Academic literature on the topic 'Social classes – Political aspects – Europe, Western'

Class inequality provides fertile ground for the development of class divisions in political interests. Post-communist societies display evidence of such inequality and — despite expectations to the contrary — of its correlates: high levels of class identification, perceived relative deprivation between classes, and links between class position and economic expectations. These aspects of class formation are in turn accompanied by the endorsement of divergent political programmes by social classes. Marketisation is thus providing the conditions under which classrelated, ‘left-right’ divisions reminiscent of those in Western democracies, structure politics in Eastern Europe.

The emergence of postwar welfare states in Europe is usually understood as a social and political phenomenon, as a social policy to prevent against forms of mass poverty and to grant general social rights and entitlements to populations during a period of rising prosperity. Beyond these sociopolitical aspects, the foundation of systems of social security after 1945 also had important cultural and epistemic implications. The promise of the state to provide a generalized form of security represented an important cultural factor in securing the social and political stability of postwar societies in Europe. This article examines some exemplary aspects of the meaning of social security by tracing their historical roots and their effects on postwar welfare states in Western Europe. In order to chart the various, interconnected cultural meanings of social security, it juxtaposes two institutional contexts in which social security and prevention were discussed: an international organization of social security experts and a Swiss life insurance company with an innovative health promotion service. The article shows how security was seen ultimately as an utopian response to the multiplication of risks and damages through the processes of industrialization and modernization and thus reveals how security served as both a technical concept for managing integrated systems of insurance and an instrument of control and calculation to help administer the economic and social policies of modern societies. By focusing on the example of life insurance, it demonstrates how security acted as an umbrella term for a generalized model of prevention that targeted the specific risks of a modern, middle-class consumer society.

During the 1980s and 1990s in countries across the globe, new populist protest movements and radical political organizations emerged to challenge traditional parties, ruling elites, and professional politicians, and even long-standing social norms. The revolts against politics-as-usual have arisen from many kinds of social groupings and from diverse points on the political spectrum. Through the 1980s, in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and North America, populist discontent erupted intermittently. But the end of the Cold War, particularly in Europe, unleashed a torrent of popular movements and political parties opposed to what the discontented perceived as the corruption and deceitfulness of the political classes and their corporate patrons. Some protest movements promoted more democracy, pluralism, and economic opportunity; some expressed intolerance, bigotry, and xenophobic nationalism.

Scholars have taken a considerable interest in how global immigration to Europe generates public concern, but we still know little about the role that migration from within the European region has in fueling apprehensions. To better understand this, I examine how public attitudes towards immigration have responded to migration following the European Union’s most extensive enlargement along its eastern border in 2004. Using recent advances in multilevel modeling, this article analyzes the longitudinal, cross-sectional relationship between east–west internal European migration on public attitudes towards the economic and cultural aspects of immigration in Western Europe using individual-level data from the European Social Survey (2004–2014). The results demonstrate that growing populations of Central and Eastern European foreigners have contributed to Western Europeans’ perception of immigration as an economic threat, even when taking into account simultaneous immigration from outside Europe. Moreover, the relationship between east–west immigration and an individual’s perception of immigration as a threat is conditional upon their socio-economic status. These findings underscore how within-European immigration in Western Europe has become consequential to the public’s attitudes about immigration more generally.

Citation: Chauvel L. (2020) The Western Middle Classes under Stress: Welfare State Retrenchments, Globalization, and Declining Returns to Education. Mir Rossii, vol. 29, no 4,pp. 85–111. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2020-29-4-85-111 Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Gustav Schmoller before him, the multipolarity of the middle classes between higher and lower, and between cultural and economic capitalsis well acknowledged. This old vision is useful to understand the “middle classes adrift” of the last 20 years in France and Continental Europe. The expansion of the “new wage earner middle class” of the 1960s to 1990s is now an old dream of the welfare state expansion of Western societies, and the European social structure now faces a trend of repatrimonialization”, meaning a U-turn towards a decline in the value of mid-qualified work and an expansion of the return to the inheritance of family assets. This paper addresses three main points. First, a new description of repatrimonialization is useful in the specific European context of middle-class societies. We need a redefinition of the system of middle classes (plural) in the context of the construction and decline of strong welfare states. Second, there are three ruptures in the social trends of the ‘wage earner society’ of the 1960s to 1990s. In this period, economic growth, social homogenization and social protection were major contextual elements of the expansion of ‘the new middle class,’ based on educationalmeritocracy, the valorization of credentialed skills, and the expansion of the average wage compared to housing and capital assets (‘depatrimonialization’). After the 1990s, the rupture and reversal of these trends, with ‘stagnation’, ‘new inequalities’ and ‘social uncertainty’ as new trends, generated a backlash in the “middle class society”. Third, I analyze the demographic and social consequences of these new trends in terms of the shrinking of the middle classes in a context where the inheritance of assets and resources changed the previous equilibrium. Finally, I highlight the importance of addressing the problem of social stability when large strata of the middle class have less interest in the maintenance of the social order.

