bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hvordan vurdere elevers kritiske lesing? Forslag til et praktisk-didaktisk rammeverk
Authors: Weyergang Cecilie , Frønes Tove Stjern , Siljan Henriette Hogga
Published: July 2023

Denne studiens mål er å utvikle et praktisk-didaktisk rammeverk for å operasjonalisere og vurdere elevers kompetanse i kritisk lesing. I læreplanen Kunnskapsløftet 2020 framheves det at elever skal kunne stille seg kritiske til informasjonen de leser. Selv om det er bred enighet om at kritisk refleksjon over tekster er viktig, er det krevende å konkretisere hva kritisk kan bety. En del av arbeidet med å sikre at elever utvikler nødvendig lesekompetanse innebærer å utvikle vurderingsverktøy. Vurdering gir ikke bare informasjon om hva elever mestrer og ikke mestrer, men kan også modellere og konkretisere ulike tilnærminger til tekster. Det har riktignok vist seg å være utfordrende å vurdere kritisk lesing, blant annet fordi begrepet er vagt og krevende å definere. I denne studien utfører vi en litteraturgjennomgang av skandinaviske studier som berører kritisk lesing i en utdanningskontekst, og fokuserer på lesing av sakprosatekster innenfor norsk og samfunnsfag. Gjennomgangen genererer en praktisk-didaktisk modell med mulige dimensjoner av kritisk lesing. I diskusjonen eksemplifiserer vi hvordan dimensjonene kan bli observerbare i vurderingssituasjoner i skolen og drøfter modellens begrensninger og praktiske nytteverdi.
English abstract
How to assess students’ critical reading? Proposal for a practice-oriented framework
The aim of this study is to develop a practice-oriented framework for operationalizing and assessing students’ critical reading. The Norwegian curricula, Kunnskapsløftet 2020, emphasize the importance of students’ adopting a critical perspective when reading. Although there is broad agreement about the importance of critical reflection in reading, it is difficult to specify what critical means. To ensure that students develop necessary reading skills, we need assessment tools. Assessment gain information about the students’ competence, in addition, the assessment may have a modeling function by concretizing textual approaches. However, it has proven to be challenging to assess critical reading, partly because the term is vague and difficult to define. We conduct a literature review of the field of critical reading in education, based on Scandinavian studies. We focus on reading of non-fiction texts in Norwegian Language Arts and Social Science. The review generates a practice-oriented model with dimensions of what critical reading can entail. In the discussion, we exemplify how the dimensions can become observable in an assessment situation. Furthermore, we discuss the model’s limitations and practical use.
Lærerutdanneren som forsvant? En retorisk analyse av styringsdokumenter for barnehagelærerutdanningen
Authors: Foss Vigdis
Published: July 2023

I tråd med de siste tiårenes utdanningspolitiske trender om målstyring av utdanningssystemet og nye visjoner om hva utdanning skal bidra til, endres også premissene for hva det vil si å være lærerutdanner. En styringstekst kan leses som en invitasjon til ulike roller på et bestemt område, for å mobilisere til visse former for praksis og profesjonelle identiteter. Denne studien er en analyse av hvordan lærerutdanneren på ulike måter inviteres inn i barnehagelærerutdanningen (BLU) i utvalgte styringstekster for utdanningen i tidsrommet 1971–2018. Styringstekstene analyseres med støtte i teoretiske ressurser som utforsker retoriske publikumskonstruksjoner. Funn i denne studien antyder en utvikling av institusjonell og organisatorisk autoritet som erstatter lærerutdanneren som synlig bindeledd mellom utdanning, læringsprosess og student.
English abstract
The Disappearance of the Teacher Educator?
According to the trends of educational policy of the last decades, preschool teacher educators encounter altered demands regarding the purposes and design of the education. Consequently, the position of the profession of being a teacher in the system of education has also changed. We can read governing documents as an invitation to different roles in given areas, mobilizing for different kinds of professional practices and identities. This is an analysis of how the teacher educators are invited into the kindergarten teacher education in Norway (BLU) in a selection of governing documents through the years 1971–2018. The analysis is based on theoretical resources that explore the concept of a rhetorical audience. Findings imply a change of authority, from professional teacher authority and autonomy to institutional and management authority. These authorities in turn replace the teacher as a link between education, the learning process and the student.
Alimentación Macrobiótica para la salud humana y las enfermedades crónicas
Authors: Blasco-Carlos Miguel Ángel , García-Moreno Jesús
Published: July 2023

