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An essay is presented on the roles of racism and colonialism in European humanism. It is suggested that the exclusion of non-Europeans from a shared notion of human dignity was a central tenet of European humanism, making it inherently racist. According to the author, humanism should not be rejected but should be revised to de-emphasize reason. Other topics include anthropology and anti-colonial movements.

This essay, which is part of an ongoing monographic study of the Société Européenne de Culture, looks at the SEC's relationship with Europe's communist intelligentsia during the first phase of the Cold War. European intellectual life during this period is generally associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Yet the SEC, the membership of which included some of Europe's most eminent figures, ranging from Camus and Jaspers, to Adorno and Merleau-Ponty, to Lukács and Sartre, can be seen as having provided a reference point particularly for the European left, not least because of its unique openness to communist participation. Giving special attention to the Dialogue Est-Ouest (Venice, March 1956), one of the earliest encounters between Europe's eastern and western intellectuals since before the war, this essay considers how the SEC's engagement with contemporary Marxist theory there not only embedded the dialectic as the SEC's operational method. It also provided an early indication of that institution's imminent shift from a preoccupation with universal values to an awareness of cultural difference and diversity, as a result of the critique of current western liberal ideology and its cultures, undertaken by the SEC in light of the Thaw. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ballymun in Dublin, one of the most famous of Europe's grandiose housing estates, has had an especially dramatic history since it was first built in 1965. At the heart of the unfolding drama has been a series of conflicts between the spatial imaginations of the state officials and planners who designed, built, and managed the initial estate and who are currently undertaking its wholesale regeneration, and the place-making activities of the local residents who have inhabited, endured, and occasionally sought to reclaim this space. Concerned to prise open some fresh ways of thinking about the hyperextension of“abstract space” into everyday life, this article presents a reconstruction of the history of space and place in Ballymun. In their exploration of the onslaught of abstract space, critical human geographers have drawn upon a wide range of social theorists including Benjamin, De Certeau, Debord, Deluze, Foucault, Giddens, Habermas, Heidegger, Jameson, Weber, and, of course, Henri Lefebvre. Strangely absent from this list, however, has been the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. And yet, contained within Sartre'sCritique de la raison dialectique(Critique of Dialectical Reason) resides a tremendously powerful account of the ever-growing occupation, dispossession, and reterritorialization of everyday life by the abstract grids and geometries imprinted on the Earth's surface by capitalism and the capitalist state. It will be the central task of this article to read the history of Ballymun through the lens of Sartre'sCritique of Dialectical Reason, and, in so doing, to rework theCritiqueso that it speaks to the concerns of contemporary critical human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]