bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A History of the Loosely Governed Seas between the 16th and 19th Centuries
Authors: Egloff Florian J.
Published: April 2022

This chapter offers a historical narrative of mercantile companies, privateers, and pirates from the 16th to the 19th century, with an emphasis on their relations with states. It defines the historical bounds of the analogy and identifies different constellations between the actors investigated in three historical periods: an account of late 16th-century Elizabethan privateering; the interaction between mercantile company, privateers, and pirates in the late 17th century; and the abolition of privateering in the mid-19th century. The late 16th century offers insights into the early modern world of overlapping sovereignties and a chaotic interplay of personal ambition and political state projects, in a world in which states were still weak. The late 17th-century period shows navies bolstered, privateers more controlled, and pirates hunted. Finally, the mid-19th century case shows a dominant power with an increased interest in the protection of property at sea, rendering piracy dangerous and privateering undesirable.
Relationships 5.0
Authors: Kislev Elyakim
Published: April 2022

No longer confined to the sidelines, new interactive technologies like AI therapists, avatar friends, and robot assistants are ready to transform technology’s role from basic tools of convenience to intimate elements of our social and emotional lives. This turn towards human-like technology signals the beginning of a new epoch in human history, a change already facing both excitement and resistance. Blending science, sociology, history, and psychology, this book asks how recent technological developments cause humans to think differently about family lives, love affairs, and emotional needs. It argues that humans are currently living through a technological paradigm shift similar in magnitude to the preceding agricultural, industrial, and informational revolutions in human history. Thanks to the convergence of the cognitive revolution (AI), the sensorial revolution (VR and AR), and the physical revolution (robots), technology can fulfill emotional, intellectual, and physical needs that have until now been met by other humans. The book then exposes the fundamental questions behind such essentials as companionship, trust, and love, and offers fascinating and revealing ideas about what the coming years will look like.
Introduction
Authors: Kislev Elyakim
Published: April 2022

This introductory chapter provides an overview of recent technological advances in various fields and how they revolutionize the ways humans live in “Society 5.0.” In particular, the cognitive (AI), sensorial (virtual reality and augmented reality), and physical (robotics) revolutions taking place in Society 5.0 are expected to reshape humans’ emotional lives. These three revolutions encompass much of the human emotional experience and can no longer be dismissed as another life improvement. As it happened with previous technological revolutions in human history, we may soon see radical changes in the ways humans form connections. This introduction thus shows how further advances in these technologies may give rise to “Relationships 5.0,” whereby people develop feelings toward technology. To be clear, human-to-human relationships will continue to be a vital part of human lives and the process will be gradual as it was in the past.
Relationships 1.0
Authors: Kislev Elyakim
Published: April 2022

This chapter discusses the influence of technology on the tendencies of prehistoric societies and their attitude toward relationships in comparison to later cultures. How did technology affect hunter-gatherer forms of relationships? While most of today’s Western societies focus on the individual, the group stood at the center of hunter-gatherer society. This social structure allowed these societies to function efficiently in finding food and shelter. As survival stood at the center, the main aim of Relationships 1.0 was to procreate in safety, with some social and inter-group bonding goals also in play. Moreover, with no one living separately, the boundaries between couples became inconsequential. In this way, the nature of relationships (monogamous, sexually permissive, polyandrous, or polyamorous) was shaped by basic social structures driven by the technological means of finding food and acquiring shelter. The argument here is not of a direct and exclusive link between technological means and relationship formation, but rather that technological means triggered a chain of social circumstances, which, in turn, encouraged certain tendencies in pairing and bonding. In other words, relationships developed in light of the wider social organization and the means available to the people of Society 1.0.
Relationships 4.0
Authors: Kislev Elyakim
Published: April 2022

This chapter shows how relationships and kinships, which have progressed throughout human history, reached a new level in the recent information age. In the information society, the individual stands as the focal point of human society. Television, computers, the Internet, and smartphones brought a process of atomization and individualization to society. As every piece of information became another node on the web of knowledge, every individual became a vector on the social web. The family, in turn, saw a sharp decline in popularity. Instead of the family being essential to breadwinning, procreation, and social status, individualism rose to power, and values of freedom, creativity, and trying new things became central. Of course, technology is not the only element affecting these changes. Factors such as education, immigration, secularization, feminism, and even the invention of the oral contraceptive pill also played a role in the decline of the traditional nuclear family.
Conclusion
Authors: Kislev Elyakim
Published: April 2022

