bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Austen’s Intentions
Authors: Chwe Michael Suk-Young
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines whether Jane Austen intends to impart game theory in her novels. If Austen has no intention of making strategic thinking a central theoretical concern, one would have to explain the inclusion of many particular and otherwise unnecessary details, such as Elizabeth's argument to Jane that the pain of upsetting Mr. Bingley's sisters relative to the joy of marrying him is best measured by whether Jane chooses to refuse him. One would also have to explain Austen's superabundance of “schemes” and prizing of “penetration,” or her fairly direct theoretical statements, such as Elinor's doctrine that others should influence only your behavior, not your understanding. The most specific “smoking gun” evidence that Austen is centrally concerned with strategic thinking is how she employs children. Since learning strategic thinking starts early, lessons missed or mistaught in your childhood can have adverse consequences later.
Austen on Cluelessness
Authors: Chwe Michael Suk-Young
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how Jane Austen deals with cluelessness in her novels. It discusses the five explanations offered by Austen for cluelessness. The first is lack of natural ability and the second is social distance. In the latter case, an unmarried person for example is not so good at understanding married people because he has not yet had the experience of being married. The third is excessive self-reference, using yourself too much as a template for understanding others. The fourth is status maintenance: a higher-status person is not supposed to think about the intentions of a lower-status person, and risks blurring the status distinction if she does. The fifth is that sometimes presumption, believing that one can directly manipulate another's preferences, actually works. The chapter applies these explanations to the decisive blunders of superiors such as Lady Catherine and General Tilney in Northanger Abbey.
From the “Hebrew Bedouin” to “Israeli Arabic”
Authors: Levy Lital
Published: November 2017

The current relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine is the outgrowth of over a century of sociolinguistic, political, and cultural developments; though the two languages had shared a long and storied past, Zionism catalyzed their reunion in the context of modern nationalism. This chapter surveys that historic landscape to offer a counternarrative of Israeli language and culture, arguing that Arabic has played a central, formative, yet paradoxical role in the self-definition of Modern Hebrew from the very outset. The repressed story of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine is inseparable from the triangulated history of Ashkenazi Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and Mizraḥi Jews, each group having faced distinct yet interrelated dilemmas of language. In excavating this multilayered site of memory, the chapter traces pre-state linguistic practices, the institutionalization of Modern Hebrew, and the continuing evolution of Hebrew and Arabic in the political scene, concluding with the question of literary translation between the two languages.
Palestinian Midrash
Authors: Levy Lital
Published: November 2017

This chapter turns to the Hebrew poetics of Palestinian Arab writers. It presents a close reading of poetry by Anton Shammas and his contemporaries Salman Masalha and Na'im 'Araidi. It argues that their poetry offers us a different window onto the question of Hebrew writing in a Palestinian hand. It reads their Hebrew verse as a poetics formed between languages, cultures, and national traditions, replacing the hermeneutics of antithesis (Palestinian or Israeli? Israeli or Jewish?) with one of “in-betweenness.” Furthermore, the chapter moves away from debating the identitarian definition of Hebrew to explore the nuanced relationship of Palestinian writers with Hebrew's cultural heritage and with the traditional Jewish modes of reading and interpretation embedded therein. Through an analysis of allusion and metalinguistic discourse in Palestinian Hebrew poetry, it illustrates the intertextual practice called “Palestinian midrash.”
Justice in the World
Authors: Connolly Joy
Published: November 2017

This chapter turns to questions of justice and ends with a close reading of Sallust's Jugurtha (and to a lesser extent, his Catiline). Sallust organizes his history of Jugurtha's war against the Romans in the North African kingdom of Numidia around the themes of justice and corruption; he ends by abruptly cutting off the conclusion of his story, the execution of Jugurtha. It is argued that Sallust's withholding of judgment at the end of Jugurtha signifies the ways in which agents in the decaying republic withhold justice on a larger scale. The silence at the ending caps a narrative pattern of repetition and deferral, creating a fundamental dislocation of consequentiality, the notion of an essential relation between intention and action.
Imagination, Finitude, Responsibility, Irony
Authors: Connolly Joy
Published: November 2017

