The impact of war accelerates many processes in the development of a language that otherwise might have been slow, gradual and imperfect. First and most palpable, the enrichment of the vocabulary—novelties and the new words to describe them. But change may go deeper and further.

The struggle for Sicily in the first Punic War engaged a large proportion of the Roman manpower for more than twenty years. Returning, the soldiers brought with them the words they had used in Sicily day by day. Hence the wide knowledge of Greek revealed by Roman comedy a generation later, before the end of the second war. Then, in a few years Rome became protector of Hellas and arbiter of the civilized world; the language and the literature of the Greeks at once permeated the upper classes.

Most historians of science and historians of philosophy have advanced the doctrine that philosophy preceded science, the so-called Pre-socratics from Thales to Democritus being the philosophers who provided the stimulus for science to begin.

There are a few historians who see the Pre-socratics as scientists. However, these historians seem without exception to be uncertain about two of the Pre-socratics: Parmenides, who appears to them to be essentially a philosopher or a logician, and Zeno, the Eleatic, who excites their attention mainly because of the influence of his paradoxes reflected in the history of mathematics.

Among the Arabs, wijdân means a particularly rich and moving relationship between essence and existence (and vice versa). In recent periods of their history it has been interpreted as mass movements, emotional violence, and the impulse to change life. Is this but one aspect, one of several effects, or is it the substance of revolutions? Does the concept “to change life” have a value by itself, or is it only a symptom or corollary of more hidden movements which justify such an abstraction?

Etymologically thawra in arabic means “effervescence.” Moreover, it does not just partially include, but surpasses our understanding of revolutions. We have become accustomed to defining them as changes in class relationships. The exercise of a secret logic can be seen which would determine, in the end, the fortunes of production relationships. This is, at any rate, what Marxist doctrine maintained, until recent studies revealed more shades of meaning and completed it. This is not the place to take up in our turn the debate about genesis/structure, structure/superstructure, the predominant factor and its consequences or effects, or “superdetermination,” which is the contingency to use ruses.

One of the more perplexing problems in American historiography is the search for group identity. Writing about a group, the historian is unable frequently to describe precisely what it is. The American patriciate is no exception to the general problem of defining group identity.

The historian approaches group definition, or an approximation of it, through interaction between historical evidence bearing upon group membership and analytic constructs imposed upon the data. Some of these are borrowed from the social sciences and seem to su$er as a consequence of the seemingly unnatural transplant. Others rise more naturally from the data. One strives for the correct synthesis of data and theory that, somehow, is never as satisfactory as the historian and his critics would like it to be.

Pictures nowadays are a mass-produced commodity. They can be widely reproduced by various techniques including electronics. The natural means of communication, gesture and speech, have been replaced by photographs, films, television, posters, comic strips and magazines, all of which make up part of our environment. The invention and transmission of signs, which constitutes culture, no longer stems from a period of reflection, expressed through writing, whose compact print (originating from the Renaissance) never distracts us. Social dynamism, in generating culture, stands on the level of an experience open to the configuration and the violence whose theatre is the world in its concrete space.

An animal enters the world with a set of highly specialized and firmly directed instincts which are correlated with pre-typified situations in the environment. Consequently it lives in a surrounding world, structured by its instinctual inheritance, which is specific to its own particular species and admitting only a limited range of variations within which life for it is possible. Man at birth is, compared to the non-human animal, an unfinished being, and his surrounding world partakes of his unfinished character. It is a world that must be fashioned then by man's own activity; he must make a human world for himself.

I have given this essay the title: “The Genealogy of Avenging Spirits” after Nietzsche's treatise: “The Genealogy of Morals” (Zur Genealogie der Moral). In this book Nietzsche clarifies the origins and essence of Christian morality which constitutes the basis of European civilization. In a similar fashion I shall endeavor to point out the origins and essence of the concept of avenging spirits which seems to me to form the basis of Japanese civilization.

