bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Transforming Liberalism, 1933–1940
Authors: Schickler Eric
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on three developments in the mid- to late 1930s that together helped bring civil rights into mainstream liberals' program. The first is African Americans' emergence as a potential source of votes for northern Democrats. The second key change is the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which pushed for a new interpretation of New Deal liberalism that included civil rights as a component. The third change arose as a response to the first two developments: southern Democrats emerged as key opponents of further extension of the New Deal. These changes brought about a new set of political battle lines, in which a coalition of southern conservatives and Republicans opposed the “ardent New Dealers” of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, African Americans, and other urban liberals.
Civil Rights and New Deal Liberalism in the Mass Public
Authors: Schickler Eric
Published: January 2018

This chapter traces the mass-level story of civil rights realignment among whites. The conventional understanding is that New Deal economic liberalism and racial liberalism were not related among whites until the 1960s or perhaps the late 1950s. The chapter shows that among northern whites, both Democratic partisanship and economic liberalism were linked to support for the major civil rights initiatives on the agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. Although partisanship was uncorrelated with civil rights views among southern whites, economic conservatism was related to more conservative civil rights views. This connection between economic and racial conservatism in the South provided fertile ground for the GOP's eventual “southern strategy.” Ultimately, economically liberal northern Democrats provided much stronger support for most of the leading civil rights policy initiatives on the agenda than did economically conservative Republicans.
Conclusions
Authors: Schickler Eric
Published: January 2018

This concluding chapter discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of the civil rights case, with a focus on party theory and on the challenges of systematically studying major political transformations. The civil rights case underscores important features of party politics that are in tension with the assumption that parties are coherent entities reflecting stable coalitional bargains. Most important, American parties are federal in structure, with the result that politicians in different states and congressional districts answer to different core constituent groups. There is no guarantee that these constituencies will view one another as allies when it comes to the major policy challenges facing the country. Indeed, at times, politicians with one kind of electoral base and those with a very different base may view weakening the other party faction as essential to their own political future. The chapter then explores the civil rights realignment's implications for today's politics.
What Determines the Army’s Reaction to an Uprising?
Authors: Barany Zoltan
Published: January 2018

This chapter lays out an analytical framework and outlines in detail the internal and external variables that affect the armed forces’ responses to revolutions. The army draws on four separate domains of input as it formulates its response to a revolution. In descending order of importance these are the military establishment, the state, society, and the external environment. The chapter also introduces six factors that can help analyst come up with a cohesive and concise report with the correct prediction—at least most of the time. In descending order of significance, these are: the military’s internal cohesion; the presence of a volunteer or conscript army; the regime’s treatment of the military; the generals’ view of the regime legitimacy; the size, composition, and nature of protests; and the potential for foreign intervention.
The Middle East and North Africa, 2011
Authors: Barany Zoltan
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes the armies’ roles in the 2011 upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa, concentrating on the six countries where considerable bloodshed occurred: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. In these cases, the regular military forces assumed roles that followed one of three distinctive patterns: they either supported or opposed the uprising or split because they disagreed about how to respond to it. The chapter explains that once one is reasonably familiar with these countries’ political dynamics, societies, and civil–military relations, the reactions of the armed forces to the revolts should not have been all that unexpected. Looking only at cases where the military did play an important role constitutes something of a selection bias, so this chapter also surveys two Arab kingdoms, Morocco and Oman, where the armed forces’ involvement in controlling unrest was far more subdued.
Conclusion: Where To From Here?
Authors: Cadotte Marc W. , Davies T. Jonathan
Published: January 2018

This book has explored the major methods and concepts in the field of ecophylogenetics. It has considered many of the common statistics and metrics used by ecologists when testing ecophylogenetic hypotheses at both small and large scales. The power of this approach is predicated on the assumption that phylogeny provides information on the evolutionary history of traits that cannot be inferred simply from community data. This concluding chapter reviews some of the advances that have been made in terms of predicting ecology from evolutionary patterns, combining trait and phylogenetic information, and developing a more predictive science of climate change and the biology of species invasions. It also discusses several possible trajectories for ecophylogenetic analyses in the future that will be important in moving the field forward. Finally, it looks at the benefits of a synthesis between ecology and evolution.
Transplanting Ties
Authors: Bowen John R.
Published: January 2018

