bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Commentary
Authors: Verpraet Gilles
Published: March 2007

The slow construction of the urban civilization: the socio-historic distances in the reading of an urban form.

The post-Soviet city is generally envisioned as a city in transition, on a more or less direct course towards the market city. This observation recalls the reconstitution of the residential property stock through privatizations, the redefinition of the individual in countries shaped by collectivist references, the post-national reconstitution of the economy and the political structures (Dressier, Gatti, and Perez-Agote, 1999). L. Kogan's approach suggests that we need a deeper analysis in the shaping of ‘urban civilization’ and the construction of urban policies, to change the way we look at the construction of urban permanence.
Communism: Between Ideological Gift and the Gift in Everyday Life
Authors: Ditchev Ivalyo
Published: March 2007

This attempt to interpret Communist society through the total social fact of the gift takes up Mauss's strategy, which attempted to explain social reproduction without written laws or state institutions. It was a culture of chronic revolution (‘revolution’ in the etymological sense), where the rules of the game changed with each party congress, institutions were in a state of permanent reform, science discovered new truths every five years, and yesterday's heroes became the traitors of today. The very concept of living in a transitory society renders every social form temporary and unreal - starting with the proclaimed disappearance of the State, the family, and private property.
The Russian Financial System's Unsteady Transition
Authors: Renversez Françoise
Published: March 2007

The financial crisis that began on 17 August 1998 confirmed any fears that we might have had as to the robustness of the Russian banking system and more generally its financial system. It also pointed up the organic link between the confidence essential to the working of the banking system and the State's ability to guarantee the legality of it. Although improvements have been seen since then, the fundamental issue remains.
Democracy and Capitalism The Role of the Former Elites in Postcommunist Transformation
Authors: Mink Georges , Szurek Jean-Charles
Published: March 2007

Although, in one respect, the role of popular movements in the collapse of the Soviet system was clear and fundamental, nevertheless that played by the former Communist elites was equally important.
The Gift as Insufficient Source of Normativity
Authors: Arnsperger Christian
Published: March 2007

To my mind, the most urgent current task in the social sciences is one in the context of which the unduly cut-and-dried distinctions between positive and normative, between sociology and ethics, between secular pluralism and religious spirituality, and so on, should be abandoned. I would like to reclaim the legacy of a Marxian-type dialectic by stating that the social sciences today (and I would even risk speaking of a single present-day ‘social science’) have the threefold task of (1) thinking through in depth the directions of a desirable social change, (2) asking what are the ‘resources for action’ already available for this end within the totality of social actors and (3) identifying the moral capacities that need to be stimulated and/or created so that the resources for action which are not yet available, but which are desirable under point (1), may be able to take root and flourish. I defy anyone to disentangle clearly and analytically the positive and normative parts of such a task …

If the somewhat acrimonious debate on the status of the gift that I have had with Alain Caillé for the last two years continues to hold my interest and if I have eventually overcome my irritation in the face of what has occasionally seemed to me a failure of understanding linked to the defence of an ‘article of local faith’, it is because our debate is a fundamental part of the worthwhile task of the social sciences. Nevertheless, I shall make it clear straight away that the expression ‘sociological gift’ hardly satisfies me, in the light of the description of this task which I have just supplied.
Introduction: Justifying a Retrospective Approach
Authors: Ganascia Jean-Gabriel , Lebrave Jean-Louis
Published: March 2007

Today, with the digitisation of texts, sounds and images and their circulation on the Internet, we are deploying new techniques for storing knowledge which will increasingly supplement and even replace older memory recording systems, such as books, vinyl discs, and photographs on celluloid. It looks as if the extent of these changes will be far reaching. And if, as many believe, the practical methods of inscribing thought have an impact on the way it is developed through the writing and reading process, we can understand why the changes now taking place could profoundly affect our ways of thinking. Here we have gathered together specialists in ancient means of recording memory - clay tablets, papyrus rolls and manuscripts - along with experts from the electronic age - originators of man-machine interfaces, enterprise knowledge management systems, hypermedia and intelligent agents - with the purpose of elucidating the present by reference to intellectual technologies of the past.
On the Supposed Neo-structuralism of Hypertext
Authors: Ganascia Jean-Gabriel
Published: March 2007

Hypertext encompasses a particular aspect of the virtual book that is playing an increasingly important part with the expansion of the Internet and the web. The success of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) - attests to its dynamism. Nowadays it seems so natural and so usual that we manipulate it with ease and we discover its ancestors among medieval cabalists or among other commentators of sacred texts. Every indexation, every note and every comment suggests a potential rudimentary hypertext. However, before its expansion over the entire planet, with the network of worldwide telecommunication, before being programmed on to every PC, hypertext took form in the minds of a few learned visionaries. We will refer to two of them.
Principles of HyperNietzsche
Authors: d'Iorio Paolo
Published: March 2007

‘One thing, however, seems certain: the manuscripts should be completely deciphered and transcribed, and studied as a group, as an individual manuscript, as an individual page (in many cases!), and then put in chronological order.