With the advent of Julius Caesar came the end times of the republic, and this chapter turns to one of Cicero's Caesarian orations. Several key themes from previous chapters come together: responsibility to the other, the significance of imagination and recognition, the politics of irony, and the limits of self-sovereignty. Interwoven with these themes is an emphasis on the necessity of speech, speech that may retain some element of resistibility even in the face of tyrannical domination. By including in a book about republican political thought a speech that is commonly taken as the starting point of imperial panegyric, the chapter also foregrounds the fact that all the texts under consideration here emerge in conditions of disruptive and disrupted politics. It is the shock of the repeat experience of autocracy (after the “decisive rift” created by Marius' seven consulships in the late second century) that distills the republican vision at the heart of Cicero's speech on behalf of the exile Marcellus.
The Impression of Influence
Authors: Grimmer Justin , Westwood Sean J. , Messing Solomon
Published: November 2017

Constituents often fail to hold their representatives accountable for federal spending decisions—even though those very choices have a pervasive influence on American life. Why does this happen? Breaking new ground in the study of representation, this book demonstrates how legislators skillfully inform constituents with strategic communication and how this facilitates or undermines accountability. Using a massive collection of Congressional texts and innovative experiments and methods, the book shows how legislators create an impression of influence through credit claiming messages. Anticipating constituents' reactions, legislators claim credit for programs that elicit a positive response, making constituents believe their legislator is effectively representing their district. This spurs legislators to create and defend projects popular with their constituents. Yet legislators claim credit for much more—they announce projects long before they begin, deceptively imply they deserve credit for expenditures they had little role in securing, and boast about minuscule projects. Unfortunately, legislators get away with seeking credit broadly because constituents evaluate the actions that are reported, rather than the size of the expenditures. This book raises critical questions about how citizens hold their political representatives accountable and when deception is allowable in a democracy.
Representation, Spending, and the Personal Vote
Authors: Grimmer Justin , Westwood Sean J. , Messing Solomon
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how political representation occurs on government spending decisions—one of the most consequential powers of government. Political representation in Congress is, in large part, about how elected officials decide how to spend federal money. While a large literature analyzes how district expenditures affect support for congressional incumbents, it remains unclear how constituents hold legislators accountable for expenditures—how constituents attribute spending to legislators, how constituents evaluate those expenditures, and how constituents reward or punish legislators for spending on projects. One reason for this lack of clarity is that constituents are unlikely to learn about the projects on their own. However, constituents' inability to track spending is not an indictment of their democratic competence. Instead, it reflects the many activities representatives perform and the subtle ways that federal expenditures occur.
Representation and the Impression of Influence
Authors: Grimmer Justin , Westwood Sean J. , Messing Solomon
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores the implications of this study's argument for representation. The credit-claiming, credit allocation process that this study characterizes enables accountability, but it also forces one to reconsider one's priorities in representation and how one might privilege transparent communication at the expense of efficient policy outcomes, and vice versa. If one prioritizes truthful and transparent discussion, then the credit-claiming, credit allocation process is problematic. The chapter then suggests some reforms in reporting and congressional credit claiming that could make the process more transparent and limit legislators' ability to engage in systematic deception. It also explains how this study could be extended, and highlights yet-to-be-answered questions about how legislators build support.
Status Attainment among Emancipated Slaves
Authors: Ruef Martin
Published: November 2017

This chapter analyzes the legacy of slavery for status attainment among the first generation of blacks who were liberated from this institution. Its quantitative findings suggest that categorical uncertainty became more pronounced over time: while the internal hierarchy of slavery clearly predicted the occupations that emancipated blacks would hold after the Civil War, it became largely decoupled from status attainment in the succeeding decades. Mediating effects, such as the Freedmen Bureau's educational interventions and black migration, also served to curtail the reproduction of antebellum status. By the early twentieth century, the most durable predictor of the kinds of jobs that were available to blacks who had been born in the antebellum South was the legal distinction between those who were free and those who were slaves before 1865.
Emancipation in Comparative Perspective
Authors: Ruef Martin
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter summarizes the evidence gathered for the postbellum South and compares it with other postemancipation projects in the Americas. The common pattern of gradual emancipation seen in former colonial possessions in the Caribbean and South America has considerable similarity with early efforts to manage uncertainty in the era of Radical Reconstruction. As in the case of the American South, those postemancipation projects soon fell victim to competing claims and mobilization among landowners, workers, and other parties, leading to profound and durable uncertainty in the economies of former slave societies. Even in the twenty-first century, some of this durable uncertainty remains as the United States struggle with the legacies of slavery and emancipation.
Being German, Becoming Muslim
Authors: Özyürek Esra
Published: November 2017

