bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Moral Testimony
Authors: McShane Paddy Jane
Published: December 2021

The main aim of this chapter is to explore the importance of moral testimony for testifiers. Up to now, writers on moral testimony have by and large focused on how moral testimony impacts dependers. And, in doing so, they’ve tended to theorize about moral testimony assuming a rather abstracted picture of the testifier according to which all that really matters about her is that she’s a credible source. In contrast, this chapter shows how paying attention to the fact that testifiers are not just potential informants but also socially embedded moral agents helps us to discern heretofore unrecognized ways that moral testimony is valuable. More specifically, this chapter argues that dependence on moral testimony is valuable because it can promote the moral development of testifiers. Furthermore, dependence on moral testimony can be a way of respecting and standing by those who are oppressed in the face of their systematic moral subordination. And, finally, for oppressed persons, giving moral testimony can function as a way of resisting oppressive constructions of identity and expressing and retaining self-respect.
The State of Nature
Authors: Smith Michael
Published: December 2021

The chapter assumes that the state of nature is the state of the world prior to the existence of social rules, and then goes on to argue for the following claims. (1) We have reasons for action in the state of nature. (2) In those state of nature worlds in which we all know what reasons for action we have and are motivated to act on them—for short, those worlds in which we are ideal—these reasons for action would support our exiting the state of nature, that is, our creating and maintaining certain social rules. (3) The social rules we have reasons to create would include social rules telling us what to do in both worlds in which we are ideal and nearby worlds in which we are non-ideal. (4) These need not be rules that we have any reason to abide by in the actual world in which we are non-ideal. (5) Thinking about the role of social rules in fixing what we have reason to do in those states of nature in which we are ideal and non-ideal suggests a complicated and novel story about what we have knowledge of, insofar as we have knowledge of what we have reason to do in the actual world in which social rules exist willy-nilly.
Felicitous Underspecification and Updates
Authors: King Jeffrey C.
Published: December 2021

Many examples of felicitous underspecification are given. In each case, how conversational participants update the context in response to accepting a sentence containing an instance of felicitous underspecification is described.
Felicitous Underspecification and Metasemantics
Authors: King Jeffrey C.
Published: December 2021

In cases of felicitous underspecification, instead of having a unique semantic value in context, the relevant expression is associated with a range of candidate semantic values in context. I formulate an account of the mechanism that associates this range of candidate semantic values in context with the relevant expression. I argue that it is the same mechanism that associates expressions with unique semantic values in context in “normal” cases.
Justification and Doubt (1919)
Authors: Shearn Samuel Andrew
Published: December 2021

This chapter addresses the first of the book’s key questions concerning the justification of the doubter: How did Tillich land theologically after the war? This chapter therefore creates a point of reference against which Tillich’s development can be measured. There is a detailed account of Rechtfertigung und Zweifel from 1919, occasionally drawing out contrasts and continuity with the publication of the same title from 1924. Tillich frames the theme as a quest to overcome the division between religious and cultural life, finding unity in one theological principle derived from the doctrine of justification: The principle takes up doubt into itself in believing affirmation of the absolute paradox, i.e. to affirm that doubt does not preclude standing in the truth. In long excursions on certainty and the critique of apologetics as ‘intellectual work’ analogous to works-righteousness, Tillich contrasts his position with Karl Heim (1874–1958) in particular. Against Heim, Tillich insists the doubter should be left with his good truth-conscience since we relate truly to God ‘through unending doubt’.
Overcoming Despair (Lichtenrade 1909)
Authors: Shearn Samuel Andrew
Published: December 2021

This chapter considers Tillich’s first series of sermons in Lichtenrade (1909) when he was covering for a minister on secondment. It is a first glimpse of Tillich’s preaching immediately after graduation. Exhibiting none of the philosophical interest of his university work, Tillich produces intense and dark pietist sermons. Indeed, Tillich’s self-examining piety drove him to despair as he wrestled for assurance in preparation of his sermon for Sunday 31 May 1909. Abandoning a first draft, Tillich rewrites the sermon and speaks for the first time about Christ meeting the doubting sinner in the darkness of despair with a message of double grace: You need do nothing, you need not hold anything to be true. This crisis is characterized as a breakthrough, and first evidence of the justification of the doubter.
Schelling and History (1909–11)
Authors: Shearn Samuel Andrew
Published: December 2021

