From the Other Shore: Aleksandr Herzen on James Buchanan

Slavic Review ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 758-766
Author(s):  
David Shengold

On 21 February 1854 Aleksandr Herzen met the future fifteenth president, James Buchanan, at a dinner given by the American consul in London for notable European revolutionary exiles. As Herzen's careerlong interest in the United States never led him to visit its shores and but rarely encompassed face-to-face meetings with its citizens, his published version of the encounter, in Part VI of Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts), provides an intriguing testing ground for his theories about and images of the “Trans-Atlantic Republic,” theories and images that received wide currency among the Russian intellegentsia of the midnineteenth century.

2018 ◽  
Vol 04 (02) ◽  
pp. 241-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
You Wang ◽  
Dingding Chen

Both China and the United States are international leaders in artificial intelligence (AI). Although there remains a significant gap between them in cutting-edge technologies, and they have adopted different methods of planning and implementation, both countries have been mobilizing national resources and formulating policies to promote AI development, so as to achieve a strategic advantage over the other, especially against the backdrop of ever more intense and complicated strategic competition between them in recent years. As an epitome of their changing relationship, Sino-U.S. competition in AI development is manifested in economic, political, security, technological and other fields. It is expected that artificial intelligence will become an even more important field of competition between China and the United States, and that the trends of AI development and competition will to some extent determine the future dynamics of their bilateral relations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A Lake

Abstract The debate about China’s rise and future United States–China relations has focused on the purpose to which China’s growing international power will be put. This article focuses on the form of China’s power, distinguishing between domination and authority. Different great powers have, at different times, chosen one, the other, or more commonly differing mixes of the two forms. How China chooses now and in the future will have a significant effect on its relationships with other states, and through them on its relationship with the United States. The first section explores the differences between domination and authority as strategies for the exercise of international power. The second section summarizes a theory of authority with particular relevance to China today. Though necessarily speculative, this section identifies where China is most likely to choose one strategy over the other as its international influence expands. The final section examines the domestic impediments in China to the choice of authority. While both China and the United States might be better off in a world in which the former constructs an international hierarchy to parallel the latter’s, the conclusion draws a relatively pessimistic assessment of the prospects for cooperation between the two emerging superpowers.


2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 871-888
Author(s):  
Andreas Paulus

Robert Kagan's article and book on the future of transatlantic relations have gained much prominence in the debate on the reasons for and impact of the transatlantic rift on the war against Iraq. However, and regrettably, Kagan's work confirms rather than challenges the prejudices and stereotypes of both sides. After putting Kagan's approach in a political perspective, I intend to show that the antinomies used by Kagan and other participants in the debate, such as might and right, unilateralism and multilateralism, prevention and repression, hegemony and sovereign equality, democratic imperialism and pluralism, constitute useful analytical tools, but do not in any way capture the divergence of values and interests between the United States and Europe. However, the result of such an analysis does not lead to the adoption of one or the other extreme, but to the realization that international law occupies the space between them, allowing for the permanent re-negotiation of the place of “Mars” and “Venus” in international affairs.


1952 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-547
Author(s):  
Dana G. Munro

We rarely have an opportunity to study the intimate reactions of two members of the President's cabinet to a series of very recent and very important events. Both Speaking Frankly and The Forrestal Diaries cover about the same period—the period when the United States was slowly awakening to the realities of the postwar world—but they are very different in other respects. Secretary Byrnes' book was written to give a picture of the problems that he encountered during his tenure as Secretary of State and to express his considered views about policy for the future. The Diaries, on the other hand, were never intended for publication, and without connective matter supplied by the editor they would be merely a collection of memoranda of meetings and conversations, copies or summaries of documents prepared by other people, personal letters, and less frequent entries in which Mr. Forrestal recorded his own opinions or impressions.


1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-190
Author(s):  
Daniel Bell

In the nineteenth and down into the twentieth century, France and the United States offered two contrasting images to each other, one of the past, the other of the future. Both considered themselves as exceptional societies. But the term exceptional differed in the two countries. Exceptional, in France, meant uncommon, a civilization uniquely marked by its culture. Exceptional, for the United States, meant a fate different from the historical course of degeneration of other nations.


