bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conclusion
Authors: Ogilvie Sheilagh
Published: May 2019

This concluding chapter argues that guilds did redistribute resources to their members at the expense of everyone else; they did not generate countervailing benefits by solving failures in markets for quality, training, or innovation; and they did inflict unintended harm on the wider economy. In practice, markets are never perfect and states are never impartial, and this was undoubtedly true of the markets and states of pre-modern Europe. However, guilds made little contribution to correcting market or state failures. By seeking rents for their own members, guilds intensified market failures, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently. They also contributed to making governments even more corrupt than they already were by offering an effective institutional mechanism whereby two powerful groups, guild members and political elites, could collaborate in capturing a larger share of resources at the expense of the rest of the economy.
Emergent Viruses
Authors: Solé Ricard , Elena Santiago F.
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses the emergence of new pathogenic viruses due to human-driven changes. A virus can be defined as “emerging” if it meets one or more of the following conditions: an already known viral disease that spreads out in a new geographic area or population; an already known viral disease that spreads out in a new geographic area or population properties; and disease or virus that has been infecting humans for a long time but remained undetected until diagnosed for the first time due to increased surveillance or to new diagnostic tools. The remainder of the chapter covers emergent diseases linked to breakdown of the equilibrium between a species and its habitat (e.g., Hanta- or Arenaviruses); the genetics of adaptation to novel host; and epidemics of emergence.
Computer Viruses and Beyond
Authors: Solé Ricard , Elena Santiago F.
Published: May 2019

The previous chapters considered the multiple facets of viruses, their structure and evolution, and how they explore their landscapes, strongly influencing the biosphere and the evolution of humans as species. But the concept of virus itself, as a parasitic entity able to propagate within and between living systems and self-perpetuating its information through a process of copying and infection, might be broader than imagined. With the development of a theory of cultural evolution, the possibility of defining a general form of propagating ideas, concepts, or symbols that were not supported by genetic material became a very appealing possibility. This chapter explores the application of key concepts associated to virus dynamics to other fields and determines how far the metaphors can be stretched.
The Internet Trap
Authors: Hindman Matthew
Published: May 2019

The Internet was supposed to fragment audiences and make media monopolies impossible. Instead, behemoths like Google and Facebook now dominate the time we spend online—and grab all the profits from the attention economy. This book explains how this happened. It sheds light on the stunning rise of the digital giants and the online struggles of nearly everyone else—and reveals what small players can do to survive in a game that is rigged against them. The book shows how seemingly tiny advantages in attracting users can snowball over time. The Internet has not reduced the cost of reaching audiences—it has merely shifted who pays and how. Challenging some of the most enduring myths of digital life, the book explains why the Internet is not the postindustrial technology that has been sold to the public, how it has become mathematically impossible for grad students in a garage to beat Google, and why net neutrality alone is no guarantee of an open Internet. It also explains why the challenges for local digital news outlets and other small players are worse than they appear and demonstrates what it really takes to grow a digital audience and stay alive in today's online economy. The book shows why, even on the Internet, there is still no such thing as a free audience.
The Political Economy of Personalization
Authors: Hindman Matthew
Published: May 2019

This chapter offers both a more detailed examination of the principles behind the recommendation systems and examines the comparative impact of these technologies across media organizations. Recommender systems research has changed dramatically over the past decade, but little of this new knowledge has filtered into research on web traffic, online news, or the future of journalism. Scholarship to date has focused on the impact of these technologies for an individual web user or an adopting media firm. But there has been little exploration of the wholesale effects of these changes not only within news and media organizations, but also with regard to competition between them. In addition, this chapter takes a detailed look at the Netflix Prize—a contest with surprising lessons even for those who do not care about movies. As it turns out, the task of recommending the right movie is similar to recommending almost anything—predicting which songs users like, which ads they prefer, which news stories they engage with.
The Elusiveness of the Particular
Authors: Benhabib Seyla
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the subterranean affinities between Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, two of the most famous exiles of the last century, through the so-called “Benjaminian moment” present in their work. It is widely known that any consideration of Arendt and Adorno as thinkers who share intellectual affinities is likely to be thwarted by the profound dislike that Arendt seems to harbor toward Adorno. However, such psychological attitudes and personal animosities cannot guide the evaluations of a thinker's work. This is particularly true in the case of Arendt and Adorno, who both shared a profound sense that one must learn to think anew, beyond the traditional schools of philosophy and methodology—a concept that will be referred to as their Benjaminian moment.
Conclusion
Authors: Benhabib Seyla
Published: May 2019

