Iranian intellectuals and the West

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Steven E. Aschheim

Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern "enlightened" Jewry and its "half-Asian" counterpart. Moreover, stereotypes of the ghetto and the Eastern Jew figured prominently in the growth and disposition of German anti-Semitism. Not everyone shared these negative preconceptions, however, and over the years a competing post-liberal image emerged of the Ostjude as cultural hero. Brothers and Strangers examines the genesis, development, and consequences of these changing forces in their often complex cultural, political, and intellectual contexts.

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Harold Samuel Stone

This book is a study of the cultural world of Giambattista Vico, one of the most creative social theorists of the eighteenth century. Based on extensive manuscript as well as printed materials, and relying on the methods of book and publishing history, this volume describes Vico's intellectual community. Special attention is paid to the interaction between scholars and Naples' vibrant operatic and artistic community. The first part of the book investigates a controversy concerning an inquisitorial investigation, Neapolitan travel literature, the papers of a scientific academy, and the patronage system for book publication. The second part describes the cultural context of Vico's writings and especially the three editions of The New Science. This work explains the accomplishments that made Naples one of the great cultural centers of the early Enlightenment.

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Ronald G. Walters

In Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America Ronald G. Walters brings together a distinguished group of contributors to reflect - often critically - on scientific and medical claims to moral, social, and political authority. Writing from a variety of perspectives - intellectual history, social history, feminist theory, philosophy, medical history, political theory, and visual analysis - the authors demonstrate that science no longer belongs exclusively to its practitioners or to any particular discipline. Situating science within other communities of discourse, they show how scientific language and metaphor spread outward into new realms, including popular culture, where they came into conflict with other languages of authority. They also show how medical authority shapes social behavior, how corporate agricultural science has displaced farmers' knowledge, and how popular science enters the collective imagination. Like such theorists as Gramsci and Foucault, the authors search out the subtle workings of power - often deeply hidden in language, culture, and the minutiae of social practice - to arrive at a demystification of claims to universal truth without going to the relativistic extreme of some modern critics of science.

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John McCardell. --

"As the nineteenth century began, the United States was a country in search of definition, of national character. Like other Americans, Southerners found the process of national self-definition urgent and exhilarating. But a series of shocks -- social, economic, intellectual, and finally, political -- gave an increasingly distinctive twist to the ideology of nationalism that developed in the South. By 1860, though agreeing with the North over constitutional fundamentals and sharing with other Americans similar hopes and fears, many Southerners had concluded that only in a separate Southern nation could their rights and security be preserved. This book is a study of how and why the ideology of Southern nationalism arose and spread."--Book cover.