Esta revisión se ha centrado en el potencial de la nutrición Macrobiótica para la salud humana, ya que es probablemente la ciencia más completa sobre el alimento como medicina. Con aproximadamente 5000 años de evolución, el tiempo le ha permitido a la Macrobiótica desarrollarse a un nivel de complejidad muy alto, al punto de adaptarse a cada individuo o circunstancia. La Macrobiótica forma parte de lo que se conoce como medicina Oriental, y afirma que la salud no es sólo el resultado de una correcta proporción de alimentos, sino también del equilibrio entre las dos energías, el yin y el yang, en el individuo y su entorno. Actualmente existen escuelas, clínicas privadas y restaurantes macrobióticos en todos los países más avanzados del mundo, pero esta disciplina aún está lejos de las carreras académicas oficiales y todavía hay muy poca investigación sobre ella. Este documento da una visión general de los pilares fundamentales de este tipo de alimentación, repasa las principales investigaciones científicas que la estudian o sobre el tipo de dieta en la que se basa, y se centra en su potencial para curar enfermedades crónicas como el cáncer y la diabetes.
Searching for Dark Matter in Space
Authors: Fisher Peter
Published: July 2023

This chapter explains how the annihilation of dark matter in the galaxy could produce cosmic rays, which are energetic normal matter particles traveling through space. It highlights processes like supernova explosions and pulsars that are known to produce cosmic rays, and astrophysicists that have been observing cosmic rays for more than 100 years. It also talks about experiments searching for evidence for dark matter in cosmic rays that must separate the cosmic rays, which result from dark matter annihilation from those produced by supernova explosions, pulsars, and other sources. The chapter describes how Weakly Interacting Massive Particles could annihilate in the Milky Way to become Standard Model particles that then traverse the Milky Way. The chapter then deals with the detection of cosmic rays in space and the unexpected observation resulting from the search for dark matter at the center of the galaxy.
Losing Belief
Authors: Mackey Jacob L.
Published: July 2023

This chapter traces the history of the loss of belief in scholarship on Roman religion. It shows how a dichotomy between belief and action accompanied by a denial of belief had sprung up by the early twentieth century and had come to prevail by the century's end. The origins of the dichotomy lie in early Christian antipagan polemic, while belief-denial was encouraged by developments in late twentieth-century anthropology. The chapter then exposes some of the flaws of the central premises and arguments offered in support of the belief-action dichotomy and belief-denial. Some scholars have taken “belief” to name a distinctively Christian attitude, not available to traditional Romans. The chapter argues that “belief” is just the English word for a very basic sort of cognitive state, which is characteristic of all neurotypical human beings, whose job is to represent the way things stand in the world.
Belief and Emotion, Belief and Action
Authors: Mackey Jacob L.
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses how belief informs Roman religious emotion and Roman religious action. It begins by examining emotion and the Intentionality of emotion. Emotions were constitutive components of Roman religious psychology and religious action, and they typically owed their very existence to religious beliefs. For one cannot feel anger, joy, or fear about a state of affairs unless one represents that state of affairs, that is to say, entertains a belief about how things stand in the world. The chapter considers how cult action, by all accounts a central feature of Roman religion, depended causally on belief, among other Intentional states. Beyond individual wants and desires, social norms also served as pervasive and potent motivators to action in the world of Roman cult. The motivational power of any “desire-independent” social norm or of any package of such norms—which can be called a deontology—flows from agents' beliefs about the content of the norms and the legitimacy of the obligations the norms impose. The chapter also looks at action theory and folk psychology.
Shared Belief, Social Ontology, Power
Authors: Mackey Jacob L.
Published: July 2023

This chapter presents a social ontology for the Roman religious world, a theory of the nature of social reality in general that explains Roman socioreligious reality in particular. It explores the creation and maintenance of institutions, such as the augurate and augural college; practices, such as inauguratio; statuses, such as the position of augur; and most consequentially, the deontologies, that is, the strictly social powers, obligations, permissions, and restrictions that attend these things, such as the augur's right of obnuntiatio. The chapter argues that shared Intentionality allowed Romans collectively to create institutions and practices, to impose statuses and positions on objects, actions, and persons, and to bestow and recognize the deontic powers of these institutions, practices, objects, actions, and persons. It shows that Roman socioreligious reality was at once ontologically subjective and epistemically objective. Ultimately, Roman socioreligious reality and socioreligious power depended existentially on belief, especially shared belief.
Ad incunabula
Authors: Mackey Jacob L.
Published: July 2023

