bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
False Starts
Authors: Heath Joseph
Published: September 2021

Despite the fact that there is an obvious normative dimension to the problem of anthropogenic climate change, environmental ethicists have so far not had much influence on policy deliberations. This is primarily because mainstream views in the philosophical literature have policy implications that are implausibly extreme. This chapter begins by considering the case of traditional environmental ethics, and the debate over anthropocentrism that has dominated this literature. Far from generating specific policy recommendations, this perspective has tended rather to generate only pluralism, if not outright skepticism about value. These difficulties led to the emergence of a second wave of environmental philosophers, who have attempted to grapple with the issues raised by climate change using the tools of normative political philosophy. Many of these frameworks have also failed to make a productive contribution because their deontological structure makes them poorly tailored to consideration of the trade-offs involved in different policy options.
Intergenerational Justice
Authors: Heath Joseph
Published: September 2021

The problem of climate change has generated renewed interest in the question of what we owe to future generations. This question is often thought to pose special problems for contractualists, because many claim that there is no possibility of mutually beneficial cooperation between generations. Because benefits can flow only forward in time, there cannot be reciprocity between non-contemporaneous generations, and so there is no place for a social contract to determine how the benefits and burdens of cooperation are to be assigned. This chapter argues that this supposed problem for contractualism is not really a problem at all, since there is no problem in principle, or in practice, with a system of intergenerational cooperation in which benefits flow only one way. The widespread failure to appreciate this is due to several counterintuitive features of the system that is at work in our society.
The Social Cost of Carbon
Authors: Heath Joseph
Published: September 2021

The past few decades have seen an expansion in the use of cost-benefit analysis as a tool for policy evaluation in the public sector. This slow, steady creep has been a source of consternation to many philosophers and political theorists, who are inclined to view cost-benefit analysis as simply a variant of utilitarianism, and consider utilitarianism to be completely unacceptable as a public philosophy. This chapter attempts to show that this impression is misleading. Despite the fact that when construed narrowly, cost-benefit analysis does look a lot like utilitarianism, when seen in its broader context, in the way that it is applied, and the type of problems to which it is applied, it is better understood as an attempt by the state to avoid taking sides with respect to various controversial conceptions of the good.
Positive Social Time Preference
Authors: Heath Joseph
Published: September 2021

Recent debates have made it clear that the choice of a social discount rate has enormous consequences for the amount of carbon abatement that will be recommended. The social discount rate determines how future costs are to be compared to present costs. Philosophers have been almost unanimous in endorsing the view that the only acceptable social rate of time preference is zero, a view that, taken literally, has either absurd or extremely radical implications. The first goal of this chapter is to show that the standard arguments against temporal preference are much less persuasive than they are usually taken to be. The second goal is to explore three different avenues of argument that could be adopted in order to show that temporal discounting of welfare may be permissible. The chapter concludes with a suggestion for how deontologists could accept a pure time preference derived from the current global death rate.
Conclusion
Authors: Heath Joseph
Published: September 2021

Justice is fundamentally concerned with imposing constraints on the harms that individuals in society may impose upon one another. Some interference with each other’s plans is an inevitable feature of social life, so the question becomes which interferences are acceptable, or to what degree. In some cases the appropriate level can be achieved through property rights and free contracting, but in many others it cannot. The ideal of regulation is one in which the state imposes the outcome that the parties would have contracted to. This is the appropriate framework for thinking about climate change policy. Carbon pricing is a way, not just of ensuring that the appropriate balancing of benefits and harms occurs, but of ensuring that the emissions we produce are justifiable.
Introduction
Authors: Tsika Noah
Published: September 2021

This introduction historicizes cinema’s relationship to policing and particularizes that relationship beyond familiar questions of regulation and censorship, while also revisiting those very questions in the context of a broader study of police power. How did the institution of law enforcement interact with the studio system? How was classical Hollywood shaped by—and how, in turn, did it shape—specific police activities? To what extent and in what ways did cinema serve the emergent public relations needs of police agencies, and vice versa? Police departments were not passive beneficiaries of Hollywood’s fiscal and ideological investments but active and self-interested contributors to various cinematic projects, many of which they themselves initiated. The relative fragility of police legitimacy—its disputability, particularly in the face of obvious abuses of power—necessitated this constant advocacy in twentieth-century America, as did Hollywood’s generic, formula-driven, reiterative commercial character.
Veto Power
Authors: Tsika Noah
Published: September 2021

