bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
What Was Gained
Authors: Boyer George R.
Published: May 2019

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's major findings. The road to the welfare state of the 1940s was not a wide and straight thoroughfare through Victorian and Edwardian Britain. As the previous chapters have made clear, the story of British social policy from 1830 to 1950 is really two separate stories joined together in the years immediately before the Great War. The first is a tale of increasing stinginess toward the poor by the central and local governments, while the second is the story of the construction of a national safety net, culminating in the Beveridge Report and Labour's social policies of 1946–48. The prototype for the welfare reforms of the twentieth century cannot be found in the Victorian Poor Law. The chapter then offers some thoughts regarding the reasons for the shifts in social welfare policy from the 1830s to the 1940s.
Theological Speculation and Theological Literacy
Authors: Tannous Jack
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses theological speculation and theological literacy in late antique and medieval Middle East. In the period beginning with the controversy between Cyril and Nestorius in 428 and ending with the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–681, the Christian community of the Middle East splintered into separate and competing churches as a result of disagreements over theological speculation. There was chronic and irresolvable controversy as to how many natures, persons, energies, and wills there were in the Incarnate Christ. The variety of distinct and competing churches that developed include the Chalcedonians, the Miaphysites, and the Church of the East. The question of literacy complicates things further. An estimate of literacy among Christians in the first several centuries AD suggested that no more than 10 percent were able to “read, criticize, and interpret” Christian literature in this time.
The Simple and the Learned
Authors: Tannous Jack
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the notion of simplicity and of the simple believer, which had a complex history—both Christian and non-Christian—and was in use long before the Council of Chalcedon. In the first centuries of Christian history, pagans attacked Christians for being simple, uneducated, and credulous, but Christians themselves would also acknowledge their simplicity and take pride in the triumph of the Christian message over the wisdom of the world. Stories were told suggesting that a Christian with simple faith could defeat and convert even learned philosophers skilled in debate. Indeed, labeling someone “simple” could also be a polemical tool, and the notion of the simple believer played an important role in the language Christian leaders used to discuss teachings they opposed; accusing adversaries of leading the simple astray was a well-worn tactic.
Power in Heaven and on Earth
Authors: Tannous Jack
Published: May 2019

This chapter looks at the most powerful tool for community formation that Christian leaders had at their disposal: the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. The sacraments united the simple and the learned alike. In the world of simple believers, the Eucharist was much more than a mystery one took at church, and baptism was much more than a rite of Christian initiation. Seeing the enormous power ascribed to these things and others provides a better understanding of why they could help produce the sort of confessional indifference among the simple that so exercised church leaders like Jacob of Edessa. Moreover, considering the extra-ecclesial life of the sacraments will help illustrate why controlling them might prove fundamental to forming a communal vessel that did not have leaks and why controlling them was ultimately more powerful than any dialectical argument.
Competition, Schools, and Qenneshre
Authors: Tannous Jack
Published: May 2019

This chapter addresses another aspect of the world after Chalcedon, the spread of Christian schools, considering the intense confessional competition driving their creation. The rivalries underlying this competition were a consequence of the diversity of Christian confessional stances and the incomplete ecclesiastical and communal separation that existed on the ground between various factions. The object of this competition was simple believers, Christians who likely had a poor understanding of the theological issues separating the various churches and whose confessional allegiance was very much up for grabs. One of the most conspicuous forms that interconfessional rivalry took was the construction of educational institutions and the expansion of educational efforts on the part of church leaders. It is at the end of the sixth and into the seventh century that one finds evidence of an educational arms race between rival churches. The chapter then looks at the monastery of Qenneshre on the eastern bank of the Euphrates.
Education and Community Formation
Authors: Tannous Jack
Published: May 2019