Every year more and more Europeans, including Germans, are embracing Islam. It is estimated that there are now up to 100,000 German converts—a number similar to that in France and the United Kingdom. What stands out about recent conversions is that they take place at a time when Islam is increasingly seen as contrary to European values. This book explores how Germans come to Islam within this antagonistic climate, how they manage to balance their love for Islam with their society's fear of it, how they relate to immigrant Muslims, and how they shape debates about race, religion, and belonging in today's Europe. The book looks at how mainstream society marginalizes converts and questions their national loyalties. In turn, converts try to disassociate themselves from migrants of Muslim-majority countries and promote a denationalized Islam untainted by Turkish or Arab traditions. Some German Muslims believe that once cleansed of these accretions, the Islam that surfaces fits in well with German values and lifestyle. Others even argue that being a German Muslim is wholly compatible with the older values of the German Enlightenment. This book provides a fresh window into the connections and tensions stemming from a growing religious phenomenon in Germany and beyond.
Introduction
Authors: Beiser Frederick C.
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's focus, namely German philosophy from 1840 to 1900. The common opinion about German philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century was that it was a period of decline and stagnation. The great creative “age of idealism” had passed away with Hegel's death, it seemed, only to be succeeded by “an age of realism,” which was more concerned with empirical science and technical progress than philosophy. It is argued that the common opinion is just false, and that the second half of the century, though written about much less, is more important and interesting philosophically than the first half. The remainder of the chapter discusses the major developments in the in the second half of the nineteenth century and the approach taken in this book.
The War Machine in the Middle Bronze Age
Authors: Smith Adam T.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the breakdown and redevelopment of the civilization machine during the Middle Bronze Age alongside a fearsome new assemblage that is best described as a “war machine.” The operation of the war machine entailed not only the reproduction of political violence but also the dissection of social orders, severing a sovereign body from the bodies of subjects—those who command from those who obey. Through the conspicuous consumption of Middle Bonze Age mortuary ritual, the war machine reproduced the terms on which social order was predicated—charisma, violence, and distinction. However, built into the conjoined operations of the civilization and war machines was a contradiction. As the one (the erstwhile sovereign) pulled away from the many (the constituted public), demands upon material resources exceeded capacities. Territorial fragmentation and military stalemate—consequences of the war machine's proliferation—threatened to undermine the workings of the civilization machine, dissecting a previously expansive public into smaller and smaller segments. As a result, the central principle of charismatic authority was put at risk insofar as political power flowed from the provision of needs through conflicts successfully waged.
Introduction
Authors: Leiter Brian
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter sets out the book's focus, namely the question of why the state should have to tolerate exemptions from generally applicable laws when they conflict with religious obligations but not with any other equally serious obligations of conscience. It illustrates this issue by describing two cases. The first involves a Sikh boy who is allowed to wear a kirpan, a dagger or sword (a symbol of their religious devotion) to school. The second involves a rural boy, who is not a Sikh and is not allowed to bring a knife to school despite the fact that doing so is a long-standing tradition in his community. There is no Western democracy, at present, in which the boy in our second scenario has prevailed or would prevail in a challenge to a general prohibition on the carrying of weapons in the school. Were he a Sikh he would stand a good chance of winning.
Why Tolerate Religion?
Authors: Leiter Brian
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that there is no principled reason for legal or constitutional regimes to single out religion for protection; there is no moral or epistemic consideration that favors special legal solicitude toward beliefs that conjoin categorical commands with insulation from evidence, even if they produce some existential consolation. Second, the general principled arguments for toleration sketched in Chapter II—both the broadly Rawlsian and Millian ones—do justify legal protection for liberty of conscience, which would necessarily encompass toleration of religious beliefs. This means the hard question will be whether to expand the range of legal accommodations to all claims of conscience. Third, and finally, the general reasons for being skeptical that there are special reasons to tolerate religion qua religion (because of the special potential for harm that attaches to the conjunction of categorical demands based on beliefs insulated from evidence) suggest that we must be especially alert to the limits of religious toleration imposed by the side-constraints.
Against Security
Authors: Molotch Harvey
Published: November 2017

The inspections we put up with at airport gates and the endless warnings we get at train stations, on buses, and all the rest are the way we encounter the vast apparatus of U.S. security. Like the wars fought in its name, these measures are supposed to make us safer in a post-9/11 world. But do they? This book explains how these regimes of command-and-control not only annoy and intimidate but are counterproductive. The book takes the reader through the sites, the gizmos, and the politics to urge greater trust in basic citizen capacities—along with smarter design of public spaces. The book criticizes a range of security structures and protocols: airport security that requires body searches while generating long lines of queuing people; New Orleans water projects that precipitated the Hurricane Katrina flood, and the militarized disaster response that further endangered residents; even gender-segregated public restrooms. The book recommends simple improvements, from better structural design and signage to assist evacuations to customer-service procedures that help employees to spot trouble. More so, it argues for a shift away from command and control toward a security philosophy that empowers ordinary people to handle crises. The result is a far-reaching re-examination of the culture of public fear.
Bare Life: Restroom Anxiety and the Urge for Control
Authors: Molotch Harvey
Published: November 2017

