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Full-Text Articles in Intellectual History

Émigrés As Aneks: Polish Intellectuals Between East And West, 1968–1989, Lukasz Chelminski Sep 2022

Émigrés As Aneks: Polish Intellectuals Between East And West, 1968–1989, Lukasz Chelminski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work focuses on Aneks (1973-1989), a publication that a small group of post-1968 émigrés, mostly Polish Jews, created in exile. Conceptualized as an “annex” to intellectual life in Poland, the publication was founded to help Polish intellectuals look beyond the country to better understand national problems. At the core of the enterprise were the Smolar brothers, who were in a unique position to offer such help: soon after their forced emigration due to rising antisemitism in communist Poland, Aleksander began to study with the great French liberal, Raymond Aron, and Eugeniusz began a career at the Polish section of …


​​​​From Repression To Appropriation: Soviet Religious Policy And Reform, 1917-1943, Andriy Dyachenko May 2022

​​​​From Repression To Appropriation: Soviet Religious Policy And Reform, 1917-1943, Andriy Dyachenko

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyses the dynamics of religious reform in the USSR from 1917 to 1943. It argues that the early Bolshevik policy of persecution was increasingly substituted by state co-optation. This dynamic was shaped primarily by Stalinist concerns with state security and problems of ideology.


The Spark Of Revolution: Lenin And Luxemburg On Spontaneity And The Revolution Of 1905, Maria Julia Hernandez Saez Jan 2022

The Spark Of Revolution: Lenin And Luxemburg On Spontaneity And The Revolution Of 1905, Maria Julia Hernandez Saez

Senior Projects Spring 2022

My project explores the debates between Lenin and Luxemburg on how to organize the working masses for revolution. I focus on the way they regard the spontaneity of the masses in this process. I analyze the ways their theory was put into practice, and proven right or wrong, in the Revolution of 1905.


"Unite The Left": Contextualizing Bukharin's Abc Of Communism And Berkman's Abc Of Anarchism, David Hayter Jan 2021

"Unite The Left": Contextualizing Bukharin's Abc Of Communism And Berkman's Abc Of Anarchism, David Hayter

Theses and Dissertations

In 1919, Nikolai Bukharin, the leading theoretician of the Bolshevik Party, published a manual entitled The ABC of Communism meant to put the governing ideology of the newly formed Soviet State into eminently readable terms. Alexander Berkman, a Russian Anarchist who strongly supported the October Revolution, became disillusioned with the new regime in 1921 and left the country. He later published his own tract entitled The ABC of Anarchism. This thesis pits these two theoretical works against each other as historical documents embodying the nature of leftist polemics that has characterized the movement since the dissolution of the First …


Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine Jun 2020

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …


Revolutionary Affinities: Democracy And Revolution In Hannah Arendt’S Portrait Of Rosa Luxemburg, Matthew P. Finck Sep 2019

Revolutionary Affinities: Democracy And Revolution In Hannah Arendt’S Portrait Of Rosa Luxemburg, Matthew P. Finck

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work is an exploration of Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Rosa Luxemburg. Beginning with a few minor discussions of Luxemburg in her first major work Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the socialist revolutionary’s place in the constellation of figures that appear in Arendt’s work grew over the course of her career. Arendt’s portrait of Luxemburg culminated in “A Heroine of Revolution,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books, and in Men in Dark Times (1968). Yet Arendt’s portrait of Luxemburg was notable for its excision of her revolutionary Marxism in the process of sculpting Luxemburg into …


The Anglo-American Reception Of Carl Schmitt From The 1930s To The Early 2000s, Benjamin T. Watkins Dec 2015

The Anglo-American Reception Of Carl Schmitt From The 1930s To The Early 2000s, Benjamin T. Watkins

History Theses

This thesis examines the Anglo-American reception, from the 1930s to the early 2000s, of the ideas of the German political theorist Carl Schmitt. The introduction provides an overview the key concepts in Schmitt’s writings in the 1920s. Chapter one examines Schmitt’s influence on the German-Jewish émigré political theorists Leo Strauss and Hans Morgenthau, in an attempt to explain how Schmitt’s ideas were initially transported from Germany to the U.S. The second chapter is a more detailed case study of the American leftist journal, Telos, which played a key role in introducing Schmitt’s writings to a broader, English language audience in …