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Schmitt's reflections on modern mass democracy start with an examination of the political consequences following the postmedieval transition from the sovereignty of the king to the sovereignty of the people, from the unitary, physical body of the monarch to the fragmented, dispersed body of the multitude. He explored the political implications of the rise of popular sovereignty and particularly the fact that “the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty was lost…[because] the unity that a people represents does not possess this decisionistic character.” In other words, he not only directly addressed the problem of agency and action of a sovereign that is transformed into an impersonal, unorganized multitude. He also sought to illuminate the democratic origins of political power, to rethink the category of sovereignty in a democratic age, and to develop a systematic theory of democratic legitimacy. Pasquale Pasquino has nicely captured this dimension of Schmitt's work, noting that it should also be read as an attempt to “think the democratic form of authority.” Sovereignty and Dictatorship Schmitt pursued his aim by combining Thomas Hobbes's absolutist concept of sovereignty and Emmanuel Sieyès's notion of le pouvoir constituent, that is, the power of a political subject to create a new constitution. In my effort to clarify Schmitt's understanding of extraordinary politics and to reach into his singular insights on popular sovereignty, I bracket for a moment his famous definition, in the opening sentence of Political Theology, according to which the “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Don't tell them only about our suffering. Tell them that we are strong; that we are still resisting. The Palestinian refugees' commemorative narratives have at various times and in specific historical contexts exhibited moods which can be categorized as tragic, heroic or sumud (steadfastness). Most schematically, heroic narratives of the past are mobilizing elements of nationalist discourse, while tragic narratives – reinforced by the victimisation discourse of aid agencies and NGOs – use past suffering as the legitimating basis of claims made on an international audience and against the Palestinian leadership. Finally, sumud narratives appear in liminal times, and see the past as moments of passive resistance. Here, I will analyze different Palestinian narratives in turn, tracing the political milieu and social relations out of which they emerge. This chapter lays the groundwork for analyzing specific commemorative themes such as martyrs, fida'iyyin, battles and massacres. Contents of commemoration Commemoration is almost always staged or “performed” for a public or an audience and demands reactions from this audience, whether that reaction is a compulsion to political action (Polletta 1998a, 1998b), an engagement in a critique of the present (Williams 1985), a demand for “moral accountability” (Werbner 1995: 102), spurring political choices (Werbner 2002: 81), or charting a map of the future (Tonkin 1992:1). That commemoration is dialogic and shaped by the constant interaction with its audience allows for ambiguity and polyvalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“The history of Ireland repeats itself from age to age with such a mournful rhythm, that Moore's poems find as quick a response in the hearts of the people now as when first published. Each generation goes through the same phases – resistance, defeat, despair. The new generation follows with hopes as brilliant and resolves as bold, again to try, again to fail. And so the sad trilogy is acted from age to age, while the nation can only helplessly mourn, as victim after victim falls dead in the dust of the arena.” While the focus of the previous chapter was the use of the gothic to represent imperial territorial possessions as insensible, the texts considered in the present chapter use the narrative conventions of the gothic to represent colonial time as stultifying, repetitive, and fragmentary. In Morgan's “Absenteeism,” Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, and Denis Florence MacCarthy's “Afghanistan,” the insensibility, and general unresponsiveness, of imperial power and its agents forestalls the progress of colonized peoples. The romance structures of imperial history that were generally written from the metropole are reworked on terms commensurate with gothic conventions to subvert that history's ideological claims and tacit reassurances. Morgan takes a long view in her writings on Irish history to suggest, anticipating Jane Wilde, that English governmental practice “repeats itself from age to age” on terms that produce the same Irish “response in the hearts of the people” (see epigraph, above). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ireland can no longer be governed by the suspension of the safeguards of popular liberty, unless we are prepared to make their suspension the rule rather than the exception. During the past five years … [he] has been regarded as the loyal Liberal, and he alone, who followed Mr Gladstone w[h]ithersoever he went … The great Liberal Party has no creed but Gladstoneism [sic]. This is at once its strength and its weakness. Crisis? What crisis? ‘I need scarcely mention that the ministers and religious bodies of all denominations were against us … Perhaps, after all, the strongest force against me in the fight was that … it was decided that the Irish vote should go Liberal.’ The frustration expressed in these words by a disgruntled candidate reflected a common experience among Independent Labour Party (ILP) parliamentary candidates during the thirty years following the 1886 Home Rule crisis. Yet most historians have argued that the Gladstonian campaign to secure Irish self-government failed to move working-class electors. Indeed, Gladstone's adoption of this cause is generally regarded as one of his worst mistakes, brought about by his wish to retain the party leadership and resist the rising tide of social reform – which Joseph Chamberlain and other ‘advanced Liberals’ felt to be absolutely necessary if the party was to retain its popular following. