Malachi Hacohen - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Malachi Hacohen
Encyclopedia of the Bible Online
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of Euro... more This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The é migré s form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish é migré s. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Popper and Agassi diverged on nationalism. Popper was a trenchant critic whereas Agassi formed a ... more Popper and Agassi diverged on nationalism. Popper was a trenchant critic whereas Agassi formed a theory of liberal nationalism. At the root of their disagreement was Popper’s refusal of Jewish identity and rejection of Zionism, in contrast with Agassi’s affirmation of progressive Jewishness and liberal Zionism. Both Agassi and Popper, however, rejected ethnonationalism. To hedge against it, they ignored the claims of ethnocultural communities. This essay will highlight Agassi’s liberal theory of the nation state but urge that we overcome Critical Rationalists’ instinctive aversion to ethnicity, and accommodate ethnocultural communities. We should also explore again both Popper’s democratic imperialism and cosmopolitan diasporas, to think a future beyond nationalism.
Business History Review, 2011
Book Reviews / 633 policyholders, companies may have faced pressure (political or otherwise) to t... more Book Reviews / 633 policyholders, companies may have faced pressure (political or otherwise) to treat their customers with more leniency. Regarding the failure of most stock companies in the U.S. to pay dividends to their policyholders, one reason might lie in the existence, often within the same company, of other investment opportunities for such customers. To this end, more discussion of the "trust" side of New York Life and Trust's business would have been helpful, as would have, more generally, some material on the investment activities of these early insurance companies. (In her brief mention of investing, Murphy suggests that she did not pursue this line of inquiry owing to gaps in the archival record.) Murphy claims in her introduction to Investing in Life that she originally intended to revisit the history of American life insurance during the Gilded Age. Her decision to focus instead on an earlier periodbefore the rise of New York Life, Equitable, and Mutual of New York, before the dominance of industrial fi rms such as Met Life, John Hancock, and the Prudential, and before the consolidation of state insurance commissioners made them important bastions of federalism-will surely prove invaluable to the historian who does tackle that topic. As she persuasively argues, most of these features of Gilded Age fi nance found their start in the less showy, but no less interesting, history of antebellum American life insurance.
Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, 2022
Modern Intellectual History, 2009
Vienna's scientific culture has long attracted historians' attention. Impressive though t... more Vienna's scientific culture has long attracted historians' attention. Impressive though the scientific accomplishments of Viennese scientists were, and recognized by numerous Nobel prizes, they alone do not account for the historians' interest. Rather, Vienna's culture of science was imbedded in broader humanistic visions and invested in political and educational projects of major historical significance. Viennese philosophy placed humanity's hopes in science and articulated its historical ramifications to the public, drawing out the political implications of competing scientific methodologies and tying them to dramatic historical events. This philosophy of science still reverberates nowadays in debates on liberty, markets, and government that quickly reveal their underpinning in the methodology of science. Vienna's scientific culture, it seems, has never ceased to capture the imagination, far beyond Austria.
Jewish Social Studies, 2009
... The little noticed result of negative liberty was to set limits to the demands of citizenship... more ... The little noticed result of negative liberty was to set limits to the demands of citizenship. If the nation-state wished to remain liberal, it could not demand absolute loyalty. ... In the 1970s, hereformulated his theory on the origins of nationalism as the "bent-twig theory." 48 ...
The Impact of Critical Rationalism, 2018
IntroductIon "I am reading with great interest your dissertation and hope it will become a book,"... more IntroductIon "I am reading with great interest your dissertation and hope it will become a book," wrote me Ian in an October 1994 email, our first communication. "Not that I agree with everything in it, far from it," he added. Then, he proceeded to invite me to contribute to a special issue of Philosophy of the Social Sciences, "The Open Society After 50 Years." This was the beginning of a decade long correspondence on Popper and his philosophy. We met in person on several occasions: I invited Ian, in 2000, for a Vienna "rehearsal" of "Scientific World Conceptions," a summer course that has since become the flagship program of the University of Vienna Summer School. We then attended together the HOPOS conference. We met again at the Karl Popper Centenary Congress in Vienna two years later. My essays on Karl Popper (Hacohen 1996, 2006) outline the Popper phase in my life. Ian was an integral part of it, someone with whom I could discuss Popper's biography, politics, and sociology of science. Ian knew Popper well, both as his student in the 1960s and as a scholar, but he charted his
Religions, 2012
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of Euro... more This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The é migré s form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish é migré s. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
This article takes up one of the most perplexing and thoroughly examined questions posed by Shake... more This article takes up one of the most perplexing and thoroughly examined questions posed by Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice – the origin and extent of Antonio’s melancholy. While many critical responses point to anxieties towards his ventures abroad, unrequited romantic love or general indecisiveness to explain the merchant’s sadness, this reading asserts that his atrabilious nature must stem from something more latent, comprehensive and socially binding. This article argues that it is Antonio’s unwanted, yet pre-existing and indisputable similitude with Shylock, the Jewish usurer, that incites an internal sadness; Antonio’s insistence upon his absolute difference to Shylock’s profession, religion and humanity ignites and prolongs melancholy, since those are, ironically, the very things that make them so similar and renders his opposition unsuccessful.
