La América Central de los años '90 es más homogénea de lo que jamás lo ha sido en el curso de su historia. Todos sus países están hoy en día democratizados y hacen frente a las mismas dificultades económicas y sociales. Esta homogeneidad ha hecho posible la creación de un sistema de integración centroamericana, en el que se encuentran Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica y Panamá. Al mismo tiempo, la integración fortalece la convergencia de las economías y las (...) políticas puestas en marcha, y de esta manera progresa la interdependencia en la región. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn the summer of 1783, a trial took place in the French city of Arras. One M. de Vissery, a resident of the nearby village of St. Omer, was appealing a decision by his local aldermen, who required him to remove a lightning rod he had put on his chimney. His young defense lawyer was Maximilien Robespierre, who made a name for himself by winning the case. In preparation, Robespierre and his senior colleague corresponded with natural philosophers and jurisconsultants. (...) Robes- pierre then persuasively resolved the crucial problem, namely, the proper relations of scientific to legal authority. He exploited the empiricist dogma common to contemporary physics and jurisprudence to argue that judges need not defer to scientific experts, but must only consider the facts, which required no expertise. It was a first approximation of an argument Robespierre would make with mounting authority over the next decade. (shrink)

. Time, baroque codes and canonization. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 403-420.

This article argues that popular revolution was closely tied to the establishment of capitalism. Contrary to the revisionist George V. Taylor’s view that the Revolution had nothing to do with the advance of capitalism because financial and productive capital were divided from one another, this article contends that the Revolution played a critical role in tying them together. Prior to the Revolution financiers began to make limited investments in wholesale trade, manufacturing and mining. But during the revolutionary crisis the sans-culottes (...) pushed the Jacobins to create a national money and to curb speculation in order to foster production and exchange and reduce unemployment. With speculative activity blocked by popular resistance and state interference, bankers and other capitalists increasingly turned to productive investments and forged a link between financial and productive capital which proved crucial to further capitalist accumulation. (shrink)

Lamarck's perspective on change within the organic world, in particular his conception of "la marche de la nature," , crystallized during the last decade of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th. I argue that it should be viewed as resulting in part from interactions with, and transfers from, the social thought—modes of thinking, ways of conceptualizing, models, metaphors and analogies—of the decades before the French revolution and of the revolutionary decade itself. Moreover, Lamarck's involvement with the (...) new institutional frameworks initiated during the revolutionary period had brought him into direct contacts with the then prevalent modes of discourse on things social. (shrink)

Control over food supply was advanced in the kingdom of France in the Eighteenth century by Physiocrat economists under the seemingly advantageous label of 'freedom of grain trade'. In 1764 these reforms brought about a rise in grain prices and generated an artificial dearth that ruined the poor, some of whom died from malnutrition. The King halted the reform and re-established the old regime of regulated prices; in order to maintain the delicate balance between prices and wages, the monarchy tried (...) to limit speculation in subsistence goods and achieved some success in regulating the provisioning of public markets. Le Mercier de la Riviere concluded that executing these reforms required more effective political control. After 1774 the new king gave the Physiocratic reforms a second chance, reforming property rights and establishing an aristocracy of the landed rich. Again, this led to price hikes and as a result so-called 'popular emotions' erupted. Turgot ordered military intervention to dispel the protesters, marking a first rupture between the monarchy and the people over speculation on subsistence. Turgot's experiment failed and he was dismissed, but the Physiocracy had discovered that the market in subsistence offered new opportunities for economic power under the misleading legitimacy of 'economic laws'. Turgot's followers, Dupont de Nemours and Condorcet, continued to develop this 'theory' that was later translated into a 'scientific language' that ultimately asserted the autonomy of the economic sphere and its alleged independence from ethics and politics. The paper examines the continuity of events through the six great jacqueries and the French Revolution, including the all- important agrarian reform that ensued after 1792. Robespierre's concept of 'popular political economy' is analysed and compared with the notion of unfettered private property rights that lies at the heart of neoliberalism. (shrink)

The history of historiography, in other words the history of history, is in vogue. In the realm of Classical Antiquity (whence speaks the author of this essay), but elsewhere as well, increasing numbers of pioneers set out each day to explore this new path of history.

The French Revolution has ceased to be the paradigm case of progressive social revolution. Historians increasingly argue that the heart of the revolutionary experience was the Terror and that the Terror prefigured 20thcentury totalitarianism. This article contests that view and argues that totalitarianism is too blunt a category to distinguish between varying experiences of revolution and further questions if revolutionary outcomes are ideologically determined. It argues that by widening the set of revolutions to include 17th and 18th century cases, as (...) well as the velvet revolutions of the 1990s, we can reinterpret the French Revolution as a characteristic case of democratic transition with particular features. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper charts eighteenth-century chemistry's transition from its definition as an art to its proclaimed status as a science. Both the general concept of art and specific practices of eighteenth-century chemists are explored to account for this transition. As a disciplined activity, art orients practitioners' attention toward particular directions and away from others, providing a structured space of possibilities within which their discipline develops. Consequently, while chemists throughout the eighteenth century aspired to reveal nature's “true voice,” the path of (...) their investigations was directed by and toward their laboratory manipulations. So long as the chemical community maintained an ethos of polite cooperation and eschewed theoretical wrangling, this point was hidden by a rhetoric of “matter of fact” reporting. But as “facts” mounted in the 1770s and 1780s, especially in pneumatic chemistry, cooperation gave way to contention as chemists sought to name and organize their findings without the guidance of a communally accepted “natural” system. Lavoisier and his fellow “new” chemists offered a forceful solution to this dilemma by introducing a revolutionary network of theories, nomenclature, and instruments that unabashedly fused the productive manipulation of their laboratory work with what they claimed as the structure and activity of nature. (shrink)