This chapter assesses the cognitive agency exercised by Roman children, both individually and jointly, in their own religious learning. Roman children can best be described not as students, for they typically did not receive formal instruction, but as apprentices in cult. The chapter begins by sketching very briefly the ontogeny, that is, the development and maturation, of some aspects of social cognition relevant to this account of Roman children's religious learning. It then explores imitation as an individualistic mode of social learning in which Roman children learned to pray by observing others in prayer. The chapter also looks at the Roman child's participatory learning through sharing Intentionality and agency in collaborative ritual actions. Finally, it takes up the question of formal religious pedagogy by examining some evidence for children's choral training.
A New Climate for a New Continent
Authors: Lehmann Philipp
Published: July 2023

This chapter looks into Herman Sörgel's Atlantropa project, which is focused on a giant dam at Gibraltar. Sörgel proposed a complete barrier between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. The project represented an idiosyncratic mix of colonialist conceptions, racist ideology, cultural pessimism, anxieties about imminent fossil fuel shortages and global environmental decline, and a cornucopian belief in technology and postnational cooperation. Moreover, Atlantropa embodies a prime example of how theories and academic climate change terms were politicized in the early twentieth century. The chapter cites how desiccation and desertification became increasingly attached to environmental, social, and cultural theories and anxieties.
The Varieties of Utopian Practice
Authors: Claeys Gregory
Published: July 2023

This chapter explores the proposition that in designated spaces utopian principles may be introduced temporarily or for longer, with the aim of promoting more intensive sociability than that usually prevailing in the wider society. It points out how the proposition demonstrates the possibility of viable alternative ways of living in which equality, solidarity, communal identity, and belongingness are prioritised as a kind of halfway house to utopia. It also looks at festivals, some of which are overtly defined by utopian principles. The chapter talks about folk memory or myth of the Golden Age that was embodied in various European festivals. Originating in religious ceremonies and the seasonal and agricultural calendar, such celebrations sometimes possess a sense of sacred time and space.
The Later Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution
Authors: Claeys Gregory
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses the utopian literary responses to growing affluence, luxury, and inequality that were both satirical and programmatic in the later eighteenth century. In Britain, literary and practical utopianism was mostly developed by two groups of republican writers. The first, in the tradition of Walter Moyle and Marchamont Nedham, were followers of neo-Harringtonians that promoted an agrarian law restricting the amount of landed property anyone could hold. The second advocated community of goods and can be termed utopian republicans because of their alignment with Thomas Moore. The chapter explains how the republican writers exhibited overtly Spartan sympathies and used fiction, pamphlets, and books to promote their views.
Counterculture and Consumerism
Authors: Claeys Gregory
Published: July 2023

This chapter talks about utopianism that seemingly began to pass out of fashion from the 1930s onwards. It mentions critics that began identifying Joseph Stalin's failings with socialism and most modern utopian enthusiasm had been invested. It also cites Ludwig von Mises' writing in 1936, which notes how socialism had only begun to turn towards asceticism to excuse its low economic productivity. The chapter describes liberal and conservative thinkers that celebrated the supposed triumph of capitalist democracy over communism. It explains how criticisms are misplaced insofar as they depict utopianism as a whole and provide evidence on the confusion between millenarianism and utopia, and are accurate only insofar as this is also shared with some utopian thinkers.
The Modern Depoliticization of Money
Authors: Eich Stefan
Published: July 2023

This chapter examines John Locke's monetary thought, which had an enormous impact during the Coinage Crisis of 1695. By 1695, due to the shortage of silver, English coins in circulation lacked more than half of their original silver content. What was a nuisance at first had come to pose a serious threat to the trust and legitimacy of English money. All agreed that the whole monetary system soon threatened to come to a grinding halt, cutting off the military and bringing down the new government with it. At the height of the crisis, in December of 1695, Locke published a pamphlet calling for a full recoinage at the old value, hoping to sway public opinion and the concurrent deliberations in Parliament. Locke thought that language and money shared a pervasive instability and corruptibility. But money—unlike language—could be stabilized by tying it to the empirical concept of a substance in the form of silver or gold. This would remove money from discretionary political meddling, thereby effectively depoliticizing it.
Empire of Salons
Authors: Pfeifer Helen
Published: July 2023

