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2 Early modern friendship: politics and law Horizontal and hierarchical power relations within a community Medieval Scholastic scholarship and its intellectual agenda shaped by ideas of a universal order were irrevocably challenged by the Reformation and the consequent segmentation of Europe, a process accelerated by rivalries among major political powers. The demand for intellectual tools to account for manifested contingency and the particularity of political situations necessitated a turn to a powerful alternative able to be sensitive to the experience of
Despite its long history, plague has not been an internationally significant disease since the mid-twentieth century, and it has attracted minimal modern critical attention. Strategies for treating plague are generally outdated and of limited effectiveness. However, plague remains endemic to a few developing nations, most prominently Madagascar. The outbreak of a major plague epidemic across several Madagascan urban areas in 2017 has sparked a wider discourse about the necessity of improving global preparedness for a potential future plague pandemic. Beyond updating treatment modalities, a key aspect of improving preparedness for such a pandemic involves a process of sophisticated review of historical public health responses to plague epidemics. As part of this process, this article outlines and compares public health responses to three separate epidemics from the early modern era onwards: Marseille in 1720–22, San Francisco in 1900–04 and Madagascar in 2017. Based on this process, it identifies three key themes common to successful responses: (1) clear, effective and minimally bureaucratic public health protocols; (2) an emphasis on combating plague denialism by gaining the trust and cooperation of the affected population; and (3) the long-term suppression of plague through the minimisation of contact between humans and infected small mammals.
. , Seem , M. and Lane , H. R. ( Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press ). Eisenstein , E. ( 2005 ), The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press ). Frontier Economics
early modern and contemporary diplomatic practice. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that the study of such documents is likely to uncover linguistic conventions and political practices that are antithetical to natural and ethical interpretations. The unintended consequence of the conceptual transformation in philosophical debate was to divert the attention of students of international politics from one of the most salient and possibly most political functions of friendship in diplomatic communication. In this way, early modern discourse of and about
as ‘neo-colonialism’) and led many developing world states to nationalise the assets of foreign-owned multi-national corporations based in their countries. Nationalism: the history of an ideology One might assert that modern history has been directed by the rise, development and spread of nationalism. We can identify a number of stages in the development of nationalism: proto-nationalism; early modern
centuries. Thus, the Slovak sense of “marginalization” or being “the periphery of periphery” has its roots in the inability of the Slavic population of Slovakia to develop its own forms of medieval statehood (Kirschbaum 1995 ). Conversely Bohemia-Moravia, Poland, and Hungary developed their native aristocratic strata and therefore became proto nation-states. However, in the modern/early modern period all three of them at one
This chapter takes a closer look at the accounts of political temporality that have surfaced as narratives of repetition, progress and decline. All of them took shape in response to the specific intellectual and political circumstances of late medieval and early modern Europe. Of all of them, this chapter argues, it is the progressive narrative that has had the most significant influence on the development of understandings of world politics since the seventeenth century. This chapter assesses the grounds and implications of progressive accounts of political time in more detail in the philosophies of history of Kant, Hegel and Marx. It also suggests that the kind of historicism that came to dominate the study of world history and politics in the nineteenth century followed from a ‘closed’ reading of the philosophy of history that reflected the influence of Darwin's evolutionary theory.
European states assumed a monopoly on the use of violence through dual processes of internal pacification and international war making. Even allowing for contemporary trends towards asymmetric conflict, the state has proven itself as a potent war-fighting institution. Closely related to the demonstrated capacity of the state to conduct war was the emergence in the early modern period of the idea of raison
/ moralist and sceptical/realist perspectives is a product of ‘the social construction’ of knowledge. The construction can be traced back to early modern theoretical, and hence rhetorical, debate over the principles upon which relations among sovereign polities in international society are built. Making a successful and convincing contribution to the debate required re-describing the concept of friendship in naturalistic and ethical terms. Thenceforth, the naturalistic and ethical concept of friendship established itself as dominant and effectively foreclosed theoretical
3 The ethics of friendship in early European diplomacy Surprising as it may sound, Humanist discourse in early modern Europe operated with a range of linguistic conventions that signalled the existence of a concept of friendship that was not only distinct from but also often entirely excluded the possibility of the contractual concept discussed in the previous chapter, despite sharing its key terms – ‘friendship’ and ‘amity’. The conventions that determined its distinct conceptual identity stemmed from the realm of ethics and morality, which many believe to be