What interests us here is the fact that Babel as a figure of confusion became almost the self-named epithet of 17th-century England. All the participants of the debate that took place during the revolution or the postbellum associated Babel with the conceptual chaos of the civil war. The lively “pamphlet war” then brought a pluralistic forum for public opinion in which all the confused languages of politics were equal. When all could read the Bible, everyone could read the story of (...) Babel in their own way. But nothing could reconcile those who read the divine right of kings in it with those who read the divine right of the people in it. In the 17th century, Babel was seen as a figure of discursive confusion, as the confusion was experienced in the form of fanatical languages of arguing sects. Liberalism, if the English-speaking world is acknowledged to be its cradle, constitutes an attempt to escape the impasse of the discursive Babel via the legalistic means of the state of law. According to Hobbes, the irreversible multitude of languages makes one ask what public order can reconcile nominalism in the sphere of political opinion with the social Diaspora of individuals released from the bonds of status or corporation. How to build a state while one Christian faith is disintegrating into many sects fighting each other? How to build a state in the chronic pluralism of the social world and multifaceted dissociation of the traditional community? This is why Babel as a figure of confusion provides the primary conceptual capacity for the liberal organization of the world. (shrink)

Otto Weininger’s work entitled Sex and Character is an important text in the intellectual history of Viennese modernism of the f‌in de siècle period. The author makes a pessimistic diagnosis of modern culture, which, according to him, is infected by anti-cultural feminine values. With desperate passion, he looks for a way to heal this state of affairs and finds it in the project of male reorientation in culture. To make this plan a reality, he thoroughly redef‌ines sex and gender. The (...) aim of the article is to investigate various paradoxes and contradictions contained in this famous work. (shrink)

The Histories by Herodotus can also be read as a work on xenology, which helps to show how what came to be Hellenic emerged from what was foreign in the early stages of Hellenic culture development. Greek civilization, which was the first to formulate cosmopolitan ideas, owed much of its genius to the extraterritorial nature of the sea. It is thanks to the sea that the civilization, and its Athenian variant in particular, evolved into a lifestyle that could be adapted (...) anywhere. One of its essential features was the permanent experience of the foreign, both in terms of contact with what was foreign and of being foreign oneself. (shrink)

What is the Federal Theology, born in the 17th century in New England? The authoress presents the characteristics of the Puritan Federal Theology, emphasising the significance of the concept of Covenant, which binds a man to God and God to man, in the constituting of a community. The covenants entered into by people are acts of mutual debt raising and of undertaking a mutual obligation to discharge it. It is because a covenant ob-liga-tes that it brings forth a league.

This paper discusses the roots of fascist ideas, which were anchored in the aesthetic heritage of Romanticism, later developed by the Nietzschean vitalism and the modernist avant-garde. From the perspective of twentieth-century intellectual history, special attention should be given to the theme of violence committed in the name of beauty, as well as the relations between the initial romantic idea of art as Sturm und Drang, the concept of the artistic avantgarde attacking the world of bourgeois values and fascist shock (...) troops. (shrink)