bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Syndicalism in Modern Society
Authors: Collinet Michel
Published: March 2007

Today, the French word “syndicat” designates both an association of workers and a group of producers or business concerns. In the nineteenth century, it was identified with “associations of resistance” which the law called “workers’ coalitions” and which were associations of workers, de facto or de jure, formed to improve the lot of the working class by one means or another. In this study we shall consider such organizations exclusively.
Economics and the Behavioral Sciences: a Desert Frontier?
Authors: Boulding Kenneth E.
Published: March 2007

One of the important intellectual interests of American scholars and scientists at the present time is the movement toward greater integration of specialized fields and disciplines. The size of the movement must not be exaggerated—it concerns a small minority of scholars, and most specialists are still content to stay comfortably within the cosy walls of their own specialty. Nevertheless there is something which might be called an “interdisciplinary movement” in many areas of knowledge, and if the movement is occasionally more undisciplined than interdisciplinary, this can be charitably ascribed to growing pains.
Social and Linguistic Structure
Authors: Cohen Marcel
Published: March 2007

“Language is eminently a social phenomenon.” From the outset one should expect an interdependence of linguistic and social phenomena, as well as extremely complex relationships of action and reaction. In such matters, oversimplification can only lead to a dead end. On the other hand, a criticism of data that respects their true nature within the framework of their extreme complexity can pave the way for researches from which one may expect solid results so far as future progress is concerned. These researches are necessarily bound up with linguistics (the first human science which, while still very young, assumed a rigorous form), with psychology (better and better equipped and yet disarmed in the face of so many problems), and with sociology, that latecomer in developing well-based techniques, whose theorists still confront each other with diverse points of view.
Marvels and Divination in Ancient Italy
Authors: Bloch Raymond
Published: March 2007

Among the multiple aspects that are apparent to us in the religious life of the ancients, our attention is quite naturally directed toward the extremely important occurrences which interrupt the normal course of things and reveal the intrusion of the sacred into the life of men. These phenomena, called τέρατα in Greek, prodigia a in Rome, are of diverse, but always significant, value, according to the particular case. They sanction the privileged state of being of people who are marked by the imprint of the divine, they adduce irrefutable confirmation of the will of the gods, they interpret the joy and, far more frequently, the anger of the all-powerful beings who decree the course of the world.
Early Contacts Between Polynesia and America
Authors: Rivet Paul
Published: March 2007

A considerable body of corroborative evidence, of a linguistic as well as a cultural order, attests to the authenticity of traditional tales referring to contacts between the islands of Oceania and the American continent during the pre-Columbian era.

In the first place, it is well known that there is close resemblance between some words in the languages of the western watershed of South America and those of Oceania, notably the Polynesian. These similarities have to do with words designating certain cultivated plants and other objects.
Social Procuration
Authors: Anderle Othmar
Published: March 2007

Socio-psychological delegation of feeling and fictive identification play a role in the life of society, a role which indicates that they are a constitutive structural element of any healthy social organism. To be sure, in this case we are concerned with a special form of delegation or identification which is characterized by its positive, serious, and purposeful tone. This particular form presupposes a firm, lasting relationship between the partners of the interrelation, has as an objective the attainment of very definite purposes, and is based upon a more or less intensive cooperation of the “delegating” component. This conviction was expressed recently among others by Roger Caillois in regard to games, and its importance was especially emphasized.
“Europe” and “Christendom” a Problem in Renaissance Terminology and Historical Semantics
Authors: Hay Denys
Published: March 2007

The term Christendom (Christianitas) meaning a territorial area took many centuries to establish itself, but by the twelfth century it had become part of the regular vocabulary of the Latin-speaking and -writing world. During the long period of the emergence of Christendom the world Europe was not a competitor, for it was used only in a geographical sense in scientific works and in exegesis on those passages of the Bible which described the peopling of the world. There is, however, a marked change in the fourteenth century in this regard. Europe is a rare word in Dante: in Petrarch it is frequently found. It is true that there is one isolated example of the adjective in the eighth century, in a chronicle describing the united resistance to the Moors. Thereafter there is, I believe, no further example until the fourteenth century. Dante in fact, who has no inhibitions about using the words “Asian” and “African,” deliberately avoids “European.” The next generation sees Boccaccio use the word “Europaic”—an old invention, which was not to have any parallels either in Latin or in vernaculars. And it is not till we come to Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini that we find Europaeus emerging. The adjective is found more than once in his voluminous writings. In the following generation we find Erasmus using Europaeus and in the next generation again we find the word entering the vernacular languages of Europe. It is, of course, true that Christianitas (or more commonly respublica Christiana) continues to be used with great frequency during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, together with the vernacular equivalents of these expressions.
For a History of the Science of Man
Authors: Gusdorf Georges
Published: March 2007

The science of man has not, as yet, had its historian. This regrettable fact demonstrates that the human or cultural sciences have not attained their full growth. They rest upon a fragmentary and indecisive epistemology, the very idea of human reality being, in the minds of the specialists, still quite vague.