Throughout modern history the majority of immigrants have occupied inferior socioeconomic positions and have settled in segregated communities. The migrant workers who came to the advanced industrial countries in Western Europe have had similar experiences. A closer examination of the legal and political circumstances surrounding their unanticipated prolonged presence reveals significant differences between the Western European situation and that encountered elsewhere. The original contract labor system legally provided sending countries with the opportunity to establish networks of organizations and institutions in the countries of destination. Although the sending countries' networks may vary in specifics, each represents an important dimension of that national community and helps to maintain an ideology of return. This, in turn, represents an important force in defining the situation for all participants—host societies, sending countries, and immigrants. The argument that one cannot approach all aspects of the European experience using theoretical models that may be appropriate for other situations is illustrated by examples of sending-country organizations active in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The article is devoted to the linguistic and social aspects of mastering English-language military terminology and its relevance in modern life realities. The author offers the development of military vocabulary in foreign language classes, regular acquaintance with news from authentic English-language sources and the preparation of concise political reports on a daily basis. This should help students to activate passive vocabulary in oral speech, as well as keep abreast of events, read news on foreign sites, be able to talk about them in the media and social networks, conduct dialogues with native English speakers on modern topics. The article also notes that due to the large number of people resettled in Europe due to the war, there is a need to conduct dialogues on military issues, generally actively communicate abroad, so the author emphasizes the need to learn and activate the military vocabulary of modern university graduates.

Differences in welfare attitudes of Eastern and Western Europeans have often been explained in terms of legacies of communism. In this article, we explore evaluations of healthcare systems across European countries and argue that East–West differences in these evaluations are explained by differences in the current institutional design of healthcare systems in the two regions. The empirical analysis is based on the fourth round of the European Social Survey, applying multilevel and multilevel mediation analysis. Our results support the institutional explanation. Regional differences in healthcare evaluations are explained by institutional characteristics of the healthcare system, that is, lower financial resources, higher out-of-pocket payments, and lower supply of primary healthcare services in Eastern compared to Western European countries. We conclude that specific aspects of the current institutional design of healthcare systems are crucial for understanding East–West differences in healthcare evaluations and encourage research to further explore the relevance of institutions for differences in welfare state attitudes across socio-political contexts.

The problem of regulating migration flows in the European Union has existed for a long time and is becomingmore difficult and complex every year. Due to the complexity of the distribution of migrants among the member countries of the organization, as well as the divergence of domestic interests of individual countries and the pan-European policy vector, internal opposition arises, which is expressed in protests and political initiatives that radicalize society. Such trends are developing especially actively in the countries of Western Europe, the most economically developed and progressive, which have taken over most of the legal migrants who have arrived. The migration policy of Western European countries has undergone a very strong metamorphosis over the past five years. Since the beginning of the migration crisis in 2015, it is possible to trace a significant strengthening and tightening of measures regulating the situation of migrants on the territory of states. It should be noted that during the same period, a new round of development of radical parties followed in many European countries, but it was in Western European countries that radical changes in politics took place. It is quite difficult to determine what impact migrants have on the state of the economy of states, as well as their relations with the indigenous inhabitants of Western European countries. Accordingly, the purpose of this article will be to consider the socio-economic impact of migrants on the countries of Western Europe during the period of radicalization of the policy of the states of the region in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Among the methods used in this study, it is necessary to distinguish empirical and theoretical ones, such as comparison, analysis and synthesis. The sources were considered on the basis of a system-structural approach to the study of complex political and social processes and phenomena, taking into account many aspects of the development of modern society and the political process in the countries. The analysis of the current situation was carried out on the basis of the principles of historicism, cultural and political continuity. The results of this study can be used in the future to form effective methods of countering social conflicts arising as a result of migration.