Historians have typically linked Ottoman imperial cohesion in the sixteenth century to the bureaucracy of the sultan's court. This book points instead to a critical but overlooked factor: gentlemanly salons. The book demonstrates that salons—exclusive assemblies in which elite men displayed their knowledge and status—contributed as much as any formal institution to the empire's political stability. These key laboratories of Ottoman culture, society, and politics helped men to build relationships and exchange ideas across the far-flung Ottoman lands. The book shows that salons played a central role in Syria and Egypt's integration into the empire after the conquest of 1516–17. The book anchors its narrative in the life and network of the star scholar of sixteenth-century Damascus, Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi (d. 1577), and it reveals that Arab elites were more influential within the empire than previously recognized. Their local knowledge and scholarly expertise competed with, and occasionally even outshone, that of the most powerful officials from Istanbul. Ultimately, Ottoman culture of the era was forged collaboratively, by Arab and Turkophone actors alike. The book illustrates the extent to which magnificent gatherings of Ottoman gentlemen contributed to the culture and governance of empire.
Introduction
Authors: Pfeifer Helen
Published: July 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Ottoman salons. Informal gatherings of gentlemen were an indispensable part of Ottoman political, social, and intellectual life in the early modern period. In cities and towns stretching from Albania to Arabia, elite salons brought leading figures from diverse ethnic and geographical backgrounds into close contact. Salons were especially important in the wake of the Ottoman expansion into the Arab Middle East in the early part of the sixteenth century. Since the medieval period, salons had offered a forum for socializing that was shared, at least in its roughest outlines, all across the Islamic world. With the Ottoman conquest of Greater Syria, Egypt, and parts of the Arabian Peninsula in 1516–7, such assemblies offered a venue in which encounters between the Turkish-speaking Ottoman ruling elite and local Arab notables could take place. The chapter explains that the book views the salon in this transformative era as it looked from the Syrian city of Damascus through the perspective of one Arab notable, Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi.
A World Divided
Authors: Pfeifer Helen
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses the decades preceding the conquest, when Syria and Egypt were under the rule of the Turkish-speaking Mamluks and Ottoman power was concentrated in Southeastern Europe and Anatolia. Despite this political division, the two empires harbored a similar salon culture. The travels of Cairene scholar ʻAbd al-Rahim al-ʻAbbasi and Ottoman official Mü'eyyedzade ʻAbdurrahman show how salons furthered social and intellectual exchanges between the two neighboring polities. Yet differences remained. Though scholars working in Mamluk lands perceived themselves to be at the center of global Sunni Islamic learning, many of their Ottoman contemporaries felt a greater affinity to the Persian world. Likewise, while gentlemanly conversation in Mamluk lands revolved mostly around Arabic, in Ottoman elite circles Turkish and Persian played far more important roles. As such, salon culture in the two regions had marked differences on the eve of the conquest.
An Empire Connecting
Authors: Pfeifer Helen
Published: July 2023

This chapter examines how salons acquired new political functions in the wake of the Ottoman conquest of Syria. The new rulers knew they lacked the fine-grained knowledge of the new provinces required to successfully incorporate them. Whom to trust? Whom to appoint? These questions became a matter of state security in the early 1520s, when rebellious holdovers from the former Mamluk administration tried to seize power and restore the old order. Informal encounters between Rumi and Arab elites played an important part in addressing these concerns and in helping the Ottoman system take root. Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi and his father Radi al-Din lost no time in reaching out to the Ottoman elites now passing through Damascus with greater frequency, including leading members of the provincial administration like governors and judges. The informality of salons allowed them to act as sites for the exchange of unlike things: locals supplied information and legitimacy in return for appointments and patronage. What is more, the relationships established within salons often lasted decades, long after salon-goers had parted ways.
Mountain Aesthetics
Authors: König Jason
Published: July 2023

This chapter describes mountains as places associated in particularly intense ways with vision, both in ancient and in modern culture. It reviews Egeria's first glimpse of Mount Sinai across the huge and extremely beautiful valley by which she approaches, which is an important moment in her narrative. The experience of looking up at the smoke of sacrifice on mountain summits was a crucial part of the communal experience of mountaintop sacrifice. The chapter cites the type of mountaintop fire in the opening lines of Aeschylus' Agamemnon wherein the visibility of the mountaintops has been harnessed and enhanced by human ingenuity. Mountaintop viewing was a central feature of ancient imaginative engagement with the earth's surface just as much as it has been in the modern world.
Dio Chrysostom and the Mountains of Euboia
Authors: König Jason
Published: July 2023

This chapter talks about the countryside, which has often been idealised as an unspoiled space set apart from the problems of urban life throughout the Western literary tradition. It cites Raymond Williams's The Country and the City that drew attention to the artificiality of nostalgic images of rural life in English literature from about 1600 onwards. It also considers the idea of pristine nature free from human interference as a fabrication, even in imagining and pursuing an ideal that is generally undermined. The chapter looks at the most remote rural environments that carry the marks of human presence and human activity, and the origins of that situation stretch far back into human history. It describes the images of primitive rustic community free from urban corruption that often turn out on closer inspection to reveal more about urban fantasies and urban priorities.
Epilogue
Authors: König Jason
Published: July 2023