Nevertheless, this latecomer among the positive disciplines has had, throughout the ages, its prophets and its precursors; but their affirmation, isolated in the cultural context of the period, merely provide a steppingstone for the future. Several centuries ahead of his time, Ibn Khaldoun, in his Prolégomènes, defined the sociological and human reality of Arab civilization. With the appearance of Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Jean Bodin, the Renaissance witnessed the first attempts to formulate a concrete anthropology and sociology. But the ways and means of this knowledge of man by man existed solely at the level of intuition. Even Vico was to rely only upon his own genius in order to evolve the total phenomenon of human reality in its becoming. A goodly number of the great historians of the nineteenth century, in Germany, in England, and in Spain, were to engage in a kind of doctrineless anthropology, entirely intuitive, extensions of which are encountered today in the works of an Ortega y Gasset, a Spengler or a Toynbee.
Information and Propaganda
Authors: Ellul Jacques
Published: March 2007

If there is one well-established commonplace, self-evident and completely reliable, it is the difference between information and propaganda. Any honest man knows that in our times information is indispensable. It is, indeed, a positive acquisition, and to know each morning what is happening in China or the decisions of our own government is one of those advantages that distinguish us from men of earlier days. Moreover, Alfred Sauvy has shown us that information is the key to democracy. There can be a valid democratic way of life only if the people are correctly informed on the political, economic, and social questions which the democracy, as sovereign, must decide. This, too, is part of our self-evident truth. And if information is, by nature, completely honest, unadorned, and clear, then propaganda, we know, is falsehood, desire for power, Machiavellianism, crooked in intent. This reassuring contrast enables us, as men correctly informed, to sleep peacefully and, it goes without saying, to be invulnerable to propaganda.
The Present State of Studies On Germanic Religion
Authors: de Vries Jan
Published: March 2007

When a new method of scientific study comes to the fore in any field, its raison d’être can be explained only in relation to previous research. We shall try, then, to assess the value of nineteenth-century contributions to the knowledge of pagan religion among the Germanic peoples. At a first glance their value seems hardly to justify the tireless efforts of the illustrious scholars who devoted themselves to the task. The failure of so much scientific endeavor is no longer surprising, however, when we recall the character of that era. Opposing the bold and often fanciful syntheses of Romanticism, the nineteenth century advocated a rigorous analysis of the mythological tradition; it wanted first of all to discover what was authentic material in a confused mass of texts emanating from a period that was at once backward and colored by a long Christian tradition. A close examination, largely philological in nature, seemed to reveal that most of the myths and legends conserved in the rich literature of the Eddas consisted of mere fables or simple popular tales embellished with names of gods by adapting hands little concerned with the old pagan traditions.
Early Christianity: Arts and Soul
Authors: Bell Charles G.
Published: March 2007

Both late pagan and early Christian expression may be considered subdivisions of some larger whole—call it the Style of Gnosis. Both are embraced in the earthly gloom and the search beyond gloom for transcendent form. As we look back on the larger motion, it seems inevitable that a faith should have grown from that world hunger. That it would be mystical is also clear. Material Rome was a Lazarus beyond even Christian revival. The faith must be one that could outlive Rome reading in its fall the divine purpose. It must be a faith beyond this life, since this life grew darker from year to year. It must give man what he searched for, a will and power to suffer and die, to meet loss and martyrdom, not in frenzied struggle, but in peace. It must give order to a new society, incorporating the somber Stoic morality in a group-righteousness of love, attended with all the promises of the immortality cults.
Dreams and Time
Authors: Zambrano Maria
Published: March 2007

Until now, the analysis of dreams has dealt almost exclusively with their contents and has been concerned with an attempt to extract all their meaning from the images which appear in them. As is well known, the incorporation into science of the analysis of dreams began with Freud, who, upon discovering a basic hypothesis or subject, quickly arrived at a kind of metaphysics of which dreams are the manifestation: the libido, which is, in essence, desire.