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Another species of mitigated scepticism, which may be of advantage to mankind . . . is the limitation of our enquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding . . . A correct Judgment . . . avoid[s] all distant and high enquiries, confines itself to common life, and to such objects as fall under daily practice and experience, leaving the more sublime topics to the embellishment of poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians.” (David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, XII) / It is apt to be forgotten by students of the Renaissance that the abstract noun “humanism,” with its cognates in Latin and the modern languages, is not attested for the period of the Renaissance itself, but began to be widely used only in the early nineteenth century. It was in the latter period, under the influence of Hegel, that the modern addiction to reifying ideologies and social trends using nouns formed from -ismos, the Greek suffix indicating nouns of action or process, began to take hold. Humanismus, humanisme, and umanesimo, the German, French, and Italian forms of the word respectively, eventually embraced two broad families of meaning. The first family understood humanism in the sense of classical education: the study of ancient literature in the original languages. It was in this sense that Georg Voigt in his seminal work, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (1859), retrofitted the word to signify the Renaissance movement to revive classical studies. In Italy the word umanesimo broadened its meaning somewhat to include Italy's literary production in the Latin language from Petrarca to Pietro Bembo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The civil war began in Gijón as it did in many other ‘red’ cities and towns across Spain. When the military leaders declared their support for the rebellion, supporters of the Republic poured into the streets, brought out by factory and port sirens and the urgent calls by trade union leaders to meet at the Casa del Pueblo to plan the defence of their city. Those who gathered, mainly working-class men of the union movements, elected a defence committee which proceeded to procure arms for ‘the people’ and, with the support of loyal police, to engage the rebel soldiers in battle. By the end of the day, the rebels had to retreat to their barracks, from where they continued their struggle, aided by warships shelling from the harbour. The rebel hold-outs were finally defeated on 21 August 1936, leaving Gijón and much of eastern and central Asturias (with the exception of the capital city, Oviedo) in republican hands until the nationalists took the city in October 1937. However, the Republic that was saved from the rebels had itself been transformed, as political power shifted from the republican parties to the trade unions. As formal institutions collapsed, at both the national and local levels, the vacuum of power was filled by whichever local groups had the best capacity to mobilise and organise masses of people – especially militiamen – in a crisis situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an observer of contemporary Italian culture, I have been struck by the recent outpouring of texts and films on the subject of the Shoah, evidence of what Fabio Girelli-Carasi sees as the belated emergence of a Jewish discourse in the Italy of today. During my years as a student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was aware of a distinct reluctance on the part of writers and directors to confront this chapter in Italian history. Of course, there was Giorgio Bassani, but he was “ghettoized” by the intellectual Left for a perceived lack of ideological engagement – a failure to represent the possibility of an activist response to Fascism and the residual injustices of the postwar period. I was dimly aware of the achievements of Primo Levi, but that awareness was clouded by a kind of respectful reticence, almost a sense of embarrassment, about his writings on the part of the critical establishment. This discomfort took the form of taxonomic indecision – how to characterize this body of writing? Was it literature or history, autobiography or legal brief – in other words, how do we label and accommodate the text of witness? Such unease, of course, reflected a far deeper problem – the Italian hesitance to tell the Holocaust story at all, the reluctance to face what the eminent Italian director, Ettore Scola, would call “a passage little frequented, and hardly edifying, of our History.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the question of Italian Jewish identity from the Risorgimento to Fascism entails a number of steps. We must identify and document dates, crucial junctures, transitions, and solutions offered by Italian Jews to the problems created by emancipation. We must identify and clearly describe the various external and internal components that influenced Italian Jewry in its process of modernization. We must also attempt to address the question of whether it is proper to speak of the experience of emancipated Judaism in Italy as unique in Europe, one accompanied by a specific cultural and political program that in turn engendered a particular identity possessing distinct characteristics that set it apart from other Western European experiences of the Diaspora. We must further establish links and relationships between this collective historical identity and the manifold individual accounts and identities that characterized the historical experience of so small a minority, small at least in strictly numerical terms. The Jewish population in Italy is estimated at 34,000 in 1800, out of a total Italian population of more than 