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411. The “Perfidious Invasion” of 1808: Ideological Disquiet and Certainty in Moratín

Author:
Jes´us P´erez Magall´on
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of European Studies
Abstract:
This paper revisits the afrancesados' role in Spanish historiography as well as their political positioning prior to, during and after the French invasion of 1808. Taking the famous playwright Leandro Fern´andez de Morat´ın as a case study, the paper explores his political ideas beyond established labels such as “supporter of enlightened despotism” coined by S´anchez Agesta. To this end the article reviews a variety of Morat´ın's texts, including Carta de un vecino de Foncarral a un abogado de Madrid sobre el libre comercio de los huevos, Apuntaciones sueltas de Inglaterra, Viaje a Italia, a Prologue to Isla's Fray Gerundio de Campazas, as well as Morat´ın's correspondence. The essay argues that despite his confessed social, economic and even political liberalism, Morat´ın never supported any specific form of political organization, neither absolutist nor liberal. His open skepticism locates him beyond prevailing ideologies.
Topic:
History
Political Geography:
Europe, France, and Spain

412. The Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro and Napoleon's Black Legend

Author:
Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of European Studies
Abstract:
Napoleon and the European war were not the primary concerns of Brazil's inhabitants. They had their own agenda and saw the British as their mercantile competitors. Most of all they resented the 1810 treaty of alliance and the article on the abolition of slave trade. Not even a a Constitution was asked for in Brazil because Brazilians were happy enough with the presence of the royal family to think of a change in government.
Topic:
History
Political Geography:
Europe, France, Brazil, and South America

413. Mexican Silver for the Cortes of Cadiz during the War against Napoleon, 1808-1811

Author:
Carlos Marichal Salinas
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of European Studies
Abstract:
In this essay attention is focused on the persistence of colonial loyalties despite the profound crisis at the center of the Spanish monarchy as a result of the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula. One clear indicator of colonial support can be found in the review of the numerous loans and donations collected in colonial Mexico for the purpose of assisting the patriot forces in Spain in their struggle against Napoleon. The financial contributions were considerable. Between late 1808 and early 1811, over 25 million pesos in tax monies, loans and donations were sent from New Spain to C´adiz, principal seat of patriot resistance in southern Spain.
Topic:
History
Political Geography:
Europe, France, Spain, Mexico, and Iberia Peninsula

414. Slavery, Science, and the end of the Old Regime in the Luso-Brazilian Empire

Author:
Kirsten Schultz
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of European Studies
Abstract:
This paper provides a preliminary examination of some of the late eighteenthcentury bases for the reception of liberalism and debates on slavery, specifically the Luso-Brazilian engagement with natural science and the work of the Lisbon Royal Academy of Sciences. The Academy's work most directly concerned with the question of slavery and the slave trade appealed to economic principles of utility, efficiency and productivity to identify ways to reform the practice of enslaving Africans in the interest of increasing the wealth generated within the colonial and imperial economies. Thus, even as slavery was being assailed internationally on both philosophical and religious grounds, Luso-Brazilian Academic writing insisted it was an economic rather than moral problem. At the same time, however, Academic inquiries into the question of human difference often undercut claims about Africans that were invoked elsewhere in the Atlantic world to justify the perpetuation of slavery and the slave trade. As Academic reformism thus grappled with the humanity of Africans, civilization and barbarism emerged as privileged categories of analysis for discerning the future of slavery, reasserting the moral dimensions of the institution.
Topic:
Human Rights and History
Political Geography:
Europe, Brazil, South America, and Spain

415. Staging the Revolution(s)

Author:
David T. Gies
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of European Studies
Abstract:
Spanish playwrights in the period between the French Revolution and the Spanish War of Independence became increasingly sensitized to militarization and conflict. Manuel José Quintana's ground-breaking Pelayo (1805) drew on tropes from Spain's historical past to discuss current and coming events. A new reading of Quintana's play suggests that he, among others, marked this rapidly changing cultural and political milieu with works that projected a growing nationalism and defense of Spain against the threats from north of the Pyrenees.
Topic:
Civil Society, War, History, and Arts
Political Geography:
Europe, France, and Spain

416. Forging Catholic National Identities in the Transatlantic Spanish Monarchy, 1808-1814

Author:
Scott Eastman
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of European Studies
Abstract:
By 1810, with the convening of the Cortes of Cádiz, the opening of the public sphere and war threatening to tear apart the monarchy, Spaniards began to forge a new national identity and an inclusive transatlantic nation. The common cultural idiom of religion and the language of national sovereignty provided a unifying symbolic repertoire for Spanish national identities during the transition from the Old Regime to liberal ascendancy. Yet American independence severed the ties of a transatlantic Spanish monarchy and an inclusive national identity as prescribed in the Constitution of 1812. The Virgin of Guadalupe, which had been appropriated by royalists as well as insurgents during the War of Independence in New Spain, soon emerged as the symbolic image of the Mexican nation. Religious imagery that had served to unite Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic fragmented into regional identifications in the Americas, and Spain itself emerged as a sovereign nation that had broken with the Old Regime.
Topic:
Nationalism, Religion, and History
Political Geography:
America, Europe, Spain, and Mexico

