Tilo Schabert - Böcker

Most scholars link the origin of politics to the formation of human societies, but in this innovative work, Tilo Schabert takes it even further back: to our very births. Drawing on mythical, philosophical, religious, and political thought from around the globe-including America, Europe, the Middle East, and China-The Second Birth proposes a transhistorical and transcultural theory of politics rooted in political cosmology. With impressive erudition, Schabert explores the physical fundamentals of political life, unveiling a profound new insight: our bodies actually teach us politics. Schabert traces different figurations of power inherent to our singular existence, things such as numbers, time, thought, and desire, showing how they render our lives political ones-and, thus, how politics exists in us individually, long before it plays a role in the establishment of societies and institutions. Through these figurations of power, Schabert argues, we learn how to institute our own government within the political forces that already surround us-to create our own world within the one into which we have been born.In a stunning vision of human agency, this book ultimately sketches a political cosmos in which we are all builders, in which we can be at once political and free.

The Historiography of German Reunification presents a critical paradigm for both the deconstructing and constructing processes of catching events in the past by a representation of those events in the form of a scholarly, sustained story. The supporting argument is this: all historiography constructs as an endeavour that builds upon already existing and equally constructed documentation concerning the original events. The authors of such documentation are the first historians to steer all subsequent historiographies.This earliest phase of historiography has hardly been dealt with. The reason for it has commonly been an insufficient amount of, and hence study of, documentary material. This book precisely fills this gap in taking the international process leading to the reunification of Germany as an issue of historiography, meaning the "construction" of its "history". It does so by handling the chosen task through (a) analysing a collection of ample material from French, British, American, German, and Russian archives, and (b) conducting numerous interviews with historical actors. Through these methods, the author examines the "black boxes" of several governments to reconstruct decisive political decisions, presenting historiography, empirically and theoretically, in a new light.Written in an accessible style, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of historiography, political history, and European history.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European bloc, the reunification of Germany was a major episode in the history of modern Europe — and one widely held to have been opposed by that country's centuries-old enemy, France. But while it has been previously believed that French President François Mitterrand played a negative role in events leading up to reunification, this book shows that Mitterrand's main concern was not the potential threat of an old nemesis but rather that a reunified Germany be firmly anchored in a unified Europe.Updated with a new introduction and other materials, the book blends primary research and interviews with key actors in France and Germany to take readers behind the scenes of world governments as a new Europe was formed. Tilo Schabert had unprecedented, exclusive access to French presidential archives and here focuses on French diplomacy not only to dispel the notion that Mitterrand was reluctant to accept reunification but alsoto show how successful he was in bringing it about.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European bloc, the reunification of Germany was a major episode in the history of modern Europe — and one widely held to have been opposed by that country's centuries-old enemy, France. But while it has been previously believed that French President François Mitterrand played a negative role in events leading up to reunification, this book shows that Mitterrand's main concern was not the potential threat of an old nemesis but rather that a reunified Germany be firmly anchored in a unified Europe.Updated with a new introduction and other materials, the book blends primary research and interviews with key actors in France and Germany to take readers behind the scenes of world governments as a new Europe was formed. Tilo Schabert had unprecedented, exclusive access to French presidential archives and here focuses on French diplomacy not only to dispel the notion that Mitterrand was reluctant to accept reunification but alsoto show how successful he was in bringing it about.

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Two words describe a "modern" world: limits and limitless. Traditionally, humans recognized limits of their power. Modernity meant a break. Its protagonists aspired to bring worlds of their imagination into reality. They taught a new anthropology. Humans could ascend to a God-like status. Schabert analyzes the history of the project and its result: a civilization in a perennial crisis. Symptoms of the crisis have been exposed, today mostly in ecological terms. Schabert takes his material from many fields: philosophy, cosmology, natural sciences, literature, social studies, economics, architecture, and political thought. While modernity is endlessly disrupted, a world beyond modernity can be traced, especially in the modern theory of constitutional government. Constitutional governments are formed by limitations within a civilization that is meant to have no limits. What appears to be paradoxical has its own logic, as Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Montesquieu, John Adams, the Federalist Papers, John Stuart Mill, Walter Bagehot, and Woodrow Wilson have shown. Schabert carefully explicates their constitutional thought. It realized the limits through which modernity holds a promise.