bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Modern Business and the Rise of the Japanese Middle Classes
Authors: Hunter Janet
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how economic processes played a crucial part in the emergence of a new social group in Japan between the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the First World War. Having a certain level of income was integral to any lifestyle that might be viewed as “middle class.” Moreover, the pattern of income distribution and economic activity helped determine the changing shape of class and social relations and the discourse surrounding them. The chapter shows that patterns of consumption drew on both “traditional” Japanese and “Western” patterns in a very specific way. It also demonstrates that the emergence of a Japanese middle class relied not least on transformations of the Japanese economy that date back as far as the seventeenth century.
Asymmetric Globality and South American Narratives of Bourgeois Failure
Authors: Parker David S.
Published: May 2020

This chapter shows how, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South America, intellectuals witnessed European and U.S. industrial progress, imperial power, and apparent cultural modernity, against which they compared their own nations, usually unfavorably. One major strain of national self-criticism focused on the supposed absence of a genuine bourgeois middle class or, if existent, its inability to carry out the “historical mission” attributed to its European counterpart. The diagnoses ranged from a focus, in midcentury, on the legacies of Spanish oppression, to more radical, materialist, nationalist, vanguardist, and anti-imperialist perspectives in the 1920s. Yet ideologically divergent explanations of middle-class failure often had common themes, many of which persisted into the 1970s and inspired both cultural and dependencia theories of Latin American underdevelopment that still echo today. Finding similar debates in Argentina, Chile, and Peru—countries whose economic and demographic fortunes varied considerably—the chapter shows that narratives of a missing or flawed bourgeoisie may have accurately reflected the knock-on effects of Latin America's successful insertion into the global economy.
Learning in the Fast Lane
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