But, in dealing with the phenomenon of dreams as a part of human life, one must first study their form: the form of the dream, first of all; later, the species of dreams, if such species exist. One must, that is, arrive at a phenomenology of the dream and of dreams. Such a phenomenology does not exhaust the study of dreams; it is simply a first approach to knowledge of dreams, an introduction.
On the Nature of Economic Growth
Authors: Seligman Ben B.
Published: March 2007

Economists today are increasingly concerned with the problem of economic growth. They are inquiring whether it is possible for our economic system to continue the seemingly miraculous business of putting more people to work, making more goods, and adding to the national income. Back in the 1930’s their major concern, however, was with depression and instability. The economy then was heading downward in what seemed to be a never ending plunge. The rate of population growth had dropped rapidly, and nineteenth-century chatter about race suicide revived. The limits of our territorial frontiers had long been reached. National output moved sluggishly, and the unemployed huddled with puzzled brows around makeshift fires and apple boxes. Then came the war, and there was a burgeoning need for men in jobs. But, despite expanded income and overtime pay, fewer goods were available than might have been expected. This was the anomaly of inflation, and economists had on their hands a new, though not unfamiliar, problem, which stayed with them even after the war.
Historical Contemporaneousness
Authors: Ruano Eloy Benito
Published: March 2007

Criticism of the traditional periodization of history (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern age), generally centered on the medieval period as the crucial point, has not even stooped to consider what is called the “contemporary age.” This new and poorly defined phase, proposed by the methodologists to inclose in history the events and times which immediately precede us or in which we live, has not in general been accepted as such a theoretical unity by those who have been occupied with the other pretentious “ages” in order to deny their equal validity.

In the ingenious and controversial scheme outlined here, certainly, the contemporary age represents a concept so artificial, so devoid of unified personality and feeling and of clear differentiation, that it only disturbs the already slight harmony of this controversial and antiquated system.
The Life of Muhammad and the Sociological Problem of the Beginnings of Islam
Authors: Rodinson Maxime
Published: March 2007

Much has been written on the life of Muhammad, prophet of Islam. (“Mohammed” and the French “Mahomet” are the result of a long-standing and now traditional deformation.) Aside from his picturesque and romantic character, sure to excite the interest of Occidentals drawn to active, impassioned lives of genius, the importance of the Moslem achievement which he initiated has given rise to important works, the solid and honorable production of historians and specialists of Islam.

We see, then, that many pages have been written on this astonishing man. Critical discussions, often heated ones, have been devoted to the least of his words or deeds. However, very few of these pages have been devoted to the fundamental problems raised by his life in the minds of those who reflect on the evolution and the destiny of societies.
The History of Philosophy and the Art of Writing It
Authors: Tatarkiewicz Ladislas
Published: March 2007

The history of philosophy, like every area of human endeavor, has given rise to criticisms and reservations. Nobody has expressed this more vehemently than Schopenhauer. “To study philosophy, not by reading the actual works of the philosophers, but with the aid of summaries of their doctrines in a history of philosophy, is like having someone else chew one's own food.”

In a general way, Schopenhauer's reservations apply to all history of philosophy, not only to one of its aspects. Nor are they directed against history itself, but specifically against the history of philosophy. The plight of the history of philosophy is worse than that of other fields of history precisely because philosophy itself happens to have the most favorable conditions. In effect, political or economic events are in the realm of the past, while philosophical events remain in the present in the form of manuscripts and books. For this reason political or economic history has a raison d'être: in it a historian reconstructs that which no longer exists, whereas a historian of philosophy merely reproduces what is.
History and Our Times
Authors: Dardel Eric
Published: March 2007

Is history at present in a position to sustain the dialogue of our times? Is it not rather, like an album of faded pictures, a curiously anachronistic story for a century infatuated with progress, speed, and productivity?
Information: a Factor of Economic Progress
Authors: Perroux François
Published: March 2007

Cyberneticians define information and the quantity of information in mathematical terms, apprehending them independently from their meaning. When they put aside their conceptualizations and symbolizations, foreign to the semantic content of messages, we see them hesitant about their domain of prospection.
The Republics of the Middle Ages: Essay on the Communal Civilization
Authors: Ungureanu Maria
Published: March 2007

The bourgeoisie—that fundamental reality of our civilization—has not i yet found its historian. Although there are more studies, relatively speaking, on the period following the Revolution, the evolution of the bourgeoisie prior to the eighteenth century is known to us only through fragmentary research, local and limited. The attention of historians is attracted solely to the exceptional cases in which the financial powers happen to play a direct political role—Colbert, Jacques Coeur, Fugger, Bardi, or Buonsignori. The great expansion of the northern cities during the thirteenth century inspired the researches of Henri Pirenne and his disciples; the high point in the development of Italian cities was studied by the Sapori-Luzzatto school, but the sum of this evolution has not been synthesized. There is not a single general history of the bourgeoisie, yet entire libraries are dedicated to feudal society.
Poetry and Tradition
Authors: Bowra C. M.
Published: March 2007

