bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s
Authors: Lynch Deidre Shauna
Published: February 2014

This essay on the novel of ideas in the 1790s investigates the sometimes conflicting goals pursue by the ‘Jacobin’ novelists—figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Hays—and also charts their characteristic preoccupations with the proper relations between reason and passion and mind and body. Revamping the Enlightenment tradition of the conte philosophique, these supporters of the Revolution in France and political reform in Britain advocated a newly ambitious species of novel capable of building bridges between the discursive domains of fiction and political theory. These novelists also set out to claim the power over readers’ emotions they found in sentimental fiction’s stories of suffering individuals. At the same time, contrariwise, they aimed to assemble comprehensive accounts of the social system—of ‘things as they are’, in Godwin’s phrase—and touted their commitment to the promulgation of universal, impersonal truth.
The Anti-Jacobin Novel
Authors: Grenby M. O.
Published: February 2014

This essay investigates the conservative, loyalist fiction published in Britain during the French Revolution and its aftermath. A substantial number and a wide variety of these novels were published: long and short, propagandistic and philosophical, for adults and children and by obscure and well-known authors. The essay identifies and analyses the principal structures and themes of anti-Jacobin fiction, and closely examines a representative sample. It assesses their contribution to the ‘war of ideas’ and considers how they fit into larger histories of the novel.
The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance
Authors: Richter David H.
Published: February 2014

Romance, the dominant long-form fiction since 200 CE, is in eclipse for half a century after the rise of the realistic novel, but has a new efflorescence around 1790 in the Gothic novel for a number of reasons. It was a mode of historical writing without any need for accuracy about dates and places, a mode of sentimental writing that found in its villainous anti-heroes an entry point to the sadomasochistic desires of its readers. The chief characteristic of the heroine or hero is passivity, an attitude mirrored in the implied female reader of the Gothic, who seeks escape or retreat into an inner world of fantasy. It is ironic that the Gothic was displaced by 1820 by the historical romance of Scott, who adopted its plots and themes, but set them in a colder verisimilar world.
Novel and Empire
Authors: Ellis Markman
Published: February 2014

This essay examines novel’s relation with empire through the relationship between the form of the novel and the ideology of empire. It analyses the themes of colony and cross-cultural global encounters in popular prose subgenres of the eighteenth century, including the robinsonade, imitations of Crusoe’s island adventures, and the oriental tale, free imitations of the Islamic story collection. Although contemporary discourse on the British Empire argued that it was founded on ideas of liberty, commerce, and Christianity, the problem of slavery presented a powerful contradiction and growing controversy. Depictions of slavery in the sentimental novel advertised the asymmetrical violence endemic to the slave system, contributing to the emerging campaign for the abolition of the slave trade and, eventually, the emancipation of the slaves. Nonetheless, Gothic fictions found creative potential in the terrors of slavery and in folk beliefs derived from slave society, such as obeah and the zombie.
The Popular Novel, 1790–1820
Authors: Kelly Gary
Published: February 2014

The ‘popular novel’ was variously defined and understood in the period 1790 to 1820, but the Minerva Press was and has been seen, usually negatively, as its major purveyor. Recent research has substantially corrected and complicated this view, and indicated the varieties of novels and of their popularity and uses during that time. In the onset of modernization and its attendant changes, conflicts, and crises, various kinds of novels, perhaps more than other literary forms, helped their various kinds of readers to understand, negotiate, and learn how to manage both modernization and the anxieties of an age of revolutions. In that process, the novel itself underwent revolutionary change and diversification to become the dominant and mainstream form still used today.
Parody and Satire in the Novel, 1770–1832
Authors: Dyer Gary
Published: February 2014

The satirical fiction of the period 1770–1832 continues earlier trends, though the development of other modes of fiction and the fiction-marketing apparatus meant that satirical narratives were less central than they had been earlier in the eighteenth century. Satirical novels ran contrary to the tendency towards more plausible, more ‘novelistic’ fiction. Many novels used parody as a technique, often to attack literary trends, often to attack contemporary doctrines. Much satire was inspired, directly or indirectly, by the debates in Britain that followed the French Revolution. The most significant author of satirical novels, Thomas Love Peacock, used methods that were unlike those used by almost any other novelist. His fiction displays both memorable wit and a range of complex narrative techniques.
The Book Trade at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Hinds Peter
Published: February 2014

This essay provides an overview of the publishing context at the turn of the eighteenth century out of which the novel would emerge, including the development and early dominance of the London book, before going on to describe the conditions for the spread of printing and bookselling nationally from 1695 onwards. As well as considering book production, the essay examines readers’ experiences in the period, looking at the testimony of individual, historical readers, and some specific genres of writing—such as diaries, autobiographies, and collections of letters—often considered important for the emergence of the novel form. The essay then turns to establish the ‘conceptual horizons’ of readers’ expectations with regard to fiction—horizons which authors could work within or seek to challenge and push further by innovating new forms of literary expression, the novel amongst them.
Chinese Political Ideologies
Authors: Jenco Leigh
Published: February 2014

