This paper argues that the interwar Japanese Marxists Miki Kiyoshi and more contemporary Hiromatsu Wataru each moved towards developing this perspective beyond simple distinctions between idealism, which is confined to concepts, and materialism, conceived as presupposing that ideas are determined by matter. Japanese Marxism was in a unique place to affect such a synthesis because of the existence of Kyoto School philosophy, with whom both Miki and Hiromatsu were associated. The proponents of the Kyoto School combined Eastern and Western philosophical perspectives, which had the aim of criticizing modernity. Miki Kiyoshi and other members of the Kyoto School eventually supported Japan's wartime effort, which delegitimized their concerns about modernity during the postwar. However, in postwar Japan, Hiromatsu developed a creative reading of Marx's materialism and in the 1994 surprised everyone by advocating a pan-Asianist critique of modernity. Hiromatsu suggested that despite problems that Miki and the Kyoto School represented, one had to grasp the rational kernel, which could save Marxism from slipping into an equally dangerous modernization theory. This task remains for us today when the dystopia of globalized capitalism seems to have become a reality that threatens the survival of our planet.

The widely acclaimed Capital and Ideology, though an important contribution to the inequality debates, is limited by its use of secondary sources and fiscal state framework in its historical analysis of China. Its arguments for a Confucian trifunctional society with property rights sacralized by nobles’ and scholars’ regalian functions, and persistently low and stagnant taxation in premodern China overly simplify the historical reality. Using primary Chinese sources, this article highlights the major oversimplifications. The information and issues presented here are also worth considering for similar social and fiscal studies of premodern China.

The aim of this article is to examine the use of suitable archive sources for the study of the economic space of cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The research is based on the integration and critical analysis of cartographic, descriptive and quantitative sources of an administrative and fiscal nature, developed by using Geographic Information Systems. The advantage of adopting this approach includes, in addition to the study of spatial relationships amongst economic activities and the urban space, the possibility of investigating discrepancies between the sources, thus facilitating their interpretation.

A decision will soon have to be taken regarding the renewal of approval of glyphosate at the European Union (EU) level; this pesticidal active substance, however, is more controversial than ever. This article critically assesses various strategies pursued by EU Member States and regional authorities which challenge the EU approach to glyphosate and aim to safeguard their higher levels of public health and environmental protection. It reflects on the prospects of success of these strategies, and their compatibility with EU law. The analysis includes the action for the annulment of glyphosate's 2017 reapproval brought by the Brussels-Capital Region, the Austrian attempt to enact a blanket ban on glyphosate-based pesticidal formulations, and the more sophisticated strategies pursued by Luxembourg and France. The article concludes that the French strategy is effective in risk regulation terms, and compatible with EU law. Nonetheless, adopting the French approach may prove rather difficult for other Member States, as a result of both structural-regulatory and practical constraints. Rather, an EU-wide strategy on glyphosate is urgently needed.

When I cracked open Marlene Laruelle’s new book, Is Russia Fascist?, I immediately wondered, who really thinks Russia is fascist? I was aware of Timothy Snyder’s study of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s glorification of the debatably fascist political theorist Ivan Ilyin, but fascist? Really? But Laruelle quickly shows in the introduction that this is not a canard or a straw man. Many reputable scholars and public intellectuals have drawn parallels between the Putin regime, its actions, and European fascism, including Snyder, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Motyl, Vladimir Inozemtsev, Gary Kasparov, Anna Politkovskaya, Madeline Albright, and Hillary Clinton. The term “fascism” has become part of the Western discussion on the nature of the Putin regime, even more so since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Cet article s’intéresse à l’emploi du subjonctif en français acadien du nord-est du Nouveau-Brunswick dans les Provinces Maritimes du Canada. Notre point de départ consiste à faire état du site de conflit qui oppose les variétés du français acadien et du français laurentien en ce qui concerne les patrons régissant sa sélection. Il a déjà été démontré que les contraintes sémantiques exercent une influence prépondérante en français acadien alors que du côté laurentien, l’effet de ces contraintes est plutôt dépassé par celui venant de contraintes lexicales et morphosyntaxiques. Nos résultats démontrent que le parler acadien à l’étude affiche des parallèles structuraux avec ce qui est rapporté en français laurentien : En plus d’être contraint à un taux variable de sélection, la productivité du subjonctif est limitée à quelques contextes spécifiques et elle n’est pas tributaire de l’effet exercé par des contraintes sémantiques. Nous suggérons qu’il n’y a pas une seule norme vernaculaire partagée par tous les parlers acadiens quant au conditionnement du subjonctif et nous nous interrogeons sur l’impact des contacts dialectaux sur la structure linguistique du français de cette région.

This article focuses on a set of aesthetic debates that took place in China in the late 1950s. By exploring the main arguments presented by different thinkers, particularly the writings of Zhu Guanqian and Li Zehou, this article demonstrates how the aesthetics took part in the ideological formation of the new socialist state. From the debates, we observe the tensions between the complexity of the material-political and the reductionism of the state ideology. We also recognize why and how aesthetics could be such an important site of political contestation in this young socialist country, and how the interactions between human senses and the material world are essential to arts universally. The dominant materialist aesthetics presented in the debate was less a theory of things than a theory of the social. This historical materialist approach might be useful as a social critique; however, when handled dogmatically, it not only rejects the autonomy of things, but also disallows art works to reflect the complex human interactions with the material world beyond economic power relations. We can find more sophisticated analysis in Zhu's aesthetic theory, which tries to incorporate the interactions between the subjects and the objects into materialism.