This chapter gathers Tillich’s academic work from 1909 to 11, including two dissertations on Schelling and his lecture on certainty and the historical Jesus. Schelling provided Tillich and his modern-positive tradition with a way of thinking about Christianity in the light of the history of religions, after the challenge of Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) to separate historical and dogmatic method. Tillich notes Schelling’s insistence that humanity is God-positing regardless of unbelief. It is also significant that Tillich affirms the notion of an undoubtable condition of thought, whether as Schelling’s concept of ‘unpreconceivable being’ or Fichte’s I (das Ich). With Schelling, Tillich sees a wider application for justification than the ethical sphere. However, it is first in the Kassel lecture on the historical Jesus that he connects the idealist notion that knowledge is limited to the self-certainty of the subject with the claim that autonomy is justification in the area of thought. This is expressed as the rejection of the misunderstanding that faith is an intellectual work. This could have been the influence of his Lutheran tradition, encouraged by Schelling. The chapter argues it emerged from Tillich’s engagement with Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922).
Bad Beliefs
Authors: Levy Neil
Published: December 2021

Why do people come to reject climate science or the safety and efficacy of vaccines, in defiance of the scientific consensus? A popular view explains bad beliefs like these as resulting from a range of biases that together ensure that human beings fall short of being genuinely rational animals. This book presents an alternative account. It argues that bad beliefs arise from genuinely rational processes. We’ve missed the rationality of bad beliefs because we’ve failed to recognize the ubiquity of the higher-order evidence that shapes beliefs, and the rationality of being guided by this evidence. The book argues that attention to higher-order evidence should lead us to rethink both how minds are best changed and the ethics of changing them: we should come to see that nudging—at least usually—changes belief (and behavior) by presenting rational agents with genuine evidence, and is therefore fully respectful of intellectual agency. We needn’t rethink Enlightenment ideals of intellectual autonomy and rationality, but we should reshape them to take account of our deeply social epistemic agency.
What Should We Believe About Belief?
Authors: Levy Neil
Published: December 2021

This chapter aims to set the scene. First, it sets out why we should about beliefs, and about beliefs. To this end, it surveys some of the rich philosophical and psychological literature on how beliefs are acquired and updated. Second, it aims to show that the existing literature, illuminating though it is, doesn’t adequately explain how and why we come to believe what we do and act as we do. Against philosophers and cognitive scientists who argue that beliefs matter less than we might think, or that people have more accurate beliefs than they sometimes let on, the chapter argues that people’s beliefs matter for their behavior and that bad beliefs are an important phenomenon. It then goes on to review explanations of bad belief stemming from or inspired by dual process accounts of human reasoning. It argues that these accounts face difficulties significant enough to warrant developing an alternative account of belief formation.
Epistemic Pollution
Authors: Levy Neil
Published: December 2021

The chapter continues the argument for thinking that individual cognition is highly unreliable. It argues that we live in an epistemically polluted environment: deliberately and inadvertently, other agents shape our environments in ways that leave individual cognition even worse off than it might have been. This chapter sketches some of the pollutants and how they work to undermine virtuous cognition. It argues we live in an environment in which the cues we rely on for assessing the expertise of individuals and the reliability of information are deliberately mimicked by people who seek to deceive us. Because we’re unable to assess a great many claims on our own, we’re reliant on these cues; their pollution ensures that individual cognition is even worse off than it might have been. The chapter finishes with some tentative suggestions for cleaning up the epistemic environment.
Terminology and notation
Authors: Steane Andrew M.
Published: December 2021

Notation and sign conventions adopted for the rest of the book are explained. The book employs index notation, but not abstract index notation. The metric signature for GR is taken as (-1,1,1,1). Terminology such as “local inertial frame” and “Rieman normal coordinates” is explained.
Linearized General Relativity
Authors: Steane Andrew M.
Published: December 2021

A complete theory of weak-field gravity is described: the linearized approximation. This is a form of first-order perturbation theory. The concept of a gauge transformation, as applied to the curvature tensor and the field equation, is explained, and it is shown how to reduce the field equation to a wave equation in the Lorenz gauge (under the linear approximation). Thus a huge variety of gravitational calculations become accessible.
Manifolds
Authors: Steane Andrew M.
Published: December 2021

We now embark on the full theory, beginning with the concept of a manifold in differential geometry. The meaning of coordinates and coordinate transformations is carefully explained. The metric and its transformation between coordinate frames is discussed. Riemann normal coordinates are described. The concepts of a tangent space and local flatness are discussed and derived. It is shown how to use the metric to calculate distances, areas and volumes, and to describe submanifolds.
Further spherically symmetric solutions
Authors: Steane Andrew M.
Published: December 2021

We obtain the interior Schwarzschild solution; the stellar structure equations (Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff); the Reissner-Nordstrom metric (charged black hole) and the de Sitter-Schwarzschild metric. These both illustrate how the field equation is tackled in non-vacuum cases, and bring out some of the physics of stars, electromagnetic fields and the cosmological constant.
Black holes
Authors: Steane Andrew M.
Published: December 2021