Abstract The Marxian vulgate, which long dominated the historiography of the French Revolution, and which was broadly accepted in the social sciences, is no longer sustainable. But newer attempts to frame the issue of class in entirely linguistic terms, producing the claim that France had no bourgeoisie because few people explicitly described themselves as ?bourgeois,? are not entirely convincing. The Revolution brought into being, and helped to sustain, a new social group: the ?state bourgeoisie,? which defined itself by its education (...) and by state service, and which was socially cohesive and exclusive. Thus, the Revolution can be seen as ?bourgeois? not in the sense of having been caused by a rising bourgeoisie, but in the sense that it caused one to rise. (shrink)

The priorities of French policy regarding genetically modified (GM) food shifted in the late 1990s from aggressive promotion to strict regulation based on precaution and separation of GM food. This paradigmatic policy change coincided with a rapid shift in the dominant meanings of GM food in larger French public discourses. Using data from media coverage, organizational documents, and in-depth interviews, the study examines the relationship between policy developments and GM food’s symbolic transformation. I argue that the interpretive dimension interacted with (...) and co-evolved incrementally with formal policy developments, and that it cannot be understood as epiphenomenal to political processes, or as preceding and propelling a policy change. I identify three mechanisms of symbolic transformation: (1) multiplication of meanings; (2) association with other salient issues; and (3) coupling with national identity (boundary work). Conversely, this symbolic transformation influenced the terms of political debates and viable strategies, influencing policy developments. The study also demonstrates how certain longstanding elements of French political culture shaped, and were changed or reproduced through, these processes. (shrink)

El objetivo del trabajo es mostrar que la revisión que los historiadores llevan a cabo en su disciplina se debe, en parte, porque se ha puesto en cuestión el presupuesto temporal sobre el que se construyó la historia como ciencia: el “pasado histórico”. En primer lugar, intento señalar de qué modo en Analytical Philosophy of History Danto expresa, en la estructura temporal de las oraciones narrativas, las características del “tiempo histórico” que subyace a la historiografía. La separación y distinción entre (...) pasado, presente y futuro; el tiempo como un flujo del futuro hacia el pasado; el privilegio epistémico del historiador por sobre el testigo constituyen algunos de los rasgos que, para Danto, distinguen a la historia de cualquier otro conocimiento. En segundo lugar, intentaré mostrar que estos presupuestos temporales se hacen visibles cuando, a partir de las catástrofes del siglo XX, la memoria es considerada como una forma privilegiada para acceder a ese pasado reciente. Es decir, el surgimiento de la memoria, a partir de los 80´s, pone en tela de juicio los presupuestos temporales que subyacen a la concepción del pasado histórico “a la Danto” y el rol que el testigo y el futuro tenían para el conocimiento histórico. (shrink)

En las condenas que caen sobre ellos, populismo y nacionalismo se mezclan hasta confundirse. Son el producto de las mismas desventuras del lenguaje y de las pasiones humanas, los mismos vergonzosos derivados de términos nobles -el pueblo y la nación- revestidos de un valor todavía positivo en lo que concierne al primero, y apenas manchado ahora de alguna sospecha en lo que se refiere al segundo. Además, por encima del vocabulario, uno y otro proceden sobre todo de la genealogía indisociable (...) de sus significaciones primeras. A partir de finales del siglo XVIII, la nación y el pueblo han sido sinónimos para los fundadores de los regímenes representativos de los que han surgido las actuales democracias, y lo siguen siendo en la medida en que las dos nociones modernas de nacionalidad y de ciudadanía se vinculan al principio de soberanía popular. De ahí se sigue igualmente que el oprobio que pesa tanto sobre el populismo como sobre el nacionalismo se justifica respecto de las mismas manipulaciones del discurso político, incluso cuando ellas son de signo opuesto; las primeras, en efecto, apelan a una identidad nacional-popular ridiculizada por los profesionales de la democracia. Las segundas, al atribuir el pecado de populismo a cualquiera que ponga en duda la necesidad de reservar el monopolio del poder a esos mismos profesionales, en nombre del principio que dice que el pueblo, incapaz de gobernarse a sí mismo, no puede hacerlo sino a través de sus representantes elegidos y reelegidos hasta su último aliento. (shrink)