This chapter takes up what might at first appear an unlikely setting for examining security dynamics: the public restroom. There are lessons to be taken from this venue, so often ignored in serious scholarship and indeed the usual basis only for jokes. Here we can see anxieties in play and all sorts of unsavory mechanisms, both at the micro and macro level, that come in response. The toilet allows us to see the combination of factors that repress—the usual culprits of class, race, and gender discrimination—but also soulful anxieties that come with the more basic human territory. Some degree of capitalist plot is happening, but that is only part of the story—a larger lesson to be considered across other less intimate realms, whether market-based or not. Whatever the combination of sources, the chapter points the way toward a safer and more pleasant toilet and one with the promise of ecological reform.
The Golden Age
Authors: Willis Paul E.
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores the musical tastes of the motor-bike boys. Pop music was a manifest and ever-present part of the environment of the motor-bike boys: it pervaded their whole culture. However, the motor-bike boys had very specific tastes that were not part of the current pop music scene, and were not catered for in the on-going mass-media sources. They liked the music of the early rock 'n' roll period between 1955 and 1960, especially that of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley. By current standards in the commercial market and the pop music provided by mass-media channels, their tastes were at least ten years out of date. By deliberate choice, then, and not by the accident of a passive reception, they chose this music. This reveals the dialectical capacity which early rock 'n' roll had to reflect, resonate, and return something of real value to the motor-bike boys.
The Hippies
Authors: Willis Paul E.
Published: November 2017

This chapter turns to an overview of the hippy culture. This time, the author enters the ‘hippy scene’ of a large industrial city in late 1969 and follows up by making some general observations of the scene; engaging in participant observation; soaking up the general hippy ambience; and participating in casual talk, directed talk, and various taped group discussions. The chapter is an exploration of the hippy identity. Notably, the hippies did not live in a world of personal certainty and had a far from certain grip on their own identities. Where in the ‘straight’ world this is a cause for concern, for the hippies it was a source of richness and the base for expanded awareness.
Introduction
Authors: Gatti Hilary
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter tackles the difficult question of liberty as it was developed in the Western world since the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Clearly related, in the first instance, to the aftermath of the systematic persecution and massacre of the Jews and the dictatorial regimes that succeeded in coming to power in some of the most civilized and refined cultures of the Western world, a literature has been produced on the liberty that was lost—and only arduously (and not always fully) regained—that is daunting both in its quantity and quality. Alongside this brief discussion of the term “liberty” and all it implies, the chapter turns to another issue which is often brought up alongside debates about liberty—republicanism. This chapter explores some theses on republicanism to form a context based on the historical roots of the liberty discourse.
Political Liberty
Authors: Gatti Hilary
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines Niccolò Machiavelli's ideas about liberty. It considers Machiavelli's Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy (1584), which contains Machiavelli's treatment of republican liberty and is considered to be his greatest contribution to the discussion of the tensions between political power and the liberty of both the individual citizen and the community at large. Alongside the conflict between law and the liberty of the republican citizen, the chapter turns to another key point in Machiavelli's arguments about liberty—the contradictions between liberty and what he calls fortuna (good luck or good fortune). Next, the chapter studies Machiavelli's Discourses in light of the genre of the utopia, as conceived by Sir Thomas More. Finally, the chapter takes a more detailed look into Machiavelli's other famous work, The Prince (1532).
Liberty and Religion
Authors: Gatti Hilary
Published: November 2017

This chapter addresses the question of liberty in sixteenth-century religious debates. It first takes a look at the discussion between the Augustinian friar Martin Luther and Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam concerning the freedom of the will. The chapter then turns to the theological thinking of John Calvin and the reintroduction into the Protestant world of the notion of heresy. Hereafter the chapter details the circumstances surrounding the dramatic rupture between the friar Giordano Bruno and the Dominican order, including the philosophical doctrines which eventually landed him in the Inquisition. Finally, this chapter follows up on Bruno's insights through the commentary of theologians Richard Hooker and Jacob Harmensz, who is more widely known as Jacobus Arminius.
Epilogue
Authors: Gatti Hilary
Published: November 2017