We discuss event horizons and black holes. First Birkhoff’s theorem is derived, and we consider the general nature of spherically symmetric spaces. Then the concepts of null surface, Killing horizon and event horizon are defined and related to one another. Cosmic censorship is briefly discussed. The Schwarzshild horizon is discussed in detail. The divergence or otherwise of redshift, acceleration, speed and proper time is obtained for infalling observers and for Schwarzschild observers. Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates are introduced and used to discuss gravitational collapse. The growth of the horizon is noted, and the causality structure is briefly considered via an introduction to the conformal (Penrose-Carter) diagram. The maximal extension is then presented, with the Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates and associated diagram. Wormholes are briefly discussed. The chapter finishes with a survey of astronomical evidence for black holes.
Black hole thermodynamics
Authors: Steane Andrew M.
Published: December 2021

The chapter presents the Penrose process, Hawking radiation, entropy and the laws of black hole thermodynamics. The Penrose process is derived and the area theorem is stated. A heuristic argument for the Hawking effect is given, emphasising a correct grasp of the concepts and the nature of the result. The Hawking effect and the Unruh effect are further discussed and linked together in a precise calculation. Evaporation of black holes is described. The information paradox is presented.
Ersatz Rigor
Authors: Wilson Mark
Published: December 2021

The natural evolution of language that can capture nature’s varied behaviors in effective terms frequently encourages descriptive practices that encode physical data in deviously complex ways. Often this complexity sets in without being overtly noticed by the agents in question. When this happens, “small metaphysics” conundrums frequently arise in the form “what is this bit of language actually telling us about the world beyond?” Historically, many of the familiar systems of grander metaphysics arose from these puzzling seeds, and these same schemes frequently place unacceptable restrictions upon the free development of science. To cast off the oppressive yoke often encouraged by this vein of philosophical musing, Rudolf Carnap and others developed a logicized conception of “theory” that claimed to liberate science (and philosophy) from any concern with “metaphysics” whatsoever. This point of view will be called “theory T thinking” in this book. But Carnap’s proposed remedy represents a diagnostic mistake; the real-life complexities of efficient data registration demand direct examinations of the strategic assumptions that underlie the effective forms of word-to-world alignment. The present book rejects the misleading conceptions of “methodological rigor” that Carnap’s conception of “theory” encourages.
Introduction
Authors: Goodman Camille
Published: December 2021

This Chapter outlines the context, objective, and scope of the book, and examines two foundational issues that anchor its law of the sea enquiry firmly within the doctrinal and methodological context of general international law. First, it considers the international law concept of ‘jurisdiction’ and examines its role and application under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in general, and in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in particular. It explores the idea of jurisdiction as a ‘continuum’ of prohibitions, rights, and obligations pursuant to which a State may be obliged, authorized but not required, or prohibited from exercising authority in relation to a person or activity, and considers the balance of interests in the sui generis regime that underpins the jurisdictional continuum of the EEZ. Second, it examines the potential legal effects of subsequent State practice in the law of the sea. It describes the conceptual framework that underlies the book’s widespread examination of State practice and explains how the relevant rules of international law apply to evaluate the legal effect of State practice under treaty law and customary international law in the unique context of the law of the sea. The Chapter outlines the parameters used to determine and analyse the State practice examined in the book, and concludes with an overview of the structure and chapter content.
The Regulation of ‘Fishing’ and Related Activities
Authors: Goodman Camille
Published: December 2021

This Chapter examines the material scope of the coastal State’s jurisdiction over foreign vessels in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) on the basis of its sovereign rights over living resources, in order to determine what activities and which vessels come within this regulatory power. It argues that ‘fishing’ is no longer simply a process that involves fishing vessels catching fish; in the modern industrial fishing complex, where bunkering, transhipment, and resupply services allow fishing vessels to stay at sea for months at a time, fishing is part of a chain of events involving multiple actors and activities, all of which fall within the regulatory authority of the coastal State in the EEZ. Notwithstanding the conflicting and inconsistent approaches that international courts and tribunals have taken to this issue, the Chapter’s examination of national, regional, and international practice demonstrates that coastal States can regulate a wide range of fishing and related activities on the basis of their sovereign rights over living resources in the EEZ. This includes all the ‘fishing related activities’ and ‘fishing support vessels’ that are involved in modern industrial fishing, regardless of whether the vessels in question are licensed to fish in the coastal State’s EEZ, or whether the activities in question relate to living resources harvested in the coastal State’s EEZ. This finding as to the underlying scope of coastal State jurisdiction provides a crucial foundation for the remainder of the book.
Conclusion
Authors: Goodman Camille
Published: December 2021

