bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Rockefeller Foundation, the University New Music Center, and “Foundation Music”
Authors: Uy Michael Sy
Published: September 2020

This chapter focuses on the Rockefeller Foundation’s support of university new music centers and contemporary chamber ensembles, offering new insights into a commonly understood historiography of U.S. twentieth-century music: the dominance and prestige of experimental music and serialism at universities. Most notably, composers at Columbia, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and Mills College served dually as outside experts and commissioned artists and performers. Milton Babbitt, Otto Luening, and Vladimir Ussachevsky benefited greatly from their involvement at Rockefeller and the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center. The composers and performers justified their work initially through the Soviet threat and rivalries with European studios, and later with innovation and creativity. The new music ensembles solidified a musical circuit that crisscrossed the country, making stops at many Rockefeller-funded centers. The foundation revealed ways it was both an advertent and inadvertent patron of what New Yorker critic Winthrop Sargeant pejoratively referred to as “foundation music.”
Epilogue
Authors: Uy Michael Sy
Published: September 2020

The epilogue discusses recent developments in arts funding and philanthropy. The divergent paths of Rockefeller and Ford—where the former discontinued its arts program and the latter rebranded its cultural work in terms of addressing “inequality”—is a revealing outcome of the increasing social and economic legitimation of arts funding. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) experienced its first budget cut under President Reagan and then, amidst the culture wars, Congress slashed its budget further. Private contributions have increasingly taken up the slack, but not without their own challenges. New philanthropists are exploring limited liability corporations, donor-advised funds, and metrics and outcomes-based funding. With increasing economic and political inequality and decreasing civic engagement, the government funds foregone because of tax-deductible charitable contributions might be re-evaluated, as well as the ways the federal government may be better suited to provide resources more equitably. An ethics of expertise is now more critical.
Post-Cold War International Political Theory
Authors: Jones David Martin
Published: September 2020

The way the Cold War ended and the triumph of market capitalism constituted the global, economic preconditions and the liberal democratic premises for abstract speculation about how the evolving world order ought to be governed. Release from the ideological straightjacket of the Cold War stimulated interest in social justice, emancipation, human security, human rights and international law. Ethics and culture replaced economics and historical materialism as subjects of academic inquiry. Human rights and social justice had been cards of low value in the Cold War ideological pack. Now, global values and shared norms trumped everything. The return of Grand Theory in a progressive guise saw otherwise obscure philosophical speculation concerning social justice and communicative reason form the basis for progressive theories of a communitarian, feminist and cosmopolitan character devoted to the ethical transformation of a global society. Political thought, once concerned with liberty and equality within the democratic state, now assumed a radical, emancipatory international dimension. It came to dominate the thought and practice of the western campus as well as form the tacit ideological dimension informing a new progressive, post political and post historicist third way.
The Language of Progress and the Closure of the European Mind
Authors: Jones David Martin
Published: September 2020

Scepticism concerning the direction of progress and the policies required to achieve it, exposed new liberalism’s incoherent character. The Home Office’s decision to ignore an intransigent minority censoring works it found offensive created a precedent. The death threats issued against Salman Rushdie represented the opening shots in a cultural war on freedom. The Religious Hatred Act (2006) gave it legislative sanction. It reflected the dialectical clash between a sui generis Euro-Islam and the secular, progressive universalism that ironically made it possible. This cultural war and the exclusive identities it upheld constituted an assault on the secular right to speak sacrilegiously of sacred things. Endorsed after 9/11 by the progressive attempt to empathize with or cherish minority cultural understandings, it not only closed debate, but also restricted and distorted the political language in which debate might be conducted. Hate speech, trigger warnings and no platforming campaigns were its inexorable consequence. This illiberal outcome was quite a remarkable achievement of the post-Rawlsian liberal mind. This chapter examines the curious accommodation between fanaticism and multicultural, illiberal liberalism after 2001 and its disturbing implications for censorship, democratic freedom, tolerance and an open society.
The Revenge of Politics and the Search for Order
Authors: Jones David Martin
Published: September 2020