This chapter examines modern Chinese political ideologies beginning in the late nineteenth century, as intellectuals began to articulate China’s place in a global order centred outside its own borders. It eschews a teleological view of China’s ideological development, in which the present communist regime is assumed to be the inevitable culmination of the past, in favour of detailing ongoing contestations about Chinese history, identity, and modernization. The chapter surveys early responses of the ‘self-strengthening’ school to nineteenth-century Western imperialism, going on to discuss the deepening of Chinese commitments to Western learning and the totalistic critique of ‘traditional’ culture by thinkers associated with the May Fourth Movement. The continuity of these ideas is discussed in relation to key contemporary ideological developments on China and Taiwan, including: Chinese democratic thought and human rights; ideologies of revolution; Communism; contemporary liberal and New Left thought; and New Confucianism.
Christian Democracy
Authors: Pombeni Paolo
Published: February 2014

Christian Democracy is an evolving concept. This chapter discusses the long journey of the term in political debate. Considered at the beginning unacceptable by the Popes, as an offspring of the ‘liberty of critics’ toward authority, it was later accepted step by step as a mean of inserting Christians (mainly Catholics) into the frame of modern constitutionalism. After a period in which the contrast with the liberal view was still retained, catholic political thought turned to a positive approach towards Western constitutionalism. After 1945 political parties labelled as ‘Christian Democratic’ were protagonists of the rebuilding of some European countries and the Popes recognized that presence as positive and coherent with its orthodoxy. In a sense Christian Democracy became the new way of dealing with the problem of church and state relations. Matters were more complicated from the viewpoint of the Reformed Churches. In the more recent cases one may also find a ‘social doctrine’ even if it is quite different from the official Catholic attitude of the Vatican authorities towards social problems.
Green Ideology
Authors: Humphrey Mathew
Published: February 2014

This chapter identifies four key commitments of green ideology—ecological restructuring, radical democratization, ecological law, and non-violence as a principle of action. It then examines whether these core principles effectively constrain the potential decontestations of other, adjacent principles. Is green ideology a ‘thin’ ideology that is open to co-optation by more developed rivals, or does it stand on more distinctive conceptual territory, placing firm limits on such ideological appropriations? The chapter then assesses some of the challenges that have emerged in recent years from ‘sceptical environmentalism’ and ‘post-ecologism’, whose proponents claim sympathy with the broad objectives of the environmental movement. The chapter concludes by suggesting that such internal diversity represents a maturing of green ideology, but it may also indicate that the version of green ideology that (in the eyes of its proponents) constituted a radical challenge to existing forms of political and economic organization now stands increasingly marginalized.
Karl Mannheim and Political Ideology
Authors: Breiner Peter
Published: February 2014

This chapter argues that the famous ‘Mannheim paradox’ regarding the ideological understanding of ideology in Ideology and Utopia merely serves as a preparation for a far more complex and persistent paradox that poses a recurrent problem for any political science seeking to understand the relation of political ideologies to political reality: namely, when we try to understand contending political ideologies at any one historical moment and test them for their ‘congruence’ with historical and sociological ‘reality’, our construction of this context is itself informed by these ideologies or our partisan understanding of them. To deal with this paradox Mannheim suggests a new political science based on Marx and Weber. This political science seeks to construct fields of competing ideologies—such as conservatism, liberalism, and socialism—and play off the insight and blindness of each to create a momentary ‘synthesis’ of the relation between political ideas and a dynamic political reality.
Latin American Political Ideologies
Authors: Rivera José Antonio Aguilar
Published: February 2014

This chapter explores the ideological traditions and families that were developed in Latin America. These can be dated back to colonial times or even to the pre-Hispanic era. However, this chapter focuses on the ideological families that became prominent during the national period after the new nations achieved independence. There are several significant ideological traditions that were developed in Latin America at this time. The article discusses Liberalism, Conservatism, Socialism, Nationalism/Populism, and Multiculturalism. The main ideas of each one of these traditions are explored as they evolved in that part of the world. The chapter provides a wide overview of the subject.
South Asian and Southeast Asian Ideologies
Authors: Bajpai Rochana , Bonura Carlo
Published: February 2014