18 million, and about 48,000 in 1938, out of more than 43 million Italians. Yet Italian Jewry constitutes a minority with a rich and multifaceted history extending back into antiquity. In this chapter I attempt to provide some answers to the questions posed above by offering hypotheses and interpretations of recent historiographic debates, by summarizing the results of research I have previously conducted, and by drawing attention to topics still awaiting investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the harsh economic conditions of everyday life, domination by local elites, and memories of past repression (most terribly, the massacre of somewhere between eight and thirty thousand largely rural people in El Salvador in 1932), peasant mobilization in Central America has needed the assistance of outside allies and support groups. Coming first in small numbers, over the years more and more religious workers, union organizers, urban students, political party activists, international development workers, and revolutionary guerrillas turned their attention to the peasantry and by the last half of the 1970s had catalyzed substantial change in many rural areas. From a once politically passive peasantry, throughout the region increasing numbers were joining peasant organizations and then multisector contentious movements, asserting their demands to local elites and then to national political leaders. The importance of allies and support groups to the mobilization of people lacking political power is well established by case studies situated in the United States, such as those of farm workers (Jenkins and Perrow 1977; Jenkins 1985), miners (Billings 1990), and the civil rights movement (McAdam 1982). The importance of such groups to peasant mobilization also is one of the significant contributions of scholars writing from a political economy perspective. Activists from outside of peasant communities provide organizational expertise, moral support, and counterhegemonic ideologies and identities that help to build and strengthen ties of solidarity among subordinate groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edward W. Said (pronounced “Sah-eed”) was born in Jerusalem, then the capital of British-ruled Palestine, in 1935, but spent most of his childhood in Cairo, where his father ran a successful stationery and office supplies business. Said's family returned to live in Jerusalem in 1947 but, like hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, was soon compelled to leave by the outbreak of Arab–Jewish fighting that followed the United Nations' decision to partition the country into separate Arab and Jewish states. Said went back to school in Cairo and then on to secondary school and college in the United States, graduating from Princeton University in 1957. He pursued graduate studies in English literature at Harvard University, receiving his doctorate in 1964. He had begun teaching at Columbia University the previous year, and over the decades that followed he would ascend through the academic ranks at Columbia to become University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. In September 2003, Edward W. Said finally succumbed to leukemia, the disease he had been battling for over a decade. Said's first book, on the Polish-born writer Joseph Conrad, was followed in 1975 by Beginnings, a literary study that also manifested Said's growing political engagement. For Said as for many Palestinians and other Arabs, the Arab defeat in 1967 and Israel's conquest of the remainder of Palestine had come as a profound shock. Said gradually moved toward a much stronger embrace of his identity as a Palestinian as well as toward political activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before going on let me say one or two things about ideology. By ideology I do not mean some totalized common intuitive life in which everyone is immersed and which infects every brain in society. If that were the case, how did I or you ever escape from its embrace long enough to look around and put a name to it? Equally, ideology is not what has been called “false consciousness.” In the sense that all consciousness is “consciousness of” something, rather than immediate apprehension of a thing in itself, all consciousness is false. So to call ideology false consciousness is more or less to say nothing. We escape tautology by the meanings which are generated by the manifest differences constantly at play in the social world. Ideology in fact is more a kind of inherently incomplete compensation strategy for generating a consciousness of unity and sense that never actually exists. No society has a single ideology, nor a pervasive system of ideas, beliefs, and common feelings that expresses the perspective of some privileged epistemology (sometimes associated with a particular class). Society may have particularly influential ideologies, but, as Gramsci has taught us, there are always more than one at any one time. Society, for one thing, is not a monolith. It is composed of diverse groups or collectivities which share bonds of thought and feeling of various strengths and weaknesses. In any one society these collectivities may have much in common, but they also have important and irreducible differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part I. Consensus But just as the scientific discoverer must not follow his own whims and fancies but earnestly seek truth, so it is not the man who abandons himself to impulse, but the man who, against mere impulse and mere convention alike, seeks and does what is Right who will really lead mankind to the truer way, to richer and fuller and more profoundly harmonious life. My ideal is a law infinitely constraining and yet infinitely flexible, not prescribing perhaps for any two men the same conduct, and yet the same law, because recognised by all as objective, and always varying on rational and therefore general grounds, ‘the same,’ as Cicero says, ‘for you and for me, here and at Athens, now and for ever.’ Or would it not be absurd to strain every nerve to attain to the utmost precision and clarity of knowledge about other things of trifling moment and not to demand the greatest precision for the greatest matters? Mr. Henry Sidgwick has recently published a book which, apart from its intrinsic value, is an interesting display of rare intellectual virtues. He almost seems to illustrate a paradox which would be after his own heart, that a man may be too reasonable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular culture is a term used to refer to a very broad and diverse array of forms and practices such as salsa, samba, religious ritual and magic, carnivals, telenovelas (television soaps), masks, pottery, weaving, alternative theatre, radio, video and oral narrative as well as the 'wholeway of life', the language, dress and political culture of subordinate classes and ethnic groups. It covers a whole spectrum of cultural practices, which are seen as lying outside the institutionalized and canonized forms of knowledge and aesthetic production generally defined as 'high' culture. These practices have in turn been studied within different disciplinary frameworks and variously defined as 'folk culture', 'mass culture', 'the culture industry' and 'working-class culture'. To gain an understanding of popular culture in Latin America is therefore a challenge to our sociological imagination: it entails examining particular cultural manifestations while simultaneously being aware of how the very object of study, and hence our knowledge of it, is framed in a certainway by a given intellectual tradition or disciplinary framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumption, consumerism, consuming, price and material culture are all crucial to our understandings of twentieth-century history. They must be accorded the same historical significance as notions of production, work, the wage and perhaps all the ideologies associated with a productivist mentality. In the final analysis, they are perhaps more important: as one recent historian of twentieth-century American commercialism put it, ‘consumerism was the “ism” that won’. We are all consumers now. Yet to herald the triumph and all-pervasive nature of consumer society is not to deny the diversity of consumerist visions of society and culture, as well as of the economy, the state, politics and government. Smith's adage that ‘consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production’ is oft repeated to remind us of the centrality of the commodity to modern life, but it actually misses its true significance. Consumption has been one of the most recurring means by which citizens have moulded their political consciousness and shaped their political organisations, as well as being one of the main acts around which governments have focussed their policies and interventions. In twentieth-century Britain, the politics of consumption has offered itself as a persistent ‘middle’ or ‘third way’ solution to a party political system dominated by the interests of manufacturers and workers. This is what unites all the individuals, groups and institutions to be covered within this book, most of whom can be located under the admittedly large umbrella of social democracy and democratic socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the catastrophe of the First World War, philosophical critics on both left and right posed their challenges to liberal-democratic politics in terms of a crisis of civilisation. The First World War had ushered out the last vestiges of Europe's old regime; no one imagined a new Metternich-legitimist restoration. But what might be the ‘new regime’ of modernity that could resolve the crisis? The answer depended in part upon one's national vantage-point. The focus here will be on the central and southern European contexts where communist revolutions were launched in 1919–20 only to be supplanted by fascist reactions thereafter. In France, the political outcomes were different but the intellectual environment, similar. Only in Britain and the United States did bourgeois institutions appear largely unchallenged. While even partisans of liberal democracy understood that ‘rescuing bourgeois Europe meant recasting bourgeois Europe’ (Maier 1975: 594), its critics sought to sweep it aside in a bold revolutionary stroke. For them, fin-de-siècle fears that a looming mass society would become a quantitative, materialist nightmare had been borne out, necessitating a turn to radical solutions. A radical conservatism demanding new institutions to restore old values came into full flower, particularly in Germany, where the fears had run deepest, while Marxists, emboldened by the Bolshevik triumph in 1917, sought to theorise the nature of, and preconditions for, a new basis of Western civilisation. Both extremes appreciated the raw power of ‘Americanism’ as a principle of social organisation, but despite occasional admirers (like Gramsci), most detested it as an alien invasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 and the subsequent formation of the communist International encouraged a philosophical recasting of Marxism. This involved crucially the rejection of the naturalistic interpretation of historical materialism which had prevailed in the Second International. Thus Antonio Gramsci hailed the October Revolution as a ‘revolution against Capital’, that is, against the conception elaborated by Kautsky and Plekhanov of history as an evolutionary process governed by natural laws which operated by ‘irresistible’ necessity. The thought was that the Bolsheviks' attempt to carry through a socialist revolution in an economically backward country and their stress on the indispensable role of a vanguard party in the class struggle required a version of Marxism in which the driving force of change was, not the development of the productive forces, but the constitution of classes as revolutionary subjects. Georg