This chapter studies Henry Neville's Plato redivivus (Plato reborn, 1681), a work that continued the discussion of republican rule under the influence of a reading of Machiavelli. It compares and contrasts Neville's work with that of another work referencing Machiavelli's republicanism in the years of the commonwealth governed by Oliver Cromwell in seventeenth-century Britain—James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). Specifically, this chapter seeks to argue that Neville's book is different from Harrington's Oceana in both kind and content, and that it needs to be read carefully for its own sake and not just as an appendix to Harrington's text.
The Good Immigrants
Authors: Hsu Madeline Y.
Published: November 2017

Conventionally, U.S. immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast, this book considers immigration from the perspective of Chinese elites—intellectuals, businessmen, and students—who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, the book looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from U.S. policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness. The earliest U.S. immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the U.S. impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act. Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei, this book examines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans.
One-Move Puzzles with Mathematical Content
Authors: Levitin Anany
Published: November 2017

This chapter provides a survey of mathematical puzzles solvable in one move. The types considered are divination puzzles, weighing puzzles, rearrangement puzzles, dissection puzzles, and folding puzzles. The chapter does not include one-question logic puzzles (e.g., Knights and Knaves) or puzzles that can be solved in one move only because of the small size of the puzzle's instance (e.g., making seven payments with links of a seven-link gold chain). Equation puzzles composed of matchsticks or decimal digits have also been excluded. In addition, the survey suggests several research projects related to the included puzzles. The chapter then concludes with answers to the puzzles highlighted in the survey.
Some ABCs of Graphs and Games
Authors: Beineke Jennifer , Beineke Lowell
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores some objects in which graphs have a role, some explicit, some not obvious. These graphical objects are presented as mathematical exhibits at a museum. The chapter starts with the Amazing Asteroid, following this with a theorem (Bernstein's Bijection), a couple of games (Chromatic Combat and Devious Dice), an episode of Eluding Execution, a coin-tossing game (Flipping Fun), and an African adventure game (Get the Giraffe). Versions of these explorations have all been successfully used with students at various levels—whether in the classroom, for Math Club, or for independent investigation—but they can be appreciated by wider audiences too. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how one of the topics in particular is contributing to successful research experiences for undergraduates.
Solving the Tower of Hanoi with Random Moves
Authors: Alekseyev Max A. , Berger Toby
Published: November 2017

This chapter studies solutions of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle and some of its variants with random moves, where each move is chosen uniformly from the set of the valid moves in the current state. The Tower of Hanoi puzzle consists of n disks of distinct sizes distributed across three pegs. At a single move it is permitted to transfer a disk from the top of one peg to the top of another peg, if this results in a valid state, i.e. a particular distribution of the disks across the pegs. The chapter proves the exact formulas for the expected number of random moves to solve the puzzles. It also presents an alternative proof for one of the formulas that couples a theorem about expected commute times of random walks on graphs with the delta-to-wye transformation used in the analysis of three-phase AC systems for electrical power distribution.
Heartless Poker
Authors: Lanphier Dominic , Taalman Laura
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers three hands in poker. It shows how the probabilities of obtaining a Full House, Straight, and Flush level off compared to the probabilities of the other hands, and then looks at how the probabilities of these three hands shift according to how the deck has been modified. These hands, as the chapter notes, have distinct frequencies in any generalized poker game. However, the analysis here is conducted through a game of Heartless Poker, which uses a standard deck with all the hearts removed. That there are only three suits and thirty-nine cards in the deck changes the probabilities, and perhaps the rankings, of the different types of hands.
An Introduction to Gilbreath Numbers
Authors: Vallin Robert W.
Published: November 2017

This chapter mathematically analyzes the behavior of a card trick described by an undergraduate math major at the University of California, Los Angeles, named Norman Gilbreath. Stated succinctly, this trick can be performed by handing an audience member a deck of cards, letting them cut the deck several times, and then having them deal a number of cards from the top into a pile. The audience member takes the two piles (the cards in hand and the set now piled on the table) and riffle-shuffles them together. The magician now hides the deck (under a cloth, perhaps, or behind the back) and proceeds to produce one pair of cards after another in which one card is black and the other is red.
Connection Games and Sperner’s Lemma
Authors: Molnar David
Published: November 2017

