Ernest Renan's Race Problem

This review revisits the role of race in Ernest Renan's thought by situating contemporary debates in a long perspective that extends back to his texts and their earliest interpreters. Renan is an ambivalent figure: from the 1850s onwards he used ‘race’ to denote firm differences between the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ language groups in history; but after 1870, he repeatedly condemned biological racism in various venues and contexts. I show that the tension between these two sides of Renan's thought has continually resurfaced in criticism and historiography ever since the late nineteenth century. Renan's racial views have been subject to particularly close scrutiny following Léon Poliakov's and Edward Said's critiques in the 1970s, but the ensuing debate risks developing into an inconclusive tug-of-war between attack and apologia. I propose three fresh directions for research. First, historians should situate the evolution of Renan's ideas on race in closer biographical context; secondly, they must reconsider the cultural authority of his texts, which is often more asserted than proven; thirdly, they should pay greater attention to his reception outside Europe, particularly regarding his writing on Islam

Effects of improved street lighting on crime

Improved street lighting serves many functions and is used in both public and private settings. The prevention of personal and property crime is one of its objectives in public space, which is the main focus of this review. There are two main theories of why improved street lighting may cause a reduction in crime. The first suggests that improved lighting leads to increased surveillance of potential offenders (both by improving visibility and by increasing the number of people on the street) and hence to increased deterrence of potential offenders. The second suggests that improved lighting signals community investment in the area and that the area is improving, leading to increased community pride, community cohesiveness, and informal social control. The first theory predicts decreases in crime especially during the hours of darkness, while the second theory predicts decreases in crime during both daytime and nighttime. Results of this review indicate that improved street lighting significantly reduces crime. This lends support for the continued use of improved street lighting to prevent crime in public space. The review also found that nighttime crimes did not decrease more than daytime crimes. This suggests that a theory of street lighting focusing on its role in increasing community pride and informal social control may be more plausible than a theory focusing on increased surveillance and increased deterrence. Future research should be designed to test the main theories of the effects of improved street lighting more explicitly, and future lighting schemes should employ high quality evaluation designs with long-term followups