The Advanced Placement (AP) program stands as the foremost source of college-level academics for millions of high school students in the United States and beyond. More than 22,000 schools now participate in it, across nearly forty subjects, from Latin and art to calculus and computer science. Yet remarkably little has been known about how this nongovernmental program became one of the greatest success stories in K–12 education—until now. This book offers an account of one of the most important educational initiatives of our time. The book traces the story of AP from its mid-twentieth-century origins as a niche benefit for privileged students to its emergence as a springboard to college for high schoolers nationwide, including hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged youth. Today, AP not only opens new intellectual horizons for smart teenagers, but also strengthens school ratings, attracts topflight teachers, and draws support from philanthropists, reformers, and policymakers. At the same time, it faces numerous challenges, including rival programs, curriculum wars, charges of elitism, the misgivings of influential universities, and the difficulty of infusing rigor into schools that lack it. In today's polarized climate, can AP maintain its lofty standards and surmount the problems that have sunk so many other bold education ventures?
Introduction
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Advanced Placement (AP) program. Advanced Placement is a privately operated, mostly privately financed, and almost entirely voluntary curricular option for high schools and their teachers and students—one that has been competently managed and adroitly led by the nonprofit, nonpartisan College Board. It has mostly avoided the politics and fads that roil contemporary American public education, even as it has gradually evolved into a significant player in the longest-running and most compelling reform impulse of all: to widen educational opportunity and foster upward mobility for disadvantaged youngsters. For several decades after its founding in the mid-twentieth century, AP was a modest venture—scarcely visible on the K–12 scene—which conferred extra advantages on a relative handful of already-fortunate kids attending a short list of exclusive private and posh suburban public high schools. Today, however, AP's profile is far higher and markedly different: A host of policies, auxiliary programs, and booster organizations have widened access to it. Not only is its scale vastly greater, its cadres are also much more diverse, both demographically and geographically, and it is being deployed strategically in many places to strengthen the secondary schooling and postsecondary prospects of poor and minority youngsters who long lacked access to high-level coursework.
Early Days
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the earliest days of Advanced Placement (AP) and the growing pains of its first two decades. At the outset, AP was explicitly intended for the strongest students at top high schools, those who “already had the luxury of being bound for prestigious colleges and universities, room to excel and an inducement to continue to work hard.” However, while the lore surrounding the program's birth associates it mostly with eastern prep schools, in fact the “pioneer schools” were a mix of independent and public institutions, the latter mostly located in upper-middle-class suburbs of major cities in the East and Midwest. Acceleration and degree credit were not the only appeal—or benefit—of AP. Many students were “content with the enrichment that the AP courses had provided” and “never applied for either AP credit or advancement in college.” For all the excitement and expansion, however, after two decades AP remained predominantly a boon for relatively privileged kids.
Poor Kids Advance, Too
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the developments in Advanced Placement (AP) from the years following its first two decades up to the mid-1990s. By the late 1970s, a profound directional shift began with the gradual emergence of a second major AP mission: assisting able disadvantaged students to engage with and master college-level academic challenges during high school; boosting their confidence that they might in fact be “college material” even if family members and neighbors had never matriculated; and—as with their more privileged age-mates—holding out the possibility of exam scores that would elevate their admissions prospects and kick-start their progress toward degrees. As the participation of minority youngsters expanded faster than the program as a whole, particularly toward the end of the 1980s, the national AP population began to diversify. State legislators began to pass laws that encouraged AP participation and expanded access to it. These years also saw the College Board adding more subjects to the AP catalog. Some of the new classes were accessible to younger high school students without a lot of prerequisites, and some appeared less daunting than physics and calculus. Ultimately, during this period, “AP became a national program to a degree which even its most fervent supporters in the early years could not have imagined.”
Growing AP in Gotham
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter assesses how the nation's largest school district, New York City, is tackling its own Advanced Placement (AP) challenge. In 2018, the city's Department of Education (DOE) housed more AP students than all but a dozen states. It is therefore not surprising that the challenge of effecting any major change in how AP works in Gotham is gargantuan when placed alongside a city like Fort Worth. Yet the story of AP in the Big Apple shares many of the same dynamics seen in Texas. As recently as 2015–16, more than a hundred of the city's four-hundred-plus high schools offered no AP courses at all—and many of those schools are located in poor neighborhoods full of African American, Hispanic, and immigrant youngsters. Over the years, municipal leaders sought in various ways to rectify this obvious inequity, even as they undertook myriad other high school reforms. One such growth initiative came in September of 2013, when the DOE joined forces with the College Board and the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) to launch an “AP Expansion” program meant to last three years. Two years later, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared—as part of his own ambitious education initiatives—that AP would be introduced into every high school that did not already have it. The chapter then analyzes in detail these two citywide initiatives, including their early results and some lessons that may be drawn from their experience to date.
Making a Difference
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter looks at the good that Advanced Placement (AP) is doing against the challenges that it faces now. When AP emerged in the 1950s, and for decades thereafter, poor and minority youngsters had limited access to the best that American education had to offer, and those limits were part of what kept them poor. Today, however, AP's rich curriculum, sophisticated pedagogy, and rigorous expectations are coming within reach of many girls and boys from disadvantaged circumstances, thanks in no small part to the College Board's wholehearted embrace of that additional mission as well as the hard work and support of policy makers, educators, and philanthropists. Yet desirable as it is to open AP-level academics to more kids in more schools and thereby help level the playing fields of life, the reason this is hard to make happen is that genuine success requires so many other things to move in sync, both in school systems and in the lives of kids. Nevertheless, opening the AP door to more kids is a good thing to do, not only for the benefit of those immediately affected but also because its implications should reverberate through what precedes and follows it. The chapter then considers the future of AP program.
Inventing Separation of Powers
Authors: Flaherty Martin S.
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on separation of powers. It shows that even standard historical accounts do not fully appreciate how central the separation of powers was in the ferment that led to the U.S. Constitution. Separation of powers first of all served as a newly central tool in diagnosing perceived failures in the first state constitutions, drafted following the issuing of the Declaration of Independence. Separation of powers, hitherto a secondary idea, came to the fore to demonstrate that too much power had been concentrated in the legislatures. The same idea that exposed the problem also pointed to the solution. Separation of powers suggested that both the executive and judicial branches needed to be made sufficiently independent and equipped to check the dominant legislatures. For the judiciary in particular, that meant, among other things, salary protection, life tenure, and the emerging idea of constitutional judicial review.
Curtiss-Wright versus Youngstown
Authors: Flaherty Martin S.
Published: May 2020