This Chapter draws on the cumulative effect of the research and analysis in the book in order to address the overall enquiry concerning the nature and extent of coastal State jurisdiction over living resources in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC). First, it proposes a general statement or ‘jurisdictional test’ regarding the nature of coastal State jurisdiction over the living resources of the EEZ. It suggests that this jurisdiction is flexible but functional, consisting of a broad discretion exercisable within functional limits that are determined on the basis of reasonableness and by reference to the balance of rights and interests reflected in the EEZ regime. Second, it outlines some more thematic conclusions about the extent of coastal State jurisdiction, considering the effect that State practice has had on the interpretation or development of relevant aspects of the LOSC, and the extent to which it justifies assertions that the ‘creeping jurisdiction’ of coastal States will upset the balance of rights and interests established in the LOSC. The Chapter concludes the book with some brief reflections on the critical importance of striking the right balance between the rights and duties of coastal States and other States in the EEZ, in order to maintain the sui generis regime established in the LOSC and effectively and innovatively address the current and future challenges of international fisheries governance.
Drivers of Mobility in the Global South
Authors: Piraino Patrizio
Published: December 2021

Empirical studies in developing countries tend to find higher levels of socioeconomic persistence across generations compared with those of high-income economies. However, there have been relatively few advances in the identification of the drivers of such higher levels of intergenerational persistence. By focusing on relevant evidence from developing countries and emerging economies, this chapter points to some of the potential drivers of social mobility that are either outside those typically considered in high-income countries or likely to be of greater relevance in the developing world. The chapter builds on the standard model of intergenerational mobility to discuss the appropriateness of some of its assumptions in a developing-country context. It will then advance some suggestions for future theoretical and empirical investigations of social mobility in the Global South.
Income Mobility in the Developing World
Authors: Himanshu  , Lanjouw Peter
Published: December 2021

This chapter examines income mobility in developing countries. We start by synthesizing findings from the available evidence on relative mobility and poverty dynamics. We then describe evidence on economic mobility obtained via synthetic panels constructed from cross-section data. We echo earlier literature in pointing to substantial movement across income classes by households over time—poverty is not inevitably a chronic condition. However, less clear are the factors driving the observed ‘churning’. In an attempt to make headway, we consider the story of economic mobility in one village in northern India over seven decades. We describe patterns of poverty dynamics and economic mobility in the village, and we highlight some of the processes that have been important in driving these patterns. While this in-depth study does not permit inferences to broader populations, it may provide a reference point against which findings from studies elsewhere can be compared.
Measuring Social Mobility in Historic and Less Developed Societies
Authors: Clark Gregory
Published: December 2021

In societies where surnames are inherited from parents, we can use these names to estimate rates of intergenerational mobility. This chapter explains how to make such estimates, and illustrates their use in pre-industrial England and modern Chile and India. These surname estimates have the advantage that they require much less data than traditional parent–child estimates. They are also more robust to errors in status data. Thus, they can be used to estimate social mobility rates in early societies such as England 1300–1800, or in less developed societies now. Surnames measure a different aspect of social mobility than conventional measures, but this surname measure is the one that matters when we consider group-level convergence of social status, or the time needed for any disadvantaged groups to attain at least average status measured in generations. Surnames thus allow us to measure a key element in the multigenerational mobility process.
The Delhi Sultanate as Empire
Authors: Kumar Sunil
Published: December 2021

This chapter studies the Delhi Sultanate, a term that refers to a period in Indian history (1210s–1550s) when five regimes ruled over large parts of the Indian subcontinent from their capital in Delhi. These were politically turbulent centuries when the scale and influence of the Sultanate varied widely. The chapter reviews the structural shifts in the making of the various regimes that comprised the Sultanate, its geopolitical location, threatened by the Chinggisids and the Timurids, and its constant endeavor to craft its varied territories and culturally diverse population into a stable empire. It considers the changing complexion of its ruling elites, the complex modes in which its history was narrated, and reflects why, despite its frequently attenuated political influence, the Delhi Sultanate was recalled as an empire in its own time and in the present day, a reflection that also inflects interpretations of empire and their modern location.
The Mali and Songhay Empires
Authors: Hall Bruce S.
Published: December 2021

This chapter situates the Songhay Empire (ca. 1464–1591) within a wider framework of African state formation, highlighting the importance of symbolic authority to the projections of power by Songhay rulers. The Songhay Empire was one of a series of early (medieval and early modern) commercially oriented polities that arose in the West African Sahel and Savannah and were known in North Africa and the Middle East because of the activities of Muslim traders. The case of Songhay is especially interesting in African history because of the richness of Arabic written sources that describe its history, and because of the importance of Islamic identity for its rulers. Destroyed by an expeditionary army sent across the Sahara Desert from Morocco in 1591, the demise of the Songhay Empire marks the beginning of a new period in West African history in which the influence of North Africa and Europe grew in scale and scope.
The Dutch Seaborne Empire
Authors: Blussé Leonard
Published: December 2021

