Modernity And Secession

The northern Italian, ‘Padanian’ identity, fostered by the Lega Nord, is rooted in the long-standing tradition, in political and scholarly discourse, of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South geographic divide. Trying to come to terms, in the late 1980s and 1990s, with Italy’s (real or presumed) inadequacies – such as inefficient government, corruption, and organized crime – this imagined geography acquired political centrality in that the North became associated with the virtues of modernity and the South with the vices of un-modernity. It was not only politicians but also social scientists, who fostered and perpetuated this conceptualization of the North-South divide, thus imposing a normative hierarchy between the two parts of the country. In response to this discourse many scholars, both in Italy and abroad, have started to question this perception of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society. Starting from this critical tradition, Michel Huysseune provides a new, systematic, and interdisciplinary approach that re-interprets the premises behind Italy’s imagined geography of modernity. He moves beyond an understanding of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society and problematizes normative notions of modernity, thus offering a new perspective on the North-South divide, which has a significance well beyond the case of Italy.

In the current neo-liberal political and economic climate, it is often suggested that a large and strong state stands in opposition to an autonomous and vibrant civil society. However, the simultaneous presence in Sweden of both a famously large public sector and an unusually vital civil society poses an interesting and important theoretical challenge to these views with serious political and policy implications. Studies show that in a comparative context Sweden scores very highly when it comes to the strength and vitality of its civil society as well as social capital, as measured in terms of trust, lack of corruption, and membership of voluntary associations. The “Swedish Model,” therefore, offers important insights into the dynamics of state and civil society relations, which go against current trends of undermining the importance of the welfare state, and presents autonomous civic participation as the only way forward.

Originally published in 1990, acknowledges the social as well as the artistic significance of the Glasgow Art Nouveau movement by examining the history of it from its inception through to its demise. By considering the contributions of social theorists like Peter Bürger, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, the author illustrates how Art nouveau can be located within an avant-garde. The book also reveals to what extent the contract which the Glasgow group had with the Secessionists in Vienna was significant for the development of their work.

In Forgetting Ourselves, Linda Bishai thoroughly examines why secession has been ignored by international relations both in theory and practice. Mainstream perspectives in international relations theory have, up to this point, questioned neither state formation nor the inside/outside divide of state sovereignty. Bishai, however, historicizes and questions the concept of secession itself, and the component assumptions of territoriality and identity upon which it rests.

The collapse of communism and the process of state building that ensued in the 1990s have highlighted the existence of significant minorities in many European states, particularly in Central Europe. In this context, the growing plight of Europe’s biggest minority, the Roma (Gypsies), has been particularly salient. Traditionally dispersed, possessing few resources and devoid of a common “kin state” to protect their interests, the Roma have often suffered from widespread exclusion and institutionalized discrimination. Politically underrepresented and lacking popular support amongst the wider populations of their host countries, the Roma have consequently become one of Europe’s greatest “losers” in the transition towards democracy. Against this background, the author examines the recent attempts of the Roma in Central Europe and their supporters to form a political movement and to influence domestic and international politics. On the basis of first-hand observation and interviews with activists and politicians in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, he analyzes connections between the evolving state policies towards the Roma and the recent history of Romani mobilization. In order to reach a better understanding of the movement’s dynamics at work, the author explores a number of theories commonly applied to the study of social movements and collective action.

Aby Warburg (1866-1929), founder of the Warburg Institute, was one of the most influential cultural historians of the twentieth century. Focusing on the period 1896-1918, this is the first in-depth, book-length study of his response to German political, social and cultural modernism. It analyses Warburg's response to the effects of these phenomena through a study of his involvement with the creation of some of the most important public artworks in Germany. Using a wide array of archival sources, including many of his unpublished working papers and much of his correspondence, the author demonstrates that Warburg's thinking on contemporary art was the product of two important influences: his engagement with Hamburg's civic affairs and his affinity with influential reform movements seeking a greater role for the middle classes in the political, social and cultural leadership of the nation. Thus a lively picture of Hamburg’s cultural life emerges as it responded to artistic modernism, animated by private initiative and public discourse, and charged with debate.

This book explores the thought of – and is dedicated to – David Frisby, one of the leading sociologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Presenting original examinations of his unique social theory and underlining his interdisciplinary approach to the critical interpretation of modern metropolitan society and culture, it emphasises Frisby’s legacy in highlighting the role of the social researcher as a collector, reader, observer, detective and archivist of the phenomena and ideas that exemplify the modern metropolis as society. With contributions from sociologists, cultural theorists, historians of the city, urban geographers and designers, and architectural historians and theorists, The Detective of Modernity constitutes a wide-ranging engagement with Frisby’s profound legacy in social and cultural theory.

In this fundamental rethinking of the rise of modernism from its beginnings in the Impressionist movement, Robert Jensen reveals that market discourses were pervasive in the ideological defense of modernism from its very inception and that the avant-garde actually thrived on the commercial appeal of anti-commercialism at the turn of the century. The commercial success of modernism, he argues, depended greatly on possession of historical legitimacy. The very development of modern art was inseparable from the commercialism many of its proponents sought to transcend. Here Jensen explores the economic, aesthetic, institutional, and ideological factors that led to its dominance in the international art world by the early 1900s. He emphasizes the role of the emerging dealer/gallery market and of modernist art historiographies in evaluating modern art and legitimizing it through the formation of a canon of modernist masters. In describing the canon-building of modern dealerships, Jensen considers the new "ideological dealer" and explores the commercial construction of artistic identity through such rhetorical concepts as temperament and "independent art" and through such institutional structures as the retrospective. His inquiries into the fate of the juste milieu, a group of dissidents who saw themselves as "true heirs" of Impressionism, and his look at a new form of art history emerging in Germany further expose a linear, dealer- oriented history of modernist art constructed by or through the modernists themselves.