The creative destruction that the financial crisis unleashed created a political and economic climate increasingly inimical to liberal, secular, progressive, or socially just outcomes. Western governments ruling according to a rationalist technique fatally underestimated the role that non-negotiable cultural understandings continued to play at the end of history. The attempt to give legal force to incommensurable values and cultures in circumstances of deep pluralism provoked fragmentation, intolerance and violence rather than social cohesion. The illusion of liberal internationalism and the legacy it bequeathed in terms of the decline of the nation state and its traditional political institutions created a climate where new ideologies emerged and old ones that had never lost a subterranean presence in Europe’s dark heart flourished once more. In this chapter, we shall discuss the commonalities between the return of these repressed identities and political religions, as history and the search for order recommenced after 2016, before examining the possible range of Western responses and their implications for the future of a limited, secular, liberal order, reconsidering how the concept of national interest defined in prudential terms of limited power and constitutional or rule-based order might save us from recent moral and rationalist excess and restore political balance.
Sectarian Identity in the Era of the Nation-State
Authors: Haddad Fanar
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines the relationship between sectarian identity, the nation-state and nationalism It challenges one of the most common and most misplaced assumptions in the field, namely that sectarian identity and national identity are opposites or that they are mutually exclusive. This misplaced assumption frames what is assumed to be a normatively positive, modern, secular and territorialized national identity as the antidote to the ills of a normatively negative, pre-modern, religious and transnational sectarian identity. All of which overlooks one of the defining features of modern sectarian identity, namely its interaction with, and refraction through, the nation-state, national identity and nationalism. Far from negating the nation-state or denying nationalism, modern sectarian competition has more often revolved around contested national truths and contested hierarchies of power within the nation-state. The chapter surveys the literature on nationalism and demonstrates its relevance to the study of sectarian dynamics at the national level. The chapter also highlights the importance of the national level by examining the impact of the advent of the nation-state on sectarian relations. To that end, a survey of sectarian relations in the medieval and early-modern periods is contrasted against sectarian dynamics in the era of the nation-state.
Iraq, 2003–2018
Authors: Haddad Fanar
Published: September 2020

This chapter takes Iraq as a case study with which to demonstrate many of the themes of the book and the layered and contextual nature of sectarian dynamics. The multidimensional model introduced in chapters 3-4 is used to explain not just the drivers of sectarian entrenchment but also of its retreat: the de-escalation of sectarian conflict, how sectarian identities lose relevance and how banal coexistence is recaptured. The chapter begins by outlining the pre-2003 roots of post-2003 sectarianization. The political changes of 2003 are then explored as is the evolution of the politics of sect between 2003 and 2018. Charting these transformations reveals the constantly evolving meaning, utility, social salience and political relevance of sectarian identity over the course of 15 years. What emerges is a gradually altered enabling environment with a changing set of incentive structures that have diminished the political salience of sectarian identity both in Iraq and regionally. This is evidenced in the normalization of the post-2003 order and in the transformations that have marked the evolution of threat perceptions, electoral behaviour, Iraq’s muhasasa system, and the parameters of populist discourse. All of which suggests the possibility that the ‘sectarian wave’ of chapter 6 may have crested.
How American Institutions Encourage and Sustain High Rates of Imprisonment
Authors: Zimring Franklin E.
Published: September 2020

This chapter explores a series of long-standing features of American government that exaggerated the scale of the penal expansion that started in the 1970s. A large list of features of government and social structure in the United States magnified the level of penal expansion, including the federal system, the public wealth of the late twentieth century, and the politics of crime policy.
What Happens Next?
Authors: Zimring Franklin E.
Published: September 2020

This chapter uses statistics from the first decade after the peak of prison population was reached in the United States in 2007 to project the likely trends in imprisonment that can be expected during the period 2020 to 2050. An estimate that takes into account the contrast between the first decade of the great imprisonment increase and the first 10 years after the all-time high suggests a modest decline over the next generation is the most likely pattern for the American penal future. By mid-century, prison and jail populations are likely to still have between half and two-thirds of the expanded 2007 peak rate behind bars.
Two Categorical Alternatives to Prisons
Authors: Zimring Franklin E.
Published: September 2020

This chapter considers what it calls “categorical” shifts in policy to help reduce penal populations. These strategies shift entire categories of government policy that had been traditionally controlled by local criminal justice and state prisons to other parts of government. The first major shift suggested is that drug abuse policy shifts from criminal law to public health, involving police and other first responders but then shifting to institutions of treatment. The second major “categorical” shift takes place within criminal justice, by shifting jurisdiction over aspects of crime custody from prisons to local facilities.
Prosecutorial Power and Adversarial Focus
Authors: Zimring Franklin E.
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses the role of prosecutorial power in state imprisonment policy. The analysis contrasts the personal preferences of prosecutors for severe punishment as a state policy (that is why they chose to become prosecutors) with the priority of prosecutors to obtain prison terms as a measure of their adversarial effectiveness, the vice that may distort local criminal justice policy. The major ambition of reform in prosecution is to moderate the power as well as the desire to consider incarceration as a measure of effectiveness in public prosecution.
Strategy and Tactics for Building Institutions
Authors: Zimring Franklin E.
Published: September 2020

If prison populations remain at the high end of historical patterns, then informed policy on whether new penal facilities should be built and where becomes an important issue. This chapter suggests that no state in the federal union should build or expand any further remote prisons in the typical twentieth-century pattern but that penal facilities close to the communities where their residents reside should be built and improved.
The Epidemic of Penal Disabilities
Authors: Zimring Franklin E.
Published: September 2020