In the course of the seventeenth century Dutch merchants created a seaborne empire that provided them with the primacy in world trade. This chapter focuses on the defining traits of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, or Dutch East India Company, 1602–1799) and the West Indische Compagnie (WIC, or Dutch West India Company, 1621–1674, 1674–1791), both limited liability joint stock companies with monopoly rights on the navigation to, respectively, Asia and the American continent. Both companies were founded as “companies of the ledger and the sword” in the middle of the Dutch Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) with the Spanish crown, and collapsed in the final years of the ancien régime. The VOC developed with leaps and bounds into an island empire in Southeast Asia that after the demise of the VOC survived into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, first as the Netherlands East Indies and today as the Republic of Indonesia. The WIC never succeeded to wrestle itself loose from close state intervention and, facing the challenges of independent merchants, had to give up its monopolies and simply survived as an umbrella organization for the plantations in Suriname and a couple of islands in the Caribbean. Compared to their neighbors in Europe, the relatively affluent Dutch never felt a strong urge to emigrate and as a result none of their overseas possessions, with exception of the Cape Colony, developed into a settler colony.
An Imperial Nation-State
Authors: Todd David
Published: December 2021

Rather than as a continuous process, French imperial expansion is better understood as a succession of four distinct empires: a Bourbon mercantilist empire until 1789, a messianic European empire in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, a global informal empire in the nineteenth century, and a republican territorial empire after 1880. In each of these empires, the ideal of assimilation, in its Catholic, Napoleonic, or republican variants, was much trumpeted by French empire-builders. But historical research has shown that, in practice, French imperial power chiefly relied on pragmatic collaboration with imperial subjects and auxiliaries. Successive waves of imperial expansion rarely resulted in extensive “Frenchification,” although universalist rhetoric often inadvertently contributed to the outbreak of violent and successful rebellions against imperial rule as in Haiti, Napoleonic Europe, or Algeria. Despite such moments of dislocation, the French experience illustrates well the potential and resilience of the nation-state as a powerbase for imperial expansion.
The Russian Empire (1453–1917)
Authors: Lieven Dominic
Published: December 2021

The construction of a mighty empire and impressive high culture in a region uniquely far from the centers of global trade and culture was a great achievement. Elements of Eurasian empire and European military-fiscal state merged in the tsarist polity. This polity’s success rested on a powerful “sacred” monarchy that dominated the church and forged a close alliance with the landowning nobility while preserving a massive “state peasantry” whose surplus went to the crown alone. As with the English, French, and Spanish, Russia’s peripheral location in Europe facilitated the conquest of non-European territories. The Industrial and French revolutions posed great challenges to Russia’s geopolitical security and social order, as well as to the regime’s legitimacy. Though these challenges (e.g., nationalism) were faced by most empires, in the Russian case factors that had been essential to previous success (autocracy, serfdom, Westernized elites) contributed to undermining the regime’s legitimacy by 1900.
US Expansionism during the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Greenberg Amy S.
Published: December 2021

The dramatic nineteenth-century growth of the United States into a continental empire was justified by an ideology called “Manifest Destiny” which cast territorial expansionism as natural and preordained. In reality, America’s territorial growth from thirteen colonies in 1776, to an imperial power embracing colonies in the Pacific by 1900, was the result of ongoing violence against Indian people by both settlers and the US army and an aggressive war against the neighboring republic of Mexico. Speculation, population increase, and slave labor all encouraged the rapid settlement of western lands, and allowed the federal government to successfully gain hegemony over much of the continent in the face of competing claims.
The Sokoto Caliphate
Authors: Last Murray
Published: December 2021

The Sokoto Caliphate, prior to 1964 generally referred to in print as the Fulani Empire, was Africa’s largest pre-colonial state and lasted for a century, coming into being in 1808 through a four-year jihad and finally in 1903 being conquered by Britain. As an Islamic state, it was run as a decentralized confederation of emirates under the supervision of the caliph and his bureaucracy in Sokoto. Though almost all the emirs initially were scholars chosen for their piety, they could be identified ethnically as Fulani/Fulbe (hence the “Fulani Empire”) whereas the majority of the population were Hausa-speakers. There was a very large number of slaves (at times over 50 percent), serving the elite or working as labor on farms, which supplied food to large households and markets in the cities. There was no standing army, but borders were closed by strategically sited ribats or strongholds. Conflicts were resolved by local administrators, with the courts using Shari‘a law; servants of local officials acted as police. The chapter’s argument is that the Sokoto Caliphate is more accurately categorized not as an “imperial” polity but as an Islamic state modeled as a confederation on Abbasid practice.
God, Grades, and Graduation
Authors: Horwitz Ilana M.
Published: December 2021