For example: yesterday I carefully examined the results of the page by page transcription of the manuscripts of Daybreak. I drew a sort of diagram of all the aphorisms in Daybreak following their appearance in the different manuscripts. Two things came out of this, which are basically the two sides of the same coin, that is: 1) the evolution of Daybreak, and 2) the exact chronology of each manuscript.
How Will they Write?
Authors: Lebrave Jean-Louis
Published: March 2007

A great deal of thought has been given to the effects of information technology on reading, books and printed material. Its impact on writing, the production of texts, which is, however, the counterpart of reading, has not aroused the same interest. It is true that witnesses to the act of creation are less familiar objects than books or newspapers: in spite of the passion of the media and the educated public for writers’ manuscripts, these remain predominantly the prerogative of researchers and are still rarely taken out of libraries and archive collections. In extremely literate Western societies, reading is an activity practised by large sectors of the population. The same cannot be said about writing as an active producer of texts, for this encompasses a much more limited group of professionals, and is thought, more or less, to require a special gift in its literary form. Written production is rather the hidden face of McLuhan's Gutenberg galaxy, and the commercial businesses which manufacture and distribute writing in its printed form are better known to the public than the mysterious secrets of creation.
Freedom and Authority
Authors: Jaspers Karl
Published: March 2007

By the nineteenth century the struggles in Europe against those forms of authority which go back to the Middle Ages resulted in giving everyone a standard of freedom perhaps without precedent in history.
Lessons From History
Authors: Murray Gilbert
Published: March 2007

Thucydides excuses the possible dullness of his history on the ground that he means it not for a passing entertainment but for a ‘permanent possession’ which may be of practical use in future times when some similar situation occurs again. We tend to smile at the idea. We all know that history never repeats itself. But surely we know also that though exactly the same situation or problem never recurs, yet elements are constantly recurring which, in different contexts, with all sorts of different accompaniments, are essentially the same; and though, obviously, the old parallel never provides an answer to the new problem, it may well help to its understanding. The differences between any problem of ours and those of Thucydides are of course enormous. Our civilisation, immense in scale, dazzling in its scientific inventions and its power over matter, is extremely different from the small-scale city state of fifth-century Athens with no electricity, no gas, no steam, no buttons, no drainage even, and a standard of food and comfort which would produce instantaneous strikes in any Western community. Yet the essential situation which Thucydides had to face was the overthrow of a very high and peculiar civilisation by a long and all-absorbing war, a war to which men could find no end, from which they could never keep aloof, and under whose influence they found themselves sinking to standards of barbarism which filled them with horror. We in modern Europe share the experience of that sort of war; and we share perhaps more fully than any age between that time and our own the special quality of that civilisation. How can we find words to describe it? It was a free civilisation, proud of its freedom of life and thought, its advance in knowledge, art, literature; with flourishing commerce, with wide command of the sea, with an acknowledged superiority over ‘barbaric’ or non-Greek communities and over some that were Greek; and open, evidently, to the kind of criticism that is always provoked by a combination of commercial wealth and high culture, of democracy and empire. Thucydides has left us a wonderful picture of Athens, not of course exactly as she was but as she conceived herself to be or as she was in the eyes of those who loved her. It is not quite as we now see her; to us, living two thousand years afterwards, Athens is chiefly remarkable for its ever-living achievements in art, philosophy, and poetry; but Thucydides hardly mentions such things, though in one famous half-sentence, ‘We seek beauty without luxury’, he doubtless implies them. He writes not as a critic of art or poetry; and his philosophy is only the philosophy of a statesman.
Indian Studies in 1952
Authors: Renou Louis
Published: March 2007

Indian studies, as other branches of Orientalism, date back to the time when the first decipherings of texts, achieved in Europe, or at any rate by Europeans, made the treasures of Indian antiquity directly accessible to us.
The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition
Authors: Eliade Mircea
Published: March 2007

In his book on the myths of the African peoples Hermann Baumann sums up the myths of a primeval paradisial era. In those times, he says, men did not know of death: they understood the language of the animals and were at peace with them; they did not work, and found abundant nourishment at hands’ reach. Following upon a certain mythical event—which we will not undertake to discuss—this paradisial stage ended and humanity became what we know it to be today.
Classical Science and Literary Innovation
Authors: Brown Harcourt
Published: March 2007

The letter of Professor John U. Nef in the first number of Diogenes cites, en passant, a formula concerning the seventeenth century that has become traditional among modern critics of the present position of science in our intellectual outlook. In the perspective of what has happened since, it is now easy to speak of the scientist's emphasis on quantity destroying the understanding of quality and values, which in turn have been relegated to the sphere of personal intuition, intangible and therefore beyond the realm of rational and objective discussion.
The Genesis of the Greek Polis
Authors: Schachermeyr Fritz
Published: March 2007

