bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Is Marx Obsolete?
Authors: Adorno Theodor W.
Published: March 2007

Reports and discussions should be aimed at deciding whether the capitalist system still reigns—however much it may have modified itself—or whether industrial development has made the very concept of capitalism, the difference between capitalist and non-capitalist states, and the very critique of capitalism redundant. In other words, is the thesis that Marx is obsolete (a very widespread thesis in sociology) correct? According to this thesis, the world is so permeated by the previously undreamed-of development of technology that the social relation which once defined capitalism—the conversion of living work into goods, and the class separation which it brought about—has lost its relevance, if indeed it has not degenerated into a superstition. And here one may point to unmistakable signs of convergence between the most technically advanced countries, the United States and the Soviet Union. In the principal western countries class differences in living-standards and class consciousness are altogether far less in evidence than in the decades during and immediately after the industrial revolution. The prognoses of the class theory, such as the prediction of impoverishment and collapse, have not come true as drastically as they were meant to—as they must have been meant to, unless one is to deprive these predictions of most of their meaning. Even if Marx's by no means unambiguous law of falling profit rates had proved true, within the system, we should have had to concede that capitalism had discovered resources within itself which enabled the collapse to be relegated to the Greek kalends. There is no doubt that the immense increase in technological potential and the large amount of consumer goods available to all inhabitants of the highly industrialized countries are foremost among these resources. And at the same time the relations of production proved to be more elastic, in the face of this technological development, than Marx credited them with being.
Marxism and the Sociology of Civilizations
Authors: Abdel-Malek Anouar
Published: March 2007

The 150th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx takes place in a setting which differs fundamentally from that in which his critical theses were worked out. These theses, from his “juvenilia” to Das Kapital—in turn celebrating its centenary—and the foundation of the International, changed the destiny of the world, of its peoples, States and nations. One is readily aware of the modifications in historical, economic, and political conditions, buffeted by revolutions and confrontation. But it is with difficulty that specialists—whether of theory or practice—take cognizance of other dimensions of this difference, which we consider to be fundamental to, and constitutive of, the very formulation of the theoretical problem which forms the subject of our study. Finally, however, the nationalitarian phenomenon asserts itself, day after day, as an objectively central factor in the multiform dialectics of revolutions, of evolutions, of counter-revolutions, and of apparent stagnation. Here a geographical thread is added to the historical one. But this new element is not, as some would wish it, a topographical one. The aim of the geographical dimension, or rather that of historical geography, is not to accommodate the geopolitical analysis of the contemporary world, but to serve as a framework for the emergence on the sociological level of a key concept, that of civilization, which seems to us to be necessary in order to determine the general theoretical pattern of the evolutionary process of human societies in this time of ours, the second half of the twentieth century.
Marx and the Intellectual From the Third World; or the Problem of Historical Retardation Once Again
Authors: Laroui Abdallah
Published: March 2007

What is Marx for an intellectual of the Third World? The author of some pages on pre-capitalist societies, the critic of Western society, or simply a name under whose authority it is sometimes convenient to take shelter? One could, of course, quote cases where considerations of tactics, or of erudition, were manifest; but it is not these cases that will be analysed here. It will be the cases where the intellectual of the Third World, conscious of his singularity, his culture and his past, finds himself one day forced, willy-nilly, to take Marx seriously and to define his own position by reference to Marx; and this day must come, theoretically speaking, if the intellectual in question is not an ideologist, in the worst sense of the word.
The “Associated Producers:” Dictatorship, Proletariat, Socialism
Authors: Papaioannou Kostas
Published: March 2007

“Between the capitalist society and the communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the former into the latter. To this there corresponds a period of political transition in which the State can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” (19, 28).
Marx and the End of History
Authors: Tucker Robert C.
Published: March 2007

The hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Marx's birth is a more propitious occasion for commemoration of him than the hundredth would have been. In May, 1918, the world was at war, and not much concerned with such ceremonies. A party of Marxist revolutionaries had just taken power in Russia, but the future of that revolution, and others like it, was still unclear. And some early philosophical writings of Marx, knowledge of which was destined greatly to deepen our understanding of the genesis and meaning of Marxism, were still lying in archives and unknown to all but a very few. It was still too soon to assess the historical significance of Marx. Now we are better situated in time to make the assessment.
Note On the Coherence of the American Phenomenon
Authors: Doremus André
Published: March 2007

The creation of any empire is comprehensible only in terms of the passion that carries it along, exceeds its historical dimension and returns to a cosmic dimension that is common to the whole of time. Great historical phases are only established in and as history by a passion that is the foundation and the cancellation of their historicity. The peoples who were called Barbarians were only called this for the way in which their upheaval of history was felt to be a cosmic and natural happening, beyond history in as much as it did not issue from history and expected nothing from it either. They were “all or nothing” in the pure state; they demonstrated at one and the same time the fact of having nothing to lose and everything to gain; they were the mixture of the origin and the end of the times; they were the irruption of the cosmic as such within the very core of history.
Structure, Structural, Structuralism
Authors: Wald Henri
Published: March 2007

