bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Operations of the Method
Authors: Dika Tarek R.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 3 reconstructs the operations of the method (intuition, deduction, and enumeration) in detail and discusses how they are deployed in solutions to particular problems in the more advanced sciences. Section 3.1 lays down the principle behind Descartes’s distinction between the operations of the method. This principle, the “principle of proportionality,” also determines how problems must be prepared in order to be solved by one or more operations of the method. The principle of proportionality requires that problems be reducible to a form in which the natural operations of the human mind can solve them. These operations are discussed in Sections 3.2–3.4.3. Section 3.5 introduces Descartes’s taxonomy of problems (his distinction between “perfectly understood problems” and “imperfectly understood problems”). Section 3.6 discusses how the human mind (ingenium) acquires the intellectual virtues that perfect intuition and deduction—perspicacity and sagacity, respectively—in solutions to the simplest problems in the arts and sciences. Section 3.7 shows that the method must be adapted to the problem at hand, on the model of Aristotelian phronesis discussed in Chapter 2.
Descartes’s Theory of the Faculties in Rules
Authors: Dika Tarek R.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 6 reconstructs Descartes’s theory of the faculties in Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Section 6.1 explains why Descartes’s theory of the faculties does more (and must do more) than mechanize Aristotelian faculty psychology: a purely mechanical theory of the faculties provides no indication of how the faculties must be employed in science. Descartes needs to describe the mechanism of the faculties in order to describe how best to exploit the mechanism. The rules that determine how to exploit the mechanism constitutes Descartes’s “habitual” theory of the faculties in Rules. Sections 6.2–6.4 describe Descartes’s theory of sense-perception (sensus); the common sense; the phantasy; and what he terms the “force” or “power” of knowing (vis cognoscens). Section 6.4 shows how vis cognoscens can freely intervene in the cognitive mechanism and modify the operation of the other cognitive faculties (above all, the imagination) such that the intuition of the simple natures by the intellect or the intellect aided by the imagination becomes possible. Throughout Sections 6.2–6.4, Descartes’s theory of the faculties in Rules is compared to late Aristotelian alternatives in order to better isolate what is distinctive about Descartes’s theory in Rules and related texts.
Introduction
Authors: Binder Andrea
Published: March 2023

Offshore finance is a set of financial services deliberately codified in law so as to circumvent national regulation predominantly in an invisible way. It is used by wealthy individuals and multinational corporations to minimize tax bills, to avoid government regulations, and to create money, legally and illegally. Offshore financial services therefore raise the classic question about the power relationship between states and markets. The question is not a theoretical one. Offshore financial services are exclusively available to the super-rich, to large multinational corporations, and to internationally active banks. They create rents for this exclusive circle of economic actors that are not available to everyone else. Offshore finance exacerbates wealth inequality. Whether states are powerful and have ‘created offshore’ or whether the offshore markets triumph and rob the state of power, determines whether the resulting inequality is a matter of political will or an instance of state capture. The chapter establishes that studying the power relationship between offshore finance and state power entails an element that asks about the mechanism of the effect and one that asks about its outcome. It explains the book’s historical-institutionalist research approach and summarizes the key findings and arguments made.
Germany
Authors: Binder Andrea
Published: March 2023

Germany is a high tax country, a large and open economy, and it shares a border with three globally important offshore financial centres: Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Indeed, private individuals and firms make substantial use of these tax havens. However, Germany is not exclusively at the receiving end of offshore finance. From the early days of the Eurodollar markets, offshore money creation was a lucrative business for Germany’s big banks. Consequently, offshore finance affects state power through both sides of its balance sheet: taxation and money creation. Via the politics of the invisible, this has allowed successive German governments to pursue contradictory economic policies without being questioned. It also provided the state with access to preferential offshore liquidity to pay for reunification. Yet, these power-enhancing effects where limited to the good times. During the constitutional crisis of the Weimar Republic as during the 2007–09 global financial crisis, offshore finance unfolded destructive forces. However, contrary to the Weimar Republic, contemporary Germany has built domestic institutions mitigating these power-undermining effects. The state found means to reap the benefits of offshore finance, while keeping the costs outside the state.
Mexico
Authors: Binder Andrea
Published: March 2023

Puzzlingly, at present Mexican economic actors rarely make use of offshore financial services. Yet, the relationship between offshore finance and state power is not static across time. Mexico, like Brazil, financed its development in the Euromarkets in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, it strengthened state power. However, the 1982 Latin American debt crisis brought Mexico’s access to the offshore dollar to a grinding halt. The costs of unregulated offshore banking hit Mexico with full force. As a result, Mexico’s exposure to offshore finance has been short, intense, and politically extremely costly. Mexico thus withdrew from offshore banking for good. It is, as in the other cases, through banking rather than taxation that offshore finance’s effects are transmitted. The reasons why that is, differ though. In Mexico, offshore tax planning and money laundering do not affect state power as much as offshore banking did until 1982 because the informal sector provides ample opportunities to dodge taxes and launder money. With so many rents to be had domestically, there is little need for using sophisticated offshore structures.
Conclusion
Authors: Binder Andrea
Published: March 2023

