Negative Freedoms in Twentieth-Century Europe

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

This review article discusses yves Cohen's recent book Le siècle des chefs: Une histoire transnationale du commandement et de l'autorité (1890-1940). Cohen provides an extensive analysis of discourses on leadership in France, the soviet union, Germany and the united states. he also studies how leadership was practiced, by French and soviet factory directors as well as by stalin himself. While giving due credit to the scope and sophistication of his book, the review article asks whether Cohen's focus on scientific discourses and highly structured organisations leaves sufficient room for contingency. it argues that interwar political leadership in interwar europe was not least about seeing and seizing opportunities in unforeseeable circumstances, often thriving on a positive fascination with crises and states of emergency. it also points out that, contrary to what the combined title and subtitle suggest, "le siècle des chefs" hardly ended in 1939, and that the quest for leadership continues to preoccupy present-day societies, cultures and polities.

Historical Journal, 56, 2013

A B S T R A C T . The present historiographical review discusses the subjective dimension of Nazism, an ideology and regime that needed translation into self-definitions, gender roles, and bodily practices to implant itself in German society and mobilize it for racial war. These studies include biographies of some of the Third Reich's most important protagonists, which have important things to say about their self-understandings in conjunction with the circumstances they encountered and subsequently shaped; cultural histories of important twentieth-century figures such as film stars, housewives, or consumers, which add new insights to the ongoing debate about the Third Reich's modernity; studies that address participation in the Nazi Empire and the Holocaust through discourses and practices of comradeship, work in extermination camps, and female 'help' within the Wehrmacht. In discussing these monographs, along the way incorporating further books and articles, the piece attempts to draw connections between specific topics and think about new possibilities for synthesis in an overcompartmentalized field. It aims less to define a 'Nazi subject' than to bring us closer to understanding how Hitler's movement and regime connected different, shifting subject positions through both cohesion and competition, creating a dynamic that kept producing new exclusions and violent acts.

This article explores the role of individuality in Europe's urban past. In so doing, it builds on Georg Simmel's famous article 'The metropolis and mental life' as well as recent work especially by Bernard Lahire, Niklas Luhmann and Uwe Schimank. The article brings out key sociological insights and links them to a range of studies by urban historians, which are thus revisited from a fresh angle. The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern city: first, sites of social and cultural life; secondly, politics and government; thirdly, nonhumans such as material objects, animals and natural elements.

Cold War discourse has long promoted the perception that 1945 marked the past century's most distinctive watershed. There are still good reasons to maintain this view, even if one accepts neither the legend of defeated Germany's "Stunde Null" nor the notion of a complete paradigm shift in international relations, which purportedly followed the logic of the confrontation between the blocs from then on. As survivors of the global cataclysm, contemporaries hoped for a new beginning. The period of the two world wars, later labeled by Eric Hobsbawm as the nightmarish half of an "Age of Extremes," had come to an end when the two hundred days between the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, and Japan's capitulation revealed the hitherto inconceivable extent of destruction and violence that occurred in the final phase of World War II. 1 The history of ideas should focus on the epochal year 1945 from a variety of perspectives. On the one hand, fascism and National Socialism, with their disastrous consequences, indeed came to an abrupt end. Liberal democracy,

In: Arendt on Freedom, Liberation, and Revolution, ed. Kei Hiruta, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 17–45, 2019

Arendt presents her defense of political freedom as a challenge to the liberal convention, which allegedly conceptualizes freedom as “freedom from politics.” But her comments on liberal theories of freedom are scattered and unsystematic, and they raise a series of questions. Is her understanding of liberal freedom accurate? If it is not, why does she misconstrue liberal freedom as she does? And does her limited understanding of liberalism undermine her defense of political freedom? This chapter aims to answer these questions. The first half clarifies Arendt’s (mis-)understanding of liberal freedom. The latter half critically evaluates her challenge to liberal freedom and considers what is alive in it over a half-century later.

Isaiah Berlin is conventionally identified as an anti-Communist Cold War intellectual, and a partisan of "negative" against "positive" liberty. Yet examination of Berlin's early political writings reveal that Berlin was concerned with the dangers posed in Western, democratic societies by imposed conformity and the displacement of politics and regulation of private life by technocratic management.