24 research outputs found
Intelligence, reason of state and the art of governing risk and opportunity in early modern Europe
Get PDFDrawing upon primary and secondary historical material, this paper explores the role of intelligence in early modern government. It focuses upon developments in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England, a site-specific genealogical moment in the broader history of state power/knowledges. Addressing a tendency in Foucauldian work to neglect pre-eighteenth-century governance, the analysis reveals a set of interrelated processes which gave rise to an innovative technique for anticipating hazard and opportunity for the state. At the intersection of raison d’État, the evolving art of government, widespread routines of secrecy and a post-Westphalia field of European competition and exchange, intelligence was imagined as a fundamental solution to the concurrent problems of ensuring peace and stability while improving state forces. In the administrative offices of the English Secretary of State, an assemblage of complex and interrelated procedures sought to produce and manipulate information in ways which exposed both possible risks to the state and potential opportunities for expansion and gain. As this suggests, the art of intelligence played an important if largely unacknowledged role in the formation and growth of the early modern state. Ensuring strategic advantage over rivals, intelligence also limited the ability of England's neighbours to dominate trade, control the seas and master the colonies, functioning as a constitutive feature of European balance and equilibrium. As the analysis concludes, understanding intelligence as a form of governmental technique – a way of doing something – reveals an entirely novel way of thinking about and investigating its myriad (historical and contemporary) formations
Design of a new electroactive polymer based continuumactuator for endoscopic surgical robots
No full textInternational audienceThis paper presents a smart continuum actuatorbased on a promising class of materials: ElectroAc-tive polymer (EAP). Indeed these polymers undergo di-mensional change in response to an applied electricalfield and could be integrated directly in an endoscopicrobot structure. We focuses on one of such materials,an electrostrictive polymer, for its valuable strain per-formances. An analytical model leading to the develop-ment of an experimental analysis of such a material inan attempts to overcome the technical gap of their in-tegration into a multilayer composite sheet to performrobotic actuation is the subject of this article
Annales des sciences naturelles.
No full textTable G\ue9n\ue9rale Alphab\ue9tique (1\ue8re s\ue9r.) (1841