SynopsisThis study questions the widely held assumption that the phenomenon known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI) existsper sein nature as a psychiatric disorder. Most MPI studies are problematical, being descriptive, retrospective investigations of specific incidents which conform to a set of pre-existing symptom criteria that are used to determine the presence of collective psychosomatic illness. Diagnoses are based upon subjective, ambiguous categories that reflect stereotypes of female normality which assume the presence of a transcultural disease or disorder entity, underemphasizing or ignoring the significance of episodes as culturally conditioned roles of social action. Examples of this bias include the mislabelling of dancing manias, tarantism and demonopathy in Europe since the Middle Ages as culture-specific variants of MPI. While ‘victims’ are typified as mentally disturbed females possessing abnormal personality characteristics who are exhibiting cathartic reactions to stress, it is argued that episodes may involve normal, rational people who possess unfamiliar conduct codes, world-views and political agendas that differ significantly from those of Western-trained investigators who often judge these illness behaviours independent of their local context and meanings.

La question de la cristallisation des classes sociales objectives (en soi) en classes sociales subjectives (pour soi) est au cœur de cette étude. Plus précisément, l’objectif est de mettre en évidence les médiations spatiales d’un tel processus de cristallisation. En effet, les individus qui constituent les classes sociales vivent dans des territoires spécifiques chargés d’héritages, et la prise en contexte de ces contextes permet d’éclairer les comportements politiques des groupes sociaux.

Ces questions seront abordés à différentes échelles dans les contextes de la Belgique et de l'Europe occidentale en utilisant des sources diverses, en particulier les scores électoraux et les enquêtes individuelles.

La prise en compte des contextes locaux ou régionaux et l'élargissement du champ des études électorales aux attitudes politiques ont permis de mettre en évidence l'importance encore décisive des classes sociales dans l'explication des comportements politiques.
Doctorat en Sciences
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Defence date: 29 November 2017
Examining Board: Prof. Hanspeter Kriesi (Supervisor), European University Institute; Prof. Fabrizio Bernardi (Co-supervisor), European University Institute; Prof. Geoffrey Evans, Nuffield College, Oxford; Prof. Silja Häusermann, University of Zurich
Post-industrial transformations in the occupational structure and new patterns of class-party alignments have fueled the debate on the relevance of social class as a determinant of political preferences and behavior. Although the growth of the service sector is one of the distinctive traits of post-industrial economies, low-skilled service workers have received limited attention in recent research on class politics. This dissertation analyzes the political implications of class in post-industrial societies, focusing specifically on the comparison between low-skilled production and service workers. Through a two-step analysis of class voting, this dissertation studies, first, the association between class and issue preferences and, second, the relationship between class and electoral behavior. This approach to class voting also allows me to theorize and analyze potential moderators and mechanisms of the individual-level association between class and political outcomes. To study these different aspects of class voting both cross-sectionally and longitudinally this thesis relies on multiple datasets like the European Social Survey, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the British Household Panel Survey, and on different estimation methods like multi-level, conditional logistic and panel data regression models. The results of a systematic comparison of production and service workers indicate that the two classes constitute a rather homogeneous electoral constituency both in terms of preferences on cultural and economic issues, as well as in their likelihood of voting for different party families. Thus, these two groups could constitute a new working class, characterized by its economically left-wing but culturally authoritarian political preferences, but also by its higher levels of electoral abstention. Other than revealing the similarity between production and service workers, this dissertation also contributes to the literature on class voting by studying moderators and mechanisms of the individual-level relationship between class location and political preferences. The analyses indicate that the politicization of policy issues by parties or the length of class tenure moderate this relationship. Moreover, I also consider how vertical and horizontal class mobility throughout an individuals’ career relates to differences in policy preferences. For this purpose, I implement a longitudinal approach, which has been rather infrequent in studies of class voting. The conclusion of this dissertation discusses the implications of these findings for the political representation of the working class and for aggregate levels of class voting. Overall, and in clear contrast with the dealignment thesis, this dissertation indicates that class is still a relevant determinant of political preferences in post-industrial societies.