This chapter provides an introduction to connection games in general. It also recounts how Sperner's Lemma, a result about labeling a triangulation of a simplex, can be used to prove that someone must win at Hex—the best-known connection game—as well as The Game of Y®, (or simply, Y) another well-known connection game. Moreover, the chapter proves a generalization of Sperner's Lemma and uses it to show that there is always a winner in the many variations of Atoll and Begird, two connection games which can be played on a variety of boards and include Hex and Y, respectively, as special cases. These “must-win” results have significant strategic implications—if one prevents the opponent from making the desired connection, one would be able to make this connection by necessity.
The Nanny State: The Challenge from Autonomy
Authors: Grand Julian Le , New Bill
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the argument that government paternalism harms or inappropriately restricts individual autonomy. More specifically, it considers the criticism that the paternalist government is actually a “nanny state”: the state is seen to treat its citizens as a nanny treats her charges, instead of as autonomous adults. After elaborating on the notion of autonomy, the chapter explores the relationship between paternalism, autonomy, and motivation. It then assesses the claim, associated with soft paternalism, that the individuals affected in fact have little autonomy to be violated. This position is based on the so-called autonomy failure—that is, the justification for paternalism depends in large part on a prior diminution of the individual's capacity for autonomous decision making, so that autonomy is therefore not offended by the intervention. The chapter describes the various circumstances in which this autonomy failure takes place and concludes by analyzing hard paternalism.
The Politics of Paternalism
Authors: Grand Julian Le , New Bill
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the politics of paternalism. It first considers the question of whether the government can do better than the individual, outlining a set of justifications for government paternalism and showing how the state can intervene to improve the well-being of its citizens. It then discusses possible ways in which the government could be held to account to ensure that, in its paternalistic interventions aimed at improving its citizens' well-being, it does actually pursue the “right” agenda. It argues that the government can indeed raise the well-being of individuals who suffer from reasoning failure, even when allowance is made for possible reasoning failure among those individuals who constitute the government. However, democratic mechanisms must be put in place to ensure that the latter do not pursue their own agenda and turn the paternalistic state into an instrument of authoritarianism.
Nanny State or Helpful Friend?
Authors: Grand Julian Le , New Bill
Published: November 2017

This chapter summarizes the book's arguments and uses them to address two central questions: whether a paternalistic government is necessarily a nanny state that infantilizes its citizens and illegitimately erodes their autonomy, or whether it could be a helpful friend that promotes their well-being without undermining autonomy. The chapter suggests that the book's arguments provide a solid foundation for deciding on the appropriateness of government paternalism in general, of different forms of paternalism, and of the various types of paternalistic interventions. It argues that most of the definitions of paternalism common in the literature are unsatisfactory and proposes an alternative: to define paternalism in relation to reasoning failure. It concludes with the assertion that the state—as a helpful friend rather than a nanny state—can help its citizens achieve their own ends, and thereby promote their own well-being and that of the whole society.
The History of American Magazines, 1741–1860
Authors: Haveman Heather A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at the history of American magazines during the period 1741–1860. It first traces the origins of magazines in Europe, where magazine publishing began in the late seventeenth century as printing presses became widespread. Among the early English-language magazines in this period were the Philosophical Transactions, A Review of the Affairs of France and of all Europe, and Gentleman's Magazine. The chapter proceeds by discussing the growth of the magazine industry in America from 1741 to 1860 as well as the evolving nature of magazine distribution in terms of audience, content, format, and genre variety, as well as publishing and readership geography. The chapter highlights the sharp distinction between the short-lived, small-circulation magazines of the mid-eighteenth century and the often long-lived, mass-circulation periodicals of the mid-nineteenth century.
Launching Magazines
Authors: Haveman Heather A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the evolution of magazines in America from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, with particular emphasis on who launched them and and why they did so. It also considers how magazines' internal operations evolved to take advantage of increasingly beneficent material and cultural resources such as population growth, urbanization, and improved printing technologies. To find out who founded magazines, the chapter focuses on entrepreneurs' social positions—their status, meaning their relative positions in a social hierarchy—which afford them access to the resources they needed to start new ventures. It then compares later magazine founders with their predecessors and investigates how founders' motivations changed over time. It also describes what founders said they hoped to accomplish with their magazine publishing ventures and concludes by analyzing the strategies they used to gain legitimacy and support from subscribers.
White Backlash
Authors: Abrajano Marisa , Hajnal Zoltan L.
Published: November 2017