This concluding chapter walks the tightrope between taking seriously historical and geographical contingencies and identifying larger patterns about state power in the age of offshore finance through comparison. Contrasting the experiences of Britain, Germany, Brazil, and Mexico, it refines the arguments made in Chapter 2 about how offshore finances affect state power. It then moves on to explain under which conditions offshore finance either undermines or strengthens state power. It spells out what the theoretical and empirical findings mean for our understanding of state power in the age of offshore finance. The book ends by lifting our gaze beyond the money view, deliberating the effect of offshore finance on the legitimacy of the democratic state.
Why Political Liberalism?
Authors: Ferrara Alessandro
Published: March 2023

Chapter 1, ‘Why Political Liberalism?’, elucidates some reasons that support the choice of the constitutional theory embedded in John Rawls’s Political Liberalism for answering the question at the centre of Sovereignty Across Generations—how should the constituent power of the popular democratic sovereign relate to that of the currently living segment of ‘the people’? For that purpose, in the first section three breakthroughs of Rawls’s paradigm are reconstructed: (i) the normative twist impressed by him on Bruce Ackerman’s ‘democratic dualism’, (ii) the liberal principle of legitimacy or ‘legitimation by constitution’, and (iii) the standard of ‘the most reasonable’ and its innovative quality. Then in the second section Rawls’s paradigm is compared to some leading paradigms for democratic theory (Habermas, Dworkin, Pettit, Bellamy, Mouffe, Tully, Gray, Williams, Honneth, and deconstructionism). Finally, in the third section, areas of the paradigm are highlighted that are most urgently in need of further elaboration, especially in the area of constitutional theory and in connection with the rise of the populist challenge to liberal democracy.
Transcending an Ossified Binary
Authors: Ferrara Alessandro
Published: March 2023

Chapter 3, ‘Transcending an Ossified Binary: Political Liberalism on Constituent Power’, places the constitutional theory of John Rawls in a virtual dialogue with Kelsen’s paradigm of ‘pure law’ and with Schmitt’s legal philosophy. The dialogue is built as an investigation of the several points of convergence and divergence of Rawls with each of these legal theorists (Sections 1 and 2). In the end the received wisdom of a radical opposition of these two constitutional models, especially concerning the relation of the law to constituent power, is challenged by a refreshing look from a Rawlsian perspective. If compared with Rawls’s normative view of the constitution as responding to a political conception of justice, Kelsen’s and Schmitt’s approaches appear as two variants of a ‘realist’ take on the cogency of the constitution and law in general. Both share a view of the constitution as self-validating and beyond substantive questioning. For Rawls, as shown in Section 3, constituent power instead always operates ‘under law’ (Michelman). Section 4 identifies the standard of ‘the most reasonable for us’ as the form of normativity that could bind constituent power, consistently with the ‘political, not metaphysical’ design of Political Liberalism. The innovative philosophical status of this normative standard and its relation to public reason are elucidated. Then, in the concluding subsection, a ‘liberal principle of constitutional legitimacy’ is introduced in order to supplement the liberal principle of legitimacy, argued to account primarily, if not exclusively, for the legitimacy of the exercise of constituted powers.
The Abilities/Needs Principle
Authors: Gilabert Pablo
Published: March 2023

This chapter provides a systematic discussion of the socialist principle ‘From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. The Abilities/Needs Principle (as this chapter calls it) is arguably at the core of socialism’s positive view of social justice but, surprisingly, has received almost no attention by political philosophers. This chapter offers a dignitarian interpretation of the principle, and argues that it involves appealing ideas of meaningful work, solidaristic contribution, fair reciprocity, recognition of individual differences, and self-determination. First, it analyses the formulation of the Abilities/Needs Principle by Marx. Second, it identifies the principle’s initial plausibility, but shows that it faces a set of serious problems (regarding scarcity, incentives, responsibility, diversity of metrics of advantage, and paternalism) that cannot be addressed without developing a fresh articulation of it. Third, it provides a new articulation of the principle that highlights demands concerning opportunities for self-realization in work, positive duties to cater for the needs of others, sensitivity to individual differences, and mechanisms of fair reciprocity. Fourth, it discusses a possible institutional implementation of the Abilities/Needs Principle. Finally, it identifies some normative puzzles about the transition from capitalism to socialism, and suggests how the Abilities/Needs Principle might gain motivational and justificatory traction by mobilizing the powerful idea of human dignity as construed by the Dignitarian Approach.
The Critique of Alienation
Authors: Gilabert Pablo
Published: March 2023

