The Habsburg monarchy was a singular experiment in diversity within the European continent. By the eighteenth century it stretched from the Austrian Netherlands to the Balkans and southern Poland, and south into Italy. Its subjects spoke a number of languages, and while the social and institutional structure of these lands shared common features, there were also substantial differences among them. Was the Habsburg monarchy therefore an empire like those of Great Britain, France or Spain?
Drawing upon modern theoretical perspectives on European expansion to answer this question, Paula Sutter Fichtner argues that the Habsburg holdings did indeed constitute a form of European imperialism, and that they are best understood in such terms.
First, the good news. John Caputo is a specialist in contemporary hermeneutics who cycles to work. His friendly and enjoyable 'commutelength' book (284 pages) is a guided tour of Western philosophy from Ancient Greece to Derrida, via Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Keirkegaard and Nietsche. English-speakers are represented only by brief but honourable mentions of J. L. Austin's performative speech-acts and Ian Hacking's thesis that, in order to sink our teeth into reality, 'we need both reality and teeth'. But readers who have not read much continental philosophy, and have no plans to do so, may be interested to find that its leaders are described by Caputo (as by Sabina Lovibond in her Ethical Formation) as occupying various positions adjacent to those of well-known analytic philosophers. According to Caputo, the high-water mark of Modernism (the Enlightenment) was established by Kant, who held that truth 'is not a matter of making the mind conform to reality, but of submitting reality to the work of the mind'. The mind works by looking at what it gets from the senses and then arbitrarily inventing categories and causal sequences. Caputo comments crisply that 'the disengagement of Kant's pure Reason from reality, from the world in which everyone else lives, is so complete that it really does begin to look quite mad', and that Aristotle would have 'collapsed in laughter' at Kant's theories of ethics, aesthetics and love (138). Kant's theory was soon subjected to criticism by Hegel 'from which it never recovered'. According to Hegel 'Truth is not just an abstract name: it actually appears in history, sitting on the back of a horse' as Napoleon rode into Jena at the head of his army while Hegel watched. More precisely, truth is the whole world, 'an incessant process that never attains a fixed form' in the way required by traditional religions and sciences with their fixed scriptures and laws. Caputo welcomes Hegel's approach but objects that Hegel 'remained in the grip of the deepest assumption of the enlightenment, 119
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.