This chapter traces the physical movement of Muslims to Britain. Muslims came to Britain mainly—though not only—from South Asia, and they settled in certain cities and neighborhoods. Although Muslims living in Britain today trace their origins to many parts of the world, the majority have roots in former British India, and mainly in today's Pakistan and Bangladesh. Furthermore, within those two countries, a small number of districts have contributed in strikingly disproportionate numbers to the Muslim population of Britain. The concentrations began with historical accident but, once in place, reproduced themselves through practices of “chain migration,” whereby one generation of immigrants pulled another after it. The results are concentrations of closely related people in certain British neighborhoods. Many of these new residents of Britain have sought to maintain their ties to the homeland through marriage and through forms of economic cooperation. These practices reinforce ties of shared ethnic and religious community within certain British neighborhoods.
Background to the Shariʿa Councils
Authors: Bowen John R.
Published: January 2018

This chapter provides the background to the shariʻa councils and explains why Islamic divorce has become the focus of shariʻa council practices. In 1982, a collection of Islamic scholars met in Birmingham to create a new Britain-wide shariʻa council. The scholars had hoped to deal with a wide range of religious issues, from banking and mortgages to standards for halal food. However, few of these issues were brought to their doors. As one of the founding scholars, Suhaib Hasan, said later, “We intended that the council provide decisions for the Muslim community on any and all matters, but pretty soon it became clear to us that we were spending all our time giving women divorces. This was not what we set out to do, but there was a vacuum in the community and we filled it.” When a marriage has broken down, ways must be sought to allow the woman and the man to remarry.
Improvising an Institution
Authors: Bowen John R.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the everyday practices at the Islamic Shariʻa Council, London (ISC). ISC scholars do what judges do in courts throughout the world: they try to arrive at a reasonable outcome in a way that is consistent with their own procedures and with their understanding of the relevant law. However, the ISC scholars do so in a global context of Islamic jurisprudence and of transnational movement: clients come to them from dozens of countries, many of them will return to those (or other) countries, and from time to time Islamic scholars from prestigious religious faculties drop in to observe. Understandably, the scholars on this and other councils discuss whether their practices fit with those of Muslim-majority countries and with positions taken by those prestigious Islamic scholars.
Internal Debates and Practical Convergences
Authors: Bowen John R.
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the internal debates over Islam in Britain. Many British Muslims are engaged in practical reasoning on issues of marriage, gender relations, work, economics, and science in a British social and knowledge context. They see it as important to reason in Islamic ways toward solutions that will work for Muslims in Britain. Also, conservative Muslims are engaged in adapting to Britain from Islamic starting points that also find acceptability in Deoband or Riyadh. The chapter then draws on several disputes among Muslims that involve efforts to find “practical convergences,” whereby different starting points can be retained and some harmonization of practices achieved. Practical convergence allows Muslims and others to preserve what they see as intrinsically valuable evaluative frameworks even as they inflect practices toward a common horizon. As such, practical convergence can offer a better way forward than demanding explicit agreement on contested social issues.
Socio-ecological Systems Thinking
Authors: Schmitz Oswald J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines how humans and nature can become increasingly entwined as a socio-ecological system. Northern cod stocks were once so plentiful in the waters off eastern Canada and northern New England. Five centuries later, the commercial northern cod fishery would collapse in dramatic fashion. To understand how the changes happened, the chapter divides the history of the northern cod fishery into four major periods of human engagement that began in 1500 and lasted until 1990. It also considers the development of new computational tools that have led to new principles that can help ecologists anticipate state changes in complex ecosystems and thereby better guide human engagement with nature's economy. Finally, it explains how the New Ecology can help us better understand the nested hierarchy and mechanisms of the inner workings of socio-ecological systems and the nonlinear responses that arise when they are disturbed or exploited.
Ecologies by Humans for Humans
Authors: Schmitz Oswald J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the potential of industrial and urban ecology to entwine humans and nature to achieve sustainability in ways that are respectful and ethical to both. Thinking about humans and nature linked as socio-ecological systems means appreciating the growing, inextricable connectedness between global locations where technology is manufactured and used, and locations that physically provide the key elements. An ethical position of environmental stewardship would obligate one to first question whether it is right to protect nature in one location and force resource extraction to be done in other parts of the world. Industrial ecology is an emerging field that enhances society's ability to maintain the functionality of related ecosystems, and is also now toying with using principles of evolutionary biology and resilience. Like industrial ecology, urban ecology is based on systems thinking and include the valuation of ecosystem services, telecoupling of real and virtual resources, and environmental stewardship.
“Your Place Is Where Your Family Is”
Authors: Garip Filiz
Published: January 2018