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, police censorship of motion pictures was a significant and always controversial index of the expansion of law enforcement agencies to include activities that many Americans deemed unbecoming of cops. As such, it offers considerable insight into contemporary debates over the scope of police power in the United States. Today’s arguments have deep roots, including in a practice that was far more prevalent—and far more contentious—than conventional histories allow. When it came to vetting motion pictures, the methods of municipal police departments varied widely. But they often illuminated broader problems: Detroit police officers who voted to ban anti-Nazi films were themselves outspoken white supremacists; Chicago cops who balked at cinema’s suggestions of eroticism were also, outside of departmental screening rooms, aggressively targeting sex workers; and Southern lawmen who sought to eliminate intimations of racial equality were known for their brutal treatment of Black residents. Police censorship of motion pictures took place not in a vacuum but within the ever-widening ambit of law enforcement, and it merits scrutiny as a measure of the authority, influence, and cultural identities of municipal cops.
A Wonderful Find
Authors: Tutino Stefania
Published: September 2021

This chapter introduces the story of Giovanni Calà, Carlo’s supposed medieval ancestor. Giovanni’s life and deeds were recorded in numerous sources, which began to appear in the second half of the 1650s. A giant man and trusted captain of the Holy Roman emperor’s army, Giovanni had suddenly decided to abandon glory and honors to become a hermit and follower of Joachim of Fiore, whose holy charisma and prophetic abilities he allegedly shared. All the sources, however, were forgeries, fabricated by a man named Ferrante or Ferdinando Stocchi. Carlo, possibly unaware of the forgery, made extensive use of these sources in the books he wrote to publicize Giovanni’s story, hoping for a future canonization. This chapter also analyzes the early modern process of canonization, characterized by a greater degree of control and oversight by the Roman Curia and by a heightened sensitivity to questions of historical accuracy and documentary authenticity.
An Unexpected Ally
Authors: Tutino Stefania
Published: September 2021

In the summer of 1660, a strange phenomenon followed Mount Vesuvius’s eruption: red or black crosses started appearing on people’s linen, clothes, and even limbs. Since the Neapolitan people feared that the crosses were a supernatural occurrence and a terrible omen, the political and ecclesiastical leaders promoted the publication of books providing reasonable and pious explanations of the phenomenon. Among the authors who intervened in the debate over the nature of the crosses were Carlo Calà (who was hoping to gain favor with both the Viceroy and the Pope) and Athanasius Kircher, one of the leading protagonists of early modern Catholic culture. This chapter explains how the common interest in the crosses and Kircher’s scientific curiosity for fossils and giants provided Carlo with the opportunity to approach Kircher and make him aware of the case of his ancestor Giovanni, with the hope that the illustrious Catholic intellectual might support it.
The Curia at an Impasse
Authors: Tutino Stefania
Published: September 2021

Although Gradi’s evaluation concluded that the documents on Giovanni were forgeries, when the Congregations of the Index and the Inquisition were asked to provide a final deliberation on Giovanni’s case, they reached an impasse. This chapter explains the nature of this impasse through the conflict of opinion between Stefano Gradi and Ludovico Marracci, another learned Catholic intellectual tasked by the Curia to examine the documents concerning Giovanni’s case. The debate between Gradi and Marracci shows that the case of Giovanni’s alleged sanctity uncovered fundamental and uncomfortable questions. How much can the truth of doctrine depend on the truth of the facts before theology loses its ontological autonomy and becomes simply a branch of ecclesiastical history or philological criticism? How much can the truth of doctrine ignore the truth of the facts without being engulfed in the same fiction from which it is supposed to keep its distance?
The State of Our Knowledge
Authors: Melin Molly M.
Published: September 2021

This chapter draws together discussions of the puzzle of continued violent conflict from across social science disciplines, international organizations, and related media coverage. The chapter offers an overview of the main related research and the lack of conclusive findings, which helps explain why violence persists despite widespread international efforts to prevent it. This chapter offers an overview of the findings on conflict resolution processes by scholars in the field of political science. It then draws from business scholarship and overviews research suggesting the positive contributions the private sector can and does make toward peace. It concludes by highlighting the problems of having disjointed approaches and offering a conceptual framework for how these distinct approaches can be combined to generate a more comprehensive understanding of conflict resolution.
The Building and Breaking of Peace
Authors: Melin Molly M.
Published: September 2021

This chapter explores the role businesses play in creating peaceful societies. It builds on the rational choice theory of civil war onset and termination and draws from business research to understand the role private firms play in preventing civil wars. Firms are uniquely situated in their ability to raise the cost of violence, and proactive firms can significantly increase a country’s peace years. At the same time, an active private sector can make it significantly harder to reach an agreement for states with active conflict, as they act as an additional veto player in the bargaining process. This chapter tests these arguments on original cross-national data. The findings emphasize the need for political scientists to examine further the role of the private sector in many of the topics they study and generate a more complete picture of conflict and its resolution.
Introduction
Authors: Russell Annelise
Published: September 2021

