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Encompassing five continents and twenty centuries, this book puts
ruler personality cults on the crossroads of disciplines rarely, if
ever, juxtaposed before: among its authors are historians,
linguists, media scholars, political scientists and communication
sociologists from Europe, the United States and New Zealand.
However, this breadth and versatility are not goals in themselves.
Rather, they are the means to work out an integrated approach to
personality cults, capable of overcoming both the dominance of
much-discussed 20th century poster examples
(Bolshevism-Nazism-Fascism) and the lack of interest in the related
practices of leader adoration in religious and cultural contexts.
Instead of reiterating the understandable but unfruitful fixation
on rulers as the cults' focal points, the authors focus on
communicative patterns and interactional chains linking rulers with
their subjects: in this light, the adoration of political figures
is seen as a collective enterprise impossible without active, if
often tacit, collaboration between rulers and their constituencies.
Encompassing five continents and twenty centuries, this book puts
ruler personality cults on the crossroads of disciplines rarely, if
ever, juxtaposed before: among its authors are historians,
linguists, media scholars, political scientists and communication
sociologists from Europe, the United States and New Zealand.
However, this breadth and versatility are not goals in themselves.
Rather, they are the means to work out an integrated approach to
personality cults, capable of overcoming both the dominance of
much-discussed 20th century poster examples
(Bolshevism-Nazism-Fascism) and the lack of interest in the related
practices of leader adoration in religious and cultural contexts.
Instead of reiterating the understandable but unfruitful fixation
on rulers as the cults' focal points, the authors focus on
communicative patterns and interactional chains linking rulers with
their subjects: in this light, the adoration of political figures
is seen as a collective enterprise impossible without active, if
often tacit, collaboration between rulers and their constituencies.
Forty years ago, German historian Reinhart Koselleck coined the
notion of 'asymmetrical concepts', pointing at the asymmetry
between standard self-ascriptions, such as 'Hellenes' or
'Christians', and pejorative other-references ('Barbarians' or
'Pagans') as a powerful weapon of cultural and political
domination. Advancing and refining Koselleck's approach, Beyond
'Hellenes' and 'Barbarians' explores the use of significant
conceptual asymmetries such as 'civilization' vs. 'barbarity',
'liberalism' vs. 'servility', 'order' vs. 'chaos' or even 'masters'
vs. 'slaves' in political, scientific and fictional discourses of
Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day. Using an
interdisciplinary set of approaches, the scholars in political
history, cultural sociology, intellectual history and literary
criticism bolster and extend our understanding of this ever-growing
area of conceptual history.
This book provides a systematic account of media and communication
development in Soviet society from the October Revolution to the
death of Stalin. Summarizing earlier research and drawing upon
previously unpublished archival materials, it covers the main
aspects of public and private interaction in the Soviet Union, from
public broadcast to kitchen gossip. The first part of the volume
covers visual, auditory and tactile channels, such as posters, maps
and monuments. The second deals with media, featuring public
gatherings, personal letters, telegraph, telephone, film and radio.
The concluding part surveys major boundaries and flows structuring
the Soviet communicate environment. The broad scope of
contributions to this volume will be of great interest to students
and researchers working on the Soviet Union, and twentieth-century
media and communication more broadly.
The so-called Democratic Antifascist Youth Movement "Nashi"
represents a crucial case of a post-Orange government-organised
formation whose values have broad support in Russian society. Yet,
at the same time, in view of the movement's public scandals, Nashi
was also a phenomenon bringing to the fore public reluctance to
accept all implications of Putin's new system. The Russian people's
relatively widespread support for his patriotic policies and
conservative values has been evident, but this support is not
easily extended to political actors aligned to these values. Using
discourse analysis, this book identifies socio-political factors
that created obstacles to Nashi's communication strategies. The
book understands Nashi as anticipating an "ideal youth" within the
framework of official national identity politics and as an attempt
to mobilise largely apolitical youngsters in support of the powers
that be. It demonstrates how Nashi's ambivalent societal position
was the result of a failed attempt to reconcile incompatible
communicative demands of the authoritarian state and apolitical
young.
Although the asymmetrical concepts have been well-known to scholars
across the social sciences and humanities, their role in
structuring the human world has never been an object of detailed
research. 35 years ago Reinhart Koselleck sketched out the
historical semantics of the oppositions "Hellenes"/"barbarians",
"Christians"/"pagans" and "UEbermensch"/"Untermensch", but his
insights, though eagerly cited, have been rarely developed in a
systematic fashion.This volume intends to remedy this situation by
bringing together a small number of scholars at the crossroads of
history, sociology, literary criticism, linguistics, political
science and international studies in order to elaborate on
Koselleck's notion of asymmetric counter-concepts and adapt it to
current research needs.
Totalitarianism has been an object of extensive communicative
research since its heyday: already in the late 1930s, such major
cultural figures as George Orwell or Hannah Arendt were busy
describing the visual and verbal languages of Stalinism and Nazism.
After the war, many fashionable trends in social sciences and
humanities (ranging from Begriffsgeschichte and Ego-Documentology
to Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis) were
called upon to continue this media-centered trend in the face of
increasing political determination of the burgeoing field.
Nevertheless, the integration of historical, sociological and
linguistic knowledge about totalitarian society on a firm factual
ground remains the thing of the future. This book is the first step
in this direction. By using history and theory of communication as
an integrative methodological device, it reaches out to those
properties of totalitarian society which appear to be beyond the
grasp of specific disciplines. Furthermore, this functional
approach allows to extend the analysis of communicative practices
commonly associated with fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet
Union, to other locations (France, United States of America and
Great Britain in the 1930s) or historical contexts (post-Soviet
developments in Russia or Kyrgyzstan). This, in turn, leads to the
revaluation of the very term "totalitarian": no longer an
ideological label or a stock attribute of historical narration, it
gets a life of its own, defining a specific constellation of
hierarchies, codes and networks within a given society.
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