The chapter examines how transnational currents of political thought and national ideological formations are intertwined, in the context of South and Southeast Asia. Focusing on trajectories of liberalism; communism; nationalism; religious ideologies; and ideologies of race, indigenity, and caste, it suggests that ideology constitutes an important terrain for analysing the dynamics of colonial and postcolonial politics. Rather than provide an exhaustive survey, this chapter seeks to diagnose the broad contours of the principal ideological fields across the regions and establish a basis for further comparative inquiry. The conclusion notes the absence of the theme of ideology in the scholarship on South and Southeast Asian politics, regions which are themselves products of ideology.
The End of Ideology Thesis
Authors: Brick Howard
Published: February 2014

The idea that ‘Western’ politics had witnessed a post-Second World War ‘end of ideology’ carried great weight among mid-twentieth-century liberal European and US intellectuals. Almost as soon as this idea was broadcast, however, it became the object of intense debate: what represented to some a welcome reprieve from ‘extreme’ and destructive political doctrines (‘isms’), and the conflict between them, struck others as an order of complacency that stifled vigorous political debate and meaningful visions of a better future. It remains exceedingly difficult to locate a clear meaning to the phrase, ‘the end of ideology’. Nonetheless, the most prevalent definition aligned it with a very moderate social-democratic perspective that was anti-Communist and allied with anti-Soviet Cold War policies, dedicated to the promise of the postwar ‘welfare state’ (in a ‘left-liberal’ sense that dismissed ideologies of free-market efficiency), and tinged with a culturally conservative disposition that was suspicious of disruptive protest movements and avant-garde culture.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Communism
Authors: Chattopadhyay Paresh
Published: February 2014

Communism, envisaged as a society of free and equal individuals succeeding capitalism, arises from the latter’s contradictions and is the outcome of the workers’ self-emancipatory revolution, which starts with their gaining political power as the first step in an ongoing process of revolutionary transformation up to the appearance of the new society. The latter is classless, hence stateless, and its mode of production is marked by the absence of private ownership in the means of production, of commodity production, including money, and of wage labour. The new mode of appropriation is collective and the labour of the individual is directly social. As regards the mode of distribution, society itself takes charge of allocating total labour time—dead and living—across the economy and of dividing the total product between production and consumption needs, and of determining the share of personal consumption in proportion to the individual’s share in common labour.
Communism in Africa
Authors: Drew Allison
Published: February 2014

Communism in Africa can be analyzed along two dimensions: Communist movements that generally developed between the two world wars and were subjected to state repression and communism as a post-colonial state policy. During the colonial era communists built alliances with democratic and anti-colonial movements; any success reflected their ability to forge links with trade unions and nationalist organizations. Following independence, many new states adopted communist ideology and policies to facilitate international alliances and promote development. Those regimes form a subset of African one-party states that span the ideological spectrum. In post-colonial Africa communist and socialist movements have made episodic political gains during turbulent periods, but they have found it difficult to capitalize on such advances when faced with multiparty elections.
1919
Authors: Fayet Jean-François
Published: February 2014

Two years after the revolution in Russia, the social revolution was once again fermenting on the ruins of the empires defeated in the war. The First World War was turning into a civil war and not only in countries defeated in the war. The year 1919 saw the spread of workers’ and soldiers’ councils and a series of anti-colonial revolts in the Middle East and Far East. As yet, the link between these and the October Revolution was largely symbolic, since the Communist International generally learned of events only after the fact even as it endeavoured to integrate them within a global theoretical framework. Nevertheless it felt as though revolution were spreading like a contagion, at the same time as a wave of repression no less generalized was building up. Opening in revolutionary struggle, the year 1919 would end in victory for counter-revolution.
Stalin and Stalinism
Authors: McDermott Kevin
Published: February 2014

This chapter provides a wide-ranging introduction to the most recent historiographical interpretations of Stalin’s personality, his rise to power and his role in the ‘revolution from above’, the Great Terror, the Second World War, and the ‘High Stalinism’ of the years 1945–53. It contends that a ‘war-revolution model’ is the best way of understanding Stalin’s modus operandi and treats Stalinism as a highly complex, dynamic and contradictory phenomenon that convulsed the lives of millions in a grand historical and revolutionary quest for socialist modernity and national security. While emphasizing the fearsomely repressive essence of the Stalinist state, it is recognized that the system was able to generate more productive and inclusive practices which gained a measure of popular legitimacy among many Soviet citizens. Stalin was undoubtedly a bloody dictator, but to his last days he retained a profound ideological commitment to the construction of a strong communist utopia.
Lenin and Bolshevism
Authors: Lih Lars T.
Published: February 2014