Unlike positivism, which took the form of a protest by the individual against the canonization of the general, and unlike existentialism, which expressed a revolt of the concrete against abstraction erected into a dogma—structuralism is an ideology of capitulation to the bureaucratic and technocratic supremacy of means over ends and of society over individuals. The dogmatic systems of the last decades have finished by creating an intellectual atmosphere in which “the whole” is put in the foreground, leaving its component “parts” in the shade.

Structuralism idolizes structure at the expense of its components, and structural analysis at the expense of induction and generalization. For the structuralists, supporting elements are seen merely as interrelated elements, and things related to one another are swallowed up by the relations between them. In their eyes, the elements that make up a structure are in themselves meaningless; they exist only by virtue of being grouped according to a certain pattern of organization. Only relations are regarded as constant, and thus as proper objects of a science; properties are merely ephemeral and illusory.
Tradition and Modernization in a North Bihar Village
Authors: Varma Vishwanath Prasad
Published: March 2007

The transformation of a traditional society into a modern well-knit organic structure can be demonstrated in various ways. In this paper an attempt will be made to study a village in North Bihar, in the district of Saran. This village, Dharampur, is about 8 miles north-east of Chapra the chief town of the district, and some 10 miles from Khairah, the nearest station on the North Eastern Railway. The old people claim that originally their ancestors inhabited another village, Panchpatra, about a mile to the south of the present settlement. There, according to legend, ghosts used to shower bones onto the roofs the houses. The inhabitants, disturbed at their work, and terrified, decided to seek the help of a Sâdhu Ramadas who lived in a nearby monastry. The saint indicated a site which he blessed, and the construction of the new village began. Thus it is clear that the migration as well as the site of the present village were linked with traditional factors, represented in this instance by the intervention of ghosts and by the Sâdhu. This incident may have happened about 200 years ago; today the former village is known as Dīha, meaning ancient dwelling place.
The Future of Culture
Authors: Bernard Pierre
Published: March 2007

It is not as easy as one thinks to define the new dimension created by science in the life of modern societies; a considerable number of prejudices, resulting from conceptions which are often directly inspired by science itself, produce an unsuspected degree of resistance in this respect. Our only means of overcoming them seems to lie in isolating the real implications of the current scientific revolution, in breaking with the clichés which ensnare us, in becoming aware that research plays a very different part from the one that the preceding generation saw fit to attribute to it, so much so that one of the great barriers erected between art and science dissolves. Thus the hope placed by Gyorgy Kepes in “a new awareness of the interdependence of knowledge and feeling,” in “the links between the intrinsic characteristics of natural and artistic forms” would be justified, together with the efforts of such men as Buckminster Fuller to erect “a bridge between our conception of the constitutive principles of nature and the application of this knowledge to the creation of man-made forms,” and with the will to “renew the ancient marriage of art and science.”
Can Pyschiatry Give Direction To Modern Philosophy?
Authors: Chessick Richard D.
Published: March 2007

The purpose of this paper is to examine those aspects of modern dynamic psychiatry which could stimulate philosophical thought and perhaps lead even to collaborative investigations between the disciplines of psychiatry and philosophy. Although the overlap of their interests is obvious, there is an astonishing lack of communication between workers in these fields.
A Pygmalion Adventure
Authors: Berger René
Published: March 2007

Broadly speaking, the situation that preceded ours can be summed up as follows: formed by tradition artists worked for a rich or fairly rich clientele, or for the State who commissioned them; their works were periodically made the object of official exhibitions (salons presided over by a committee or inspired by amateurs or connoisseurs), or in the form of private shows, both indeed appealing to the same “élite”—on whom Proust has left us some exemplary pages. The rest of the public was composed for the most part of people who had no access to art, who never entered a museum or a gallery, much less a salon, still less the studio of an artist; in short, for whom art had no existence except some names—Rembrandt, Raphael, Michelangelo—who remained names. Between the “élite” and the no-man's-land, a “fringe” public, made up of those who wanted to have, for reasons of taste, of curiosity, or for other motives, an initiation to art, to have some idea of it, and who went periodically to museums, to exhibitions, or who gathered information by reading. It is noteworthy that school hardly played any part: artistic teaching being most often reduced to “drawing lessons” where one learnt to copy Egyptian or Roman plaster casts, engravings, pictures, in short, to copy a design. As for books, they became confused with the same grisaille of printing and line-drawings, which, indeed, reappeared in the windows of bookshops and even in the town…
Mass Communication: Dilemmas for Sociology
Authors: Meyersohn Rolf
Published: March 2007

The relationship between social science and television has been an uncomfortable one. So “conspicuously vulgar,” so “manifestly tempting,” so “clearly a waste of time,” television's “evil effects” have been pondered by social scientists ever since the first antennas were raised on the rooftops of America and Western Europe.