This chapter profiles what it calls “the epidemic of penal disabilities” that restrict the liberties and economic prospects of many millions of persons after conviction of crime as well as their innocent family members. Just as the prison population increased by a factor of five in the generation after 1970, so too did the population of persons with felony conviction records, but the number of persons with such records is more than twice as high. There are about 46,000 state and federal laws imposing a wide variety of restrictions, often without any policy justification. Nothing less than a national commission on these often obscure and frequently purposeless prohibitions can bring order to this mess.
Developing and Debating the Covenant of Works
Authors: Perkins Harrison
Published: September 2020

Whereas Chapter 2 dealt primarily with the relationship between Ussher’s doctrine of the covenant of works and the broader Christian tradition, this chapter examines how he developed his view in relation to more proximate Reformed theologians and their discussions specifically about the covenant of works. This chapter analyzes how the theologians whom Ussher cited as having written works important to his own thinking developed the concept of the covenant of works. This emphasis on Ussher’s connection to his identified sources illustrates how he adopted and modified previous arguments about the covenant of works. It also gives insight into how theologians built their doctrines on differing assumptions from older traditions, depending on whether they tended to lean more Thomist or more Scotist.
Conclusion
Authors: Perkins Harrison
Published: September 2020

This concluding chapter summarizes the arguments of the entire book and draws together the implications for understanding Ussher and his relationship to early modern theology more broadly. It highlights the difficulties in analyzing Reformed theology after the Restoration, but it demonstrates that prior to the Restoration Ussher was clearly a major figure in the theological development of the Irish and English churches. Ussher’s relationship to puritanism is examined in light of the investigative results detailed throughout the book, and new directions are suggested for future research in Ussher studies and in studies of puritanism and conformity generally.
Suffrage
Authors: Adkison Danny M. , Palmer Lisa McNair
Published: September 2020

This chapter focuses on Article III of the Oklahoma constitution, which concerns suffrage. Section 1 provides that “all citizens of the United States, over the age of eighteen (18) years, who are bona fide residents of this state, are qualified electors of this state.” Added in 1978, Section 2 provides for the creation and membership of a State Election Board. Section 3 concerns mandatory primary system and nomination of candidates. Section 4 provides for the manner of holding and conducting elections. This provision gives the legislature a great deal of authority in regulating elections. Lastly, Section 5 states that “all elections shall be free and equal.” It also provides that “no power, civil or military, shall ever interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage, and electors shall, in all cases, except for treason, felony, and breach of peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance on elections and while going to and from the same.”
Distribution of Powers
Authors: Adkison Danny M. , Palmer Lisa McNair
Published: September 2020

This chapter looks at Article IV of the Oklahoma constitution, which concerns distribution of powers. One of the hallmarks of the U.S. Constitution is its embrace of the concept known as separation of powers, notwithstanding that the document does not explicitly refer to it. The Oklahoma framers made the concept explicit. Section 1 provides for the separation and distinction of the departments of government. It states that “the powers of the government of the State of Oklahoma shall be divided into three separate departments: The Legislative, Executive, and Judicial.” This provision does not prohibit some blending of the three branches. What this section does clearly prohibit is all of the power of one branch being exercised by another branch. It also prohibits the legislature from appointing its own members to boards that have the authority to approve grant applications for development, use, and control of water resources.
Executive Department
Authors: Adkison Danny M. , Palmer Lisa McNair
Published: September 2020

This chapter addresses Article VI of the Oklahoma constitution, which concerns the executive department. Section 1 provides that “the Executive authority of the state shall be vested in a Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, State Auditor and Inspector, Attorney General, State Treasurer, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Commissioner of Labor, Commissioner of Insurance, and other officers provided by law and this Constitution.” While these executive officers may hold meetings outside the state’s capital, they may not set up branch offices in any place other than Oklahoma City. Section 2 states that “the Supreme Executive power shall be vested in a Governor.” Sections 3 and 4 provides for the eligibility of an individual to certain state offices as well as the terms of office and succession, respectively. The chapter then details the provisions for the qualifications, powers, and duties of each of the executive officers. Article VI also includes the provision for the seal of the state (Section 35), which incorporates images from the Five Civilized Tribes along with the seal of Oklahoma Territory.
Public Roads
Authors: Adkison Danny M. , Palmer Lisa McNair
Published: September 2020