Senators get to choose what kind of representative they want to present themselves as—a policy wonk, a constituent servant, and a partisan warrior. These types are dependent upon a senator’s relationship to her constituency and the makeup of that constituency. These styles convey important information about what a senator prioritizes in office and how lawmakers build a reputation with a digital constituency. Senators make strategic choices, incentivized by their constituencies and personal political goals, that shape rhetorical agendas on Twitter, using more than 180,000 senator tweets over two years to explain how senators communicate their priorities for representation. Senators can say what they want on Twitter; however, what emerges from this unrestricted platform is a carefully crafted rhetorical agenda that fosters constituent relationships and confers legitimacy.
Communicating Congressional Priorities in the Digital Age
Authors: Russell Annelise
Published: September 2021

Senators are “going public” with their rhetorical agenda, communicating a style of representation that will resonate with their individual constituencies. Senators’ tweets tell us what kind of representative they want to present themselves as, using the platform to develop a reputation as a policy wonk, a constituent servant, or a partisan warrior. This chapter explores the role of strategic communication in the Senate through the lens of Twitter and explains why these short and not-so-sweet messages have become an integral part of senators’ political communication. Twitter, unlike alternative media options, offers senators outsized discretion with minimal costs over the information a networked, digital constituency receives on a daily basis. Senators are systematically presenting themselves to voters through their rhetorical agendas, using the unconstrained and low-cost advantages of Twitter to signal their priorities in ways that resonate with a senator’s preferred constituency.
Partisan Agendas
Authors: Russell Annelise
Published: September 2021

Contentious politics is nothing new for a partisan Senate where compromise and bipartisan cooperation seem like increasingly outdated conceptions. This chapter explains patterns in partisan communication and explains why conservative senators and party leaders are more likely to adopt a partisan-warrior style of strategic communication on Twitter. When it comes to communicating partisan priorities as part of senators’ rhetorical agendas, the data reveals an asymmetric pattern of partisan rhetoric where Republican senators and party leaders are more likely to prioritize partisan politics, reinforcing their partisan reputation for constituents with a similar ideology. Republicans are more likely to use partisan rhetoric on Twitter, both attacking their Democratic counterparts in Congress or the White House and signaling support for their own party. And they continue to do this over time given data that shows how Republican senators and party leaders since 2013 have consistently communicated as partisan warriors.
Exemptions from Securities Act Registration
Authors: Steinberg Marc I.
Published: September 2021

This chapter addresses the convoluted SEC exemption framework and offers measures for effective reform. During the past four decades, Congress and the SEC have engaged in piecemeal alterations to the exemption framework. As a consequence, the exemption framework lacks clarity and unduly favors capital formation at the expense of investor protection. The chapter accordingly focuses on the exemption framework for both primary offerings and resales of securities. Its objectives are to explain why the current regimen is incompatible with the best interests of investors and the securities markets as well as to recommend the implementation of a revised framework that effectuates a more sound exemption framework. Hence, as set forth herein, the SEC’s exemption framework should be restructured so that the exemptions are tailored in a balanced manner that satisfies both issuer and investor needs.
Federalization of Corporate Governance
Authors: Steinberg Marc I.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the federalization of corporate governance from both historical and contemporary perspectives. It addresses gaps in the corporate governance framework and recommends the implementation of improved standards on the federal levels. These recommendations focus on such timely matters as board of director composition, greater gender and racial diversity on corporate boards, employee representation on boards, adoption of director term limits, excessive executive compensation, the implementation of a more realistic definition of “independent director,” and shareholder access to a company’s proxy statement to nominate a specified number of directors. The chapter also posits that federal court invocation of state law principles to ascertain the parameters of the federal securities laws in the corporate governance sphere is misplaced in view of the entrenched federalization of corporate governance.
Newness in Scholastic Traditions
Authors: Bronner Yigal
Published: September 2021

This chapter surveys previous treatments of innovation in South Asian cultural studies and shows the strong resistance among scholars to the very possibility of meaningful innovation in this world. In recent decades, this resistance has begun to erode, and several scholars have identified the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as an era of heightened creativity. However, the main voices in recent scholarship still find serious restraints holding back full-throated novelty, characterized by Sheldon Pollock as a situation wherein the “newness of the intellect” is constrained by the “oldness of the will.” This chapter argues that the controversy over the role of sequence in scriptural interpretation charted here in fact shows radical changes disguised by a thin veneer of traditionalism. It also sets this controversy against the background of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic hermeneutic approaches to “early” and “late” in scripture.
Behind the Veil of the Old
Authors: Bronner Yigal
Published: September 2021