This chapter argues that human dignity grounds a solidaristic requirement of support for positive freedom and develops this normative point by exploring the structure of the critique of alienation in social life, with a focus on the predicament of workers in capitalism. The chapter makes four main moves. First, it offers a novel analytical framework to discuss alienation—distinguishing its various definitional, explanatory, and normative dimensions. Second, it articulates the critique of alienation as an appraisal of situations in which there are problematic limitations on positive freedom such that agents face socially avoidable limitations on their ability to develop a positive sense of self in activities featuring self-determination and self-realization. Third, it identifies four important objections to normative engagement with alienation, which concern the risks of an essentialist view, a mishandling of the distinction between the good and the right, the risk of paternalistic impositions, and ignorance of the significance of democratic authorization. Finally, the chapter responds to these objections by recasting the discussion of positive freedom and alienation in terms of the Dignitarian Approach.
The Critique of Domination
Authors: Gilabert Pablo
Published: March 2023

This chapter offers an account of the concept of domination and articulates the normative contours of the critique of domination. It concentrates on the multilayered phenomenon of the domination of wage workers by capitalist employers. The first, conceptual part of the chapter offers an analytical framework. Domination is characterized as a highly asymmetric social power relationship between agents such that some are able to impose their will on others with respect to some issues or outcomes, in some circumstances. Several dimensions of domination are identified, including its degree, range, sites, scope, depth, mechanisms, resources, and dynamic transformation. The idea of non-domination is also distinguished from the related ideas of self-determination and agential empowerment. The second part of the chapter offers a substantive account of the critique of domination by using, and developing further, the Dignitarian Approach. Domination conflicts with rights that have a dignitarian justification. People have rights to access the conditions for their self-determination and self-realization, so that they can feasibly and reasonably develop and exercise the valuable capacities at the basis of their dignity. Domination frustrates access to these conditions. In addition to clarifying and justifying rights against domination, the Dignitarian Approach generates other requirements of support for people’s empowerment which are independent of the avoidance of domination. As a result, the approach provides a systematic and unified perspective to simultaneously articulate the content, grounds, and limits of the critique of domination as an appraisal of social injustice.
Comparing Socialism and Capitalism
Authors: Gilabert Pablo
Published: March 2023

How should we think about the comparison between socialism and capitalism? This chapter offers some tentative remarks about how to approach this question. It starts by providing a working definition of capitalism and socialism. It then discusses recent proposals by G. A. Cohen and Jason Brennan as to how to compare these social systems, and deploys some of the theoretical resources offered in this book to further frame and advance our normative inquiry on this important topic. The chapter concludes by highlighting how the idea of dignity might play a role in the exercise. A democratic rather than authoritarian framework for political organization and change is defended and deployed to illuminate the comparison between socialism and capitalism.
Prologue
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

This prologue recounts the morning of June 17, 1951, when Nâzım Hikmet escaped by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc. He was forty-nine years old at this time, and was Turkey’s best-known poet. Nâzım Hikmet was also a communist, someone who had spent years of his life behind bars for refusing to renounce his politics. On this particular morning, he was riding away from his former life across the turbulent waters of the Black Sea. Yet the poet-communist’s future was an uncertain one, as he had a checkered political past in Moscow. Had Nâzım Hikmet escaped from a Turkish frying pan, only to jump into a Stalinist fire?
Child of the Imperial Borderlands
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

