Warren Breckman

European Reference Index for the Humanities

As historians of ideas, we agree with our colleagues in the History of Science who have recently protested against the creation of a European Reference Index for the Humanities by the European Science Foundation. The creators of the Index present it as an effort to rank journals—including historical journals—by objective criteria. Theoretically, it grades journals not by subjective qualities but by the breadth of their readership, their methods of peer reviewing and the like, in order to provide a ‘‘research information system for the Humanities.’’ In fact, however, the Foundation nowhere makes clear how it chose the members of its ratings committees or what measures it took when gathering the information that enabled them to sort journals into three categories. Journals of very similar age, quality and standing receive different ratings—a symptom of arbitrary procedures and one that saps faith in the results. Yet the use of terms like ‘‘top-quality’’ and ‘‘first-rate’’ inevitably creates the impression that these rankings correspond in some way to the scientific importance of journals. Worst of all, journals published in English and addressed to a large readership are clearly granted precedence over journals published in other languages and devoted to more specialized subjects and limited publics—a violation of the basic principle that, as our colleagues write, ‘‘Great research may be published anywhere and in any language. Truly ground-breaking work may be more likely to appear from marginal, dissident or unexpected sources, rather than from a well-established and entrenched mainstream.’’ As presently conceived and executed, this exercise will harm the humanistic disciplines that it seeks to serve.

Nationalism, individualism, and capitalism: Reply to Greenfeld

Abstract Reversing the arguments of Anderson, Gellner, and Hobs‐bawm, Liah Greenfeld contends that it is nationalism that produces economic development. Specifically, she claims that nationalism inspired three seminal economic thinkers: Marx, List, and Smith. However, Greenfelds ideological preferences lead her to a problematic conception of individualism as nationalism, as well as to flawed treatments of Smith, List, and Marx. Nationalism is better understood as an attempt to address the deepening conflict between the imperative of community and the secular trends of the marketplace, which challenge national sovereignty and democracy.

The Power and the Void: Radical Democracy, Post-Marxism, and the Machiavellian Moment

The crisis and collapse of Marxism as the dominant intellectual system of the Left was surely one of the seismic shifts in the Ideological history of the late twentieth century This was a crisis already underway well before the collapse of the East Bloc. Indeed, by 1977, the most Influential Marxist thinker in Trance, Louis Althusser, took the “crisis of Marxism” as a given fact, but he pleaded with his readers that instead of writing the epitaph for Marxism, they should give this crisis “a completely different sense from collapse and death.” It was necessary, in Althusser’s words, to show “how something vital and alive can be liberated by this crisis and in this crisis.”1 This is a challenge that remains to this day, lhe questions that animated the Marxist tradition continue to press on us, even If many of that tradition’s answers have lost much of their persuasive power—the critique of and struggle against forms of domination that work through the visible and Invisible channels of social and economic relations, the desire for social justice and equality, as well as the attempt to envision and bring into being modes of collective life and decision making that liberate rather than oppress people.

Emancipation and the Bounds of Meaning: Reading, Representation and Politics in Young Hegelianism

This paper explores the status of symbolic representation in the work of the Left Hegelians Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. Hegel believed, contrary to his Romantic contemporaries, that symbols were too ambiguous to serve as means of philosophical communication; and as his followers turned against religion, they radicalized Hegels critique of Romantic symbolism in the name of an emancipatory impulse toward clarity and full possession of the object of meaning. While Bauer insisted that the possibility of human emancipation depended on overcoming the otherness of symbolic representation, Feuerbach reintroduced the symbolic as a crucial dimension of his humanist theory of religion and his account of embodied subjectivity.