Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The General Crisis of the 17th Century

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 96 posts

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#31

Post by TeMPOraL »

walterbell wrote: post #29
JonnieCache wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been recently changed. Catholics are now allowed, and men no longer take precedence over women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement The whole thing is still, to quote Doug Stanhope, "some dungeons and dragons bullshit", but at least its not immutable even today.

> at least its not immutable even today We've since moved to immutable trade agreements.

And here I was thinking immutable == good. I guess functional programming doesn't work well with nation states.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#32

Post by benbreen »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #24
bgilroy26 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re:whiggish-ness https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...

Thanks for posting this. That essay is fantastic. It's actually a perfect complement to that article and the discussion happening in this entire thread. It beautifully highlights the modern historian's crisis. You cannot distill history into a framework because any unique set of events seem to be reproduced somewhere else in history with different outcomes. You must distill history into a framework otherwise it's imp…

This seems like a good spot to link to one of my favorite essays on the theme you've raised here - the historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin (of the hedgehog and the fox fame) on "The Concept of Scientific History." (Short version: he argues that there's no such thing). By the way, I'm happy to see such an interesting discussion of my favorite historical topic on HN - thanks.

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/cc/scihist.pdf

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#33

Post by jkot »

btilly wrote: post #2

Regardless of what you think about whether these crises were connected, they did give rise to a rather important idea. At its heart, the idea is that, "I won't kill you for your beliefs if you aren't going to kill me for mine." This may seem like common sense today, but historically we only arrived at it after having plenty of opportunity to deal with the aftermath of people being willing to kill each other for havin…

Roman Empire had pretty tolerant culture as well...

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#34

Post by woodpanel »

btilly wrote: post #2

Regardless of what you think about whether these crises were connected, they did give rise to a rather important idea. At its heart, the idea is that, "I won't kill you for your beliefs if you aren't going to kill me for mine." This may seem like common sense today, but historically we only arrived at it after having plenty of opportunity to deal with the aftermath of people being willing to kill each other for havin…

I can echo the dissent to this view. Not one european nation came out as a turf for religious freedom. Quite the opposite, most nations came out as religiously cleansed.

Ethnicity, Religion and Nationhood are different things. Todays meaning of "nationhood" was probably formed in this time of wars. But most of Europe's nations of present day are culturally dominated by one the belligrent religions:

Catholic: Italy, Belgium, France, Austria, Ireland, Poland Protestant: Great Britain, Netherlands, Scandinavia, the Baltics

Today, there are only two exceptions. Switzerland and Germany. Germany didn't exist as a "nation", but in each of the many German states, it was either one or the other religion. As was the case in Switzerland's Cantons.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#35

Post by btilly »

amyjess wrote: post #21
btilly wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deliberately stated a very mild form of the idea because that is what actually seems to have been accepted relatively early on. The stronger idea that we should actually treat people with different beliefs as we would like to be treated in turn took a lot longer. For instance the lot of many faiths in the UK started improving with the toleration act of 1668. Why were Catholics excluded? Because there had been actua…

> The US was fundamentally no better, and in practice worse despite the Bill of Rights You also have to remember that until the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, the Bill of Rights only applied to acts of Congress ("Congress shall make no law...") and not to state legislatures.

You have oversimplified the history. After the Fourteenth Amendment arrived, there was considerable confusion about what it actually meant for state laws. And it took a long time for the very complex details to get ironed out. That is why the case I pointed to was nearly a century after the 14th amendment was passed.

See http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2012/03/12/the-14th-amendmen... for a detailed (and admittedly somewhat opinionated) history of this topic. And see http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment14.html to start digging in on exactly how complex the current interpretation of the 14th amendment actually is.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#36

Post by btilly »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #19
btilly wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deliberately stated a very mild form of the idea because that is what actually seems to have been accepted relatively early on. The stronger idea that we should actually treat people with different beliefs as we would like to be treated in turn took a lot longer. For instance the lot of many faiths in the UK started improving with the toleration act of 1668. Why were Catholics excluded? Because there had been actua…

And yet your own hereditary monarch in 2015 has to be an Anglican.

Which hereditary monarch would that be?

I was born in California.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#37

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

applecore wrote: post #3

Interesting concept, although the single most significant event of that era would have to be the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648.

And of our era, 9/11, the beginning of the end of the Westphalian state-based order and signaling a new world order of overlapping authorities and loyalties, from multinational corporations to terrorist organizations. "The Modern Mercenary" by Sean McFate is a good book based on this idea.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#38

Post by Someone »

So, where is the test for "Distribution of conflicts does not follow a Poisson distribution?"

Certainly, that is a necessary condition before one can claim that a period is special in some way.

Yes, one can tweak the raw data by adjusting the time period, the estimation of the magnitude and number of conflicts (for example, was the 80-year war a single war? There certainly was a 12-year truce that likely was longer than many periods of formal peace), and by what areas of conflict to include, but that should only make it easier to get a statistically significant result.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#39

Post by voidlogic »

derefr wrote: post #20
pluma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually exactly how I've recently heard the Peace of Westphalia[0] described (which ended the Thirty Years War in Germany): it established the idea that nations are independent "wholes" with their own laws, religion and politics, and that that's okay. The ideas encoded in the agreement are basically the reason we think of events like the Crimean secession[1] as an unconstitutional Russian annexation regardle…

> even if there was a referendum and even if that referendum was formally valid and the outcome was in favour of the secession, the constitution of the Ukraine forbids the secession and therefore renders the referendum invalid by definition. That's kind of weird. What does it take to peacefully annihilate/void a constitution, then? I would assume that if every citizen revokes their citizenship to the original country…

>What does it take to peacefully annihilate/void a constitution

Most constitutions specify processes for amending them, which often could be used to dismantle them.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#40

Post by btilly »

woodpanel wrote: post #34
btilly wrote: post #2

Regardless of what you think about whether these crises were connected, they did give rise to a rather important idea. At its heart, the idea is that, "I won't kill you for your beliefs if you aren't going to kill me for mine." This may seem like common sense today, but historically we only arrived at it after having plenty of opportunity to deal with the aftermath of people being willing to kill each other for havin…

I can echo the dissent to this view. Not one european nation came out as a turf for religious freedom. Quite the opposite, most nations came out as religiously cleansed. Ethnicity, Religion and Nationhood are different things. Todays meaning of "nationhood" was probably formed in this time of wars. But most of Europe's nations of present day are culturally dominated by one the belligrent religions: Catholic: Italy, B…

There should be no conflict here. The idea arose out of a period of intense conflict. This idea arose as a response to religious conflict, and took a long time to get accepted. It is therefore no surprise that there was a lot of religious cleansing prior to and during the period where the idea formed.

More specifically, modern notions of religious freedom generally get traced back to John Locke's Letters Concerning Toleration (1689–92). He was influenced in turn by ideas developed by Baptist theologists. And his sphere of influence includes people like Thomas Jefferson who put freedom of religion into the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Post reply on HN