This chapter reviews the idea of the summit position that has been a very powerful one within modern mountaineering culture. At various times over the last few centuries the idea of conquering mountain summits has been entangled with imperialist ideals. It emphasizes how viewing mountain scenery is linked with ways of envisaging landscape that have an elitist history, where the ability to appreciate and access places of beauty and sublimity has been a marker of social distinction. The chapter talks about the enjoyment that many people take from experiencing physical challenges in difficult mountain terrain, which is the legacy among other things of late nineteenth-century developments within mountaineering culture. Mountains have often been used as landscapes for the exercise of an elite, white, able-bodied, male identity and has involved importing an outsider perspective that elides the experience of those who live and work in the mountains.
“A Rebellious Hand”
Authors: Dever Carolyn
Published: July 2023

This chapter argues that the grand experiment of Works and Days begins not once but twice, and that the situation prompting each of these commencements is at once close to identical to and deeply enmeshed in Victorian novelistic forms. This situation involves three critical elements: reclaiming loss as strength and absence as presence, the power gained from fetishistic objects, and the worldly force, transcendent over time and space, that Michael Field claim for themselves, and for Edith Cooper in particular. For good reasons, scholars typically credit Michael Fields' 1888–89 notebook as the first formal volume of Works and Days. At the same time, however, the chapter discusses the existence of an anomalous 1868 volume, written by twenty-two-year-old Katharine Bradley solo, partly in French. The 1868 book documents Bradley's visit to Paris, where she met—very briefly—and flirted with the sculptor and stained-glass artist Alfred Gérente, brother of a friend.
“The Hot Hands of the Modern”
Authors: Dever Carolyn
Published: July 2023

This chapter reveals in the 1892 volume of Works and Days how the two narrators negotiate the entanglements of art and desire. This was brought about by Edith Cooper's falling in love with the art critic Bernhard Berenson, who repelled her passion through a series of grindingly humiliating rejections—of Cooper herself, of Katherine Bradley, and of Michael Field. This affair causes an existential threat to their existence as poets and lovers. The year thus finds Michael Field writing marriage and sex, about bodies and about corpses, about the clothing that covers nakedness, and about the naked bodies that fill out clothing from the inside, as old wine fills new bottles.
“The Infamous Cliché”
Authors: Dever Carolyn
Published: July 2023

This chapter chronicles Michael Field's life in 1897. They root the year's narrative in the tropes of Victorian melodrama: suspected murder, a missing body, a rogue photographer, hostile and inscrutable foreigners, and a dashing hero. And romance: in this year's narrative, Michael Field exchange wedding rings, and in earnest—and in private—commence their life as a couple in the full flush of married harmony. In the year they turned fifty-one and thirty-five, respectively, Michael Field are “daughters” no longer; they are out from under the thumb of a tyrannical and angry patriarch. Here, the 1897 text presents a classic tension between the worldly events that were public—indeed, tragic—and tangible, and the deep affective bedrock of those worldly events' narration.
“Lilies and Light and Liquor”
Authors: Dever Carolyn
Published: July 2023

This chapter presents 1899 as a year of desire for Michael Field—and a year of action, in anticipation of a new century. Though it begins in apprehension about the meaning and implications of their desires, volume 13 of Works and Days is a narrative of Michael Field's new possibilities. Here the women take the abstract, emotional concept of a “home” firmly into the domain of the material: the nitty-gritty stuff of the everyday, from paint colors and ventilation to sublime satinwood. In 1899, Works and Days takes the measure of the domestic ideal using the yardstick of the domestic real. Their home is the anchor of the poets' identities, and their decision in late 1898 to leave their home at Durdans and seek a new one verges on the existential. But in an entirely stunning embrace of the pleasures of homemaking, Michael Field use their artistic powers to create a temple to their marriage.
Introduction
Authors: Kalisman Hilary Falb
Published: July 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the role of public school teachers in state- and nation-building in the modern Middle East. Under colonial rule, public education, a national institution, necessarily promoted regional and transnational notions of affiliation, shaping how individuals situated themselves in relation to separate spheres of nation and state. In the particular case of Britain's Middle Eastern mandates, British colonial policies purposefully exacerbated a regionwide scarcity of educational institutions and of educators. The lack of even literate individuals forced the growing governments of Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine to hire teachers where they could. These states drew from Ottoman-era educational hubs, which had become international rather than provincial centers. The circulation of educators, for schooling or for employment during the interwar era, encouraged transnational ideologies that comfortably overlapped with national ones. Public education not only incorporated a small but increasing segment of the Middle East's population into government service, it also became a key arena of antigovernment activities. This book follows the arc of educators' changing status across the transition from colonial and elite to national and mass education.
From Kuttab to College
Authors: Kalisman Hilary Falb
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses how the demographically varied student population and the wildly different institutions they attended during the final years of the Ottoman Empire were key elements in the forging of networks of people and information linking the Arab provinces with one another and with the imperial capital. State schooling promised state employment. Both education and careers in the civil service required travel across the empire to rare, urban institutes of higher learning, and from one educational or administrative post to another. Although travel and migration within the Ottoman Empire were not unheard of, including for education and government work, the number of individuals making these journeys—and the number of institutions available for them to travel to—greatly increased in the nineteenth century. The travels of these students, later educators, formed systems of schooling, affiliation, and employment that persisted after the imposition of mandate borders, and after the substitution of Arabism or other ideologies for Ottoman loyalties. In short, the geographic and personnel networks of late Ottoman education underlay the foundation of the type of state that would arise in the mandate era, as well as that era's transnational and regional ideologies.
“Borders We Did Not Recognize”
Authors: Kalisman Hilary Falb
Published: July 2023