This chapter discuses a particular migrant group that doubled in size, as well as in its relative share among first-time migrants from Mexico to the United States, between 1987 and 1990. This group encompassed more than one-third of all migrants at its peak in 1991 and contained a large majority of women and migrants with family ties to previous U.S. migrants. The migrants in this group are called family migrants. The sudden increase in the number of family migrants occurred right after the enactment of Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, an immigration law that opened the path to legalization for more than 2 million undocumented Mexicans in the United States. Family reunification was a major factor that pulled family migrants from Mexico to the United States. The group included a large share of wives and daughters joining their husbands and fathers, who were already there.
Brazil in Transition
Authors: Alston Lee J. , Melo Marcus André , Mueller Bernardo , Pereira Carlos
Published: January 2018

Brazil is the world's sixth-largest economy, and for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century was one of the fastest-growing countries in the world. While the country underwent two decades of unrelenting decline from 1975 to 1994, the economy has rebounded dramatically. How did this nation become an emerging power? This book looks at the factors behind why this particular country has successfully progressed up the economic development ladder. The book examines the roles of beliefs, leadership, and institutions in the elusive, critical transition to sustainable development. Analyzing the last fifty years of Brazil's history, the book explains how the nation's beliefs, centered on social inclusion yet bound by orthodox economic policies, led to institutions that altered economic, political, and social outcomes. Brazil's growth and inflation became less variable, the rule of law strengthened, politics became more open and competitive, and poverty and inequality declined. While these changes have led to a remarkable economic transformation, there have also been economic distortions and inefficiencies that the book argues are part of the development process. This book demonstrates how a dynamic nation seized windows of opportunity to become a more equal, prosperous, and rules-based society.
Introduction
Authors: Alston Lee J. , Melo Marcus André , Mueller Bernardo , Pereira Carlos
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers Brazil's path to sustainable development in brief. It argues that development is contextual; that is, each country must find its own way. Brazil is no exception, hence the chapter makes a brief exploration of the changes in Brazil and the change in beliefs in Brazilian society, which later led to changes in economic and political institutions. Today, the dominant belief held among those in power as well as the majority of the population is in “fiscally sound social inclusion.” The chapter examines how this belief emerged and, moreover, what forces will sustain it. In doing so, the chapter places Brazil within the larger context of economic development in the modern world.
Cardoso Seizes a Window of Opportunity (1993–2002)
Authors: Alston Lee J. , Melo Marcus André , Mueller Bernardo , Pereira Carlos
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Cardoso's presidency, arguing that his leadership was not solely top-down; rather, the Cardoso team coordinated other organizations and citizens to buy into the Plano Real. It argues that, first, Brazil entered into a virtuous path toward a critical transition, which was not inevitable. Second, to quell inflation entailed up-front costs and coordination problems that required leadership, which the Brazilians resolved by maintaining that social inclusion would still be given priority as long as it was fiscally sound. Third, new economic and political actors developed a stake in the reform process and formed a constituency that did not exist before: firms redeployed their assets in new profitable ways (as opposed to rent seeking) and politicians increasingly voted for public goods.
A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Critical Transitions
Authors: Alston Lee J. , Melo Marcus André , Mueller Bernardo , Pereira Carlos
Published: January 2018

This chapter fleshes out an inductive framework for understanding stasis and critical transitions. The framework has been developed with a lens on Brazil, but to illustrate its wider applicability, this chapter applies the framework very generally to understand the critical transitions in Argentina from the early twentieth century to 2014. The key elements in the framework are beliefs and leadership, which interact synergistically and vary across countries. Because beliefs and leadership cannot be measured rigorously and classified, the use of the framework necessarily involves subjectivity and interpretation. With more case studies applying this framework, more general lessons on the dynamics among beliefs, power, leadership, institutions, policies, and outcomes that form stasis or development can be constructed.
Conclusion
Authors: Alston Lee J. , Melo Marcus André , Mueller Bernardo , Pereira Carlos
Published: January 2018