It can hardly be claimed that the advance in material civilization has done much for poetry. The growth of large towns has curtailed that intimate connection of man with nature which has in the past provided countless themes for song; the pressure of crowded populations fosters conventions of behavior which are inimical to the free play of imaginative impulse; the spread of standardized education does not always encourage the originality and independence which are necessary to creative work; the specialization of intellectual life diminishes not merely the desire to write poetry but the ability to enjoy it. A mass of evidence shows that poetry is far less popular in western Europe and the United States than in countries like Persia or China or India, whose material civilization is far less advanced but which have kept a traditional taste for the beauty of words. At an even lower level, in societies where conditions are still primitive and existence is indeed hard, poetry may be the main pastime and consolation of peoples like the Asiatic Tatars or the Armenians or the Ainus, among all of whom it is a truly national art practiced with a high degree of accomplishment and enjoyed by whole populations. Compared with such societies, our own mechanized, urban world is indeed feeble and uncertain in its approach to an art which has in the past enjoyed great glory but seems now in danger of becoming an esoteric pursuit of cliques and coteries.
Problems Regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls
Authors: Dupont-Sommer A.
Published: March 2007

Our knowledge of ancient history has been tremendously enlarged in the last hundred years. Ancient civilizations, formerly scarcely glimpsed or completely unknown, have emerged from the obscurity in which they were buried. In other domains, already more or less well known, the discovery of documents year after year has shed a clearer—sometimes even a harsh—light upon the great pages of the human past. These discoveries, which reveal to us what the man of earlier days was like and which enable us to achieve a better understanding of the man of today, have at times been due to the purest chance. The manuscripts we are discussing here as well as many others belong in this category.
Anxiety and Society
Authors: Chapiro Marc
Published: March 2007

The theories about the origins of humanity contain, for the most part, a strange contradiction. For one thing, we acknowledge that the human mind is basically different from animal intelligence; indeed, there are few writers who question the revolutionary nature of the change that has occurred in the psychic makeup of living beings as a consequence of the advent of conceptual thought, of conscious reflection, and of objective knowledge of the world. “Human intelligence,” writes Le Roy, “presents a completely original, distinctive feature; there is something exceptional and unique about it that is not to be found anywhere else,” while Durkheim observes: “Man is not merely an animal with a few additional attributes, but quite another thing.” “Although the Infusoria are linked to the monkey by a whole series of intermediate stages, the monkey is separated from man by a hiatus,” insists Claparède, and, finally, a writer who is not a scholar expressed the following common-sense judgment on the subject: “We would know exactly what man is if we could accurately assess that insurmountable wall that separates the most ‘intelligent’ animal from the most primitive pygmy.”
Modern Myths
Authors: Ellul Jacques
Published: March 2007

The time is past when “myth” could be considered serenely, when μvθoς could be translated as “legend,” or when Littré could define it as follows: “A story pertaining to time or facts that history does not clarify and embracing either a real fact transformed into a religious notion or the invention of a fact with the help of an idea.” It was calmly asserted that the myth concerned formal divinities, that it was the means of expressing the relationship between these divinities and men—hence the historical form it most frequently assumed. But, in any case, it was a matter of the past. The gods were indeed dead, and the stories regarding them no longer concerned us. The nineteenth century, the century of reason, was devoid of myths, and only the “poets” (falsifiers!) regretted this. But along came the psychology of the unconscious, then sociology and history, to give a fresh meaning, and thereby vigor, to these dusty tales incorporated in Greco-Latin mythology. No longer were they a childish invention to lend color to a naïve religion. We perceived instead subtle expressions of the profound and complicated tendencies of man, and the divinities involved in these myths were no longer the simple gods of thunder and of time. Complex characteristics enriched their personalities. They assumed unprecedented dimensions. Cronus and Zeus were cloaked in mystery—the mystery of man. And by a strange reversal, what seemed childish then was not the imaginary myth but the rationalist philosophy that had contested it because of its failure to understand.
On Byzantine Painting
Authors: Weidlé Wladimir
Published: March 2007

Except for scholarly works dealing with well-defined problems, writings on Byzantine art rarely fail to arouse in the reader some disquiet, some perplexity, regarding the aggregate of this art—its distinctive characteristics and essential values. The following remarks, confined to painting, are designed solely to clarify the foregoing statement, to indicate why it is justifiable, and to retrace, if possible, the genesis of such a state of affairs.
Nature and History in the Greek Conception of the Cosmos
Authors: Papaioannou Kostas
Published: March 2007