This chapter discusses Article XVI of the Oklahoma constitution, which concerns public roads. Building and maintaining a state highway system is a mandatory governmental function over which the state enjoys “sovereign immunity.” Section 1 states that “the Legislature is directed to establish a Department of Highways, and shall have the power to create improvement districts and provide for building and maintaining public roads, and may provide for the utilization of convict and punitive labor thereon.” Section 2 clarifies that the state does not attempt to preempt the federal government’s actions and rights with regard to the public highways. It also assures that this provision was not intended to take away the rights of a Native American tribe. Section 3 gives the legislature broad powers to use its discretion to make, and to generate money for, a system of levees, drains, and irrigation ditches. The state may pay for such items through taxation.
Municipal Corporations
Authors: Adkison Danny M. , Palmer Lisa McNair
Published: September 2020

This chapter focuses on Article XVIII of the Oklahoma constitution, which concerns municipal corporations. Section 1 recognizes the power of the legislature to create municipal corporations and define their powers, but puts certain limitations on that power. In Oklahoma, cities possess no inherent power or authority, but exercise only those powers expressly granted, or incidental to powers expressly granted, by the state of Oklahoma. Section 3(a) provides for the framing and adoption of a charter, while Section 3(b) focuses on the election of a board of freeholders. Meanwhile, Section 4(a) through Section 4(e) deals with the powers of the initiative and referendum. Section 5(a) provides that “no municipal corporation shall ever grant, extend, or renew a franchise, without the approval of a majority of the qualified electors residing within its corporate limits, who shall vote thereon at a general or special election.” Lastly, power over the city streets within municipalities is reserved to the state, but cities have been delegated full power to control and regulate the streets. Cities may, for instance, use this delegated power to regulate parking.
Insurance
Authors: Adkison Danny M. , Palmer Lisa McNair
Published: September 2020

This chapter looks at Article XIX of the Oklahoma constitution, which concerns insurance. Section 1 reflects the state’s paternal desire to protect its citizens from insurance companies that might come into Oklahoma with the intent to defraud Oklahoma residents. The legislature has chosen to pass laws imposing taxes on foreign insurance companies, as allowed by this section of the constitution. Section 2 specifies the entrance fees and annual tax that foreign insurance companies must pay to the insurance commissioner. Meanwhile, Section 3 deals with nonprofit insurance organizations. To establish status as a fraternal beneficiary association under this section, the character of such business, and not its formal organization, determines its status. Section 4 is basically a bookkeeping provision that determines what is done with fees charged to insurance entities in the state.
Public Institutions
Authors: Adkison Danny M. , Palmer Lisa McNair
Published: September 2020

This chapter addresses Article XXI of the Oklahoma constitution, which concerns public institutions. Section 1 provides that “educational, reformatory, and penal institutions and those for the benefit of the insane, blind, deaf, and mute, and such other institutions as the public good may require, shall be established and supported by the State in such manner as may be prescribed by law.” This section allows the legislature to provide for certain citizens as an act of public goodwill, and perhaps as a requirement of other constitutional provisions. For instance, this section has been important in defining rights such as the provision of interpreters for deaf mutes in criminal prosecutions, failure to educate, law libraries in prisons, school desegregation, and prisoners’ rights. As a specific example, in Board of Commissioners of Logan County v. State (1927), the court decided that the state has a duty to establish hospitals for the insane and to support or sustain those hospitals.
Toward a Truly Ecumenical Wisdom
Authors: Adler Eric
Published: September 2020

This concluding chapter uses Irving Babbitt’s educational philosophy as a starting point for an intellectually and ethically sound approach to the contemporary humanities. Although Babbitt did not present a defense of the humanities completely appropriate for our day and age, his ecumenical and comparatively broadminded approach can help ground a contemporary rationale that is both novel and satisfying. The chapter argues that contemporary humanists must vouch for the central importance of their subjects in part by expressing the ways in which masterworks of culture (from all intellectual traditions, not just Western ones) help contribute to the creation of better human beings.
Does Art Change Us?
Authors: Harold James
Published: September 2020

This chapter takes up the question of art’s effects on its audience. The thesis is that art probably does affect us in ways that matter morally, and so we should be suspicious of accounts that treat art’s effects as unimportant. The chapter has two main parts. First, it sets out a prima facie case for the claim that artworks might change their audiences in morally salient ways. Drawing on social science research, this section establishes that there is a plausible mechanism and supporting background evidence to suggest that we might well be affected by the art we enjoy: made more aggressive, for example, by narratives centered around violent protagonists. The second part argues that the principal approaches to judging art morally without talking about art’s effects suffer from significant weaknesses.
Artworks and Persons
Authors: Harold James
Published: September 2020

