Aidan Beatty | Carnegie Mellon University (original) (raw)

Books by Aidan Beatty

Love it or hate it, it's hard to deny that British Trotskyism created some fascinating stories. F... more Love it or hate it, it's hard to deny that British Trotskyism created
some fascinating stories. Finding themselves increasingly irrelevant
in modern politics, these political parties and sects often became
twisted aberrations of Comrade Trotsky’s ideals. Gerry Healy’s
Workers Revolutionary Party was no exception.

This new biography tells the story of Healy’s life, picking
apart fact from fiction, to reveal a man rotten to the core with
authoritarian tendencies. Saturating the party with his personality,
Healy took advantage of his comrades’ trust and revolutionary zeal,
eventually creating a split in 1985.

This is a tragic story in the history of Communism, wracked
with accounts of abuse, collaboration with the state, and vicious
infighting. It also reveals the dangers of male-dominated political
movements, secular cults and celebrity culture, and is an important
reminder of what can happen when a working-class movement is
betrayed from within.

This is a book about what people imagine it means to live in a world where private property i... more This is a book about what people imagine it means to live in a world where private property is dominant, and their fears - and sometimes hopes - about living in a future world where private property has disappeared. In the propertied imagination, private property is a fragile thing, an institution beset by terrifying enemies and racialised and gendered mobs: Levellers and Diggers, socialists and anarchists, fervent religious radicals, abolitionists, feminists, and haughty welfare-state bureaucrats. The history of private property is the history of a recurring nightmare that one or another of these groups would storm the castle and take control. That threatened social chaos is the central unifying story of this book.

Private property and the fear of social chaos starts by charting the thinkers who laid the foundations for how we understand private property, including Locke, Burke, Marx and Engels. The book looks at how their ideas have been put into practice in ways that continue to shape the modern world, from Harry Truman's housing policies and the anti-abolitionist George Fitzhugh to Margaret Thatcher and Elon Musk. Arguing that the spectre of 'the mob' has been intimately interconnected with the idea of private property throughout capitalist modernity, the book ambitiously narrates this history from the early colonisation of the Americas to Silicon Valley, and the future of human colonisation in space.

A collection of essays exploring the comparative history of Irish and Jewish identity. The Irish ... more A collection of essays exploring the comparative history of Irish and Jewish identity. The Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled with their lack of formal political sovereignty in nineteenth-century Europe. Simultaneously European and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior and yet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to deal with their subaltern status through nationalism; both had a tangled, ambiguous, and sometimes violent relationship with Britain and the British Empire; and both sought to revive ancient languages as part of their drive to create a new identity. The career of Irish politician Robert Briscoe and the travails of Leopold Bloom are just two examples of the delicate balancing of Irish and Jewish identities in the first half of the twentieth century. Irish Questions and Jewish Questions explores these shared histories, covering several centuries of the Jewish experience in Ireland, as well as events in Israel-Palestine and North America. The authors examine leading figures of both national movements to reveal how each had an active interest in the successes, and failures, of the other. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars from the fields of Irish studies and Jewish studies, this volume captures the most recent scholarship on their comparative history with nuance and remarkable insight.

This book is a comparative study of masculinity and white racial identity in Irish nationalism an... more This book is a comparative study of masculinity and white racial identity in Irish nationalism and Zionism. It analyses how both national movements sought to refute widespread anti-Irish or anti-Jewish stereotypes and create more prideful (and highly gendered) images of their respective nations. Drawing on English-, Irish-, and Hebrew-language archival sources, Aidan Beatty traces how male Irish nationalists sought to remake themselves as a proudly Gaelic-speaking race, rooted both in their national past as well as in the spaces and agricultural soil of Ireland. On the one hand, this was an attempt to refute contemporary British colonial notions that they were somehow a racially inferior or uncomfortably hybridised people. But this is also presented in the light of the general history of European nationalism; nationalist movements across Europe often crafted romanticised images of the nation’s past and Irish nationalism was thus simultaneously European and postcolonial. It is this that makes Irish nationalism similar to Zionism, a movement that sought to create a more idealized image of the Jewish past that would disprove contemporary anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Essays and Peer-Reviewed Papers by Aidan Beatty

This paper is an attempt to provide a deep historical genealogy of the sexual emotions and desire... more This paper is an attempt to provide a deep historical genealogy of the sexual emotions and desires at work in contemporary far-right antisemitism. Embedded in primary research while also drawing heavily on the existing literature on antisemitism, this paper seeks to make an intervention into the historiography of antisemitism and to argue for the existence of a sexual component at the heart of antisemitism, both historically and today. My central, counter-intuitive claim is that while serious scholars of antisemitism recognize its abhorrent nature, for antisemites it is instead something positive. The organizing principle of this paper is the need to identify the joy that exponents of various forms of racism gain from their actions and, as this paper specifically argues, the various kinds of erotic excitement that antisemites might gain from anti-Jewish hatred.