This chapter offers some conjectures about the future of Brazil, especially in light of recent declarations that the Brazilian miracle has vanished once again. It attempts to reconcile Brazil's current political and economic situation with the more optimistic forecast this volume has set out so far, by using the institutional possibility frontiers (IPF) to interpret this paradox. The IPF illustrates this by showing the trade-offs existing in any country between disorder and dictatorship (authoritarianism) and reveals that a state that has more powers to control disorder also has more for dictatorial abuse. The chapter also returns to the analytical framework already expounded in the previous chapter, and finally predicts Brazil's likelihood for another critical transition to a society more akin to the current developed countries in the world.
The Claim to Free Time
Authors: Rose Julie L.
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that all citizens are entitled to a fair share of free time on the basis of the effective freedoms principle. Just as citizens generally require income and wealth to take advantage of their formal liberties and opportunities, so too do citizens generally require free time. Empirical political science has taken appropriate notice of this observation, including citizens' access to the resources of both money and time in standard models of political participation. Yet, normative political philosophy, while extensively considering citizens' requirements for income and wealth, has scarcely noted citizens' corresponding requirements for time. The chapter also considers the assumptions of the time–money substitutability claim, the perfect divisibility of labor demand and the perfect substitutability of money and basic needs satisfaction. Finally, it discusses free time as a distinct object of distributive justice and its relation to occupational choice.
Creativity Class
Authors: Chumley Lily
Published: January 2018

The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion. New ideologies of creativity and creative practices have reshaped the training of a new generation of art school graduates. This is the first book to explore how Chinese art students develop, embody, and promote their own personalities and styles as they move from art school entrance test preparation, to art school, to work in the country's burgeoning culture industries. The book shows the connections between this creative explosion and the Chinese government's explicit goal of cultivating creative human capital in a new “market socialist” economy where value is produced through innovation. Drawing on years of fieldwork in China's leading art academies and art test prep schools, the book combines ethnography and oral history with analyses of contemporary avant-garde and official art, popular media, and propaganda. Examining the rise of a Chinese artistic vanguard and creative knowledge-based economy, the book sheds light on an important facet of today's China.
Thirty Years of Reform
Authors: Chumley Lily
Published: January 2018

This chapter begins with an oral history of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, describing how the school changed over the course of gaigekaifang. Gaigekaifang is often referred to in English as “reform” (gaige), putting the stress on the structural adjustments that fomented change, while kaifang roughly means “opening up.” This institutional history is given a broader social context through interpretations of three art exhibitions commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of reform and opening up in 2008. These exhibitions offer perspectives on the legacies of socialism and the novelties of reform that are variously aligned with or critical of official state narratives, showing how contemporary Chinese dreamworlds contest with one another.
Conclusion
Authors: Chumley Lily
Published: January 2018

This concluding chapter considers a question posed by Maxim Gorky in 1932: “On which side are you, ‘Masters of Culture’?” Examining the role of creative human capital in an urban service economy by analyzing a 2008 propaganda video titled “Reunion,” this chapter shows how the “creative class” is positioned intermediate to the socialist class categories of capital and labor. The culture workers who are supposed to transform the nation, the culture, and the economy with their innovative potential appear as labor to capital (in the person of the client or collector) and capital to labor (in the person of working-class service providers). Their professional activities can be framed as either authorial power or subaltern service, depending on context. This ambivalence demonstrates the antinomies of class in China's already postsocialist, but increasingly postindustrial, political economy.
Of Shaykhs and Kings
Authors: Salomon Noah
Published: January 2018

This chapter takes a brief look at the history of the state in Sudan, and in particular its myriad interactions with the diverse and plural religious landscapes into which it has intervened, and out of which it sought to manufacture a productive partner for its governing efforts. It examines the early efforts of British colonialism as it sought to undo the Mahdist Islamic political order that had taken over Sudan in the early 1880s and to replace it with the institutions of a modern secular state. By both institutionalizing its religion and “civilizing” its population, the British hoped to pull Sudan into an emerging global order, one to which the Inqadh regime responded nearly a hundred years later, not by rejecting its categories, but rather by seeking to instill in them the ethical values of Islam.
Civilizing Religion
Authors: Salomon Noah
Published: January 2018

Debates over Sudan's future remain vibrant today. New Islamic political movements have emerged as the Islamist project of the regime entered into somewhat of a holding pattern, while the government seeks to form a national consensus that might include other parties, Islamist or not. Indeed, the sentiment expressed by the president that when the South and its diverse peoples seceded the regime would “fix the constitution of Sudan” is a view shared by many who see the separation of the South, and the departure of religious minorities it occasioned, as a means to reinvigorate the Islamic state and not a mark of its failure. This chapter looks back at the era of late Islamism that characterizes the discursive landscape of the Sudan in which the author arrived in 2005 to begin his fieldwork. He claims that we must understand where the Islamist coup began, into what problems it saw itself intervening, what solutions it offered to those problems, and how it recalibrated its vision as a result of realities on the ground.
Introduction
Authors: Salomon Noah
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book offers an ethnographic study of the Sudanese experience with the Islamic state from its revolutionary establishment in 1989 to the present, with a particular focus on the years of National Unity, 2005–11, when the author lived in Sudan for a prolonged period of time. The period of National Unity between the ruling National Congress Party and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, representing the South, was particularly interesting because it constituted perhaps the first time since coming to power that the Islamists were compelled to grapple with religious pluralism as they sought to construct a state that did not give up on its Islamic aspirations, but might also appeal to non-Muslims.
Heine’s Law and Jewish Foreign Policies
Authors: Barnett Michael N.
Published: January 2018