Sheer quantity provides perhaps the leading cause for the concern. Much as uncontrolled births, “the problem of overpopulation,” serves as fulcrum for concern with “underdeveloped” countries and as epitome for the difficulties associated with raising levels of living, so uncontrolled television viewing, the problem of over-viewing, serves as fulcrum for concern with modern societies and as epitome for the difficulties associated with improving styles of life.
Metaphor and Invention
Authors: Schlanger Judith E.
Published: March 2007

In La Nouvelle Héloïse Rousseau states that everyone uses figurative expressions; he adds that only fools and geometricians express themselves without using metaphor. Can one allow even these two exceptions? It has become increasingly clear in the field of culture that metaphor can be used in a foolish manner: how many doctrines have a dominant analogy at the basis of their reasoning; how many metaphors have become dogmatic as the areas in which they may be applied increase? And if metaphor is central to faulty reasoning and foolish arguments, is it altogether absent from the geometrician's work? The geometrician's categories are certainly limiting in this respect, and it appears paradoxical to wonder whether geometrical concepts, such as a straight line or a point are not figurative expressions borrowed from other fields. However the problem becomes far less paradoxical when one moves from geometry to mathematical astronomy, mechanics and by degrees to the whole of physics. For in most fundamental categories, those which instigate a new field of knowledge, a metaphorical dimension, then become apparent. The further one descends Comte's ladder of science, the more the terminology retains the stamp of the transitional stage from which the concept originated. A straight line, a point, a circle are perhaps first concepts as regards expression and invention. But attraction, natural selection, physiological division of labour, or division of social work bear in their very names the mark of the intellectual transference through which they were formed. With the result that scientific invention does not use non-figurative concepts; it often finds its mode of expression through metaphor. Neither the fool nor the geometrician escape the metaphorical realm of thought, because it is the usual means of expression and conceptualisation. Because of this the metaphor used by the fool and that used by the geometrician link up, and it becomes possible with regard to certain predominating metaphors, to tackle the question of the quality of reasoning and the question of the discovery of knowledge, the study of argument and the study of conceptualisation, together: for beyond the general usage of metaphor, it is the expressive nature of speech itself with which we are primarily concerned.
Some Remarks On Public Life
Authors: Herrmann Rolf Dieter
Published: March 2007

This paper sketches an analysis of the public realm in Western democracies. It has often been said that there is a decline of public life in advanced industrial societies, and that this decline threatens the nature and function of political democracy. I doubt this. The most that I would claim at this stage is that large masses of the citizenry are excluded from the contemporary political scene, and that the most urgent political problems are discussed by social organizations representing the interest of individuals and groups. This is of philosophical interest; for these organizations, and not individual citizens, are constituting now the public life. It would take me too far afield to show how the new radicalism of the 1960s and many other social and political movements of today reacted against the threatened liquidation of the public realm. My main object is to draw attention to the lack of participation, least of all of political participation, of the citizens, and to answer the question why this happened.
Historical Facts and Their Selection
Authors: Schaff Adam
Published: March 2007

“Facts are not really like fish on a fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming in a huge and sometimes inaccessible ocean; what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but principally on the part of the ocean which he has chosen to fish in, and also on the bait he is using. These two factors are, of course, determined by the sort of fish he intends to fish for. In general, the historian will find the sort of facts he wishes to find.”

E. H. Carr, What is History?
Past and Future of Rural Communities
Authors: Mendras Henri
Published: March 2007

Industrial societies are seeking a civilization for which they have not as yet found a firm framework of moral and social values, nor definite forms of social life. That is why traditional peasant values and ways of life, and social institutions in rural communities, still appeal so strongly to emotion and remain so strikingly evocative in our urbanized, industrialized world. Village society is still seen as an ideal—and often idealized—social model; industrial societies would like to have something comparable in their vast cities.
Venice and Genoa: Two Styles, One Success
Authors: Lopez Robert S.
Published: March 2007