This book provides an authoritative assessment of how immigration is reshaping American politics. Using an array of data and analysis, it shows that fears about immigration fundamentally influence white Americans' core political identities, policy preferences, and electoral choices, and that these concerns are at the heart of a large-scale defection of whites from the Democratic to the Republican Party. The book demonstrates that this political backlash has disquieting implications for the future of race relations in America. White Americans' concerns about Latinos and immigration have led to support for policies that are less generous and more punitive and that conflict with the preferences of much of the immigrant population. America's growing racial and ethnic diversity is leading to a greater racial divide in politics. As whites move to the right of the political spectrum, racial and ethnic minorities generally support the left. Racial divisions in partisanship and voting, as the book indicates, now outweigh divisions by class, age, gender, and other demographic measures. The book raises critical questions and concerns about how political beliefs and future elections will change the fate of America's immigrants and minorities, and their relationship with the rest of the nation.
Introduction
Authors: Samin Nadav
Published: November 2017

This book examines why tribal genealogies continue to be a central facet of modern Saudi identity despite the erosion of kinship ties resulting from almost 300 years of religious conditioning, and despite the unprecedented material transformation of Saudi society in the oil age. It considers what accounts for the compulsion to affirm tribal belonging in modern Saudi Arabia by focusing on verse 49:13 of the Quran and the multiple contexts in which it is embedded in the kingdom. More specifically, the book asks why this verse is interpreted by so many Saudis as a license to assert their particularist tribal identities, while its ostensibly equalizing final clause is dismissed as an afterthought. It also explores the politicization of the Arabian oral culture by documenting the life and work of the Arabian genealogist and historian Hamad al-Jāsir.
Toward a Genealogical Rule of Governance
Authors: Samin Nadav
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the compulsion to claim tribal belonging in relation to a set of institutional policies and techniques adopted by the modern Saudi state over the course of the twentieth century. It explains how these policies and techniques combine to produce a genealogical rule of governance that underpins political practice in Saudi Arabia. It also considers how the Saudi state's efforts to standardize citizen identities according to genealogical criteria through identification papers called tūbiʻiyya, promote lineal authentication as a core political function, and privilege kinship as a dominant symbol of Āl-Saʻud rule have made genealogy a pervasive aspect of social and political life in the modern kingdom. The chapter concludes by analyzing the territorial dispute over the oasis of Buraymī.
Apprentices to Chance Event
Authors: Zuba Jesse
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores representations of career in Harmonium (Wallace Stevens), Observations (Marianne Moore), and White Buildings (Hart Crane) that resist the normative course of development that underpins the professional ideal of regular production. The indeterminacy of representations of career in nineteenth-century poetry is pressed to an extreme in modernist debuts, which are burdened not only with evoking the uncertainty that confirms vocational integrity and the intermittency that signals autonomy from the market, but also with evoking those ideas in new ways. This last challenge, necessitated by the demand that every artistic generation make it new, is made still more daunting by the rise of a culture of professionalism in which writing poetry was apt to appear as childish, effeminate, escapist, elitist, and generally absurd.
Conclusion
Authors: Zuba Jesse
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter brings up to date the history of first-book prizes begun in Chapter 2. Supplementing the interpretation of poems with the interpretation of debut paratexts, this chapter shows how the prize-winning debut—framed by lyrical prefaces, elaborate acknowledgments, and other, often tellingly overwrought, textual devices and conventions—continues at the turn of the millennium to legitimate virtually all the figures and institutions operating in the field of poetic production. It highlights the ways in which debut paratexts evoke the ideal of poetic autonomy even as they call it into question, and furthermore the chapter looks at recent poems that illustrate poets' ongoing engagement with the complex issue of imagining careers at the moment before their careers have properly begun.
What Was Life?
Authors: Helmreich Stefan , Roosth Sophia , Friedner Michele
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines three limit biologies that theorize what life was—that is, they declare the possible end of “life”: Artificial Life, marine microbiology, and astrobiology. Artificial Life is a genre of theoretical biology that flourished most vigorously in the 1990s and sought to model living things in the medium of computer simulation. Marine microbiology is a field that has as its object of study the world's tiniest, most abundant, and metabolically extreme ocean creatures, including microbes at deep-sea volcanoes. Astrobiology is the study of life as it might exist on other worlds. The chapter argues that the conceptual trouble bedeviling “life” is shadowed by worries about what form “theory” might take in natural and social analysis these days. The emphasis is on how accounts of life forms in biology and ideas about social and cultural forms of life inform and deform one another.
Life forms
Authors: Helmreich Stefan , Roosth Sophia
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how natural philosophers and scientists in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries employed the term “life form.” It asks how life came to have a form, where the term “life form” came from, and what “life form” has come to mean in the contemporary moment, when it is possible to use the term to refer to as-yet-conjectural manifestations that may redefine the very referent of life itself. To map the historical transformation of the term “life form,” the chapter draws on Raymond Williams's 1976 Keywords, in which Williams offered histories of keywords in social theory, detailing the shifting, contested meanings of such terms as “culture,” “nature,” and “ideology.” Using this approach, the chapter identifies a move from deductive reasoning to inductive reasoning to abductive reasoning.
Nature/Culture/Seawater
Authors: Helmreich Stefan , Roosth Sophia , Friedner Michele
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how the nature/culture binary imposes particular qualities on water, which water is then sometimes imagined to overflow. In asking after water this way, the chapter retools the historian of science Peter Galison's notion of a “theory machine,” an object in the world that stimulates a theoretical formulation. According to Galison, networks of electrocoordinated clocks in European railway stations at the turn of the twentieth-century aided Albert Einstein's thinking about simultaneity. The chapter considers how water has operated as a theory machine in anthropology, how it has been framed by nature/culture, and how it has in turn reframed nature/culture. It also discusses seawater imagery and metaphors in early ethnography, in maritime anthropology, and in recent social theory. It argues that seawater has moved from an implicit to an explicit figure for anthropological and social theorizing, especially in the age of globalization, which it also terms “oceanization.”
Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies
Authors: Friedner Michele , Helmreich Stefan
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines “sound” and “hearing” in relation to silence and deafness. Sound studies and Deaf studies would seem, at first perception, to operate in worlds apart. Sound studies privileges attention to listening and hearing in cultural experience, whereas Deaf studies emphasizes the visual, particularly as a space of communicative practice. The chapter considers four major practices that might prompt scholars in sound studies and Deaf studies into conversation. These practices ask how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice; how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deaf–hearing dichotomies; how “deaf futurists” champion cyborg sound; and how signing, non-speech-based communicative practices, and listening might unwind phonocentric models of speech and move analysis away from the simple frame of “speech communities.” The chapter concludes by asking how to move beyond the ear and eye, rethinking the subjects of sound and Deaf studies.
Jihad
Authors: Kelsay John
Published: November 2017