Nature and history are for us two diametrically opposed possibilities of organization, knowledge, interpretation, and evaluation of the reality around us. Since the Renaissance, the world can no longer be thought of as a structured and coherent whole, and its meaning always remains partial. The world bears within it a duality which nothing can surmount: Nature and mind represent the two poles of a reality which Jean Mair described as early as the end of the fifteenth century as non facientia unum. The being of Nature consists henceforth in being an object of representation, of scientific knowledge, and of technical exploitation. The being of man consists in placing himself as subject opposite the world, which is conceived as an object essentially foreign to man, “mute” in what concerns his ultimate destination. Up to that time, man knew himself by referring to an “objective,” undiscussed world; existence could be constantly shaken by the deepest terrors, but it was not problematical : man knew his natural place in a world ordered by a sovereign reason. Now with the destruction of the theophanic universe, it was not only man's place in the world which became problematical but the very idea of the universe; the experience of the living totality of the world was progressively drained of its substance. The new “situation of man in the world” is that of a being savagely freed of everything, profoundly isolated in the midst of an infinitely open world in which the global has less and less meaning and in which it is no longer a question of participating in being but of doing and of having. Rimbaud's remark, “We are not in the world,” began to be true; incapable of finding his support in the universe, placing all his pride in seeking his truth within himself, man then turned to history to ask of it those answers which the former wisdom, the former Weltweisheit, or revelation could no longer give him. In the “ocean of Cartesian doubt” Vico saw history as the only firmum et mansurum to which man could lay claim. As the work of a freedom progressively creating its own content for itself, as a return to itself of the mind lost or “alienated” in matter, history was becoming the only humanly possible way of conceiving the “natural” place of man in the world, the sole encompassing (τɛρι∊χoν) totality still capable of serving as a horizon for his triumphant self-certainty, the only world still conceivable after the suppression of transcendency and the loss of presence. According to Marx’ profound observation, history had the mission, “once the thither side of truth had vanished, to establish the truth of the hither side.” To the “dead” or “hidden” God and to “mute” or inaudible Nature, man opposed this derisory fragment of time which he had succeeded in making his and from which he hoped to derive at once the truth of his being and the norm of his action.
The Revolution of the Ax
Authors: Métraux Alfred
Published: March 2007

The word “revolution” has acquired, of recent years, a very broad meaning. It has been applied to any innovation entailing substantial economic and social change. For example, the term “neolithic revolution” is currently used to designate the transition from a hunting and gathering the fruits of the soil type of economy to the relatively sedentary life of the agriculturist. The acquisition of metal—copper, bronze, and, later, iron—also gave rise to all kinds of technical as well as social transformations. The patient researches of archeologists enable us to assess the impact of this “revolution of metal” which so profoundly altered the life of our ancestors. We have a general notion of the social changes that resulted from it, thanks to our knowledge of such things as the layout of villages or cities and the details of funeral accoutrements. Here again ethnology comes to the aid of archeology.
The Gnostic Manuscripts of Upper Egypt
Authors: Meyerovitch Eva
Published: March 2007

Our epoch, fertile in inventions in the most diverse fields, has in recent years seen several discoveries which hold extraordinary interest for history in general and for the history of religions in particular. Around 1930 seven volumes of Manichean writings were discovered at Fayum; in 1941, a few miles outside Cairo, near Tura, unpublished works of Origen and his disciple Didymus the Blind were found; the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls occurred around 1945, and in Egypt, at roughly this same time, an equally fortuitous find was made of a considerable body of Coptic manuscripts dating perhaps from the third century a.d. Although these last have not been entirely deciphered, they are considered by specialists to be prodigiously rich; such a find, says one, “does not merely enrich or renew our previous knowledge of the literature, the genealogy, or the history of Gnosticism : it revolutionizes this knowledge, and opens to research in the field a path absolutely distinct from all those which criticism has previously followed.”
A Modern Estimate of Ancient Religion: The Work of Charles Kerényi
Authors: Picard Charles
Published: March 2007

Charles Kerényi began his research before 1927. In that year he achieved brilliant renown, thanks to a suggestive and wonderfully comprehensive book on the Greco-oriental novel that is replete with ideas. He wrote it from the illuminating standpoint of the history of religions. Following the author of the classical Psyche, and with innumerable contributions of his own, he once again gave proof of that delicate sense of the religious subconscious which could have subsisted, more or less somnolent, in the composite spirit of the Mediterraneans of yesterday and today. We are eternally indebted to the curious, folkloric inquiries which have transported us to their time, introducing us to an ancient religiosity, secret, and perhaps unconscious. The Hellenistic or Greco-Roman novels, forerunners of some of our most modern literature, drew substance at will from eternal, human belief. In stoically scrutinizing their content—one might even say balderdash—we tend therefore to forgive them much because of the richness of their soil, infused as it was with popular legends which carry with them a highly tonic and savory mixture of old rites, discarded superstitions, half-extinguished cults. Where, for example, can one seek a better statement on the notion of the pure and the impure, which still preoccupies us so much today? Or on the sensitivity of those who, in quest of virtue, went off whenever necessary and with great ado to meet the assembled gods?
A Prehistoric Bureaucracy
Authors: Chadwick John
Published: March 2007

