Playing with the ‘Erbe’: The Legacy of the Songs of the 1848 Revolution in the GDR

After the twelve-year rupture caused by the Nazis, in the Soviet zone after 1945 attempts were made to reconnect with the traditions of workers’ songs and critical folk songs that were viewed as the cultural heritage of the communist movement. One of these ‘repertoires’ of song was that of the 1848 Revolution. In the 1950s GDR researchers such as the Germanist Bruno Kaiser, the musicologist Inge Lammel and in particular the folklorist Wolfgang Steinitz made substantial contributions to the collecting and publication of the 1848 songs. Their work provided an important reference point for the singers of the German folk song revival in the GDR from the late 1970s onwards. As the cases of groups such as Folkländer and Wacholder showed, theirs was a particularly creative appropriation of the revolutionary Erbe that involved performing protest songs of the past as if they were criticising the present.

Early crime writing and the state: Jonathan Wild, Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville in 1720s London

This article argues that the early development of crime writing needs to be understood in relation to the consolidation of the modern state. It demonstrates that London in the 1720s constitutes a significant moment in this early development for three main reasons. First, the period witnessed a crime epidemic which reached its climax in the 1720s and which precipitated a set of particularly aggressive counter-measures by the state; second, it saw the rise and eventual fall of the infamous Jonathan Wild who acted as both thief and surrogate policeman; and third, it was also marked by a surge in interests on the part of writers like Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville in the related matters of crime and punishment. This article explores the ways in which accounts of crime and punishment in this period deployed and in some instances interrogated the rhetoric of social contract theory and writings on statecraft, particularly by Thomas Hobbes and Mandeville. But while the criminal biographies and gallows sermons produced by the Newgate prison’s ‘ordinaries’ provided crude and reductive accounts of the efficacy of the state, the article shows how two accounts of the life of Jonathan Wild (by Defoe and H.D) responded in highly complex ways to the issues of crime and policing and provided a consistently and self-consciously ambivalent reading of the state and state power. To conclude, I suggest that this ambivalence can be read as a critique of the impartial or neutral state and that it constitutes one of the key features of what we would later understand to be crime writing as a dedicated literary genre.

AHRC-DFG Project "Songs of the Revolution of 1848 and their Reception History in Germany"

This on-line project consists of commentaries and critical editions of the songs of the 'Vormaerz' and the 1848 Revolution which have shaped the cultural memory of this period in Germany. Looking at both textual and musical developments the research deals with the history of reception of key 1848 songs by established as well as anonymous poets. These together have formed an enduring corpus in the repertoires of singers of German political song. One of the main findings is how songs are not static: they evolve musically and textually and can undergo changes of function during a process of historical reception which is often ideologically motivated.

Review of Bernard Lahire's 'The Plural Actor'

Book review of 'The Plural Actor' by Bernard Lahire

Knowledge, innovation and emulation in the evolutionary thought of Bernard Mandeville

Of the early modern writers on the division of labour, Bernard Mandeville alone extended it to all aspects of human activity and emphasised its role in a cumulative process of evolution in which each generation modified and built on what had been achieved by earlier generations. This required exploration of the mechanisms through which new knowledge was developed as well as the means by which knowledge was transmitted between the generations. The present article examines Mandeville’s treatment of these mechanisms and explores their theoretical origins. It examines Mandeville’s understanding of the role of the division of labour in facilitating discovery and learning and the role of education and imitation in transmitting social knowledge. It shows that, for Mandeville, innovators were people of ordinary capacity who were alert to the opportunities and challenges of their environment. As a result of specialisation, they possessed tacit knowledge which was actualised in what they did rather than in theoretical propositions. Mandeville’s evolutionary thought influenced subsequent writers on political economy and evolutionary social thinkers. It may also have had some influence on Charles Darwin, though it is not, in itself, Darwinian. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved.

Oppositional Political Identity in the Song Culture of the Vormärz and the 1848 Revolution in Germany

Historically political song has often been perceived negatively, as a disturbance of the peace, summed up by the legendary line from Goethe’s Faust: “Politisches Lied – ein garstiges Lied”. In the period in Germany of the Vormärz (from 1815 up to the revolution of March 1848), however, we see how this perception may be changing as it increasingly becomes a means of self-expression in public life. This was the era of restauration, in which broader sections of German society are striving for political emancipation from the princes and kings. A whole host of political themes emerge in the songs (Freiheitslieder) of that period in which a new oppositional political consciousness is reflected. The themes range from freedom of speech, freedom from censorship, and the need for democratic and national self-determination to critiques of injustice and hunger, and parodies of political convention and opportunism. Sources of reception give indications about the social and political milieus in which these songs circulated. Such sources include broadsheets, handwritten manuscripts, song collections, commemoration events, advertisements in political press, memoires, police reports and general literature of the time. In many cases we see how these songs reflect the emerging social and political identities of those who sing them. One also sees the use of well known melodies in the popular dissemination of these songs. An intertextual function of music often becomes apparent in the practice of contrefacture whereby melodies with particular semantic associations are used to either underline the message or parody the subject of the song.

The limits of democracy: Ireland 1778-1848

A survey of the use of the term democracy in Irish politics in the late eighteenth and early ninetenth centuries

Bernard Mandeville and the doctrine of laissez-faire

The view of Mandeville as a pioneer of laissez-faire is difficultto reconcile with his repeated insistence that private vices were turnedinto public benefits by the ‘dexterous management of the skilfulpolitician’. Even if references to the skilful politician are regarded asshorthand for a legal and institutional framework, there remains thequestion of whether such a framework is a spontaneous order or theproduct of purposeful experiment as Mandeville thought? Mandevillewarned about the harmful effects of meddling but his complaint wasabout the actions of fashionable do-gooders rather than government. Heunderstood that the voluntariness of a transaction could be regarded asa defence against complaints of unfairness but he was quick to pointout the limitations of voluntariness especially in the market for labour.Mandeville’s objective was to teach people what they are not what theyshould be. He pointed to the strengths of the emerging market systembut was not afraid to expose its faults.