Lukács Various theorists – for example, Karl Korsch and Gramsci himself — participated in this projected philosophical revolution. But its key work was undoubtedly Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923). Lukács brought to Marxism an already formed and sophisticated philosophical sensibility shaped by Neo-Kantianism. A pupil of Simmel and Weber, he took from them chiefly a sense of the extreme fragmentation of modern society. Whatever formal coherence might arise from the use of instrumental rationality to discover the most efficacious means to attain arbitrarily chosen goals, capitalism was unable to integrate its different aspects into a self-equilibrating whole. Individual actors confronted a social world which together they had created, but whose overall workings they were unable either to understand or to control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emancipation is a matter of critique and construction, of which resistance represents the first step and transformation, in the sense of structural change, the second. Resistance and emancipation are interdependent, with the proviso that not every form of resistance opens the way to emancipation and some block it. What sets emancipation as a concept apart from resistance is the proactive, transformative element. Foucault's understandings of power breaks with traditional political theory in showing that ‘power's function is not merely prohibitive and repressive but productive, positive, educative’ (Cocks, 1989: 51). Similarly, emancipation is not simply about saying no, reacting, refusing, resisting, but also and primarily about social creativity, introducing new values and aims, new forms of cooperation and action. A fighting underground is a veritable state in miniature. Resistance on Robben Island is meaningful not only in its own right but also in the context of fundamental concerns of theorizing political organization and political change. This chapter begins by explaining the norms and sanctions that undergirded a disciplinary order that was implicit in the Island polity and society. This proto-governance is critical insofar as it moves resistance from refusal to creation and claims back the right of making laws or rules and controlling society from the state to the inmates. This determination to create one's own political community was built on foundations resembling constitutional government insofar as individuals gave up some of their own rights and powers to representative government in return for agreement to stated and unstated norms, particularly as expressed in codes of conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[T]he cream of the struggle of South Africa was – is from political prisoners from Robben Island…. [The Island] changed my way of life…. I've grown politically, I've grown in all spheres…. It gives you time to listen to this person…. It gives you patience for that person, and that thing is very rare…. In all spheres. Even we were able to study even the warders. Their behaviour, we were able to study them. It's like when Pavlov put a dog there for conditioning you know? You know, we were out of that situation. Once survival became more secure, prisoners had to sustain themselves mentally and culturally, as a community of prisoners and as political organizations. Crucial to resisting the state's attempt to destroy them mentally, the Islanders began and extended their cultural, academic, and sporting efforts. Before our enemy had been physical cruelty, now it was boredom, isolation, the psychological decay of an endlessly unproductive and confined existence; so the [mini-Olympic] Games were an important way of getting ourselves mobilized, using our inner resources to smash the routine and monotonous futility of prison life. This chapter examines the role of education, culture, and sport as vital instances of resistance. These forms of resistance accept, at least temporarily, the inevitability of incarceration, whereas planning and executing escape attempts are forms of resistance that seek to transcend imprisonment. The viability and implications of escape are therefore also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter is mainly descriptive. Relying on secondary literature and electoral and organizational data, it describes the variation in my dependent variable: the national experiences of the class left in the three main dimensions of size and electoral development, early ideological orientation, and organizational cohesion. SIZE AND ELECTORAL DEVELOPMENT In the 361 national elections held in the thirteen countries between the beginning of the 1880s and the end of the 1980s – almost 110 years – at least one class-left party was present and competed in 347. The fourteen missing cases are concentrated in three countries where free elections were held in the 1880s and 1890s without a socialist-type party taking part: in Sweden between 1887 and 1899 (six elections); in the United Kingdom between 1885 and 1895 (four elections); and in Norway between 1882 and 1891 (four elections). These three countries have, therefore, a late entry of the left into electoral politics with respect to the beginning of competitive elections. In the twentieth century, socialist, communist, and other splinter parties of the same family collected one-third of the European vote averaged by country (33.2%; see Table 2.1), 30.3% of the vote of the total European electorate (see Table 2.2), and 25.1% of the European valid votes. Table 2.1 reports the country average strength over the whole century and the standard deviation of their results, as well as the number of elections in each country. In a century-long perspective, only three left parties overcome the 40% average barrier: Austria, Finland, and Sweden. The largest group of seven countries averages between 32% and 35% (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom), which is approximately the European mean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]