This concluding chapter discusses how the increasing socioeconomic inequality in the last twenty years has resulted in a negative redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. Along with the erosion of socioeconomic equality, political equality and reciprocal respect has also eroded. The fragmentation resulting from the rise of the new social media as well as the spread of some of the more insular forms of identity politics have done serious damage to the cultivation of enlarged mentality among the citizens and to their capacity and willingness to take the standpoint of the others. However, the chapter shows that such fragmentation is not wholly negative, in that it has also given rise to “counter-publics” by oppositional groups that had not enjoyed their own public voices and media.
Was the Pericope Adulterae Suppressed?
Authors: Knust Jennifer , Wasserman Tommy
Published: May 2019

This chapter demonstrates that the outright deletion of a significant block of text like the pericope adulterae from a written Gospel book would be surprising, if not impossible: editorial and literary objections to textual deletion were common; manuscript evidence suggests that scribes preferred to preserve the texts they found in their exemplars, though they did omit or delete a few words here and there; and editors preferred to preserve earlier texts, even if portions of these texts were regarded as spurious. Editors and scholars discussed possible additions to texts, often at length, but they were deeply hesitant to remove these disputed passages. The chapter then considers the suppression theory, which was first articulated by Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century and then revived in the nineteenth century by New Testament scholars interested in explaining the story's early demise.
“In Many Copies”
Authors: Knust Jennifer , Wasserman Tommy
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the pericope adulterae in the Latin West. Approximately two-thirds of extant Old Latin manuscripts included the story, and mixed texts invariably either included it or show an awareness of its presence elsewhere. Only one-third of the Old Latin copies exclude it altogether. Fourth-century Latin Christian writings and copies of John preserving Old Latin texts therefore confirm the widespread inclusion of the pericope adulterae within John in the Latin West. By the end of the fourth century, however, there was also already great textual diversity in the Old Latin tradition in general, and the pericope adulterae in particular, which is evident from a comparison of these extant Old Latin manuscripts and citations by Latin fathers.
The Loan That Saved Russia?
Authors: Malik Hassan
Published: May 2019

This chapter focuses on the 1905 Revolution, underscoring the price Russia paid for the strategic errors discussed in the previous chapter, and stressing the important financial-historical legacy of this period within the broader story of the revolution. It shows that, given the precarious state in which the Tsarist government found itself at the time and the massive size of the Russian Government Loan of 1906, some began to refer to the deal as “the loan that saved Russia.” However, an examination of business and government documents from both the Russian and Western sides suggests that such an interpretation is overly generous. Based on materials in European banking archives as well as Russian sources, there is reason to question the idea that the 1906 loan played a stabilizing role, and to think of it instead as a deal that played a destabilizing role in Russia and even abroad in the long run. The loan did not just fail to resolve domestic political tensions, it in fact exacerbated them, exposed the regime to attacks from its enemies abroad, and likely contributed to the roots of the Panic of 1907—a seminal event in the financial history of the twentieth century.
Conclusion
Authors: Malik Hassan
Published: May 2019

This concluding chapter explains that both the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent default were intertwined and historically contingent. They emerged from a particular set of historical circumstances, processes, and turning points. The events and the processes that produced them were linked by the explicitly financial character of the war the Bolsheviks waged against their opponents—be they the ancien régime, the Provisional Government, domestic class enemies, or foreign powers. Indeed, by 1917 and well before the Bolshevik takeover, a default in Russia—whether in the form of an outright cancellation of debts or a “restructuring”—had become inevitable. Three years of war had seen the Russian Empire lose critical parts of its economy to the enemy, while the strategy of relying on domestic debt markets had seen diminishing returns, forcing the government to resort to the printing press. Even by employing the latter method, the government could not keep up. Under such circumstances, even counterfeiters could not keep pace with the rate at which currency was being issued.
A People's Constitution
Authors: De Rohit
Published: May 2019

