This article provides a reassessment of the Berlin socialist women's movement of the mid-1890s as a historically significant attempt to establish a new kind of gender politics. The article shows how the movement provides an entry point to a broader, richer, more complicated feminist resistance than previously recognized. The historiographical processes that have narrowed interpretations of the movement are explored through a feminist-Foucauldian lens, which reveals the more collaborative activities and fluid alliances both among the women's groups and between them and a wider circle of social democratic men. A feminist-Foucauldian approach shifts attention to the movement's formation as an effect of power, highlighting its innovative organizational style, leadership, theorists, ideas, and resistance activities.
Search Results
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 114–136 (23 total)
The Fractal Process of European Integration
A Formal Theory of Recursivity in the Field of European Security
Grégoire Mallard and Martial Foucault
This article proposes a simple formal model that can explain why and how European states engaged in the negotiation of federalist treaties in the fields of European defense and security. Using the non-cooperative model of multilateral bargaining derived from the Stahl-Rubinstein game, we show that the specific sequencing of treaty negotiations adopted by federalists explains why, against all odds, states preferred federalist-inspired treaties to intergovernmental treaties. We argue that federalists succeeded in convincing states to sign their treaties, rather than alternative treaties, by spreading the risk of rejection attached to various components of European security treaties into successive periods of negotiations, a process that they repeated in each new round of negotiation. In doing so, we show that Jean Monnet and his transnational network of European federalists had an influence on the process of EU integration because they segmented treaties into components with different probabilities of acceptance, and structured the different rounds of negotiations of these components by starting with the less risky ones, rather than because they convinced states to change their preferences and adopt federalist treaties instead of intergovernmental treaties.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2011
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 68–89 (22 total)
The Origins of the Anti-Liberal Left
The 1979 Vincennes Conference on Neoliberalism
Michael C. Behrent
Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, François Châtelet, Nicos Poulantzas, and Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The Vincennes conference occurred at what, in retrospect, appears as a crucial turning point in France’s intellectual, political, and economic history. On the one
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 44–67 (24 total)
J. David Case
The study of historical memory in its various forms is a burgeoning
area of inquiry among historians. The debate over public, official,
government-supported memory and private individual memories
reveals a complex dynamic among myth, memory, and history,
which as Michel Foucault and others have argued, is simply the dominant
form of memory in a society at a given time.1 Some of the most
revealing instances of the intersection between public and private
memory are commemorations and memorial sites where personal
memories are created and sustained within the context of the official
representation of the event and those involved. The constant need to
locate memories within a larger social frame of reference ensures
that supporters of different memories of the same event will directly
and forcefully link images from the present with their memories of
the past, no matter how incongruous these images may appear.
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 1998
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 58–81 (23 total)
L'expérience, le désir et l'histoire
Alain Corbin ou le «tournant culturel» silencieux
Dominique Kalifa
Il est de nombreuses façons d’envisager l’oeuvre d’Alain Corbin dans le paysage historique contemporain. On peut partir des divers objets élaborés par l’historien jusqu’ici (les sociétés et les comportements ruraux, l’histoire des sens et des appréciations, le paysage, etc.) et montrer l’étonnante capacité d’invention ou de renouvellement dont il fit preuve dans leur mise en forme. Souvent privilégiée, cette approche est évidemment pertinente, mais elle peine parfois à se dégager du simple panégyrique. On peut, de façon plus synthétique, insister sur la cohérence du projet d’ensemble (l’histoire des sensibilités), le penser dans le temps long de l’historiographie et l’inscrire dans une série de filiations (la psychologie historique de Lucien Febvre, l’histoire des mentalités façon Robert Mandrou, l’ombre portée de Michelet et du projet romantique de réanimation du passé), elles-mêmes infléchies par l’apport de sociologues comme Norbert Élias ou de philosophes comme Michel Foucault.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2004
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 14–25 (12 total)
Queen Mathilda of Saxony and the Founding of Quedlinburg
Women, Memory, and Power
Helene Scheck
This essay examines the memorial practices at the tenth-century Saxon community of canonesses at St. Servatius, Quedlinburg, to consider what is gained—and what lost—in the remembrance of key figures of the Ottonian dynasty. A memorial foundation established by Queen Mathilda of Saxony in honor of her husband, King Henry I, this community provides a particularly effective way to explore the relationship between memory, gender, and power in Ottonian culture, since the architecture, ritual practices, institutional rules, daily and intellectual life of the inmates, and literary works possibly produced by them function together as a complex memorializing machine. Reading this community's contributions to the constitution of dynastic memory through Michel Foucault's notion of power, the essay considers the effects of memorializing practices on women in Saxony at the time, who, I argue, never come to be fully present and therefore leave their successors, women writers to come, a legacy of loss.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 21–36 (16 total)
Nadia Ferrer
In current and future situations of trans-global crises, social dissent and related practices of resistance cut across conventional country boundaries. Expressions of dissent and resistance pursue change through unconventional practices not only to challenge current governance, but to re-invent participation. They seek to impact society by transforming acquired values, subjectivities and knowledge. Despite these transformations of people’s subjectivities, majoritarian theories examining social movements still focus on finding rational patterns that can be instrumentalized in data sets and produce generalizable theoretical outcomes. This paper problematizes how social theory makes sense of collective action practices on the ground. Everyday non-discursive practices prove productivity-led theories' increasing disengagement with their object while challenging the excessive bureaucratization of scientific knowledge (Lyotard, 1997). That is, people experiment collectively with their capacities, and create their own initiatives and identities which do not follow determined patterns but do-while-thinking. The dichotomist approach of majoritarian debates in collective action theory is critically analysed by introducing the work of ‘minor authors’ and ‘radical theorists’. The fundamental purpose of this paper is to open a discussion space between the field of social action theories and activism knowledge, hence encouraging the creation of plateaus that blur academic boundaries and construct new subjectivities beyond “the indignity of speaking for others” (Deleuze in Foucault et al., 1977. p. 209). Drawing on the experience of the 15th of May 2011 in Spain, I analyse how radical theory reflects on current movements and collectives."
Brett Bowles
In a 1989 article published by Annales under the title “Le monde comme représentation,”1 Roger Chartier articulated a conceptual framework for bridging the gap that had traditionally separated the history of mentalities from social and political history. While the former field—pioneered by Georges Duby, Robert Mandrou, and Philippe Ariès in the 1960s—had legitimized the study of collective beliefs, anxieties, and desires as historical phenomena, the latter remained largely devoted to more concrete, easily quantifiable factors such as structures, institutions, and material culture. Drawing on the anthropological and psychoanalytical premises that had informed the work of Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Michel de Certeau, among others, Chartier emphasized the performative dimension of individual and collective representations in order to argue that they should be understood not only as evidence registering the exercise of social and political power, but as underlying catalysts of change in their own right. Like habitus, Pierre Bourdieu’s complex model of social causality and evolution, Chartier framed representation as a symbiotic “structuring structure” that deserved to sit at the heart of historical inquiry.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2014
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 1–3 (3 total)
Getting Medieval on Steven Pinker
Violence and Medieval England
Sara M. Butler
foundation for studies of historical violence and has been reenergized through new conceptualizations multiple times since its publication in 1939. Without a doubt, the most thought provoking has been Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 29–40 (12 total)
Patrick McEvoy
extracting new concepts from it as well. Following Bourdieu, she describes an artisan habitus, incorporating her own concept of “synesthetic reasoning,” which cheesemakers use to guide their production. Similarly, she finds Foucault’s biopolitics operating