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Abstract
The article focuses on the role of Western goods and cultural influences in the Estonian SSR during late socialism, aiming to analyze “conspicuous” consumption practices, behaviors, and attitudes. Situated in the context of Soviet modernization and the economy of shortages, the article moves beyond the dominant discourse of scarcity and contributes to a growing body of literature that has uncovered the Soviet consumer as a modern shopper with distinctive tastes, demands, and sensibilities that were formed at the interplay between the socialist “good taste” and the imagined, yet incredibly tangible manifestations of Western material objects. The article argues that younger, urban, and largely female consumers in Soviet Estonia were susceptible to the enticement of materiality and status-oriented consumption that could be explained by the rise of “new” Soviet consumer’s consciousness, Western-imitating do-it-yourself practices, and acquisition of Western goods that were regarded as a sign of knowledge, prestige, and social standing.
Abstract
February 24, 2022, after several months of preparation, Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine. For the EU and NATO states, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine means, inter alia, a major change for their security. But Russia’s war against Ukraine has been going on since 2014. In reaction, the EU, the US, and other Western states imposed economic sanctions on Russia in 2014.
The subject of research is primarily comprehensive (general) sanctions. Another type of economic sanctions—targeted (smart) sanctions—are relatively new, so there is also relatively little research devoted to them. The main purpose of the article is to investigate the impact of smart (targeted) sanctions on five banks: Sberbank, VTB Bank, Gazprombank, Vnesheconombank (VEB), Rosselkhozbank, and three oil companies: Rosneft, Transneft and Gazpromneft. The study has been conducted on the basis of the analysis of the basic indicators illustrating the financial situation and changes in the prices of shares listed on the Moscow Exchange. The main finding is that the effects of sanctions are relatively weak and limited in time; in 2015–2017, a deterioration in the financial situation of only some of the eight corporations surveyed was noticeable, but later their situation improved significantly and in 2018–2019 it was clearly better than before the sanctions were imposed.
Drawing on a large amount of previously neglected printed or handwritten sources, the authors highlight the impact that Grotius, Pufendorf, Heineccius and others exerted on the teaching of politics and moral philosophy as well as on policies regarding public law, codification praxis, or religious toleration.
Contributors are: Péter Balázs, Ivo Cerman, Karin Friedrich, Gábor Gángó, Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Knud Haakonssen, Steffen Huber, Borbála Lovas, Martin P. Schennach, and József Simon.
Drawing on a large amount of previously neglected printed or handwritten sources, the authors highlight the impact that Grotius, Pufendorf, Heineccius and others exerted on the teaching of politics and moral philosophy as well as on policies regarding public law, codification praxis, or religious toleration.
Contributors are: Péter Balázs, Ivo Cerman, Karin Friedrich, Gábor Gángó, Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Knud Haakonssen, Steffen Huber, Borbála Lovas, Martin P. Schennach, and József Simon.
Abstract
In Prague, secular natural law had been discussed already before the reforms of Maria Theresia. Even before it was imposed from above, Nicolas Ignaz Königsmann and several others university professors discussed Grotius, Pufendorf and other more modern authorities out of interest. The reforms of Maria Theresia after 1748 introduced a chair of natural law, but its survival was threatened by short-sighted staffing policies. The competition for the new professorship in 1758 secured a new incumbent and provided for the division of the discipline between a specialized chair of public law, held by Franz Lothar Schrodt, and a chair of natural law, held by Josef Anton Schuster. It also helped to silence the Jesuit teacher in Philosophy Josef Jurain who sought to compete with the Faculty of Law. The 1760s then saw a series of new works on natural law by the new professors. Archival material (in part newly discovered) documents the competition of 1758. Analysis of the printed publications shows the type of natural law ideas advanced, including Schrodt’s strongly absolutist conception of public law, and their relationship to major Protestant authors.
Abstract
Much of the scholarship on the Unitarian Church that emerged during the Reformation in the Principality of Transylvania has dealt with theological concerns. This paper rather examines the degree to which one of the major Unitarian figures, György Enyedi, engaged with the concept of divine law and natural law in the late sixteenth century through his sermons, in which he addressed a range of topics – including divinity, miracles, human behaviour, conscience, moral law, property, the social order, state theory, the ethics of war and civil law. A study of these topics reveals how the Unitarian articles of faith were tied to earlier traditions but also involved many ideas that would later be systematized by philosophers in the seventeenth century. Given that copies of Enyedi’s magnum opus, Explicationes, was in the possession of such writers as Locke and Newton (and general readers from Adrian Heerbord, Samuel Pepys and Robert Sharrock to Richard Allestree, Thomas Gataker and William Wake), Enyedi’s views on the oneness of God, the freedom of religious belief (and the true religion), and the role of minorities in society, are deserving of closer attention.
Abstract
The paper offers an overview, based on hitherto underexplored print and manuscript sources, of the institutionalisation of natural law as an academic discipline at all three academic gymnasia in the Polish province of Royal Prussia, i.e. Toruń, Elbląg, and Gdańsk. In this first synoptic account of the teaching of moral or political philosophy and jurisprudence based on natural law in these institutions, the author shows that the inspiration that Ernst König, rector at Toruń and later Elbląg, drew from Samuel Pufendorf’s works, De officio hominis et civis in particular, exerted a lasting impact, directly or indirectly, on the curricula of all three gymnasia. In contradistinction to Western academic institutions, the introduction of natural law as part of modern philosophy proved to be a reversible process in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From the mid-eighteenth century, the gymnasia in Toruń and Elbląg returned to the humanist curriculum.
Abstract
Taking Hugo Grotius’s comment that ‘Poland does not legislate on religion’ as point of departure, this article traces the impact of natural law discourses on the debates around toleration in the multi-religious and multi-national Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. Starting from earlier sources of natural law thinking in the Polish conciliarist tradition, it explores the ‘process of Confederation’ as an attempt to implement the decisions of the Interregnum Sejm of Warsaw (1573), leading up to the mid-seventeenth century, it shows how political writers linked the desire to maintain religious peace with a defence of the forma mixta constitution, appropriating a natural law discourse to balance the conflict between self-interest and the common good through the exercise of virtue and civic duty. With a focus on the rights of the individual (noble) citizen and freedom of conscience, Polish natural law discourse promoted the participatory republican model of the Commonwealth, rather than the need for state-building. The transfer of ideas did not just flow from West to East. The Polish model of civic responsibility also left an imprint on Grotius’s own thinking on matters of faith and state.
Abstract
The paper examines the problem of human freedom as related to moral obligation in Miklós Apáti’s Vita triumphans civilis (Amsterdam 1688). At a first glance, the vast majority of Apáti’s work provides its readers with paraphrases of passages from Pierre Poiret’s Cogitationum rationalium de Deo, anima et malo (Amsterdam 1685) and Antoine Le Grand’s Institutio philosophiae secundum principia Renati Descartes (Nürnberg 1683). Having identified Apáti’s main sources, the paper moves on to describe the indifference theory of human freedom, as it is developed by the Hungarian author following Poiret’s discussions. Regarding Le Grand, Apáti’s paraphrases focus on the closing chapters of the last Part of the Institutio that quote Pufendorf’s De officio (Lund 1672) almost verbatim. Therefore, the corresponding passages in the Vita triumphans raise the question in what way Apáti composed his own paraphrases of Le Grand’s compilations of Pufendorf’s De officio. Against this complicated philological background, the paper qualifies the Vita triumphans civilis as an insightful constellation of Cartesianism and natural law theory.