The strategy of European Social Democracy, as embodied in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and set forth in the canonical writings of Karl Kautsky, was based on the aggressive use of political freedom to carry out large-scale propaganda campaigns. Lenin aimed at implanting this strategy into the uncongenial soil of Russian absolutism, which gave rise to his organizational ideas for the Social Democratic underground. After the 1905 revolution, Bolshevism was defined by a scenario for overthrowing the tsar in which the socialist proletariat would provide class leadership to the putatively democratic peasantry. Lenin responded to the crisis of European Social Democracy in 1914 by putting forward a vision of a new era of global revolutions, taken in large part from Kautsky’s writings. There is more continuity between pre-war Bolshevism and the revolution in 1917 than is commonly realized, but one crucial shift was the marginalization of political freedom.
Popular Opinion Under Communist Regimes
Authors: Fitzpatrick Sheila
Published: February 2014

The totalitarian nature of communist states is generally understood to exclude the existence of a public sphere sufficiently independent of the state to allow the expression of a range of opinions. However, popular opinion, if not a public sphere, did exist and it was monitored extensively by these states, since leaders needed to know about popular responses to their policies and campaigns. This essay explores the limits on the expression of popular opinion in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe, and the ways in which those limits shifted—and were challenged—over time. If it may be argued that the transformation of popular opinion into a ‘public sphere’ followed the collapse of communism in Poland, and possibly Hungary, ‘civil society’ was relatively insignificant in the collapse elsewhere (or indeed its persistence in the case of China).
Sport Under Communism
Authors: Edelman Robert , Hilbrenner Anke , Brownell Susan
Published: February 2014

This article examines sport in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and China. Despite the early Soviet emphasis on mass physical culture, high-performance sport was the priority of these regimes and all three notionally used ‘amateurism’ to enhance national prestige. Having started out as opponents of Olympism, all three at different times came to prioritize winning medals at the Olympic Games. Despite similarities in the organization of sport—the state played a significant role and ties to the military and police were strong in all three countries—there were significant differences between them: China rejected competitive sport for much of the Mao era, whereas sport was one arena in which the GDR outshone West Germany. The article shows that during the Cold War sport was as much an arena of competition between socialist states as it was between the capitalist and communist worlds.
Popular Culture
Authors: Vuletic Dean
Published: February 2014

Immediately following the Second World War, Eastern European communist parties employed censorship against Western popular culture, such as film and popular music, which they regarded as politically inappropriate. From the late 1950s, most parties increasingly sought to satisfy their citizens’ desires for consumption and entertainment, and they promoted the development of local cultural alternatives. The parties were not uniform in their policies, as a comparison between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia demonstrates. However, they did seek to appropriate popular culture to advance their political interests, and they similarly faced resistance from some domestic artists who criticized the government. The reluctance of the parties to allow as much freedom of consumption and expression as existed in the West, together with their inability to provide cultural goods that could keep up with Western fashions, points to popular culture as a factor that contributed to the demise of communism in Eastern Europe
Communism in South East Asia
Authors: Belogurova Anna
Published: February 2014

In South East Asia the Marxist message came primarily to address issues of nation-building. The article traces the development of communist parties from their early diasporic networks and engagement with the Comintern, to their relations with the colonial powers, to the establishment of communist-ruled states after the Second World War, through to the Cold War and US efforts to contain communism. The article looks at the various forms that communism took in the region, from hybrid Chinese associations in British Malaya and Hồ Chí Minh’s Indochina network, to the constitutional party of Sukarno’s Indonesia, to the semi-Buddhist Burmese Way to Socialism of Ne Win, to the neo-dynastic communism of Pol Pot. Special attention is paid to the interplay between nationalism, internationalism, and communism.
Communism in the Islamic World
Authors: Alexander Anne
Published: February 2014

This essay explores some of the common patterns in the history of communism in Muslim-majority societies. The most important of these had little to with Islam. Rather, they reflected the impact of European imperialism and nationalist resistance, the uneven tempo of integration into the global economy, the timing of the anti-colonial revolutions and the location of the post-colonial regimes in the great games of geopolitics. However, the other side of this narrative is the interwoven story of the decline of communist movements in most Muslim-majority societies and the rise of their Islamist competitors. It is argued that this trajectory is best explained not by recourse to essentialist explanations about the appeal of Islamist politics to Muslim believers, but by the failures of the post-colonial states on which the communists had pinned their hopes for national liberation and non-capitalist development.
Political and Economic Relations between Communist States
Authors: Szalontai Balázs
Published: February 2014

This chapter investigates the relations between the various communist states, particularly the USSR, the East European countries, and the Asian communist regimes, from the perspective of empire studies. It seeks to refine the concept of ‘totalitarian empire’ by making brief comparisons between communist and fascist practices of domination, and argues that the relations between the various communist states were considerably influenced both by internationalist and nationalist conceptions, which did not appear as mutually exclusive forces. A peculiar feature of communist imperial policies was that the dominant powers selected the (nominally) sovereign nation-state as the basic unit of their ‘outer empires’, rather than simply annexing the occupied countries or creating semi-sovereign structures.
Averting Armageddon
Authors: Roberts Geoffrey
Published: February 2014