This chapter offers a manual for understanding the foreign policies of the American Jews, exploring how their beliefs were an outgrowth of, primarily, the American experience, and, secondarily, the world. It begins by situating American Jews in historical context, contrasting their history with that of the Jews of Western and Eastern Europe, and highlighting how the American experience explains American Jewry's affinity for liberalism and non-Orthodox Jewry. These commitments explain the rise and endurance of the political theology of Prophetic Judaism, which, in turn, explains American Jews' cosmopolitan sensibility when addressing the Jewish Problem and the Jewish Question. The chapter ends with a discussion of the foreign policy of a transnational people and considers how the foreign policy process is informed by the linking of identity, interests, and institutions.
Prophets Mugged by Reality
Authors: Barnett Michael N.
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the period from 1914 and the beginning of World War I through the end of World War II. The world changed, and so too did the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews—but not as much as might have been expected given this long stretch of murderous anti-Semitism. The American Jewish Committee went to Paris after World War I with the agenda of convincing the victors to force the new national states of Europe to recognize the fundamental rights of minorities and to lobby for a League of Nations with responsibility for monitoring and enforcing those rights. At the same time, there was a slow, cautious acceptance of Zionism. However, not all Zionisms are alike, and as American Jews increased their support for Zionism, they also gravitated toward a version that did not hinge exclusively on the Jewish state.
The New Tribalism
Authors: Barnett Michael N.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the two decades following 1967—the year when American Jews turned into the zealots they are said by some to have always been. Israel's victory in 1967's Six-Day War gave American Jews a renewed sense of power and pride, and their Jewishness became increasingly defined by the twin experiences of suffering (the Holocaust) and redemption (Israel). This new Jewish identity created something of a tension for American Jews: their domestic political theology continued to run toward liberalism, but their foreign policy beliefs began exhibiting greater traces of tribalism. Moreover, global cosmopolitanism was developing in ways that were not necessarily sympathetic to Jewish concerns. The human rights movement became increasingly viewed as a possible threat to Jews and especially to Israel. Fortunately, this was also a moment when American Jews could rely on something better than human rights—American power. An American Jewry that once saw security as bound up with a culture of acceptance now found greater reassurance in the threat and use of force.
Conceptualizing the Caliphate, 632–1517 CE
Authors: Hassan Mona
Published: January 2018

This chapter begins with a discussion of how the embodied practice of the earliest generations of Muslims was essential in consolidating a nearly universal Islamic consensus upon the obligation of appointing a leader for the Muslim community. As such, the caliphate was incorporated into Sunni Islamic law as a legal necessity and a communal obligation, and Muslim scholars attempted to address the institution's increasing divergence from ideals over time. Following the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad in 656/1258, Muslim scholars of Mamluk Egypt and Syria drew from this rich tradition of Islamic political thought and jurisprudence to articulate creative solutions that bolstered the socio-legal foundations of the reconstituted caliphate in Cairo. As intellectual predecessors, teachers, disciples, colleagues, rivals, and adversaries, these premodern scholars were connected to each other through intricate social webs that traversed the centuries of Mamluk rule from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.
In International Pursuit of a Caliphate
Authors: Hassan Mona
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes the vibrant discussions of the early twentieth century over how to revive a caliphate best suited to the post-war era. While some advocated preservation of a traditional caliphal figurehead, many Muslim intellectuals were greatly persuaded by new models of internationalism embracing the nation-state and proposed international caliphal councils and organizations, similar to the League of Nations, or other purportedly spiritual institutions, similar to the refashioned papacy, to preserve the bonds of a transregional religious community. To varying degrees, all the participants in the debate over reviving a twentieth-century caliphate were influenced by an intriguing confluence of both the historic transregionalism of the Muslim community as well as the modern thrust of the new age of global internationalism.
Measuring Recurrent Event Features in Univariate Data
Authors: Harding Don , Pagan Adrian
Published: January 2018