Homer, the first and greatest of Greek poets, depicts a society which may be loosely described as feudal. Power is in the hands of kings, who are bound to each other by ties of marriage and traditional friendship. Their nobles are men of equally good blood and high repute; the common people appear to have no function but to serve their lords and masters. The operation of the government is but sketchily indicated. The kings and princes meet in council, decisions are taken and are reported verbally by messengers. There is not the slightest hint that administration involves paper work, nor is there anything that can be called a “civil service.”
Contemporary Geopolitics and the Geographical Framework
Authors: Olagiie Ignacio
Published: March 2007

During the first half of the twentieth century geographers analyzed at length the individual's relationship with his natural environment. The French school of humanist geography must be credited with stressing the influence of environment which, in proportion to its pronounced characteristics, becomes more and more powerful. Thus we came to understand the causes which determine a way of life, the customs, psychology, and idiosyncracies of those who inhabit the mountains, plains, forests, deserts, or seas. Our task has been a more daring one : we have studied the relationships established in the past between a certain geographical environment and the civilizations which formerly flourished there. In recognition of their meaning we labeled these relationships “geopolitics.” The term, coined by the German school, enjoyed a tremendous vogue because it was so apt. However, as critics have amply demonstrated, of and by itself it was really meaningless because the subject matter with which it must be concerned belonged to other, previously established and independent disciplines, such as economics or political geography. An inexact term, the word “geopolitics” crept into our present-day language. We, however, have chosen it to designate a determinate historical relationship.
The Ancient Civilizations of the Amazon: The Present Status of the Question of Their Origins
Authors: Métraux Alfred , Halperin Elaine P.
Published: March 2007

Scarcely fifty years ago the “Indian sphinx” posed enigmas that seemed simple. Known pre-Columbian civilizations were relatively few, and their past, however obscure, could be considered recent in contrast to the millenniums that separate us from the cultures of the ancient Orient. Today this is no longer true. The emergence of new archeological horizons has singularly transformed our summary view of the history of man in the Western Hemisphere. The date of the first human migrations through the Bering Straits has been put back some twenty or thirty thousand years—to the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations which the Spaniards knew in their full flower. Others have been added which, in turn, give rise to fresh enigmas.
Newer Approaches to Jewish Emancipation
Authors: Baron Salo W.
Published: March 2007

“Jewish emancipation”—the term itself started to come into common use after the achievement of the Catholic emancipation in England in 1828—is a weighted phrase. Like the corresponding Roman legal concept, it connotes the release of Jews from previous bondage into a state of freedom. As such it has represented a major stage in the struggle of liberal forces for the attainment of equality of rights for all men and was the dominant factor in the political and legal evolution of modern Jewry. From that standpoint modern Jewish history has often been equated with the progress of legal equality. In fact, most historians have dated its beginning with the emancipatory legislation of the French Revolution, that is, with the proclamation by the French National Assembly in January, 1790, of the equality of rights of Sephardic (Spanish-Portuguese) Jews and of the Ashkenazic (German-Polish) Jews in September, 1791. So widely accepted was this periodicization that it was considered an expression of American nationalism when, some three decades ago, two American Jewish historians, Max L. Margolis and Alexander Marx, pushed back the inception of that period a few years to the era of the American Revolution.
Modern Methods in Archeology: the Novgorod Excavations
Authors: Yanine Valentin L.
Published: March 2007

The study of the Russian Middle Age, utilizing archeology as a key, has scored great successes at Novgorod during these last years. The thick historical layer formed there over a period of a thousand years is at present being sifted by an important group of Soviet archeologists.
The New Fortunes of Humanism
Authors: Van Lier Henri
Published: March 2007

It has become a commonplace to say that Western civilization—all the civilizations of the globe, in fact—is in a state of crisis. Spengler and Toynbee, after studying the laws governing the development of great cultures of the past, expressed the opinion that our experience is repeating what marked the decline of each of them: development of universal empires, atony of languages, cultural as well as religious agnosticism. For those who may distrust such sweeping views, it is sufficient to observe that today's questioning attitudes represent neither mere matters of detail nor even the major renewals experienced by a civilization in a state of becoming. Humanism is shaken to its very foundations, and, the object of criticism and schism, has lost its inspirational force. Renaissance and revolutions broke with their immediate past only to breathe new life into an endangered civilization. This new breath was either drawn from an old tradition or anticipated in political and social readjustment. The French Revolution professed to be carrying out the aims of reason and nature, which had inspired the West for eight centuries, just as the Renaissance had professed to rediscover the spirit of antiquity. Our questions, on the other hand, arise not from a disorder in the old but from a conviction that the old has exhausted its principles and its possibilities and that it can henceforth only give way to something entirely new.
Snobbism: One Aspect of the Will to Power
Authors: Fatta Corrado
Published: March 2007