This chapter seeks to establish the symbolic terms of a transition that remains incomplete. By the outset of the twentieth century, America's ascendance as a major power exerted corresponding pressure on the Constitution's original conception of meaningful separation of powers applied to foreign and domestic affairs alike. Increased engagement in world affairs, diplomacy, colonization, imperialism, and wars major and minor inevitably shifted power to the executive at the expense of Congress and the courts. At the same time, courts had become less equipped to play their still-traditional role. By the mid-twentieth century, these and other factors pressured the judiciary to retreat from its envisioned role. At least a partial retreat did begin, and this would become more marked as the century progressed. It would not, however, become sufficiently systematic, unbroken, or unopposed to count as a legitimate customary amendment to the Constitution's original scheme. Then and now, two iconic cases embody the challenge in best determining the Court's role in foreign affairs and its ongoing repudiation: United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. and Youngstown Sheet ﹠ Tube Co. v. Sawyer.
Conclusion
Authors: Flaherty Martin S.
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter concedes that, in many of the areas considered, on certain issues the federal judiciary has already proceeded perilously far in the wrong direction. Justice Jackson's opinion in Youngstown helps explain why, citing the distinct advantages of the executive in particular in asserting foreign affairs powers in a dangerous world, especially given a subservient legislative branch. The executive's advantages, moreover, may be even more ominously robust than Jackson supposed, and not just because of the nature of modern international relations. The combination of aggressive executive and supine Congress has for some time reached into the composition of the Supreme Court itself. Typical among recent appointments are candidates with executive branch experience and an ensuing commitment to judicial deference to the president, especially in foreign affairs.
Moving Up without Losing Your Way
Authors: Morton Jennifer
Published: May 2020

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, this book looks at the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. The book reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, the book seeks to reverse this course. It urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. The book paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves.
Introduction Strivers
Authors: Morton Jennifer M.
Published: May 2020

This chapter provides a background on ethical costs of upward mobility. It explains what ethical costs are, why they matter, and how to contend with them. The chapter outlines the elements of a new narrative of upward mobility, one that is honest about the ethical costs involved. It also emphasizes how narratives are powerful tools in shaping the understanding of people and their future. The ideas introduced are not only backed up by arguments or evidence from the social sciences, but also illustrated by the stories of real-life strivers. It does not intend to serve as a rigorous, systematic empirical study of the experiences of first-generation students. Rather, it is meant to show narratives of upward mobility that are far more ethically complicated than is generally acknowledged.
Resisting Complicity
Authors: Morton Jennifer M.
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the need for strivers to think about their potential complicity within the social structures that make it hard for others who are disadvantaged to succeed. It argues that strivers are in a unique position to improve those social structures because of the skills and knowledge they acquire on the path upward. The field of philosophy tends to attract those who already have a privileged position in society. Consequently, much of the philosophical dialogue concerning justice centers around work written by White, privileged men, even though this is the population that has the least to lose by maintaining the status quo. The intellectual and creative energy that will drive social change will come from those who have the most to gain from the system changing.
International Organizations and Development as a Global Mission
Authors: Lorenzini Sara
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores how the growing awareness of the global dimensions of development had made international organizations, especially the United Nations, crucial to development thinking and practice. International organizations' involvement in development proceeded in stages, converging toward “one size fits all,” universal technocratic knowledge, and solutions unconnected to cultural specificities, even if distinctive in their ideological orientation. In the 1990s, the naturalized French diplomat Stéphane Hessel wrote that development was a concept that informed the whole structure of the United Nations and gave it meaning. He claimed it took forty years to move from the black-and-white reasoning of the 1950s toward a more nuanced view. The chapter tells the story of this transformation. International organizations that had acted as agencies of civilization in late colonial times became arenas in which different ideas of modernity were articulated. Some, like the World Bank, were clearly the expression of a Western capitalist mindset, whereas others, like the United Nations, provided a home for both technocratic thinking and anti-imperialist ideas that differed from the prevailing modernization theory.
Resources, Environment, and Development
Authors: Lorenzini Sara
Published: May 2020