At first sight, the situations of Venice and of Genoa seem to be almost as identical as mirror images. They are set at the head of the two deepest bays in the Mediterranean, both of them being virtually at the physical centre of that sea, and seemed fated by geography to act as rallying-points for East and West, and as bridge-heads for North and South. This, however, is not overly important: all countries, all nations are, in their own eyes, the physical centre of the Universe. The opportunity is always there, but it needs initiative to take advantage of it. For Venice, just as much as Genoa, had to overcome serious difficulties, both being almost cut off from their hinterland, Venice by the lagoons, Genoa by the mountains. Both cities were republics, and both ended up by having even the name of their supreme magistrate in common: the Doge. The merchandise that they exported and imported, the routes covered by their merchants, the currency, contracts, techniques, beliefs, and prejudices, only differed in a few details. The colonial empires were connected at several points. This made the wars between Venice and Genoa more fierce, but also made their ententes more intimate.
The Western Conception of Moral Order
Authors: Marcus John T.
Published: March 2007

In an age when the interactions between East and West are multiplying and the once-dominant characteristics of Western life appear to be disintegrating, the search for some “principle of coherence” which characterizes a given civilization assumes special significance. None of the many explanations of the distinctive character of Western civilization which have been advanced by generations of scholars seem fully convincing when the latter is seen in both its structural and chronological aspects. Indeed, neither its devotion to technological innovation nor its Christian messianism can account for the kaleidoscopic elements in Western culture. It is also fruitless to attempt to find the underlying principle of unity in some unique world-view that would ostensibly be applicable at all times and in all social and geographical contexts—unless one would arbitrarily reduce the concept of civilization to the outlook or behavior of an educated elite, drawn from one or two relatively small social classes.
Comments On Contemporary African Philosophy
Authors: Hountondji Paulin J.
Published: March 2007

Dedicated to my son.

“There are two ways of losing oneself: by isolation walled into the individual, or by dilution in the ‘universal’."

Aimé Césaire (Letter to Maurice Thorez 1956)

I term a group of texts “African philosophy”: to be precise, the group of texts written by Africans and defined as “philosophic” by the authors themselves.

This definition, let us note, involves no “petitio principii.” The sense of the adjective “philosophic” need not be reckoned with here, and even less the cogency of the adjective. All that matters is the fact of the adjective itself, the deliberate recourse to the word “philosophy” whatever, by the way, the sense or meaninglessness of the word may be. In other words, all that concerns us is the philosophic intention of the authors, not the extent (hard to evaluate) of its effective realisation.
Philosophers Have Avoided Sex
Authors: Alexander W.M.
Published: March 2007

It is a strange and puzzling fact that philosophers have acted almost as though man were not sexual.

It's as though sex had no significance for human thought, or as though it made no difference that the thinker was also a sexual creature.

This philosophical blind spot has been remarked from time to time by one solitary observer or other. In the last century the German sociologist Georg Simmel noticed that the discussions in Plato's Phaedrus and the Symposium and “the very one-sided reflections of Schopenhauer,” apart from occasional individual comments, “are all that the great thinkers have contributed to this problem.” As Erwin Reisner sees it, philosophy has paid strikingly little attention to this phenomenon so absorbing to the poets. “Indeed, one can almost say, it has industriously ignored and skirted the subject, exactly so, as if it had to fear that it might be corrupted by the notion...”
Wastage in Modern Economy Media and Wastage
Authors: Matarasso Michel
Published: March 2007

“Holidays are social life inside out.”

(Cl. Lévi-Strauss)

Some years ago, Vance Packard—neither wholeheartedly a sociologist nor economist, but a voice with a dazzling mastery of all that bears reference to the procedures and jargon of advertising—uttered a cry of alarm, applying himself to the task of taking to pieces a strongly developed socio-economic system: the system of wastage in our opulent societies, with American society topping the bill. In a prefatory image he said: “In a sense the American people are becoming a nation sitting astride a tiger. The Americans have to learn how to consume more and more, or else their magnificent economic machine will turn round on them and devour them.” The idea of consuming more and more involves both the incentive to and the organisation of wastage. The waste-makers, those who organise or create wastage, are as necessary to the American economy as the American economy is to them, thanks to an intimate and indispensable complicity. The super-abundant production of consumer goods calls for the development of a collective ethic of wastage, which, in return, provides for it. But deep down it is preparing its ruin, by the gradual exhaustion of natural resources.
Marx, Freud, and the Undertakings of Thought in the Future
Authors: Axelos Kostas
Published: March 2007

There was the young Marx and the old Marx. There was the young Freud and the old Freud. There was Marxism and Marxisms, Freudianism and Freudianisms. There has even been a Freudo-Marxism. One speaks of Freudo-Marxism because it is after a certain level of understanding of Freud that one comes to Marx, in order to bring the two together in an articulated whole which admits of mediations between the two geniuses of reductive analysis of social man and of human society. Hunger and social effort to satisfy it, on one hand, love and desire aimed at satisfaction, related in an unfathomable way with death, on the other, are established as the constituents of the historic and social nature of Man and of humanity in general coming to grips with the great cosmic whole. (Both Marx and Freud seem to have overlooked the Will: the will to power, indeed the will to possess a will. But another, falling between them, included it: Nietzsche.)
Acculturation
Authors: de Coster Michel
Published: March 2007