For the scholar of ancient history, the ‘polis’ is the most important and most worthy subject of study. By ‘polis’ we mean that well-known type of Greek city which with its territory constituted an autonomous state and, in this respect, was quite similar to the centres of the Italian Renaissance. Ancient Hellas was made up of a great number of such ‘polis’ cities. Each of them had its own freedom, its individual pride as an independent republic. But in the over-all picture we recognise in the institution of the polis the ground that nourished the dynamic and in a sense revolutionary spirit of the ancient Greeks. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Cleisthenes and Themistocles, Pericles and Alcibiades, Protagoras and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle were the sons of polis cities. We may even assert that these men could be what they were only in the emancipated and inspired atmosphere of the polis. No other ancient culture could have given them birth. If we consider the Greek polis from the point of view of universal history we come to a rather astonishing conclusion: the polis differs from all other comparable cultural institutions in Asia, Egypt, and Europe by a very fundamental and special trait: Europe knew only a primitive, barbarian, rustic way of life. People were either roving nomads or tillers of the soil who lived in simple villages.
The Pathos of the Mediterranean Religion
Authors: Marconi Momolina
Published: March 2007

On the basis of studies of the last fifty years, the term ‘Mediterranean’ has come to acquire an ethnographic, linguistic, and religious value, besides its purely physical and geographic meaning. If anthropology today speaks of a ‘Mediterranean race’—located between the extreme west of Europe and the peninsula of Malacca—archeology speaks of a ‘Mediterranean civilisation’. Of this civilisation, perhaps even the Indian revelations of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa do not mark the ultimate limit. It derived from a particularly evolved Neolithic, reached its apogee on the island of Crete in the Bronze Age, and spread from there all through the basin of the Mediterranean, continental Greece and Asia Minor (where alternate contacts and conflicts, not necessary to specify here, had characterised for millennia the relations between peoples of various races). This civilisation was succeeded by a more composite one, called the Mycean, with the Achaeans as its fulcrum, a people who had already proved their maritime and warlike skill in Anatolia, between the shores of the Black Sea and the Sporades. Linguistics, in turn, speaks of a ‘Mediterranean idiom’.
After the Fall of Lyssenko
Authors: Kolar Stefan
Published: March 2007

Scientific progress does not consist solely in the discovery of new truths; it also includes the exposure of mistakes. Often errors turned out to be necessary before the truth could finally be discovered. The history of science is thus not only a history of valuable finds, but also one of vagaries, gropings, and failures. There are some mistakes, however, which scarcely belong to the long series of honourable scientific errors and carry a wholly different meaning: these are the mistakes made by scientists or pseudo-scientists who, driven by the will-to-power, have abused science for the temporary achievement of their ambitions.
Philosophy East and West History of Philosophy: Eastern and Western
Authors: Renou Louis
Published: March 2007

The manuals on Indian philosophy, very rare until about thirty years ago (you still had to rely on Deussen and Max Mueller at that time), have multiplied since then. The years between 1922 and 1925 saw the publication of the first volume of Dasgupta's study as well as of Radhakrishnan's, of the shorter treatises by Masson-Oursel, by Grousset, and by Otto Strauss. Slowly it became clear that philosophy was not the monopoly of the Greeks and their successors and that, since the beginning of historical time, India in particular had handled in its own way and most worthily the notions which form the nucleus of our own speculations. It will become increasingly more difficult to set aside the role of India when a worldwide picture of the facts is to be presented.
Direct Democracy and Totalitarianism
Authors: Ritter Gerhard
Published: March 2007

The following article is an excerpt from Professor Gerhard Ritter s contribution to a Symposium on the origins and methods of National Socialism. This Symposium, whose publication in English translation is forthcoming, was organised under the auspices of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies.

The International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies has assured complete freedom of expression to all participants while obviously not endorsing any of the opinions expressed in the Symposium.

In presenting the material of this Symposium the publishers wish to make it clear that the opinions expressed are those of the authors themselves and do not represent the policy of Intercultural Publications or the views of its personnel.
The Problem of Evolution
Authors: Aron Jean-Paul
Published: March 2007

It may be an exaggeration to say that a reappraisal of the concept of evolution is taking place. But it cannot be denied that in the last few years a number of extremely important studies have given new formulations to some of the fundamental questions concerning the rhythm, structure and meaning of biological evolution. It might be of interest, therefore, to discuss the present state of these problems and to indulge in some critical considerations regarding them.
The Presence of the Sultan Saladin in the Romance Literatures
Authors: Castro Américo
Published: March 2007