This short chapter recapitulates the main conclusions of the previous chapters. The preceding chapters taken together support a moderate skepticism with regard to how we evaluate art morally. Artworks in themselves are rarely appropriate objects of moral evaluation. We should not judge artworks as though they were people. Art might sometimes affect us—either our character or our understanding—but these effects can be hard to see, and they can be good or bad. Our engagement with art can also affect our relationships with others in our affective communities, and these effects can matter too. However, the arguments thus far doesn’t tell us much about what these moral evaluations of art come to or how they matter. The second part of the book, which starts in Chapter 6, takes up these larger questions.
An Expressivist Account of the Differences between Aesthetic and Moral Judgments
Authors: Harold James
Published: September 2020

This chapter begins with five more or less familiar ways of distinguishing between aesthetic and moral judgments. These distinctions are far from perfect—they allow of exceptions—but they constitute a reasonable guide. Then the chapter introduces two new distinctions from an expressivist framework. The first is the fact that aesthetic reasoning, but not moral reasoning, involves a particular kind of non-valenced judgment. The second is that aesthetic judgments, but not moral judgments, are recalcitrant in the face of conflicting higher-order judgments. The chapter concludes that expressivism offers a reasonably clear basis for distinguishing between moral and aesthetic judgments.
Should Moral Judgments Affect Aesthetic Judgments (or the Other Way Around)?
Authors: Harold James
Published: September 2020

This chapter offers a defense of autonomism—the view that aesthetic and moral judgments are independent of one another. When we ask whether judging an artwork to be morally bad affects its aesthetic value, we are asking a normative question about what it is best for us to do. Should we take a moral judgment about the effects of an artwork to bear on our aesthetic judgment about the work itself? The chapter argues that we do not make any error if we refuse to change one judgment in light of the other. We are free to keep them separate. This chapter concludes with replies to objections from both those who endorse a stronger link between morality and aesthetics as well as those who want a complete separation.
Conclusions and Illustrations
Authors: Harold James
Published: September 2020

This chapter applies the approaches defended in the book to some cases of moral criticism of art. The first part considers some cases of criticisms of entire kinds of art: criticisms of horror films, bell hooks’s criticisms of the representations of black women in popular media, and Paul Taylor’s critique of “narratives of moral representation.” Second, it considers criticisms of two specific works: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman. It concludes by revisiting the arguments of Chapter 1. The conclusion is that judging art morally is no easy matter, and it might not always be clear whether or not a work is good, but that there is value in thinking through these matters.
Local Competition and PMSCs’ Behavior in Civil Wars
Authors: Akcinaroglu Seden , Radziszewski Elizabeth
Published: September 2020

What is the significance of local or conflict-level competition on PMSCs’ military effectiveness? And what is the mechanism through which such competition improves PMSCs’ accountability? This chapter argues that variation in local competition, the number of PMSCs that operate in a given conflict zone, affects the level of accountability to the client. With the presence of multiple PMSCs, companies can anticipate the existence of informal peer monitoring. Whether gaining a competitive edge or safety concerns motivate companies’ monitoring of each other in the field, this puts pressure on PMSCs to fulfill contractual obligations and become more militarily effective or risk losing future contracts. The chapter argues that a greater level of local competition pushes companies to improve their skills and to limit fraud and human rights abuses, factors that contribute to quicker termination of war.
Under Pressure
Authors: Akcinaroglu Seden , Radziszewski Elizabeth
Published: September 2020

This chapter highlights key findings and theoretical contribution of the book. It delineates policy recommendations based on the study of PMSCs’ interventions into civil wars and suggests that awarding contracts based on non-cost factors such as companies’ reputation for corporate professionalism and positive media coverage could increase the selection of those PMSCs that are most likely to be militarily effective. Awarding contracts to multiple companies as opposed to just one also improves accountability in a conflict zone. The chapter discusses ideas for future research such as comparing PMSCs’ performance across different local areas within a given conflict zone and exploring the rise of new mercenary groups and their impact on conflict dynamics.
Conclusion
Authors: Jones Clive , Guzansky Yoel
Published: September 2020

In December 2018 and before a conference organised by the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, Yair Golan, a former IDF deputy chief of staff, poured metaphorical cold water on those in Israel advocating closer ties with the Gulf monarchies: “We should,” he noted, “be very very careful regarding the Gulf monarchies.” While Golan agreed that “common interests” were apparent, he warned that “we [Israelis] rely on a completely different set of values and we should not overemphasise this relationship.”...
The Seduction of Terror
Authors: Wilkinson Benedict
Published: September 2020

This chapter looks at terrorism as a strategic choice. It looks at the calculations that terrorists make, and how terrorism is an attempt to bridge the very limited resources available to terrorists with their large political objectives. In this context, it introduces the idea of strategic scripts: stereotypical responses to given situations. It also introduces the eight broad categories of terrorist scripts explored in the following chapters: survival, power play, mobilization, provocation and polarization, de-legitimization, attrition, co-operation, and de-mobilization.
The Ordeal of Incongruity
Authors: Gill Sam
Published: September 2020