This chapter evaluates how, during the interwar years, public education grew and supported nationally bounded infrastructures while facilitating regional networks, methods of political engagement, and ideologies. Educators' mobility, the regional nature of their political expression, and their entanglement with multiple governments are key, and somewhat overlooked, factors in the effendiyya's political impact. The promise of engagement with the state and their thoughts on what the state could and should do led educated individuals to play a more complicated role than simply harbingers of modernization and democracy. They spread alternative ideologies, along regional as well as national lines, through the institutions of multiple states. Teachers both trained and formed a key segment of this modern, educated, interwar society, possessing a particular mentality of civil servant cum antigovernment rebel.
The Professional Teacher and the Hazards of Mass Education
Authors: Kalisman Hilary Falb
Published: July 2023

This chapter explores the seismic changes in the teaching profession wrought by independence for Iraq, Jordan, and Israel and diaspora and occupation for Palestinians. From the 1940s through the 1960s, mass education came to function as a crucial institution of postcolonial states but ended the automatic links between government education and government employment that had previously benefited teachers. The separation of teachers from high politics and their declining social and economic position changed their tactics of resistance. No longer elites or latent politicians, educators confronted their states en masse. They raised their voices as a collective, as an important political bloc, but in the process, they lost their “privileged access” to administrative posts, which had been so exceptional during the interwar era. Instead, educators banded together to the extent each government permitted, seeking better wages and economic protections as well as the ability to engage in formal politics.
Adam Smith Reconsidered
Authors: Sagar Paul
Published: July 2023

Adam Smith has long been recognized as the father of modern economics. More recently, scholars have emphasized his standing as a moral philosopher—one who was prepared to critique markets as well as to praise them. But Smith's contributions to political theory are still underappreciated and relatively neglected. This book argues that not only have the fundamentals of Smith's political thought been widely misunderstood, but that once we understand them correctly, our estimations of Smith as economist and as moral philosopher must radically change. Rather than seeing Smith either as the prophet of the free market, or as a moralist who thought the dangers of commerce lay primarily in the corrupting effects of trade, the book shows why Smith is more thoroughly a political thinker who made major contributions to the history of political thought. Smith, the book argues, saw war, not commerce, as the engine of political change and he was centrally concerned with the political, not moral, dimensions of—and threats to—commercial societies. In this light, the true contours and power of Smith's foundational contributions to western political thought emerge as never before. Offering major reinterpretations of Smith's political, moral, and economic ideas, the book seeks to revolutionize how he is understood. In doing so, it recovers Smith's original way of doing political theory, one rooted in the importance of history and the necessity of maintaining a realist sensibility, and from which we still have much to learn.
Commercial Society, History, and the Four Stages Theory
Authors: Sagar Paul
Published: July 2023

This chapter elaborates on Adam Smith's political thought on commercial society, four stages theory, and conjectural history. It clarifies that Smith was not a conjectural historian in his respective political thoughts. Contrary to received wisdom, Smith's four stages theory is not a historical account and it should be conceived as an a priori explication of how human economic development might be expected to proceed in idealized circumstances under certain artificial assumptions. Meanwhile, commercial society is sometimes employed as a generic term for liberal capitalism without the anachronistic, post-nineteenth-century resonances. The chapter applies Smith's political thought on European economic development and China.
Whose Corruption, Which Polity?
Authors: Sagar Paul
Published: July 2023

