APOSTLES OF MODERNITY: SAINT-SIMONIANS AND THE CIVILIZING MISSION IN ALGERIA Osama W. Abi-Mershed Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010 (xii + 328 pages, bibliography, index, tables, figures, maps) $60.00 (cloth, e-book)Into the more than one thousand pages of notes and quotations that make up The Arcades Project, German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin inserted the following comment: “All social antinomies dissolve in the fairyland which le progres projects for the near future” (578). This reflection came in a section of this prewar study of the capitalist origins of modernity that Benjamin devoted to French utopian writer Henri de Saint-Simon and his nineteenth-century followers. In these political theorists, engineers, bankers, and soldiers, Benjamin located the origins of a fatal crisis of modernity: the contradictions of industrial society diverted from their revolutionary path by fantasies of social conciliation, material wealth, and technological advancement (“le progres”). As Benjamin anticipated, these fantasies ended ultimately in violence, violence that claimed his life in 1940.Benjamin did not present much of the Saint-Simonians’ work in the Middle East in The Arcades Project, but he should have. They served as something akin to foot soldiers of empire in places like Egypt and Algeria, where the Saint-Simonian “fairyland” was enacted and transformed by the social conflicts of colonialism. Osama W. Abi-Mershed’s history of this fairyland in nineteenth-century Algeria is thus a much anticipated and necessary addition to scholarship. In this cogently argued and welldocumented account the reader gets-for the first time in English-a detailed view of the Saint-Simonian impact on colonial policy. A skillful and nuanced reading of the sources uncovers the projects by which the political and social subjugation of Algerians was wrought through a story of cultural enrichment, combined interest, and moral and material progress. Empires typically rely on such ideological configurations to legitimate their rule. But the particular way that the Saint-Simonians did this work in Algeria is worth special attention. As Benjamin’s interest in them signals, the Saint-Simonians were key, if too often overlooked, architects of modernity.The Saint-Simonians in Algeria were a loose and often deeply divided group that drew inspiration from the writings of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). Having lived through the turmoil of the French Revolution, Saint-Simon developed an eclectic constellation of reform ideas that emphasized social harmony and material abundance as tools for fighting poverty and social tensions. For Marx and Engels, these ideas earned him inclusion in the trinity of nineteenth-century utopian socialists, along with Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. But with his veneration of productivity and efficiency, Saint-Simon distinguished his thinking and made himself a favorite among engineers, bankers, and the technically skilled elite of postrevolutionary France. In Algeria, these ideas inspired people as divergent as Ismayl Urbain, author of L’Algerie pour les Algeriens (1860), an important arabophile defense of Algerian rights, and Auguste Warnier, a staunch voice of settler opinion who drafted the laws by which more than a million acres of farmland infamously passed from Algerian to European owners after 1873.The few historians who have ventured to tell this story (Michel Levallois, Dominique Casajus, Philippe Regnier, Marcel Emerit, Emile Temime) have generally presented the Middle Eastern turn of the Saint-Simonians, beginning in Egypt in 1833, as a flight from repression in France. Blocked in the metropole, they sought somewhere else to realize their goals, looking to people like Muhammad ‘Ali, the “industrial pacha,” and traveling to Istanbul, Mecca, Ethiopia, and Sudan searching for likeminded leaders amenable to their projects of trade, education, and development.
PLACE YOUR ADVERT HERE
- ACCOUNTING PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS3553
- EDUCATION PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS3486
- ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS2939
- COMPUTER SCIENCE PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS FINAL YEAR1274
- BANKING AND FINANCE PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS1250
- BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS1236
- EDUCATION FOUNDATION GUIDANCE AND COUNSELLING TOPICS AND MATERIALS1045
- ZOOLOGY PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS1002
- MASS COMMUNICATION PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS1001
- ANIMAL SCIENCE PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS978
- LAW PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS896
- ARTS EDUCATION PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS844
- MARKETING PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS690
- AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS676
- PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS654
LATEST PROJECTS
STUDIES ON SOME ASPECTS OF ANTHRACNOSE-BLIGHT-DIEBACK COMPLEX OF CULTIVARS OF GRAPEVINES (VITIS SPP.) IN...
GENETIC VARIABILITY STUDIES OF TWENTY POTATO GENOTYPES
RELATIONSHIP OF HAEMOGLOBIN AND POTASSIUM POLYMORPHISM WITH CONFORMATION, MILK PRODUCTION AND BLOOD BIOCHEMICAL PROFILES...
ADOPTION OF AGRICULTURAL INNOVATIONS AMONG MEMBERS AND NON-MEMBERS OF WOMEN CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETIES IN OJU...
SMALL FARMER CREDIT WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO NIGERIA
DISCLAIMER
All undertaking works, records and reports posted on this website, modishproject.com are the property/copyright of their individual proprietors. They are for research reference/direction purposes and the works are publicly supported. Do not present another person’s work as your own to maintain a strategic distance from counterfeiting its results. Use it as a guide and not to duplicate the work in exactly the same words (verbatim). modishproject.com is a vault of exploration works simply like academia.edu, researchgate.net, scribd.com, docsity.com, coursehero and numerous different stages where clients transfer works. The paid membership on modishproject.com is a method by which the site is kept up to help Open Education. In the event that you see your work posted here, and you need it to be eliminated/credited, it would be ideal if you call us on +2348053692035 or send us a mail along with the web address linked to the work, to [email protected]. We will answer to and honor each solicitation. Kindly note notification it might take up to 24 - 48 hours to handle your solicitation.