The concept of acculturation is at the centre of the social changes which are taking place, not without some disorganization, in the developing countries. The increasing interest which they continue to arouse therefore necessitates, among other things, the utilization of exact and operational concepts in the study of a social reality undergoing profound changes and suddenly confronted with civilizations totally different from their own.
The Childhood of Mankind
Authors: Schlanger Judith E.
Published: March 2007

The childhood of humanity, the human race in its infancy: while this expression was in common use, there was probably no ground for seeking out the implementation of real symbols on each occasion on which it was used. Its very success having made it commonplace, a metaphor becomes a convenient and communal way of speaking which does not necessarily correspond to a way of thinking. But as soon as the formula seems to be out of date, is ceases retrospectively by this fact, to be commonplace. Or to be more exact, a triteness to which the common run of thought no longer adheres, begins in itself to pose a question: if the end of a stereotype is not a loss for scholarship, it is a spur to reflection. What a modification must take place in our rational apprehension of ourselves, what an alteration of the status, content and function of the ideas of humanity and of childhood, in order that the metaphor “the childhood of humanity” should in future have no explanatory power, and that having ceased to enlighten or to prove, it should have ceased to appear natural, in order to become obsolete. Since the image of the childhood of humanity was commonplace, what concatenation of evidence was the basis for this commonplaceness? What does the recourse to images of childhood mean, as related to the definitive confines of humanity? And what is the conception of human “becoming” which is backed up by the temporal and qualitative buttresses of a childhood?
Overall and Prospective History of the Third World
Authors: Sachs Ignacy
Published: March 2007

Our capacity to foresee the lengthy life and the prospective techniques which are available to us has not essentially altered in the last 25 years, at a time when the field of possibles has been considerably widened by the exponential growth of our material and intellectual out-puts. Furthermore, as scientific revolutions, in the sense in which T. Kuhn intends this term, are becoming increasingly frequent and are affecting very different areas, one has leave to count upon the continuation of this widening process in the field of possibles, despite the constraint imposed by the finite quantity of identified and identifiable resources, at least on the scale of our planet. In other words, we do not think that this accelerated destruction of the environment (which is the main feature of our industrial civilisation) is beyond control, and that one should consequently preach—as various Jeremiah prophets are doing—a planetary Neo-Malthusianism extending to all the resources and expressed by the thinly veiled rejection of the right to industrialise for those countries still waiting to join the ‘rich man's club.’ But suddenly our ascendancy over the ever more diversified future grows slighter and slighter, because the prospective is stamping its feet; and this is a paradoxical and troubling consequence of the acceleration of the history in which we have to live. The widening of the field of possibles implies, moreover, an increase of choices. These choices are being made constantly, sometimes explicitly, but mostly implicitly: large options are sliced up by decisions of a minor order, and this obscures but does not lessen their significance.
The Horizon of the Renaissance
Authors: Chastel André
Published: March 2007

The centuries have acted rather as a warehouse for the idea we harbour about the Renaissance: the age of initiative, the age, above all others, of motivated decision-making provoked by strong images, the age when decisions were taken with ardour and carried through with confidence. If this intuition is not an unreal one, then historians should both stake their claim in it and account for it.

The fine quality of self-confidence which we attribute to the great figures of the Renaissance supposes the necessary and certain knowledge that one can “change the order of things.” And one can have a fairly clear idea from the example of the French how this certain knowledge is formulated and how it operates.
Mental Health and Medical Care: Four Cultures and a Single Theme
Authors: Shepherd Michael
Published: March 2007

We are now slowly re-discovering the conclusion reached by Alfred Grotjahn in his remarkably prescient Soziale Pathologie, namely that “zwischen dem Menschen und der Natur die Kultur steht.“ [1]. In some measure this maxim affects every branch of modern medicine but to none is it more relevant than psychiatry, which is so closely embedded in the social matrix in which the subject is practiced. A comprehensive study of this matrix would have to touch on a number of disciplines, including history, economics, social anthropology and sociology, but for our immediate purpose these multiple influences can be canalized by reference to the available systems of medical care which exist to deliver the two broad types of service offered by contemporary medicine: on the one hand, the specific products of biomedical research—a surgical operation, say, or a new drug—which are impersonal, often expensive and ideally directed at the cure of disease; on the other hand, the “non-specific” psychosocial contribution of medicine, intensely personal and more often directed towards alleviation or support. These two categories do no more than reflect the derivation of modern medicine from its twin sources of science and magic whose respective attributes were etched so sharply by Malinowski: “Science, even as represented by the primitive knowledge of savage man, is based on the normal universal experience of everyday life, experience won in man's struggle with nature for his subsistence and safety, founded on observation, fixed by reason. Magic is based on specific experience of emotional states in which man observes not nature but himself, in which the truth is revealed not by reason but by the play of emotions upon the human organism. Science is founded on the conviction that experience, effort and reason are valid; magic on the belief that hope cannot fail nor desire deceive. The theories of knowledge are dictated by logic, those of magic by the association of ideas under the influence of desire”. [2]
The Literary and Artistic Sociology of Black Africa
Authors: Agblemagnon Ferdinand N'Sougan
Published: March 2007