It may seem strange to talk about a concept of avenging spirits. Nevertheless Norinaga Motoori considered mono-noawaré (the melancholy quality of things) the essence of Japanese culture; Daisetsu Suzuki, who was influenced by Zen, related its essence to a conception of Nothingness; and Ruth Benedict related it to the concept of shame as opposed to that of crime. I do not feel that these different opinions which have preceded mine are erroneous, for they undoubtedly capture certain aspects of our culture; however I would venture to say that it is more profoundly influenced by the concept of avenging spirits.

The present paper deals with Indian social values and concepts as revealed by a critical study of Hindi poetry of the second half of the 16th century and especially the works of Tulsidasa, Surdasa and Dadu Dayal. Although a detailed comparative study of other forms of literature, particularly in the Persian language, has not been attempted here, this has been taken into consideration in the process of analysing the works of these three poets.

All these writers were religious saints and their theme is essentially devotion (bhakti) and godliness. It is accepted that many of the traditional concepts and some of the idealised situations may not necessarily reflect the position as it obtained in the second half of the 16th century. Nevertheless, a cautious and careful examination of poetry, more particularly of the choice of words, does enable us to determine the prevailing attitudes and social concepts. Some of these are briefly referred to in this paper.

The standpoint of this article is, first and foremost, a historical one, giving an introductory outline of a general theory of thrift. More specifically, it aims at comparing the principle (or: principles) of economy of thought and the principle of “natural economy” to coin a short term.

By way of a prologue, a historical and interpretative summary of events shows the consequences of a cultural fact which hallmarks the 14th century and, in itself, restores the first frank expression of a principle of thrift, at once theoretical and practical, to its essential context, thus countering the in flation of abstract entities. Nevertheless, it would not appear, three centuries later, that the nosology of the Diafoirus, at which Moliere poked so much fun, had already adopted this precious standard for itself.

All civilizations are necessarily concerned with political wisdom, with events, and with applicable rules of conduct. Clearly, all political wisdom is implicitly bound up with morality and metaphysics, but the originality of Greece consists of having, at a very early stage, made this relationship explicit, and of having sought a world-picture in which politics would be directly linked to a general philosophy: Plato and Aristotle are examples of this. In addition, once created, political philosophy was to maintain its place in almost all modern systems of thought, but the rediscovered emphasis of political thought assures it today of a prominent position in all countries where, for example, Marxists or liberals confront one another. The beginnings of such a mode of thought therefore deserve some attention.

The Fang, a conquering people, overran the southern Cameroons and northern Gabon during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their conquest followed a rather curious pattern: without a deliberated tribal organization, one family after another picked up and descended to the sea. Their conquering past has deeply influenced the Fang; they do not hesitate to appropriate new techniques and ideas, confident that they are strong enough to assimilate almost anything into their culture. Eager for innovations and change, the Fang are convinced that progress never rests, and they are not hindered by nostalgia which they feel is sterile and unjustified. It was natural for them to seek out Western civilization and try to assimilate it. As a result there was a massive conversion to Christianity among the Fang.

At the time of Plato's Republic, the citizens lived in a unity of religion and politics. Hegel refers to this life, prior to the rending of the conscience into the exterior modern State and interior religion, as beautiful, free, and happy.

Perhaps the nostalgia for the beautiful, free, and happy unity presides today over the confused attempts to “change life,” where politics and religion exist side by side and intermingle. But this unity was not possible except in the ideal of the Republic; the current confusion takes place rather in the name of a utopian non-city.

An important aspect of science-fiction is the creation of an imaginative setting by extrapolation from the present frontiers of science and technology. Such projections may be used not only to explore the ramifications which a particular development possesses in itself, but also to examine its significance for its creators. Through its projective analyses, science-fiction possesses a unique capacity to contend with an era in which the geometric accumulation of scientific knowledge is, at an accelerating pace of technological application, sweeping us into an unknown and possibly dangerous future.

The questioning of Western civilization is today a commonplace exercise, and the condemnation of science constitutes a necessary chapter. But is this condemnation of science or of technology, or of the uses that modern society makes of one or the other? We do not want to examine here the value or the means of a political control of technology nor do we want to distinguish between “pure” science and its blameworthy applications. The ties are too tight and historically too evident between Western civilization and the development of science. It is science itself which is in question, and one more commonly blames it for ignoring the quality of things and for not recognizing anything but the measurable. Around this central criticism are rather confusedly expressed secondary themes, ranging from “the quality of life” up to the ineffable modes of special communication.