The post-war communist peace movement was a powerful instrument of Soviet foreign policy during the early Cold War. By the early 1950s the movement had eclipsed the Cominform as the centrepiece of communist political strategy. The communist-dominated World Peace Council was supported by many famous Western artists, scientists, and writers and by hundreds of millions of people across the world who signed its anti-nuclear petitions such as the Stockholm Appeal. The relationship between the communist peace movement and Moscow was a two-way affair and the movement’s leaders—Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Ilya Ehrenburg, Alexander Fadeev, Pietro Nenni, and J. D. Bernal—were crucial in cementing the USSR’s commitment to the struggle for peace and in steering Stalin away from the idea that war was inevitable under capitalism. In 1956 the peace movement split over the USSR’s invasion of Hungary and thereafter declined, overshadowed by the rise of non-communist movements of disarmament campaigners.
Collectivization and Famine
Authors: Wemheuer Felix
Published: February 2014

In the Soviet Union and Maoist China several deadly famines occurred. The article argues that there is no necessary relation between collectivization of agriculture and famine. In many cases in Eastern Europe, collective agriculture was introduced and established for decades without causing mass starvation, especially when communist governments were willing to accept a mixed economy in the countryside. In the Soviet Union in 1931 and in China in 1959, however, collectivization did produce famines on a mammoth scale. These resulted directly from government decisions to launch overambitious industrial programmes to escape backwardness. Rapid urbanization and the resulting increase of millions of eaters in the urban rationing system, together with grain exports, overburdened the peasants. Rural consumption was curbed to a point that tens of millions could not survive.
The Politics of Plenty
Authors: Betts Paul
Published: February 2014

Chronicling the failure of communist regimes to match the consumer desires of its citizens has become shorthand for rereading the events of 1989 as a Whiggish victory of Western ‘soft power’ over its more militaristic, hard-line Soviet rival. However, consumerism did play a key role in communism. The essay explores the meanings of consumerism from the 1930s, when the Soviet Union attempted to accommodate shifts from long-preached ascetism and sacrifice to an increasing yearning to get and spend. In Eastern Europe in the 1960s communist governments used the Great Leap Forward in ‘consumer socialism’ to showcase their political legitimacy. Yet consumerism aroused acquisitive appetites that the state could not satisfy and thus subjected the populace to cycles of arousal and frustration. Seemingly banal problems of provisioning shaded into trenchant political criticisms of communism’s ability to make good on its material promises, a key factor in the collapse of communism.
Communism and Women
Authors: Harsch Donna
Published: February 2014

This article discusses women and gender relations under communism, beginning in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, continuing through the Cold War era in Eastern Europe, and including Cuba and China today. It addresses communist gender theory, ideology, and discourse. Women’s role in politics and government is discussed. The article covers employment and education, the peasant and urban family, social policies, and socialist consumption. Under communism, the article argues, women, especially married mothers, broke through traditional resistance to women’s participation in paid, including skilled, labour. Their levels of education and employment increased dramatically in most communist states. Yet women did not attain economic equality with men in any communist society and their share of political power remained stunningly low.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Stephen A.
Published: February 2014

The introduction offers a ‘global’ survey of the history of communism not only in the geographical sense but also in the sense of seeking to integrate history from above and history from below, social and cultural with political and economic history. The first half offers a synoptic view of the history of communist revolutions before and after 1945, highlighting the tensions between ‘intentionalist’ interpretations that stress human agency and political will and structuralist interpretations that stress the role of impersonal forces. It traces the way in which the meaning of the Russian Revolution was revised in the 1920s from being a mass revolution involving soviet power and radical equality to one concerned with the state mobilization of the human and material resources of a backward society to bring about economic, social, and military modernization. The second half looks at a number of major issues relating to the political, economic, and social history of communism in power. In respect of politics, these include the role of ideology in politics, the relationship of informal to formal political practices, the relationship of ‘neo-traditional’ to modern political practices, and the problem of bureaucracy. In respect of the economy, they include the relationship of the planned economy to the ‘second economy’, difficulties of economic reform, and the shift towards meeting the needs of the consumer from the 1950s. In respect of social aspects, the essay stresses the importance of non-state-directed social processes in shaping the development of communist societies, the reconstitution of forms of social inequality, ideas of cultural revolution, and policy towards women and national minorities. While not attempting to summarize historiography, the introduction seeks to give readers a sense of issues currently under debate.
Mao and Maoism
Authors: Cheek Timothy
Published: February 2014