It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India's greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, this book upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and the book looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, the book illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state's own procedures. It examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist's contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders' challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers' petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers' battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, the book considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.
The Birth of Modern Belief
Authors: Shagan Ethan H.
Published: May 2019

This book traces the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. The book focuses not on what people believed, which is the normal concern of Reformation history, but on the more fundamental question of what people took belief to be. It shows how religious belief enjoyed a special prestige in medieval Europe, one that set it apart from judgment, opinion, and the evidence of the senses. But with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, the question of just what kind of knowledge religious belief was—and how it related to more mundane ways of knowing—was forced into the open. As the warring churches fought over the answer, each claimed belief as their exclusive possession, insisting that their rivals were unbelievers. The book challenges the common notion that modern belief was a gift of the Reformation, showing how it was as much a reaction against Luther and Calvin as it was against the Council of Trent. It describes how dissidents on both sides came to regard religious belief as something that needed to be justified by individual judgment, evidence, and argument. The book demonstrates how belief came to occupy such an ambivalent place in the modern world, becoming the essential category by which we express our judgments about science, society, and the sacred, but at the expense of the unique status religion once enjoyed.
The Birth Pangs of Modern Belief
Authors: Shagan Ethan H.
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores how, by the eighteenth century, belief was already associated with sound and judicious consideration, and the struggle to believe correctly was no longer simply about defeating the gathering forces of evil, it could also be about overcoming the forces of intolerance that seek to corrupt human judgment. The chapter traces how this transformation began, mapping the reaction against the confessional project of belief that had defined the sixteenth century, and sketching the intellectual resources that allowed an alternative project to replace it. This first stage is the so-called “birth pangs” because modern belief enjoyed neither a peaceful nor an easy delivery.
Conclusion
Authors: Shagan Ethan H.
Published: May 2019

BELIEF HAS A history; it changes over time. Thomas Kuhn famously borrowed the term “paradigm” to describe regimes of scientific principle and practice, while Michel Foucault adopted “episteme” to describe the intellectual conditions in which knowledge is made. This book has suggested that there are also “credulities”: spaces or conditions of believing. A credulity is a framework of intellectual resources and assumptions that shapes religious knowledge and its relationship to other truth-claims. The term does not refer to a particular orthodoxy; on the contrary, I use the root ...
The Young Thaumaturge
Authors: Newman William R.
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines the young Newton from his education at the Free Grammar School in Grantham during the 1650s up to his student years at Trinity College, Cambridge, beginning in 1661, in order to see how his interest in chymistry originated and developed. The standard view is that Newton was stimulated to his early interest in chymistry by the works of Robert Boyle. However, the recent discovery of an anonymous and hitherto unexamined manuscript, Treatise of Chymistry, provides new evidence showing that Newton was already compiling chymical dictionaries before reading Boyle's works on the subject. The chapter also considers what could be Newton's earliest notes on chrysopoeia, namely, his abstracts and summaries of the works attributed to the supposed fifteenth-century Benedictine Basilius Valentinus. Finally, it attempts to pin down some of the early contacts in Cambridge and London who transmitted the manuscripts and other texts to Newton that provided a major part of his alchemical knowledge.
Johann de Monte-Snyders in Newton’s Alchemy
Authors: Newman William R.
Published: May 2019

This chapter focuses on self-proclaimed adept Johann de Monte-Snyders or “Snyders” as Newton usually calls him, who increasingly influenced Newton from the mid-1680s onward. More than any other figure, Snyders fits the picture of a wandering adept who would drift into town, perform a transmutation or two, and then mysteriously disappear. In order to illustrate the way in which Newton tailored the writings of Snyders to fit his own conception of the alchemical magnum opus, the chapter explores other contemporary accounts of Snyders's processes and shows that Newton's interpretation did not fit the standard view. The German adept exercised more impact on Newton the alchemist than any other author short of Philalethes.
The Winding Road to the Welfare State
Authors: Boyer George R.
Published: May 2019