In the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis, American historiography underwent a significant shift... more In the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis, American historiography underwent a significant shift. Previously dominated by cultural and social history methodologies, a new wave of capitalist histories emerged. Unabashedly presentist in motivation, these works returned capitalism and class to the centre-ground of American history. Works such as Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton, Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Walmart, Jonathan Levy's Freaks of Fortune and Destin Jenkins' Bonds of Inequality all raised serious questions not just about capitalism but also about adjacent issues of race, gender, religion, and the environment. 1 Simultaneously, with the increasing return of socialism to the mainstream of American life, works drawing on Marxist frameworks have also proliferated, such as Jason Moore's Capitalism in the Web of Life or Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit. 2 The blatant connections between capitalism and the climate crisis have only made the need for a serious understanding of the former more obvious. At least in the United States, it is a good time to be studying capitalism. Ireland suffered an arguably worse crash in 2008 than the United States (and indeed probably worse than most of the global North). And yet an Irish capitalist studies remains undiscovered. Within Irish history-writing, this is probably not too surprising. Conservatism-both methodological and subtly political-still predominates. Irish historians remain wedded to "the State," both in the obvious methodological sense that it is the primary category of analysis, but also in the ways that, financially and professionally, many scholars are reliant on the state. In all the recent events of the Decade of Commemoration, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone discussing capitalism, even though it was always a central concern for key figures during the so-called Revolution, from the state-developmentalism and import-substitution industrialisation of Arthur Griffith to the overt anti-capitalism of Connolly, Larkin and Markievicz and the smallholders republic of de Valera. While it may not feature much as a claim in most Irish historiography, modern Irish history cannot be understood outside of the capitalist contexts in which it unfolded. Ireland was a key laboratory of capitalism from the early modern period onwards: from the Cromwellian plantations that remade patterns of landownership, to the construction of Ireland as a dependent market before and after the Act of Union to the obsessions with personal responsibility during the Famine and economic restructuring and social engineering after that. These had a profound effect on the economic and social class relations on the island. While normally depicted via a blunt sectarianism-the trope of a capitalist Protestant north versus an agrarian Catholic south-the extractive nature of British capitalist CONTACT Aidan Beatty

Stuart Hall was undoubtedly one of the key theorists of late twentieth-century British politics a... more Stuart Hall was undoubtedly one of the key theorists of late twentieth-century British politics and one of the most important leaders in the development of a serious understanding of race and racism in British society. This short review essay examines the odd ways in which Ireland and Irishness are only nominally present—and thus, in a real sense, absent—in his voluminous writings. Given the centrality of Irishness to the deep history of race in Britain and the role played by fears of Irish
terrorism in Thatcherism, both central concerns of Hall’s, this is a major lacuna. This essay offers some speculative assessments as to why Hall generally ignored Ireland and draws a connection to the broad context of the British Left, which had (and still has) similar blind spots.

The Catholic Church in twentieth-century Ireland was infamously anti-communist. In this paper, I ... more The Catholic Church in twentieth-century Ireland was infamously anti-communist. In this paper, I look at the other side of this equation: what did the leading savants of Irish Catholicism think of capitalism? Where anti-communism often goes hand-in-glove with an uncritical support for capitalism, Irish Catholic thinkers were often equally suspicious of both communism and capitalism. And their opposition to both economic ideologies drew on similar rationales; a hostility to anything "foreign", a fear that global culture would destroy traditional Irish culture, anti-materialism, a desire to return to an idealized medieval past, and pervasive antisemitic paranoia.

Friedrich Engels maintained close relations with two Irish women; Mary Burns (c.1822-1863), Enge... more Friedrich Engels maintained close relations with two Irish women; Mary
Burns (c.1822-1863), Engels’ common law wife, and then her sister Lydia
‘Lizzie’ Burns (1827-1878), who formally married Engels just before her
death. The history of women, like those of the working classes and racial
minorities, is always bedevilled by what E.P. Thompson called ‘the enormous
condescension of posterity’, in which illiterate peoples are erased
from the historical record. Yet, it is rare to find illiterate women so close
(and seemingly making a major determining impact) on the lives of literate
men. Drawing on Marx and Engels’ sprawling correspondence, as well as
other contemporary records, this paper seeks to uncover how much we
can ever truly know about these two women? How much of a role did
they actually play in Engels’ political and literary work? And how much
have their real lives been covered up with a Marxist romanticising of two
proletarian, illiterate factory workers?

The period from the Home Rule Crisis to the end of the Civil War is the most heavily privileged p... more The period from the Home Rule Crisis to the end of the Civil War is the most heavily privileged period in modern Irish historiography and it has become commonplace among Irish historians to describe the events from 1912 to 1923 as "The Irish Revolution". Moreover, a number of Irish historians have built on this to see the 1920s and early '30s as the period of the "Irish Counter-Revolution", when more radical political impulses were suppressed in favour of the Free State's vision of conservative law and order. This paper challenges these paradigms by arguing that the themes commonly associated with the "Revolution"-meritocracy, violence, the excitement about acquiring national power-had currency within Irish nationalism long before 1912. Similarly, the defining features of the "Counter-Revolution"-coercion, fear of socialism and feminism, a desire to force Irish citizens to live up to certain prescribed social roles-were already implicit in the politics and culture of the "Revolution". Viewing Irish nationalism from the 1890s up the 1930s through the lens of masculinity shows how there was much continuity here: the Irish nationalist project of creating politically reliable, implicitly male citizens can be traced from the period of the cultural revival, through the "Revolution" and into the post-1922 "Counter-Revolution". Moreover, as this paper argues, "Masculinity" was a key means of supressing more radical political currents in the years after 1916. Imagining the nation as a harmonious fraternity of men united by a common cause, allowed mainstream nationalists to portray socialism and feminism as divisive ideologies that would dangerously undermine national unity. Again, using masculinity as an analytic lens does much to advance and complicate our understanding of the form and content of Irish nationalism.