This chapter studies how the linkage between state power and large-scale projects that ruled during the modernization years entered a crisis in the 1970s, when modernity ceased to be an end in itself and new sensibilities replaced what in 1958 Nehru called the “disease of giganticism.” While development struggled to keep its promise to quickly grant underdeveloped countries wealth and well-being, problems related to industrialization appeared in the form of ecological imbalances. At the turn of the decade, development was considered a failure as a Cold War weapon, and there was widespread doubt about planning. Though ideology was still unyielding in the periphery, where international crises and civil wars stemming from decolonization and the failure of new states continued to fuel Cold War dynamics, in international organizations the East–West conflict rarely challenged the fundamental underlying agreement on global issues. Instead, a major cleavage ran along the old color line—between a rich, white, developed North and a colored, poor, underdeveloped South.
Authority
Authors: Dweck Yaacob
Published: May 2020

This chapter situates the polemic over Sabbatianism as a problem of authority. It casts Jacob Sasportas versus the Sabbatians, particularly Nathan of Gaza. If Sabbatian prophets and their followers drew on their ecstatic physical experience of redemption as the source of legitimacy for their suspension of the law and their introduction of new rituals, Sasportas turned to the bookshelf in order to reinstitute textual discipline. Against the authenticity of their revelations, Sasportas upheld written norms as the sole source of authority. Trained in a tradition that placed emphasis on erudition at the expense of local custom or individual experience, Sasportas took pride in his mastery over the entirety of Jewish law from the Mishnah and the Talmud of antiquity through the codes and commentaries of the Middle Ages up through the most recent responsa. The chapter then examines the debate over messianic authority as it transformed into one of text versus text.
Crowds
Authors: Dweck Yaacob
Published: May 2020

This chapter assesses the doubt of an individual versus the certainty of the crowd. It posits that Jacob Sasportas's aversion to Sabbetai Zevi as the Messiah was as much a response to the force of perceived social chaos as it was an attack on the truth-value of Sabbetai Zevi's claims. Sabbatianism posed an acute philosophical problem to Sasportas. The certainty with which the Sabbatian believers propagated their newfound faith, the confidence and imperiousness with which they attempted to silence dissent, and their contempt for doubt as a condition for belief, all of these threatened the welfare of the body politic. Belief, or the acquisition of the correct opinions, could be cultivated and acquired only if the welfare of the body politic and the welfare of the soul had been adequately regulated. These intellectual and social demands forced Sasportas to draw upon the single most important resource he had in order to confer intellectual legitimacy upon his argument for the conditionality of messianic belief: Maimonides. As opposed to the collective need for instant certainty, he upheld the individual quest for discernment. Throughout The Fading Flower of the Zevi and throughout his long career in the Sephardic Diaspora, Sasportas consciously cultivated the posture of an articulate outsider. He saw himself as a figure of authority, the product of his lineage and his learning, who was quite capable of seeing the problems in Jewish society.
Prophecy
Authors: Dweck Yaacob
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses Sabbatian messianism as an epistemological problem. How does one know whether or not someone is the Messiah? In the middle of the seventeenth century, prophecy was one way of obtaining such knowledge. Prophecy played a decisive role in the success of Sabbatianism. Adherents to the new movement emphasized the renewal of revelation both in the period of its rapid spread prior to Sabbetai Zevi's conversion as well as in the years that followed. Beginning with the leading Sabbatian propagandist, Nathan of Gaza, and continuing well into the eighteenth century, Sabbatians spoke and wrote about their activities as prophecy. Repeatedly they invoked their own capacity to communicate with the divine as a source for their own authority. Indeed, prophecy often served as the legitimating grounds for their suspension of legal norms and invention of new rituals. The chapter then looks at Jacob Sasportas's response to the Sabbatian renewal of prophecy as well as to other modes of knowing, such as dreams and astrology. For all of Sasportas's profound skepticism about the Sabbatian revival of prophecy, he refused to condemn the category outright. Just as he had continued to insist on his belief in the messianic idea but rejected Sabbetai Zevi as its fulfillment, he continued to hold open the possibility of prophecy while denying the legitimacy of Nathan of Gaza.
Coda
Authors: Dweck Yaacob
Published: May 2020

