Ideas and Society in Don Porfirio's Mexico

1973 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Raat

An opinion often expressed by historians of Mexico and Latin America is that the age of Don Porfirio's Mexico was one in which the philosophy of positivism, wherther Comtean or Spencerian, was the dominant and official ideology of the day. In contrast to this viewpoint, an important supposition of this essay is that the intellectual history of the Porfiriato can only become intelligible if and when other ideas, concepts, and philosophies are distinguished from positivism. In addition, an accurate description of the role of ideas necessitates that some attention be focused upon the function of ideas in society. Thus a concern of this essay, apart from differentiating ideas, is that of suggesting the interrelationship of ideas to certain political and socio-economic groups during the Porfiriato. To do this properly will first require a statement about the social structure of Mexico between 1876 and 1911.

Author(s):  
Julia Wesely ◽  
Adriana Allen ◽  
Lorena Zárate ◽  
María Silvia Emanuelli

Re-thinking dominant epistemological assumptions of the urban in the global South implies recognising the role of grassroots networks in challenging epistemic injustices through the co-production of multiple saberes and haceres for more just and inclusive cities. This paper examines the pedagogies of such networks by focusing on the experiences nurtured within Habitat International Coalition in Latin America (HIC-AL), identified as a ‘School of Grassroots Urbanism’ (Escuela de Urbanismo Popular). Although HIC-AL follows foremost activist rather than educational objectives, members of HIC-AL identify and value their practices as a ‘School’, whose diverse pedagogic logics and epistemological arguments are examined in this paper. The analysis builds upon a series of in-depth interviews, document reviews and participant observation with HIC-AL member organisations and allied grassroots networks. The discussion explores how the values and principles emanating from a long history of popular education and popular urbanism in the region are articulated through situated pedagogies of resistance and transformation, which in turn enable generative learning from and for the social production of habitat.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria Orrego Hoyos

AbstractThe article below, which is written by Gloria Orrego Hoyos, presents an overview of the Inter-American Human Rights System, its main instruments, its organs for the protection and promotion of human rights in the Americas and the available tools for the academic research and the activism in the vindication for human rights in the region. This information is presented from the contextualization of the system within a history of violation of human rights in the region, and the role of both the Inter-American Convention and the Inter-American Court in the transformation of the social, political and institutional realities of the people of the continent.


2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Fine ◽  
Dimitris Milonakis

AbstractIn this response to the symposium on our two books we try to deal as fully as possible in the brief space available with most of the major issues raised by our distinguished commentators. Although at least three of them are in agreement with the main thrust of the arguments put forward in our books, they all raise important issues relating to methodology, the history of economic thought (including omissions), and a number of more specific issues. Our answer is based on the restatement of the chief purpose of our two books, describing the intellectual history of the evolution of economic science emphasising the role of the excision of the social and the historical from economic theorising in the transition from (classical) political economy to (neoclassical) economics, only for the two to be reunited through the vulgar form of economics imperialism following the monolithic dominance of neoclassical economics at the expense of pluralism after the Second World War. The importance of political economy for the future of economic science is vigorously argued for.


Author(s):  
Daniel Ricardo Quiroga-Villamarín

Abstract While the history of international law has been mainly dominated by intellectual history, the neighboring humanities and social sciences have witnessed a ‘material turn.’ Influenced by the new materialisms, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have highlighted the role of objects and nonhuman infrastructures in the making of the social. Law, however, has been conspicuously absent from these discussions. Only until recently, things began to be studied as instruments of – global – regulation. In this article, I trace an intellectual history of the intellectual history of international law, contextualizing it since its inception in the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ to its spread into the legal field via the Critical Legal Studies movement and its final import into international law in the last two decades. I conclude arguing that international legal historians can depart from the ‘well-worn paths’ of intellectual and conceptual history to engage with the materiality (past, present, and future) of global governance.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 637-644
Author(s):  
THEODORE M. PORTER