Ireland is one of the few countries to be discussed systematically in Capital, Karl Marx's most i... more Ireland is one of the few countries to be discussed systematically in Capital, Karl Marx's most important work. Ireland and the Irish were also discussed in Marx's lesser known economic writings and journalism. And famously, Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England devoted a chapter to the status of Irish migrant labourers in Industrial Britain. This paper discusses Marx and Engels' writings on Ireland and how they relate to three other important themes in their work: race, gender, and the nature of "Primitive Accumulation". As with their writings on Jews or Indians, Marx and Engels rehearsed a number of common contemporary racial stereotypes about Irish people, specifically focusing on their supposed primitiveness, backwardness or even drunkenness and lack of hygiene. At the same time, however, Marx and Engels also saw the Irish in idealised terms: a revolutionary and masculine people who existed outside of the space-time of capitalism. Marx and Engels engaged in romanticised visions of Ireland and, this paper argues, race and gender (concepts not usually considered central to Marxian thought)
played a strong role in that romance.

Richard S. Devane (1876-1951) was a Jesuit priest, a campaigner on a variety of social issues and... more Richard S. Devane (1876-1951) was a Jesuit priest, a campaigner on a variety of social issues and a prolific author. He was also a key figure in the legislative landscape of post-1922 Ireland. He was invited as an expert witness to the Committee on Evil Literature in 1926 which enshrined a regime of literary censorship in the newly independent Ireland and he was the only witness personally invited to submit evidence to the Carrigan Committee in 1932, the infamous government commission that helped lay the groundwork for the Criminal Law Amendment Act that banned the sale, manufacture or importation of contraception in Ireland. In both his presence as a witness and in his voluminous journalistic writings on social issues, Devane provided a politico-theological legitimacy for this kind of draconian legislation. Drawing on Devane’s published works, his collected papers in the Irish Jesuit Archive and government papers in the National Archives of Ireland, this biographical paper analyses Devane’s central role in the Irish Free State’s project of social control and raises questions about the borders dividing Church and State in the period after 1922. Moreover, I trace Devane’s later political development in the 1930s and ‘40s; by this period, Devane had far less input in the State’s legislative agenda but was producing far more detailed political writings; his two later books, Challenge from Youth (1942) and The Failure of Individualism (1948), as well as showing a clear Fascist influence also highlight the soft authoritarianism inherent to the politics of post-1922 Ireland.

The Gaelic League was founded in 1893 with the aim of reviving the Irish language, as well as pro... more The Gaelic League was founded in 1893 with the aim of reviving the Irish language, as well as promoting home-grown industries and social reform. By the turn of the century, it had become one of the most important cultural organisations in Ireland. This article studies a central element of the League's ideology and praxis, albeit one that has thus far received little attention: their promotion of a specifically nationalist understanding of Irish space. " Space " was a key trope for the Gaelic League and was linked to a number of other dominant nationalist concerns; state sovereignty, race, gender, and modernity. Moreover, this paper argues that a focus on " space " allows for a better comparative understanding of Irish nationalism, since similar spatial logics were at play in other late nineteenth-and early-twentieth century national movements both in Europe and in the (post)colonial world.

This paper is a comparative cultural history of Zionism and Irish nationalism, focusing on themes... more This paper is a comparative cultural history of Zionism and Irish nationalism, focusing on themes of race, gender, and identity. It seeks to highlight the strong similarities of both nationalist projects: to show how Zionists and Irish nationalists were both heavily invested in state-building projects that would disprove European racist stereotypes about their respective nations and yet, paradoxically, were also part of the general history of European nationalism. Both Zionism and Irish nationalism sought to create idealised images of the past and claimed to be rebuilding a glorious ancient society in the future as a means of escaping a degraded present. Both movements saw language revival as a key means of carrying out this 'return to history'. And both emphasised martyrdom as a way to build up prideful ideals of devotion to the nation and used sport, militaries and agriculture as forms of nationalist social engineering. Despite their claims to the contrary, neither national movement was truly unique.

This paper focuses on three of the most canonical Irish nationalists of the nineteenth- and twent... more This paper focuses on three of the most canonical Irish nationalists of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries – Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), Michael Davitt (1846-1906) and Eamon de Valera (1882-1975) – and the various claims they made that the Irish nation was analogous to the Jewish nation. In his recent work on Anti-Judaism, David Nirenberg has shown how abstract “figures of Judaism” have been used in large swathes of European political thought. Such abstract “Jewish” figures, Nirenberg argues, have been utilised in debates over secular authority, the perils of capitalism, even modernity itself. Following Nirenberg, this paper argues that O’Connell, Davitt and de Valera engaged in a comparable Irish nationalist “thinking with Judaism”; this was a means of thinking about Irish statelessness and about where Ireland fit into a broader white, European world, whilst simultaneously attacking British rule as analogous to the worst excesses of violent anti-Semitism.

In April 1998, Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Unionists in Northern Ireland signed a histor... more In April 1998, Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Unionists in Northern Ireland signed a historic peace agreement, The Good Friday Agreement. This paper examines how the news of this peace agreement was received in Israel, which was dealing with its own issues of peace agreements and peace processes. Israeli press coverage of peace in Northern Ireland ranged from the jealous to the congratulatory, from a dovish desire to find lessons for Israel/Palestine in the example of Northern Ireland to a hawkish refusal to make the comparison.