How did Britain transform itself from a nation of workhouses to one that became a model for the modern welfare state? This book investigates the evolution of living standards and welfare policies in Britain from the 1830s to 1950 and provides insights into how British working-class households coped with economic insecurity. The book examines the retrenchment in Victorian poor relief, the Liberal Welfare Reforms, and the beginnings of the postwar welfare state, and it describes how workers altered spending and saving methods based on changing government policies. From the cutting back of the Poor Law after 1834 to Parliament's abrupt about-face in 1906 with the adoption of the Liberal Welfare Reforms, the book offers new explanations for oscillations in Britain's social policies and how these shaped worker well-being. The Poor Law's increasing stinginess led skilled manual workers to adopt self-help strategies, but this was not a feasible option for low-skilled workers, many of whom continued to rely on the Poor Law into old age. In contrast, the Liberal Welfare Reforms were a major watershed, marking the end of seven decades of declining support for the needy. Concluding with the Beveridge Report and Labour's social policies in the late 1940s, the book shows how the Liberal Welfare Reforms laid the foundations for a national social safety net. A sweeping look at economic pressures after the Industrial Revolution, this book illustrates how British welfare policy waxed and waned over the course of a century.
Social Welfare Policy and Living Standards between the Wars
Authors: Boyer George R.
Published: May 2019

This chapter describes the interwar expansion of social welfare policies and their role in alleviating economic insecurity in an era of unprecedented unemployment. The social security system established before the war and extended in the 1920s consisted of several independently administered programs—unemployment insurance, sickness and disability insurance, old age pensions, widows' and orphans' insurance, and the Poor Law. This safety net of many colors proved to be quite successful in alleviating poverty and maintaining the well-being of working-class households. The important role played by the safety net is clearly shown in the social surveys undertaken in the 1930s—between one-third and one-half of all working-class families surveyed received social income of some form. While the condition of the working class would have been considerably worse without the safety net, it contained many holes, which led to calls for a restructuring of social policy.
The Beveridge Report and the Implementation of the Welfare State
Authors: Boyer George R.
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores the story of the 1942 Beveridge Report and the beginnings of the welfare state. The policies proposed by Beveridge and the 1945–48 legislation were logical extensions of government's expanding role in social welfare policy beginning with the Liberal Welfare Reforms. This does not mean that the importance of the postwar legislation should be downplayed. Because of the adoption of the National Health Service, universal coverage, and equality of treatment, Britain after 1948 deserves to be called a welfare state, while Edwardian and interwar Britain do not. Unfortunately, despite the enthusiasm with which the public greeted the welfare state, the postwar policies did not eliminate economic insecurity.
The Making of the Medieval Middle East
Authors: Tannous Jack
Published: May 2019

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.
Where Economics Went Wrong
Authors: Colander David , Freedman Craig
Published: May 2019

Milton Friedman once predicted that advances in scientific economics would resolve debates about whether raising the minimum wage is good policy. Decades later, Friedman's prediction has not come true. This book argues that it never will. Why? Because economic policy, when done correctly, is an art and a craft. It is not, and cannot be, a science. The book explains why classical liberal economists understood this essential difference, why modern economists abandoned it, and why now is the time for the profession to return to its classical liberal roots. Carefully distinguishing policy from science and theory, classical liberal economists emphasized values and context, treating economic policy analysis as a moral science where a dialogue of sensibilities and judgments allowed for the same scientific basis to arrive at a variety of policy recommendations. Using the University of Chicago—one of the last bastions of classical liberal economics—as a case study, the book examines how both the MIT and Chicago variants of modern economics eschewed classical liberalism in their attempt to make economic policy analysis a science. By examining the way in which the discipline managed to lose its bearings, the authors delve into such issues as the development of welfare economics in relation to economic science, alternative voices within the Chicago School, and exactly how Friedman got it wrong. Contending that the division between science and prescription needs to be restored, the book makes the case for a more nuanced and self-aware policy analysis by economists.
Defining the Sciences
Authors: Feke Jacqueline
Published: May 2019