Defence date: 11 June 1998
Supervisor: Prof. Bernhard Giesen, Universität Giessen ; Co-Supervisor: Prof. Laurence Fontaine, European University Institute
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017
Why are national identities imagined in one way rather than in another? The book analyses national imaginations as an on-going reconstruction process in a political and social context in which several imaginations of the nation struggle to impose their conception. Focusing on a fundamental element of any collective identity, namely the «Other», the book looks at the reconstruction of national identities by actors in political debates on immigration in the late 1980s and 1990s, particularly associations and political clubs which were in favour of and against the presence of immigrant minorities in their respective countries. Thus, the book investigates different ways of imagining the same nation in two old European nation-states, namely France and Denmark, which differ with regard to their nation-building processes, their Second World War history, their memory of colonialism and their experience of immigration. It is thus possible to illustrate that existing ideas of the nation and memories of historical events shape the way in which the nation could be re-imagined in the 1980s and 1990s.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
While the Arab spring succeeded in ousting the long-term dictator led governments from power in many Arab countries, leading the way to a new democratic process to develop in the Arab world, it did not end the old suspicions between Arab Muslims and the West. This research investigates the beginning of the relations between the Arab Muslims and the West as they have developed over time, and then focuses its analysis on perceptions from both sides beginning with 9/11 through the events known as the Arab spring. The framework for analysis is a communication perspective, as embodied in the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). According to CMM, communication can be understood as forms of interactions that both constitute and frame reality. The study posits the analysis that the current Arab Muslim-West divide, is often a conversation that is consistent with what CMM labels as the ethnocentric pattern. This analysis will suggest a new pathway, one that follows the CMM cosmopolitan form, as a more fruitful pattern for the future of Arab Muslim-West relations. This research emphasizes the factors fueling this ethnocentric pattern, in addition to ways of bringing the Islamic world and the West to understand each other with a more cosmopolitan approach, which, among other things, accepts mutual differences while fostering agreements. To reach this core, the study will apply a direct communicative engagement between the Islamic world and the West to foster trusted relations, between the two.

Viewed from a theoretical and empirical perspective, the ongoing process of Europeanization poses new challenges to sociology. As a science, sociology reveals the inadequacy of the conceptual and methodological instruments currently available for our understanding of European social phenomena. Sociologists fi nd it di cult to defi ne the very object under scrutiny: does a European society exist? How should we defi ne a society whose boundary lines are variable? Does a study of Europe from a sociological perspective entail a study of the European Union, or of a broader social formation? e di culty encountered in "studying Europe" in the sociological area is linked to a broader theoretical debate which, in the light of the ongoing processes of change, queries the entire cognitive apparatus and the theoretical paradigms developed by sociological disciplines and related to the modernity of the western world. e "national constellation" of norms, institutions and regulative techniques which have allowed political and social integration within the national state, are now challenged by phenomena which undermine their very epistemological foundations. e concepts applied to the study of social and political integration, - society, state, legitimacy, social inequality, mobility, justice, solidarity, etc.- are, in a classic defi nition of the term, no longer e cient in discerning the phenomena which impact on contemporary societies. e variety of themes discussed by several Italian and foreign authors explore many aspects of the workings of Europe; they reveal new theoretical and methodological perspectives with which we set out to study the political, social, cultural and economic phenomena which today characterize Europe.

This chapter argues that, on the evidence of the content and intention of this range of radical periodicals, the key distinguishing element was that of social class. In order to demonstrate this innovative aspect of print culture, it explores explore how these publications created identities of class as well as propagandizing politically on behalf of new readers with a particular focus on the language used. To this extent, the radical press marked both a continuity as well as a rupture with previous traditions of the press: continuity in the claims of the press as a force that eroded the traditional hierarchies of information flow, claims which had accompanied print as a technology since its introduction in to Western Europe; rupture in that the press had hitherto been incapable of generating a lexicon of appeal to anything other than an elite political or mercantile audience. The radical form of advocacy that the radical press launched was not long in the ascendancy. Its disruptive impact was dramatically reduced when many of its claims and much of its rhetoric were subsumed within a mainstream popular press, responding reflexively as it claimed to incorporate the interests of the ‘people’ in its own coverage.

