen in Europa, wie ein Vergleich zwischen den USA und Frankreich zeigt. Intellectuals are the most lively species declared dead multiple times in intellectual history. Especially in academia, their time seemed to have passed with the ubiquity of experts. Now, with the rise of economic inequality, social tensions and populist politics, their voice is in demand again. Leading Representatives of economics from the United States are significant, albeit problematic role models in this regard. However, the structural and cultural conditions of their public engagement differ greatly from those in Europe, as a comparison between the USA and France shows.

Intellektuelle sind die lebendigsten Totgesagten der Geistesgeschichte. Gerade in der Wissenschaft schien ihre Zeit mit der Allgegenwärtigkeit von Experten abgelaufen. Nun, im Zeichen ökonomischer Ungleichheit, sozialer Spannungen und populistischer Politik, ist ihre Stimme wieder gefragt. Führenden Vertretern der Wirtschaftswissenschaften aus den Vereinigten Staaten kommt dabei eine bedeutende, wenn auch nicht unproblematische Vorbildfunktion zu. Allerdings unterscheiden sich die strukturellen und kulturellen Bedingungen ihres öffentlichen Engagements stark von jenen in Europa, wie ein Vergleich zwischen den USA und Frankreich zeigt. Intellectuals are the most lively species declared dead multiple times in intellectual history. Especially in academia, their time seemed to have passed with the ubiquity of experts. Now, with the rise of economic inequality, social tensions and populist politics, their voice is in demand again. Leading Representatives of economics from the United States are significant, albeit problematic role models in this regard. However, the structural and cultural conditions of their public engagement differ greatly from those in Europe, as a comparison between the USA and France shows.

Die Frühneuzeitgeschichte hat sich von Modernisierungstheorien weitgehend abgewandt. Sie gelten als ideologisch verdächtig (Eurozentrismus, Fortschrittsdenken) und historisch naiv (Anachronismus, Teleologie). So berechtigt einzelne Kritikpunkte auch sind, die Frühneuzeithistorie ist mit der pauschalen Ablehnung von Modernisierungstheorien in eine Archaisierungsfalle getappt: Um dem Gegenwartsbezug von Modernisierungstheorien zu entgehen, beschreibt man die frühe Neuzeit als eine exotische Gegenwelt und bleibt eine Erklärung schuldig, wie aus der damaligen Wirklichkeit unsere Gegenwart geworden ist. Der vorliegende Aufsatz versucht, modernisierungstheoretische Fragestellungen für die Frühneuzeitforschung wieder fruchtbar zu machen. Er tut dies nicht in apologetischer, sondern in kritischer Absicht, indem er in einem ersten Schritt Niklas Luhmanns modernisierungstheoretische Annahmen über Vertrauen in Verfahren anhand jüngster Entwicklungen auf ihre Stichhaltigkeit prüft und in einem zweiten Schritt die Ergebnisse dieser Prüfung auf die verfahrensorientierte Reformtätigkeit von Jean-Baptiste Colbert in den ersten Herrschaftsjahrzehnten Ludwigs XIV. überträgt. Colbert eignet sich für ein modernisierungstheoretisches Experiment besonders gut, da er in jüngerer Zeit konträren Deutungen unterzogen worden ist, ohne dass dabei die jeweiligen modernisierungstheoretischen Implikationen offen zur Sprache gekommen sind. Modernization theories do not figure prominently in the historiography on the early modern period anymore. They represent ways of thinking to which most early modernists today distance themselves from: progressivism, Eurocentrism, anachronism, teleology etc. One could even say that the term „early modernist” has become an anachronism itself as the majority of historians working in the field do not describe their period as „modern”; rather, they stress its exotic otherness and thereby leave the connection between past and present unexplained. By rejecting the alleged presentism of modernization theorists, early modernists produce an anachronism of the opposite sort: they archaise the past. This article attempts to re-evaluate the use of modernization theories in analysing early modern processes. It does so, first, by discussing Niklas Luhmann's assumptions about the modernizing role of trust in formal proceedings and, secondly, by applying the results of this discussion to Jean-Baptiste Colbert's reform politics during the early reign of Louis XIV. Colbert is a case in point because he introduced formal proceedings in different areas of government and because his contribution to the modernization of the French state has come under critical scrutiny recently.

Rezension von: Europa im späten Mittelalter.

