In the nineteenth century the Germany university was the most admired institution of higher education in the western world.1 Much of this admiration arose from the widespread assumption that Germany's universities exemplified the ideal of pure learning, the disinterested pursuit of truth, knowledge for its own sake. German contemporaries saw the university in these terms, contemporary observers elsewhere agreed, and modern historians have accepted this statement of purpose.

Historians who have studied French primary education during the nineteenth century, Maurice Gontard, Jacques and Mona Ozouf, and Peter Meyer, have noted the great gains made by the instituteurs and their growing professional-ization from the time of the law of 1833 to the law of the 1880s. Improvements in the quality of teaching derived mainly from the introduction of a national system of normal schools (écoles normales primaires) by the Law on Primary Education of 1833. This article will discuss the history, programs, and organization of these schools and the origin and backgrounds of their students. It will also examine 280 essays written by schoolmasters in 1861 on the state of primary education in the towns and villages of France; these mémoires, written for the most part by graduates of the normal schools, provide first-hand insight into the teacher himself, his professional goals and sense of mission, and how he viewed the world around him in the middle of the last century.

The nature of the relationship between ideas and the social conditions in which they develop has long been among the central concerns of fields like the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of intellectuals, and the social history of ideas. For generations, scholars in these areas have hotly debated the proper way of characterizing the form of this relationship and how it should be conceptualized and studied. With few exceptions, however, there has been an astonishing consensus on one matter: fundamental intellectual reorientations have almost invariably been seen as the product—whether simple or complex—of one or more major social changes. As far as it has gone, this perspective has led to extremely important conclusions, but except among the psychoanalytically inclined, it has remained strangely and regrettably silent on the specific micro-level processes by which macro-level social changes actually translate into changes in ideas.

Among the various weaknesses that characterize much of the literature concerning political phenomena in Latin America, there are a few that appear to be fundamental. One serious criticism that could be made concerns the marked ahistoricity of many studies, exemplified by the tendency to take certain social structural features as given in this context, such as the existence of an oligarchy, a more or less undifferentiated impoverished mass, and a weak and politically insignificant middle class. This static and ahistorical consideration of structural phenomenon is directly related to a further weakness of such literature, this being the tendency to isolate political processes from what is in fact a dynamic socioeconomic reality, and thereby reduce the former to the interplay of more or less circumstantial factors.

A nationalist coalition with middle-class leadership seized control of the Bolivian state in 1952. Uprisings immediately broke out in the countryside, and peasants seized lands previously held in large estates. In response to pressure from below, the new government in 1953 initiated an agrarian reform that destroyed the economic base of the landed oligarchy. It also reorganized old agrarian institutions and created new ones to serve the rural poor. Yet government policies a short while after the revolution ceased to favor the peasantry.

The thirty–fourth chapter of the Greater Bundahišn, which is the fullest eschatological account within this important Middle Persian text, ends on an extremely peculiar note. Its final verse states:

This also is said [in the Avesta]: “The earth becomes flat, without a crown and without a seat. There are no mountain peaks nor hollows, nor are ‘up’ and ‘down’ preserved.”