This chapter points out how the political turbulences of the twentieth century prevented the emergence of a viable middle class. Until the late nineteenth century, China seemed to remain static, while Western Europe developed a new kind of dynamic bourgeois society underpinned by industrialization and fueling imperial expansion. This situation changed after the opening of the treaty ports, which became important places for the entry of Western modernity into China. In the coastal cities, it is possible to speak of the emergence of a social group that resembled the Western middle class, at least from the second decade of the twentieth century. On the one hand, it involved an entrepreneurial elite; on the other, a new generation of Western-educated Chinese, who either joined the private economic sector, found employment as teachers in the rapidly expanding schools and universities, or tried to make a living as freelance intellectuals. This short period, however, came to an end after the Japanese invasion in 1937, and completely disappeared after 1949, when any remnants of middle-class society were ruthlessly eradicated by the Communist Party.

This chapter opens the part of the monograph devoted more specifically to migration. It aims to consider the link between vigilantism and the social reaction to migration. Indeed, the social reaction to migration has been an important trend in the political game in Western Europe and North America, partly explaining the electoral support for the far right. The rejection of migration is fuelled by a series of cause entrepreneurs. Anti-migrant vigilantism seeks to frame migration as an issue to be considered primarily through a law and order prism. In the wake of the 2015 ‘migrant crisis’, many anti-migrant groups in Europe, most often linked to the far right, have sprung up to ‘secure’ frontiers.The social reaction to migration can also be explained by underlying trends. First of all, the theory of cleavages asserts that the right–left cleavage has been joined by another political cleavage between communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. Moreover, the social reaction must also be understood in the light of an economic discourse that promises the local working classes an improvement of their socioeconomic conditions, conditional on the exclusion of the immigrant parts of the working classes.

Problems of social revolutions and/or transformations belong to the classical agenda of social inquiry, as well as to the most prominent real and potential challenges encountered by contemporary societies. Among revolutionary events of the last decades, particular attention has been drawn to the changes that unfolded at the turn of the 1990s and brought the supposedly bipolar (in fact incipiently multipolar) world to an end. The downfall of East Central European Communist regimes in 1989 and of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of a new era, originally characterised on the one hand by the relaxation of international tensions and on the other by the ascendancy of Western unilateralism. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet collapse prompts the authors of this book to reflect on revolutions and transformations, both from a long-term historical perspective and with regard to the post-Communist scene. The social changes unfolding in Eastern and Central Europe are not only epoch-making historical turns; their economic, social and political aspects, often confusing and unexpected, have also raised new questions and triggered debates about fundamental theoretical issues. Moreover, they have had a significant impact on developments elsewhere in the world, in both Western and developing countries.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, a qualified kind of ethnogenesis can be observed among the educated classes of the Western world. In the course of their social emancipation a new political identity emerged, one orientated towards the fatherland, the state, and its population. This new ethnic consciousness bridged older identities such as estate, profession or religion. It originated in connection with the great eighteenth-century social movement of patriotism, which became more and more politicised. The philosophical discourse about the nature of language, which had existed since antiquity, intensified immensely during the eighteenth century. John Locke and George Berkeley in Britain and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac in France provided important stimuli in this respect. Johann Gottfried Herder was the first to take vernacular languages and popular poetry seriously as expressions of the culture of illiterate peoples. This chapter examines how national languages were invented and looks at the divergent situations in which the first national languages were used in Europe.