It’s widely acknowledged that American parents from different class backgrounds take different approaches to raising their children. But missing from the discussion is the fact that millions of parents on both sides of the class divide are raising their children to listen to God. What impact does a religious upbringing have on their academic trajectories? Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers’ religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. God, Grades, and Graduation introduces readers to a childrearing logic that cuts across social class groups and accounts for Americans’ deep relationship with God: religious restraint. This book takes us inside the lives of these teenagers to discover why they achieve higher grades than their peers, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from lower-middle-class families particularly benefit from religious restraint. But readers also learn how for middle-upper-class kids—and for girls especially—religious restraint recalibrates their academic ambitions after graduation, leading them to question the value of attending a selective college despite their stellar grades in high school. By illuminating the far-reaching effects of the childrearing logic of religious restraint, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a compelling new narrative about the role of religion in academic outcomes and educational inequality.
Remarkable Report Cards
Authors: Horwitz Ilana M.
Published: December 2021

This chapter argues that abiders have an academic advantage in secondary school. This advantage stems from a synergy between schooling and religion: both institutions strive to maintain social order. Because religion and schooling promote the same ideals, the types of children who thrive in one institution are also likely to thrive in the other. To make this case, the chapter examines how Protestantism has shaped the current form of schooling and explains the importance of the “hidden curriculum”—the rules, routines, and regulations. Children raised with religious restraint are stellar at navigating the hidden curriculum. Abiders’ God-centered self-concept leads them to be deeply cooperative and conscientious. They do what is asked of them, they are kind to their peers, and they are self-disciplined. In return, they reap tangible academic rewards: they earn better grades. This is referred to as the “abider advantage.”
God’s Guardrails
Authors: Horwitz Ilana M.
Published: December 2021

This chapter explains why religious restraint operates differently based on teens’ social class background. It argues that what religion offers isn’t equally helpful to everyone. Working- and middle-class teens benefit from religious restraint because religion gives these kids access to social capital, which middle- and especially working-class kids can’t access elsewhere. Since boys are especially prone to getting caught up in risky behaviors that derail them from academic success, the social capital of religious communities creates crucial “godly” guardrails that help them stay on the path to college. The benefits of godly guardrails are not distributed evenly, because not everyone’s road to college looks the same. Professional-class kids don’t benefit from godly guardrails as much because they already have access to social capital through other social institutions.
Conquering Death Through Ritual
Authors: Sauthoff Patricia
Published: December 2021

Chapter 7 traces the historical development of possession to argue in favor of a literary tradition that undermines the argument that such beliefs were only held by the disempowered. It shows that exorcism and demonic possession have a long history in literary Tantra and therefore must not have been an idea that existed only among the non-elite. The chapter then explores ideas of immortality and the conquering of death in the Sanskrit literary tradition. This sheds light on the corporeal yoga tradition of the Netra Tantra. The first of three chapters on yoga, the Netra Tantra’s sixth chapter offers a detailed description of ritual oblation to escape death. The translated passage offers a look at the natural products offered to the ritual fire. These objects must be protected with enveloping mantras and accompanied by recitation.
Conclusion
Authors: Sauthoff Patricia
Published: December 2021

The Conclusion examines the conception of the body in medieval India. This body was vulnerable to demons and reliant on deities for its continued existence. For the Tantric practitioner, the divinized body is part of a psychophysical organism. The protective rites of the Netra Tantra reveal that the name of an individual overcome with illness works as a ritual substitute for that person. This is not to say that the physical body of the person is not important. The body is central to ritual practice. When the mantrin places the mantra upon the body (nyāsa), he creates a Tantric body that itself becomes a ritual tool. The body and the mantra become fused. This allows the mantra to heal the body.
Fearful Asymmetry
Authors: Sun Anna
Published: December 2021

The definition of spirituality shifts perpetually across time and place, but there is a pattern at work. The definition of “spirituality” is always in relation to the definition of “religion” in a given society. In the United States and Western Europe, spirituality has been defined by what is left out of it, by which we mean diverse beliefs and varied everyday practices outside of—or on the margins of—existing religious institutional norms. While both are distinct from secularism, spirituality is the “other” to the “norm” of religion. In contemporary China, however, a different dynamic is at work. The dominant form of religious life emphasizes diverse beliefs and everyday ritual activities that are rooted in multiple religious traditions. This means that we require new ways of thinking about spiritual life in the Chinese context and other societies, such as those in Africa, with similar polytheistic patterns of practice.
Textures of Spirituality in Rural Malawi
Authors: Swidler Ann
Published: December 2021