Cultural phenomena never exist except in connexion with the agents of human life that make them possible and endow them with their authentic value. Culture is not of itself a fertilising rain—nothing human can be ‘of itself, an island of abstraction. Literary themes, then, are things that happen in and to someone's historical life. Their value is manifested to its full extent when the theme that interests us is seen as the expression, through an individual, of a particular people, who, in giving life to the literary theme, achieves its self-realisation in terms of a value structure. We have rather too frequently thought about comparative literature as if its motivating force were always some theme common to several literatures, and as if these literatures were limited to the historico-geographical space in which the migratory theme takes up residence and progressively ‘evolves’. This over-abstract and anti-vital idea leads to another, the notion of the theme in its pure state, the Urtema, in many comparative studies.
The Decline of the Ancient World
Authors: Domarchi Jean
Published: March 2007

The problem to which this article tries to supply an answer, in any case for the time being, is the following: was the political collapse of the Greek world the result of a slow internal disintegration or of the destructive action of the Roman conquest?

In other words: did the Graeco-Macedonian states, constituted after the conquest of Asia by Alexander, die ‘their own splendid deaths’ or were they ‘assassinated’ by Rome?
Cities and Countryside
Authors: Mendras Henri
Published: March 2007

According to G. Childe, the history of mankind is dominated by two great revolutions: the invention of agriculture and the birth of cities. From the same socio-historical point of view, R. Redfield is inclined to think that the consequences of the invention of agriculture have been less decisive than the urban revolution. Hence, he is led to classify all civilisations in two categories: the ‘pre-urban’, and those that have known a greater or lesser urban development.
The Classical Age; Idealist Thought of India
Authors: Renou Louis
Published: March 2007

The great history of India conceived by K. M. Munshi, the first undertaking of this magnitude to be carried out entirely by Indian scholars, is continued with Vol. Ill, which covers roughly the period from 320 to 750. After an interval of about ten months, it follows Vol. II, The Age of Imperial Unity, which embraced the period between 600 before our era and 320 after; the first volume, which appeared in 1952, had, naturally, dealt with the sources (‘up to 600 b.c.’), or what is conventionally known as ‘the Vedic period’. As is well known, the scientific editor is the esteemed historian R. C. Majumdar. To him, in this volume, has fallen the all important task of compiling the chapters on dynastic history which occupy the first three hundred pages, with the exception of the history of the Deccan monarchies, which was entrusted to the epigraphist D. C. Sircar (who has undertaken also Ceylon and the Châlukyas), another exception being the period of the Pallavas and other kingdoms of the South, treated by R. Sathianathaier.

An original characteristic of the work is the important part—in this volume actually preponderant—occupied by the elements constituting Indian culture at the epoch under consideration: literature (G. V. Devasthali, H. D. Velankar, Srinivas Iyengar), political and juridical theory (U. N. Ghoshal), religion (Nalinaksha Dutt, A. D. Pusalker, A. M. Ghatage, D. C. Sircar and others), art (S. K. Saraswati, N. R. Ray), general social questions (U. N. Ghoshal). Finally R. C. Majumdar returns to describe India's exchanges with the outside world and adds a summary of the expansion of Indian culture in Asia.
The Mover and the Adjuster
Authors: de Jouvenel Bertrand
Published: March 2007

The influence of man on man is exercised sometimes to assemble a group of individuals moved toward common action, sometimes to remedy the antagonisms which naturally result from the conflict of human wills. These two situations give rise to two forms of authority which are seldom found in the same person, since one form is essentially exciting and the other essentially calming. The contrast between them can be illustrated by the two images of the bridge of Arcole and the oak of Vincennes.

The print which shows Bonaparte hurling himself at the enemy and urging his soldiers to follow sums up in a single scene all the influence toward action he had exercised on them since he had taken command. He had found troops low in morale and without any disposition to take the offensive; he breathed his own fire into them; his famous proclamation tended to imbue them with his own ambition, and united them as participants in his plan. By a remarkable feat of transference, impatient because he was without glory, he made them realize that they were without shoes, and he materialized for them his own vast dreams in the visible form of “the fertile plains of Lombardy.”
Bases and Lines of Force in Cybernetics
Authors: Le Lionnais François
Published: March 2007

Cybernetics has fallen prey to snobs and journalists, who, in dealing with it, tend to mix myth with science. In this study we shall try to sift out the chaff, which a regrettable sensationalism has needlessly mixed with the good grain. Concentrating our attention on the rational bases and some of the lines of force of this new field of study, we shall try to eliminate the element of fable, but we shall not prohibit ourselves from opening windows on any perspectives that seem reasonable.