Despite theoretical experimentation, although one cannot speak of a separate post-socialist legal family,1 it is without a doubt that CEE, post-socialist countries – and more precisely, the countries aspiring for EU membership – have had to cope with similar problems since the 1990s. Among the difficulties concerning the transition from dictatorship to democracy,2 a political – or rather, professional – discourse that mostly occurs in constitutional courts and is aimed at the true nature and the method of ensuring judicial independence has been and is now given more emphasis in Western countries as well. Independence from party politics or governmental authority plays an increasingly important role in CEE countries since the collusion of the single-party state and courts frequently had tragic consequences during the Stalinist period3 (the later and milder phase of the dictatorship in some countries was not always associated with an unfailing prevalence of judicial independence either, although direct political pressure could not be detected in a considerable part of legal disputes.4 ) In light of this saddening historical period, it is understandable that the chances of party political aspects that appear are more resounding than usual in post-socialist societies. Such fears are predominant in a narrow social stratum since the system of CEE political traditions, a weakened democratic legacy and frail or malfunctioning autonomies result in indifference towards institutional changes concerning the judicial independence as well. In this study, the most important constitutional foundations of the judicial systems of post-socialist CEE countries are presented. The judicial system of the assessed legal systems is presented by defining the constitutional bases and the rules laid down in the most important laws through the presentation of the literature on the institution. Having clarified the structural issues and the constitutional status of the courts – the central forms of administration – an assessment is conducted as to how well-known aspects of judicial independence and accountability play a role in the administration of justice of a given legal system. At the heart of the analysis is the much-misunderstood concept of judicial independence. Within this, the organisational independence of the judiciary, which determines the relationship of courts with other branches of power, on the one hand, determines the actual margin of appreciation of judges, and on the other hand, it may shed light on the reforms of CEE judicial systems on their way to democracy following dictatorship and the single-party system. The above may also reveal how these systems tried to meet the requirements of European accession and how they responded to societal needs. Although the system of the organisation of the judiciary in post-socialist countries has also undergone changes, mainly due to constitutional amendments aimed to enforce the principle of access to justice, no analysis of the changes is conducted here due to a lack of space. Although we can talk about a broader and narrower meaning of the concept of justice, in this chapter, the situation of CEE legal systems based on the narrower concept is also presented for reasons of length. Thus, we specifically deal with courts, which are the central actors in the application of the law. We also dispense with the presentation of constitutional courts’ activities, to which this volume devotes a separate chapter. At the beginning of this chapter, we conduct an analysis of how the Court of Justice of the European Union and the Council of Europe, which connects the wider Europe, interpret the concept at its heart: judicial independence. Afterwards, we discuss the constitutional fundations and the central administration of courts. As a conclusion, we outline possible ways of development in post-socialist judicial systems.

As the previous chapters have suggested, striking changes in medical education had occurred by 1800 in nearly every Western country. In particular, the movement toward practical training in medical teaching had gathered momentum toward the end of the eighteenth century. Not only in Vienna, Paris, Edinburgh, and Leyden but also in scores of universities, hospitals, military schools, dispensaries, lying-in clinics, and private courses spread across Europe and North America, students were finding new opportunities to practice dissection; see patients at the bedside; take case histories; practice surgical, obstetrical, and other procedures; and even diagnose and treat patients under a teacher’s supervision. It is this sea change in attitudes toward practical training that we explore in this chapter. Spurred by Enlightenment concerns for public health and utilitarian concepts of practical training, new clinical experiences were becoming available in many places. Although in some countries, notably France and Germany, the state played a decisive role in fostering the new development, in others, especially Britain and America, students were left largely on their own to gather practical experience, choosing from a variety of lecture-demonstration courses, hospital training, apprenticeship opportunities, experience in outpatient dispensaries, and private classes. National differences in social and political development channeled the strong pressures for utilitarian education into new forms of clinical training. Differing concepts of what constituted a “teaching clinic” came to exist side by side, especially in Europe. In unsettled France, the clinical impulse, which had early centered on surgical practice in urban hospitals and was now promoted by an all-powerful revolutionary government, found its primary outlet in large hospitals. In the German states, on the other hand, politically divided and lacking large hospitals in most university towns, clinics developed largely as small appendages to university programs in medicine. British clinical training, as described in earlier chapters, was centered haphazardly in the London hospitals away from the nation’s universities and was growing also in provincial hospitals and dispensaries. In North America, the search for clinical experience was spread over a great variety of small infirmaries, dispensaries, and private courses, and apprenticeship training remained the dominant mode of getting hands-on practice.