Mao Zedong played a central role in leading the largest communist revolution in the world outside the Soviet Union and in the ‘creative developments’ or ‘Sinification’ of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy to suit Chinese conditions. He combined the roles of Lenin and Stalin. The essay traces his rise to power in the Chinese Communist Party between the 1920s and 1949 and his career as leader of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1976, looking at the part he played in key moments, including developments in the Yan’an base area from the late 1930s, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. The essay examines the central ideas in Mao’s philosophy, such as the primacy of practice, contradiction, rectification, and concern with bureaucracy. It goes on to explore key debates in the historiography and asks what ‘Maoism’ really means. The personality cult around Chairman Mao culminated in outrageous veneration in the 1960s and his memory today elicits strong feelings, both positive and negative. Despite his many mistakes and towering cruelty, he is still widely respected in China, as can be seen from his appropriation in popular culture. His ideas continue to be influential in parts of Asia and Latin America and his image is still invoked by contending interests in China.
1936
Authors: Rees Tim
Published: February 2014

The year 1936 was a momentous one in the history of communism. This was a time of acute uncertainty and fear, during which the Soviet Union and international communist movement faced unprecedented challenges. This article examines the attempts to build a socialist state in Russia, and to follow new international policies of collective security and the building of popular front alliances. Particular attention is given to the principal developments of the year—the internal crisis in the Soviet Union, the Chinese and Spanish civil wars, the Popular Front in France, the origins of the Great Terror—but also to the more everyday experiences of communists around the world.
1989
Authors: Middell Matthias
Published: February 2014

The essay argues that the story of 1989 can be told either as a narrow or a wide story. The narrow story focuses on the end of communism, the unification of Germany, and the subsequent integration of former communist states into the European Union. It works especially well for Central and Eastern Europe, although it also has implications for regimes in Africa that relied on Soviet support. However, it also requires considerable qualification, given the survival of communist regimes in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere. In the second, wide version of the story, 1989 brings to visibility processes that had been at work for several decades, undermining the power blocs of the Cold War era and the territorially defined polities on which the system of international relations rested. In this story 1989 is of as much relevance to the West as to the former Eastern Bloc. The essay looks at both stories in relation to Gorbachev and perestroika, the US role in the end of the Cold War, German unification, the singing revolution in the Baltic, and 1989 in China and Cuba.
Communism in Eastern Europe
Authors: Kolář Pavel
Published: February 2014

This article outlines the place of Eastern Europe in global communism. After considering the historical origins of communism, it concentrates on the period of state socialism (1945–89). The communist project was part of East European societies’ long-term endeavour to overcome their backwardness and to catch up with the West. It thus found itself between nation-building and Sovietization. The article argues that Eastern European communism was characterized by four major contradictions: between nation and class, state and society, production and consumption, and culture and ideology. The regimes successfully mastered these conflicts for a rather long time, acquiring a considerable degree of legitimacy in the process. Yet eventually these contradictions caused communism’s collapse in the late 1980s. Through this prism, the article traces the development of communism from popular democracy through Stalinism and de-Stalinization to ‘actually existing socialism’.
Communism in China, 1900–2010
Authors: Kuisong Yang , Smith Stephen A.
Published: February 2014

The article examines the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from its foundation in the May Fourth Movement, through the first and second united fronts with the Guomindang to victory following the Sino-Japanese War in 1945. It examines land reform and the campaigns against counter-revolutionaries and the attempt of Mao Zedong to leap into communism through the Great Leap Forward. It shows how Mao concluded from the ‘revisionism’ in the Soviet Union that advance from ‘undeveloped’ to ‘developed’ socialism depends on continuous class struggle against those who would take the capitalist road. The postscript traces China’s rise to the world’s second largest economic power, via policies of export-led and investment- led growth initiated by Deng Xiaoping. It shows that this has bought unprecedented prosperity but also unprecedented inequality. It concludes that rising social conflict does not at present threaten the stability of the CCP.
Clinical Pragmatics
Authors: Cummings Louise
Published: February 2014

Pragmatic disorders pose a barrier to effective communication in a significant number of children and adults. For nearly forty years, clinical investigators have attempted to characterize these disorders. This chapter examines the state of the art in clinical pragmatics, a subdiscipline of pragmatics that studies pragmatic disorders. The findings of recent empirical research in a range of clinical populations are reviewed. They include developmental pragmatic disorders found in autistic spectrum disorders, specific language impairment, intellectual disability and the emotional and behavioural disorders, as well as acquired pragmatic disorders in adults with left- or right-hemisphere damage, traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia, and the dementias. Techniques used by clinicians to assess and treat pragmatic disorders are addressed. In recent years, theoretical frameworks with a cognitive orientation have increasingly been used to explain pragmatic disorders. Two such frameworks—relevance theory and theory of mind—will be examined in this essay.
Neuropragmatics
Authors: Stemmer Brigitte
Published: February 2014