Any serious study of the literary and artistic forms of expression found in the continent of Africa south of the Sahara must open with a look at the traditional forms of expression. It is these forms of which the various intellectual movements in Africa are becoming increasingly aware, a trend exemplified by the Festival of Negro Arts organised a few years back at Dakar.
The Rights of Science After Death
Authors: Doll Paul - Julien
Published: March 2007

It is with fear that one approaches anything closely or distantly related to the idea of death and the dissection of a body which has held life. To some, giving one's body or an organ is a “taboo” subject. And yet numerous transplants can only be conceived of by starting from a corpse from which one removes the liver, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, etc… It is thus, for example, that between 15th March 1963 and 15th March 1965, 196 kidney transplants were registered in the world, taken from corpses, with 35.7% of successes.
Was Homer a Liar?
Authors: Chadwick John
Published: March 2007

...une tradition à la fois antique et directe, ininterrompue, orale, deformée, méconnaissable et vivante.

M. Proust

This is a deliberately provocative title, chosen in an iconoclastic moment, when I was annoyed by reading yet another book, in which the author prostrates himself abjectly before the altar of Homer the historian. The worship of this false god has reached such proportions that every writer on Mycenaean Greece devotes a great deal of space to what Homer says, and spends page after page trying to reconcile the Homeric account with the archaeological evidence. The idea that Homer can tell us about the Mycenaean Age dies hard; it is time to administer the coup de grâce.
Kingship as a System of Myth: an Essay in Synthesis
Authors: Yamaguchi Masao
Published: March 2007

Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge attracts the attention of ethnologists who are interested by the symbolical analysis of kingship. Although this book does not deal with the theme of kingship as such, it overlaps it on a mythical level. It is a novel about the rise and fall of a man, Henchard, whose initial act is to sell his wife and daughter; in order to commit this act he deviates from the context of the human norm by way of drunkenness. He then enjoys great success as a corn merchant and becomes mayor of the town. Twenty years after this the graph of his destiny starts to fall with the arrival of a young man named Farfrae, who eventually ousts Henchard from his business as well as from his political position, and who goes to the length of taking over not only Henchard's mistress, Lucetta, but also his daughter, Elizabeth-Jane.
A Note On the Decentring of History and Apprehension By All People of Their History
Authors: Chandra Satish
Published: March 2007

It is possible to assert that the present crisis in history on which there has been so much discussion is more specifically a problem affecting the historical sciences in the West rather than in the Afro-Asian countries. In the Afro-Asian countries, particularly those which have either become independent recently or have been able to assert their independence recently, history is considered important in forming a national self-image, help in the processes of national unity, and in the processes of modernization or social change within the nation. The role of history in providing an ideological-cultural framework for national unity and growth is important, for in many of these countries the concept of a nation has not grown out of a long historical process by which people belonging to different race, religion and regions have become emotionally welded together. Rather, nationalism in these countries is a means for bringing about such a unity. The interpretation of the past therefore becomes a matter of wider public concern. In this context, history can hardly be regarded by anyone as irrelevant: it remains a prestigious subject in most universities (not only because it offers a better opportunity for entering into a civil service career), and national historians command a measure of public esteem which is becoming rare elsewhere. On the other hand, history has been displaced from its pre-eminent position in the West. The profession no longer enjoys the prestige which it enjoyed among nineteenth-century intellectuals: many social scientists consider that “the destruction of the conventional historian's conception of history is a necessary stage in the construction of a true science of society”; “a significant number of philosophers seem to have decided that history is either a third-order form of science, related to the social sciences as natural history was once related to the physical sciences, or that it is a second-order form of art, the epistemological value of which is questionable, the aesthetic worth of which is uncertain.”
Market, Fair and Festival
Authors: Pierssens Michel
Published: March 2007