This chapter begins by surveying the petering out of the debate over sequence in interpretation in seventeenth-century India and speculating about the reasons for its decline. At this point, the chapter returns to the broad question of innovation with which this book began, and places the story in the context of the “New Intellectuals” in South Asia and that of a few comparative case studies in order to present a broader survey of modes of novelty in scholastic traditions. The rhetorical stance of traditionalism that masks substantive innovation in the book's main case study has significant parallels in other intellectual traditions, suggesting a larger pattern that may merit further investigation. The “oldness of the will” discussed in chapter 1 may be only a pretense, after all, and a new one at that.
Harm Caused by Consumers
Authors: Waltman Max
Published: September 2021

The chapter analytically reviews research on the associations between, on the one hand, pornography consumption and, on the other, sexual aggression, attitudes promoting or trivializing violence against women, and sex purchasing. A positive association is found. The complementary methods used to draw causal inferences are illuminated: experiments, naturalistic observations (longitudinal and cross-sectional), and qualitative studies. Mechanisms that explain the effects of nonviolent pornography include subordination and dehumanization of women, targeting of perceived promiscuity, and imitation with unwilling partners. Results are corroborated across studies with samples drawn from the general population, youth, battered women, sex purchasers, and prostituted persons. It is shown how studies that control for variables and moderators such as hostility and promiscuity, which are not independent of the causal variable, likely underestimate pornography’s effects (a problem called post-treatment bias). Additionally, causal overdetermination and other problems in aggregated crime report studies are addressed (e.g., trivialization caused by pornography).
Democracy and Hierarchy
Authors: Waltman Max
Published: September 2021

The chapter sets forth a political theory of what would make legal challenges to pornography successful. Obstacles are identified in early liberal concepts of “negative rights,” which prevent interventions against non-state abuses of power. A nuanced view of power recognizes “positive rights” to intervention. The feminist theory of consciousness-raising is explored, shedding light on the necessity of subordinated groups’ representation. Intersectionality theory illustrates how multiple disadvantages prevent redress for people harmed by pornography under existing laws. Hence, legal challenges are hypothesized to be more efficient when the perspectives and interests of survivor groups of pornography-related harms are represented. The postmodern position submitting that subordinated groups’ rights should not be recognized, claiming they will be misappropriated and “renaturalize” oppression, is criticized for being a reductionist anti-state position conflating social categorization with its material consequences, thus denying (like negative rights do) a politics that could challenge that same oppressive material reality.
The Anti-pornography Civil Rights Ordinances, 1983–1991
Authors: Waltman Max
Published: September 2021

The chapter analyzes attempted civil rights legislation against pornography (the “MacKinnon-Dworkin” ordinance). It delineates its underlying hierarchy theory: consciousness-raising, group representation, and intersectional legal analysis—a commanding approach to end oppression through civil lawsuits against producers and disseminators, avoiding criminal law. The contemporaneous critics’ charges of “rigidity” and “one-sidedness” are found wanting, inadequately apprehending hierarchy and subordination. The ordinances’ definitions are shown to target provably harmful material only, preventing overbreadth and vagueness. A legal argument is advanced that the ordinances are narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest, the incidental restrictions on alleged First Amendment freedoms are no greater than is essential to further their interest, and the definitions are sufficiently analogous to other unprotected expressions (e.g., obscenity and group libel). The Seventh Circuit’s judicial invalidation in American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut (1985) is found based on ideology rather than law, political ideas rather than legislated rules.
Federal Responses, 1984–2014
Authors: Waltman Max
Published: September 2021

The chapter analyzes significant federal attempts to challenge pornography production and distribution in 1984–2014. The empirical, harm-based legal argument of the 1986 Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography and its endorsement of the MacKinnon-Dworkin civil rights ordinance are assessed. The million-dollar P.R. campaign to discredit the Commission’s work is discussed. Congressional civil rights bills introduced in 1984–1992 are examined, including amendments by Senators Heflin, Specter, and Biden that watered down the bills’ potential. Renewed Department of Justice efforts in 2002–2014 to indict high-profile producers/distributors of violent and degrading pornography under obscenity statutes are studied. Their legal concepts of obscenity and contemporary community standards, and the documented desensitization to women’s subordination fueled by pornography, are shown to exclude from legal action all but the most extreme materials. The strategy’s underlying frailty is exposed through an analysis of its constitutional litigation. The chapter concludes by comparing the obscenity approach with the civil rights approach and presenting alternative combinations.
Challenging Production, 1993–2005
Authors: Waltman Max
Published: September 2021

