Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm
- 2 Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein's Exile Studies
- 3 A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile
- 4 Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann
- 5 The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State
- 6 First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile?
- 7 The Second Wave: An Autobiographical Exercise
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
3 - A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Study of Intellectual Exile: A Paradigm
- 2 Self-Knowledge and Sociology: Nina Rubinstein's Exile Studies
- 3 A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider, and/or Exile
- 4 Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann
- 5 The Symbolic Uses of Exile: Erich Kahler at Ohio State
- 6 First Letters: The Liquidation of Exile?
- 7 The Second Wave: An Autobiographical Exercise
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the historical study of political thought, it is a cliché that periods of practical innovation and theoretical fecundity are initiated “when words lose their meaning.” The confusions attending the Peloponnesian War, which are documented by Thucydides, are said, accordingly, to have enabled the work of Plato and Aristotle; the obsolescence of the pivotal distinction between king and tyrant, as well as the language of natural hierarchy, that came with the Religious Wars of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, opened the way to Bodin and Hobbes and competing discourses of the modern state. The decline of aristocracy and the rise of democracy, according to John Stuart Mill and other observers of the time, put the language of the party of order in crisis. All of these contentions have a certain plausibility.
In the past few decades, correspondingly, it has been maintained that the languages of citizenship, legal orders, popular self-rule, and the like, all oriented to the geographically and culturally bounded nation-state, have been made irrelevant (or obscurantist) by conditions variously characterized as globalization, post-colonialism, or post-modernism. The concept of exile, understood as a distinctive political status associated with defeat, banishment, exclusion from a bounded location and similar attributes, appears as one of these terms of an obsolete political discourse.
Exile reappears, however, as a key term in a counter-discourse, to refer precisely to the condition of dis/location, which is said to define the world beyond national identities and relations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Liquidation of ExileStudies in the Intellectual Emigration of the 1930s, pp. 35 - 42Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011