Taking Almagest 1.1 as the starting point of this study, as it functions as an epitome of Ptolemy's general philosophical system, this chapter argues that the metaphysics Ptolemy presents when differentiating the three theoretical sciences—physics, mathematics, and theology—is Aristotelian, though not Aristotle's. They do not derive directly from Aristotle's Metaphysics but from his greater corpus. Ptolemy appropriates aspects of Aristotle's metaphysics and epistemology to construct his own. Ptolemy adapts criteria from Aristotle's broader corpus to distinguish the objects of the sciences and, by extension, the sciences themselves. Whether and how an object is perceptible determines whether it is studied by physics, mathematics, or theology. An imperceptible object, the Prime Mover, is studied by theology, special sensibles are studied by physics, and common sensibles are studied by mathematics.
Mathematics and the Good Life
Authors: Feke Jacqueline
Published: May 2019

This chapter demonstrates how Ptolemy's distinctly mathematical ethics emerges from his response to a contemporary debate over the relationship between theoretical and practical philosophy. He first asserts that the two are independent, differentiated by the manner in which one attains virtues in each domain, whether by instruction or continuous activity. Thereafter, he diminishes the distinction by revealing how they relate. Theoretical philosophy, specifically mathematics, transforms the soul. The study of astronomical objects—the movements and configurations of heavenly bodies—reveals their constancy, good order, commensurability, and calm. Mathematicians, aided by habit, come to appreciate these qualities and transform their souls into a fine and well-ordered state. Organizing their actions in accordance with astronomical theories, they never forget their ultimate objective, the divine-like condition of the soul. The study of mathematics is crucial to obtaining this good life.
Harmonics and Astronomy
Authors: Feke Jacqueline
Published: May 2019

This chapter analyzes in what ways and to what degree harmonics and astronomy are complementary, particularly with respect to their epistemic efficacy. In Almagest 1.1, Ptolemy claims that mathematics provides sure and incontrovertible knowledge. In his study of harmonics and astronomy, does he maintain this position? Does Ptolemy consider his harmonic and astronomical judgments to be sure and incontrovertible knowledge? It is argued that Ptolemy's Harmonics and Almagest indicate that harmonics does attain this epistemic success, but astronomy does so only in certain respects. How astronomy falters epistemologically has consequences for Ptolemy's practice of astronomy as well as the relevance of the various parts of his astronomy to his ethical system.
Conclusion
Authors: Feke Jacqueline
Published: May 2019

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. It suggests that Ptolemy attempted to quantify his astronomical models because astronomy, like astrology, is by definition a predictive science. Ptolemy defines astronomy in juxtaposition with astrology in the first chapter of the Tetrabiblos. Consistent with Almagest 1.1, he claims that the judgments of astronomy are sure, whereas astrology, like every other study of material quality, is conjectural. Yet, the claims of astrology are still possible, as opposed to impossible, and therefore they merit study. The chapter then considers the question of whether Ptolemy's his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics were influential.
Forging the Franchise
Authors: Teele Dawn Langan
Published: May 2019

In the 1880s, women were barred from voting in all national-level elections, but by 1920 they were going to the polls in nearly thirty countries. What caused this massive change? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it was not because of progressive ideas about women or suffragists' pluck. In most countries, elected politicians fiercely resisted enfranchising women, preferring to extend such rights only when it seemed electorally prudent and necessary to do so. This book demonstrates that the formation of a broad movement across social divides, and strategic alliances with political parties in competitive electoral conditions, provided the leverage that ultimately transformed women into voters. As the book shows, in competitive environments, politicians had incentives to seek out new sources of electoral influence. A broad-based suffrage movement could reinforce those incentives by providing information about women's preferences, and an infrastructure with which to mobilize future female voters. At the same time that politicians wanted to enfranchise women who were likely to support their party, suffragists also wanted to enfranchise women whose political preferences were similar to theirs. In contexts where political rifts were too deep, suffragists who were in favor of the vote in principle mobilized against their own political emancipation. Exploring tensions between elected leaders and suffragists and the uncertainty surrounding women as an electoral group, the book sheds new light on the strategic reasons behind women's enfranchisement.
Introduction
Authors: Teele Dawn Langan
Published: May 2019