This chapter studies Christian education in the post-Chalcedonian Middle East. It is unlikely that an attempt would be made to educate all young Christian boys—the need for child labor in an overwhelmingly agrarian society would have made such a goal difficult to achieve. In fact, it was perhaps only in the regions which surrounded certain especially strong monasteries that educating all boys was even an ideal. However, one should still recognize that the spread of Christianity in the Middle East and the post-Chalcedonian increase in educational efforts must have had a positive effect on literacy rates, even if those rates remained quite low. A two-tiered system seems to have been the most typical course that education took in the late Roman and early medieval Middle East. Indeed, some members of the clergy would receive more than just the basic education.
A House with Many Mansions
Authors: Tannous Jack
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses Christianity. There was a range of Christian beliefs and a gamut of understandings of what was encouraged, what was acceptable, and what was forbidden by church leaders for Christians to do and to believe. When Arab conquerors rode into the Middle East in the 630s and 640s, the Christianity they would have encountered would have included that of all these people, and others as well. The spectrum of what was acceptable and what was not for a Christian could be person relative and depending on the issue, different Christian authorities might have divergent standards. As such, there was also a broad spectrum of beliefs held by Christians. This spectrum extended well beyond the Christologically based doctrinal typologies carefully laid out in modern patristic manuals and theological textbooks.
A Religion with a Thousand Faces
Authors: Tannous Jack
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the variety of meanings that “Islam” and “Muslim” may have held in the earliest period of Islamic history. Although later Muslim tradition would regard the earliest generations of Muslims as the most pious and devout in all of Islamic history, most of them had little detailed knowledge of the message of the Prophet and paid scant heed to its implications for how they lived their lives. Moreover, even among those who did care about the Prophet's message, there was disagreement as to what exactly it was and shifting opinions about what would later be regarded as matters of central importance. Judged by later standards, most of the earliest followers of Muhammad—both the salaf and those who came after them—will have fallen far short of the expectations and assumptions about them that they have been saddled with for many centuries.
Conversion and the Simple
Authors: Tannous Jack
Published: May 2019

This chapter looks at the observation that a person who was actually learned in both his own religious tradition and in the Islamic tradition would never convert for anything other than nontheological reasons. Most Christians and Muslims were not learned in their own religious tradition, much less in that of a rival religion, and will have been ill-equipped or simply unable to discuss and debate religious difference at the level of sophisticated theology in a proper and informed way. For this reason, if when speaking about Christian–Muslim relations, one's focus is on difference at the level of doctrinal theology, one will gain only a distorted understanding of seventh- and eighth-century realities. One will overlook the existence of a layering and continuum of knowledge in the Christian community and fail to take into account the reality that most conversions by Christians to Islam will have been conversions of simple Christians into simple Muslims.
Dark Matter and the History of the Middle East
Authors: Tannous Jack
Published: May 2019

This concluding chapter argues that late Roman Syria was a place where linguistic frontiers did not translate into cultural boundaries. The Arab conquests of the seventh century did not change this; instead, the prestige their new scripture enjoyed added a third literary language, Arabic, to the mix of a region with an already rich history of intercultural exchange. Moreover, religious dynamics continued as they had for centuries—viewed against the background of post-Chalcedonian Christian–Christian interaction, the scope and nature of Christian–Muslim interaction looks very familiar. Ultimately, in trying to place the existence of the Middle East's population of simple Christians not just into this story, but at its center, this book has attempted to capture some of the excitement and interest of this process in a way that does justice to all of the people living there, not just a small subset of them.
Introduction
Authors: Getachew Adom
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to study the global projects of decolonization black Anglophone anticolonial critics and nationalists spearheaded in the three decades after the end of the Second World War. Drawing on the political thought of Nnamdi Azikiwe, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michael Manley, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, George Padmore, and Eric Williams, it argues that decolonization was a project of reordering the world that sought to create a domination-free and egalitarian international order. Against the standard view of decolonization as a moment of nation-building in which the anticolonial demand for self-determination culminated in the rejection of alien rule and the formation of nation-states, the book recasts anticolonial nationalism as worldmaking. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
A Political Theory of Decolonization
Authors: Getachew Adom
Published: May 2019

This chapter sketches a political theory of decolonization that rethinks how anticolonial nationalism posed the problem of empire to expand our sense of its aims and trajectories. Drawing on recent histories of international law as well as the political thought of Black Atlantic worldmakers, it reconceives empire as processes of unequal international integration that took an increasingly racialized form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with a racialized international order, anticolonial nationalists turned to projects of worldmaking that would secure the conditions of international nondomination. It argues that attention to the specificity of political projects that emerged out of the legacy of imperialism provides a postcolonial approach to contemporary cosmopolitanism. A postcolonial cosmopolitanism entails a critical diagnosis of the persistence of empire and a normative orientation that retains the anti-imperial aspiration for a domination-free international order.
The Welfare World of the New International Economic Order
Authors: Getachew Adom
Published: May 2019