This chapter begins with a discussion of why we would expect to find that the time spent in expansions (bull markets, etc.) would be much greater than the time spent in contractions (bear markets, etc.). By focusing on the probabilities of getting particular outcomes for the binary variables summarizing the recurrent events, we can provide an explanation of this long-observed feature. The remainder of the chapter looks at many proposals for summarizing other features of the recurrent events. These involve well-known quantities such as durations and amplitudes, as well as lesser known ones, such as the sharpness of peaks and troughs.
Measuring Synchronization of Recurrent Events in Multivariate Data
Authors: Harding Don , Pagan Adrian
Published: January 2018

This chapter presents methods for capturing the synchronization of recurrent events in bivariate and multiple series. The special features of the unconditional densities of binary series recommend the use of moment-based measures of synchronization. It looks at similarity across events in terms of a range of features, such as amplitudes. It then looks at the situation when model-based rules are used to define them, and further gives an application of the methods to studying the synchronization of cycles in industrial production across countries. The question often arises of whether there is synchronization of the events across a number of industries, countries, and so on. This involves multivariate synchronization and this is studied in the chapter. Finally, the chapter examines the relationship between the synchronization of cycles and the comovement in the continuous variables in which those cycles occur.
Using the Recurrent Event Binary States to Examine Economic Modeling Issues
Authors: Harding Don , Pagan Adrian
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at using the binary states describing the recurrent events to help in either constructing economic models of time series or evaluating the fit of such models. The chapter provides a general discussion of the issues that come up when using the binary states in regressions. It then turns to the analysis of complete economic models. In these it is very common to see variance decompositions computed and used to draw conclusions about which shocks are responsible for the recurrent events. It is shown that this methodology is flawed when it comes to shedding light on what causes the business cycle. What can be done is investigated in the chapter, which illustrates how to determine which shocks are important to a matching of the business cycle features discussed in Chapter 5. The discussion moves on to some economic models that have been constructed in the wake of the global financial crisis and which aim to highlight the role of financial shocks.
The Birth of God in the Soul: The Beginnings of German-language Philosophizing in the Middle Ages in the Work of Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa’s Consummation and Demolition of Medieval Thought
Authors: Hösle Vittorio
Published: January 2018

This chapter traces the beginnings of German philosophy in the Middle Ages. It considers Dominican Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1327/28) as the first German philosopher because he was the first writer to express his own philosophical ideas in the vernacular. It then focuses on Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), who was clearly influenced by Eckhart and whose genius he praised. Nicholas' first work, De concordantia catholica (On Catholic Concordance), published in 1433, defended the conciliarist position: that the council could depose a pope who violated his duties. He also elaborated a philosophy of the state that justified rule largely on the basis of consensus. His subsequent philosophical-theological works include De docta ignorantia (“On Learned Ignorance,” 1440) and De venatione sapientiae (“On the Hunt for Wisdom,” 1463).
The Human Sciences as a Religious Duty: Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, the Early Romantics, and Wilhelm von Humboldt
Authors: Hösle Vittorio
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the origin of the German human science. At the end of the eighteenth century, a transformation of Lutheranism took place among Germany's intellectual elites involving the retention of the religious motivation of philology, which was now extended to universal history and philosophically grounded, i.e., creating a trinity of theology, philosophy, and philology. The word of God was no longer limited to the Bible but manifested itself in the whole history of the human spirit. Understanding it as a unity is not only a valid scholarly interest; it is a religious duty, and presumably it is only by fulfilling such a duty that one has a chance to do something really lasting. No one so energetically pursued the breakdown of the old Lutheran orthodoxy as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781).
The Federal Republic’s Adaptation to Western European Normality: Gadamer, the Two Frankfurt Schools, and Hans Jonas
Authors: Hösle Vittorio
Published: January 2018

The two most appalling consequences of National Socialism were the victims of mass murder and the Second World War. The National Socialists also destroyed, along with many other things, the special status of German culture. They did so by driving out and murdering its Jewish and critical intelligentsia; the German policy of occupation caused Scandinavia, central Eastern Europe, and the Benelux countries, where German had often been a scientific lingua franca, to turn resolutely toward English; and even after the restoration of constitutional government based on the rule of law in the Federal Republic, further travel along specifically German philosophical paths was no longer possible. This chapter discusses the philosophers of the Federal Republic who won wide international recognition. A strong focus of the young Federal Republic was on the historiography of philosophy, to which thinkers attached their own, usually modest systematic ambitions.
Beginnings
Authors: Dow Katharine
Published: January 2018