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book shows how political competition and the alignment of interests between suffragists and politicians helps explain women's enfranchisement in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. These three countries are apt for comparison: they were among the first to experiment on a large scale with representative institutions, and they produced some of the earliest and most vociferous feminist political thought. In 1900, all three countries had well-established and growing suffrage movements, and all were on the winning side of the First World War. Shortly after the war, all three had high levels of electoral contestation, and at least one chamber in each country's national legislature passed a woman's suffrage bill.
What Types of Leaders Fight for “Face”?
Authors: Yarhi-Milo Keren
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses what self-monitoring is, and how and why individuals differ in their self-monitoring dispositions. Self-monitoring concerns the extent to which individuals strategically cultivate their public appearances. A very large body of scholarship reviews how individuals differ in the extent to which they monitor and control their self-presentation in social situations. The literature distinguishes between two ideal-types of individuals: high self-monitors and low self-monitors. On average, high self-monitors are more likely to be concerned about reputation for resolve compared to low self-monitor individuals, and those tendencies could be moderated by overall dispositions about use of force. The chapter then explains how individuals’ beliefs about the efficacy of military force have an important intervening effect on whether a given leader will fight for reputation. It classifies leaders with regard to their willingness to use military instruments for international reputation into four ideal-types: reputation crusaders, reputation believers, reputation skeptics, and reputation critics.
Jimmy Carter and the Crises of the 1970s
Authors: Yarhi-Milo Keren
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines Jimmy Carter and several of the international crises he faced during his presidency that many observers argue risked the United States' reputation for resolve. Unlike those of most of his predecessors or successors, Carter's discourse and policies seem to show that he was not motivated by projecting resolve for the sake of reassuring allies or intimidating adversaries. In fact, evidence from primary documents reveals that Carter's behavior during international crises corresponds closely to the reputation critic ideal-type. The chapter then reinforces the classification of Carter as a reputation critic using additional qualitative evidence in the form of Carter's personal diary and prepresidential speeches, memoirs written by his advisors, and other secondary literature. It also uses available biographical evidence to illuminate the self-monitoring tendencies of Carter's closest advisors: National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.
Ronald Reagan and the Fight against Communism
Authors: Yarhi-Milo Keren
Published: May 2019

This chapter assesses the extent to which reputational concerns shaped President Ronald Reagan's discourse, decision making, and policies during international crises. It focuses on four of these international crises: the escalation in Afghanistan, the intervention in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada, and the air strikes against Libya. Each posed a challenge, real or perceived, to US reputation for resolve and so are good tests of the dispositional theory. A review of Reagan's self-monitoring tendencies and beliefs about the use of force place him closest to the ideal-type high self-monitor hawk, and thus, one should expect his behavior to be consistent with that of a reputation crusader. However, his behavior and discourse during the crises covered cannot be convincingly explained simply by highlighting his hawkish tendencies. In order to fully appreciate Reagan's policies, rhetoric, and state of mind, one must look at how these hawkish tendencies interacted with his high self-monitoring disposition.
His Biographers
Authors: Boardman John
Published: May 2019

This chapter looks at how several contemporary scholars, courtiers, and writers who knew Alexander wrote histories of his exploits. From them scholars can glean some idea of historical events, but also the nonhistorical ones, as well as much that was generated by prejudice for or against their subject. All these historians have been discussed by Lionel Pearson in his The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great, a monograph of the American Philological Association of 1960. An even fuller account of these sources is Professor U. P. Arora's Greeks on India, Alexander to Megasthenes. The chapter dwells especially on two authors who depended on and quoted these sources—Plutarch and Arrian—writing long after the events.
The Alexander Portraits in Antiquity
Authors: Boardman John
Published: May 2019

This chapter explores how Alexander's life and experiences, real and imagined, were always ready subjects for illustration. As time passed, conventions for showing him and his deeds developed from the probably real, of his lifetime, to the imaginary but based on exaggeration of the “real,” to the totally fanciful. Lifelike portraiture had appeared first in Greek art in the later part of the fifth century BC—possibly first among the Greeks of Asia Minor, to judge from coinage. In an Asia Minor ruled by Persians the idea of a royal or ruler portrait was more acceptable, and might be used on coins of Greek type being made for Persian governors. Alexander was royal and non-Greek, and so a safe subject.
A Limited-War Theory of Secrecy
Authors: Carson Austin
Published: May 2019