This chapter analyzes the concept of jihad. Literally meaning “struggle,” jihad may be associated with almost any activity by which Muslims attempt to bring personal and social life into a pattern of conformity with the guidance of God. Nevertheless, early in the development of Islam, jihad came to be associated particularly with fighting or making war “in the path of God.” It is argued that Muslim thinking about war bears a strong resemblance to that developed by Christians, Jews, and other groups. This does not minimize the objectionable nature of certain judgments, such as al-Qaeda's doctrine of total war. But the question of war is present for every historic and contemporary group, and the attempt to regulate it, to see war as a tool that is sometimes appropriate for attaining or defending justice, is difficult.
Minorities
Authors: Friedmann Yohanan
Published: November 2017

This chapter analyzes both Muslim minorities under non-Muslim rule and non-Muslim minorities under Muslim rule. The issue of minorities in the Islamic world is complex. The minorities are not restricted to Jews and Christians, some minorities belong to religious communities that existed before the emergence of Islam (Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists). Others were related to Islam when they came into being but developed into distinct religions (Yazidis, Nusayris, Druzes, Babis, and Baha'is). Another group considers itself Muslim but has been placed beyond the pale of Islam by the Muslim mainstream (Ahmadis). It is important to note that whatever tolerance was practiced in most historical periods in relation to the Jews, the Christians, the Zoroastrians, and even the non-Arab polytheists were not accorded to adherents of religions that came into being after the emergence of Islam.
Modernity
Authors: Salvatore Armando
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that the relation between modernity and Islam cannot be reduced to an analysis of deficits to be measured by Islam's alleged insufficient capacity to supersede its rooting in tradition or in a set of combined traditions; by Islam's dependencies on Western hegemonic patterns of modernity; or by alleged Islamic idiosyncrasies reflected by distorted outcomes of a dependent modernization. It discusses how Western observers failed to see the cumulative trend among Muslim reformers consisting of rejecting the view of either “Islam” or “modernity” conceived as comprehensive entities, as Western scholars were used to seeing them. The idea that Islam is internally plural and that modernity is a process not entrenched in a singular culture seemed alien to most Western observers, while it gradually became a main avenue of reasoning for key Muslim thinkers.