The sense of power has a double face : on the one hand, it is the will to power as a force impelling to action; on the other hand, it is a basic state of mind which essentially conditions our intellectual approach to reality. It is in this second perspective that we see why the interpretation of a series of relationships between man and reality in terms of power, inconceivable among the Zunis or the Arapesh, is natural to the Western mind, or, at any rate, is more or less in agreement with its general attitude. As Mannheim observed, “We enter at birth a world which has already been interpreted, a world which has already been made comprehensible, and each of whose parts has a meaning.” In this study we propose to examine to what degree and through what modes of expression this age-old spiritual conditioning has influenced our view of the world and of the realities of existence.
Why History is Constantly Rewritten
Authors: Schaff Adam
Published: March 2007

The slightest reflection shows that the conceptual material employed in writing history is that of the period in which a history is written. There is no material available for leading principles and hypotheses save that of the historic present. As culture changes, the conceptions that are dominant in a culture change. Of necessity new standpoints for viewing, appraising and ordering data arise. History is then rewritten.

The problem referred to in this passage is well known both from the literature on the subject and the practice of historiography: historical works get old, the development of science—particularly of historical science—determines a new approach to old problems, and, consequently, history is rewritten in a different way. The fact is incontestable. But how should it be interpreted? Why is it so?
The Problem of Invariance in Anthropology
Authors: Lévi-Strauss Claude
Published: March 2007

In Iroquois and Algonquin legend there is the story of a girl who submits in the dark of night to a man she believes to be her brother. Every detail seems to identify him: physical appearance, clothing, a scratched cheek attesting to the heroine's virtue. When formally accused by her, the brother reveals that he has a second self (Sosie) or, more precisely, a double; the bond between them is so strong that everything befalling the one is automatically transmitted to the other : the torn garment, the wounded face. In order to convince his incredulous sister, the young man kills his double before her eyes, but with this single blow he pronounces his own death sentence, since their destinies are one.
Notes and Discussion
Authors: Marcuse Herbert
Published: March 2007

This note was written in the hope that it would make a small contribution to the revival, not of Hegel, but of a mental faculty which is in danger of being obliterated : the power of negative thinking. As Hegel defines it, “Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us.” What does he mean by “negation,” the central category of dialectic?
The Cinema and Popular Culture
Authors: Dumazedier Joffre
Published: March 2007

Every citizen has an equal right to culture. The development of the means of diffusion and of democratic ideas has unquestionably furthered a trend toward the unification of culture, but this process is often hindered and retarded. Profound disparities separate the cultural ideas and practices of society, the ideal or real cultural models of different social classes and categories, those of different groups, and, finally, those of the leaders and of the public. Imbalances result from this, and it is these imbalances that popular culture tends to modify. In order best to meet the continuously new cultural needs of industrial and democratic society, popular culture has adapted to modern life some of the features of traditional culture. It has initiated the masses into the elementary techniques of learning—writing and reading. An increasingly complex and extended primary education has become more widespread. Contemporary society raises problems that evolve so rapidly and are so intricate that popular culture must be continued after school and during a man's entire life. It finds its way into new systems of permanent instruction and training through the agency of large-scale means of diffusion, by means of groups or social relationships.
Jews and Moslems
Authors: Poliakov Leon
Published: March 2007

The tolerance which the Islamic tradition showed—not in theory alone but in practice as well—toward the infidels, the “protected” (dhimmi) Jews and Christians, is well known. In several places in the Koran, Mohammed proclaimed the inalienable right of these two “Peoples of Scripture” to worship the common God of Abraham in their very imperfect fashion. The passages in question ordinarily mentioned Christians and fetus, and the imprecations which in another context (in the “Sura of the Cow,” for example) the Prophet hurled against the Jews of Medina who would not recognize him, in no way altered the cardinal principle developed later by the commentators in the hadith (“tradition”). The two categories of dhimmi were placed under the same legal and political control. In conformity with the “pact” of Caliph Omar (the second successor to Mohammed) the dhimmis had to recognize Moslem supremacy, lavish many signs of subordination and respect upon the true believers, behave as loyal subjects, and above all, pay tribute. By this means the free exercise of their cult under the protection of Islam was assured.
Religion and the Mexican State
Authors: Soustelle Jacques
Published: March 2007