By contrasting his own personal experience dancing with Smith’s preference for reading, the author engages a complex and far-reaching discussion of the role and importance of experience both in religious subjects studied and in the lives of the scholars. From a biologically and philosophically based theory of experience, the chapter examines the importance of repetition, feeling kinds of knowing, and gesture, among other aspects of being bodied, to posit that religion and also the study of religion are skills honed through long repetitive experience. The chapter also engages the implications that sensory-rich religious experience is transduced into written description that is often the only access scholars have to their subjects of study. Countering the common understanding that Smith is reluctant to value experience, the chapter shows that the core role of incongruity and difference Smith attributes to religion and its study amounts to, in his own terms, an ordeal or determining experience.
Smith’s Golden Bough
Authors: Gill Sam
Published: September 2020

This chapter draws inspiration from the broad contributions of Jonathan Smith as well as the author’s in an extensive development of a new approach to a proper academic study of religion based on the philosophy and biology of human movement. The implications and advantages of this distinctive self-moving approach are discussed in terms of place, myth, ritual, comparison, body, and religion theory. The chapter presents a richly developed range of new perspectives and concepts, including aesthetic of impossibles, transduction, play, the corporeality of concepts, coherence as preferable to meaning, the essential role of metastability and nonlinearity in religion studies, gesture/posture/prosthesis as opening access to experience, religion as skill-based behavior, material/biological expansionism, biology of transcendence, and the challenges and goals to which a proper study of religion should be directed. The chapter concludes by proclaiming Jonathan Smith to be a major inspiration and resource for the creative and productive future of the study of religion.
Introduction
Authors: Field Sandra Leonie
Published: September 2020

This chapter lays out two contemporary radical democratic theories of popular power with conceptual frames drawn from early modern philosophy, and it foreshadows an alternative theory of popular power to overcome their shortcomings. The contemporary theories are exemplified by the work of Tuck and Negri. Tuck promotes Hobbes’s idea of a ‘sleeping sovereign’ as an absolute democratic sovereign, cutting through the ordinary workings of government. Alternatively, Negri promotes Spinoza’s idea of an insurgent popular multitude as an irresistible democratic force disrupting any settled institutional regime. The chapter then indicates some reasons for dissatisfaction with radical democratic theories of popular power, and foreshadows the alternative theory that will be put forward and defended through the course of the book. It sketches how this alternative theory emerges from a new interpretation of the political philosophies of Hobbes and Spinoza, and in particular, of their conceptions of power as potentia.
Relational Power
Authors: Field Sandra Leonie
Published: September 2020

This chapter analyzes Hobbes’s theory of individual human power (potentia), and its transformation across his works. It argues that Hobbes’s early works offer an account of potentia reflecting an intuitive common sense that an individual’s power lies in the faculties or capacities that the individual possesses. It claims that such a conception still bears the marks of scholasticism, and it illustrates this point against a stylized presentation of Aquinas’s conception of potentia. By contrast, the chapter argues that on Hobbes’s later account, individual potentia is irreducibly relational, with the corollary that potentia cannot be identified in abstraction from actual social life. This change belatedly extends the antischolasticism of Hobbes’s natural science into his science of human beings.
The Political Problem
Authors: Field Sandra Leonie
Published: September 2020

This chapter argues that Hobbes’s late view of human collective power, unlike the early view, is able to grasp informal and emergent collective power. Hobbes’s later works, with their new relational conception of potentia, offer both theoretical resources to conceive informal collective power distinct from the state, and also analytical reasons to expect such power to be politically troubling. The ‘political problem’ emerges: in order to achieve the concrete power sufficient to uphold its absolute authority (potestas), the state needs to harness or tame the informal collective powers within the populace. The chapter argues that the political problem explains the absence of the ‘sleeping sovereign’, so central to the radical democratic interpretation of Hobbes, from Hobbes’s later writings. But informal collective power cannot necessarily be celebrated as a welcome popular insurgency against excessive state power: for its characteristic inner structure is complex oligarchic allegiance rather than equal horizontal affiliation.
Capitalism's Sexual History
Authors: Smith Nicola J.
Published: September 2020

What is the relationship between capitalism and sexuality, and why are they so often assumed to be antithetical? The book interrogates these questions by bringing together insights from two fields that have often overlooked each other, international political economy and queer theory. It develops a queer political economy lens to understand how the history of capitalism has been intimately entangled with the history of sexuality. Yet central to this story has been the construction of sexuality as something that needs to be protected from capitalism’s adulterating influence at all costs. As the author examines, this is no accident since capitalism profits greatly from the illusion that economic and sexual relations exist in distinct realms that can and must be kept apart. Focusing on the specific site of sex work in Britain, the volume draws on wide-ranging archival research to chart a genealogy of capitalist development from the Middle Ages to the present day. It shows that capitalism has long been organized around the extraction of unpaid sexual labor that, in turn, has been made possible by the creation and maintenance of a dualism between sex and work. By exposing the historical mechanisms through which the economy/sexuality dichotomy has been constituted, the book opens up new space for critical inquiry into the intersections between sex, work, and economic and sexual injustice.
Time and the Essay
Authors: Ellis Markman
Published: September 2020