The chapter analyzes Swedish legislative attempts to challenge pornography production with laws against pimping/procuring. Minority parliamentary motions and the 1993 Prostitution Inquiry’s proposal to extend prostitution laws to cover pornography producers are considered. The 1998 Sexual Crimes Committee’s rejection of this proposal is scrutinized. Its attempts to invoke the legislative history of media antitrust and bankruptcy law, child pornography and child molestation amendments, as well as distinctions between content and underlying criminal conduct, are rebutted by legal analysis based on the primary sources. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that case law on analogous issues disproves the Committee’s position, including decisions on violent resistance and dishonest conduct during artistic film projects, filmed sexual crimes, amateur pornography, and purchasing/possessing illegal weapons as an integral means of otherwise legitimate news reporting. It is concluded that decisions not to apply prostitution laws to pornographers are based on ideology, not law, political ideas, not legislated rules.
Pilgrimage, Landscape, and Identity
Authors: Grau Marion
Published: September 2021

The book explores the ritual geography of a pilgrimage system woven around local medieval saints in Norway and the renaissance of pilgrimage in contemporary majority-Protestant Norway, facing challenges of migration, xenophobia, and climate crisis. The study is concerned with historical narratives and communal contemporary reinterpretations of the figure of St. Olav, the first Christian king who was a major impulse toward conversion to Christianity and the unification of regions of Norway in a nation unified by a Christian law and faith. This initially medieval pilgrimage network, which originated after the death of Olav Haraldsson and his proclamation as saint in 1030, became repressed after the Reformation, which had a great influence on Scandinavia and shaped Norwegian Christianity overwhelmingly. Since the late 1990s, the Church of Norway participated in a renaissance that has grown into a remarkable infrastructure supported by national and local authorities. The contemporary pilgrimage by land and by sea to Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim is one site where this negotiation is paramount. The study maps how pilgrims, hosts, church officials, and government officials are renegotiating and reshaping narratives of landscape, sacrality, pilgrimage as a symbol of life journey, nation, identity, Christianity, and Protestant reflections on the durability of medieval Catholic saints. The redevelopment of this instance of pilgrimage in a majority-Protestant context negotiates various societal concerns, all of which are addressed by various groups of pilgrims or other actors in the network. One part of the network is the annual festival Olavsfest, a culture and music festival that actively and critically engages the contested heritage of St. Olav and the Church of Norway through theater, music, lectures, and discussions, and features theological and interreligious conversations. This festival is a platform for creative and critical engagement with the contested, violent heritage of St. Olav, the colonial history of Norway in relation to the Sami indigenous population, and many other contemporary social and religious issues. The study highlights facets of critical, constructive engagement of these majority-Protestant actors engaging legacy through forms of theological and ritual creativity rather than mere repetition.
Reconstructing Rituals
Authors: Grau Marion
Published: September 2021

The final chapter pulls together central threads that characterize this pilgrimage network. Pilgrimage gives a particular ritual form to individuals’ quest to seek recovery, healing, meaning, and connection in their lives. The Norwegian pilgrimage network offers various experiences, narratives, and strategies for pilgrims, hosts, locals, and tourists to engage in rediscovering and reinventing history, making meaning, seeking cultural experiences, reclaiming indigenous history and spirituality, and reconstructing spiritual traditions. The figure of St. Olav provides a prism through which contemporary Norwegians can reflect on the ambivalence of the past, as well as critique present practices and narratives of what it means to be Christian, pushing the boundaries of what it means to be Norwegian, and what saintly lives in the context of climate change might look like. Nidaros Cathedral facilitates such engagement as an adaptable space anchoring widely diverse engagements with both heritage and contemporary society. Thus, these and other ritual practices serve to reconstruct heritage critically in a pilgrimage network that is remarkably open for the transformative reconstruction of spiritual practices and narratives in a shifting sacred geography.
Failure Is an Option
Authors: Patterson Silver Wolf David A.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the way the medical profession addresses physical illnesses and how recovery—from even the most difficult surgical procedures or terrible diseases—is still more likely than it is from substance use disorders. This chapter argues that few addiction treatment professionals regularly employ evidence-based interventions and emphasizes the importance making institutional or structural changes to ensure that they do.
A Vision
Authors: Patterson Silver Wolf David A.
Published: September 2021

The second section of the book focuses on solutions. This chapter deals with the important issue of having a vision—a North Star—and observes that, today, the addiction treatment field lacks a vision of its own future. There is no “big, hairy, audacious goal.” This chapter calls for such a vision.
Ties That Bind
Authors: Patterson Silver Wolf David A.
Published: September 2021