This concluding chapter reflects on the meaning of love in light of the possibility of consummating affection, care, and empathy through technology. Technology has increasingly shown the power to satisfy some of humans’ most sophisticated and nuanced emotional needs. Thus, if many components of human desires that used to seem irreplaceable, almost mystic, can be produced by technology now or will be in the near future, the three technological revolutions described in this book are paving a way to something fundamentally different. They are likely to change civilization, human society, and the concept of relationships in the same way that agriculture, and steam engines did when they were discovered and invented by humans. Naturally, these changes come with both advantages and disadvantages, and there is a need to explore, anticipate, and research how these technologies will affect human behavior, emotion, and society.
Reenacting the Enemy
Authors: Isurin Ludmila
Published: April 2022

This book discusses how group memories about recent political events are constructed by the media of the group and how the information provided by the media is consumed by individual minds to form memories of those events. Based on the accumulated research in three distinct areas—collective memory, media, and the mind—the book offers an interdisciplinary sociocognitive framework within which a case study of Russian and American memory construction is investigated. The analysis of seven political events involving Russia that took place in the second decade of the 21st century and were discussed in Russian and American media outlets showed how ideological bias, distortion, and schemata worked to push against the other in an attempt to establish a narrative that reenacted an old and now reemerged enemy. By initially invoking not entirely forgotten stereotypes from the decades of the Cold War and later reinforcing those with new stories that perfectly fit old narrative frames, the two countries—via their respective media—became engaged in an information war that ultimately aimed at reaching the minds of people in those two countries. Those minds, however, while consciously questioning the trustworthiness of news coverage by their respective media, have formed memories along the ideological lines provided by the very media that they claim they do not trust. The book brings together two different methodologies and resources: content analysis of media texts and empirical data from human participants.
Collective Memory, Journalism, and News Making
Authors: Isurin Ludmila
Published: April 2022

This chapter discusses the role of media in the construction of collective memory, especially in the post-broadcast era. It focuses on the role of institutions and power organizations standing behind journalists and influencing how news stories are reported. It discusses various techniques used by journalists to make such stories believable, relevant, and accessible to the target audience, such as the choice of eyewitnesses, selective sources, or using media templates in order to reinforce stereotypes and provide the typification of new reports. In addition, the chapter discusses techniques that intend to manipulate the minds of the group as well as it discusses the macro- and microstructures of the news text, including headlines, leads, and visuals, are also discussed.
Conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the Downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17
Authors: Isurin Ludmila
Published: April 2022

This chapter discusses two events that are related closely to the takeover of Crimea. The civil war in Ukraine that started with protests in southeastern regions of the country in spring 2014 and the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in the territory controlled by the separatists in summer 2014 are major events contested by the US and Russian governments and, by extension, the respective media of the two countries. Whereas the MH17 downing is discussed through the analyses of the two separate media, for the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, it was decided to take a parallel look—wherever possible—at how both media sources reflect on the same issues within this conflict.
Civil War in Syria and the 2016 US Presidential Election
Authors: Isurin Ludmila
Published: April 2022

This chapter discusses two events in the second decade of the 21st century that brought Russia and the United States to another standoff: the engagement of both countries in Syria’s civil war and Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. What makes these two events more similar than different is that both took place in an area not necessarily controlled by either of the two sides: the Middle East and cyberspace. Moreover, in both instances, Russia was accused by the United States of interference in the affairs of another state, which Russia strongly denied. Both events are discussed through the analysis of the US media followed by a similar analysis of Russian media.
The 2014 Sochi Olympics and the 2018 Poisoning of the Skripals
Authors: Isurin Ludmila
Published: April 2022

This chapter discusses two less significant events selected for the project, the Sochi Olympics and the poisoning of the Skripals. These two events, incidentally, occupy opposite ends on the temporal continuum of the more important international affairs discussed in this book: The Sochi Olympics happened a month before the takeover of Crimea, and the case of the Skripals’ poisoning in the United Kingdom fell on the rich soil of the accumulated anti-Russian and anti-American propaganda in the respective countries. With this in mind, the chapter shows how the ideological information war between the two countries had changed over the 4 years that separate these two events. The analysis of the US media is followed by the analysis of Russian media related to the event.
The Medical Model
Authors: Lenz Martin
Published: April 2022

This chapter presents Hume as endorsing a medical model of intersubjectivity. While it benefited greatly from so-called naturalistic and therapeutic readings, it differs from those in that it takes the references to medicine not as metaphorical. Rather, it will try to spell out how the model shapes Hume’s view of the mind. It shall be argued, then, that for Hume medical assumptions help us by seeing how our mental lives are socially shaped. Although Hume is not explicit about the precise medical theories he endorses, he is adamant to defend his account of sympathy against competing explanations, especially against so-called climate theories according to which our mental life is largely shaped by our physical environment rather than through interactions. The emerging position is that the sympathetic interdependence of our minds forms the background against which our views count as normal or good.
An Anxious Inheritance
Authors: Hughes Aaron W.
Published: April 2022