This chapter defines and takes stock of the challenge of war escalation and the practice of limited war. It develops a logic for secrecy based on shared fears of large-scale conflict escalation. The theory is anchored in the nature of escalation dynamics in modern war and the difficulty of bounding conflict. The chapter argues that secrecy generally addresses two common pathways for unwanted escalation: political constraints and miscommunication. The heart of the chapter argues that covert forms of military intervention can simultaneously insulate leaders from outside audience reactions and communicate to adversaries one's interest in maintaining a limited-war framework. The chapter then connects these themes to two puzzles mentioned in the previous chapter by showing that limited-war dynamics make sense of collusion by an adversary and the continued value of widely exposed interventions. The chapter ends by explaining how the severity of escalation dangers influences the choice between frontstage and backstage and identifies process-related observable implications.
Conclusion
Authors: Carson Austin
Published: May 2019

This chapter summarizes the key empirical findings and address extension of the basic argument to cyberconflict and violence within states (i.e., civil wars, terrorism). A consistent theme of the book is that the backstage of war sometimes features direct combat encounters by outside powers that were publicly understood to have avoided such entanglements. The chapter then presents a brief case study of a post-Cold War conflict: the Iranian covert weapons supply program during the U.S. occupation of Iraq (2003–2011). The U.S. occupation of Iraq and the Iranian covert intervention that followed suggest the links between limited war, covertness, and collusion continue to be relevant. Though conclusions about the case are necessarily preliminary, the chapter reviews this conflict to illustrate how the claims of the theory travel to a more recent case. It also addresses questions about the initial choice to intervene, mistakes and exploitation, and the possible implications of social media and leaks in the contemporary era. It concludes by discussing the implications of secrecy's role in escalation control for policy and scholarship.
Creatures of Cain
Authors: Milam Erika Lorraine
Published: May 2019

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.
A Dangerous Medium
Authors: Milam Erika Lorraine
Published: May 2019

This chapter examines how Hollywood depictions of violence on screen, almost always performed by men, perpetuated popular conceptions of human nature as inherently brutal. They also served as a focal point for the concerns of parents, psychologists, and educators about the potential effects of violence in the media on sensitive viewers like children or adults with emotional disturbances. Renewed debates over what constituted “appropriate” content on television and in the theaters quickly followed. Some parents, meanwhile, argued that violence was an inevitable aspect of modern life and therefore children should be taught to understand and deal with it. Film provided one means of doing so. A great many more (or at least a more vocal subset) insisted that through a steady consumption of shoot-'em-up westerns and other tales of revenge and mayhem, innocent children could turn into troubled youths. Of all the concerns parents and teachers raised about the subtle lessons children would learn through violence in film and on television, two repeatedly recur: that the line between criminality and justice was nebulous, and that all men had the potential for violent action when subjected to great pressure.
The Cash Ceiling
Authors: Carnes Nicholas
Published: May 2019

Why are Americans governed by the rich? Millionaires make up only three percent of the public but control all three branches of the federal government. How did this happen? What stops lower-income and working-class Americans from becoming politicians? This book is a compelling and comprehensive account of why so few working-class people hold office—and what reformers can do about it. It debunks popular misconceptions (like the idea that workers are unelectable or unqualified to govern), identifies the factors that keep lower-class Americans off the ballot and out of political institutions, and evaluates a variety of reform proposals. The book shows that in the United States elections have a built-in “cash ceiling,” a series of structural barriers that make it almost impossible for the working-class to run for public office. Elections take a serious toll on candidates, many working-class Americans simply cannot shoulder the practical burdens, and civic and political leaders often pass them over in favor of white-collar candidates. But these obstacles are not inevitable. Pilot programs to recruit, train, and support working-class candidates have the potential to increase the economic diversity of our governing institutions and ultimately amplify the voices of ordinary citizens. Who runs for office goes to the heart of whether the USA has a democracy that is representative or not. The book shows that the best hope for combating the oversized political influence of the rich might simply be to help more working-class Americans become politicians.
Government by the Privileged
Authors: Carnes Nicholas
Published: May 2019