One of the most effective and proven ingredients of successful addiction treatment is the relationship between the therapist and patient. Known as a therapeutic alliance, the strong professional relationship is the most important piece of treatment and, unfortunately, one of the first things damaged when a patient enters a standard treatment facility. This chapter discusses the importance of the therapeutic relationships and how our system of care must change in order to build strong alliances. Touched on are the skills therapists should have and the most effective interventions therapists should know how to efficiently deploy in practice. Addressed are certain principles that should be continually monitored during a counseling session.
The Twenty-Third-Century Solution
Authors: Patterson Silver Wolf David A.
Published: September 2021

In light of the issues identified and problems discussed in the preceding chapters, a new addiction treatment is proposed. The COVID-19 pandemic has vividly illustrated how a crisis can lead to disruption and change, including the new and creative use of mobile technologies to bring and keep people together. Using telecom and other Internet-based technologies throughout healthcare systems was once thought to be in our far-off future. However, in response to this pandemic, with little preparation or planning, we have quickly transformed many face-to-face services into virtual/remote ones. These innovations can be leveraged to bring real-time data and better outcomes to the treatment of substance use disorders.
Concluding Thoughts
Authors: Patterson Silver Wolf David A.
Published: September 2021

The concluding chapter briefly revisits some of the main points of the book and makes the closing argument for a new addiction treatment system.
Why War?
Authors: Coker Christopher
Published: September 2021

What are humanity’s biological origins? What are the mechanisms, including culture, that continue to drive it? What is the history that has allowed it to evolve over time? And what are its functions – how does it survive and thrive by exploiting the features that define us as a species? These are the four questions of the ‘Tinbergen Method’ for explaining animal behavior, developed by the prize-winning Dutch ethologist Nico Tinbergen. The book contends that applying this method to war – which is unique to humans – can help us better understand why conflict is so resilient. The author explores these four questions in both past and present, and looks at our post – human future, assessing how far scientific advances in gene- editing, robotics and AI systems will de- center human agency. From the ancient Greeks to Artificial Intelligence (AI)  the book is an exploration of humankind’s propensity to warfare and its behavioral underpinnings. What it offers are new ways of thinking about our species’ unique and deadly preoccupation.
Sectarianism without Sects
Authors: Bishara Azmi
Published: September 2021

This book develops a theory of sectarianism and its relationship with communities of shared religion and with the emergence of imagined communities of this kind. Distinguishing between social sectarianism and political sectarianism, it discusses the relationship of political sectarianism to communities of religion as pre-existing social-historical entities. The main concern of the study, however, is to investigate how modern sectarianism invents imagined religious communities, or ta’ifas in Arabic. It does this by exploring sectarianism in various Arab countries. The book puts forward five theses. First, political sectarianism is a modern phenomenon. Second, an ‘imagined community of religion’ is a modern social imaginary based on the sectarian conceptualization of a religious or confessional affiliation as an identity shared by people who have never formed a community in practice within a vast imagined community, built on a selective reading of history and legend. Third, religious communities do not produce sectarianism, but sectarianism reproduces these communities as imagined communities. Fourth, power in modern authoritarian regimes is not attained by sectarian (Khaldunian) ‘asabiyya (group solidarity), but rather an authoritarian regime might use primordial ties to ensure loyalty and thereby produce sectarianism. Fifth, unlike a traditional community, an imagined community is not an ethical community.
The Damascus Document
Authors: Fraade Steven D.
Published: September 2021

The Damascus Document is an ancient Hebrew text that is one of the longest, oldest, and most important of the ancient scrolls found near Khirbet (ruins of) Qumran, usually referred to collectively as the Dead Sea Scrolls for the proximity of the Qumran settlement and eleven nearby caves to the Dead Sea. Its oldest parts originate in the mid- to late second century BCE. While the earliest discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls occurred in 1947, the Qumran Damascus Document fragments were discovered in 1952 (but not published in full until 1996), mainly in what is designated as Qumran Cave Four (some ten manuscripts altogether). However, it is unique in that two manuscripts (MS A and MS B) containing parts and variations of the same text were discovered much earlier, in 1896 (and published in 1910), among the discarded texts of the Cairo Geniza, the latter being written in the tenth-eleventh centuries CE. Together, the manuscripts of the Damascus Document, both ancient and medieval, are an invaluable source for understanding many aspects of ancient Jewish (and before that Israelite) history, theology, sectarian ideology, eschatology, liturgy, law, communal leadership, canon formation, and practice. Central to the structure of the overall text, is the intersection of law, both what we would call “biblical” (or biblically derived) and “communal,” and narrative/historical admonitions, perhaps modeled after a similar division the biblical book of Deuteronomy. A suitable characterization of the Damascus Document, to which we will repeatedly return, could be “bringing the Messiah through law.” Because of the longevity of its discovery, translation, publication, and debated interpretation, there is a long history of modern scholarship devoted to this ancient text.
Disability in International Human Rights Law
Authors: de Beco Gauthier
Published: September 2021