This essay summarizes the findings of studies investigating aspects of linguistic pragmatic behaviour and the brain correlates underlying such behaviour. Although pragmatics is a large field, most brain-oriented studies have focused on specific aspects of linguistic pragmatics such as structural discourse and figurative language. Research indicates that linguistic pragmatic behaviour relies on brain correlates that are routinely activated during word and sentence processing (the default language network). Although no agreement has yet been reached concerning questions such as whether these correlates are qualitatively and/or quantitatively different, whether additional brain areas/networks are implicated, and, if so, what these are, some concrete suggestions have emerged. At a more general level, there is consensus that the classical standard pragmatic model is not supported by most neuroimaging studies and that the right-hemisphere hypothesis on figurative language processing needs revision. The essay ends with some speculations on interpreting pragmatic behaviour within a microgenetic framework.
Physiology and Organic Bodies
Authors: Duchesneau François
Published: February 2014

In Leibniz's time, micro-mechanism seemed to dominate, though not exclusively, the more innovative trend in physiology, and microscopic anatomy (anatomia subtilis) determined the representation of living beings. The basic postulate was that human understanding could rely on microscopic observation and account for microstructures by framing mechanical models: along that trend, hope was to attain the real causes of physiological phenomena. In his natural philosophy, Leibniz grants living beings a prominent place. His metaphysics contains arguments and notions that build on physiological concepts to express the condition of finite substances and the relationship between substances in the phenomenal world. For Leibniz, at least in the later stages of his career, the account of living individuals and of their properties would provide access to a well-founded representation of corporeal substances in general. This chapter looks at Leibniz's views on physiology and organic bodies, focusing on his conception of living beings as "machines of nature" and his theory of monads.
The Principles of Contradiction, Sufficient Reason, and Identity of Indiscernibles
Authors: Rodriguez-Pereyra Gonzalo
Published: February 2014

This chapter discusses three fundamental principles of Leibniz's philosophy: the Principle of Contradiction, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles. It evaluates various formulations of these principles, their axiomatic character, and some attempts to demonstrate them. In particular, the chapter discusses in detail the derivation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in Primary Truths, and argues that Leibniz does not use the Principle of Contradiction in that derivation. It also discusses an attempt, in the correspondence with Clarke, to prove the Principle of Sufficient Reason empirically. Finally, the article examines the argument for the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles in the Discourse on Metaphysics.
Molecular Foundations of the Symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder
Authors: Chen Michael C. , Gotlib Ian H.
Published: February 2014

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a prevalent and costly disorder with a broad range of cognitive, affective, and behavioral symptoms. Despite the absence of a clear final common molecular pathway in depression, many molecular systems have been implicated in MDD. In particular, disruptions in molecular systems like serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, and other neurotransmitters, as well as in stress hormones, cytokines, neurotrophins, and neuropeptides, may contribute to MDD. To link the symptoms of MDD with molecular dysfunction, this article examines these molecules in the context of three symptom clusters of MDD: cognitive/affective symptoms, volitional/behavioral symptoms, and homeostatic/vegetative symptoms. It examines how these molecules and their receptor, transport, and regulatory systems contribute to MDD and to the development of specific symptom clusters. It presents two possible frameworks of molecular dysfunction in MDD that encompass the interactions between vulnerability phenotypes and biochemical perturbations that may lead to the heterogeneous symptoms of this disorder.
Genetic Tools in the Erasure of Emotional Memory
Authors: Sargin Derya , Yan Chen , Josselyn Sheena
Published: February 2014

Fear is an important emotion; remembering fearful events/places/stimuli is key for survival. However, dysregulation of fear may underlie the etiology of several psychiatric diseases. Inappropriate storage and/or recall of fearful events can lead to maladaptive fear behaviors and physiological responses that contribute to emotional disorders. Much research has provided insights into the neural processes mediating the formation of fear memories. In addition, some new research has begun to provide insights into how fear memories may be weakened. A more thorough understanding of the molecular, cellular, and circuit basis of the formation and storage of fear memories may one day provide insights into how we can rid ourselves of aberrant fear memories associated with psychopathological responses.
Copy Number Variation in Neuropsychiatric Disorders
Authors: Rucker James J. H. , McGuffin Peter
Published: February 2014