This chapter analyzes the ways that anticolonial nationalists responded to an intensified postcolonial predicament with their most ambitious project of worldmaking—the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO constituted a welfare world that sought to enhance the bargaining power of postcolonial states, democratize decision-making, and achieve international redistribution. At the center of this welfare world was a radical recasting of sovereign equality as a demand for an equitable share of the world's wealth. The NIEO envisioned this expansive account of sovereign equality as the economic component of international nondomination. The view that sovereign equality had material implications marked anticolonial nationalists' biggest departure from the postwar international legal order and was quickly rejected and displaced in the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1970s.
Sweet Science
Authors: Colander David , Freedman Craig
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the methodological tradition that Classical Liberal economists embraced, which interpreted the science of economics narrowly and created a firewall between scientific pursuits and policy endeavors. This tradition is best found in the policy methodology of Classical Liberals such as John Stuart Mill and his followers. That methodology recognized the messiness of policy compared to the elegance of the theory underlying science. To deal with that messiness, the policy methodology needed a branch of economics that was free of scientific certainty. One way to handle that problem would be to accept that no part of economics was a science. The second way was to divide economics into different branches: a scientific branch concerned with agreed-upon empirical facts and logical implications of assumptions, in which normative values played as minimal a role as possible; and a policy branch in which values were seen as essential elements of the analysis.
Planting the Seeds of a Chicago Tradition
Authors: Colander David , Freedman Craig
Published: May 2019

This chapter traces the beginning of economics at the University of Chicago to study the development of a Chicago tradition. The Chicago tradition begins with James Laughlin, the first chair and founder of the department in 1892. He put his stamp on Chicago economics in ways that would serve to nurture future generations but would also prove to be regrettable. Laughlin, during his sometimes-controversial career, placed himself well within the boundaries defining Classical Liberalism. He helped create the persistent, but at times quite misleading, appearance that identified the Chicago department as a virulent breeding ground of ultra-conservative thought, tarred by a predilection for ideologically tinged policy prescriptions. The chapter then looks at the Chicago School of Economics.
What Has Chicago Wrought?
Authors: Colander David , Freedman Craig
Published: May 2019

This chapter begins by differentiating between the views of economic theory of the interwar Chicago Economics Department and the postwar Chicago School. The interwar department was highly skeptical of the direct relevance of all theory for policy. In contrast, the succeeding Chicago School lost much of that skepticism. Indeed, in the tumultuous postwar period, the older Chicago tradition mutated into a distinctive and formidable strategic approach, one nurtured under the critical eyes of Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Aaron Director. Their meticulously hewn fabrication would eventually engulf and define the department. In a series of ever more distinguishable departures, this postwar generation of Chicago nurtured economists found themselves breaking with the older tradition that had defined the department during its more formative years.
The Classical Liberal “Argumentation for the Sake of Heaven” Alternative
Authors: Colander David , Freedman Craig
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the method of “argumentation for the sake of heaven.” This method entails an honest exploration by economists focused on advancing understanding, not on winning debates. Argumentation for the sake of heaven can only occur if one recognizes that it is needed. Thus, implementing an argumentation for the sake of heaven methodology would require economists ascribing to opposing views on policy to willingly personally discuss the nuances of their policy differences. The mutually held goal of these debaters arguing for the sake of heaven would be to reduce differences. To the degree possible, the overriding objective would be to reach a consensus, or at least a specification of what type of evidence might persuade economists on both sides of the policy issue, to change their mind.
Ptolemy's Philosophy
Authors: Feke Jacqueline
Published: May 2019

The Greco-Roman mathematician Claudius Ptolemy is one of the most significant figures in the history of science. He is remembered today for his astronomy, but his philosophy is almost entirely lost to history. This book reconstructs Ptolemy's general philosophical system—including his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics—and to explore its relationship to astronomy, harmonics, element theory, astrology, cosmology, psychology, and theology. The book uncovers references to a complex and sophisticated philosophical agenda scattered among Ptolemy's technical studies in the physical and mathematical sciences. It shows how he developed a philosophy that was radical and even subversive, appropriating ideas and turning them against the very philosophers from whom he drew influence. The book reveals how Ptolemy's unique system is at once a critique of prevailing philosophical trends and a conception of the world in which mathematics reigns supreme. The book demonstrates how Ptolemy situated mathematics at the very foundation of all philosophy—theoretical and practical—and advanced the mathematical way of life as the true path to human perfection.
Introduction
Authors: Feke Jacqueline
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. It begins with a brief discussion of the life and work of Claudius Ptolemy, and how his contributions in philosophy have been all but forgotten. It then sets out the book's purpose, namely to prove that Ptolemy was very much a man of his time in that his philosophy is most similar to middle Platonism, the period in Platonic philosophy that extended from the first century BCE—with Antiochus of Ascalon, who was born near the end of the second century BCE and moved from Ascalon, in present-day Israel, to Athens to join the Academy—to the beginning of the third century BCE, with Ammonius Saccas, the Alexandrian philosopher and teacher of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism. Both Antiochus and Ammonius Saccas are known for their syncretic tendencies.
Astrology and Cosmology
Authors: Feke Jacqueline
Published: May 2019