This study is about the tensions between the early framers of Islam and non-Muslims in the early Islamic period. More specifically, it is about how these early framers struggled with religious others, both external and internal, and how this struggle was ultimately responsible for the creation of what would emerge as (Sunnī) orthodoxy. While the latter would appear as the natural outgrowth of Muhammad’s preaching to those doing the framing, it was ultimately little more than a subsequent development accompanied by a retroactive projection onto the earliest period. Non-Muslims (among them Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians) and the “wrong” kinds of Muslims (e.g., Shīʿa) became integral—by virtue of their perceived stubbornness, infidelity, heresy, or the like—to understand what true religion was not and, just as importantly, what it should be. Without such religious others, proper belief could not be articulated and orthodoxy would simply have remained adrift in its own inchoateness.
Introduction
Authors: Fujiki Hideaki
Published: April 2022

The Introduction situates this book’s approach to cinema audiences within two theoretical frameworks: analyzing cinema audiences in terms of the discursive creation of historically constituted social subjects such as “the people;” and using the concept of historical contingency. Extant scholarship has tended to focus on the relationship between the audience/spectator on the one hand and the screen image and viewing conditions (theaters, movie-going practices, areas surrounding theaters, audiences’ social positions, etc.) on the other. In contrast, this book pays attention to discursive and non-discursive phenomena, which worked to associate cinema audiences with the formation of historical social subjects, whose terms gained relative degrees of currency in their respective contexts. The Introduction, by critically examining previous scholarship, also develops an approach through which cinema audiences and the social subjects they feed into are conceptualized as simultaneously “subjects” and “agents.” This approach may enable us not only to illuminate the complexity and significance of cinema and media audiences from a far-reaching socio-historical perspective, but also to recapture the hundred-year socio-cultural Japanese history as a whole from the lens of connections between cinema and media and social subjects. Finally, the Introduction demonstrates how the approach of this book offers a drastically different historical vision of Japanese cinema and media from that of previous scholarship in the field. Here and throughout the book, terms are constantly placed in quotations marks to remind readers of the nature of the terms endowed with historical contingency.
Mobilizing Individuals into “the National Populace”
Authors: Fujiki Hideaki
Published: April 2022

This chapter primarily analyzes discourses about the uniqueness of cinema, in order to elucidate how these discourses saw three levels of mobilizing people—first to mobilize them to watch national policy films, then to mobilize them to identify with “the national populace” redefined as self-disciplined subject, and finally to mobilize them for total war—as identical functions. While clashes erupted over the different principles of entertainment and education, popularity and prestige, and spontaneity and coercion, these cinema discourses led to the formation of fantasies that could disavow these conflicts, as well as contradictions concerning region, gender, and other social components. The chapter further suggests that this kind of fantasy structure carried over to the postwar era and even to the present day.
The Politics of “the Masses” in the Televisual and Atomic Age
Authors: Fujiki Hideaki
Published: April 2022

This chapter focuses on the three influential scholarly and critical discourses on “the masses” during the postwar period: mass society theory, mass culture theory, and mass communication theory. It argues that while these three discourses had different backgrounds, they shared a common base insofar as they all inherited concerns about “the masses” from the prewar period and were defined by a search for the possibility of a “democratic subjectivity” (minshu) that could resist systemic power in the postwar context. For many scholars and critics, television and nuclear power were both symbols of a newly emergent, large-scale, and systemic form of social power, which became so deeply embedded in everyday life that it became taken for granted and hence determined the thought and behavior of “the masses.” Thus, for these scholars, it was imperative to find possible methods of resistance. This situation, the chapter also elucidates, significantly differed from the US academic situation, where mass society theory, originating in Europe, attempted to expose mass society as a social form ultimately inducing and bolstering fascism, while mass communication research tended to explicitly or implicitly align itself with the aims of US governmental power within Cold War politics.
The Porous Intimate-Public Sphere of “Citizens”
Authors: Fujiki Hideaki
Published: April 2022