This chapter discusses Nâzım Hikmet’s family and life between 1902 and 1920 within the larger context of events unfolding during the final years of the Ottoman Empire’s existence. Nâzım grew out of a long history of border-crossers, whose colorful lives and cosmopolitan backgrounds had for years contributed to Nâzım’s elite but downwardly-mobile bloodline. “Macro” sections of this chapter investigate broader political developments relating to the Young Turks, pan-Turkism, and socialism during the first two decades of Nâzım’s life. Discussion then shifts toward Nâzım Hikmet’s changing poetic voice during the course of the Balkan Wars, World War I, and the postwar British occupation of Istanbul.
On the Road to Ankara
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 2 details the journey that Nâzım and his best friend Vâlâ Nureddin took to Ankara in the early months of 1921. The two had resolved to escape the British occupation of Istanbul so that they could join the resistance movement forming in Ankara under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). This chapter also introduces Şevket Süreyya (Aydemir), who would become a good friend and traveling companion of Nâzım and Vâlâ during a later stage of their journey. While tracing Nâzım and Vâlâ’s progress across Anatolia, discussion shifts to larger events occurring during these years, including the collapse of the Russian Empire, Ottoman efforts to bring back its POWs from Russia, and the creation, in Baku, of the Turkish Communist Party under the direction of the erstwhile pan-Turkist Mustafa Suphi. The final sections of this chapter return to Nâzım and Vâlâ as they make their way toward Ankara, meeting up with a group of Turkish Spartakists en route. The chapter ends with Nâzım and Vâlâ’s arrival in Mustafa Kemal’s capital in a much different frame of mind from that with which they had departed Istanbul.
First Soviet Steps
Authors: Meyer James H.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 4 discusses Nâzım and Vâlâ’s activities in Georgia in 1921–22. The boys had come to Georgia through an act of improvisation, deciding to make the journey eastward once they had learned that Nâzım’s girlfriend Nüzhet and her brother-in-law Muhittin Bey had moved to Tbilisi. While Nâzım and Vâlâ hoped that Muhittin Bey would help them find work in Georgia, the boys also desired to learn more about communism first-hand. In Tbilisi, Nâzım and Vâlâ made the acquaintance of Ahmet Cevat (Emre), who offered the boys jobs working for a TKP-owned newspaper in Batumi. There they met and befriended Şevket Süreyya, a former pan-Turkist who had recently become a communist while working as a teacher in Azerbaijan. The chapter concludes with Ahmet Cevat receiving an offer to teach Turkish at Moscow’s Communist University of the Toilers of the East and inviting Nâzım, Vâlâ, Şevket, and Şevket’s wife Leman to go to Moscow with him and study at the newly-formed school.
Female Conversion to Islam
Authors: Simonsohn Uriel
Published: March 2023

Chapter 5 considers the agency of female converts to Islam in bringing about the subsequent conversion of other family members. Although difficult to recover in the periods under study, a woman’s religious conversion was clearly not limited to better documented historical moments. The vast treatment of women’s conversion to Islam (or from it) in legal corpora, specifically (although not exclusively) Islamic ones, read alongside the exemplary images of the female Companions of the Prophet in medieval biographic dictionaries, suggest anything but a marginal phenomenon. The role of these images, it is premised here, was to inspire, if not to guide, women who converted to Islam in the social reorientations that followed their religious decisions. At the same time, it was once again thanks to their unique familial capacities that women were in a position to motivate other family members to embrace Islam as well. Thus, in converting to Islam, women were not only untying previous religious commitments but also defying the very essence of patriarchal authority.
Modernity and Indian Literature
Authors: Raveendran PP
Published: March 2023

The chapter tries to make sense of Indian modernity, especially as it is articulated in bhasha literatures, through an analysis of its affinities and antipathies with European modernity and by placing both in the context of the debates on colonialism’s modernization drive in the non-European world. Although a rejection of tradition is often cited as a seminal characteristic of modernity, it is important to remember that tradition does not imply the same set of values for the colonizer and the colonized. In the case of the colonized community, the tradition disrupted by modernity could also imply the ethos and values connected with the subject’s self. It is quite evident that in the colonial world upholding tradition can also mean a move in the direction of the recovery of a historically erased sense of the self. Added to this is Indian modernity’s identity as a heterogeneous compendium of pluralistic cultural strands and its secular belief in the worldliness of experience, as contrasted with the belief in a transcendental world. The chapter historicizes the evolution of the bhasha literary culture and indicates how difficult it is for India’s alternative modernity to assert its politics in the face of capitalism’s continuing promotion of European modernity’s hermetic aesthetic. The chapter uses the nineteenth-century journal Vidyasamgraham as well as the novels Indulekha and The God of Small Things for illustrative purposes.
The Everyday as Modernity
Authors: Raveendran PP
Published: March 2023

The analysis of the salient characteristics of Indian modernity initiated in Chapter 1 is continued in Chapter 2 by scrutinizing the signals of everydayness animating Indian bhasha writing. Lefebvre, the original formulator of everydayness, considers the concept as constituting an important dimension of modernity, though there is limited scope in practical terms for its articulation in western modernity because of the latter’s continuing alliance with the hermetic aesthetic. While one may not be in a position to eliminate the icons of the everyday from one’s experience of modernity, the conventions of reading promoted by western aesthetics might persuade the reader to misread them as signals of eternity. Bhasha literature, by contrast, is uniquely placed to celebrate the everyday as a seminal principle of Indian modernity. The chapter illustrates this using the writings of the Malayalam fictionist S.K. Pottekkat. The analysis reveals the irony at work in his kind of writing, which is that even as modernity engenders the category of the everyday, it also devises ways of exorcizing it from experience. This can be explained only in terms of modernity’s dialectic, which is linked intimately to the question of the form of realism that dominated the fictional imagination for the most part of modernity.
Print Capitalism and Modernity
Authors: Raveendran PP
Published: March 2023

