Geschichte und Gesellschaft

Following Anglo-American and Dutch intellectual history, recent work on the history of political order and thought has drawn heavily on the concept of “political communication.” This article seeks to contribute to this general reorientation by accommodating important insights of Anglo-American discussion (Cambridge School) to the still much-neglected history of ideas of the Holy Roman Empire. The paper analyzes early modern debates about the right to political resistance as well as the traditions of criticizing rulers and authorities and thus examines a widely used “political language.” This political language of resistance and critique stressed the limits of power and political rule. It substantiated a sophisticated theologico-political program–the so-called ‘politica christiana.’ For several decades of the 16th and 17th centuries, the politica christiana must be understood as a noteworthy counterpart to the dominant concept of “political Aristotelianism.”

Based on a nationally representative face-to-face survey from 1985 and retrospective questions an analysis (N = 715) is made of the extent of former Nazi sympathy among the elder population (born 1930 and earlier). It is shown that the majority once held some sympathies, but that the proportion of ideologically consistent “hard core” Nazis represented a small minority. Sympathy for National Socialism was most pronounced among the younger cohorts, males, Protestants and – especially in the younger generation – among the better educated. It is argued that surveys deserve greater attention in historical research than has been the case in the past.

In the 1950s and 1960s the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialized organization of the United Nations with the task to distribute radio frequencies among the nation states of the world, developed a particular organizational culture that enabled it to fulfill its duties under the portents of intensive confrontation between the eastern and the western bloc. Taking this organizational culture as empirical basis, the article tries to initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue between sociological research on organization cultures and new institutional economics. In particular it is asked whether the sociological approach can contribute to a better explanation of decision-making processes within organizations by the newinstitutional economics.

The Bohemian aristocracy in the late nineteenth century has long been neglected by historians. This essay intends to draw attention to research on the history of the Bohemian aristocracy between the revolution of 1848 and the end of the First World War, respectively the Czechoslovak land reform in 1921. Geographically, the focus is on research done in the Czech Republic, but studies from Germany, Austria, and North America are taken into account as well. A substantial number of books and articles discusses the aristocracy with cultural history approaches, focussing, e.g., on family, language and representations. A further, much-debated issue is the relationship between the so-called feudal-conservative wing of the aristocracy and the Czech national movement. Contrary to research on early modern times, a synthesis is still to be awaited.