This chapter provides a case study of independent film screening events by “citizens,” and explicates how such events have functioned as nomadic and porous sites serving to create a multilayered network of media, “citizens,” and their concerns while also forming an intimate-public sphere where individuals can share contingent physical vulnerability and discuss their concerns and issues. The chapter first illuminates the development of de-territorializing-oriented “citizen’ ” networks, which are overwhelmingly organized by women, based on the theorized intimate sphere, and exemplify a new kind of social movement that increasingly takes advantage of social media. The chapter then shows how these events have functioned as junctures for people to connect themselves to existing networks of media, social concerns, and like-minded people while also expanding those multifaceted networks. The porous process of each event is enacted on the grounds of the intimate-public sphere, where a film screening and ensuing discussion function together as a catalyst for participating “citizens” to both share concerns and care for each other and deliberate on the issues and imagine strategies for changing the status quo, within the shared progression of time and physical space. These events function as resistance to economic and political power and as an intellectual space for grappling with the contradictions of the risk society, where risks such as potential nuclear disaster are born out of systemic forces or power network far beyond individuals’ wills, but the responsibility for those risks are imposed on each individual once an accident happens.
Breaking Away
Authors: Stucke Maurice E.
Published: April 2022

This book emphasizes that the privacy and autonomy concerns of consumers are indeed warranted, and the remedies deserve far greater attention than they have received from leading policymakers and experts to date. It offers a clear and accessible insight into how a few powerful firms, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, have used the same anticompetitive playbook and manipulated the current legal regime for their gain at people's collective expense. It also cites references from various prisms of economic theory, market data, policy, and law. The book addresses fundamental issues that confirm whether more competition necessarily promotes privacy and well-being. It discusses who owns personal data and what are the policy implications if personal data is non-rivalrous.
How Data-opolies Have Exploited the Current Legal Void, and What’s Being Proposed to Fix It
Authors: Stucke Maurice E.
Published: April 2022

This chapter surveys the multiple proposals to rein data-opolies in, which include improving privacy protection as a necessary means to deter their data-hoarding. It also mentions the emerging consensus that the data-opolies are expanding rather than shrinking and will continue to leverage their power into other markets. The chapter emphasizes how the current legal system moves too slow relative to the technological changes, noting the California legislature that implied that the law has not kept pace with personal privacy implications surrounding the collection, use, and protection of personal information. It discusses the United States’ and European Commission’s proposed far-reaching obligations on data-opolies as gatekeeper-related problems.
The Promise and Shortcomings of Treating Privacy as a Fundamental Inalienable Right
Authors: Stucke Maurice E.
Published: April 2022

This chapter considers an alternative approach of viewing privacy and one’s right in one’s data as a fundamental, inalienable right. It explains how deeming privacy as a fundamental right does not automatically provide individuals greater control over their data nor does it lead to a uniform approach to deter data-hoarding and curb the toxic competition engendered by behavioral advertising. It also examines the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which have been hailed as privacy highpoints. The chapter deliberates how CCPA and GDPR treat privacy as a fundamental, inalienable right and seek to give individuals greater control over their data. It explores the challenge in enacting the privacy framework that attacks the surveillance economy, which a few powerful platforms have designed for their benefit and at the public’s expense.
Avoiding Four Traps When Competition and Privacy Conflict
Authors: Stucke Maurice E.
Published: April 2022

We increasingly hear data-opolies using privacy concerns to justify behavior that coincidentally helps them maintain their dominance. This chapter flags four traps that await policymakers when competition and privacy conflict: opting for competition, opting for privacy, confusing what is measurable with what is important, and celebrating an impressive privacy improvement instead of being wary. Although privacy could be a legitimate justification for the data-opoly’s anticompetitive behavior, this chapter examines why one data-opoly’s privacy justifications promote neither privacy nor competition. The chapter emphasizes that neither privacy nor competition are absolute rights, and each must be balanced against other important societal interests and fundamental rights.
Introduction
Authors: Gorski Philip S. , Perry Samuel L. , Tisby Jemar
Published: April 2022

This chapter explains what white Christian nationalism (WCN) is and is not. It is a deep story about America’s past and a political vision of its future. The story claims that America was founded by and for (white, Protestant) Christians. It warns that America’s power and prosperity are endangered by racial, religious, and foreign-born others. The vision connects freedom, order, and violence in a particular way: freedom for white, native-born Christian men; order for everyone else; and violence for anyone who steps out of line. WCN is not just “Christian patriotism.” It is not about love of country but the defense of hierarchy. Nor is WCN synonymous with “evangelicalism.” Many white mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics also embrace it as do a small but growing number of non-Christians. Meanwhile, some conservative white evangelicals vehemently reject it, as do most of their non-white coreligioinists.
The Spirit of 1690
Authors: Gorski Philip S. , Perry Samuel L. , Tisby Jemar
Published: April 2022

The deep story of white Christian nationalism was already fully formed by around 1690, nearly three centuries before the emergence of the New Christian Right. It was woven together out of three stories taken from the Christian Bible: the Chosen People story, the End Times story and the Racial Curse story. Who counted as “white,” “Christian,” and “American” has changed over time. But the basic plot line has remained the same: America is a white Christian nation whose power and prosperity is threatened by racial, religious, and national others, inside and outside its borders. The chapter also highlights the recent transition in white Christian nationalism from an eschatology that favored reconstructing America into a biblical model toward a premillennial eschatology that foresees imminent chaos and conflict between God’s people and the forces of evil.
Avoiding “The Big One”
Authors: Gorski Philip S. , Perry Samuel L. , Tisby Jemar
Published: April 2022