It is over with Germans … Germany has been what it has been. The vast, utmost wickedness is everyday getting riper for slaughter … I want to prophesy to Germany – not from the stars, but from theology and the Word of God – God’s wrath, since it is impossible that Germany can go unpunished. It must suffer a great rout.Martin Luther, Table Talks, quote from 1539Mother Rome: O Germany, I tell you, if you keep and listen to Luther and his godless bunch for longer, nobody will endanger you as much as yourself. I, however, will then, out of motherly goodness, not be ready to ignore your misery, when seeing (God may forestall it!) that your members kill, burn and ravage each other in strife, that they wreck each other’s bodies, goods and honours.Johannes Cochlaeus, A Pious Exhortation of Rome to Germany, 1525In 1517, when a little-known Augustinian monk with a doctorate in theology and a solid classical education entered the stage of church reform, the majority of German humanists immediately greeted him as one of their own. Quite a few, and probably the noisiest ones, even put their nationalist hopes on his broad shoulders. They expected him to restore the honour and freedom of the German nation by ending the alleged exploitation of Germany by the Roman Church and by purifying the German clergy from moral depravity and material excess. In Ulrich von Hutten’s widespread dialogues, Vadiscus or the Roman Trinity (Vadiscus sive trias Romana) and The Onlookers (Inspicientes), both published in April 1520, Martin Luther’s cause appeared as a nationalist enterprise for the liberation of Germany.The initial support by humanists for the Wittenberg professor proved crucial in turning a local protest into a national reform movement. However, no humanist had asked for a theological revolution. When this was later delivered from the pen of the same monk, many of Luther’s earliest proponents reacted with bewilderment and their love affair with the Reformation came to an abrupt end (see Figure 12). Most exponents of the older generation of German humanists, who had started their literary career under Maximilian’s reign, either quietly retreated from the new theological battlefield or marched with loud protests into the Catholic camp. Eventually, Luther’s most tenacious opponents within Germany came from similar circles as his initial supporters. Catholic polemicists such as Johannes Cochlaeus (1479–1552), Johannes Eck (1486–1543) and Thomas Murner (1475–1537) were all humanist theologians.

Agrarian man can be compared with a natural species which can survive in the natural environment. Industrial man can be compared with an artificially produced or bred species which can no longer breathe effectively in the nature-given atmosphere, but can only function effectively and survive in a new, specially blended and artificially sustained air or medium.Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1983In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983The study of nationalism was profoundly reshaped by three publications that appeared independently of each other in 1983: Nations and Nationalism by Ernest Gellner, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson and The Invention of Tradition, a collection of essays edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. These books did not come out of the blue, of course. Gellner and Hobsbawm had been publishing on the subject since the 1960s, and some of their leading arguments had already been introduced earlier by other scholars – Karl Deutsch in the 1950s and Carlton Hayes as far back as the 1920s. Yet, thanks to their critical and commercial success the books marked a watershed and proved most influential for the boom of nationalism studies and the triumph of the modernist paradigm in the following decades.Although the theoretical discourse on nations and nationalism has significantly broadened and diversified since then, these three works are still regarded as most representative of the modernist approach, followed by other classical studies, such as John Breuilly’s Nationalism and the State and Eric Hobsbawm’s later lectures Nations and Nationalism since 1780. This is why they are to be put at the centre of any critique of the modernist approach. Interestingly enough the books differ strongly both in argument and in content.

Nature speaks our German language in all things which make a sound. Thus, quite a few wished to think that the first man, Adam, had only been able to name the birds and all other animals with our words, because he expressed every innate sound according to its nature; it is no surprise, therefore, that most of our root words conform to the sacred language.Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Treatise to Protect the Work on the German Language, 1644The bond of language, customs and even of the common name unites humans in such a strong, yet invisible way and creates, as it were, a kind of kinship. A letter or a journal concerning our nation can offend or delight us.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Exhortation to the Germans, 1679When the members of the English and French natio were about to cross swords at the Council of Constance, a clergyman in the little town of Bielefeld, a few hundred miles further north, completed a world chronicle with the title Cosmidromius. His name was Gobelinus Person, and in his introduction he made the following observation:While the ancients considered a division of provinces following the borderlines and the ends of rivers, mountains, forests and seas, the modern populace makes such distinctions according to the differences of vernaculars.As a consequence, Gobelinus continued, it was now possible that a local community, depending on the means of measurement, belonged to two different provinces. By calling his contemporaries, who defined boundaries based on linguistic criteria, vulgares, Gobelinus indicated that he did not approve of this change. He perceived the replacement of natural with cultural demarcations as a bottom-up process, which was generally considered the wrong direction in late medieval society.If we compare Gobelinus’ clear-cut distinction with other writings of the fifteenth century which deal with the political significance of vernaculars, we come to a contrary conclusion. The identification of political and linguistic boundaries seems to have been introduced top-down, from royal courts to princely estates to city councils to villages etc. In the following paragraphs, I will present the case of the German lands as an example of a more general process in Western Europe.

PrefaceIn 1963, the political scientist Kalman H. Silvert edited an anthology on nationalism in ‘developing countries’ with the slightly awkward title Expectant Peoples. The book did not receive much attention at the time and has been long forgotten, despite the fact that it made Silvert a pioneer in the field of nationalism studies. In his foreword, Silvert introduced a new question, which would later be raised repeatedly without ever being answered conclusively. The question was: how to justify ‘yet another book on nationalism’?If an author of the early 1960s had to give reasons for a new contribution to the study of nationalism, how severe must the pressure be now, after hundreds, if not thousands more books have been published in the meantime? The answer probably has to be ‘very severe indeed’. No author will be able to escape the pressure. However, this is no bad thing. There are still good arguments to justify yet another book on nationalism.