This chapter argues that Ptolemy maintains the epistemology and scientific method that he articulates in Almagest 1.1 and applies in the Harmonics in his studies of astrology and cosmology in the Tetrabiblos and Planetary Hypotheses. Both Ptolemy's astrology and his cosmology rely on astronomy. Indeed, Ptolemy suggests that their very study depends on an antecedent and complete examination of the stars' movements and configurations. The conclusions astrology and cosmology put forward, however, remain conjectural, and Ptolemy remarks in both the Tetrabiblos and Planetary Hypotheses on the conjectural nature of astrology, cosmology, and physics in general. Nevertheless, by placing his astrology and cosmology on an astronomical foundation, Ptolemy endeavours to produce the best guesses possible of the physical characteristics of aethereal bodies and the physical effects they have on the sublunary realm.
Paul Sethe
Authors: Berghahn Volker R.
Published: May 2019

This chapter turns to the “grand old man” of West German journalism—Paul Sethe (1901–1967)—who was one of the best-known journalists during the founding years of the Federal Republic. Sethe also poses a considerable challenge to the historian who tries to evaluate his professional record because of his work as an editor of the Ohligser Anzeiger und Tageblatt (OA) until December 1933 and of Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ) between 1934 and 1943. After all, whereas in the OA he expressed views that were critical of Hitler before 1933, the FZ's journalism occupied a rather more ambiguous position in the Third Reich. There is also the question of whether deep down in his heart he was more of a scholar of serious history than a journalist writing in the daily hustle and bustle of the newspaper business. As this chapter shows, he wrote several big books on historical themes after 1945 and, judging from his output, putting pen to paper certainly seems to have come to him with ease.
The Intellectual Journey of Marion Countess Dönhoff
Authors: Berghahn Volker R.
Published: May 2019

This chapter considers the experiences of Marion Countess Dönhoff (1909–2002), one of the most famous female German journalists of the twentieth century. Dönhoff belongs to the so-called “Generation of '32” and was confronted with the difficult question of how to react to the dictatorship that Hitler established so swiftly starting in January 1933. For an understanding of her career, both during the Nazi period and after World War II, it is also important that she was a woman in what was still very much a male-dominated world. These are significant factors when it comes to assessing her role as an “inner emigrant.” Here she, an anti-Nazi of the first hour, moved more and more toward active resistance and, as will be seen, was lucky that the local Gestapo let her go after a brief interrogation following the failed July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. After 1945 she became a journalist who wrestled with explanations of what had happened under Nazism and of what kind of society should be built out of the ruins of the German and European catastrophe.
Hans Zehrer’s Intellectual Journey from Weimar Berlin to Postwar Hamburg
Authors: Berghahn Volker R.
Published: May 2019

This chapter provides a fresh analysis of Hans Zehrer (1899–1966), examining his journalism and politics at the end of the Weimar Republic. Ousted after the Nazi seizure of power, he “emigrated internally” to Sylt. He left the island after 1945, first as the editor in chief of Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, founded by Bishop Hanns Lilje in Hanover, and later of Die Welt in Hamburg. The chapter traces the evolution of his thoughts from his wartime book Der Mensch in dieser Zeit, through his Stille vor dem Sturm. Zehrer showed that he was not a liberal or a social democrat but a conservative who wrestled with how battered West Germany might become a new society based on firm constitutional principles and Christian morality. Moreover, Stille vor dem Sturm indicates that, if nothing else, Zehrer's notions of politics and society went through a phase that reflected a learning process and a willingness to change. It was only in the mid-1960s that he became more resigned and fatalistic, partly in response to the weakening of his influence within Axel Springer's media empire.
The Sovereign Debt Puzzle
Authors: Roos Jerome
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to contribute to debates on the power of finance and the consequences of contemporary patterns in international crisis management for social justice and democracy. It does so by revisiting a seemingly simple question whose answer has nonetheless eluded economists for decades: why do so many heavily indebted countries continue to service their external debts even in times of acute fiscal distress? The chapter then presents a brief history of sovereign default followed by discussions of why governments repay their debts, the three enforcement mechanisms of debtor compliance, and consequences for international crisis management.
Why Do Countries Repay Their Debts?
Authors: Roos Jerome
Published: May 2019