The notion of “information,” cornerstone of cybernetics, sheds light on the theory of knowledge. What is science, indeed, but an interpretation, which tries to be objective, of the flood of signals with which the universe submerges us? A Protean notion, it permits us to discover a certain unity among the most disparate phenomena. But it is a dangerous notion, too, because of the multiplicity of senses one may give to it.
Water and Cane Sugar
Authors: Freyre Gilberto
Published: March 2007

In 1929, Sir Halford Macknider gave a talk before the International Congress of Geography at Cambridge. He upheld the supremacy of water over all the elements that one must consider in the study of a region and its land. “The hydrosphere,” Sir Halford said, “should be considered as the central theme in geography.” There is nothing more important in the study of man than his relations with water—with sea water, river water, the condensed water in clouds, with rain or thaw, with subterranean water, the water that flows through plant sap or circulates in the arteries and veins of animals; even with the water content of blood, man's very life. Thus he expressed an almost mystical attitude toward water.

In our country, Arthur Orlando, one of the most energetic publicists of his generation, underlined the importance of water-the water one absorbs and which has such a great influence on man's life, as well as the river and ocean waters, which play such an important role in civilizations. It is true that water appears to be the dominant factor in the life of the land, in its physical as well as its cultural existence. This does not mean, however, that we must think of it mystically, as Sir Halford does.
Workers, Proletarians, and Intellectuals
Authors: Aron Raymond
Published: March 2007

The term proletariat became ambiguous when it no longer denoted industrial workers alone.

In the writings of Marx himself, one can trace the origin of a distinction between the working class and the proletariat, between factory workers as such and the total dehumanization which the term proletariat suggests. This distinction remains a virtual one for Marx and Marxists, because neither the prophet nor his disciples questioned, officially, the coincidence of these two definitions: it is the industrial workers who possess, par excellence, the proletarian characteristics of exclusion from the community and of disintegration of all special traits. And so one does not feel the need to separate the concrete group to which the term applies from the social condition or the state of mind that it evokes.
Philosophical Symbolism and the Use of the Myth Among Arab Philosophers
Authors: Saliba Djemil
Published: March 2007

Philosophical symbolism is first of all a concrete interpretation of abstract truths. It permits one to become aware of the complex realities of intellectual and moral life by borrowing the cloak of symbols and myths whose external meaning disguises their esoteric significance. Plato's use of the myth is a characteristic example. The Platonic myth is, in reality, merely the concealment of a thought which, according to the philosopher, seemed too daring and too advanced for its period. If one wishes to explain the ideas that affect the suprasensible world, one cannot avoid using concrete symbols or alluding to them by the use of figurative meanings. Concrete symbols and myths make it possible to examine doctrines in allegorical form, wherein the imagination is given full rein, combining its freest fantasies with underlying truths. Symbolic thought proceeds in this way, by imagery and analogy, in contrast to logical thought.
Individuality, Leadership, and Democracy
Authors: Yolton John W.
Published: March 2007

There is a growing concern in the western world with the nature and function of democracy, a concern induced by outside pressures of conflicting ideologies and by internal development of protective devices. The latter source of concern, which finds its highlight in America in congressional investigative techniques, has its origins in the practical and political arena. The issues it raises are tremendously significant for the future growth of democratic processes of government. The struggles which it has released will be a long time abating. But behind these local issues of democracy there lies a more subtle and less popular difficulty, the difficulty of harnessing enlightened political consciousness to the broad-based electorate required by democratic theory. This particular difficulty is not without its practical ramifications and applications; in fact, it is the nub of the struggle over investigative techniques in America. But the problem of uniting political wisdom with an extended franchise has a closer connection with the theory of democracy than does the problem of technique of investigations: it raises, in fact, the critical theoretical question of whether democracy is possible. Put more carefully, the question to which I have reference asks whether democracy is possible as government directed from below by the electorate, or from above by the intelligentsia.
Foreword
Authors: Caillois Roger
Published: March 2007

The first three volumes of A Study of History appeared in 1934; the last four are not yet two years old. During the interim the work of Arnold Toynbee has been widely disseminated, thanks to the abridged edition prepared by D. C. Somervell in 1946. Vigorously attacked by historians as soon as it appeared, the work continued to evoke their serious reservations. Some concentrated their efforts on pointing out multiple errors of chronology, fact, emphasis and interpretations: others, attacking the very inspiration or magnitude of the endeavor, judged it to be presumptuous and vain, foredoomed to failure, and all in all more the product of an outmoded concept of the philosophy of history than of proven methods of historical research.
A Study of History: What I Am Trying To Do
Authors: Toynbee Arnold J.
Published: March 2007

Since 1927 I have been writing this book, A Study of History, side by side with the Chatham House Survey of International Affairs that my wife and I began to write in 1924.1 could not, I believe, have done either piece of work if I had not been doing the other at the same time. A survey of current affairs on a world-wide scale can be made only against a background of world-history; and a study of world-history would have no life in it if it left out the history of the writer's own lifetime, for one's contemporaries are the only people whom one can ever catch alive. An historian in our generation must study Gandhi and Lenin and Atatürk and F. D. Roosevelt if he is to have any hope of bringing Hammurabi and Ikhnaton and Amos and the Buddha back to life for himself and for his readers.
A Biological and Mystical Interpretation of History: Arnold J. Toynbee
Authors: Madaule Jacques
Published: March 2007