This coda details how Jacob Sasportas, as well as his three most intensive readers—Jacob Emden, Gershom Scholem, and Joel Teitelbaum—all perceived their worlds to be in crisis. For Sasportas, the crisis in the middle of the 1660s was one of order. This manifested itself as contempt for the law. Sasportas used all the resources of the textual tradition he called his own to make sense of the world around him, a world that a Messiah whom he had never met and who lived half a world away had turned upside down. He gestured toward a position that validated his own provisional skepticism as a better path to genuine repentance than the ardent and collective certainty of the Jewish crowd. A half century after Sasportas died, Jacob Emden reedited and reprinted Sasportas, thereby forging an image of Sasportas as a heresy hunter. A century and a half after Emden's death, Gershom Scholem turned to Sabbetai Zevi and the messianic movement around him, which enabled Scholem to tell a story about Jewish immanence without the law. Meanwhile, Joel Teitelbaum lived through the same geopolitical catastrophe as Scholem but reached a different conclusion about it. Just as Sasportas had the courage of his convictions to speak out against the Jews of his day, nearly all of whom had become believers in Sabbetai Zevi, Teitelbaum similarly rebuked the Jews of his own time, nearly all of whom had become Zionists.
Introduction
Authors: Folch Christine
Published: May 2020

This chapter gives a background on politics via water. It talks about Hydropolitics, the political economy that comes from an industrialization and electrification powered by water. It uncovers how it comes to matter to politics within Paraguay that the electricity that powers homes and factories comes from hydro, not fossil fuels. To untangle how energy can be simultaneously technological and sociopolitical, this chapter explains that people's relationship to the environment is a form of cultural production, which, in turn, inflects political, economic, and social structures. Understanding the dam requires the dual intervention of political ecology, which analyzes both how human interventions shape environment and how the shaping of nature in turn affects human communities. Itaipú has presented the Brazilian and Paraguayan governments the ability to achieve multiple political goals and has had far-reaching cascade effects. What Itaipú Dam has done is to turn the Paraná River under its influence into a political-electrical machine, an engineered complex of geological objects, atmospheric cycles, and cement intrusions.
Ecoterritorial Turns
Authors: Folch Christine
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores how water creates community. It explains how citizenship is constructed in relation to transboundary water, which is distinct from patterns of governance based on fixed territorial boundaries in relation to connections between legal priorities, climate change, and the durability of capitalism. In liberal democracies, communal hopes and fears get fought over in law. However, this chapter takes law as a site of values enforcement through the signed Joint Declaration and a proposed region-wide South American Energy Integration Treaty, which rescripted sovereignty and state power under new hydraulic pressures. The chapter also describes how rights get attached to water-as-energy and how rights are generated by water-as-energy. Because of the quality of movement, water's ecoterritorial attributes exceed the boundaries of the national state, implying a larger region as the basis of an ecocitizenship. It discusses how ethics are expressed through renewable energy as law is produced and circulated through Itaipú.
The Master Equation and the Convergence Problem in Mean Field Games
Authors: Cardaliaguet Pierre , Delarue François , Lasry Jean-Michel , Lions Pierre-Louis
Published: May 2020

This book describes the latest advances in the theory of mean field games, which are optimal control problems with a continuum of players, each of them interacting with the whole statistical distribution of a population. While it originated in economics, this theory now has applications in areas as diverse as mathematical finance, crowd phenomena, epidemiology, and cybersecurity. Because mean field games concern the interactions of infinitely many players in an optimal control framework, one expects them to appear as the limit for Nash equilibria of differential games with finitely many players as the number of players tends to infinity. The book rigorously establishes this convergence, which has been an open problem until now. The limit of the system associated with differential games with finitely many players is described by the so-called master equation, a nonlocal transport equation in the space of measures. After defining a suitable notion of differentiability in the space of measures, the authors provide a complete self-contained analysis of the master equation. Their analysis includes the case of common noise problems in which all the players are affected by a common Brownian motion. They then go on to explain how to use the master equation to prove the mean field limit. The book presents two important new results in mean field games that contribute to a unified theoretical framework for this exciting and fast-developing area of mathematics.
Presentation of the Main Results
Authors: Cardaliaguet Pierre , Delarue François , Lasry Jean-Michel , Lions Pierre-Louis
Published: May 2020