The striking puzzle at the heart of international lending has long been known as the “enforcement problem” of cross-border debt contracts: clearly there is some kind of cross-border enforcement at work, but the precise mechanism through which it operates is not immediately observable, and economists still do not understand how exactly it works. This chapter discusses the four conventional explanations of debtor compliance found in the economics literature, and assesses their validity in light of the available evidence. The four explanations center on (1) the borrower's long-term reputation; (2) legal and trade sanctions; (3) democratic institutions; and (4) spillover costs.
The Structural Power of Finance
Authors: Roos Jerome
Published: May 2019

It has been established that power lies at the heart of the sovereign debt puzzle. This chapter asks: What are the precise mechanisms through which finance exerts its power? Under what conditions are these mechanisms likely to be effective, and under what conditions are they likely to break down? How have these dynamics been impacted by the globalization and financialization of the capitalist economy in recent decades? And what, if anything, can still be done to counteract the power of finance from below? It is argued that a distressed sovereign borrower will only choose to renege on its financial obligations if the social costs of repayment have become unbearable and citizens threaten to withdraw their loyalty to the state. Only in the context of a destabilizing legitimation crisis and a citizens' revolt from below will the administrators of a contemporary “debt state” ever contemplate defying their private creditors by defaulting on their financial obligations.
Syndicated Lending and the Creditors’ Cartel
Authors: Roos Jerome
Published: May 2019

This chapter considers the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. Unlike the 1930s, when debt moratoriums were widespread, the debt crisis of the 1980s was marked by a striking absence of unilateral default. With payment suspensions effectively ruled out as a permissible policy response, debtors and creditors engaged in a concerted effort to reschedule the amortization of principal, refinance maturing obligations and prevent an interruption of interest service at all costs. The chapter shows how the highly concentrated and interlocked nature of syndicated lending contributed to the emergence of a coherent international creditors' cartel that was capable of effectively coordinating collective action among the major Wall Street banks, keeping the debtors in the lending game by rolling over maturing obligations while simultaneously imposing strict market discipline on the borrowing governments through the credible threat of a refusal of further credit in the event of noncompliance.
“The Rich Got the Loans, the Poor Got the Debts”
Authors: Roos Jerome
Published: May 2019

This chapter takes a closer look at the outcomes of the Mexican debt crisis and the consequences of the reduced state autonomy at the heart of the crisis of the 1980s. The first section considers the brief period of tension between Mexican policymakers and their foreign lenders, and discusses Argentina as a counterfactual case in which a democratically elected government came to power that was strongly opposed to debt repayment. The second part of the chapter considers the final resolution of the Mexican debt crisis through the Brady debt restructuring deal of 1989–1990, which, far from constituting a coercive default, was actually undertaken at the initiative of the Wall Street banks with their own interests firmly in mind. Finally, the chapter considers the unequal distribution of adjustment costs inside Mexico as a direct consequence of the creditors' power to shape the outcome of the crisis in their favor.
The Establishment Digs In
Authors: Roos Jerome
Published: May 2019

This chapter considers the factors behind Greece's compliance in the first years of the crisis. It shows that in the first two years of the crisis, the “establishment triangle” revolving around the political class, private bankers, and the financial technocrats at the Bank of Greece, far from being weakened by the government's precarious fiscal position or the financial fragility of the Greek banks, actually managed to solidify its stronghold on financial policymaking through its capacity to fulfill a bridging role to foreign lenders and keep providing their fiscally distressed national government with much-needed short-term credit lines. The third enforcement mechanism, in short, was relatively effective. But while this helped internalize debtor discipline into the Greek state apparatus, it did not succeed in returning the country to solvency.
Who Fights for Reputation
Authors: Yarhi-Milo Keren
Published: May 2019