White Christian nationalism is fast becoming a serious threat to American democracy. So long as white, native-born Christians were numerically and politically dominant, WCN could coexist with American democracy. As the nation has become less white and more secular, however, WCN has taken an authoritarian turn. The result is an increasing hostility not only toward the voting rights of racial and religious others, but toward democracy itself. The chapter documents with statistical data how WCN influences white Americans to support Donald Trump out of fear for their own persecution, and to favor electoral strategies and systems that help them maintain power (like the electoral college and gerrymandering). It concludes that America is at a crossroads. To the left lies the path toward a true multiracial democracy. Toward the right is a system of white minority rule. Call it Jim Crow 2.0. Only a broad, “popular front” stretching from democratic socialists to classical liberals that includes both secular progressives and religious conservatives will be strong enough to save American democracy.
Gains and Losses
Authors: Jasper James M. , Elliott-Negri Luke , Jabola-Carolus Isaac , Kagan Marc , Mahlbacher Jessica , Weisskircher Manès , Zhelnina Anna
Published: April 2022

What kind of tradeoffs do protest movements face in trying to change the world around them? Many scholars have tried to figure out why some social movements have an impact and others do not. By looking inside movements at their component parts and recurrent strategic interactions, we show that they usually produce familiar packages of effects, including both gains and losses. We ask what kinds of tradeoffs and dilemmas these packages reflect, why a certain kind of gain is so often accompanied by a familiar kind of loss. We do this by examining not just the diverse players involved in politics and protest but also the many strategic arenas in which they maneuver. Success in one arena often entails a loss in another. We analyze six diverse cases from around the world: Seattle’s conflict over the $15-an-hour minimum wage; the establishment of participatory budgeting in New York City; a democratic insurgency inside the New York Transport Workers’ Union; a communist party’s struggle to gain votes and also protect citizen housing in Graz, Austria; the internal movement tensions that led to Hong Kong’s umbrella occupation; and Russia’s electoral reform movement embodied in Alexei Navalny. Gains and Losses looks at the details of politics, where individuals make decisions, negotiate with allies and opponents, suffer tradeoffs, and struggle with dilemmas. No social movement gets everything it wants, and some get nothing. In between, most attain complex packages of gains and losses.
Introduction
Authors: Jasper James M. , Elliott-Negri Luke , Jabola-Carolus Isaac , Kagan Marc , Mahlbacher Jessica , Weisskircher Manès , Zhelnina Anna
Published: April 2022

In recent years, scholars have tried to explain what impact protest and social movements have on the world. Some efforts succeed and others, probably most, fail, but they all have a range of consequences. This book looks for patterns of gains and losses by concentrating on the interactions between protestors and various other strategic players as they engage in a range of arenas. This chapter also provides brief summaries of the book’s cases: the battle to establish a $15-an-hour minimum wage in Seattle, the establishment of participatory budgeting in New York City, a radical insurgency within New York’s Transport Workers Union, the efforts by the Communist Party of Graz, Austria to gain electoral success while helping residents with their housing needs, the internal struggles that led to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, and Russia’s electoral reform movement following the White Revolution of 2011.
Owning an Issue across Arenas
Authors: Jasper James M. , Elliott-Negri Luke , Jabola-Carolus Isaac , Kagan Marc , Mahlbacher Jessica , Weisskircher Manès , Zhelnina Anna
Published: April 2022

This chapter examines the crucial relationship between gains and losses across different arenas. The Communist Party of Austria in the country’s second-largest city of Graz benefited when it came to “own” the issue of housing advocacy. It leveraged its initial success in direct-help and protest arenas (more typically associated with social movements than political parties) and the arenas of legislation and government administration and policy, demonstrating the boomerang-effect package. However, entering many arenas has its own risks and costs. Entry into arenas controlled by others can turn out poorly, hurting rather than helping a player’s reputation. Time and other resources can be spread too thinly. Players don’t necessarily need to enter every arena; when to engage, and when not to, matters.
The Radical Package
Authors: Jasper James M. , Elliott-Negri Luke , Jabola-Carolus Isaac , Kagan Marc , Mahlbacher Jessica , Weisskircher Manès , Zhelnina Anna
Published: April 2022

Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement gained fame when it occupied multiple parts of the city, including around the Central Government Complex in Admiralty in September 2014. It was the product of nearly two years of organizing and negotiating between factions of the pro-democratic movement by a group called Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP). This chapter traces the complex interactions within the electoral reform movement during those two years, as well as interactions with government entities, in the months leading up to the occupation. The explicit dilemma was whether and how to initiate disruptive activities to put additional pressure on the authorities. The radical package that ensued yielded some benefits to movement players, but also devastating losses: greater media attention and a sense of urgency but also more state repression and the long-term collapse of the movement and the democracy it desired. The Occupy Trio tried to negotiate the naughty-or-nice dilemma by insisting that disruption was only a last resort, and a costly one to them personally.
The Personality Package
Authors: Jasper James M. , Elliott-Negri Luke , Jabola-Carolus Isaac , Kagan Marc , Mahlbacher Jessica , Weisskircher Manès , Zhelnina Anna
Published: April 2022

In electoral arenas, political personalities are crucial: they can run and win elections. Personalities are important to collective efforts beyond elections, too. They can become symbols of movements and proposals. Compound players struggle over how dominant and influential a particular personality should be. The hopes, risks, and outcomes that accompany decisions to rely on charismatic individuals represent a “personality package.” This chapter explores the gains and losses typical of the personality package, using the example of Alexei Navalny, a challenger to Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia, and his participation in the mayoral elections in Moscow in 2013.
Conclusion
Authors: Jasper James M. , Elliott-Negri Luke , Jabola-Carolus Isaac , Kagan Marc , Mahlbacher Jessica , Weisskircher Manès , Zhelnina Anna
Published: April 2022

Strategic tradeoffs give rise to dilemmas and decisions, and those decisions launch players down paths of interaction with others. In many cases, those interactions lead to patterns of gains and losses, spread across multiple arenas, that we can identify as familiar packages. Although we focus on the details of interactions among players in strategic arenas, microanalysis does not preclude explanations of “big” outcomes such as regimes and their transformations. Players in all sorts of strategic settings face similar dilemmas. The same kinds of interactions appear across many types of arenas, and help define those arenas. We have also seen some lessons for activists: be aware of tradeoffs and dilemmas, know what risks you are taking by choosing one route rather than another, and try to alleviate them.
Paying for Government’s Role in Democratic Liberalism
Authors: Holden Richard , Dixon Rosalind
Published: April 2022

This chapter explores the implications of fair market ideas for the budget bottom line of governments. It argues that democratic liberalism requires reconsidering neoliberal commitments to fiscal austerity, and a greater emphasis on long-term fiscal investment by governments, including cases where it leads to budget deficits and increased government debt, providing it is “good debt” not “bad debt” that supports capital and not purely current expenditure. It further suggests that the debt and deficit burden associated with a fair markets approach could be alleviated by a range of new sources of tax revenue—including through closing existing loopholes and new forms of capital and progressive value added taxes, although not large-scale increases in wealth, income, or corporate taxes.
Ground War
Authors: Goedert Nicholas
Published: April 2022

Ground War tackles the controversies, litigation, and effects surrounding partisan gerrymandering of the U.S. Congress. The book argues that nonpartisan commissions, not courts, are best equipped to address the issues presented by gerrymandering. It illustrates how existing measures and legal standards are too narrow, being well-adapted to evaluating maps in swing states in close elections but failing to adapt to states or national electoral environments favoring one party. The book demonstrates that the bias and responsiveness of partisan maps are highly sensitive to both the makeup of a state’s electorate and the ephemeral election conditions under which individual elections take place. Therefore efforts to convince courts to adopt legal standards based on any such existing measures are misguided. The book makes its argument through multiple empirical approaches. First, it shows how competition and responsiveness have varied in actual elections as a function of the map-drawing party in interaction with national electoral tides in counterintuitive ways. Second, it uses new measurement techniques to simulate recent maps under a broad range of electoral conditions, revealing differences under varied redistricting regimes and partisan tides and wide variation in the magnitude of bias and responsiveness of partisan gerrymanders. But this does not mean that partisan gerrymandering must be excused as a dilemma without a reasonable remedy. Instead, Ground War argues that nonpartisan commissions, adopted state by state, represent the best alternative to legislative districting, presenting evidence that such commissions foster competitive elections, produce unbiased delegations, and give consideration to representational claims distinctive to each state.
Fintech and Risk Management
Authors: Allen Hilary J.
Published: April 2022