The evolution of prose as a medium of creative communication in bhashas in the nineteenth century, which marks an important moment in India’s literary history, is taken up for discussion in this chapter. Through an examination of the work of such writers as Hermann Gundert, George Mathan, and Keralavarma Valiyakoyi Thampuran, it probes how the transition from verse, a genre of writing that enjoyed a great deal of social power in the pre-modern world, to the relatively humble and vulnerable genre of prose led to a massive social upheaval in most Indian bhashas. Although the arrival of prose can certainly be interpreted as a passage from the traditional to the modern, it can also be construed as indicating the advent of a logic that is centred on scientific reason in total disregard for the emotional and imaginative make-up of the colonized subject. Both these dimensions of prose receive detailed analysis in the chapter, which also discusses, borrowing concepts from Benedict Anderson, prose’s relation with print culture and print capitalism.
Modernity and Literary Historiography
Authors: Raveendran PP
Published: March 2023

This chapter explores the possibilities of developing an alternative and critical literary historiography that would stay clear of modernity’s colonial cultural baggage, which trammels available models of non-western literary historiography. Using M. Leelavathy’s genre-based history of Malayalam poetry titled Malayala Kavita Sahitya Charitram as a point of reference, the chapter tries to rethink literary history’s Euro-centric methodology of reading bhasha literary texts as mirror images of colonial literary texts. Literary history’s practice of using the western template for interpreting the evolution of Indian literary history through such expressions as ‘romanticism’ and ‘modernism’ is also subjected to interrogation. The chapter argues that though Leelavathy’s literary history does not openly defy the protocols of conventional literary historiography, it can be said to carry within its unconscious the seeds of a truly critical literary history for Indian bhashas.
Grafting and Ecological Imperialism in John Fletcher’s Bonduca
Authors: Steffen William H.
Published: March 2023

Drawing upon a horticultural discourse, this chapter investigates John Fletcher’s Bonduca (1612) and its pervasive treatment of grafting as a meditation on the horticultural practices that were considered essential to early modern English colonialism. Through metaphorical imagery as well as physical gestures of grafting, Bonduca attends to the ecological repercussions of Britain’s colonial history and explores the potential risks of colonial expansion. In addition, the play represents the Roman exposure to several metaphorical diseases, which registers an early understanding of disease transmission as pathogenic, and which imagines a reversal of the effect of Old World diseases on indigenous human populations in the New World. These dramatized grafts sanction a complex representation of empire formation, where non-human actants play a more prominent role in determining the outcome of a political, military, and colonial struggle than human agents.
Epilogue
Authors: Steffen William H.
Published: March 2023

This chapter addresses the implications of combining histories of weather accidents with ecological contingencies across global history. I address potential avenues for further exploration in using a deep timescale as an approach to literary criticism and performance studies.
The West and the War at Sea
Authors: Grove Eric
Published: March 2023

The role of seapower in World War II was central to explaining Allied victory. Control of a global network of maritime communication meant being able to fight in distant theatres, being able to supply material assistance between allies, and being able to choose the place and timing of amphibious operations. The Axis, it is argued, had few advantages once Allied naval power was fully mobilized. Even the U-Boat war in the Atlantic was less impressive than usually argued. Strangling Japanese overseas supply was a major factor in Japan’s defeat.
Introduction
Authors: Blank Daniel
Published: March 2023

The Introduction begins with a discussion of two university theatrical productions that engage closely with Shakespeare’s works: Narcissus, performed at Oxford in 1602, and the Parnassus trilogy, performed at Cambridge between 1598 and 1601. These plays highlight Shakespeare’s presence within the academic sphere during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, even as both English universities had enacted prohibitions against performances by professional players. The Introduction then considers Shakespeare’s awareness of the universities in order to provide context for one of the book’s central claims: that Shakespeare repeatedly took inspiration from university drama. University plays varied widely in several respects, and it was a select number of them—some of which circulated either in print or in manuscript, and some of which reflect critically upon academic culture—with which Shakespeare and his contemporaries engaged. These connections refute the longstanding notion that university drama was completely separated from the commercial stage. The Introduction also discusses the book’s methodological approach as well as its aims—both to bring university drama further into critical focus and to offer new interpretations of a number of commercial plays.
Orthodoxy and Marginality
Authors: Hokama Rhema
Published: March 2023

In Chapter 1, I argue that a shared soteriological outlook undergirded both the public ceremonialism of Richard Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity and the experiential devotional practices that were developed by Reformed theologians like William Perkins. Although the prevailing scholarship on early modern church history and literary studies has largely regarded the theologies of Hooker and Perkins as mutually opposed, I maintain that the continuities between these religious outlooks shaped the way early modern English worshippers understood devotional expression during the decades after the Reformation. The overlaps in the ways Hooker and Perkins thought about the role of participatory worship and bodily affect provided models for how English Protestants could intellectually and experientially confirm their devotion, and my discussion of these continuities provides the historical and intellectual framework for my subsequent readings of early modern poetry.
Donne’s Speaking, Weeping, Bleeding Images
Authors: Hokama Rhema
Published: March 2023