At first glance it may seem paradoxical that a historian as resolutely idealist, in almost every sense of the word, as Arnold J. Toynbee, could be accused by some of his critics of replacing historical method by that of the natural sciences. This charge has been made, however, and upon reflection we realize that, rather than being overcome with astonishment, we must seek to explain the charge and, if possible, to justify Toynbee's method.
The Civilization of India According to Arnold Toynbee
Authors: Renou Louis
Published: March 2007

India has furnished the work of the English historian with a relatively large number of its elements. Without a doubt there is in this domain no material comparable in density and in erudite development to the excursus on the Achaemenian Empire which fills pages 580-689 of Volume VII of A Study of History. But there are enough passages, both long and short, to enable the reader fully to discern the author's reaction to this civilization. Where, indeed, would he have found so many motivated changes, so many external stimuli and internal absorptions, coupled with such continuity in time and in human habitation, to illustrate the general theses of his work?
Humanist Thought in Confucian Literature
Authors: Tao Wang
Published: March 2007

Confucian humanist thought takes as its pivot human life, both in its spirituality and in its love for everything that is. It consists in the perfecting of self and of everything existent, always following the laws of life, in order to arrive, through beneficent knowledge, at perfect union. Since it contemplates man in his relationship with other men, with Heaven, with everything that is, from the vantage points of economics, politics, society, morality, virtue, arts and letters, philosophy, in order to attain the diverse degrees of natural knowledge, there is nothing that it cannot encompass within itself. The general structure of the whole of Confucian humanist thought tends to the traditional objective, which consists in the benevolent appraisal of the aspirations of people in conformity with the creative principle that the heavens embrace everything and that everything emanates from their generously protective climate.
Letter to the Editor
Authors: Rivet Paul
Published: March 2007

Words, like human beings, embody avatars. Their meaning is transformed, expanding or contracting under multiple influences; in the end it is the collective will that always triumphs despite the resistance of elites or of schools. Such was the fate of the word which originally denoted the science of man in his totality and in his complexity: the word “anthropology·”
Surplus Value, Profit, and Exploitation
Authors: Daya
Published: March 2007

The theoretic structure of Marxian economy was elaborated to provide an understanding of the laws of the motion of capitalism. The motion of capitalism, however, is nothing but the process of economic development under conditions of multiple centers of investment-decisions. It becomes, then, an interesting question to ask how much of the theoretic structure of Marx applies to the problems of economic development in general and how much is limited to those aspects alone which follow from the theoretically contingent condition of decentralized investment-decisions. It will not, therefore, be the primary purpose of this paper to examine the adequacy of the conceptual structure of Marxian economic thought, or even its relative advantages or disadvantages over the more widely accepted school, following the inquiries of Walras, Menger, Jevons, and others; but, rather, to assume the general framework of Marxian theory and attempt to seek an answer within its limits.
Opinion and Power
Authors: Sauvy Alfred
Published: March 2007

This article is concerned with the general relations between power and informed public opinion in a Western democracy. It is based mainly on examples taken from France, where the separation between power and public opinion seems the sharpest, but is more or less applicable to all countries having the same political system. Parallel phenomena can be observed in most of the Western democracies, each of which could provide illustrations as striking as those the author has singled out.
The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism. II
Authors: Scholem Gershom
Published: March 2007

This principle of the Torah as a living unit connects with the third principle we are now ready to discuss, that of the manifold and even infinite meanings of the Torah. The different limbs in the simile of the organism were frequently interpreted not as coordinate organs on the same level of importance, but as different layers of meaning, leading the mystical student of the Sacred Text from the outer and exoteric meaning to ever deeper strata of understanding. The idea of an organism becomes identified here with the idea of a living hierarchy of meanings.
The Twenty-Five-Hundredth Anniversary of the Buddha
Authors: Cœdès George
Published: March 2007

The full moon in May is the occasion of the greatest festival of the year in the Buddhist world, it being the triple anniversary of the birth of Sakyamuni, of his ascent to the omniscience of a Buddha, and of his final extinction in Parinirvana. Ceylon and the countries of southeast Asia, which adopted the Singhalese Buddhism in the thirteenth century—Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos—are monsoon lands where the month of May coincides with the beginnings of the rains, thus signaling great rejoicing exemplified by offerings to the monks, recitals of prayers, and nocturnal circumambulations of the temples by the faithful torchbearers.
Mr. Bell on Tragedy
Authors: Crocker Lester G.
Published: March 2007

In his article on tragedy (Diogenes, No. 7), Mr. Charles G. Bell has offered us some provocative insights and opinions. I am compelled to question, however, some of the basic concepts he brings to the interpretation of tragedy.