In its curving watercourse, the Loire encompasses vast areas of central France—Touraine, Blésois, Sologne, Berry—former provinces, all closely related, where one travelled from one town to another by imperceptible degrees, a whole district which since time immemorial, has been, above all, French. The towns there have remained as they were in olden times: peaceful populous villages which are quiet and slow-moving although their organisation is complex, standing on an unpretentious historic substructure whose only outcrops are familiar remains: Here a still-imposing castle; there a church, frequently of outstanding beauty; and sometimes public monuments dating from the first onset of community awareness—they consist of such things as a wash-house, a fountain, a bridge over a river, a shady square, or covered market…
Mexico According To Quetzalcoatl: an Essay of Intra-History
Authors: Lafaye Jacques
Published: March 2007

The seal of Utopia stamped the history of Mexico from its colonial origins. Thomas More's Utopia was published at Louvain in 1516, three years before Cortez disembarked on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and twenty years later Vasco de Quiroga, the first bishop of Michoacan, attempted to realise Utopia in his diocese. When, in the first years of the last century, the learned traveler Alexander de Humboldt made investigations which resulted in A Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, he was able to verify the Indians’ continuance of the country of the “venerable Vasco” (tata Vasco) Besides a hagiographic legend (one could cite a great many of them) and besides an equally significant regional tradition, the historian establishes that the Utopian aspirations and Messianic hope had been permanent characteristics of the national conscience of Mexico throughout its formation.
On the Myth and Practice of the Blacksmith in Africa
Authors: Margarido Alfredo , Wasserman Francoise Germaix
Published: March 2007

The present-day dossier of the blacksmith in black Africa and elsewhere is made up of a considerable bulk of literature. The various documents are not homogenous: some are confined to providing us with raw information—a sort of implicit phenomenology; others tend to be in support of, for the most part, particular theories, and, in fairly rare cases, general theories. Engendered by the ambiguous status of this artisan at once manipulator of fire and of chtonic powers, this literature attempts to put forward conclusive answers to situations which are, either in a real sense or in an apparent sense, contradictory. Thus it is that the blacksmith is at times the marginal citizen, something of an outcast who is despised above all else, and at others the equivalent of the figure holding the reins of power, if not this figure in person; in this way his image travels from one extreme of recognised social standing to the other. But in almost every instance he is recognised as possessing the technical knowledge which is the determining factor for the functioning of societies, whatever the category of social formation in which they may be included.
Concepts of “Cultural Personality” in the Ideologies of the Third World
Authors: Erassov Boris S.
Published: March 2007

The wide diffusion of the concepts of “cultural personality” or “cultural originality” in the social thought of developing Asian and African countries is determined by a number of circumstances. These concepts, though they claim a theoretical understanding of the processes involved in the “entry of these countries into the 20th century,” all boil down to the basic fact that the source, the foundation and the decisive sphere for the processes of self-determination in developing Asian and African countries in the present day world must be their traditional cultures, as opposed to the industrial civilization of the West.
The Plural Logics of Progress
Authors: Berque Jacques
Published: March 2007

Unlike him who said: “Man is something that must be gone beyond,” I shall have the temerity to say: “Man is something that must be opened out.” But this opening out presupposes a statutory plurality of the person, society and the world. It is because it ignored this plurality and broke away from it that the industrial era is experiencing what have been called contradictions.
On the Truth: A Study Considering the Religious Behavior Concerning Mt. Fuji
Authors: Hirano Takakuni
Published: March 2007

It will be interesting to listen to the personal beliefs concerning “Truth” as revealed in the studies of different scholars in different countries. But how will such a collection of beliefs contribute to the seeking of truth itself when we want to attribute to the word truth one of the adjectives: “absolute,” or “universal”?
Analysis and Plurality: Madness and Sheikh Hamidu Kane
Authors: Melone Thomas
Published: March 2007

The five texts listed at the front of this edition of Diogenes are the work of the “Equipe de recherches en littérature africaine comparée” (ERLAC), which is headed by Mr. Thomas Melone, professor at the Federal University of Cameroon. They are part of a collection of studies carried out by this center, shortly to be published under the title: African Miscellany (Mélanges Africains).
Ethnic Survivals and the Modern Shift
Authors: Tchoungui Pierre , Pleasance Simon
Published: March 2007

Research into the psychological characteristics of a people in the context of its so-called literary production has been frequently criticized, and not without good reason. In an article published in the Revue de Psychologie des peuples, Mr. Brossaud of the Center for the Study of Civilizations at Nanterre—a department under the direction of Professor Guy Michaud—has emphasized the difficulties presented by the literary approach in the field of ethno-psychology. If the ethno-psychologist demonstrates a certain suspicion towards anything that does not represent pure ethno-psychology, this is because the interest of a poem or a play is essentially of an aesthetic nature. It would certainly be a perilous task to look for the characteristics of the French mentality, for example, in the literary works of contemporary France.
Experiencing Nature: a Comparison Between Early Medieval and Modern Encounters With Nature
Authors: Bulhof Ilse N.
Published: March 2007

We witness today a widespread concern about the relation between man and nature: we have, it seems, reached a limit in the exploitation of the resources of the earth; if we continue to treat nature merely as our inexhaustible source of supplies, the balance between man and nature might be destroyed forever.