What does religion in rural Malawi have to teach us about spirituality more broadly? If spirituality is the experience of the self as connected directly to the sacred, rural Malawi fosters intense religiosity, but often muffles spirituality. Nonetheless, where spirituality pushes up through the undergrowth of practical religious concerns, we see some of what the spiritual does for Malawians, and for us as well: it replenishes and revitalizes the inner resources of the self by linking the self to transcendent sources of power and meaning. Based on interviews and participant observation conducted in Malawi, this chapter focuses on the meaning-making process of spirituality and shows how the experience of the self is connected directly to the sacred. The analysis of this process has implications for our understanding of spirituality in other parts of the world as well.
Everything Is Connected
Authors: Aupers Stef
Published: December 2021

It is a mainstay that spiritual seekers—from New Age thinkers, neopagans, esoteric cults, or people referring to themselves as “spiritual, not religious”—imagine nature as a mysterious, spiritual, and meaningful force to counter alienating and disenchanting modernity. In this chapter, I argue that this spiritual imagination about “mysterious incalculable forces” is not necessarily projected on nature, but, perhaps increasingly, on complex modern institutions. In critical dialogue with the ideas of the classics—that is, Weber, Marx, Mannheim—on modernity and religion, I will argue that such undertheorized forms of modern re-enchantment should be understood as cultural responses to powerful, yet highly opaque systems that are beyond the control of contemporary citizens. Although various examples are used throughout this chapter to illustrate this relocation of spiritual power from nature to society, the main case used is the phenomenon of conspiracy culture or, rather, the phenomenon of “conspirituality.”
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Authors: Forestal Jennifer
Published: December 2021

Boundaries are the first necessary characteristic of democratic spaces. Boundaries facilitate the democratic affordance of recognition; they help communities to form. This chapter outlines the role of boundaries in constituting democratic communities by drawing on Aristotle’s concept of “political friendship.” In clearly bounded spaces, citizens are more likely to recognize their common interests and interlocutors—the things they share and the people they share them with. Boundaries thus help generate ties of political friendship. With this function of boundaries in mind, the chapter turns to the example of Facebook to explain how boundaries can operate in digital environments. It shows how design choices made by Facebook—notably, the dissolution of the boundaries imposed by the early .edu requirement and the more recent turn to reimpose boundaries with Facebook Groups—have clear consequences for the likelihood that Facebook users can develop political friendships with one another, thereby forming communities on the platform.
r/democracy
Authors: Forestal Jennifer
Published: December 2021

The final necessary element of democratic space is flexibility. Flexible spaces facilitate the experimental habit required for democratic politics; they help us improve our communities. Using the work of John Dewey, this chapter explains how flexible spaces provide an environment in which citizens can develop the experimental habits required for a progressive democratic politics. In flexible spaces—spaces characterized by both variety and malleability—citizens will not only encounter difference but will also be able to use it in the process of democratic decision-making. The chapter then turns to the case of Reddit as an example of a digital democratic space. It also shows the effects of flexible spaces by comparing two subreddits: r/the_donald and r/TwoXChromosomes. The chapter concludes by suggesting how the spaces of Reddit could be redesigned to be more flexible, further facilitating the democratic practice of experimentalism.
Stumbling into a Larger World
Authors: Chen Yuan-tsung
Published: December 2021

Yuan-tsung reunited with Phyllis Wu at her salon in Chongqing and started to learn social skills by helping her entertain guests. In this way, Yuan-tsung came into close social contact with some of the country’s leading politicians and intellectuals, getting to know them not so much in their official capacities as in more informal settings, when they relaxed over tea or wine. Among them was Zhou Enlai, then the Communist representative to China’s “United Front,” the tense, shaky arrangement whereby the Communists and the Nationalists supposedly worked together to defeat the Japanese invaders. At parties and dinners she heard them talk about the role of the Third Force, and “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, and watched as Zhou Enlai cultivated these US-educated intellectuals so as to gain access to influential Americans.
Outside the Great Wall, by the Blue Danube
Authors: Chen Yuan-tsung
Published: December 2021

To advance her career, Yuan-tsung was obliged to demonstrate her loyalty to the Party by doing whatever it wanted her to do, and so in late 1950, she went to do land reform work in a poverty-stricken farming village, known as Dragon’s Village, outside the Great Wall in northwestern Gansu Province. Six months later, she returned to Beijing, and at a weekend party, an old Nankai schoolmate, Dora Zhang, introduced her to Jack Chen, an overseas Chinese who, along with his father, had been an early supporter of the Communists. At the party, they waltzed to the music of the “Blue Danube.” She was not as impressed by Chen’s political pedigree as by his library, which included banned works by writers like Marcel Proust and D. H. Lawrence. They talked about these “decadent writers” and fell in love.
From the Magic Circle into the Great Famine
Authors: Chen Yuan-tsung
Published: December 2021

