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Age of Empires 3
(2017)
A Case for Serious Play
(2017)
The article describes the history of Jews in Europe from the end of the Middle Ages until the aftermath of the Second World War as a sequence of migrational processes. It thereby demonstrates how the migration paradigm can contribute to a comprehensive understanding of European Jewish history during the given period by better explaining the various types of settlement, as well as other central phenomena of Jewish existence, such as inclusion/exclusion, assimilation/acculturation, and anti-Semitism. The article tries to assess the significance of the "religious factor" within the complex interdependencies between so-called "push" and "pull" factors that determined the individual migrations. In most cases, religious motives played only a minor role, while economic factors tended to dominate, particularly in regard to the functions Jews, as members of a minority, were permitted to carry out in the context of non-Jewish majority societies.
As an example of migration of the Franciscans, this article pursues the effects of their idea of mission: acquisition and transfer of knowledge concerning non-Christians in the communication of missionaries, using the examples of journeys to Mongolia or the encounter with indigenous peoples in the New World (Aztecs).
These friars wanted to teach non-Christians rather than subjugate them. The context of religion and migration resulted in a "boom" of inculturation. And the same context shows the way the Franciscans claimed their identity as well as their struggle, how Franciscans connected pastoral care with recognition of the cultural and religious plurality of Christendom. They embodied what it could mean to say: "our monastery is the world".
Had Hitler still managed to win at the End? Europe's Jews between Shoa Restructuring and new Dangers
(2015)
Introduction to Georg Lukacs: Why Democracies are superior to Autocracies? and The real Germany
(2015)
Two short typescripts by G. Lukacs from the archive, dating from 1941/42, shed light on his appraisal of the cultural 'inner reserves' of Germany and the 'moral reserves' of the democracies involved in the Second World War, as well as on Lukacs's political philosophy at that time. The conception of an intrinsic interrelation of a humanist philosophical anthropology and rationalist epistemology elucidates his egalitarian and democratic account. Both texts are located within the intellectual development of the author in an introduction by the editor, which sketches the historical background and indicates relevant contemporaneous theoretical and political debates, such as the controversies over realism and humanism and also a dispute with K. Jaspers on German collective guilt.
Sociability and Hugo Grotius
(2015)
Grotius has a rudimentary theory of sociability. Only with hindsight has a remark about appetitus societatis been promoted to the starting point of a theory that flourished in the writings of later natural jurists. In this article, I address the issue of the appearance in Grotius's natural law of sociability [as the 1715/38 English translation of John Morrice renders appetitus societatis, following Barbeyrac's sociabilite]. Writing in the just war tradition, Grotius is first of all interested in finding out the conditions for peace, and although injustice is a condition of war, it is not per se true that injustice is a perversion of society. Apparently, not all societies are perfect and the violence of war and the legal actions of peace are both instruments for achieving a greater modicum of justice in this world. Yet appetitus et custodia societatis is called the foundation of justice. Grotius achieved this context for sociability in phases, through a series of writings from c. 1600 until De iure belli ac pacis of 1625, and its revision of 1631. In this development the notion of fides plays an intriguing role, through which we can obtain a better understanding of the meaning of appetitus societatis in the later work. The present article is a sequel to a previous publication, on fides in De iure praedae (Ms. 1604/5). Analysing the genesis of appetitus societatis in De iure belli ac pacis, I argue that Grotius was changing his strategy over the years, without however arriving at a definitive solution to the question of what commits men to the pursuit of justice.
This article offers a theoretical overview of transnational history in relation to the history of ideas, a field that certain specialists of transnational history have singled out as a promising field of future transnational research. Recent historiographical discussions within Enlightenment studies are offered to throw light about the actual novelty that a transnational perspective would offer for the history of ideas. Rather than being an entirely new outlook, transnational types of analysis can be understood as lying at the heart of classical, universalistic Enlightened scholarship, a perspective that was challenged according to the fundamental problem of context.
In this article, entangled media history is presented as an approach to combine recent methodological developments towards an international turn in intellectual history on the one hand with the social history of ideas on the other. By concentrating on press networks, publishers, and media formats the various processes of constitutionalization and nationalization in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period can be reconstructed as part of an emerging European public sphere. This is exemplified by the example of the political discourse of that time in Germany. In a first step, the international networks around the two most important German publishers, Johann Friedrich Cotta and Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, are reconstructed. In the second part, the crucial role of translations and adaptations of political articles in two decisive media formats of the political discourse, the historical-political journals and the "Conversationslexikon" is examined. And finally in a third step, the specific significance of the reception of the Spanish revolution of the "trienio liberal" for the development of a constitutional vocabulary in Germany is sketched.