This book examines what international human rights law has gained from the new elements in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons (CRPD). It explores how the CRPD is intricately bound up with other international instruments by studying the relationship between the Convention rights and those protected by other human rights treaties as well as the overall objectives of the UN. Using a social model lens on disability, the book shows how the Convention sheds new light on the very notion of human rights. In order to so, the book provides a theoretical framework which explicitly integrates disability into international human rights law. It explains how the CRPD challenges the legal subject by drawing attention to distinct forms of embodiment, before introducing the idea of the ‘dis-abled subject’ stemming from a recognition that all individuals encounter disability-related issues in the course of their lives. The book also examines how to apply this theoretical framework to a number of rights and highlights the consequences for the implementation of human rights treaties as a whole. It not only builds upon available literature straddling different fields, which include disability studies and legal and political theory, but also draws upon the recommendations of treaty bodies and reports of UN agencies as well as disabled people’s organisations. The book provides an agenda-setting analysis for all human rights experts by inviting them to appreciate the benefits of placing disabled people at the heart of international human rights law.
Virulence evolution
Authors: Schmid-Hempel Paul
Published: September 2021

Virulence (i.e. reduction of host fitness) results from the parasite–host interaction. It can be an unselected side effect or the result of short-sighted evolution. The evolutionary theory of virulence predicts virulence by the fitness advantages for the parasite. Thereby, trade-offs among virulence level and host recovery or transmission rates are critical. This process can lead to lower, higher, or intermediate virulence, depending on conditions. Vertical transmission generally selects for lower virulence, whereas co-infection tends to increase virulence levels, also depending on genetic relatedness among the parasites. The sensitivity framework more generally addresses virulence levels in different systems; in this context, manipulation by parasites can result in significant virulence effects, especially when avoiding clearance and when effects are delayed. Different vaccination mechanisms can modify the evolution of virulence. Besides, virulence can evolve within hosts; for example, adaptation to a particular host type with serial passage attenuates virulence on other hosts.
Models of Leadership in Plato and Beyond
Authors: Scott Dominic , Freeman R. Edward
Published: September 2021

This book draws on Plato’s philosophy to throw light on contemporary leadership theory and practice. It combines an account of his thought with applications to modern case studies and approaches, in both politics and business. Rather than attempting to give a single ‘one-size-fits-all’ definition of leadership, his strategy was to break it into its different strands. He presents several ‘models’ of leadership, most of them images or analogies: the leader as doctor, navigator, artist, teacher, shepherd, weaver, or sower. Each model points to features of leadership that we intuitively recognize to be important (e.g. curing a social malaise, charting a new course, or weaving together the social fabric). Some were already in wide circulation in Plato’s time, like the shepherd and the navigator. What he did was to make them much richer and more complex. The book goes through the models individually, setting out the essentials of Plato’s thought and then illustrating each model with modern case studies—eighteen in total, including presidents, CEOs, and Nobel laureates. There is also a chapter comparing Plato’s models with four recent leadership approaches. Highly innovative in its approach, this book presupposes no prior knowledge of Plato, although those familiar with his philosophy will find it a fruitful way of re-reading his work. But the focus is first and foremost on leadership, rather than celebrating Plato’s achievements: the priority is to present a multi-faceted approach, which does justice to the complex phenomenon of leadership.
Explanations of and in Time
Authors: Wilson Alastair
Published: September 2021

Various approaches to quantum gravity render spacetime an emergent phenomenon, with the existence and properties of spacetime depending on a non-spatiotemporal underlying reality. This chapter investigates the mode of dependence that is involved. I explain and defend my recent proposal to classify different kinds of dependencies in terms of the principles mediating the dependency, and apply this proposal to the emergence of spacetime. While philosophers have typically interpreted spacetime emergence as involving metaphysical grounding, I show how premises that are widely endorsed lead us to classify the emergence of spacetime in loop quantum gravity as causal in nature. I recommend spacetime functionalism as a resolution of this puzzle that vindicates the natural view of spacetime emergence as non-causal. I then explore a different approach to spacetime emergence in quantum gravity, the ‘many-instant landscape’ scenario described by Gomes, and show how it fits into the proposed framework for spacetime emergence.
Do You See Space? How to Recover the Visible and Tangible Reality of Space (Without Space)
Authors: Ismael Jenann
Published: September 2021