417. Crown, Empire and Nation (1807-1834)

Author:
Miriam H. Pereira
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of European Studies
Abstract:
Before 1807, in Portugal the new liberal ideals had mainly an indirect influence, reflected in the enlightened elite. The wave of a more profound political change came about only in the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the whole Iberian area was involved in the European wide struggle between old regime and the new liberal society and state, that was enhanced by the Napoleonic wars. Between 1807 and 1820, Portugal went through one of the most complex period of its whole History, when the British informal occupation of twelve years, followed the French invasion, short but very destructive. The Crown survived in the hands of the House of Bragança and kept Brazil and the rest of the its colonial territories for over a decade. This makes the Portuguese and Brazilian history of this period somewhat different from that of both Spain and its American colonies. It provides an interesting case for the study of the evolution of three main institutions and political concepts involved in the end of the Old Regime: the Crown, the Empire and the Nation, whose changes during this period are analysed in this paper..
Topic:
Civil Society and History
Political Geography:
United Kingdom, America, Europe, Brazil, South America, and Portugal

418. The Mongol Connection: Russia's Asian Entry into European Politics

Author:
Iver B. Neumann
Publication Date:
07-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
Abstract:
The end of the 15th Century saw what was beginning to be known as Europeans coming into first contact with the 'new world' to their West, and driving the Moor out of Europe to their South. In what contemporaneity thought of as 'the North', i.e. what we would now call the East, a less conspicuous but nonetheless highly consequential development took place. Beyond Poland, a new political entity was making itself felt in such a degree that diplomatic relations had to be sought with it. This was Muscovy, led by Ivan III. Russians shared an experience with Christians in the South Balkans and the South Iberians; they had fresh experience with being ruled by non-Christians, more specifically, by the Mongols who were based in their tent capital Saray at the Volga. I start with a presentation of Mongol and Rus' political organization at the time of the invasion in 1240, and discuss Rus' as a suzeraign system which was part of the Golden Horde empire (which was itself in the early decades part of the Mongol empire). I then ask how, once the Golden Horde fell apart and Muscovy emerged as a separate polity, Muscovy's Mongol connection coloured its entry into the European states system. My conclusion is that, since Muscovy itself chose to seek recognition among other things as successors to the Mongol Golden Horde and since it did so by dint of a number of practices that were taken directly from the Mongols, European powers were warranted in seeing Russia as a partly Asian polity. The argument is framed as a critique of the English School's proclivity for treating sequences such as these as cases of 'expansion of international society'. I attempt to demonstrate that such a perspective cannot account adequately for what should rather be treated as relations between cultures.
Topic:
History
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Asia, Poland, and South Iberia

