The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors by Dr. Paul H. Elovitz, PhD (2018) – follow the link to order from the publisher (ISBN # 978-1-138-58749-6, use FLR40 code to get a 20% discount).
Read Excerpts from Ch. 1 and Ch. 2 and Table of Contents from The Making of Psychohistory.
Volume 25 - Number 2 - Winter 2019,
Pages: 131 - 213
Section: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Cohn, S. (2019). Puzzles of Brexit [Letter to the Editor]. Clio’s Psyche, 25(2), 227-228. https://doi.org/10.70763/82ca5dd156cc926b2992f73c2896f761
Puzzles of Brexit (letter to the editor)
Keywords: Brexit, psychohistory, puzzles, Samuel Cohn, sleepwalk, suicide
Dear Editor:
Questions of Brexit are ripe for psychohistorical explanation: why do societies at certain junctures in history wish to commit suicide or to sleepwalk into certain decline and slow death as seems to be happening in Britain today with Brexit? By simple arithmetic, Parliament has the numbers to create a broad and successful coalition of those in the remaining camps and pass either a soft-Brexit, Norway style, or call for a new referendum and thereby avert the disastrous social, political, and economic consequences of either a No-Deal Brexit or a New-Deal Brexit (PM May’s supposed Plan B), which seeks to placate the minority Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of North Ireland and a minority of Hard-Brexit fundamentalists in the Conservative Party.
A second question for psychohistorians: why has Teresa May put her ego so blatantly above the future wellbeing of her nation—refusing to rule out a No-Deal Brexit and thereby risking the disasters she so vividly detailed in the lead up to Parliament’s “meaningful vote” on Brexit on January 15? What is it about some politicians who find it so difficult to stomach compromise or flexibly to negotiate a change in direction, especially after a monumental defeat of the magnitude of May’s plan A last week? Of course,
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the arrival to supreme power of such politicians at this historical juncture is hardly limited to Britain. Given the U.S.’s twittering President, perhaps American commentators on current events and psychohistorians might help the British with this puzzle.
Sincerely,
Samuel Cohn
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Authors:
Samuel Cohn
Samuel Cohn, PhD, is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow, an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities of the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Over the past 17 years he has focused on the history of popular unrest in late medieval and early modern Europe and on the history of plague. His latest books include The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (2002); Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders (2004); Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425 (2006); Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance (2010); and Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns (2013); and most recently Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (2018), funded by a three-year Leverhulme “Major Research Fellowship.” These books are published by Cambridge, Harvard, and Oxford universities’ presses. Professor Cohn may be contacted at .
How to Cite This:
Cohn, S. (2019). Puzzles of Brexit [Letter to the Editor]. Clio’s Psyche, 25(2), 227-228. https://doi.org/10.70763/82ca5dd156cc926b2992f73c2896f761PDF downloads:
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