It would seem that Mr. Bell, despite the depth of his thinking, has embraced several of the current clichés, which perhaps have their origin in the writings of A. C. Bradley. Critics adhering to this school hold that, for one reason or another, it is not possible to write tragedy in the twentieth century and that no work ending in bleak pessimism or despair is tragic. Mr. Bell, combining literary and historical criteria, is particularly severe in his limitation of the field of tragedy and the possibilities open to it. If I read him aright, only Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and the earlier Sophocles (before he fell from grace) have ever really earned admission to the exclusive realm.
African Societies in Transition
Authors: Deschamps Hubert
Published: March 2007

The doctoral theses of Georges Balandier, professor at the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes—Sociologie actuelle de l'Afrique noire (“Current Sociology of Negro Africa”) and Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires (“Sociology of the Negro Brazzavilles”)—are the culmination of studies undertaken in French Equatorial Africa while he was working in the Office de la Recherche scientifique Outre-Mer (French Bureau of Scientific Research Overseas). They are equally far removed from metaphysical sociology and from a static ethnography which seeks pure states and original traditions. They treat a moving present, ethnic groups already formed, African societies concerned about European intervention and about their own deveoping future. “Sociology,” Louis Wirth used to say, “is the science and the art of human relations.” Humanity is indeed the object of sociology, but sociology should be as well a tool for humanity. Balandier's work is a precious tool for understanding present-day Africa beyond what appears on the surface, and perhaps even for helping to construct the new Africa.
The Hobo: Myths and Realities
Authors: Vexliard Alexandre
Published: March 2007

The hobo is a man of many legends; these legends are contradictory because they “serve” opposite goals. Like Snow White, Mickey Mouse, or Sherlock Holmes, he has become a hero of comic-strip cartoons for children. Sometimes he is a bugaboo, whose mournful fate serves as an example of punishment for “laziness, that mother of vices.” At other times he is the protagonist of proud and lofty freedom. And is not freedom the purpose of our actions and the reward for the greatest virtues?
The Agrarian Revolution
Authors: Mendras Henri
Published: March 2007

American ethnologists are currently discovering a type of man and a “culture.” Their attention had been focussed for a long while on the various Indian tribes as a favored field of investigation, and, more recently, on the inhabitants of large or middle-sized American cities. This scientific “isolationism” had, therefore, effectively hidden from them the condition of the two-thirds of humanity who are neither “primitives” nor city-dwellers but, rather, peasants.

Robert Redfield, whose first inquiries took him to Mexico, there encountered what he called “folk culture.” Dispersed about the globe, his students brought back studies which led him to think that “peasant society and culture have a generic quality. This species of human organization has a certain uniformity throughout the world.” Studying the life of Polish, Chinese, European, Latin-American, and Hindu peasants, he noted what he calls “this imperturbable sameness.”
Biology of Art: Initial Formulation and Primary Orientation
Authors: Weidlé Wladimir
Published: March 2007

For a good while, men of high intelligence have been extolling a strictly descriptive phenomenological theory of art, concerned with the work of art itself and with its effect upon the spectator or the audience. Moreover, theories exist which tend in this direction, but sometimes they are still contaminated with the methods of psychological aesthetics, and sometimes they devote too much effort to combating those methods and to defining their own theory rather than putting it to the test of application.

The work of art is an object that exists solely for the human understanding, but which exists for it objectively—that is to say, outside or beyond individual variations of perception. Anyone who wishes to achieve results in this field—provisional results, to be sure, but at least concrete and capable of being verified or corrected—must describe both the common denominators and the distinctive traits of such objects.
Myths and Rites of Shamanism
Authors: Lewitzky Anatole
Published: March 2007

What is shamanism? What is the social nature of this institution which at times seems so clearly to be situated on the fringe of society that one is tempted to call it anti-social? There is indeed no lack of definitions, but where religion is concerned definitions are never satisfactory, for the limits of various phenomena are too uncertain and shadings between them too subtle. The social position of the shaman is so variable that it seems hardly possible even to state the question precisely. On the other hand, we find in mythology and ritual numerous elements indicating the place held by the shaman in collective, and especially in more general, representations of divinities. An attempt to establish, as evidenced in mythology, the position of the shaman in relation to the divinities will lead us to indications as to his social nature, that is, to society's conception of the shaman.
Notes on American Popular Culture
Authors: van den Haag Ernest
Published: March 2007

Unlike any other type of culture, popular culture—a full-fledged style of living with a distinct pattern of feeling, thinking, believing, and acting— was made possible and in the end necessary by mass production. Unless the requirements and effects of industrialization are fully grasped, popular culture does not become intelligible.