Eamon de Valera was first elected to public office in a by-election in East Clare in July 1917. ... more Eamon de Valera was first elected to public office in a by-election in East Clare in July 1917. Having recently been released from prison in one of the first post-Rising amnesties, de Valera comfortably defeated Patrick Lynch, a lawyer and the Irish Parliamentary Party’s chosen replacement for the constituency’s previous representative, Major Willie Redmond. De Valera’s 1917 victory prefigured Sinn Féin’s ascendancy in the following year’s general election. Drawing primarily on the ephemera collections of the National Library of Ireland and the Contemporary Documents collection of the Bureau of Military History, this paper studies the tropes and imagery used in propaganda employed by de Valera in this election. The paper clusters de Valera’s propaganda around a number of recurring (and intertwining) themes:
• Historical time and mythology;
• The Irish Language;
• Masculinity;
• Land and Agrarian Economics.

Across all of these themes, I argue, de Valera was presented as a saviour for the Irish nation, a man steeped in the Irish national past, and the one who would protect voters from the evils of British rule and restore dignity to a humiliated nation. Such imagery and language, I suggest, deserve a central place in any analysis of Sinn Féin’s electoral victories at the outset of the War of Independence.

From a special issue of of the Journal of World-Systems Research on "Ireland in the World-System"... more From a special issue of of the Journal of World-Systems Research on "Ireland in the World-System"

There is a conventional view among Irish historians that a revolution occurred in that country between the passing of the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912 and the end of the Civil War in 1923. The violence of those years, the collapse in support for the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), the meteoric rise to power of Sinn Féin, a new sense of meritocracy, a greater sense of democracy and a widespread radicalism; all are seen as elements of a major change in Irish politics and life, a ‘Revolution.’

As Immanuel Wallerstein has suggested, though, ‘revolution’ is a problematic heuristic device. While the term carries connotations of a sudden rupture or break with the past, the events usually studied under this rubric often have deep temporal and structural roots. In this vein, and drawing on Gramsci's notion of a 'revolution without a revolution', this paper seeks to understand the events in Ireland of 1912-23, not as a sudden rupture with the past but as the culmination of a much longer period of (often British-backed) capitalist development in post-Famine Ireland.

Declan Kiberd has argued that Irish nationalists have often displayed a tendency to remain trapped within the very codes they sought to oppose. Irish nationalists spoke of a ‘break’ with Britain, but in many respects what they demanded was simply the right to manage the country themselves along the same capitalist lines. The nationalist mainstream did not seek an economic or social revolution; this paper seeks to understand the structural reasons why this was so.

Moreover, as both John Hutchinson and Stephen Howe have argued, conventional ‘revisionist’ Irish historians are ‘methodological nationalists’, given their uncritical use of ‘the nation’ as their basic unit of analysis. This paper argues that Irish nationalist politics in the decades before 1912 is better understood via categories such as class, gender, capitalism and the pervasive power of the British state. As such, as well as pursuing a reassessment of the project of Irish historical development and state-building, this paper also seeks a reassessment of the project of (an equally statist) Irish historiography.

In this interview, Denis O'Hearn presents his views of Ireland's historical and contemporary stat... more In this interview, Denis O'Hearn presents his views of Ireland's historical and contemporary status in the capitalist world-system and which countries Ireland could be profitably compared with. He discusses how Ireland has changed since the publication of his well-known work on The Atlantic Economy (2001) and addresses questions related to the European Union and the looming break-up of Britain as well as contemporary Irish politics on both sides of the border. O'Hearn also touches on the current state of Irish academia.

In 2008 Ireland entered an economic free-fall. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger challenged some o... more In 2008 Ireland entered an economic free-fall. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger challenged some of the central tenets of mainstream political thought in Ireland, as the country was revealed to be less a deregulated mouse that roared, and more of a politically weak and underdeveloped semiperiphery whose elite had little real control over the country's economy. Since then, the Irish political elite, as well as the ECB-IMF-European Commission Troika, have shown themselves to be strong supporters of socially destructive austerity policies. This has prompted a slowly emerging backlash, most notably protests against government plans to privatize the water supply.

For decades, Gerry Healy was the leading figure of the British Trotskyist movement-a serial rapis... more For decades, Gerry Healy was the leading figure of the British Trotskyist movement-a serial rapist, bully and liar who used his authoritarian sect to facilitate his crimes. In the annals of British Trotskyism, a special kind of ignominy is reserved for Gerry Healy. To his dwindling band of diehard admirers, Healy was the leading revolutionary in the British working-class movement of his time, with a career at the head of the class strule stretching over more than half a century. To his detractorsfar greater in number, among those who remember him at all-he was a petty tyrant with extreme delusions of grandeur, subjecting those who were supposed to be his comrades to a regime of psychological, verbal, physical and sexual abuse. Healy was always one of the most polarising figures in postwar British socialism. His relentless drive, towering ambition and iron-fisted control over his political organisations left an indelible mark on the Trotskyist movement, as much as it might generally prefer to disown him. He demanded absolute loyalty from his followers, suppressed dissent with great ferocity-including through physical violence-and fostered an atmosphere of fear and submission within the ranks of the Socialist Labour League (SLL) and the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), groups which he dominated as leader and theorist for several decades. At the heart of Healy's control was a meticulous and frequently brutal application of Leninist principles, at least as Healy interpreted them. Aidan Beatty's recent book, The Party is Always Right, takes an unsparing look at Healy's lengthy and notorious career, tracing his life story from his upbringing in revolutionary Ireland to his final disgrace and downfall. In doing so, Beatty performs an important service in bringing to light the human toll Healy's regime of repression, directly antithetical to the most basic values of socialism, took on those who devoted themselves to him.