It is evident to anyone who is at all familiar with the documents and witnesses of the times that Aztec society at the time of the discovery of Mexico appears to be intensely religious, that all public and private life was invaded, so to speak, by rites and dominated by beliefs. But what exactly was the place of religion and its ministrants in the hierarchy of powers? To what degree was the priestly function interwoven with that of government and the administration of the city? Can the regime of ancient Mexico be described as a theocracy? To answer these questions, it is of no small use, first, to go back to the period preceding the foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
The Germanic Monarchy of the Middle Ages and Its Power Over the Church
Authors: Fichtenau Heinrich
Published: March 2007

“We have chosen our teacher, Lord Sylvester, as Pope, and ordained and created him by the grace of God.” The Emperor Otto III wrote these words in the year 1001 in a document for Pope Sylvester II, the famous Gerbert von Aurillac. It is not known that Gerbert protested against this remarkable formulation, and he accepted harsh words of reproof, also contained in this document, for the “carelessness and ignorance” of his predecessors. The latest of these predecessors on the chair of St. Peter had been Gregory V, a cousin of the emperor; and it had already become clear in his day what conclusions Otto drew from his views. When a Spanish bishop was to be removed, the emperor headed the synod which handled the matter together with the pope, and signed the document that Gregory released on this occasion. He ruled the church together with the popes, or through the popes, and was not the only one to do this.
Museums and the Modern World
Authors: Allan Douglas A.
Published: March 2007

Man has always been a collector and presumably always will be one. In the dim ages of his beginnings, he collected food, shellfish, berries and nuts and in his tropical and sub-tropical haunts lived fairly securely through the little changing seasons. When he invaded the temperate regions, with their seasonal variations, he learned to his cost the rise and fall of the tides of food supply and, dreading winters’ want, practised a variety of methods to hoard his food gatherings until the season of food a-plenty came round again. It was the same with the hunters, who, whatever their feasting at the close of a successful hunt, could not consume everything and, experiencing shortages and failures, began to put aside food to be kept. Extra supplies probably in time gave rise to barter of one thing for another more desired—the furrier skin, the sharper antler pick, the more beautifully finished hand-axe or adze. He who had reserves could face a famine, a lost pelt and a broken tool, and doubtless gained in stature and status among his fellows. What he had, he had to hold by strength or guile— or both in combination in himself, his family or his tribe. Hunting no doubt led to the elimination of competitors, who would lower the food supplies, and to the proclamation of hunting rights, just as, later on, occupation of land good for grazing or cultivation, would give rise to tribal or chieftain ownership—and to the unending battle for ownership, over other claimants. This is again collecting, though in another form.
Social Significance of a Religious Rite
Authors: Delcourt Marie
Published: March 2007

The ceremony of gathering twelve-year old children together in each parish for the first sacrament of the Eucharist is not an old custom. The primitive Church took Christ's word literally: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” (John, VI, 53), from which it was generally thought that children who died before having received communion were as damned as if they had not been baptised. The initiation of neophytes required successively both sacraments and confirmation. When the custom was established of baptising the new born (2nd and 3rd centuries) they received communion at the same time. As they were incapable of eating the host, the blood of Christ was conferred upon them in the guise of wine.
The Concept of an African Prose Literature
Authors: Whiteley Wilfred H.
Published: March 2007

Prose is simply defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as “… the ordinary form of written or spoken language without metrical structure” and certainly for a majority of native English speakers this definition serves well enough, though in English, prose is more usually understood to be written rather than spoken. Most people have a more or less clear idea of what they mean by prose, if only because there is a large body of accepted verse with which to contrast it, a contrast not materially affected by the problems posed by modern verse techniques. There is also a pretty wide measure of agreement as to what constitutes literature, again because there is a corpus of material, accumulated over the centuries, which is regarded as such by common consent. This material provides a basis for judgments of value on more recent work, so that one can make some sort of contrast between “Gibbon's History and to-night's evening paper” but there is bound to be futile argument over certain cases, and one can be sure that there will be divergence from the current view with the passage of time. All in all, however, there is likely to be a large area over which one may obtain a fair measure of agreement as to what may be termed the prose literature of English.
Toward a History of Africa
Authors: Deschamps Hubert
Published: March 2007

It is now almost two centuries since James Cook discovered the oikoumene, and fifty years since explorers planted their flags at the Poles. Clio has marched more cautiously. Historians, those sons of Herodotus, have only slowly rounded off his domain. The textbooks of my childhood remained confined to the Mediterranean and the “little promontory” of Europe, as at the times of Bossuet. I would not swear that they have progressed very much. If La Fontaine required two days to travel from Paris to Clamart, a single day suffices for us to reach the tip of Africa, and soon we will be able to circle the globe several times in eighty minutes. The earth is no more than a house and the antipodes are close neighbors. It is no longer enough, therefore, to know only oneself and one's own history.