What are the historical roots of the ecological crisis? There seems much to say for the thesis that ultimately the Western, more specifically the Christian assumption that man is the appointed ruler of the world, is responsible for our ruthless attitude toward nature. Is not man admonished in the biblical account of creation to rule the earth? The story of Genesis suggests that, from the moment Western Civilization was born, an awareness of the antagonism between man and nature has existed; it underlines the prevalent opinion that nature, whether it be the outside nature of wild seas, rugged mountains, marshes, jungles, or whether it be the instinctual nature inside of us, has to be conquered by man. It is, after all, the function of civilization to protect man against the violence of outside nature and against the untamed nature inside of ourselves and our fellowmen. Civilization emerges, we feel, only where hostile nature has been defeated and made serviceable to our goals. It might be interesting in this context to recall some earlier Western attitudes toward nature.
Functions of the Book for Society and Self: a Study in Secular Transformation
Authors: Katz Elihu , Adoni Hannah
Published: March 2007

Reading and study were among the central values of traditional Jewish society. Indeed, it is impossible to explain the continuity of the Jewish people without reference to the unique status of the book. Any analysis of contemporary Israeli culture, therefore, must look first to the fate of the book as it is affected by the weight of tradition and of modernity. This task is attempted here. It is part of a comprehensive national study of the sociology of Israeli culture in the ‘70s.

In traditional Jewish society, the book refers, of course, to the Holy Scriptures and the body of rabbinic literature that was built upon them throughout the ages. The Jews came to be called the “People of the Book” by virtue of living according to the rules of the Book with which they were so preoccupied.
Some Aspects of the Philosophy of History
Authors: Vahiduddin Syed
Published: March 2007

The wonder with which philosophy begins is first and foremost the cosmic wonder, the wonder which Nature forces on us in its cosmic complexion and in its macroscopic expanse. No doubt the mystery of the starry heavens has compelled man's attention earlier than the riddle of the unfathomable deep surging within. The history of the philosophical inquiry makes it abundantly clear that the reflection on self has no psychological or historical priority. But once philosophic consciousness awakens to the dichotomy of the self and the not-self the accent of philosophic reflection shifts constantly from one sphere to another. The attempt to assimilate the world of Nature to the world of psychic privacy is met with a parallel movement which seeks to reduce the world as experienced from within into the categories of the world as given without. It was the genious of Plato that introduced the concept of a third realm which belongs neither to Nature nor to psychic reality, a world of pure transcendental universals which he called Ideas. But neither the beginnings of early classical European thought nor of Oriental speculation have shown any concern for historical reality. It is true that the concept of perpetual flux dominated the classical antiquity very early but there is a long way from the idea of interminable change to the idea of historical process.
Casual Remarks of an Arabist
Authors: Gabrieli Francesco
Published: March 2007

The Arabic language has a term, “musta'rib” with a long and varied history. In the genealogical schemes of pre-Islamic antiquity, it indicated those tribes in the Peninsula (the northerners, according to the most wide-spread opinion; but there were those who instead, turning the relationship upside-down, designated southerners in this way), who, as opposed to the pure autocthomic Arabs (al-’Arab al-’âriba) were “assimilated” or “assimilating” to the Arabs, in other words “secondary Arabs” or “Arabized.” Then, in Moslem Spain, as is known, the term served to designate that part of the Iberian population which remained Christian in religion, but culturally was Arabic, that is “Mozarab.” And in modern linguistic usage, mustarib along with mustashriq indicate the Orientalist, and more precisely, the Western Arabist: he who takes as object of his studies the Arabs, and in some way tries to become closer and even assimilated to them (according to the prevailing semantic value of the prefix of the tenth verbal form ista-, to which in fact the original Arabic participle refers). Common to all the evolution of the term then is the meaning of one who is not really and originally an Arab, but who wants to become one and be considered one, whether by pretending Arab blood or by assimilating Arab culture.
Genesis of Indian Civilization: The Evidence of Grhya Sutras
Authors: Indradeva Shrirama
Published: March 2007

The genesis of civilization has been an enigma for the historian and the social scientist. How does it happen that the homogenous stream of a tribal culture differentiates into the elite and folk traditions? The duality of cultural tradition in civilised societies is widely recognized and is designated by such paired terms as the classical and the lay, the aristocratic and the common, and the great and the little tradition of culture. Apart from architechtonic formulations of the philosophers of history and the various metaphysical and mythological models that we have inherited, this question has to be approached from an empiric angle on the basts of cultural data about ancient civilizations available to us.