Stanford University

Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism & Romanticism

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“What a strange invention marriage is!” wrote Kierkegaard. “Is it the expression of that inexplicable erotic sentiment, that concordant elective affinity of souls, or is it a duty or a partnership . . . or is it a little of all that?”

Like Kierkegaard a few decades later, many of Germany’s most influential thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth century wondered about the nature of marriage but rejected the easy answers provided by biology and theology. In Uncivil Unions, Adrian Daub presents a truly interdisciplinary look at the story of a generation of philosophers, poets, and intellectuals who turned away from theology, reason, common sense, and empirical observation to provide a purely metaphysical justification of marriage.

Through close readings of philosophers like Fichte and Schlegel, and novelists like Sophie Mereau and Jean Paul, Daub charts the development of this new concept of marriage with an insightful blend of philosophy, cultural studies, and theory. The author delves deeply into the lives and work of the romantic and idealist poets and thinkers whose beliefs about marriage continue to shape ideas about gender, marriage, and sex to the present day.




 
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University Of Chicago Press
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Adrian Daub
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978-0226136936

The Russo-Georgian war and beyond: towards a European great power concert

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Abstract

The brief war between Georgia and Russia in August 2008 provoked vigorous international reactions among the European states as consequence of the sudden shift in the strategic balance. This article argues for a focus on the great powers France, Germany and Britain as crucial actors for understanding the policy reactions towards Russia. It argues furthermore that reactions must be explained from the perspective of experience based on past geopolitics which translate the external pressures into concrete foreign policy: France oriented towards the creation of a strong EU as global actor, Germany influenced by her self-imposed restraint in foreign affairs and Britain influenced by Atlanticist commitments in her balancing behaviour. Beyond the Russo-Georgian war, the article points to an interest-based foreign policy approach towards Russia in the longer term driven by a great power concert with the Franco-German axis as stable element but increasingly with backing from Britain, thus contributing to transatlantic foreign policy convergence on the issue.

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Routledge: European Security
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Henrik Larsen

From Prague Spring to Arab Spring: Global and Comparative Perspectives on Protest and Revolution, 1968-2012

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36th Annual Stanford - Berkeley Conference on Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

 

 From Prague Spring to Arab Spring:  Global and Comparative Perspectives on Protest and Revolution,

1968-2012

 Friday, March 2, 2012

9:30 am - 5:00 pm

McCaw Hall, Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford 

9:30 a.m.

Coffee

9:45 a.m.

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Robert Crews (Director, Stanford CREEES)

 10:-00 – 11:45

Panel One – Who Makes Revolutions?

Chair:  Katherine Jolluck (Stanford) 

Jane Curry (Santa Clara Univ.), “Media - New and Old:  How It Has Made Protest and Revolutions” 

Joel Beinin (Stanford), “Working Classes and Regime Change in Egypt and Poland” 

Edith Sheffer (Stanford), “Global 1989?”  

1:00 – 3:00

Panel Two – How (Some) Revolutionaries Prevail and Others Fail

Chair: Gail Lapidus  (Stanford)

 Cihan Tuğal (UCB), “Islam and Neoliberalism in the Revolutionary Process”

 Sean Hanretta (Stanford), “The Arab Spring and West Africa: Influences and Consequences” 

Djordje Padejski (Stanford), “Serbian Fall:  Lessons from a Democratic Revolution”  

Natalya Koulinka (Stanford), “A Revolution that Persistently Fails:  The Case of Belarus” 

3:00-3:15

Break 

3:15 - 4:45

Panel Three – Interpreting Protest Movements

Chair: John Dunlop (Stanford)

Jason Wittenberg (UCB), “Political Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Hungary” 

Kathryn Stoner-Weiss (Stanford), “Arab Spring, Slavic Winter?” 

Edward Walker (UCB), “The Collapse of Soviet Socialism and the Arab Spring Compared” 

4:45-5:00

Closing Remarks

Yuri Slezkine (Director, UCB ISEEES) 

 

Co-sponsored by: the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies at Stanford University, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers program

 

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Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center

Robert Crews Speaker CREEES
Katherine Jolluck Speaker Stanford
Jane Curry Santa Clara University Speaker
Joel Beinin Speaker Stanford
Edith Sheffer Speaker Stanford
Gail W. Lapidus Speaker Stanford
Cihan Tugal Speaker UCB
Sean Hanretta Speaker Stanford
Djordje Padejski Speaker Stanford
Natalya Koulinka Speaker Stanford
Jason Wittenbrg Speaker UCB

Kathryn Stoner

FSI
Stanford University
Encina Hall C140
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 736-1820 (650) 724-2996
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Satre Family Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
kathryn_stoner_1_2022_v2.jpg MA, PhD

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Princeton School for International and Public Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School). At Princeton she received the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship awarded to outstanding junior faculty. She also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She has held fellowships at Harvard University as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. 

In addition to many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia, she is the author or co-editor of six books: "Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective," written and edited with Michael A. McFaul (Johns Hopkins 2013);  "Autocracy and Democracy in the Post-Communist World," co-edited with Valerie Bunce and Michael A. McFaul (Cambridge, 2010);  "Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia" (Cambridge, 2006); "After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions" (Cambridge, 2004), coedited with Michael McFaul; and "Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional" Governance (Princeton, 1997); and "Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order" (Oxford University Press, 2021).

She received a BA (1988) and MA (1989) in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University (1995). In 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Iliad State University, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Mosbacher Director, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), Stanford University
Senior Fellow (by courtesy), Hoover Institution
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Edward Walker Speaker UCB
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Michael A. Seeberg

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Michael Aagaard Seeberg is a CDDRL visiting researcher in winter and spring 2012, while researching on his PhD project titled “Democracy Against the Odds”. He expects to obtain his PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark in the fall 2013.

Michael Seeberg’s PhD project seek to understand the emergence of stable (though minimalist) democracy in a number of countries despite low levels of modernization, lack of democratic neighboring countries and other factors consistently related to democratic stability in the literature. Cases in point are Ghana, India, Mauritius and Mongolia. The study of deviant democracies can give us some leverage in understanding the determinants of democracy – determinants that have not really been uncovered yet. Current accounts stress the absence of ‘damaging factors’ as decisive for the successful emergence of democracy. With the project, Michael Seeberg hope to refine existing explanations of democratization while, on the other hand identify the positive drivers that also contributed to new stable democracies. The overall aim is to build a foundation for a better understanding of why some regime changes result in stable democracies whereas others are stuck as hybrid regimes or return to the set of outright autocracies.

Prior to his PhD studies, Michael Seeberg has been a visiting scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle, assistant attaché at the Danish Mission to the United Nations in New York, and a visiting scholar at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds an MSc in political science from Aarhus University. Concurrently with his PhD studies, Michael Seeberg is engaged in the Scouts in Denmark, where he is a member of the executive board at the YMCA Scouts, and member of the Steering Committee for the Project supporting Guiding and Scouting in Eastern and Central Europe.

 

Publications

  • "Mongolian Miracles and Central Asian Disappointments: Nomadic Culture, Clan Politics and the 16. Soviet Republic”, Politica, 2009, 41(3): 315-330.

Historian Edith Sheffer discusses the barrier between East and West Germany

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Listen to Stanford historian Edith Sheffer's seminar about what truly divided Germany. Her talk was co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES), the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), The Europe Center and the German Studies department.
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