This book provides an original framework, based on insights from psychology, to explain why some political leaders are more willing to use military force to defend their reputation than others. Rather than focusing on a leader's background, beliefs, bargaining skills, or biases, the book draws a systematic link between a trait called self-monitoring and foreign policy behavior. It examines self-monitoring among national leaders and advisers and shows that while high self-monitors modify their behavior strategically to cultivate image-enhancing status, low self-monitors are less likely to change their behavior in response to reputation concerns. Exploring self-monitoring through case studies of foreign policy crises during the terms of US presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, the book disproves the notion that hawks are always more likely than doves to fight for reputation. Instead, it demonstrates that a decision-maker’s propensity for impression management is directly associated with the use of force to restore a reputation for resolve on the international stage. This book offers a brand-new understanding of the pivotal influence that psychological factors have on political leadership, military engagement, and the protection of public prestige.
Introduction
Authors: Yarhi-Milo Keren
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the concept of reputation for resolve. A state’s reputation for resolve is the belief that during crises, the state’s leaders will take actions that demonstrate willingness to pay high costs and run high risks, and will thus stand firm in crises. Leaders who project or protect a reputation for resolve signal that they are willing to use military instruments in order to affect others’ beliefs about their willingness to stand firm. The historical record suggests that leaders and their closest foreign policy advisors often hold divergent views about whether reputation for resolve is worth fighting for. This book then offers an alternative analytical framework in explaining such variations of views that focuses on psychological dispositions and beliefs of national leaders. Importantly, by attributing variation in willingness to fight for reputation to variation in individuals’ self-monitoring, it shows that fighting for reputation has prepolitical origins.
Self-Monitoring, US Presidents, and International Crises
Authors: Yarhi-Milo Keren
Published: May 2019

This chapter looks at original surveys of sixty-eight presidential historians on the president each had studied in depth. The historians’ survey suggests that American presidents exhibit variation in their self-monitoring dispositions. The chapter then leverages this variation to test statistically whether US presidents’ behavior during international crises is consistent with the expectations of the theory presented in this book. The self-monitoring disposition of a US president is a significant predictor of his likelihood of employing and initiating military instruments to demonstrate resolve during international conflict. Low self-monitor presidents not only engage in less militarized interstate disputes, but they are also significantly less likely to initiate such disputes, compared to high self-monitor presidents. The chapter also presents findings indicating that high self-monitor presidents are more likely to prevail in militarized interstate disputes compared to their low self-monitor counterparts.
Theology and the Scientific Imagination
Authors: Funkenstein Amos
Published: May 2019

This book is a pioneering work of intellectual history that transformed our understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the development of science. The author explores the metaphysical foundations of modern science and shows how, by the 1600s, theological and scientific thinking had become almost one. Major figures like Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and others developed an unprecedented secular theology whose debt to medieval and scholastic thought shaped the trajectory of the scientific revolution. The book ends with the author's influential analysis of the seventeenth century's “unprecedented fusion” of scientific and religious language. Featuring a new foreword, the book is a pathbreaking and classic work that remains a fundamental resource for historians and philosophers of science.
Divine Omnipotence and Laws of Nature
Authors: Funkenstein Amos
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores how eternal truths are created in a radical sense of the word; even mathematical theorems are contingent upon God’s will. What the most radical defenders of divine omnipotence in the Middle Ages hardly ever asserted, Descartes did without hesitation: that God could invalidate the most basic mathematical operations. Meanwhile, Spinoza argued that divine omnipotence and necessity of nature are one and the same, since all that is really possible in the world is also as necessary as any mathematical truth. The chapter shows how medieval theology introduced the distinction between the two aspects of God’s power so as to enlarge as far as possible the horizon of that which is possible to God without violating reason.
The Persian Alexander/Iskander
Authors: Boardman John
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses the challenge of determining how modern Persia/Iran might value Alexander. The land whose great empire had been destroyed by Alexander did not forget its conqueror and could even be more inclined to forgive him. Indeed, it proved to have the longest memory of antiquity, although not in the immediate aftermath of its defeat. There is virtually nothing of Alexander in Parthian story or art, and Sasanian art appears to ignore him, often in favour of more “classical” subjects. In the years before the advent of Islam, there was knowledge of the Alexander Romances via the Pahlavi and Arabic versions, but then two great compilations of Persian history gave him prominence, as did artists.
The Indian Alexander
Authors: Boardman John
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines how in India, there is no real reflection of Alexander in the arts of Gandara in the early centuries CE, where memory of classical Indo-Greek and Parthianizied forms and subjects remained strong though far divorced from their sources. Persian and Arab adoption of Iskander/Alexander had its effect far to the east and, naturally enough, into Mughal India. There has been some doubt about whether in Indian languages “Skanda” refers to him. Apart from the real legacy of his conquests, Alexander was also easily inserted into Indian history by some writers without much regard to any evidence or even tradition.
Fellow Travellers, Marco Polo to TV
Authors: Boardman John
Published: May 2019

This chapter considers how many travellers have attempted to follow Alexander's footsteps, or in their account of their own Asian journeys have made a point of referring to him as their forerunner, even guide. During the Great Game, the struggle between the great powers, mainly Britain and Russia, for control of Afghanistan and surrounding territory on the Gateway to India, there were many worthies in this great man's footsteps. The American Josiah Harlan was one of the first, becoming a general of the Afghan army and allegedly obsessed with Alexander, yet he seems never directly to refer to him in his annals.
Secret Wars
Authors: Carson Austin
Published: May 2019