Is intelligence a fit topic for intellectual history? The creation and institutionalization of IQ (the initials have become self-sufficient, and no longer stand for “intelligence quotient”) have been a favorite topic in the history of psychology, and have even achieved some standing in social histories of class, race, and mobility, especially in the United States. The campaign to quantify intelligence tended to remove it from the domain of intellectual history, which after all has traditionally emphasized ideas and interpretations. Measurement, and not alone of the mind, was pursued as a way to rein in the intellect by making it more rigorous. What was pushed out the door, however, returned through the window in the form of debates about what intelligence means; in what sense and with what tools it can be measured; and how these measures relate to other ways of comprehending mind, thought, and reason. Quantification, a potent strategy for releasing science from the grip of history, is itself profoundly historical, as a half-century of modern scholarship has demonstrated. This historicizing of the antihistorical embodies what we may call counterreflexivity, and, as such, is partly about puncturing illusions, though it need not take a negative view of the social role of science. The perspective of history is all the more essential because the depoliticization of merit through science entails a consequential moral and political choice. Measurement, by rationalizing and stabilizing the idea of intelligence, enabled it more readily to enter everyday discourse and to be put to work in schools, businesses, and bureaucracies.


2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA HOLIAN

AbstractIn the first years after the Second World War, Munich was home to a unique institution, the UNRRA University. Created by and for Europe's displaced persons, the university was defined as a new kind of educational institution, dedicated to the cause of reviving humanism and promoting internationalism. By virtue of their experiences of occupation, persecution and dislocation, the university argued, displaced persons were uniquely qualified to spearhead the post-war reconstruction of education and culture. This article traces the social and intellectual history of the UNRRA University. It examines the university's ideas on nationalism and internationalism, the reconstruction of higher education and the role of the intellectual in the post-war world. It argues that while much of the literature on displaced persons has focused on national communities, wartime and post-war displacement also gave rise to new transnational solidarities and imaginaries among the displaced.


1975 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 410-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Waterbury

Regionalism has always been an important component of the social structure and history of Mexico. Fortunately for the scholar interested in developing theories about peasant rebellions, regionalism facilitates the method of controlled comparison. This paper will contrast the role of the peasants of Oaxaca and of Morelos in the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20.


Author(s):  
Альберт Кравченко ◽  
Al'bert Kravchenko

The social structure is a photograph of society, which embodies its historical destiny - from tragic fractures to the highest point of prosperity. The economic downturns and booms and changes in the political regime were followed by changes in the fate of entire estates, classes and professional groups. The author examines in detail and analyzes the correlation of social strata in different historical periods of Russia through their dynamics: the division and proletarisation, the Genesis of the working class, the formation of new layers in its composition, in particular, the precariat and the cognitive system, the phenomenology of poverty, the evolution of the country-specific noble and serf bourgeoisie, the universal historical role of the middle class, intellectuals and the elite of society. The monograph is aimed at specialists in the field of socio-economic issues of the history of Russia and is addressed to modern youth, thinking about the fate of their homeland.


1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 135-146
Author(s):  
Namita Poudel

One of the profound questions that troubled many philosophers is– “Who am I?” where do I come from? ‘Why am I, where I am? Or “How I see myself?” and maybe more technically -What is my subjectivity? How my subjectivity is formed and transformed? My attempt, in this paper, is to look at “I”, and see how it got shaped. To understand self, this paper tries to show, how subjectivity got transformed or persisted over five generations with changing social structure and institutions. In other words, I am trying to explore self-identity. I have analyzed changing subjectivity patterns of family, and its connection with globalization. Moreover, the research tries to show the role of the Meta field in search of subjectivity based on the following research questions; how my ancestor’s subjectivity changed with social fields? Which power forced them to change their citizenship? And how my identity is shaped within the metafield? The methodology of my study is qualitative. Faced to face interview is taken with the oldest member of family and relatives. The finding of my research is the subjectivity of Namita Poudel (Me) is shaped by the meta field, my position, and practices in the social field.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document