The paradigm of Jacob & Esau, which portrayed Jewish-Christian relations for two-millennia, has c... more The paradigm of Jacob & Esau, which portrayed Jewish-Christian relations for two-millennia, has collapsed in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel. Portrayals of Jacob & Esau have changed radically in both European and Israeli cultures. The two have moved in both parallel and opposite directions. Europeans have embraced the traditional Jewish Jacob and declared him European, indeed a model for European culture. Israeli writers, in contrast, have distanced themselves from the Jewish Jacob, whether rabbinic or Zionist, and converted him into a universal type, a lover and a mourner. Esau has been largely absent in non-Jewish discourse but has enjoyed rehabilitation among both Zionists and post-Zionists, most notably, among the Jewish Settlers. The new Jacob & Esau part with the traditional Jewish and Christian typologies. They mark an unprecedented age in Jewish history, and a new period in Jewish-Christian relations.
die 68er lieber Marcuse gelesen haben statt [Arthur] Koestler, Mans Sperber und Hannah Arendt,« s... more die 68er lieber Marcuse gelesen haben statt [Arthur] Koestler, Mans Sperber und Hannah Arendt,« said Daniel Cohn Bendit in 2005, »das war schlimm, genauso schlimm wie die RAF [Rote Armee Fraktion]!« 1 His comrade Joschka Fischer quietly agreed. Almost four decades after the generational conflict that pitted students against their teachers, the 68ers against leading ØmigrØs, the most thoughtful and successful among the rebels, chastened by political experience, revised their views of the elders, finding instruction in the political books they had previously ignored, or abhorred. Significantly, even as the 68ers' politics changed, the ØmigrØs remained their frame of reference. Cohn-Bendit and Fischer were merely taking a different side in the old fight: The former hero, Herbert Marcuse, now became a villain, and the former villains were now heroes. From beginning to end, the life of the 68ers was bound up with that of the ØmigrØs-whether reviled or admired. The ØmigrØs were the victims, symbolic and real, of the European past, against which the 68ers rebelled. »Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands« (we are all German Jews), chanted the Parisian students, defending Cohn-Bendit against French detractors. Wishing to set the past aright, the 68ers refocused social and academic attention on the ØmigrØs, sought their approval and developed a new * This was originally a Ringvorlesung in the series, »1968 als Ereignis und Symbol,« organized by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Vienna, and given on 24 May 2008 at the University of Vienna. Thanks to Friedrich Stadler and Christoph Limbeck for the organization and for comments and to
Encyclopedia of the Bible Online
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of Euro... more This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The é migré s form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish é migré s. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Popper and Agassi diverged on nationalism. Popper was a trenchant critic whereas Agassi formed a ... more Popper and Agassi diverged on nationalism. Popper was a trenchant critic whereas Agassi formed a theory of liberal nationalism. At the root of their disagreement was Popper’s refusal of Jewish identity and rejection of Zionism, in contrast with Agassi’s affirmation of progressive Jewishness and liberal Zionism. Both Agassi and Popper, however, rejected ethnonationalism. To hedge against it, they ignored the claims of ethnocultural communities. This essay will highlight Agassi’s liberal theory of the nation state but urge that we overcome Critical Rationalists’ instinctive aversion to ethnicity, and accommodate ethnocultural communities. We should also explore again both Popper’s democratic imperialism and cosmopolitan diasporas, to think a future beyond nationalism.
Business History Review, 2011
Book Reviews / 633 policyholders, companies may have faced pressure (political or otherwise) to t... more Book Reviews / 633 policyholders, companies may have faced pressure (political or otherwise) to treat their customers with more leniency. Regarding the failure of most stock companies in the U.S. to pay dividends to their policyholders, one reason might lie in the existence, often within the same company, of other investment opportunities for such customers. To this end, more discussion of the "trust" side of New York Life and Trust's business would have been helpful, as would have, more generally, some material on the investment activities of these early insurance companies. (In her brief mention of investing, Murphy suggests that she did not pursue this line of inquiry owing to gaps in the archival record.) Murphy claims in her introduction to Investing in Life that she originally intended to revisit the history of American life insurance during the Gilded Age. Her decision to focus instead on an earlier periodbefore the rise of New York Life, Equitable, and Mutual of New York, before the dominance of industrial fi rms such as Met Life, John Hancock, and the Prudential, and before the consolidation of state insurance commissioners made them important bastions of federalism-will surely prove invaluable to the historian who does tackle that topic. As she persuasively argues, most of these features of Gilded Age fi nance found their start in the less showy, but no less interesting, history of antebellum American life insurance.
Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, 2022
Modern Intellectual History, 2009
Vienna's scientific culture has long attracted historians' attention. Impressive though t... more Vienna's scientific culture has long attracted historians' attention. Impressive though the scientific accomplishments of Viennese scientists were, and recognized by numerous Nobel prizes, they alone do not account for the historians' interest. Rather, Vienna's culture of science was imbedded in broader humanistic visions and invested in political and educational projects of major historical significance. Viennese philosophy placed humanity's hopes in science and articulated its historical ramifications to the public, drawing out the political implications of competing scientific methodologies and tying them to dramatic historical events. This philosophy of science still reverberates nowadays in debates on liberty, markets, and government that quickly reveal their underpinning in the methodology of science. Vienna's scientific culture, it seems, has never ceased to capture the imagination, far beyond Austria.
