Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Review (165) (remove)
Language
- English (165) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (165) (remove)
Keywords
- Rezension (16)
- Englisch (8)
- Literatur (3)
- Semantik (3)
- Sprachlehrbuch (3)
- Deutschland (2)
- Europa (2)
- Europe and Neighbourhoods (2)
- Frau (2)
- Fränkisches Reich (2)
Institute
- Gesellschaftswissenschaften (48)
- Geschichtswissenschaften (40)
- Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) Mannheim (15)
- Rechtswissenschaft (11)
- Philosophie (8)
- Institut für Sozialforschung (IFS) (7)
- Exzellenzcluster Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen (5)
- Kulturwissenschaften (5)
- Medizin (4)
- Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften (3)
Wilhelmine Germany enjoyed something of an economic miracle that enabled men from modest backgrounds to become wealthy and influential. Among these was Carl Duisberg, who rose as the son of a modest ribbon weaver in Barmen to head the Bayer chemical works and later the massive German chemical trust I. G. Farben. Like others of his generation, Duisberg was the beneficiary of an excellent scientific education and the opportunities opened up by a rapidly expanding economy. In this massive and definitive biography of the man, Werner Plumpe explores Duisberg’s life as an industrial entrepreneur to uncover the role of the individual manager in the creative-destructive dynamics of capitalism, drawing on his own extensive knowledge of German entrepreneurship and industrial relations in the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras. ...
Johannes Fried saves the programmatic aim of his book for the last chapter, but I’ll begin with it: unlike their counterparts in China or India or really any other center of historical civilizations, Europe has a particular disdain neither for its oldest period nor for the most recent but for the middle age (507). Some, and Fried chooses his countryman Immanuel Kant as their chief, regard the middle ages as an age lacking in the beauty of the ancient world and without the dedication to reason that his modern counterparts share. He holds Gothic architecture in particular contempt (506). Just as bad, Fried notes, are those who would romanticize the middle ages, ignoring the truly radical thought of characters like Meister Eckhart and William of Ockham, whose philosophical explorations set the stage for the most radical thought of what Kant would regard as his own era’s Enlightenment (508). In his masterful book titled simply The Middle Ages, Fried begins with Boethius and wends his way to Machiavelli in a campaign against such dismissals and such flattening accounts, telling a tale of political thought and philosophical exploration and most importantly of complexity at every step, a journey through Western Europe’s middle millennium that encourages the reader to think of the period as a truly fruitful period of intellectual, political, and social transformation. ...
The question of Russia’s European identity has traditionally been controversial. Usually, the country is either defined as belonging to Eastern Europe in a narrower sense or, contrarily, totally excluded from the concept of Europe. From the times of Czar Peter the Great (1689–1725), Russia acquired the unquestioned status of a European power; however, despite the "enlightened" reforms of Empress Catherine the Great (1762–1796), its society remained feudal, its economy backward and its government autocratic. Right up until its collapse, the Russian Empire was decidedly less urbanized and less advanced in agriculture in comparison not only with the West but also with East-Central Europe. ...
Rezension des Werkes: Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust. London, Taylor & Francis Books Ltd, 1992. 288 pp. (Deutsche Ausgabe: Siegel der Erinnerung. Das Trauma des Holocaust – Psychotherapie mit den Kindern der Überlebenden )
"In the beginning all the World was America" reads the iconic opening of § 49 in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Beyond mentioning "America", Locke’s theory and the story told by Juan Pablo Scarfi in The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas share an unsettling resemblance. The expansion of international law and the deepening of legal techniques for the purposes of US hegemony in the American hemisphere, the invasion of politics by the language of science, the double standard, one of real military and monetary interventions, and another of (usually) suave diplomatic correspondence about the advantages of pan-Americanism, all are part and parcel of The Hidden History. Moreover, around the mid-20th century the pattern extended around the entire globe. Therefore, as Scarfi elegantly suggests, the interventions in Latin America by the newly established US empire in the early 20th century had the nature of laboratory experiments. In the end, all the world was America again, but with a good number more of international organizations, institutions devoted to the scientific study of international law, and international legal norms and principles. This image, of course, simplifies tremendously the complex history of the past century. However, it summarizes the message of Scarfi’s book. ...
I. Introduction The early 1970s in the United States was a turbulent, rebellious period – in which all questions were legitimate, certainly on the college campus. As the rabbinic advisor to the Orthodox minyan at Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel, I found myself challenged repeatedly by congregants, colleagues and friends regarding the status of women in Jewish law and ritual. This required me, in turn, to search for honest and appropriate explanations and rationale. This quest has continued to preoccupy me for more than three decades. When I first embarked on this endeavor, I did so with a sense of confidence and commitment. As a “Halakhic Feminist,” I have searched for ways to increase women’s involvement in Jewish spiritual and ritual life, and I remain confident in the inherent viability of the halakhic process. But through it all, my highest commitment has been to the integrity of Halakhah. I firmly believe that without Halakhah as our anchor, we would rapidly lose our direction and raison d’etre.Because of these sensitivities, I picked up Tamar Ross’s recent book “Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism” with a great deal of excitement and anticipation. The author comes with wonderful credentials: she is an esteemed professor of philosophy, a traditional Jewess, and a highly respected Orthodox feminist. Academically, this extremely analytical, insightful, erudite and welldocumented book turned out to be highly challenging because of its interdisciplinary nature, saturated with new jargon and concepts. But it was by no means disappointing. Indeed, more than 300 pages later, I found myself intellectually edified and stimulated by my newfound understanding of the history, philosophy and theology of feminism. Prof. Ross is quite effective at outlining many of the troubling issues concerning the status of women in Jewish law – issues that every thinking, committed Jew should ponder. As a result, this work has received generally laudatory reviews. Despite all the above, I found the book very unsettling. In her preface (p. xvii), the author indicates that, in addition to scholars of religion and feminism, this book is directed to two other audiences. The first group includes those who have been sensitized by feminism but are desirous of keeping their grip on tradition. The second audience consists of those who are firmly Orthodox, but would like to gain greater insight into what the feminist fuss is all about.5 In short, as the title ofthe book suggests, Prof. Ross attempts to span the divide between Orthodoxy and feminism. Unfortunately, I do not believe she has succeeded in this task, and this essay is an attempt to delineate why.