It has long been known that the human genome is subject to deletion and duplication of genetic material by various molecular mechanisms. Until recently, such events were assumed to be relatively rare phenomena. It is now known that submicroscopic deletions or duplications calledcopy number variants(CNVs) are a major source of genomic variation. Rare CNVs (defined as occurring in less than 1 percent of the population) have been implicated in schizophrenia and autism. Measured in terms of odds ratios, individual CNVs have been shown to have large effects, some increasing the risk of disorder several-fold. But they are incompletely penetrant, no one CNV is either necessary or sufficient to cause the disorder. The findings are less clear-cut with bipolar disorder but, here, too, rare CNVs probably play a role. In unipolar depression, initial evidence suggests an overall increase in rare CNVs that disrupt exons, the coding regions of genes.
Neurogenetics of Individual Differences in Brain, Behavior, and Risk for Psychopathology
Authors: Hyde Luke W. , Bogdan Ryan , Hariri Ahmad
Published: February 2014

Neurogenetics research is advancing understanding of how genetic variation gives rise to individual differences in brain function, which, in turn, shapes behavior and risk for psychopathology. Despite these advancements, neurogenetics research is currently confronted by three major challenges: 1) conducting research on individual variables with small effects, 2) absence of detailed mechanisms, and 3) a need to translate findings towards greater clinical relevance. This essay showcases techniques and developments that address these challenges and highlights the benefits of a neurogenetics approach to understanding brain, behavior, and risk for psychopathology. To address the challenge of small effects, we explore approaches including incorporating the environment, modeling epistatic relationships, and using multilocus profiles. To address the challenge of mechanism, we explore how nonhuman animal research, epigenetics research, and GWAS can inform our mechanistic understanding of behaviorally relevant brain function. Finally, to address the challenge of clinical relevance, the essay examines how neurogenetics research can identify novel therapeutic targets and identify for whom treatments work best. By addressing these challenges neurogenetics research is poised to exponentially increase our understanding of how genetic variation interacts with the environment to shape the brain, behavior and risk for psychopathology.
Genetics and Criminal Justice
Authors: Morse Stephen J.
Published: February 2014

This essay addresses the relevance of genetic data, including gene-by-environment interactions, to criminal responsibility and sentencing. After describing the criminal law’s implicit psychology and criteria for responsibility, it considers the present and future contributions genetics may make. It suggests that, at present, genetics should not play a large role in the adjudication of individual cases unless it translates directly into the law’s folk psychological criteria for responsibility, which it seldom does. Future discoveries may increase the usefulness of genetics to rational adjudication, however. The role of genetics at sentencing may be somewhat more promising, especially concerning the prediction of future behavior.
Genetics of Autonomic Nervous System Activity
Authors: de Geus Eco , van Lien Rene , Neijts Melanie , Willemsen Gonneke
Published: February 2014

Large individual differences in the activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) play a key role in risk for cardiovascular disease. This chapter presents an overview of the measurement strategies that can be used to study ANS activity in samples that are sufficiently large to allow genetic analyses. Heart rate variability, in particular, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is identified as the measure of choice to index parasympathetic activity, whereas preejection period (PEP) is the measure of choice to index sympathetic activity. Twin studies have demonstrated significant genetic contributions to resting levels of both RSA (heritability estimates range from 25 to 71 percent) and PEP (heritability estimates range from 48 to 74 percent) and the genetic variance in these traits seems to further increase under conditions of psychological stress. Identifying the genetic variants that influence parasympathetic and sympathetic activity may increase our understanding of the role of the ANS in cardiovascular disease.
English-Canadian Ethnocentricity
Authors: Lindgren Allana C.
Published: February 2014

In July 1936, Boris Volkoff, a respected Toronto dance teacher and choreographer, and some of his students represented Canada at the Internationale Tanzwettspiele, one of the arts events staged in conjunction with the infamous Nazi Olympics. To depict Canada and its heritage in dance, Volkoff choreographed Mon-Ka-Ta and Mala, two works inspired by indigenous cultures. Accessing archival documents, this chapter argues that Volkoff’s choreography was aligned with the attitudes underpinning English-Canadian ethnocentricity, particularly regarding salvage ethnography, aesthetic primitivism, and the appropriation of indigenous iconography for nationalist narratives.
“Hot” Latin Dance
Authors: McMains Juliet
Published: February 2014

Through a brief history of Latin dance within the American ballroom dance industry, this paper reveals how participation in Latin dance by non-Latinos in the United States has, throughout much of the twentieth century, relied on and reinforced harmful stereotypes of ethnic Latinos. The author argues, however, that when Latin dance is practiced in integrated communities in which Latinos and non-Latinos share the dance floor, such stereotypes can be weakened. Two case studies of integrated Latin dancing are offered as examples: mambo dancing at New York’s Palladium Ballroom in the 1950s and salsa dancing practiced at international salsa congresses since 1997. In both cases, the evidence suggests that Latinos are able to strengthen their own ethnic identity through participation in Latin dance while simultaneously challenging non-Latino dancers to move toward a more nuanced understanding of Latino people and cultures.