The Necessary Nation by Jusdanis Gregory;

Author:Jusdanis, Gregory;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2001-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

1 “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio” (Horace 1929: Epistle II, 155–56).

2 Aristotle gave expression to this when discussing political change in the Politics (V 1316a 1). Referring to Plato’s treatment of this topic in the Republic, he wrote that “all things change in a certain cycle.” A political revolution could not lead to great social transformation because it took place within cycles. For this reason tyranny could lead into another tyranny, or an oligarchy, democracy, or aristocracy (1984: 2089). Political change involved a return to a previous stage rather than a new phase of human development.

3 On Christianity and time, see Gurevich 1985.

4 In modernity time and space become compressed by technologies that enable people to cruise at great speeds and messages to traverse enormous distances instantly. On this, see Harvey 1985. Georg Simmel argued a hundred years ago in his The Philosophy of Money ([1900] 1978) that money has the capacity to connect people located in various parts of the world.

5 The metaphor of the battle comes from Jonathan Swift’s (1667–1745) satire against the moderns in A Tale of a Tub (1704] 1972).

6 I capitalize Ancients and Moderns here when referring specifically to the combatants in the Battle of the Books, but use lowercase when alluding to ancients or moderns generally. On the Battle of the Books, see Jones 1961), Levine 1991. DeJean (1997) makes fascinating comparisons between this battle of the books and the culture wars in our own fin de siècle.

7 The most notorious of these battles was thus fought over Homer, specifically over such issues as his description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad.

8 On how western Europe attained this technological preeminence see Abu-Lughod 1989, Braudel [1946] 1973, Hodgson 1993, Wallerstein 1974, 1979.

9 Even utopia, originally considered a spatial ideal (i.e., a topos), was given temporal form in modernity. The modern longs more for a lost time than a place (Lowe 1982: 40).

10 Interestingly, literary criticism first spread the idea of revolution through Europe as it employed the word to describe changes in fortune of a character. “Revolution in this sense implied a capacity for novelty and an openness to change that were often seen as the root of the modern Enlightenment” (S. Smith 1990: 222).

11 Noteworthy in this endeavor is Frederick Turner’s frontier thesis, a form of geographical determinism that contends that the evolution of American political institutions was dependent on the expansion westward. One of the aims of Turner, himself a midwesterner, was to highlight the significance of the frontier in American history vis-à-vis the East Coast (1962).

12 Marxism particularly, as John Ehrenreich argues, has failed to incorporate the reality of nationalism in its theoretical understanding of the world (1983: 1).

13 In a desperate attempt to save the empire, Emperor John VIII (reigned 1425–48) and Patriarch Joseph II (1416–39) gave in, during the Council of Florence (1438–39), to most papal demands on doctrinal difference in exchange for military aid. But the agreement proved unacceptable to most clergy.

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