scholarly journals The Gift of The Nation

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-77

In order to question the modernist common sense of mainstream sociology, epitomised today by the charge of methodological nationalism, this article offers an overall reading of Marcel Mauss’s The Nation. Conceived during the Great War and written mainly in 1920, Mauss’s work radically re-examined both the nation and nationalism from a regenerated sociological viewpoint centered on the relations between societies. Distinguishing between partial relations of exchange and total relations of encounter, Mauss came to discover the gift as a total social fact, seeing it as the traditional unconscious spring of the federative dynamics that had to be reactivated in Europe to associate its nations in a great ‘Inter-nation’ and avoid the risk of a new total war. The Nation, by reviving the original ambition of Émile Durkheim’s sociology to be a way rethinking and reshaping the concepts and institutions of modernity, helps us explore the contradictions and pathologies involved in the concept and history of the nation, in a situation currently marked by the return of nationalism and the quest for a social Europe.

1919 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 176-176
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (156) ◽  
pp. 643-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fitzpatrick

AbstractIt is now widely admitted that the Great War was also Ireland’s war, with profound consequences for every element of Irish life after 1914. Its impact may be discerned in aberrant aspects of Ireland’s demographic, economic and social history, as well as in the more familiar political and military convulsions of the war years. This article surveys recent scholarship, assesses statistical evidence of the war’s social and economic impact (both positive and negative), and explores its far-reaching political repercussions. These include the postponement of expected civil conflict, the unexpected occurrence of an unpopular rebellion in 1916, and public response to the consequent coercion. The speculative final section outlines a number of plausible outcomes for Irish history in the absence of war, concluding that no single counterfactual history of a warless Ireland is defensible.


1924 ◽  
Vol 63 (6) ◽  
pp. 546
Author(s):  
D. W. B. ◽  
Julian S. Corbett

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.


Author(s):  
Laura Eastlake

This final chapter examines the cultural implications of a new century and the outbreak of the Great War for notions of masculinity. It considers the writings of commentators like Robert Baden Powell and A. C. Benson to show that questions of how best to prepare Britain’s youth to face the ‘vast energies and problems’ of the modern world were also, inevitably, questions about the role and relevance of a classical education in that process. The final section glances forward to examine the processes by which receptions of Ancient Rome persist, and are remade during the Great War and a new modern era of total war. Far from attempting to ‘finish’ the meaning of Rome or to homogenize its uses as part of a single theory of what Rome meant to the Victorian male, this chapter emphasizes the ongoing pluralities and complexities inherent in the Roman parallel.


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