David Roberts meets the switchman: A footnote to the total work of art in European modernism

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 152 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-75
Author(s):  
Peter Beilharz
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Total Work ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Leon Trotsky ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
European Modernism

The scope of David Roberts’ book on the Total Work of Art is daunting. It stretches from the French Revolution through to the modernist avant-garde and its dissolution in totalitarianism. If Wagner is its chief leader and artistic animator, it also echoes back to Robespierre, Napoleon and Saint-Simon, and through at least to Bolshevism and Futurism, Stalinism and Italian Fascism. The total work of art totalizes the world of the artwork, but it also adds in the politics of the sublime, turns politics into art and negates both as independent spheres of existence at the same time. In this piece I offer some observations on the thinking of a key switchman in this story: Leon Trotsky.

scholarly journals Composer of the revolution: Scriabin’s idea of the Mysterium - the total work of art

Muzikologija ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 161-181
Author(s):  
Branislava Trifunovic
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Climate ◽  
Total Work ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
Russian Intelligentsia

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Alexander Scriabin with his conception of the total work of art, named Mysterium, unconsciously provided the artistic vision of revolutionary claims, anticipating the October Revolution of 1917. Since the first decade of the 20th century, the revolutionary conscience was a singular feature of the Russian intelligentsia, so the concept of Mysterium was, in such social climate, a concept of force that prompted the artist to seek a better world. Just like avant-garde artists - whose actions are an intervention in social systems - in his Mysterium Scriabin emphasized the need for a transformation of the world through art. Bearing this in mind, the musicological interpretation of Mysterium here is made with the aim of positioning Scriabin as a modernist subject. The insights into the composer?s responses to socio-political reality - both within Scriabin?s philosophical and creative narratives - refer to the demands of the revolutionaries for the collective/sobornost. This study shows that those demands were, in the case of Scriabin, shaped as the idea of the utopian function of art.

The Glory and the Sorrow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tackett
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Small Time ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Ordinary Citizen ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The book describes the life and the world of a small-time lawyer, Adrien-Joseph Colson, who lived in central Paris from the end of the Old Regime through the first eight years of the French Revolution. It is based on over a thousand letters written by Colson about twice a week to his best friend living in the French province of Berry. By means of this correspondence, and of a variety of other sources, the book examines what it was like for an “ordinary citizen” to live through extraordinary times, and how Colson, in his position as a “social and cultural intermediary,” can provide insight into the life of a whole neighborhood on the central Right Bank, both before and during the Revolution. It explores the day-to-day experience of the Revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, the disappointments—often all mixed together. It also throws light on some of the questions long debated by historians concerning the origins, the radicalization, the growth of violence, and the end of that Revolution.

THE APPEARANCE OF AMERICAN GIRLS, AS VIEWED BY MOREAU DE SAINT-MÉRY ABOUT 1795

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-167
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Young Girls ◽  
The North ◽  
North Side ◽  
The World ◽  
The French Revolution

The French jurist, Méderic Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819), was driven into exile during the French Revolution by Robespierre's accession to power. From 1794 to 1798 Moreau lived in the United States. In the journal he kept during these years, he described American young girls as follows: American girls are pretty, and their eyes are alive with expression; but their complexions are wan, bad teeth spoil the appearance of their mouths, and there is also something disagreeable about the length of their legs. In general, however, they are of good height, are graceful, and, in enumerating their charms, one must not forget the shapeliness of their breasts. Philadelphia has thousands of beauties between fourteen and eighteen. To offer but a single proof: on the north side of Market Street, between Third and Fifth Street, on a single winter's day I saw four hundred young maidens promenading, each one of whom would surely have been followed in Paris, a seductive tribute that could be offered by perhaps no other city in the world. But these girls soon became pale, and an indisposition which is reckoned among the most unfavorable for the maintenance of the freshness of youth is very common among them. They have thin hair and bad teeth, and are given to nervous illnesses. The elements which embellish beauty, or rather which compose and order it, are not often bestowed by the graces. Finally, they are charming, adorable at fifteen, dried up at twenty-three, old at thirty-five, decrepit at forty or fifty.

All Societies Die

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Common Features ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Drug Cartels ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
The French Revolution

The author of this book asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But the author also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope. In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, this book considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. It points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution, to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. While unveiling the past, the message to us about the present is searing. Through an assessment of past and current societies, the book offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, the reader is shown that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer. This inventive approach to an “end-of-the-world” scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. The book concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Paul Rusnock ◽  
Jan Šebestík
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Public Forum ◽  
The World ◽  
Joseph Ii ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Bolzano’s life coincides almost exactly with what has been called the Age of Revolutions. Born in 1781, he lived through the revolution from above launched by Joseph II in 1780, the French Revolution, the triumphs and defeats of Napoleon, the conservative reaction embodied in the Metternich System, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the July revolution of 1830, and finally the uprisings of 1848, the last year of his life. It was a time of exaggerations, of great hopes and fears, sudden reversals, and crushing disappointments, a time of vast enthusiasms and general confusion, as unprecedented forces were let loose upon a world almost completely unprepared for them. The world of letters was not spared, as authors strove to make their voices count in an ever more crowded and noisy public forum. Novelty was everywhere sought, overreach and passion common on all sides....

