Liberalism was not only the first modern ideology, it was also the first secular movement to have an international presence. The scholarly articles in this collection, skillfully edited by Iván Zoltán Dénes, examine liberal ideas and movements from Scotland to the Ottoman Empire. The volume seeks to uncover and analyze various relationships between liberalisms and nationalisms, national identities and modernity concepts, nations and empires, nation-states and nationalities, traditions and modernities, images of the self and the others, modernization strategies and identity creations. This volume provides an important historical analysis that is essential toward understanding the questions and motivations of liberalism in the European Union today. This is, therefore, a timely contribution to both historiography and contemporary politics.

Analyzes the processes of nation-building in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century south-eastern Europe. A product of transnational comparative teamwork, this collection represents a coordinated interpretation based on ten varied academic cultures and traditions.

This book presents a concise and comprehensive overview of the mainstream flows of ideas, politics and itineraries towards modernity in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans over two centuries from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the Gorbachev administration. Unlike other books on the subject which view modernity based on the idea of Western European supremacy, this book outlines the various different pathways of development, and of growing industrialisation, urbanisation and secularisation which took place across the region. It provides rich insights on the complex networks whereby very varied ideas, aspirations and policies interacted to bring about a varied pattern of progress, and of integration and isolation, with different areas moving in different ways and at different paces. Overall the book presents something very different from the traditional picture of the" two Europes". Particular examples covered include agrarian reform movements, in various phases, different models of socialism, and different models of socialist reform.

The fifty years or so preceding the watershed of 1848–49 witnessed the emergence of liberal nationalism in Hungary, along with a transmutation of conservatism which appeared then as a party and an ideological system in the political arena. The specific features of the conservatism, combining the protection of the status quo with some reform measures, its strategic vision, conceptual system, argumentation, assessment criteria and values require an in depth exploration and analysis. Different conservative groups were in the background or in opposition from 1848 to 1918, while in the period between the two World Wars, they constituted the overwhelming majority of ruling parties. During the one-party system, from 1949 to 1989, the liberals and conservatives—like all other political groups—were illegal, a status from which they could later emerge upon the change of the political system. The inheritance of the autocratic system frozen up and undigested by the one-party state was thawed after the peaceful regime change, the constitutional revolution and its discrete components began to be reactivated, including the enemy images of earlier discourses. "Liberal" and "conservative" had become state-party stigmas in line with fascist, reactionary, rightist, and bourgeois. In reaction to that, at first conservative then liberal, intellectual fashions and renascences unfolded in the 1980s. The attempts by liberal and conservative advocates to find predecessors did not favor an objective approach.The first step toward objectivity is establishing distance from the different kinds of enemy images and their political idioms. This is a pressing need because, although several pioneering works have appeared on different variants of the Hungarian liberalisms and conservatisms, there are no serious unbiased syntheses. This work is urgent because the political poles of the constitutional revolution and the ensuing period have up till now been described in terms of different conspiracy theories.

This book discusses how American literary modernism and postmodernism interconnect memory and identity and if, and how, the intertwining of memory and identity has been related to the dominant socio-cultural trends in the United States or the specific historical contexts in the world. The book’s opening chapter is the interrogation of the narrator’s memories of Jay Gatsby and his life in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The second chapter shows how in William Faulkner’s Light in August memory impacts the search for identities in the storylines of the characters. The third chapter discusses the correlation between memory, self, and culture in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Discussing Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party, the fourth chapter reveals that memory and identity are contextualized and that cognitive processes, including memory, are grounded in the body’s interaction with the environment, featuring dehumanized characters, whose identities appear as role-plays. The subsequent chapter is the analysis of how Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated deals with the heritage of Holocaust memories and postmemories. The last chapter focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, the reconstructive nature of memory, and the politics and production of identity in Southeastern Europe.

African Philosophy in Search of Identity

As the essays in this collection make plain, Isaiah Berlin invented neither the term "Counter-Enlightenment" nor the concept. However, more than any other figure since the eighteenth century, Berlin appropriated the term, made it the heart of his own political thought, and imbued his interpretations of particular thinkers with its meanings and significance. His diverse treatment of writers at the margins of the Enlightenment, who themselves reflected upon what they took to be its central currents, were at once historical and philosophical. Berlin sought to show that our patterns of culture, manufactured by ourselves, must be explained differently from the ways in which we seek to fathom laws of nature. Many of the essays in this volume were prepared for the International Seminar in memory of Sir Isaiah Berlin, held at the School of History in Tel Aviv University during the academic year 1999-2000.

This is the history of the relationship between mass produced visual media and religion in the United States. It is a journey from the 1780s to the present - from early evangelical tracts to teenage witches and televangelists, and from illustrated books to contemporary cinema. David Morgan explores the cultural marketplace of public representation, showing how American religionists have made special use of visual media to instruct the public, to practice devotion and ritual, and to form children and converts. Examples include: studying Jesus as an American idol Jewish kitchens and Christian Parlors Billy Sunday and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the anti-slavery movement. This unique perspective reveals the importance of visual media to the construction and practice of sectarian and national community in a nation of immigrants old and new, and the tensions between the assimilation and the preservation of ethnic and racial identities. As well as the contribution of visual media to the religious life of Christians and Jews, Morgan shows how images have informed the perceptions and practices of other religions in America, including New Age, Buddhist and Hindu spirituality, and Mormonism, Native American Religions and the Occult.