This chapter collects the main results of the master equation for the convergence of the Nash system. It explains the notation used, specifies the notion of derivatives in the space of measures, and describes the assumptions on the data. One of the striking features of the master equation is that it involves derivatives of the unknown with respect to the measure. This chapter also discusses the link between the two notions of derivatives, which have been used in the mean field game (MFG) theory. The main result states that the master equation has a unique classical solution under the regularity and monotonicity assumptions on H, F, and G. Once the master equation has a solution, this solution can be used to build approximate solutions for the Nash system with N-players.
A Starter: The First-Order Master Equation
Authors: Cardaliaguet Pierre , Delarue François , Lasry Jean-Michel , Lions Pierre-Louis
Published: May 2020

This chapter contains a preliminary analysis of the master equation in the simpler case when there is no common noise. Some of the proofs given in this chapter consist of a sketch only. One of the reasons is that some of the arguments used to investigate the mean field games (MFGs) system have been already developed in the literature. Another reason is that the chapter constitutes a starter only, specifically devoted to the simpler case without common noise. It provides details of the global Lipschitz continuity of H. The solutions of the MFG system are uniformly Lipschitz continuous, which are independently of initial conditions.
Convergence of the Nash System
Authors: Cardaliaguet Pierre , Delarue François , Lasry Jean-Michel , Lions Pierre-Louis
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about addressing the convergence problem, which is devoted to the convergence of the Nash system. It contains several results on the differential calculus on the space of probability measures together with an Itô's formula for functionals of a process taking values in the space of probability measures. For simplicity, most of the analysis provided in the chapter is on the torus, but the method is robust enough to accommodate the nonperiodic setting. The chapter also shows that monotonicity plays no role in the proofs of certain theorems. Basically, only the global Lipschitz properties of H and DpH, together with the nondegeneracy of the diffusions and the various bounds obtained for the solution of the master equation and its derivatives matter.
Doubt and Unbelief in the Early Modern Era
Authors: Pastore Stefania
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at freethinkers and how they came to their freethinking. From an early modern perspective, the pathways to a humanistic understanding of religion prove to have been more complicated than sometimes thought. The chapter then focuses on humanist scholars, like the diplomat and man of letters Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. It was an encounter with ancient texts and the work of Sextus Empiricus in particular that turned Mendoza into a skeptic in matters of religion. However, what caused him to be so susceptible to Pyrrhonist argument in the first place was the Granada milieu he grew up in, a world of religious encounter where Muslim and Jewish writings alongside Christian ones circulated in challenging profusion.
Contesting Secularization
Authors: Gordon Peter E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter reveals that even secular-minded thinkers like Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas were or are now sensitive to such claims discussed in the previous chapter. Weber understood secularization as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but he was aware that modernization came at a price and a steep one. The diminishment and privatization of religion entailed a loss that Weber acknowledged with ambivalence and melancholy. Once religion was consigned to its corner, he anguished, what remained to guide human beings through life but “the steel hard cage” of economic rationality? Habermas, once a firm secularizer, has come to a similar realization: that the “communicative rationality” so central to his vision might, in its rejection of final truths, create an enervating “normative deficit.”
Murder, Honor, and Culture
Authors: Hammer Juliane
Published: May 2020

This chapter analyzes debates about Muslims and domestic violence in mainstream U.S. media outlets and other publications. It traces the attempts at self-representation by Muslims and at taking control of the narratives that surround reporting on domestic violence (DV) incidents in Muslim communities. Central to discussions of Muslims and DV are the othering of Muslim communities through insisting on honor and honor killings as the only available frame and the simultaneous construction of Muslims as foreign to the United States through notions of culture that can include racialization as well as religious othering. The chapter then explores the connection between political goals and media production as they intersect with the lives of American Muslims and with the work of Muslim advocates against domestic violence. It also looks at a particular domestic violence murder in 2009, that of Aasiya Zubair, and its aftermath.
Political Equality
Authors: Wilson James Lindley
Published: May 2020