This chapter looks at the risk management function performed by the financial system for the broader economy. It explains how that risk management function is likely to be transformed by the application of machine learning technology, and considers the ways in which that transformation could benefit and harm financial stability. In particular, this chapter focuses on problems associated with the complexity of machine learning models, and their potential to exacerbate herd behavior when it comes to financial decision-making. This chapter ends with three case studies. The first looks at the robo-investing industry, the second considers the use of machine learning by BlackRock’s Aladdin risk management platform, and the third explores the potential financial stability implications of some “insurtech” innovations being adopted by the insurance industry.
Conclusion
Authors: Allen Hilary J.
Published: April 2022

The short conclusion of this book is a call to arms, urging readers to agitate for precautionary regulation of fintech by underlining the potential stakes of fintech-precipitated financial crises—not just for our economy, but also for our democracy. To assist with this process, the conclusion engages in a “mythbusting” exercise, systematically dismantling many of the arguments about innovation, efficiency, and cost that are likely to be marshaled against taking a precautionary approach to regulating fintech. It also reiterates one of the book’s key arguments: that the private sector simply does not have the incentives, information, and ability to coordinate behavior necessary to address the systemic risks emerging from the rise of fintech. A regulatory response is therefore needed.
Optics and Immanent Lawful Teleology
Authors: McDonough Jeffrey K.
Published: April 2022

This chapter begins with a discussion of Leibniz’s seminal Unitary Principle of Optics, Catoptrics and Dioptrics, published in 1682 in the Acta Eruditorum. In that piece, Leibniz shows how the central laws of geometrical optics—the laws of reflection and refraction—can be derived from an optimality principle according to which light takes the easiest path between its starting and ending points. After sketching the historical and technical context of Leibniz’s discoveries in optics, the chapter goes on to explore the implications of Leibniz’s discoveries for his views on teleology. It argues that Leibniz’s immanent lawful teleology presents a formidable challenge even to contemporary philosophers, many of whom are understandably reluctant to allow genuine teleological explanations at the level of fundamental physics.
Hanging Chains and Monadic Agency
Authors: McDonough Jeffrey K.
Published: April 2022

This chapter looks to Leibniz’s work on catenaries—freely hanging cords suspended at both ends—for insight into his understanding of monadic agency. After discussing Leibniz’s understanding of catenaries as instances of optimal form, the chapter argues that catenaries provide an especially elegant model for Leibniz’s understanding of monadic agency, a model that helps to resolve otherwise outstanding problems in Leibniz’s thinking about how immaterial mind-like substances may unfold in a goal-directed manner. As a whole, the chapter aims to show how specific features of optimal form may be invoked to provide Leibniz’s views on monadic agency a coherence and elegance that they would otherwise lack.
Empathy and Altruism
Authors: Krebs Dennis L.
Published: April 2022

This chapter reviews theory and research supporting the contention that mental mechanisms that induce individuals to empathize with others have evolved in several species, and advanced levels of empathy motivate us to help others as an end in itself. It offers evidence that there is a close parallel between the evolution of mental mechanisms that mediate empathy and the development of these mechanisms through the life span. It reviews research indicating that advanced perspective-taking abilities enable us to experience empathic concern for the plight of others that motivates us to help them in order to improve their lot, as opposed to helping them in order to relieve our own distress or to achieve other selfish goals, such as making a good impression, allaying our guilt, and improving our mood.
Contextual Drivers of Difference
Authors: Bruner Christopher M.
Published: April 2022

Ultimately, the project of describing the corporation and corporate law’s domain becomes a matter of describing drivers of difference around the world. Toward that end, this chapter explores various forms of legal, cultural, market, and historical dynamics that have led to substantial divergences in terms of how the corporation is conceptualized, and how corporate law’s domain is defined, across jurisdictions and over time. The aim is not to provide a comprehensive account of these drivers of difference. Rather, the goal of this chapter is to identify a set of core contextual dynamics that are critical to the more flexible framework developed later in the book, and that help to illuminate the underlying forces at work in the various comparative analyses that subsequently build upon that framework.
Re-Imagining Corporate Accountability
Authors: Bruner Christopher M.
Published: April 2022

This chapter analyses the nature and scope of corporate accountability through multiple lenses. First, Bruner assesses the nature and scope of directors’ accountability through the composition of the board, considering systems where non-shareholder constituencies (notably, employees) have some measure of direct board representation; initiatives aimed at increasing the diversity of directors in publicly traded companies; and speculation that boards of directors might be augmented, or even replaced entirely, by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. Next, the chapter considers the degree to which legal responsibility for the impacts of global value chains ought to flow up to entities at the top of those chains, whether they are organized through corporate parent-subsidiary relationships or through nominally arms’-length contractual relationships. Finally, the chapter assesses a striking national effort to reimagine corporate governance along more sustainable lines—the corporate governance system of post-apartheid South Africa, which provides a vivid case study through which to assess pitfalls and opportunities that may arise in pursuing greater sustainability through corporate governance.
Introduction
Authors: Allen Michael S.
Published: April 2022