Scotland has always been part of my origin story, though I never lived there before my fieldwork. My father is Scottish and my parents met as a consequence of both studying at St. Andrews University. When they divorced, whilst I was a baby, my father moved up to Edinburgh. I made regular trips to see him and, later, my stepmother, half sister, and half brother during the school holidays whilst I was growing up. He would often take us to see the sights of Scotland, its landscape of villages, castles, forests, and mountains. The Scott Monument, Culzean castle, the pretty painted houses of Tobermory, ham sandwiches and fruit cake eaten in the back of the car, the music of The Corries, the smell of the Caledonian brewery hanging over western Edinburgh (sometimes sweet and malty, sometimes strangely akin to cat food), the train through to Glasgow, the small glass of (Dow’s) port I was allowed at Hogmanay—this was the Scotland that was part of my childhood and I took it with me when I went to do fieldwork....
Future Generations
Authors: Dow Katharine
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines how conceptions of the environment and the state of the natural world are implicated in people's ideas about parenthood, fertility, and future generations. It carries the theme of the stable environment out into the wider world by considering what it means to care about stabilizing the natural environment in the interest of future generations. It also discusses the importance of reproduction—in humans and other parts of the natural world—in caring for the environment and working to prevent climate change. The chapter analyzes the concerns that the people of Spey Bay had about humans putting ourselves at risk of endangerment by destroying our natural environments and becoming overreliant on technology to create children. Finally, it looks at the salience of nature and naturalness to how people in Spey Bay think about reproduction, ethics, the future, and the environment.
Money Talks
Authors: Dow Katharine
Published: January 2018

This chapter extends the discussion of surrogacy by focusing on how the people of Spey Bay thought about paying for bodily services and substances and what they felt this said about them as members of a community. People in Spey Bay do not think of money as inherently corrupting but hold individuals responsible for their own decisions about how they make and spend it. This chapter analyzes the views of the people of Spey Bay about blood, egg, and sperm donation in order to highlight the connections between community values and reproductive ethics, as well the circulation and meanings of money in their personal and professional lives. In doing so, it revisits questions about the contextual nature of ethics and the broad significance of reproduction in everyday life.
A Teacher’s Novels
Authors: Sanders Mark
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the issue of learning Zulu in Sibusiso Nyembezi's novels. It first considers what Nyembezi tells us about the struggle over patrimony between fathers and sons and how it relates to learning Zulu before discussing Nyembezi's The Rich Man of Pietermaritzburg (1961) and Mntanami! Mntanami! (My Child! My Child!, 1950). It then reads Mntanami! Mntanami! in the light—or in the shadow—of Alan Paton's 1948 classic Cry, the Beloved Country, as well as Nyembezi's translation of the latter, entitled Lafa elihle kakhulu. In particular, it analyzes two scenes of language learning in Lafa elihle kakhulu and how the novel is connected to Learn More Zulu. Whereas both Lafa elihle kakhulu and Learn More Zulu exclude non-standard forms of Zulu, Mntanami! Mntanami! entertains non-standard forms of Fanagalo.
2008
Authors: Sanders Mark
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the phenomenon of mobs discriminating in the name of Zulu in 2008. In June 2008, a wave of xenophobic attacks against migrants and foreigners that began in Gauteng spread across Johannesburg. Mobs were forcing people to take “tests” to establish their nationality. A language test is first, where one is asked to label certain body parts in isiZulu. These Zulu language “tests” were compared to the “pencil test,” once used by apartheid government officials to help them refine racial classifications. The chapter considers how ownership of a language like Zulu is being asserted in pursuit of an exclusive right to ownership of property and opportunity. It argues that Zulu is the language of xenophobia, used to discriminate against, and to deprive. It also comments on the Chief of The Point, a satirical persona adopted by Volovolo Memela in his newspaper column, “Ngeso likaVolovolo.”
Survey and Punish
Authors: Winter Stefan
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the Ottoman cadastres in detail, both to demonstrate the extent of the Ottoman state's control over the region in the sixteenth century and to show that the Ottomans did not attempt to annihilate the ʻAlawi population (as is claimed in local folklore) but rather to maximize their tax revenues, maintaining ʻAlawi-specific dues but also emending or even forgiving taxes in areas in need of economic revival. The second part of the chapter draws mainly on Ottoman executive orders to show that the imperial government perceived of brigandage in the coastal mountains committed by ʻAlawis as a social and not a religious problem, repeatedly casting “uneducated” ʻAlawi subjects as the victims of manipulation by more powerful figures, and not discriminating against them on the basis of their religion.
Introduction
Authors: Allan Michael
Published: January 2018