In Private Property and the Fear of Social Chaos, Aidan Beatty argues for a long history of priva... more In Private Property and the Fear of Social Chaos, Aidan Beatty argues for a long history of private property and its relationship to social order in the modern Anglophone world. The first three chapters consider 'theories' of private property, while the second half of the book examines its 'practices' in relation to specific case studies in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book's first half considers theories of private property as espoused by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, outlining the historical contingencies that shaped developing understandings of private property, race, and gender in modern capitalist societies. In concentrating upon these theorists, Beatty seeks to introduce the reader to 'the three dominant strands of politics within Anglophone Atlantic capitalism', and the threat of the 'mob' around which each pivoted, whether socialist and communist, conservative, or liberal. This effectively underscores the elements of practice upon which Beatty later draws, although the book arguably operates from a theoretical standpoint throughout, with the conceptual framing of private property leading to discussions of its implementation in the second half of the book, if not its experience. At the start of the second half-'Practices'-Beatty begins by considering slavery in the American Deep South. Here, Beatty explores the ways in which slavery reinforced connections between property and capitalism, exploring how social theorists like George Fitzhugh constructed abolition itself as a threat to the upholding of a propertied order in its entirety, with ramifications beyond the property relations of slaveowners alone. The analysis then moves to consider housing in the Truman era, outlining the struggles faced by an administration that purportedly strove to balance private housing interests with some level of state intervention. Beatty makes an interesting and persuasive point here around the endurance and ultimate triumph of a privatized 'way of thinking and seeing the world'. In the final chapter, Beatty turns his attention to private property in Thatcher's Britain. For Thatcher, the mob could be characterized into racialized, gendered, and socialist terms, but combatted through a healthy dose (medical rhetoric is shown to be Thatcher's linguistic weapon of choice here) of retrospectively constructed and deployed nostalgia for a heteronormative, patriarchal order. Beatty ends with an epilogue that speculates upon the role of private property in 'space fantasies' of the future, asking questions of ambitions towards 'interplanetary settler-colonialism', a framing that deliberately looks back to the Lockean roots of such a concept introduced in the first chapter.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-irish-and-the-jews/

British and American governments competed and sometimes collaborated for influence in the region.... more British and American governments competed and sometimes collaborated for influence in the region. By mid-century on the isthmus, however, the United States began to overshadow British control, first with the construction of the Panama Railroad (1850s), then with a series of military interventions (13 in total), and finally with the annexation of the Panama Canal Zone and creation of the new Republic of Panama in 1903. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the Caribbean seemed to look to the United States like the Mediterranean did to the British-a sea of imperial authority.

The scholarly study of masculinities has emerged as a dynamic field within Irish history in recen... more The scholarly study of masculinities has emerged as a dynamic field within Irish history in recent years. This historiographical essay surveys this field, identifying recurring themes and possible avenues for further exploration and research. The essay identifies a first wave of Irish masculinities studies that focused on high politics in the period from 1912–23 and a more recent cohort of researchers that build on these earlier works by adopting innovative methodologies from fields such as the history of emotions and the history of everyday life.

Between the Easter Rising of 1916 and the War of Independence of 1919-1922, Irish nationalists ma... more Between the Easter Rising of 1916 and the War of Independence of 1919-1922, Irish nationalists made a push to break from Britain. This culminated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922, which gave Ireland a dominion status within the Empire and required all Irish politicians to swear an oath to the British King; disputes over whether to accept this Treaty precipitated the Irish Civil War, which lasted until 1924. In this paper, I examine how the various strands of Irish nationalists discussed the nature of Irish national sovereignty in those years. Ostensibly, Irish nationalism had converted to a full-blown Republicanism in this period; the main nationalist militia changed its name from the Irish Volunteers to the Irish Republican Army. Sinn Féin [We Ourselves], became the dominant political party, their name suggesting complete separation from the British constitutional monarchy. Countless pamphlets and handbills spoke of the Republic that was just over the horizon. And when the Civil War erupted, it divided the country between those who identified as Republicans and those that they identified as closet imperialists and lackeys of the British Crown. But as I show in this paper, "royalism" was actually a recurring theme across the spectrum of Irish nationalism. The embryonic "Republic" was pitched as a successor to the national sovereignty of the ancient Kingdom of Ireland. National sovereignty was regularly understood as a return to the glory of mythical and semi-mythical ancient and medieval Irish kings, reflecting how nationalism often acts as a vehicle for the "janus-faced" modern perception of historical time. Leading republicans even openly stated that they would accept the appointment of a new King of Ireland, provided he was an indigenous and fully sovereign Irish King. And all of this also shows how Irish nationalists remained affected by regnant British ideas of sovereignty; Irish republicanism was as much a product of the encounter with Britain as it was also a desire for a break with Britain. Examining the function and recurrence of royalism in Irish republicanism thus reveals important paradoxes and contradictions within nationalist thought and praxis in the years before and after formal independence.