This chapter introduces Niścaldās’s magnum opus, The Ocean of Inquiry, offering evidence of its popularity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and exploring the reasons for its subsequent neglect. The chapter also introduces the framework of “Greater Advaita Vedānta,” which highlights the spread of Advaita Vedānta not only through Sanskrit philosophical works but through vernacular works, narratives and dramas, and “eclectic” works blending Vedānta with other traditions. It is argued that a study of Greater Advaita Vedānta is necessary if we are to understand where, when, how, and why Advaita Vedānta came to be viewed as (in the words of A. L. Basham) “the standard philosophy of intellectual Hinduism.”
Conclusion
Authors: Allen Michael S.
Published: April 2022

This concluding chapter argues for the relevance of Indian scholasticism to the emergence of modern Hinduism. The chapter begins with a summary of the “construction of Hinduism” debate, before turning to a study of the final chapter of The Ocean of Inquiry, in which Niścaldās presents a synthesis of various philosophical schools and theological sects typically identified as “Hindu,” with Vedānta at their summit. It is argued that this presentation, which might seem distinctively modern, can in fact be traced to the work of earlier, premodern thinkers. The chapter suggests that the scholastic method itself—with its aims of synthesizing, harmonizing, and removing doubts—contributed to the gradual systematization of an expanded Vedic canon. The unification of traditions that would later come to be labeled as “Hindu” can thus be understood, at least in part, as a natural result of the kind of inquiry embodied in Niścaldās’s magnum opus.
British Pasts
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

This chapter focuses on accounts of the history of the Welsh (usually referred to as Britons), written (mostly) in Latin, from the sixth century to the eve of the first Norman invasions of Wales in the 1070s. After briefly considering how Bede and other early medieval English historians portrayed the Britons and Welsh, it assesses the significance of Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae (‘The Ruin of Britain’), possibly datable to c.540, which interpreted the Britons’ loss of territories in Britain to the English as divine punishment for their sins. Attention turns in the rest of the chapter to the collection of historical texts extant in British Library, Harleian MS 3859: Historia Brittonum (‘The History of the Britons’, 829/30), the Harleian chronicle or A-text of Annales Cambriae, and the Harleian genealogies. The discussion highlights the strong identification with a wider Brittonic world revealed by these works and their use of a wide range of sources, including texts from England, Ireland, and the European Continent.
Saints, Kings, and Princes
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

This chapter examines the increasing quantity and variety of Welsh history writing produced between the late eleventh and late thirteenth centuries. Much of this responded to political changes, both attempts by Welsh rulers to expand and consolidate their power, and foreign conquest and settlement that led to the creation of marcher lordships and to attempts by kings of England to assert their overlordship over Wales which culminated in the Edwardian conquest. It begins by focusing on accounts of the ancient and early medieval history of the Britons of Wales written between the late eleventh and mid-twelfth centuries: saints’ Lives and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s hugely popular Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’), a cornerstone of medieval Welsh historical writing. This section concludes by examining the reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the writings of Gerald of Wales and Welsh translations of Geoffrey’s History. The rest of the chapter turns to narrative works in which secular rulers occupy centre stage. It begins with the only surviving medieval biography of a medieval Welsh ruler, the Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137), before discussing Latin chronicles, especially those underlying the Welsh-language chronicles known as Brut y Tywysogyon (‘The Chronicle of the Princes’). After addressing some of the textual problems these pose, the chapter assesses how the chroniclers portrayed Welsh rulers and the extent to which they promoted the idea of a united Wales.
From the Universal to the Local
Authors: Pryce Huw
Published: April 2022

This chapter examines the different frameworks adopted for narrating the history of Wales in works composed between the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. First, it analyses the treatment of Wales in the world chronicle written in Welsh and completed in 1552 by Elis Gruffudd, a member of an impoverished Flintshire gentry family, while serving in the English garrison in Calais. This is followed, second, by an assessment of the scope and purpose of the first works conceived as histories of Wales, both written in English by Welsh Renaissance scholars who adapted the medieval narrative framework of Brut y Tywysogyon in accounts focused on the period from the late seventh century to the Edwardian conquest: Humphrey Llwyd’s Cronica Walliae (1559) and the first printed history of Wales, David Powel’s The Historie of Cambria (1584), an edited and expanded version of Llwyd’s work. Third, the chapter turns attention to histories of families and counties by members of the Welsh gentry, including chorographical accounts (influenced by similar works in England) such as George Owen of Henllys’s Description of Penbrokshire (1603), and highlights their greater readiness than Llwyd and Powel to cover events from the Edwardian conquest of Wales down to their own day.