This is the first book to systematically analyze the ways that powerful states covertly participate in foreign wars, showing a recurring pattern of such behavior stretching from World War I to U.S.-occupied Iraq. Investigating what governments keep secret during wars and why, the book argues that leaders maintain the secrecy of state involvement as a response to the persistent concern of limiting war. Keeping interventions “backstage” helps control escalation dynamics, insulating leaders from domestic pressures while communicating their interest in keeping a war contained. It shows that covert interventions can help control escalation, but they are almost always detected by other major powers. However, the shared value of limiting war can lead adversaries to keep secret the interventions they detect, as when American leaders concealed clashes with Soviet pilots during the Korean War. Escalation concerns can also cause leaders to ignore covert interventions that have become an open secret. From Nazi Germany's role in the Spanish Civil War to American covert operations during the Vietnam War, the book presents new insights about some of the most influential conflicts of the twentieth century. Parting the curtain on the secret side of modern war, the book provides important lessons about how rival state powers collude and compete, and the ways in which they avoid outright military confrontations.
Public Opinion in South and Nation
Authors: Caughey Devin
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the political attitudes of the Southern mass public in the wake of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Taking advantage of hundreds of public opinion polls conducted beginning in the mid-1930s, the chapter documents Southern whites' collective turn against many aspects of the New Deal as well as their persistent ideological diversity on economic issues. The chapter illustrates these developments with a focus on four policy areas: old-age pensions, minimum wages, union security agreements, and income taxation. It then summarizes these patterns using a dynamic group-level item response theory (IRT) model, which estimates the economic conservatism of demographic subpopulations in each state and year. Based on this and other evidence, the chapter argues that the South's turn to the right was driven partly by the increasingly urban and union-oriented character of New Deal liberalism, which alienated rural areas throughout the nation, and partly by white Southerners' growing sense of threat to their region's system of racial hierarchy.
Southern Democrats in Congress
Authors: Caughey Devin
Published: May 2019

This chapter moves from the mass public to the halls of Congress. Paralleling the previous chapter, it describes the ideological evolution and continuing diversity of Southern senators and representatives, focusing again on their positions on economic issues. Using an item response theory (IRT) model similar to that used to estimate mass conservatism, this chapter shows that between the 1930s and 1940s Southern members of Congress (MCs), like the Southern white public, turned sharply but incompletely against New Deal liberalism. By the mid-1940s, Southern Democrats in Congress had come to occupy a pivotal position on economic issues midway between non-Southern Democrats and Republicans, giving them outsized influence over national policymaking in the wake of the New Deal. The chapter illustrates these developments with three of the four policy areas which Chapter 3 examines at the mass level. Moreover, taking proper account of the ideological diversity of Southern MCs requires treating them as a collection of individuals, not a reified bloc. This chapter therefore analyzes Southern Democrats (along with other MCs) as individuals with possibly distinct preferences.
Democratic Primaries and the Selectoral Connection
Authors: Caughey Devin
Published: May 2019