In 1932, the Irish Free State became embroiled in an Economic War, when the newly elected de Vale... more In 1932, the Irish Free State became embroiled in an Economic War, when the newly elected de Valera government intentionally defaulted on annuities owed by Irish farmers to the British government under the terms of the 1891 and 1909 Land Acts. This ‘post-colonial wrangle’, as the economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda termed it, was one of the seminal elements of 1930s Irish politics; the debates and actions around the annuities issue helped to redefine the Treatyite divisions of 1920s Ireland into the economic divisions of a populist Fianna Fáil versus a conservative and quasi-fascist Fine Gael in the 1930s. This chapter
studies the various pamphlets published in the 1920s and 1930s in which these politico-economic issues were debated, from the socialist writings of Peadar O’Donnell to works produced by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael ideologues.

This chapter examines the triangular relationship between masculine revival, economic revival, an... more This chapter examines the triangular relationship between masculine revival, economic revival, and national revival in the Irish Free State of the 1920s and 1930s. As Fianna Fáil rose in power at the end of the 1920s, so too did their representation of Irish rural masculinity as the national ideal; the sturdy self-sufficient farmer became a national treasure. Building on the popularity of this imagery, and the longstanding
emotional and economic power of the Irish landscape dating back to the land reforms of the 1880s, Fianna Fáil positioned itself after 1930 as the only Irish political party that could and would achieve the social and economic advancement of the ‘small man’.

Chapters 3 and 4 seek to focus on the experience of external visitors to the gardens. The chapter... more Chapters 3 and 4 seek to focus on the experience of external visitors to the gardens. The chapters show how gardens became spaces of leisure for tourists and locals and link this phenomenon with the history of public parks. Chapter 3 focuses on the practicalities of accessing the gardens and what visitors were looking for when visiting them, while chapter 4 explores the way people would interpret and understand, or "read," the gardens, often through tools such as catalogs, guidebooks, or thanks to the knowledge of the staff. These two chapters make remarkable use of limited sources on these topics. Chapter 5 demonstrates that medical men also used their gardens for agricultural experiments, combining pleasure and usefulness. It highlights their participation in the improvement movement. Chapter 6 is described as an exploration of sociability in the garden but moves on quite quickly from reflections on parties in gardens to more general remarks that bring a conclusion to the overall book. The aptly titled "Epilogue" is then dedicated to a discussion of heritage practices in gardens and how the academic analysis of the book could contribute to them. Hickman explores many engaging themes that are unfortunately invisible in the table of contents but come back periodically throughout the book. One of these hidden topics is the crucial role of gardeners as expert technicians, which appears first in the very first chapter, but is also discussed in several other parts of the book. There are also some considerations of the entanglement of the medico-gentility with colonial and imperial networks, which is partly the subject of chapter 2, but appears in several other places too. Though they are less numerous, there are also some reflections on the connections between Lettsom's Quaker faith and his medical and gardening practices. Hickman has done a remarkable job of working on gardens that have long disappeared and are often not very well documented. She has put together an impressive array of sources on each of the gardens, allowing her to discuss topics like visitors' reception of the gardens, or the work of gardeners, which are famously difficult to access. Since the book does not contain any comparison with nonmedical gardens, it is at times difficult to tell if the practices described were specific or unique to doctors. There may also have been space for a reflection on how different actors would make decisions regarding their gardens. Some examples were private gardens in which the owner would have most likely been free to do whatever they fancied, and others, especially botanic gardens, that were attached to institutions or societies with established goals, which would have limited the freedom of their managers. The book does an excellent job of showing what all the examples had in common but does not necessarily highlight the diversity that could still exist in such a sample. Overall, The Doctor's Garden will likely be relevant for most people working on the period in one way or another, and is an enjoyable read. Through its interdisciplinary lens, it brings a welcome renewal to the field of garden studies.