This chapter focuses on Adam Smith's political thought on systemic corruption in an effort to dismiss the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. It elaborates on the phenomenon surrounding moral corruption and venal corruption. Theory of Moral Sentiments was subjected to a great deal of misrepresentation, especially since the work does not tackle the moral sentiments of commerce, luxury, inequality, or any of the other issues typically associated with advanced modern European societies operating extensive market economies. The chapter clarifies that Smith readily recognised the capacity for moral sentiments to be corrupted in commercial societies in particular due to the division of labour. Additionally, Smith did not view commerce or markets as presumptively normatively problematic due to the motivations that powered them.
Completely Free
Authors: DiIulio John Peter
Published: July 2023

Few thinkers have been as influential as John Stuart Mill, whose philosophy has arguably defined Utilitarian ethics and modern liberalism. But fewer still have been subject to as much criticism for perceived ambiguities and inconsistencies. This book offers an ambitious and comprehensive new reading that explains how Mill's ethical, moral, and political ideas are all part of a unified, coherent, and powerful philosophy. Almost every aspect of Mill's practical philosophy has been charged with contradictions, illogic, or incoherence. Most notoriously, Mill claims an absolute commitment both to promoting societal happiness and to defending individual liberty—a commitment that many critics believe must ultimately devolve into an either/or. The book resolves these and other problems by reconsidering and reconstructing the key components of Mill's practical thought: his theories of happiness, morality, liberty, and freedom. Casting new light on old texts, the book argues that Mill's Utilitarianism and liberalism are not only compatible but philosophically wedded, that his theories naturally emanate from one another, and that the vast majority of interpretive mysteries surrounding Mill can be readily demystified. In a manner at once sympathetic and critical, the book seeks to present Mill in his most lucid and potent form. From the higher pleasures and moral impartiality to free speech and nondomination, the book provides an unmatched account of the unity and power of Mill's enduring moral and political thought.
Noble Pleasures
Authors: DiIulio John Peter
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses John Stuart Mill's value theory, addressing what is intrinsically valuable or desirable and what does he mean by happiness or the good life. It assesses Mill's so-called doctrine of the higher pleasures and argues that he successfully combines the hedonistic and qualitative aspects of his doctrine into a supra hedonistic position called high-minded hedonism. It also covers the rejection of the most notable readings of Mill as a qualitative hedonist and proposition of a new way of synthesizing his hedonistic and non-hedonistic claims. The chapter reconstructs Mill's empirical defense of the higher pleasures and develops his hedonic value sense theory. It represents Mill's critique of psychological hedonism along the very lines defended by some of his most trenchant critics.
Introduction, with Pig
Authors: Michelson Emily
Published: July 2023

This chapter talks about the pig, which reminds how words, no matter how dry, eloquent, or erudite, has meaty physical consequences. It provides a background on sermons that were built from high-minded words, but at least once were coalesced around a living and energetic pig stuffed in a box. It also highlights forced conversionary sermons that became a defining feature of early modern Rome, which are considered another kind of occasion when Christians observed a crowd of Jews in public. The chapter establishes that sermons to Jews helped to define the New Rome of the early modern era in the eyes of locals, tourists, and visitors, including Protestants. It tells a story of early modern Catholicism in Rome with Judaism and Roman Jews at its center.
The World of Conversion in Early Modern Rome
Authors: Michelson Emily
Published: July 2023

This chapter recreates the range of conversionary efforts that animated early modern Rome. It discusses how the idea of “conversion” is applied in different ways to all of Rome's religious innovation, starting with the growing desire to create committed, educated Catholics with their hearts converted from sin. In launching concerted missionary activity across the world, early modern Catholicism became the world's first global religion. The chapter points out the requirement of both internal and confessional conversion of the physical conversion of the city of Rome into the church's exemplary capital, a new Jerusalem. Forced preaching to Roman Jews are seen as part of the broad range of conversionary efforts that characterized the whole of early modern Rome.
The Careers of Preachers
Authors: Michelson Emily
Published: July 2023

This chapter mentions how conversionary preaching drew the attention of ambitious clerics from across and outside Rome. It traces the varied and sometimes erratic careers of conversionary preachers, which were drawn in the early days from many different backgrounds. It also points out how the conversionary pulpit served some conversionary preachers as a stepping-stone to greater glory, while for others it was a strategic career obligation or a lifetime calling. The chapter introduces conversionary preachers and reconstructs their lives, showing that preaching to Jews immediately became a point of prestige for preachers and remained even as the office itself transformed from a fashion to a fixture. It asks what kind of person delivered forced sermons to Jews and what they did with this experience, looking at the varied, sometimes-erratic careers of individual preachers inside and outside the pulpit.
Preaching Traditions and Change
Authors: Michelson Emily
Published: July 2023