419. Demystifying Newton: The Force Behind the Genius

Author:
Gena Gorlin
Publication Date:
12-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
Einstein credited Isaac Newton, the father of physics and arguably the founder of scientific certainty, with "the greatest advance in thought that a single individual was ever privileged to make." The compliment is not hyperbole: In his Principia and the discoveries that preceded it, Newton single-handedly deciphered more of the universe's enigmas than perhaps any other scientist in history. He revolutionized mathematics, integrated the previously disparate fields of mechanics and astronomy, and thus opened the door to the science of force and motion as we know it. And yet, ironically, Newton himself remains an enigma to those biographers who attempt to identify the force that moved him-the motive that compelled him to strive for the discovery and validation of scientific truths on such a grand scale. Most biographers shy from examining Newton's motives, asserting that a genius and creative power of Newton's magnitude defies mundane human explanation. One scholar, however, accepted the charge. Frank Manuel, in his biography, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, attempted to diagnose the source of Newton's genius by means of what is, in effect, a retroactive psychoanalysis. In keeping with the neo-Freudian school of psychology, Manuel attempts to demystify Newton's thought and behavior by speculating about repressed insecurities and unconscious defense mechanisms that may have commanded Newton's psyche. Since the book's publication in 1968 and to this very day, biographers and Newton scholars defer to Manuel-with varying degrees of enthusiasm-on the question of what, in Newton's character and soul, could have spawned his inexhaustible passion for discovering the nature of things. Manuel's model of Newton's underlying motives stands, by default, as the definitive account of the psyche whence sprang the Principia. For example, James Gleick, in his recent biography Isaac Newton, quotes-without critique or comment-Manuel's interpretation of Newton's relationship with his niece Catherine, whom he raised and nurtured into adulthood: "'In the act of fornication between his friend Halifax and his niece was Newton vicariously having carnal intercourse with his mother?'" Such rhetorical suggestions offered in explanation of Newton's words and actions abound in Manuel. And because other Newton scholars have defaulted on the task of evaluating Newton's motives, such "suggestions" have stood unchallenged and unrefuted to this day-coloring the legacy and tainting the name of one of history's greatest scientists. It is easy to sympathize with biographers who struggle in vain to knit together the apparently disparate threads of Newton's psychological life. By common accounts, Newton was a man of perplexing contradiction-described alternately as an arrogant, self-obsessed egomaniac and then as a neurotic "recluse" crippled by "searing" self-doubt. On one hand, he is the man who proclaimed his own theory of light to be "the oddest if not the most considerable detection which has hitherto been made in the operations of nature"-which Manuel interprets as an instance of Newton's "fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience and his self-image as the perfect one." On the other hand, Newton himself, denying a friend's compliments of his preternatural genius, mused that his success is the outcome of "nothing but industry a patient thought." And in the twilight of his years Newton reflected on himself as "only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." These are not the words of a "narcissist" or an "egomaniac" who is "completely wrapped up in himself," as is commonly postulated-but of a man wrapped up in the quest for truth, and humbled by the vastness of its terrain. Indeed, Newton's close friend John Locke described him as "a nice man to deal with and a little too apt to raise in himself suspicions where there was no ground." This seeming contradiction between Newton's supreme "arrogance" on the one hand and his apparent self-doubt on the other is what led Manuel to postulate that Newton was driven by deep-seated unconscious insecurities. But is there really any contradiction? In truth, when Newton was certain of his conclusions, he was unshakably sure of himself-and did not suffer criticism that he considered misguided, let alone dishonest. Yet when he was uncertain, he did not rest content until he copiously checked his conclusions against the facts. For instance, in 1666, he tested his theory of an inverse-square gravitational force, likely formulated in the early 1660s by deduction from Kepler's elliptical theory, against observations of the moon's motions. He found that the motions agreed "pretty nearly," but not nearly enough-and because he could not explain the discrepancy, he set aside the theory until he could amass further evidence. Whereas his fellow scientists, from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Galileo, sought nothing further than approximate agreement between their theories and the empirical phenomena, Newton was "extreme" in his demands for accuracy. In Manuel's account, such polar extremities of behavior bear the elusive signature of a "neurotic." For Manuel, Newton's apparent "swings" of extreme self-assurance and extreme self-doubt are symptoms of a deep neurosis rooted in his childhood. In true Freudian fashion, Manuel points to Newton's abandonment by his mother when she remarried and sent him to live with his grandmother. He also points to Newton's puritanical education, which allegedly inculcated in him a powerful fear of wrongdoing. These traumatic experiences, according to Manuel's account, begat a combined longing for attachment and fear of punishment that molded his scientific thought. Manuel even goes so far as to speculate that Newton's discovery of the gravitational force was inspired by his childhood anxieties: Newton "knew of the common metaphoric description of the attractive power of a magnet as love" and of the "'sociability' of liquids." Consequently, Manuel speculates, Newton's "longing for the absent ones, his dead father and his remarried mother" inspired his formulation of gravity as "a sort of an impulse or attraction." And as for Newton's vehemence in defending the certainty of his conclusions-this Manuel explains as a wall of defense against the puritanical guilt constantly clamoring to invade his mind. In one instance, Manuel cites a fervent (and thus, in his view, feverish) letter in which Newton defends his theory of light against a religiously motivated attack by a group of Jesuit scholars. The letter was penned in response to a charge by Anthony Lucas, a Jesuit who leveled a cavalier accusation against Newton's measuring accuracy, claiming that Newton had incorrectly reported the length of an image of the light spectrum. Newton had previously refrained from defending himself against the unscientific accusations of the Jesuits, writing that he did not wish to become a "slave to philosophy" (which meant, in his terms, to empty sophistic bickering) by engaging them in argument. But now, he was infuriated: Lucas had challenged the accuracy of Newton's experimental data, without bothering to supply any evidence in support of his challenge. Enraged, Newton wrote to Oldenberg, president of the Royal Society of London: "'Tis the truth of my experiments which is the business at hand. On this my Theory depends, which is of more consequence, the credit of my being wary, accurate and faithful in the reports I have made or shall make of experiments in any subject, seeing that a trip in any one will bring all the rest into suspicion." Ultimately the Royal Society duplicated Newton's experiments and formally refuted Lucas's objections, such that, in Newton's terms, he stood "convicted" by the "trial of the Royal Society." Lucas had miscalculated in groundlessly questioning the truth of Newton's calculations; his error was in underestimating Newton's reverential devotion to that truth. In Manuel's interpretation, such reverence bespeaks neurosis. Interpreting the incident, Manuel writes, "Ambivalent neurotics have a craving for certainty. Themore searing the doubt the more profound the need for a safe haven. Newton had two such refuges, a great blessing for a man in his state of everlasting tension: one was the Bible . . . the other was mathematical proof." He proceeds to explain the neurotic basis for Newton's intolerance of doubt: "Scientific error was assimilated with sin, for it could only be the consequence of sloth on his part and a failure in his divine service. For Newton a sin was not an act of human frailty that could be forgiven, but a sign that the culprit was possessed by evil." Manuel thus diagnoses Newton's preoccupation with scientific certainty and his impatience with doubt as symptoms of a psychotic insecurity, which stems, in turn, from his oppressive puritanical upbringing. But such a diagnosis seems quite peculiar if one considers that Newton is right. As is the case with his theory of light, Newton's theories do stand or fall on the truth of his evidential arguments, because true theories admit of no contradictory evidence. If an objector such as Anthony Lucas were to discover an error in Newton's empirical measurements, he would indeed cast doubt on Newton's entire theory. Thus, in vehemently defending the truth of his experiments against those who launch a frivolous attack against it, Newton reveals his "religious" devotion, not to his puritanical schoolteachers or to a wrathful God who censures his every step, but to the real, physical world-and to his understanding thereof. It is not Newton's departure from reality, then, but rather the intensity of his devotion to it that Manuel finds psychotic. Psychosis is generally defined as a state of delusion, a split from reality. A preoccupation with "divine service," as Manuel describes it, implies obeisance to an invisible God at the expense of any rational judgments grounded in this-worldly evidence. But Newton's alleged psychosis consists precisely in obeying the evidence of this world as he searches for scientific truth; the preoccupation Manuel refers to is not with an otherworldly authority, but with physical reality. Manuel does not seem to recognize this distinction, as he repeatedly lumps together Newton's reverence for the truth with his deference to God and his alleged cringing fear of divine punishment. Manuel's psychoanalytic model of the mind treats any pervasive behavior or thought pattern as symptomatic of childhood trauma or some other brand of prior conditioning. What this model does not seem to admit as a possibility is a mind not buoyed along by external circumstances, but rather governing itself, holding the truth as its sole guide and master-a mind conscientiously committed to the pursuit of truth as its primary and fundamental motive. And yet such a scenario should not seem so far-fetched, given that grasping the truth is the mind's proper and primary function. Viewed in this light, Newton's "craving for certainty" is not a symptom of illness but of exemplary mental health. Indeed, the craving for certainty is a venerable virtue-for to crave certainty is to crave the truth, and truth is infinitely valuable. Given the advances in science enabled by the certainty of Newton's laws, and the vast benefits ultimately conferred on human life by those advances, the objective value of Newton's "preoccupation" with truth is indisputable. . . .
Topic:
History