Review of J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960)

2021 ◽  
pp. 325-326
Author(s):  
Martin Wight
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
The World ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The French Revolution

Wight noted that in an earlier book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Professor Talmon identified Rousseau as the ‘main source’ of ‘the totalitarian messianism of the French Revolution’. In this sequel he examines ‘the vast effervescence of utopian political thought between 1815 and 1848, which produced modern nationalism and Communism’. He aims to place the genesis of Marxism ‘in a wider historical setting than histories of socialism usually supply, against a background not only of Owen and Fourier, Fichte and Hegel, but of the whole romantic range of the Saint-Simonists and Lamennais, Michelet, Mazzini, and Mickiewicz’. The complex outcome is ‘the world we still live in, where national particularities seek to justify themselves in the service of a universal ideal, but revolutionary war makes national frontiers irrelevant; where national uniqueness is the strongest adversary of international revolution, nationalism finds its fulfilment by turning socialist, and socialism cannot establish itself except within national boundaries’.

Lauener, Michael, Schutz der Kirche und Stabilität des Staates durch Absenz von religiöser ,Seichtigkeit': die religionspolitischen Anschauungen von Jeremias Gotthelf und Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel aus dem Geist der Versöhnung

2019 ◽  
Vol 105 (1) ◽  
pp. 280-349
Author(s):  
Michael Lauener
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Strong State ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Church ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Protection of the church and state stability through the absence of religious 'shallowness': views on religion-policy of Jeremias Gotthelf and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel out of a spirit of reconciliation. The article re-examines a thesis of Paul Baumgartner published in 1945: "Jeremias Gotthelf's, 'Zeitgeist and Bernergeist', A Study on Introduction and Interpretation", that if the Swiss writer and keen Hegel-opponent Jeremias Gotthelf had read any book of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, some of this would have received his recognition. Both Gotthelf and Hegel see the Reformation to be the cause of the emergence of a strong state. For Gotthelf, this marks the beginning of a process of strengthening the state at the expense of the church. Hegel, on the other hand, considers the modern state to be the reality of freedom, produced by the Christian 'religion of freedom' (Rph, §270 Z., p. 430). In contrast to Gotthelf, for whom only Christ can reconcile the state and religion, Hegel praises the French Revolution as "reconciliation of the divine with the world". For Gotthelf, the French Revolution was only a poor imitation of the process of spiritual and political liberation initiated by the Reformation, through which Christ reduced people to their original liberty. Nevertheless, both Gotthelf and Hegel want to protect the state and the church from falling apart, they reject organizational unity of state – religion – church in the sense of a theocracy, and demand the protection of church communities.

Christianity as Insurrection

1991 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-324
Author(s):  
P. Matheson
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Women Slaves ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Social Upheaval ◽  
The French Revolution

To suggest that authentic Christianity is an insurrectionary faith, a standing provocation to the conventional values of society is, on the face of it, to invite derision. Yet the ferocity with which the first Christians were persecuted was in no small part due to their subversive teachings and practices which gave women, slaves and artisans ideas above their station. This subversive dimension may often have been forgotten. It can hardly have been very evident to the inhabitants of Wittenberg in 1515, for example, yet within a decade Germany was to be embroiled in an unprecedented crisis of authority, one which led not only to turmoil in the world of student and scholar and cleric, but to the greatest social upheaval prior to the French Revolution, to the uffrur we know as the Peasants' War.

Jacobinism from Outside

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Rapport
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
The World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Full Force ◽  
The French Revolution

‘Jacobinism’ as perceived and experienced outside France varied between local contexts, the rich diversity of responses to the French Revolution reflecting the ideas, symbols and rhetoric emanating from France, but also pre-existing political and ideological trends, earlier attempts at reform, the specific structures of society and the scale of resistance to change. There were commonalities that included similarities in ideology, rhetoric, symbols and practices, but international Jacobinism was never a coherent ideology or political movement. ‘Jacobins’ outside France were, moreover, usually minorities and everywhere they felt the full force of reactions in defence of tradition and the conservative order. The varieties of ‘Jacobinism’ outside France nonetheless provided an important response to the widespread debates about the nature of freedom and political identity, the shape of which was being fervently disputed around the world.

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