This chapter identifies what it means to enjoy specifically political equality. To affirm equal political status is to recognize each citizen as equally entitled to render authoritative judgments as to how to organize and regulate all citizens' common life. Citizens have equal political status when common institutions and practices reflect and express the idea that they each have the capacity to judge matters of justice and political morality, and the entitlement to exercise that capacity by rendering judgments that have public authority on equal terms with others. Admitting citizens into the common project of political rule—to a share in the regime—respects them, by granting authority to their political judgment. A politically egalitarian society, then, regulates matters of common concern through decision-making processes that respect equally each citizen's authority, or jurisdiction.
Democratic Deliberation
Authors: Wilson James Lindley
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines how the requirement of appropriate consideration regulates institutions and practices of political deliberation. These institutions and practices do not directly determine what the political community will do, as legislation does, but they shape the character of these decisions. Accordingly, they determine in significant part whether the regime is truly democratic. The chapter also critiques a family of views that claim fair deliberation requires equality of influence among citizens. The most basic problem with these views is their narrow conception of citizens' interests in fair deliberation. This narrowness leads the views to largely ignore a variety of affective, unconscious, arbitrary, and discriminatory ways in which citizens respond to efforts at influence. By contrast, the appropriate-consideration conception of political equality properly responds to the plurality of citizens' deliberative interests. The chapter then suggests what appropriate consideration requires of common deliberation, and how people should vary the scope and character of the consideration granted to different citizen judgments under different circumstances. These requirements attend both to individuals' claims for direct hearings for their views, and to broader concerns about a fair structure for synthesizing the various and conflicting judgments rendered by different citizens.
Racial Vote Dilution and Gerrymandering
Authors: Wilson James Lindley
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores one important controversy bedeviling nonproportional, territorial-districting systems such as those that exist in the United States: the problem of racial minority vote dilution. Vote dilution is indeed a serious political injustice, and consideration conception demonstrates why. In some circumstances, districting schemes diluting minority votes reflect and promote broader deliberative neglect of certain minority groups-that is, they reflect and promote failures of consideration. Recognizing these injustices does not commit one to supporting the proportional representation of groups in the legislature. The discussions of proportional representation and vote dilution together reveal that the fair representation of groups requires a variety of forms of consideration, and that there are few institutional means that will universally guarantee those forms of consideration in all political societies. These analyses also explain what is objectionable about partisan gerrymandering—that is, efforts to draw districts to favor a particular political party. Such efforts deny various forms of consideration to supporters of other parties.
Sorting Out the Mixed Economy
Authors: Offner Amy C.
Published: May 2020

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.
Decentralization Reborn
Authors: Offner Amy C.
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes Eduardo Wiesner as an International Monetary Fund and World Bank economist of the 1980s and 1990s. During those years, he acquired a notorious reputation for negotiating structural adjustment programs across Latin America, and he championed new forms of decentralization that took apart developmental states. Wiesner was no dissident outsider to developmental state-building; he was a product of it. Wiesner's career in Washington grew from his work in Colombia, and nothing makes that fact clearer than his decades of writing on state decentralization. During the 1990s, Wiesner distinguished himself as an authority on decentralization, and he and his colleagues at the World Bank presented it as an adjunct to structural adjustment.
Epilogue
Authors: Offner Amy C.
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the elements of the mixed economy, which has been sorted out by the conflicts of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and redefined them as features of different historical eras. As a result, remnants of the mixed economy are all around the globe, generally renamed and politically resignified. It describes how mid-century states came into being and how they came undone. It also dislodges neoliberalism as the only conceivable endpoint of twentieth-century political economy. This chapter presents features of mixed economies as antagonistic antecedents. Welfare and developmental states were profoundly contradictory formations that offered extraordinary resources to those who dreamed of social democracy. They generated manifold forms of decentralization, private delegation, deregulation, and austerity, nearly all of them forgotten because subsequent state makers appropriated those practices, put them to new ends, wrote them new genealogies, and branded them neoliberal.
Introduction
Authors: Nurhussein Nadia
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about the concept and various forms of Ethiopianism as it gained visibility by the end of the nineteenth century. It talks about martial Ethiopianism, documentary Ethiopianism, and spectacular Ethiopianism. Although the malleability of Ethiopia's signification for African America made it especially well-suited as a model of black nationhood and a source of spiritual citizenship, invariably the concept of Ethiopia's long-standing imperial identity was central to this signification. The chapter also follows the development within African America of imperial Ethiopianism, the larger rubric under which variations may be subsumed. Whether assuming a military attitude, or adopting an archaeological perspective, or expressing a fascination with pageantry, each of these variations on Ethiopianism begins and extends from a commitment to the imperial.
Ambitious Pragmatism: First-Order Economic Principles
Authors: Lin Justin Yifu , Monga Célestin
Published: May 2020