Jewish Social Studies, 2009
... The little noticed result of negative liberty was to set limits to the demands of citizenship... more ... The little noticed result of negative liberty was to set limits to the demands of citizenship. If the nation-state wished to remain liberal, it could not demand absolute loyalty. ... In the 1970s, hereformulated his theory on the origins of nationalism as the "bent-twig theory." 48 ...
The Impact of Critical Rationalism, 2018
IntroductIon "I am reading with great interest your dissertation and hope it will become a book,"... more IntroductIon "I am reading with great interest your dissertation and hope it will become a book," wrote me Ian in an October 1994 email, our first communication. "Not that I agree with everything in it, far from it," he added. Then, he proceeded to invite me to contribute to a special issue of Philosophy of the Social Sciences, "The Open Society After 50 Years." This was the beginning of a decade long correspondence on Popper and his philosophy. We met in person on several occasions: I invited Ian, in 2000, for a Vienna "rehearsal" of "Scientific World Conceptions," a summer course that has since become the flagship program of the University of Vienna Summer School. We then attended together the HOPOS conference. We met again at the Karl Popper Centenary Congress in Vienna two years later. My essays on Karl Popper (Hacohen 1996, 2006) outline the Popper phase in my life. Ian was an integral part of it, someone with whom I could discuss Popper's biography, politics, and sociology of science. Ian knew Popper well, both as his student in the 1960s and as a scholar, but he charted his
Religions, 2012
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of Euro... more This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The é migré s form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish é migré s. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
This article takes up one of the most perplexing and thoroughly examined questions posed by Shake... more This article takes up one of the most perplexing and thoroughly examined questions posed by Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice – the origin and extent of Antonio’s melancholy. While many critical responses point to anxieties towards his ventures abroad, unrequited romantic love or general indecisiveness to explain the merchant’s sadness, this reading asserts that his atrabilious nature must stem from something more latent, comprehensive and socially binding. This article argues that it is Antonio’s unwanted, yet pre-existing and indisputable similitude with Shylock, the Jewish usurer, that incites an internal sadness; Antonio’s insistence upon his absolute difference to Shylock’s profession, religion and humanity ignites and prolongs melancholy, since those are, ironically, the very things that make them so similar and renders his opposition unsuccessful.
The paradigm of Jacob & Esau, which portrayed Jewish-Christian relations for two-millennia, has c... more The paradigm of Jacob & Esau, which portrayed Jewish-Christian relations for two-millennia, has collapsed in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel. Portrayals of Jacob & Esau have changed radically in both European and Israeli cultures. The two have moved in both parallel and opposite directions. Europeans have embraced the traditional Jewish Jacob and declared him European, indeed a model for European culture. Israeli writers, in contrast, have distanced themselves from the Jewish Jacob, whether rabbinic or Zionist, and converted him into a universal type, a lover and a mourner. Esau has been largely absent in non-Jewish discourse but has enjoyed rehabilitation among both Zionists and post-Zionists, most notably, among the Jewish Settlers. The new Jacob & Esau part with the traditional Jewish and Christian typologies. They mark an unprecedented age in Jewish history, and a new period in Jewish-Christian relations.
die 68er lieber Marcuse gelesen haben statt [Arthur] Koestler, Mans Sperber und Hannah Arendt,« s... more die 68er lieber Marcuse gelesen haben statt [Arthur] Koestler, Mans Sperber und Hannah Arendt,« said Daniel Cohn Bendit in 2005, »das war schlimm, genauso schlimm wie die RAF [Rote Armee Fraktion]!« 1 His comrade Joschka Fischer quietly agreed. Almost four decades after the generational conflict that pitted students against their teachers, the 68ers against leading ØmigrØs, the most thoughtful and successful among the rebels, chastened by political experience, revised their views of the elders, finding instruction in the political books they had previously ignored, or abhorred. Significantly, even as the 68ers' politics changed, the ØmigrØs remained their frame of reference. Cohn-Bendit and Fischer were merely taking a different side in the old fight: The former hero, Herbert Marcuse, now became a villain, and the former villains were now heroes. From beginning to end, the life of the 68ers was bound up with that of the ØmigrØs-whether reviled or admired. The ØmigrØs were the victims, symbolic and real, of the European past, against which the 68ers rebelled. »Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands« (we are all German Jews), chanted the Parisian students, defending Cohn-Bendit against French detractors. Wishing to set the past aright, the 68ers refocused social and academic attention on the ØmigrØs, sought their approval and developed a new * This was originally a Ringvorlesung in the series, »1968 als Ereignis und Symbol,« organized by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Vienna, and given on 24 May 2008 at the University of Vienna. Thanks to Friedrich Stadler and Christoph Limbeck for the organization and for comments and to