The Picturesque Prospect of Architecture: Thomas Sandby's Royal Academy Lectures

Thomas Sandby (1721/3–98), who served as the Royal Academy's first professor of architecture from 1768 to 1798, shaped his students’ architectural thought. His lectures represent some of the crucial developments in viewing architecture that occurred during the period. They are vibrant expressions of how a viewer's experience of buildings informs architectural teaching and design, and demonstrate the importance of architectural experience for eighteenth-century architectural thought. This article explores Sandby's thinking, first in his own observations of buildings in his diary of a tour through Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and then in his teachings, which functioned as a kind of manual for future architects. It examines the diary and the lectures for his ideas on the effects of architecture — a building's situation, exterior, interior and decorations — in relation to the picturesque, one of the dominant concepts in his texts and drawings. Sandby's architectural thought is shown to be a relatively early statement of the picturesque applied to architecture and its setting.

The Guanabara Confession of Faith

The Guanabara Confession, an early statement of the Reformed faith, was written in “Antarctic France,” a sixteenth-century French colony in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After the discovery of Brazil in 1500, Portugal was slow to protect and settle its new territory. Only in 1549 did the Portuguese crown take direct control of its South American domains by appointing the first governor general. For decades other European nations had set their eyes upon the new land and its natural resources. Among those nations was France, whose ships came continuously to the Brazilian coast in order to smuggle dyewood and other products.

Beruf, rationality and emotion in Max Weber's sociology

The concept of Beruf, variously translated as ‘calling’ or ‘vocation’, refers to the pracdce of systematic self-control in pursuing constant goals or purposes, which Weber, in The Protestant Etbic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), found in both Calvinist religious practice and capitalistic entrepreneurship and labour. But the term is not confined to these applications; it is also central in Science as a Vocation (1917) and Politics as a Vocation (1919). The general significance of the idea of Berufis that it accounts for the mechanisms required to realize in action the quality of rationality, another of Weber's characteristic terms. The connection between rational activity and calling is constant in Weber's discussion. In his early statement of the argument, however, practices of Beruf achieve rationality through the suppression of emotion. In his later discussion, Beruf is achieved through and expresses passion and emotions.

Entrepreneurs and Democratization: Iran and the Philippines

The relationship between social structure and the emergence of democracy has long intrigued social scientists. In an early statement of the modernization perspective on this topic, Lipset (1960) postulated that a strong association exists between the degree of socioeconomic development and democracy. As economic development rose, so did wealth, income, and education, but income inequality declined, resulting in a population of moderate upper and lower classes and an expanding middle class, all of which favored the development of democratic political institutions. Subsequent quantitative studies found that a strong correlation can indeed be demonstrated between socioeconomic development and democratic institutions (Bollen 1983; Bollen and Jackman 1985). Despite significant contributions, these studies have not paid sufficient attention to either social agency or the mechanism of democratization during transitional periods. This essay will examine both of these factors by focusing on the role played by entrepreneurs in ousting dictatorial regimes.

The Irish remonstrance of 1317: an international perspective

The document commonly known as the ‘Remonstrance of the Irish princes’, which was sent to Pope John XXII in or about 1317, has inspired a great deal of written comment since the text first became generally available during the nineteenth century. It has been seen as an early statement and vindication of Irish national identity and political independence; it throws light on the application of the English common law in early fourteenth-century Ireland; it illustrates the relations between English and Irish monks and secular clergy within the Irish church; it demonstrates that in the early fourteenth century Pope Adrian IV’s bull Laudabiliter, in which he had urged Henry II of England to conquer Ireland, was regarded even by enemies of the English as a key element in the English monarchy’s claims to the lordship of Ireland; and its account of the English settlers in Ireland has been used to demonstrate a growing distinction between them and their cousins in England. In recent years the remonstrance has also been quarried for evidence on the application of the canon law of the just war, and for information on racial attitudes on the frontiers of medieval Europe.

Unity and Diversity in Latin American History

This article has its origins in a generalized feeling of dissatisfaction with current theories about political development trends in Latin America. It is an early statement of a series of arguments which will subsequently be developed in a forthcoming book.The veritable explosion of empirically grounded monographs in the last fifteen or twenty years has made the task of producing a synthetic account of Latin American development simultaneously more pressing and more difficult: more difficult because it has made simple explanatory models harder to sustain, and has opened up the accepted historiography to serious and widespread revisionist attack; more pressing because many, if not most, social scientists accept the need to develop a theory of social change which is historically grounded, capable of explaining large-scale social transformations. My concern in this article is with the methodological issues involved in the formulation of an adequate theory of Latin American development, rather than with establishing new facts. There is considerable historiographical controversy over many of the events discussed in this article, and in these cases I have made my own judgement about where, on balance, the evidence points.