In Chapter 4, I explore Donne’s tendency in the Holy Sonnets to be simultaneously fascinated with and repelled by images of Christ. I argue that Donne’s contradictory stance on devotional images—both as a poet and as a preacher—was not indicative of an idiosyncratic spiritual struggle so much as it was telling of a wider devotional confusion about what constituted idolatry after the English Reformation. Donne’s stance on images resonated with the Calvinist theology of William Perkins, whose iconophobia was coextensive with an equally powerful iconophilia. While Perkins denigrated all material depictions of God, paradoxically, he also suggested the possibility that certain images might be preserved—if not in the material world then in the mind, enhanced and enabled by the outward senses. Like Perkins, Donne’s confusion about the role of religious images had distinctive repercussions for the way in which he allowed himself to ascertain and verify devotional affect—not only in his relationship with Christ, but also in his erotic encounters. For Donne, the affinity between believer and Christ were linked by means of visible and experiential impressions, and through bodily proximity. In imagining access to Christ, I demonstrate that Donne redeployed the logic of his sexual relationships with his various mistresses and with his wife, Anne More.
A Christian Holy Land
Authors: Klein Konstantin
Published: March 2023

This chapter looks at the enormous changes wrought by the expansion of Christianity in the Holy Land. Such changes were principally the result of the conversion of Constantine the Great to the new faith in 312 ce, which gave it imperial support. Over the next three centuries numerous churches and monasteries were built throughout the Roman Empire, but in the Holy Land in particular, for churches were erected to commemorate the events of Jesus’ lifetime and ascetics desired to establish themselves in the places where their Lord had walked. Such a desire also drew lay people, pilgrims, eager to see for themselves the sites that they knew from the New Testament. By the end of the period covered by this chapter, paganism had all but vanished from the Holy Land, and Christians had taken firm control of it, shaping it according to their vision. Christianity’s anti-Jewish tendencies meant that this was an increasingly difficult time for Palestinian Jews, yet it also gave their community greater definition and the period saw the emergence of the Palestinian Talmud at the hands of the rabbis of the Holy Land.
Managing Information
Authors: Blair Ann
Published: March 2023

The rapid spread of printing in Europe, starting in the late fifteenth century, generated an explosion in the number of books available and encouraged the production of longer books. The authors and printers of informational genres used layout and paratexts to facilitate consultation, reading, or the ability to find specific information in large books. The alphabetical index, the table of contents, tables and branching diagrams, among other apparatus, all of which originated in the Middle Ages, became more widely diffused through printing. These aids to the reader characterized genres that today we might call reference works. Complaints about the overabundance of books also prompted the production of books designed to manage the books themselves, including bibliographies, library catalogues, auction catalogues, and journals comprising book reviews.
The Islamic World
Authors: Blair Sheila S. , Bloom Jonathan M.
Published: March 2023

Because of the sanctity of the revelation and the desire to record it faithfully, writing and books have always played an extraordinarily important role in the Islamic world. Islamic culture has spanned a millennium and a half, from the early seventh century to the present day, and exists around the globe from southern Spain and North Africa to Indonesia and beyond. Following a brief introduction to the principles of Arabic script, this chapter surveys this vast production in four broad chronological blocks: Qur’an manuscripts from the first centuries of Islam; the transition from parchment to paper in medieval times; deluxe books with illustrations produced from the late thirteenth century to the early seventeenth; and other forms and formats typical of more recent times including albums, loose-leaf Qur’an manuscripts from Africa, printing, and artists’ books. The purpose is to investigate books from the Islamic lands not only as written texts but also as physical objects that shed light on important social and intellectual questions such as the change from the oral to the written, rates of literacy, identification of readership, the roles of illustration and illumination, collecting, preservation, and libraries.
Business Reponses to Populism in Denmark
Authors: Ibsen Christian Lyhne
Published: March 2023

This chapter shows how organized business elites in Denmark have responded to the populist party, Danish People´s Party [Dansk Folkeparti] (DPP) on anti-migration policies, welfare state reforms, and the EU. The chapter builds on the argument by Feldmann and Morgan that business elites will respond to populism using voice or loyalty, but rarely exit. It moreover employs their distinction between soft voice and loud voice, and explicit vs. implicit loyalty. Surveying the period since the establishment of DPP, the chapter identifies both loud voices and implicit loyalty of business in Denmark. Loud voice by business going against DPP’s policies on restricting labour migration when they affect labour supply negatively. Implicit loyalty to the DPP’s policies pertains to welfare chauvinism when refugees and migrants have seen their benefits and eligibility reduced. Even though the material interests and cultural values of business and the DPP rarely coincide, the relationship between organized business elites and the DPP is relatively pragmatic and peaceful. The chapter ends by discussing the emergence of a new welfare state chauvinist coalition across business elites and mainstream parties that hitherto had been opposed to the anti-globalism of the populist parties.
Technocracy and Populism in the Philippines
Authors: Takagi Yusuke
Published: March 2023