This chapter opens the discussion on why working-class Americans—people employed in manual labor, service industry, or clerical jobs—almost never go on to hold political office in the United States. It suggests that the economic gulf between politicians and the people they represent—a so-called government by the privileged or white-collar government—has serious consequences for the American democratic process. Although journalists and scholars have always had hunches about what keeps working-class Americans out of office, to date there has been almost no actual research on why the United States is governed by the privileged or what reformers might do about it. This book tries to change that. It argues that workers are less likely to hold office not because they are unqualified or because voters prefer more affluent candidates, but because workers are simply less likely to run for public office in the first place.
The Conventional Wisdom (is Wrong)
Authors: Carnes Nicholas
Published: May 2019

This chapter has two aims. The first is to do what the proponents of the conventional wisdom about workers never do, namely, test their ideas using actual data on U.S. politics. The second is to begin answering this book's larger research question: Why are working-class people virtually absent from American political institutions? The chapter begins by identifying the stage in the candidate entry process that screens working-class people out. Along the way, it also tests two common ideas about the underrepresentation of workers, namely, that workers seldom hold office because they are not fit to govern and because voters prefer affluent candidates. The chapter shows that these ideas do not hold water: workers are not underrepresented in public office because they are less qualified or because voters dislike them, they are underrepresented because they just do not run in the first place.
What’s Stopping Them?
Authors: Carnes Nicholas
Published: May 2019

This chapter aims to shed light on the gates that keep workers out of office in the United States. Elections themselves appear to be the root cause. The analysis focuses on the two features of elections that seem to be behind the micro-level inequalities documented in Chapter 3, namely, the high and rising burdens associated with campaigning and the insular world of candidate recruitment. The practical anxieties that keep individual workers from running appear to stem from the very nature of elections in a representative democracy. The encouragement gaps that workers experience seem to arise from the basic logic of the candidate recruitment process, the fundamental challenges that lead many recruiters to simply look for new recruits within their own mostly white-collar personal networks.
What Can We Do About It?
Authors: Carnes Nicholas
Published: May 2019

This chapter uses what has been learned about America's cash ceiling in the previous chapters to sort through the various reform proposals that observers have floated throughout the years. Some are essentially pipe dreams: they would work, but they are completely infeasible (like quotas for working-class politicians or replacing democratic elections in the United States with government by lottery). Others are long shots, ideas that would probably help, but would take decades to execute and would require massive changes to American society. The interventions that seem to have the most promise are reforms that specifically target working-class people and directly address the resource and recruitment gaps that elections naturally create—reforms like political scholarships, seed money programs, and candidate training programs.
“He Sang New Sorrow”
Authors: Creswell Robyn
Published: May 2019

This chapter discusses how marthiya is central not only to Adonis's revision of the classical corpus but also to his own poetry, which is full of a particular kind of elegy—those for fellow poets. It is by way of the elegy and its variations that Adonis negotiates his turn away from politics and seeks to establish a modernist countercanon, a series of imaginary filiations that provide him with a compensatory, nonpolitical authority. Even while bidding farewell, the elegist makes a claim upon his precursor, seeking to annex some of the previous poet's power. The elegy is in this sense another mode of translation, in which the poet asserts his right to a particular literary inheritance and projects its survival under unpropitious circumstances. Adonis's marathi are markedly distinct from the neoclassical and the collective elegy, his innovations spring from a refusal of their tropes and techniques.
“You, Mozart, Aren’t Worthy of Yourself”: Aesthetic Discontents of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri
Authors: Nisnevich Anna
Published: May 2019

This chapter analyzes Rimsky-Korsakov's creative crisis by considering his opera Mozart and Salieri. With Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov was compelled to interrogate directly—for the first time in his life—the very core of his professional being, and so query the very grounds of composerly worthiness. Indeed, in his Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov summoned historical styles not to comment on history, but to confront the contemporaneity that appeared increasingly incapacitated by what he'd identified in 1892 as metaphysical excess, but what he was now coming to see as a more widespread ailment, “the indifference of taste”—the loss of familiar experiential connection, of active kinship between life and art. His opera did not just celebrate the creator sympathetically aligned with his environment; it offered an object lesson in the proliferation of sentience.