Published six times a week, Addison and Steele’s The Spectator (1711–12) offered readers a daily essay, and some advertisements, on the two sides of a half-folio sheet costing one penny. This chapter explores the diurnal production and reception of The Spectator. In their daily sequence, each diurnal essay is an adventure in thought located in a fixed chronological relationship with the others but taking a new and unanticipated direction. Reading the diurnal Spectator offers unexpected juxtapositions of essays on different topics and in different modes and styles. Subsequent republications in quarto and octavo volumes changed the reading experience, especially through the provision of an index allowing readers to follow topics across discrete essays. Indexical reading exposes an ambivalence in the essay form between the everyday sally of thought—the attempt or endeavour—and the more philosophical thinking of the tract or treatise in miniature.
On Coffee-Houses, Smoking, and the English Essay Tradition
Authors: Gigante Denise
Published: September 2020

The Romantic essayist James Henry Leigh Hunt, in two essays saturated with nostalgia for a lost world of Enlightenment coffee-house sociability, registers a shift in the cultural place of the literary essay in the 1820s—the era of the cigar-smoking George IV—from an urban public sphere dominated by Mr Spectator and his pipe, to more suburban cubicles of domestic privacy. Through the medium of Hunt’s self-reflective essays on the English periodical essay tradition, this chapter reveals the fate of the literary periodical essay to be linked to a fading amateur culture of belles-lettres and ornamental arts. Hunt blames the early essayists for the result of the civilizing process: the cultivation of a taste for polite literature that has isolated readers and emptied Covent Garden of its intellectual life. The reveries, dreams, and visions of the literary essay made possible by the Orientalized cigar divan (Romantic successor to the coffee-house) reflect the complicated reality of London in an age of global imperialism.
Charles Lamb, Elia, and Essays in Familiarity
Authors: James Felicity
Published: September 2020

Charles Lamb helped develop the familiar essay genre through his Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays (1833). Highly popular through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he faded from view through the twentieth century thanks to New Critical scorn. This chapter restores the Elian voice to contemporary conversations about the essay, tracing Lamb’s influence and afterlives in the work of later writers from Anne Fadiman to David Foster Wallace. More broadly, the chapter uses Lamb to open up the many nuances of the familiar essay, and to trace its origins and debts. From conversation to letter-writing to the work of the Romantic poets and the strange persona of Elia himself, it explores the many meanings and histories of the familiar mode.
Creative Nonfiction and the Lyric Essay
Authors: Stuckey-French Ned
Published: September 2020

This chapter is devoted to writing which falls under a recent, nearly paradoxical coinage: ‘creative nonfiction’, a phrase which raises the fundamental theoretical questions asked by Lukács and Adorno about whether the essay is better seen as art or knowledge. Stuckey-French examines both the rise of this category in creative writing programmes in universities in the United States, and the arguments of the influential theorist and anthologist of the essay John d’Agata, who rejects ‘creative nonfiction’ in favour of the ‘lyric essay’. Stuckey-French then shows how the contemporary essayists Jo Ann Beard, Eula Biss, and Claudia Rankine are both preoccupied by the boundary between fiction and reality, and often transgress it without minimizing its ethical and political significance, in respect of childhood memory, violence, or race.
Introduction
Authors: Saunders Nicholas J.
Published: September 2020

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Great Arab Revolt Project (GARP). GARP was an interdisciplinary study of forgotten war places—the first archaeological-anthropological investigation of a modern guerrilla landscape whose physical traces belonged to the First World War and the Arab Revolt, but also to the long tail of twentieth- and twenty-first-century guerrilla warfare. It was an archaeology which had not been attempted before, and which took place against the background of the American-led Coalition which was occupying Iraq—a nation itself created in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, in which the Arab Revolt had played such a prominent role. The archaeology of the Arab Revolt sites reflects the apparent randomness of the surprise attacks launched on the railway by the Arabs and British. While some sites were created by such raids, more often they were a response to the threat of them. Ultimately, this was an investigation of what asymmetrical warfare looked like on the ground—the archaeology of a desert insurgency and of Ottoman Turkish counter-insurgency measures.
Archaeology, Material Worlds, and the Arab Revolt
Authors: Saunders Nicholas J.
Published: September 2020