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has described himself as a punisher, while scholars describe him as an example of ‘penal populism’. In contrast with his brutal anti-drug campaign, his economic management appears reasonable and even reform-oriented. It argues that the Philippine government has carried out technocratic economic policy reforms under both the democratic Aquino administration and the authoritarian Duterte administration, thanks to the unintended legacy of the populist administration in the 1990s. After the rise and decline of populism in the late 1990s, the socio-economic policymakers addressed the structural problem of underspending on social infrastructure. Regardless of whether leadership is democratic or authoritarian, they introduced a series of reform laws to generate revenue, enhance social well-being, and improve the business environment. Tracing the policy-making process of the reform laws, we conclude the president does not dominate the entire policy-making process. A coalition politics allows various stakeholders to join the porous policy-making process. The Philippines’ odd couple depends not on the president’s popularity but on the technocracy that has evolved independently of the rhythm of presidential politics.
The Orderly Universe
Authors: Alexander Amir
Published: March 2023

An algorithm places steep requirements on the universe in which it operates: for a predetermined set of operations to reliably produce correct results or desired outcomes, the world must be orderly and predictable. Newton’s development of the calculus from the earlier method of indivisibles is a case in point. The method was a broad and flexible approach, which made few assumptions about broader order in the world. The calculus, in contrast, is an algorithm that applies a small set of rules to an infinite number of cases, and consequently assumes a world of strict order and predictability. A study of Newton’s development of the calculus from 1665 to 1704 shows a gradual transition from the “special case” approach of the method, to the orderly rule-bound universe of the calculus. Such a move extends beyond mathematics, and requires a change in philosophical, religious, and even political perspectives. Newton’s development of the calculus, it follows, is not just a mathematical achievement, but a cultural one.
Iraq against the World
Authors: Helfont Samuel
Published: March 2023

Iraq against the World is a powerful reconsideration of both the history of Iraqi foreign policy under Saddam Hussein as well as post–Cold War international history more generally. As the United States emerged triumphant at the end of the Cold War, challenging Saddam’s belligerence provided a test for a new system of international politics. For its proponents, this new order would be embedded in institutions of international law like the United Nations Security Council, which was designed to contain the might-makes-right calculations that had tortured the twentieth century. This is the first book to examine Saddam Hussein’s confrontation with this post–Cold War order through the internal files of the ruling Ba‘th Party. The results highlight previously unknown Iraqi strategies, including the prominent use of influence operations and manipulative statesmanship. The book traces Ba‘thist operations around the globe—from the streets of New York and Stockholm, to the mosques of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the halls of power in Paris and Moscow. In doing so, it offers new insights into the evolution of the post–Cold War order and reveals why wars in Iraq became a central feature of global politics for the past thirty years.
Introduction: Iraq and the World
Authors: Helfont Samuel
Published: March 2023

As the United States emerged triumphant from the Cold War, it attempted to use the 1990 Gulf Crisis to shape international order for the post–Cold War period. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq responded with a campaign of influence operations to divide the American-led system and make sanctioning Iraq politically difficult. Measuring the effectiveness of influence operations necessitates distinguishing between operational effects and strategic effects. The former measures the ability to ally with foreign partners. The latter deal with the political impacts. This book’s primary contribution is a reassessment of Iraq’s international strategy in the 1990s and early 2000s. It is the first book to use the documents of the ruling Iraqi Ba‘th Party to do so. The book also contributes to broader post–Cold War international and global history.
Courting Clinton
Authors: Helfont Samuel
Published: March 2023

Clinton inherited a world infused with hope. He and his administration learned very quickly that the age-old hatreds and geopolitical rivalries did not cease with the end of the Cold War. The dreams of a new world order began to strain in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. As this reality set in, Clinton adjusted. However, his predecessor had put the American strategies toward the Ba‘thist regime at the center of the post–Cold War order. To Baghdad’s surprise and frustration, the United States could not simply walk away from Iraq. Too much was at stake. As this reality set in, the Ba‘thists launched a sustained political campaign in the United States to undermine Clinton’s policies and to delegitimize American approaches toward the post–Cold War order, which centered on Iraq.
A Turning Point for the New World Order
Authors: Helfont Samuel
Published: March 2023