As an intellectual tradition, the history of Hegelianism is the history of the reception and influence of the thought of G.W.F. Hegel. This tradition is notoriously complex and many-sided, because while some Hegelians have seen themselves as merely defending and developing his ideas along what they took to be orthodox lines, others have sought to ‘reform’ his system, or to appropriate individual aspects and overturn others, or to offer consciously revisionary readings of his work. This makes it very hard to identify any body of doctrine common to members of this tradition, and a wide range of divergent philosophical views can be found among those who (despite this) can none the less claim to be Hegelians. There are both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ reasons for this: on one hand, Hegel’s position itself brings together many different tendencies (idealism and objectivism, historicism and absolutism, rationalism and empiricism, Christianity and humanism, classicism and modernism, a liberal view of civil society with an organicist view of the state); any balance between them is hermeneutically very unstable, enabling existing readings to be challenged and old orthodoxies to be overturned. On the other hand, the critical response to Hegel’s thought and the many attempts to undermine it have meant that Hegelians have continually needed to reconstruct his ideas and even to turn Hegel against himself, while each new intellectual development, such as Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology or existential philosophy, has brought about some reassessment of his position. This feature of the Hegelian tradition has been heightened by the fact that Hegel’s work has had an impact at different times over a long period and in a wide range of countries, so that divergent intellectual, social and historical pressures have influenced its distinct appropriations. At the hermeneutic level, these appropriations have contributed greatly to keeping the philosophical understanding of Hegel alive and open-ended, so that our present-day conception of his thought cannot properly be separated from them. Moreover, because questions of Hegel interpretation have so often revolved around the main philosophical, political and religious issues of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hegelianism has also had a significant impact on the development of modern Western thought in its own right. As a result of its complex evolution, Hegelianism is best understood historically, by showing how the changing representation of Hegel’s ideas have come about, shaped by the different critical concerns, sociopolitical conditions and intellectual movements that dominated his reception in different countries at different times. Initially, Hegel’s influence was naturally most strongly felt in Germany as a comprehensive, integrative philosophy that seemed to do justice to all realms of experience and promised to preserve the Christian heritage in a modern and progressive form within a speculative framework. However, this position was quickly challenged, both from other philosophical standpoints (such as F.W.J. Schelling’s ‘positive philosophy’ and F.A. Trendelenburg’s neo-Aristotelian empiricism), and by the celebrated generation of younger thinkers (the so-called ‘Young’ or ‘Left’ Hegelians, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge and the early Karl Marx), who insisted that to discover what made Hegel a truly significant thinker (his dialectical method, his view of alienation, his ‘sublation’ of Christianity), this orthodoxy must be overturned. None the less, both among these radicals and in academic circles, Hegel’s influence was considerably weakened in Germany by the 1860s and 1870s, while by this time developments in Hegelian thought had begun to take place elsewhere. Hegel’s work was known outside Germany from the 1820s onwards, and Hegelian schools developed in northern Europe, Italy, France, Eastern Europe, America and (somewhat later) Britain, each with their own distinctive line of interpretation, but all fairly uncritical in their attempts to assimilate his ideas. However, in each of these countries challenges to the Hegelian position were quick to arise, partly because the influence of Hegel’s German critics soon spread abroad, and partly because of the growing impact of other philosophical positions (such as Neo-Kantianism, materialism and pragmatism). Nevertheless, Hegelianism outside Germany proved more durable in the face of these attacks, as new readings and approaches emerged to counter them, and ways were found to reinterpret Hegel’s work to show that it could accommodate these other positions, once the earlier accounts of Hegel’s metaphysics, political philosophy and philosophy of religion (in particular) were rejected as too crude. This pattern has continued into the twentieth century, as many of the movements that began by defining themselves against Hegel (such as Neo-Kantianism, Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, post-structuralism and even ‘analytic’ philosophy) have then come to find unexpected common ground, giving a new impetus and depth to Hegelianism as it began to be assimilated within and influenced by these diverse approaches. Such efforts at rapprochement began in the early part of the century with Wilhelm Dilthey’s attempt to link Hegel with his own historicism, and although they were more ambivalent, this connection was reinforced in Italy by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. The realignment continued in France in the 1930s, as Jean Wahl brought out the more existentialist themes in Hegel’s thought, followed in the 1940s by Alexander Kojève’s influential Marxist readings. Hegelianism has also had an impact on Western Marxism through the writings of the Hungarian Georg Lukács, and this influence has continued in the critical reinterpretations offered by members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas and others. More recently, most of the major schools of philosophical thought (from French post-structuralism to Anglo-American ‘analytic’ philosophy) have emphasized the need to take account of Hegel, and as a result Hegelian thought (both exegetical and constructive) is continually finding new directions.