This chapter looks at how the timely development of an interdisciplinary archaeology (modern conflict archaeology) of the First World War from the late 1990s offered a comprehensive and nuanced way of investigating the many interlocking military and cultural aspects of the Arab Revolt and its aftermath. Ephemeral archaeological traces in the sands of southern Jordan, it was hoped, would speak to the origins of modern guerrilla warfare which itself contributed to the shaping of the Middle East after 1918. The new approach showed the power of objects to create and transmit impressions and evaluations of the Revolt and its personalities—not least by the catalysing effects of finding similar items during excavations of the original landscapes whence all such objects derived their historical significance. The desert, so apparently empty of information and insight, would prove to be full of both. The key to deciphering its archaeological message lay in understanding the landscape, its layers and its objects—a quest which began with the largest artefact of all, the Hejaz Railway.
Guerrillas and the ‘Sultan’s Mule’
Authors: Saunders Nicholas J.
Published: September 2020

This chapter addresses how the First World War revitalised the Hejaz Railway, but not always as the new Turkish government, their German allies, or the British could have foreseen. No one could have predicted the role the faithful railroad would play in the coming conflict, its momentous consequences, or its galvanizing role in creating modern guerrilla warfare. And nobody, let alone the recently volunteered intelligence officer 2nd Lieutenant T. E. Lawrence, could have recognized that Abdulhamid II’s dream railway would be a catalyst for the modern legend of Lawrence of Arabia. The railroad had been a strategic artery since its inception. Despite Ottoman emphasis on its religious role, and its economic and cultural effects along its route, there had always been a geopolitical dimension, as it bypassed the Suez Canal and threatened British India and the Far East. Yet there was nothing inevitable about a war fought along its length. The railroad was to be an unexpected proving ground for a new form of conflict with global reach based on a modern adaptation of traditional Bedouin raiding, itself honed by centuries of attacking Hajj caravans.
Forts, Stations, and Ancestors
Authors: Saunders Nicholas J.
Published: September 2020

This chapter focuses on Wadi Rutm Station and Tel Shahm Station. Tel Shahm Station and its landscape is characterized by several types of militarization—tent-ring campsites, a fortified hilltop and blockhouse, shadowy remains of defensive trenches around the station, and a karakoll strong-point further south. It is possible that the anomalous northernmost tent-ring campsite is a mix of prehistoric, railway construction-era, and Arab Revolt-period occupation, and that the southern construction camp saw later re-occupation between 1917 and 1918. The hilltop blockhouse, its perimeter wall, and the observation posts are clear examples of Turkish militarization, reinforced by the munitions found at those posts facing the railway, indicative of outgoing Turkish rifle or machine-gun fire. Together with the shattered railway tracks down on the desert, it is likely that much of the archaeology of this multi-component site belongs to the Arab Revolt.
Ritual, Ascetic, and Meditative Practice in the Veda and Upaniṣads
Authors: Galewicz Cezary
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines ascetic and meditation practices as borne witness to in the ancient scriptures of Hinduism, the Vedas and Upaniṣads. Close to the appearance of Buddhism towards the sixth or fifth century bce, the already rich textual heritage of the Veda emerged as a canonical collection rearranged for ritual use. Most of its texts had been composed centuries earlier, beginning in the north-west areas of the Greater Punjab, and continued to grow while transmitted orally over a period of several centuries. All that accompanied a slow movement towards east and south of the Vedic tribes and clans. They fought and formed alliances among themselves and with others in the process of growing cultural synthesis. The complex Vedic canon represents a religion which modern scholarship chose to name either Vedism or Vedic Hinduism as preceding that of Brahmanism and later traditions of Hinduism. It also bears witness to a marked emphasis on ritual practice of a decidedly elite character. The late phase of its oral canonization has been recently considered as redefinition in the face either of the universal call of Buddhism or the challenge of the written media of the neighbouring Persian Empire. This chapter examines these developments.
Historical Context of Early Asceticism
Authors: Bronkhorst Johannes
Published: September 2020

Ascetics have impressed foreign visitors to India from an early time onward. The Greek Megasthenes, who spent time in eastern India around the year 300 bce, described ascetics that remained motionless for a whole day in one single position. More than a thousand years later, Arab travellers marvelled at men in India who remained motionless for years on end. After almost another millennium, in the seventeenth century ce, the Frenchman François Bernier saw ascetics who remained standing seven days and nights, without sitting or lying down, leaning against ropes while asleep. Today Indian ascetics still impress foreigners, but the latter no longer have to leave their armchairs and can observe the sādhus, yogis, or fakirs on their television or computer screens. This chapter will briefly present what we know about asceticism in early India. It will present the evidence schematically, because this is the only way in which an understanding of complicated historical processes can be conveyed.