Fianna Fáil have long posed an odd paradox in Irish history writing; so central to Irish politics... more Fianna Fáil have long posed an odd paradox in Irish history writing; so central to Irish politics and yet so very much understudied. Only a handful of academic monographs have studied the party, Kieran Allen's Fianna Fáil and Irish labour and Richard Dunphy's The making of Fianna Fáil power in Ireland being the two dominant texts. Kenneth Shonk's monograph, tightly focused on the party's formative and more radical early years and adeptly plugged into recent currents in Irish gender history, makes a serious addition to this field. An initial preparatory chapter provides an overview of Fianna Fáil's early history and political innovations and the party's efforts to disprove any accusations that they were 'irrational, emotional, militant, and thus feminised agents of disorder'. The subsequent chapters focus, in turn, on the party's understandings of femininity and masculinity. Shonk's final chapter then suggests, in a fascinating way of thinking about Irish gender history, that once these properly nationalist Irish feminine and Irish masculine archetypes were realised, they 'could then engage in the act of symbolic national coitus upon which a new Ireland could be based'. This is fascinating but it also means that the book sometimes remains wedded to a binary understanding of 'gender', one that only allows for two optionsmale or female. However, at other times, Shonk carefully recognises that Fianna Fáil in the 1920s were attacked for being the wrong kind of irrational and violent men, rather than for being feminised. Cumann na nGaedheal presented itself as a law-and-order party, against the disorder and ostensible queerness of militant republicanism, which was pitched as neither male nor female but something uncomfortably in-between. Early in the book Shonk states that under Fianna Fáil, 'the people of Ireland were now asked to direct their energies towards the inculcation of republican ideology into all aspects of their daily life'. In statements like this, he verges on an overly totalising understanding of the party and its activities. Were Fianna Fáil really ever successful at so massive a restructuring of Irish life? At a later point, he asserts that 'The recasting of Irish republicanism under the guise of de Valera's party coalesced around its larger discourse, such that all aspects of the Irish polity came to be viewed in direct relation to the renascent movement enabled by the economic war' [my emphasis]. Fianna Fáil may have wanted this, but it is hardly the case that they actually achieved it. Nonetheless, the book does trace the shifts from Sinn Féin to Fianna Fáil with an admirable level of patience for the subtleties of party-political ideologies. In his chapter on 'The Irish feminine', for example, Shonk shows how the well-known coercion of Irish women in the Free State period co-existed alongside a desire to transform Irish women into nationalist consumers and even, in a very controlled way, to give political agency to women (provided that agency was used in ways deemed correct by Fianna Fáil). Where women were encouraged to be consumers, men were encouraged to be producers. Drawing on the party's visual material, Shonk shows how Fianna Fáil emphasised speed, dynamism and growth, tropes that were familiar from other inter-war European nationalist movements that sought to avoid the trappings of both capitalism and communism. At the same time, Shonk is careful enough to point out that Fianna Fáil's political aesthetics was also the result of the party's 'Keynesian leanings' and their 'monetary alchemy'. The party's vision of manliness served as 'the pedagogical model of the Irish masculine' and 'If Fianna Fáil was pedagogical, then de Valera was the professor'. Seeking to go beyond the consensus view that Ireland was unaffected by the interwar politics of continental Europe, Ireland's new traditionalists pursues a cautious comparison throughout with continental fascist movements. Shonk remains rightly cautious in his comparisons to interwar Europe; rather than arguing that Fianna Fáil was a variant of fascism, he makes the more apt point that it was a product of the same moment in European politics, when questions of national sovereignty, borders, essentialised understandings of national identity and a desire for an ordered and disciplined mass politics were to the fore. In doing this, the book also tacitly moves past the various historians who, with an incredibly selective memory, have described post-1922 Ireland as a democratic, pragmatic or liberal polity. Shonk ends his narrative firmly in 1938, resisting any temptation to trace Fianna Fáil's trajectory through the Lemass, Lynch or Haughey years. Nevertheless, this book

It would be almost too obvious to say that this is a timely book. With the resurgence of overt an... more It would be almost too obvious to say that this is a timely book. With the resurgence of overt antisemitism in recent years-not least the online proliferation of "cultural Marxist" as a thinly veiled alt-right slur-Paul Hanebrink's excavation of the Jews-as-communists myth arrives at a grimly appropriate time. Primarily focused on East Central Europe while also pulling in material from across the continent, the result is an engaged and sophisticated genealogy of one specific strand of antisemitic paranoia. As the book adeptly illustrates, the assumption that communism was a Jewish plot was "a core element of counterrevolutionary, antidemocratic, and racist ideologies in many different countries" (p. 4). Thus, apprehending the myth of "Judeo-Bolshevism" is necessary for understanding the nature of Far-Right politics in both the past and present.

Print) 1469-9303 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisr20 J. M. Synge and... more Print) 1469-9303 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisr20 J. M. Synge and travel writing of the Irish revival

a f fo on nd da az zi io on ne e d de el l d di is sc co or rs so o r re ea az zi io on na ar ri ... more a f fo on nd da az zi io on ne e d de el l d di is sc co or rs so o r re ea az zi io on na ar ri io o A Ai id da an n B Be ea at tt ty y 9 Marzo 2023 Anche Giorgia Meloni invoca spesso Edmund Burke come primo teorico del conservatorismo moderno. Le sue teorie contro la Rivoluzione francese si basano su antisemitismo, disprezzo per le masse e invenzione del «nemico esterno» el 1789, Charles-Jean-François Depont, un aristocratico liberale francese, scrisse al politico e filosofo britannico di origine irlandese Edmund Burke, chiedendogli le sue opinioni sulla La fondazione del discorso reazionario-Jacobin Italia https://jacobinitalia.it/la-fondazione-del-discorso-reazionario/

Right-wingers often hail Edmund Burke as a founding father of modern conservatism. His Reflection... more Right-wingers often hail Edmund Burke as a founding father of modern conservatism. His Reflections on the Revolution in France is based on fear of the mob-and a racialized worldview that blames Jews for upsetting the "natural" social order. In 1789, Charles-Jean-François Depont, an aristocratic French liberal, wrote to the Irish-born British politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, asking him his views of the emerging revolution in France. Burke had been a cautious sympathizer of the American Revolution a decade earlier, and Depont hoped that he would now also lend his support to the French Revolution. Depont was to be sorely disappointed. Even before Depont's letter, Burke was becoming increasingly uneasy about the events of the French Revolution. He was especially disturbed by the looming threat that Jacobinism would cross the English Channel and upset the supposed social harmonies of Britain. When the radical preacher Richard Price used a public meeting at the Old Jewry Meeting House in London in November 1789 to welcome this importation of French radicalism, Burke was truly horrified (an emotional response that only intensified when Price's speech began to circulate nationally as a pamphlet). As he drafted his increasingly long response to Depont, Burke began to zero in on the "Jewish" location of Richard Price's speech.