In the search for a theory of quantum gravity, there are strong theoretical pressures that have pushed in the direction of theories in which space (or spacetime) is not present at the fundamental level. The task of recovering the appearances is especially pressing in such theories. This chapter looks at the cognitive processes that produce spatial experience to better understand the empirical constraints on such theories. There is no question that we have immediate awareness of the visible and tangible reality of space, but what that awareness amounts to, and whether it supports the requirement that space has to be recovered as concrete external structure, is not something that has received enough attention. This chapter fills that gap.
Authoritarian Liberalism in Late Weimar
Authors: Wilkinson Michael A.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the interwar breakdown of liberal democracy in the Weimar Republic. Hermann Heller used the term authoritarian liberalism to capture the conjunction of political authoritarianism and economic liberalism ruling late Weimar. This regime attempted to depoliticize conflict, specifically in the economic sector, which had been threatening the interests of capital. It was ‘tolerated’ by the social democrats, who gradually abandoned democratic projects over the course of the 1920s, leaving behind not only radical options such as democratization of the economy, but also the parliamentary institutions of the Weimar Republic. The chapter concludes by examining how the seizure of power by the Nazi party, although marking a break, in the sense of heralding a regime based on mass mobilization, national redemption, and a cult of violence, continued the trajectory of depoliticization, signalling the ‘end of the political’.
Restraining State Sovereignty: Imagining a ‘European Germany’
Authors: Wilkinson Michael A.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how post-war Europe was reconstituted through a new regional geopolitics of inter-state relations, an acknowledgement of the interdependence of internal and external domains of state action, and a change in the abstract meaning of sovereignty. Materially, inter-state relations in Europe were reconstituted through the response to the ‘German question’, extraneous factors of Cold War superpower rivalry, and the project of European integration. This was supported by constitutional developments. Domestically, these developments involved commitments to internationalism and Europeanism and the turn to counter-majoritarian institutions, disconnecting state sovereignty from popular sovereignty. Regionally, they involved the constitutionalization of the European Economic Community (EEC), cementing a functionalist ideology and depoliticization through juridical and technical avenues.
De-democratization of the Political Constitution
Authors: Wilkinson Michael A.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how institutional change in post-war Europe reconstituted inter-state, state society, and social relations in such a way as to restrain sovereignty, depoliticize the economy, and deradicalize politics. The constitutionalism that developed in the post-war era, and the transformation in state-society relations that it signalled, had international, European, and domestic dimensions, which were themselves intertwined. Constitutionalism contributed significantly to the process of de-democratization, in combination with a demobilization of the masses and a de-radicalization of parties of the Left. The transformation of political problems into technical or legal issues, along with the decline of parliamentarism as a touchstone of political legitimacy, and the constitutionalization of the European Treaties, would be facilitated by the relatively high levels of economic growth during the Trente Glorieuses, which permitted welfare corporatism to complement the constitution of a passive authoritarian liberalism. The chapter concludes by noting how this set in motion a dynamic that takes a sharper turn in the ‘new neoliberalism’ of the 1980s.
The Material Constitution: There is no Alternative … or is There?
Authors: Wilkinson Michael A.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines how the material constitution of economic liberalism was entrenched after Maastricht, with Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the neo-liberal drift. In the domain of political economy, the deepening and widening of post-war trends was most evident, the logic of the market being brought to bear on macroeconomic policy with a near-complete political abdication to ordoliberal and neo-liberal demands. The chapter also discusses the dramatic geographical extension of these trends via the process of enlargement of the Union. And, yet, in the socio-economic domain, certain discontinuities could also be identified, and the chapter discusses the opposition to the Maastricht settlement and its political orthodoxy that started to bubble below the surface. It concludes with a discussion of the growing social fractures that developed after Maastricht, albeit without being channelled into a significant political countermovement.
The New Constitutionalism and its Discontents
Authors: Wilkinson Michael A.
Published: September 2021

This chapter examines the unsettling of the political constitution by domestic challenges to the euro crisis response, particularly against the actions of the European Central Bank (ECB). The disconnect between postnational discourse and domestic constitutionalism generated critical constitutional moments over who was ‘the guardian’ of the European constitution. These moments were exemplified by the OMT saga, when the German Constitutional Court threatened to invalidate an ECB programme that had existential implications for the eurozone. The chapter will examine how the ECJ’s assertive ruling, in response, did not signal the perfection of European constitutionalism, as suggested by the new constitutionalists, but revealed its precarity, rubber-stamping a programme that was of dubious legitimacy. If this would ‘buy time’ for the project, it would do so in a way that merely concealed the dysfunctionality of Economic and Monetary Union. The chapter concludes that authoritarian liberalism was, ultimately, juridically fortified by these challenges, but left open to further constitutional contestation, revealing the erosion of sovereignty underlying the European construct.