This book raises a number of questions concerning the assumed universalism of world literature by analyzing the interwoven strands of modernization, literature, and secularism. It examines the putative opposition between a practice of reading based on memorization, embodiment, and recitation in Qur'anic schools and another practice based on reflection, critique, and judgment, increasingly integral to what gets defined as literacy in the modern Egyptian state. By taking colonial Egypt as a paradigmatic site from which to consider literary publics, textual cultures, and the history of reading, the book reveals two convergent and enmeshed narratives: on the one hand, the formation of a modern literary paradigm linked to education reform, the rise of a reading public and modern Arabic literature, and on the other hand, the story of what gets blotted out, religious institutions and practices that come to be understood as traditional.
World
Authors: Allan Michael
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the world of world literature—understood as either the site at which a literary work is produced (for world systems theory) or the site disclosed in the literary work itself (through practices of close reading). It examines the scholarship of Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and Edward Said in order to elucidate dominant frames for understanding world literature and interweaves these different frames with selected scenes from modern Egypt: the first, the protests on the streets of Cairo of a Syrian novel deemed blasphemous, Haydar Haydar's Walīmah li-aʻshāb al-bahr (A Banquet for Seaweed); and the second, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Naguib Mahfouz. Drawing from Said's notion of secular criticism, the chapter argues that reading—and not solely textuality—should be understood as worldly activity with a normative force across interpretative communities.
Intellectuals
Authors: Allan Michael
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the provincialism of a literary world in early twentieth-century Egypt and France by focusing on two scenes of epistolary exchange: the letters exchanged between André Gide and Taha Hussein in 1939, and a series of imagined letters exchanged in the context of Hussein's 1935 novella Adīb (A Man of Letters). It first considers the transformation of theological questions into literature in the correspondence between Gide and Hussein before asking about the world that literature makes thinkable. It then analyzes the imaginary correspondence staged in Adīb that recounts the story of a friendship between two intellectuals from the same village. The Gide–Hussein correspondence invites us to contemplate on the circulation and dissemination of literary writing—the sorts of transnational exchanges by now integral to discourses of world literature and access to texts across languages and nationalities.
Conclusion
Authors: Allan Michael
Published: January 2018

This chapter concludes that the book has explored the relationship between literature and secularism during the reforms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. It has discussed textual analysis from the standpoint of competing interpretative worlds: in one instance, a discussion of Charles Darwin within the context of a family, and in another, frames for understanding the relationship of literature and religion in the work of Taha Hussein. The chapter draws together some of the underlying arguments at stake across the chapters and considers their implications for our work as comparatists. It raises a number of questions and challenges regarding the study of literature by assessing the presumptions of a global public sphere and the parameters of critique and opinion in a literary world. Finally, it comments on Erich Auerbach's 1952 essay “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” in which he traces the relationship between history, philology, and world literature.
The Social Meaning of Credit, Value, and Finance
Authors: Carruthers Bruce G.
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes monetary differentiation within formal organizations, banks, and other financial institutions. It demonstrates how, despite the advantages of liquidity, organizational budgeting practices create incommensurable categorical distinctions, akin to earmarks, within fungible money. Many forms of individual and organizational credit similarly involve earmarks that constrain the use and allocation of future purchasing power. Credit is always earmarked in terms of who is a legitimate recipient but also often in terms of how the money can be used. A home mortgage, for example, can be used to purchase a house but not a car. The chapter also considers whether the financialization of the economy “has helped to monetize more of the world.” It finds instead unexpected limits to monetary valuation. In the contemporary over-the-counter derivatives market, for instance, participants often rely on non-price-based forms of valuation.
The Constitutional Approach to Money
Authors: Desan Christine
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the constitutional approach to money, which asserts that money is colored from the start. Money has never been an “absolutely impersonal instrument.” To the contrary, money has an internal design: societies produce it by structuring claims of value in ways that make those claims commensurable, transferable, and available for certain private as well as public uses. The claim that money has an internal design contradicts a tenet basic to modern economics. The chapter first describes the challenges that societies confront when they begin creating money and how they engineer solutions at a constitutional level—the level that configures public authority and its relationship to individuals. The next section samples design decisions; it compares the monies made in medieval England and in early America on several key elements of design to highlight their impact. The last section contrasts those methods with the modern money first produced in late-seventeenth-century England. The chapter concludes by circling back to the ideology that part of money's modern design operates precisely to render its influential work invisible.