Although Iraqis faced the prospect of economic and social collapse at home due to sanctions, Baghadad also was able to use Iraq’s suffering as a political tool to undermine the global order that imposed it. For Saddam and his regime, the inroads that Ba‘thists made in political systems around the world marked important political gains. Paris’s divergence with Washington, as well as shifting attitudes in Russia and the Middle East highlighted an important turning point and a new direction in global politics. The once-unified American-led coalition was breaking apart. As a result, norms of unity and cooperation that underpinned the anti-Iraq coalition at the Security Council were melting.
Why Is There No Escalation in Cyberspace?
Authors: Lonergan Erica D. , Lonergan Shawn W.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 1 introduces the central empirical puzzle that motivates the book: if cyberspace is in fact an environment that gives rise to escalatory dynamics between rivals, why is there so little evidence of escalation? While there have been hundreds—if not thousands—of cyber incidents, not a single one has led to dangerous spirals, let alone escalation to war. The chapter previews the core theoretical argument: four features of cyber operations—secrecy and plausible deniability; requirements for planning and conducting offensive operations; limitations on cost generation; and the role of intelligence—have dampening effects on escalation risks. Next, the chapter defines key terms. It then reviews the existing literature on cyber operations and escalation, dispelling what are argued to be incorrect assumptions that define that body of scholarship, such as the idea that cyberspace is offense dominant or that secrecy and ambiguity increase instability. The chapter concludes by charting a path forward for the remainder of the book.
Implications for Policymaking
Authors: Lonergan Erica D. , Lonergan Shawn W.
Published: March 2023

This chapter concludes the book by extending the theoretical analysis to offer policy recommendations for the United States. First, the theory and case studies suggest critical implications for the role of offensive cyber operations in U.S. strategy, especially in the wake of the recent strategic concept “defend forward,” articulating a more assertive and proactive role for military power in cyberspace, including offensive cyber operations short of war. Despite some concerns, the evidence from a decade of cyber operations raises doubts about the likelihood of escalation. Second, the use of cyber operations for signaling is highly underdeveloped in U.S. cyber strategy, despite its potential in the context of international crisis bargaining and escalation management. Emerging evidence regarding the ways states can reassure and convey restraint through the conduct of cyber operations could be incorporated into future U.S. strategic thinking. Finally, policymakers may be overlooking the need to address the cyber defense and resilience of the capabilities that support deterrence and warfighting, and craft measures to avoid the escalation risks that may emerge from adversary—and U.S.—cyber operations in these systems. The potential consequences of inadvertent cyber escalation stemming from cyber operations conducted against critical conventional and nuclear systems, and the existing gaps in U.S. efforts to secure those systems against cyber operations, are far more significant and dangerous than the cyber operations on which most experts are focused.
From Personal Files to Blueprints
Authors: Sezen Tonguҁ Ibrahim
Published: March 2023

Building upon the concepts of transmedia paratextuality and object- and design-oriented fandom, this chapter investigates the historical evolution and characteristics of epistolary paratexts of the Alien franchise. Written in an in-universe style, these ancillary texts imitate the forms of scientific reports, engineering manuals, technical drawings, and other similar factual material. They project the world of Alien by describing its scientific, economic, and political inner workings instead of narrating events, and expand it with plausible speculations. Epistolary paratexts were part of the Alien franchise since late 1980’s, focusing on on-screen details, reproducing, and repurposing them. Reflecting the transformation of the film series into a media franchise, they became more and more common in recent years, also coinciding with the rise of design-oriented fandom and encyclopaedic reading practices. This chapter provides a historical and comparative reading of these paratexts by focusing on their form, content, and contributions to the world building processes and their relation to the films and wider Alien media.
“Must Be a Chick Thing”
Authors: Kamm Frances A.
Published: March 2023

In his 1979 review, Vincent Canby calls Alien a “Gothic set in space”: in this chapter I will reflect upon the implications of describing the film as “Gothic,” arguing that the franchise engages with the traditions of the Female Gothic, specifically. The Female Gothic is typically defined by stories in which a central female protagonist is imperiled within isolated locations, usually because of a villainous male figure and/or patriarchal structures more broadly. Alien evokes this narrative patterning as the film comes to center on Ripley as the heroine, resisting the sexualized threat of the xenomorph in conjunction with the exploitative nature of the Company. These Female Gothic tropes continue to appear within the film’s larger franchise, following Ripley’s appearances in Aliens (1986), Alien3 (1992), and Alien Resurrection (1997). Indeed, when analyzing the franchise through the lens of the Female Gothic, it is fascinating to see how these four films—produced within varying historical contexts, with different filmmakers and diverse narrative set-ups—can be brought into a new dialogue, with the Female Gothic functioning as intertextual and transmedial structuring element. Revisiting the Alien franchise via the Female Gothic provides another way of considering these films together, illuminating both the continued cultural currency of the Female Gothic tradition, and Ripley as a screen icon.