420. New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America

Author:
Eric Daniels
Publication Date:
12-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Objective Standard
Institution:
The Objective Standard
Abstract:
Seventy-five years have elapsed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the flurry of government programs he called the New Deal. In the years since, most historians have lavished FDR with praise, claiming that his bold leadership helped to pull America out of the Great Depression. Even those who acknowledge the failure of particular Roosevelt-era programs claim that FDR instilled hope and confidence in the American people, and that his economic failures were the result of his not going far enough in his policies and not spending enough money. Today, amidst calls for increasing government regulation of the financial industry and increasing government spending through stimulus packages, the New Deal is making a comeback. In light of the recent mortgage crisis and economic downturn, pundits are calling for a revival of 1930s-style policies. Daniel Gross claimed at Slate.com that New Deal reforms were "saving capitalism again." Newly minted Nobel economist Paul Krugman issued calls in the New York Times for President-elect Obama to mimic and expand FDR's response to the Great Depression. And a recent Time cover called for a "New New Deal"-and featured an iconic photo of FDR, with Obama's face and hands substituted. As the Obama administration begins to implement its economic plan, Americans would do well to reexamine the history of the original New Deal and its effects. Though most historians rank FDR as a great president, some, including Burton Folsom Jr., boldly dare to ask if "the New Deal, rather than helping to cure the Great Depression, actually help[ed to] prolong it" (p. 7). According to Folsom, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, the answer is clearly the latter. In New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, he challenges the myth that FDR's New Deal represents a shining moment in American history. As long as the mythology surrounding the New Deal remains intact, he notes, "the principles of public policy derived from the New Deal will continue to dominate American politics" (p. 15), costing Americans billions of dollars and further damaging the economy. . . .
Topic:
Economics, Government, and History
Political Geography:
America