1999 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory R. Woirol

Economics in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s was notable for the richness of its methodological and theoretical approaches. Encompassing the peak period of American institutionalism, these years also witnessed a recurrent debate over the proper scope and method of economics which was bracketed by a minor methodenstreit in the 1920s and the measurement-withouttheory dispute of the late 1940s. In retrospect it is apparent which lines of thought would dominate economic discourse in later decades. At the time, however, this future was not as clear. A late 1920s evaluation by Paul Homan of the state of contemporary economics concluded that economists “seem in our own day to be separated by more impassable barriers of thought than at any time in the past” (Homan 1928, p. 10). In looking beyond “the present impasse,” as he called it, Homan concluded that “whether economics in the future shall consist of a body of doctrines, or a body of facts scientifically ascertained, or a technique, or more or less of one and the other, is on the laps of the gods” (ibid., pp. 466-67).


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 245
Author(s):  
Edward Foley

In the midst of this pandemic, most Christian Churches in the United States have been required to limit severely if not suspend face-to-face worship. The responses to this challenge when it comes to celebrating the Eucharist have been multiple. Frequent pastoral responses have included the shipping of consecrated elements to folk for their use during live-stream worship and virtual communion, in which worshippers employ elements from their own households as communion elements during the digitized worship. These options are not permitted for Roman Catholics. Instead, it is most common for Roman Catholics to be invited into spiritual communion. This is often considered a diminished, even ternary form of communing, quickly dispensed when quarantines are lifted and herd immunity achieved. On the other hand, there is a rich and thoughtful tradition about spiritual communion that recognizes it as an essential element in communion even when such is experienced face-to-face. This article intends to affirm the values of spiritual communion as a real, mystical and fruitful action that not only sustains people worshipping from afar, but enhances an authentic eucharistic spirituality.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reg Green

Many countries restrict the ability of organ donor families and their recipients to communicate with each other; many make it virtually impossible. These restrictions were made for the best of reasons, mainly because of fears that one side or the other might suffer psychological damage. In the United States, however, for more than 25 years, communication has been strongly encouraged if both parties want it and under conditions set by their medical advisers. In literally tens of thousands of cases, a great majority of those contacts, which can range from the exchange of anonymous letters to face-to-face meetings, have proved to be therapeutic for both sides and significant problems have been very rare. Indeed, it is the families who are kept apart who may suffer most. The author is an American journalist, whose seven-year old son was shot on a family vacation in Italy whose organs and corneas were donated there. He and his wife have met all seven recipients and everyone, he says, has benefited.


Author(s):  
W. W. Rostow

As in the other chapters in this book, it is wise to begin by recalling the past. In this case, I begin with the history and concepts that have guided U.S. foreign policy. This historical survey is useful first because the issues we will confront in the next half century, while distinctive, will not be wholly new. Americans have wrestled with them, wisely or otherwise, in the past, and that should help provide perspective as we face the future on the other side of the Great Spike. Second, looking forward, it is necessary to see the past as objectively as we can. There are endless aphorisms about the usefulness of history to illuminate the present and the future, as well as many concerning its lack of usefulness. In general, the use of history as a guide to the future has a bad name. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in one century and Lewis Namier in another both asserted that humanity could only look at the past and was incapable of looking forward. But in a book about the future, there is virtue in trying to belie Coleridge and Namier and, looking backward as well as forward, in trying to clarify where we have come from and what we face in the time ahead. In the half century from the Revolutionary War to President James Monroe's message to the Congress in 1823, the United States evolved from a group of colonies to a nation-state. In this half century, the United States gained its independence with the decisive aid of France. It struggled through another war with Britain over a neutral country's right to freedom of the seas. In 1823, it moved to guarantee the independence of its hemisphere against military intrusion from outside. There was an abiding security as well as an ideological component in the Monroe Doctrine. As for security, it warned the nations of Europe, including Russia, not to extend their military presence in the hemisphere. John C. Calhoun, then secretary of war, wished the United States to guarantee not merely the independence of Latin America from any extension of European power but also Latin America's movement toward democracy. John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, had two objections. First, he felt that "the feudal and clerical heritage" of Latin America would render its movement toward democracy problematic.


1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-90
Author(s):  
Edwin Vermulst ◽  
Bart Driessen

The dispute between the United States and the European Community on American extraterritorially operating trade legislation is far from resolved. The European Community has adopted a two-pronged approach to the matter; on the one hand WTO dispute settlement proceedings were initiated which, however, were subsequently suspended. On the other hand, the Community adopted quite unique anti-extraterritoriality legislation. This contribution reviews developments relating to the Community's double response in the last year, and provides some comments on possible developments in the future. Redress (noun): Reparation without satisfaction. Among the Anglo-Saxons a subject conceiving himself wronged by the king was permitted, on proving his injury, to beat a brazen image of the royal offender with a switch that was afterward applied to his own naked back. The latter rite was performed by the public hangman, and it assured moderation in the plaintiff's choice of a switch.


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