In the last two centuries, machinery and specialization have immensely increased economic productivity—the amount of goods produced per manhour—in Europe and America. This process has gone farthest in America, where popular culture too has gone farthest. Although enrichment led to a vast population increase, production per head rose stupendously and is still rising. Everybody benefited materially, but the main beneficiaries were the poor. Their income rose most. Furthermore, if the income gap between poor and rich had not narrowed as it did, an expanded national income distributed in unchanged proportions still would have augmented the welfare of the poor disproportionately. If the income of poor and rich alike increases by 50 per cent, the welfare of the poor is raised far more than that of the rich. Our progressive tax system—which taxes additions to the income of the poor less than additions to the income of the rich—is based entirely on this roughly correct view.
Relations Between Man and the World
Authors: Huard Pierre , Wong Ming
Published: March 2007

The relationship man-world is of very great importance for the primitive man who finds himself perpetually (even when deeply engaged in mechanical or technical pursuits) in a state of subjective participation with his milieu. No distinction whatsoever exists for him between the self and the world, but rather a constant and intimate liaison, made real by a mythical behavior which leads us to consider the myth as the most archaic stage of knowledge (Leenhardt).

Prehistoric myths were prolonged in the cosmologies by which the civilizations of ancient Asia tried to contemplate the world under the category of totality. The procedure of their attempts was the opposite of that of contemporary science, whose attitude is extroverted. They accounted for phenomena by projecting upon them, lacking all objectivity, their own sensory, emotive, imaginative, or intellectual reactions as well as their own subjective notions, introverted in value, of hierarchy and order. Pushed on by an invincible anthropomorphic tendency, they constructed a humanized nature by means of analogical deduction.
The Vital Domain of Animals and the Religious World of Man
Authors: Ruyer Raymond
Published: March 2007

According to Auguste Comte, whose extravagant statements are almost always meaningful, the whole of the physical and mathematical sciences, once integrated into positivist dogma, must become cosmology—or, more properly, he qualifies, geology, in the etymological sense of the word: the study of the earth, of the “human planet,” as the necessary environment “of all the higher functions, vital, social, and moral.” Even astronomy should be no more than “the heavenly study of the human planet, that is to say, the knowledge of our relations with those stars that are liable to affect and destroy our destinies by modifying the conditions of the earth.” His religion is focused on the world, not on the universe.

One cannot understand religion in general, and religious truth or error, save by stressing at the start the fact that, although it goes beyond the narrow confines of Comte's positivism, it flows from the cosmos of the world, the historico-geographical domain of man, not of nature, as an ensemble of the non-temporal laws or laws of the universe, devoid of center, which interests science. Religions contradict the positivist and humanist limitations of Comte. But this contradiction, this transcendence, is intelligible only if we define that which is transcended; and, in order to understand this, we must go all the way back to animal psychology.
The Barbarians
Authors: Sinor Denis
Published: March 2007

The aim of this paper is to try to define the concept of the Barbarian and, at the same time, to show some aspects of the role that peoples entering into this category played in the course of history. We shall use the term “barbarian” in a very loose sense and will forego altogether the study of the history of the word itself. We know that it denoted successively the non-Hellene, the non-Roman, the non-Byzantine, the non-Christian, and, finally, even the non-Italian. In spite of numerous secondary applications and even misapplications of the word, it is quite clear, and has been asserted more than once, that in its primary and principal meaning the term is the antonym of “civilized” and is, therefore, for all practical purposes synonymous with “uncivilized”; it has a distinctly pejorative flavor.

The fact that in its earliest, Greek, application “barbarian” simply meant “foreigner,” together with some other considerations, would suggest that this pejorative flavor is due to chauvinism: Country A tends to regard Country B as barbarous and vice versa. Superficial proofs could easily be found to warrant such a theory: the Romans were barbarians for the Greeks; China and Europe regarded each other as barbarians. However, to accept such proofs would lead us very much astray. A closer examination of, for example, Chinese-European relations would soon reveal if not a mutual esteem at least the recognition that each civilization is what the Germans call a “Hochkultur,” a word which, for want of a better expression, we could translate “major civilization.” For the Chinese, India was never a country of barbarians, nor was Persia, oddly enough, for the Romans or the Byzantines.
Renaissance Cosmologies
Authors: Michel Paul-Henri
Published: March 2007

In the prose commentary to Chapter VI of his poem De monade, Giordano Bruno designates Ficino as one of the princes of Platonism: “unus e principibus platonicis Ficinus.” Statements of this kind are all the more valuable because they are rare. Bruno seldom cites his sources; he utilizes his authors more often than he names them, and it requires a certain attentiveness to perceive that he knows Platonism and particularly Neo-Platonism only through and thanks to Ficino. On occasion Bruno makes use of Plotinus’ opinion, quoting texts that one would seek in vain in the Aeneid; they have been taken from the Ficinian commentaries. The same is true as regards Porphyry and Jamblichus.