This chapter explains how the white primary created a selectoral connection between Southern members of Congress (MCs) and the voting public, thus incentivizing them to respond to the preferences of the eligible electorate. It marshals quantitative evidence on competition in Southern primaries as well as qualitative evidence drawn from archives, newspapers, and other historical sources on Southern MCs' representational and accountability relationships with their constituents. In doing so, the chapter argues that Democratic primaries, though racially exclusionary, provided forums for political participation by a broad swath of the white population. Not only did the electorate extend well beyond a narrow economic elite, but the potential electorate was even larger than the actual one, in part because whites' electoral participation depended on the competitiveness of the race. While primary competition was hardly universal, it was frequent and meaningful enough to provide a credible threat of opposition. In addition to enabling voters to remove out-of-step incumbents, these accountability mechanisms induced sitting incumbents to change their positions to preempt electoral punishment. The end result was a selectoral connection that, through turnover as well as adaptation, fostered responsiveness to the preferences of the white public, despite the absence of partisan electoral competition.
Conclusion
Authors: Caughey Devin
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses the implications of the revisionist portrait of Southern politics introduced in the previous chapters. It begins by considering how much the South has changed since the dismantlement of the one-party system. It also examines the qualitative distinction between the status of blacks and whites in the Jim Crow South. Southern members of Congress (MCs) could not ignore whites' preferences the way they did blacks', a fact with important implications for their behavior in office and, indirectly, for the course of American political development. The chapter then explores this book's implications for our understanding of American political development, of mass politics in authoritarian regimes, and of the role of parties in democracy. After all, just because the one-party South was not itself a democracy does not mean that we cannot learn something about democracy from studying it. Chief among the lessons here is the claim that a multiparty system—and specifically, partisan electoral competition—is a necessary condition for democracy.
Introduction
Authors: Milam Erika Lorraine
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter offers a quick glimpse into the historical milieu during which this volume is set. Between the Second World War and the 1970s, this chapter shows that scientists from a wide range of disciplines crafted a historical trajectory for humanity that was self-consciously anti-eugenic. The best of humanity had not degenerated from living in the artificial constructs of civilization, would not dissolve because of the overbreeding of the lower classes, and could not be corrupted through miscegenation. Instead, these evolutionists argued that our common past provided evidence of our continued remarkable success as a species. In essence, so these scientists reasoned, our present human nature resulted from the synergy of biology and culture, both in dynamic flux throughout our development as a species. We had become the most recent manifestation of a human lineage destined for even greater things in the future. Through their work, an evolutionary perspective wended its way into each discipline perched at the intersection of the natural and social sciences.
The Academic Jungle
Authors: Milam Erika Lorraine
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the collaborative journey of Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox. Tiger found his way to animal behavior as a result of his long-standing fascination with the logic of leadership. Fox came to animal behavior through a different route entirely, through the ethological insight that the origins of emotions lay in our evolutionary past. Both men made quite a pair as they quickly bonded in London in 1965 and began to work together. Fox and Tiger, both at the time and retrospectively, described their collaboration and the dynamics of the academic culture in which they worked as a function of theories about men in groups.
The New Synthesis
Authors: Milam Erika Lorraine
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses new understandings of humanity from the 1960s onward. It shows how a particular group of scientists struggled with the question of human nature by conceiving of natural and sexual selection as acting at the level of individuals, who in turn served as genetic-information processing units. A trait could not spread in a population unless it conferred some advantage to the individuals who possessed it, allowing them to contribute more copies of their genes to the next generation of that population than other individuals. These struggles are furthermore framed within a period when sociobiology was just starting to get a foothold in academics.
What Is in My Heart Is on My Twitter
Authors: El-Ariss Tarek
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the confrontational practices of Egyptian activist Wael Abbas. Investigating the interplay of leaks and scene-making in Wael's posts and language, which are often decried or dismissed as vulgar and offensive, the chapter problematizes the charge of qillat adab (uncivil, disrespectful, impolite, rude), exploring it both as practice and performance that is amplified by new media technology yet coincides with, is grounded in, and arises from local, affective models of protest and contestation. Tracing a trail of invectives and bruises, torture videos, and online attacks, it is argued that the activist-blogger is no longer tied to the disciplining project of the liberal state or to the “lonely intellectual” speaking truth to power.
Fiction of Scandal Redux
Authors: El-Ariss Tarek
Published: May 2019

This chapter analyzes the works of Rajaa Alsanea (b. 1981) and Khaled Alkhamissi (b. 1962) as the fiction of the leaking subject who wants to reveal it all, mimicking e-mails about the private life of individuals turned characters and recording and circulating scenes of abuse and violation on the street through novelistic scenes. It argues that the author, who is traditionally understood as the function of discourse in Foucault or as the object of sacrifice in Barthes, emerges in this new fiction as the scandalous function of the leak that recodes the novel as medium. It explores how literature is reimagined and reaffirmed in instances of greed, exhibitionism, confrontation, and hacking that affectively grab and move readers, marking the emergence of a new literary culture and aesthetics tied to the bestseller and the pursuit of fame.
Conclusion
Authors: El-Ariss Tarek
Published: May 2019

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. Examining literature and social media, activism and politics, the book identified a techno-archaic portal, breaching the narrative of modernity. The role of the Internet as “public sphere”—a utopian framework that promised an open and nonhierarchal encounter with the other—has given way to pre-Islamic raids and sophisticated hacks, trolling and attack that come from the present and a fantasized past, and jinn-like seers and narrators of akhbār. Both the Internet and the subject of modernity are leaking, unable to contain their enlightenment and liberal narratives, or to control the gushing from a dimension that lies beyond. This leaking is not a techno-salvation, but creates the possibility of change that also involves dangerous processes and openings that risk engulfing authors and activists.