Opinion: sci-fi capitalists would have us believe that outer space is just another empty space wa... more Opinion: sci-fi capitalists would have us believe that outer space is just another empty space waiting to be turned into a tech utopia By Aidan Beatty, University of Pittsburgh A number of prominent thinkers on the Left, from Mark Fisher to David Graeber, have argued that we live in a world where we no longer enjoy utopian visions of any kind of better future to come. In an age of climate breakdown, pandemic and the return of overt white supremacy, it can be hard to have a positive sense of the future. Yet one small remnant of utopianism lingers in an unusual place: the fantasies of tech billionaires, from Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, that they will one day launch privatised expeditions into the cosmos. On the surface, these claims are often poorly thought out or even absurd and seem more like publicity stunts than realistic attempts to launch actual extra-planetary flights. Branson once promised that his Virgin Galactic company would become the first commercial spaceline, with flights starting in 2007 and flying 3,000 people in the first five years.

Paul Childs/Reuters On Monday, Boris Johnson floated a bold new plan: giving housing associations... more Paul Childs/Reuters On Monday, Boris Johnson floated a bold new plan: giving housing associations tenants the chance to buy their houses. Under the plan, some 2.5 million tenants would be allowed to put housing benefits towards mortgages, using public funds to create private property.

Reviewed by Aidan Joseph Beatty ne of the more annoying products of the four Trump years has been... more Reviewed by Aidan Joseph Beatty ne of the more annoying products of the four Trump years has been a certain genre of very lamentable journalism in which legacy media platforms seek to understand, and come to terms, and even empathize, with Trump's supporters. Often appearing in high-end outlets like the New York Times, these articles-such as an egregious November 2017 NYT portrait of the Ohio neo-Nazi Tony Hovater-exude an ethnographic tone in seeking to unpack the concerns and political motivations of these seemingly exotic Trump voters who are invariably white and working class and usually male (or, at the very least, have "normal" ideas about gender and sexuality). The Review: Tanya Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web ... http://logosjournal.com/2021/review-tanya-lavin-culture-warlords-my-jo...

elena Sheehan is a well-known and well-established presence on the Irish Left, an activist-academ... more elena Sheehan is a well-known and well-established presence on the Irish Left, an activist-academic with a strong form in meditative Marxist thought as well more accessible political commentary. As she shows in her new memoir, Navigating the Zeitgeist, it would be almost too obvious to say she led an "interesting" life, moving from post-war suburbia and a brief period as a nun, to communism and Irish republicanism; she narrates each of these stages of her life in a fast-moving and engaging (but not always problem-free) style.

Nicos Poulantzas is a thinker awaiting a revival of interest. A theorist of states, classes, and ... more Nicos Poulantzas is a thinker awaiting a revival of interest. A theorist of states, classes, and the dynamics of fascism and authoritarianism, his work has some obvious relevance for contemporary political problems. Born in Greece in 1936, he relocated to Germany and then France for graduate study and was effectively exiled after 1967 by the rule of the Greek colonels. In Political Power and Social Classes, published at the end of the sixties, and in State, Power, Socialism, a decade later, Poulantzas developed a complex conceptual model for understanding the workings of capitalist states. Both books were quickly translated into English and published by what was then called New Left Books, subsequently Verso Books.

In Hail, Caesar! the Coen Brother's recent paean to 1950s Hollywood, there is a curiously politic... more In Hail, Caesar! the Coen Brother's recent paean to 1950s Hollywood, there is a curiously political scene in a later part of the film: Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) a popular cinematic heartthrob is kidnapped by a group of disgruntled (and secretly communist) screenwriters. Having hidden him in a well-appointed beach-front property, the kidnappers add insult to injury when they force the leading-man to attend their interminably boring Marxist discussion group. Initially confused, Baird Whitlock falls under the spell of the circle's philosophical guru, a vaguely mitteleuropäische academic named Prof. Marcuse and is soon speaking a leftist lingo, spouting talk of "theories generating their own anti-theories". For those in the know, "Prof. Marcuse" was a recognizable figure, a barely concealed remake of Herbert Marcuse, the radical German-Jewish social theorist. And Marcuse's densely-worded philosophy is accorded a similar status as the sword-and-sandal epics and camp musicals pastiched in Hail, Caesar!; all are cultural artifacts from a distant past. For sure they are presented with a fairly gentle nostalgia. But it is a nostalgia that reinforces how old-fashioned this all is for twenty-first-century viewers. Densely Hegelian Marxist philosophy is a lot like technicolor cinema; they don't make them like that any more.

Masculinities on the British Fringe A One Day Conference at the University of Chicago 25 Ap... more Masculinities on the British Fringe

A One Day Conference at the University of Chicago

25 April 2015

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Prof. Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck College, London.

While much of the scholarly study of masculinity in Britain has focused on the construction of mainstream and normative middle-class ideals of English male behaviour, this conference will focus on the lived realities of those on the fringes of British society, both the Celtic fringe as well as immigrant and working class masculinity. The conference seeks to explore how such fringe masculinities co-existed with, had an influence on, and were influenced by, more mainstream concepts of male behaviour.

Potential papers could include, but are not limited to:
- Working class masculinity
- Manliness, language, and nationalism on the Celtic fringe
- Conflicting ideas of masculinity in post-1945 multi-cultural Britain
- Comparative studies of British masculinities across the Empire
- British Homosexuality
- Everyday life in the Armed Forces
- Masculine ideals and religious minorities
- The division-of-labour as a gender-division in the British economy

Please send abstracts of 300 words to Aidan Beatty (ajbeatty@uchicago.edu) and Amanda Blair (amandahelenb@uchicago.edu). Deadline for submissions – 30 September 2014.

Miracles: An Encyclopedia of People, Places, and Supernatural Events from Antiquity to the Present