This chapter draws on lessons from history to argue that policy disappointments such as Ghana's mainly reflect failure not of politics but of economic thinking and policy making. There are now enough both failed and successful experiments in economic development for researchers and policy makers to draw on. It highlights the possibilities for poor countries to transform into middle-and even high-income economies and stresses the benefits of such transformations for the world economy as a whole. The chapter starts with a discussion of the role of agricultural development in developing countries today, stressing both its potential contribution in the short term and its limitations in the medium and long term. It then details some first-order economic principles for success, pointing to the need for structural change, which occurs only through industrialization. For the process to be successful, economic policy should aim at “ambitious pragmatism,” which requires calibrating the pace of economic take-off with the existing economic structure and country development level.
The Art of Performing Economic Miracles: Implementation Guidelines
Authors: Lin Justin Yifu , Monga Célestin
Published: May 2020

This chapter talks about the elements for success that may sound abstract, but actually provide a framework for achieving sustained growth, employment creation, and poverty reduction in poor business environments. It explains how the elements are applied to real policy situations and offers a road map for implementing an economic development strategy that leaves little to randomness. Drawing from economic history and analysis, the chapter explains why countries do not evolve from low- to medium- and high-income status as the result of chance. It starts by explaining the importance of rational selection and the choice of policy domains that will give a poor economy the highest probability of developing dynamic business ventures. It then provides step-by-step guidelines for policy makers in poor countries struggling to make sense of the often-conflicting economic advice they receive from many development institutions.
Hacking Diversity
Authors: Dunbar-Hester Christina
Published: May 2020

Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. This book investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to achieve the diversity that their ideals support. The book shows that within this well-meaning volunteer world, beyond the sway of human resource departments and equal opportunity legislation, members of underrepresented groups face unique challenges. The book explores who participates in voluntaristic technology cultures, to what ends, and with what consequences. Digging deep into the fundamental assumptions underpinning STEM-oriented societies, the book demonstrates that while the preferred solutions of tech enthusiasts—their “hacks” of projects and cultures—can ameliorate some of the “bugs” within their own communities, these methods come up short for issues of unequal social and economic power. Distributing “diversity” in technical production is not equal to generating justice. The book reframes questions of diversity advocacy to consider what interventions might appropriately broaden inclusion and participation in the hacking world and beyond.
Introduction
Authors: Dunbar-Hester Christina
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on internal negotiations of diversity proponents and their mediating work within open-technology communities. It explains why it matters if hackers and open-technology enthusiasts promote expanding the ranks of hacking as a means to wider political emancipation and what is at stake in framing proficiency in computing as a significant path to social inclusion. The chapter also describes what is obscured in framing technical cultures as the appropriate site of intervention and what does calling this diversity “work” accomplish. It argues that diversity advocacy has the most potential to change the expressive culture of open-technology communities. Interventions in sites can serve as stages in miniature where people confront wider social problems; it can be powerful and galvanizing to strive for inclusivity in a social milieu over which one has some control.
Putting Lipstick on a GNU?
Authors: Dunbar-Hester Christina
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores social identity and multiple conceptions of who might embody the missing diversity in open-technology cultures, from the perspectives of diversity advocates. It discusses gender, race, and ethnicity. It also proposes that representation has its limits as a project of empowerment and suggests that workplace relations to some degree constrain the criticism that advocates express. The chapter focuses on how advocates for diversity in open-technology cultures define the identity categories around which they rally. It is evident that they hope to deepen an association between certain categories of social identity and certain forms of technological belonging. Contemporary social studies of technology treat technology as neither wholly socially determined nor as conforming to or flowing from an internal rational logic.