Yuan-tsung awaited her fate, sure that it would be the same as that of her immediate boss, Director Wang, who had been driven to suicide, but Jack came to her rescue. They reconciled and got married in 1958. She lived a privileged life in his “magic circle,” which, up to that time, was untouched by either purges or famines. But in that magic circle, she watched with terror and apathy as the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the ensuing Great Famine unfolded. Feeling it morally wrong that she did not suffer with the others, she volunteered in 1960, the worst famine year, to go to a famine-devastated rural area, the Red Flag People’s Commune. To survive, she had to hunt for food like the other villagers.
The Mob Rule Continued
Authors: Chen Yuan-tsung
Published: December 2021

In 1967, during a mutiny known as the Wuhan Incident, Zhou Enlai flexed his political muscles and pacified the insurgent commanders. Mao felt threatened. Yuan-tsung’s friend Courtier Yu, her direct link to Zhou, warned her that she had been caught in the crossfire of a huge power struggle between Zhou and Mao. Zhou wanted to reach an understanding with the West that would lead to the lifting of its trade sanctions against China. Mao, however, wanted to resuscitate the Great Leap Forward. Yuan-tsung’s best bet was Zhou. If Zhou prevailed, he would use Jack’s knowledge of English and Western culture to explain his open-door policy to the West. In return Jack and Yuan-tsung would get their exit visas. Courtier Yu arranged a meeting at a place near Badaling where Yuan-tsung could take her plea directly to Zhou.
Epilogue
Authors: Chen Yuan-tsung
Published: December 2021

In May 1971, the Chens arrived in Hong Kong. In October of the same year, Jack went on his speaking tour. It was a success, and they decided to emigrate to the United States. Both worked at Cornell University, and then in 1978, they moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Yuan-tsung worked at the East Asiatic Library at the University of California, Berkeley until she retired in 1992. In 2010, she moved to Hong Kong and started to write her present memoir. After the Party authorities implemented the National Security Law in 2020, the strategy of “shock and awe” put Yuan-tsung on tenterhooks. However, in spite of herself, she was determined to complete her book and get it published.
Workers Gain Formal Political Power
Authors: Wisman Jon D.
Published: December 2021

Industrialization and urbanization during the nineteenth century brought workers physically together, where they could organize and petition through strikes and revolts for better wages, shorter working hours, limits to child labor, safer working conditions, education for their children, and most importantly, the franchise. Although inequality continued to increase, conditions for workers and their families began improving. Workers gained formal political power within government. Yet although workers acquired the vote and with it the potential for dramatically rewriting the rules of the game (because they held the overwhelming majority of votes), elites’ ideology was effective in convincing them to restrain their political muscle. Nevertheless, elites’ monopoly control over the political sphere had been broken. As a result, they could no longer as readily use violence to put down worker demands. Their retention of disproportionate shares of income, wealth, and privilege would depend more fully upon the persuasiveness of their ideology.
Simon Kuznets’s Happy Prognosis Crushed in an Ideological Coup
Authors: Wisman Jon D.
Published: December 2021

In 1955, economist Simon Kuznets suggested that, while inequality increases during early economic development, in later stages it declines. However, this felicitous hypothesis has been contradicted by inequality’s explosion since the 1970s. This explosion was energized by President Ronald Reagan’s declaration in 1981 that “government is the problem.” Turning popular sentiment against government was an ideological coup, because only government policies can decrease inequality. Government was not reduced in size or in its intervention into the workings of the economy, but policies shifted radically in favor of the wealthy. Taxes were cut for the rich, the economy was significantly deregulated, and welfare measures were trimmed. This chapter unfolds the dynamics that enabled laissez-faire ideology to revive and become more entrenched than ever before. It clarifies how this ideology managed to survive the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, during and after which inequality has continued to explode.
What Future for Inequality?
Authors: Wisman Jon D.
Published: December 2021

Because the struggle over inequality is the principal defining issue of history, it will also be the defining issue of humanity’s future. This concluding chapter briefly surveys reasons for pessimism and optimism concerning future inequality. On the side of pessimism, since the rise of the state 5,500 years ago, elites have almost always taken all of producers’ surpluses, leaving them with bare subsistence. Only partial delegitimation of elites’ ideology during the Great Depression led to 40 years of political measures reducing inequality. The resurgence of laissez-faire ideology and inequality over the past 45 years does not inspire optimism. Yet enormous progress has been made over the course of human history, and especially in the past several centuries. This has been especially impressive in the development of science and human critical faculties which privilege rule by reason. This book goes to press amidst growing awareness of inequality’s unfairness and negative consequences.