A crusading spirit colors the vision that most European historians, especially the Spanish, have of the Iberian peninsula's past. The classical conception of the Reconquest of the territory invaded by the Moors and redeemed for Christianity at the end of a secular war (in which the legendary figure of El Cid and Ferdinand the Catholic found glory) has been greatly qualified without ever having been abandoned entirely. Leaving aside the modern controversies, we shall try to throw some light upon the origins of the ideology of the “Reconquest”; for it is just that: an ideology whose aim was to justify a certain political action. We can better understand its meaning if we compare it to the two other ideologies then competing for the Iberian peninsula, the Islamic holy war (djihad), and the Judaic eschatological hope linked to the diaspora of the Sephardim.

The title of this essay may look surprising, if not provocative. What connection is to be found between education and slogans? The latter, first and foremost, are part of the world of publicity and propaganda; they obey a concise, punch-packing formula which aims not to instruct, but to provoke action. The word slogan is furthermore distinctly pejorative. Well…?

Well, I shall raise two questions. First: does not education in effect make use of slogans, unintentionally? After all, the slogan is not confined to the area of publicity and propaganda; slogans existed before them, and they exist apart from them; they are a function of language. It is therefore justifiable to look for slogans where one least expects to find them, and where it is hardest to recognize them for what they are.

Learned and voluminous works, of course, have brought together and compared the representations men have fashioned for themselves of the Beyond—in other words, of the kind of life in store for them after death. Sometimes the authors of such compilations have tried to classify these imaginary worlds and discover by what secret laws the after-universes where the dead live were designed, and in what spaces, both near and irremediably separate, they were located. It is not always easy to reach them, even if it is inevitable. As for returning, it is impossible, aside from a few legendary exceptions: a goddess, Ishtar; a fabled hero, Orpheus; a man who was raised from the dead but of whom nothing further is known, Lazarus.

Until the end of the 15th century America had remained the “lost continent.” Her inhabitants, neglected by all, lived removed from the other populations of the globe. The accidental arrival of a few Icelandic boats in Canada and the northeastern United States, or of occasional Asiatic junk boats on the California coast had had no influence on the culture or the physical type of the American Indian. And a real immigration from Polynesia is doubtful and has never been satisfactorily demonstrated.

Some new proof of the extended biological isolation of these populations has been offered by the study of their blood composition. Although most of them show Mongolan traits more or less markedly, almost the totality of South American Indians belong to the blood group O, and all are likewise Rh negative. The group A, largely represented in Asia, is found with certain frequency only in the northwest tribes of the continent.

… The ultimate contradiction of capitalism—in the words of Marx—can be understood and should be described as follows: capitalism is the value-system, its development and its maintenance (money being the external value); value is produced exclusively by work done by men and women; the fate of capital is thus the fate of this work—the subjective praxis of the individual. Inasmuch as the real process of production includes within it the accomplishment of this praxis, it is precisely the same thing as a process of value-formation, a process of valorization. *

From here stems the first moment of Marx's problematics: his analysis of capital as it effectively exists; in other words, his analysis of the process of its formation, which in turn leads to the analysis of the real process of production and the revelation, in this process, of the element that produces value, namely, this subjective praxis. Economic analysis, therefore, is nothing more than the analysis of the effects of the real component parts of the process; the composition of capital into value refers, inasmuch as it is an organic composition, to its technical composition and this is where its whole explanation lies.

In seventeenth-century Germany art and reality stood in a contradictory relationship to one another, and this contradiction was a fruitful one: it contained, in an undeveloped and indistinct form, the paths that art was to take in the centuries that followed. From the point of view of the history of culture, it is important to feel the basic contradiction of this period, the pledge of the developments of the future, even though the period itself perhaps suffered from this contradiction. We ourselves will be helped in this direction—that is, towards the elucidation of the central contradiction of seventeenth-century art—by a few isolated comments and observations on the literary texts of the time.