This chapter takes up the medieval European precedents that established “imaginary Judaism” as an enduring and powerful concept in Christian thought. It looks at patristic conceptions of Jews that reached their rhetorical peak in the public disputations of medieval Spain and Paris. Disputations determined the standard tropes and exegetical techniques for demonstrating the superiority of Christianity over Judaism. The chapter compares the stylized rhetoric of Christianity with another precedent that influenced early modern preachers, which is the sermons of fifteenth-century Italian mendicants. It seeks to account for continuities and differences between certain precedents and the evolving conventions of conversionary sermons in early modern Rome.
Jewish Responses
Authors: Michelson Emily
Published: July 2023

This chapter reveals the evidence that Jewish people regularly and consistently resisted and refuted conversionary sermons. By the late seventeenth century, Jewish people made formal protests to objectionable content in conversionary sermons, publishing letters and treatises advocating for better treatment. The chapter also explains how preachers sometimes responded to Jewish protests with letters of their own that expose the many ways Jewish resistance forced changes in conversionary sermons in both content and delivery. The chapter places interludes against the backdrop of ongoing tension and the sometimes staged acts of violence between Christians and Jews in Rome. It points out how sermons provoked violence and ritualized mockery and blurred the distinction between theological objections to Jewish ideas and social objections to Jewish neighbors.
Introduction
Authors: Pérez Efrén , Tavits Margit
Published: July 2023

This introductory chapter highlights the importance of grammatical nuances, citing that language is fundamental to the human experience. Language can affect political opinions because it plays a role in the encoding and recall of political information. The chapter considers the effects of language on politically relevant attitudes by referencing a comprehensive framework that explains whether, why, and how language affects mass opinion across several domains. The framework to evaluate language–opinion effects in several political domains depends on the notion of thinking for speaking and belief-sampling. The chapter also looks into the mechanisms and the manifestation of how languages affect public opinion.
Ghosts in the Language Machine
Authors: Pérez Efrén , Tavits Margit
Published: July 2023

This chapter elaborates on how the language–opinion hypothesis extends to lexical features of any language, such as gender-neutral pronouns. It tackles the conceptual knot between language and culture. Simple lexical differences in how people speak are sufficient to produce measurable differences in expressed attitudes. Meanwhile, previous research found that anti-gay prejudice is partly rooted in perceived gender role violations. The chapter explains how language meaningfully shapes the construction and maintenance of attitudes toward gender roles and categories. Moreover, gender-neutral terms decrease individuals' mental bias in favor of men and enhance the salience of women and other heterodox gender groups in speakers' minds.
The Language Premium
Authors: Pérez Efrén , Tavits Margit
Published: July 2023

This chapter explains how language shapes opinions through linguistic tags, which is the way information is stored and organized in memory. It covers the opinion-formation process by considering how people integrate new information into long-term memory. A language premium emerges when people express opinions about public affairs in a nation's majority language. Moreover, language can shape the very responses people offer when they interview. The chapter references the language–opinion hypothesis, which helped clarify when language shapes opinions in multilingual settings through yet another nongrammatical path. It explains the evidence and implications of language premium, which includes the coexistence of a majority language alongside a minority tongue.
Elite Social Terrain and State Development
Authors: Wang Yuhua
Published: July 2023

This chapter explains state development, which the author defines as a dynamic process in which the state's strength and form evolve. It underlines that a state's strength refers to its ability to achieve its official goals, while the state form is a product of two separate relationships. Building on social network theories, the chapter utilizes three graphs to characterize three ideal types of elite social terrains. It elaborates on how elite social terrains help us understand changes in state strength and form over the long run. The chapter then elucidates that network structures that characterize elite social terrains are also a principal factor that shapes how the state is structured and the development of state institutions. It discusses how elite social terrain shapes state institutions through two relationships: between the ruler and the ruling elite; and between the state and society. The chapter highlights the central theme of the book: the Chinese ruler's pursuit of power and survival by reshaping the elite social terrain so that he could divide and conquer the elites created a great paradox in Chinese history: imperial rule endured, but the imperial state lost strength.
State Maintaining in the Ming Dynasty
Authors: Wang Yuhua
Published: July 2023

This chapter illustrates how the development of social transformations that had germinated during the Song Dynasty were reinforced during the Yuan era and passed on to the Ming Dynasty. It particularly examines the consolidation of the second era during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). The chapter focuses on a critical fiscal reform—the Single Whip—which provides a useful lens through which to analyze the behavior of the Ming elites. It reveals that politicians with localized kinship networks—the majority of Ming-era politicians—represented local interests and influenced central policy making to protect their kin's economic interests and autonomy. The chapter also draws on an original biographical dataset of 503 major officials under Emperor Shenzong (1572–1620) and historical data on local implementation of the Single Whip reform. It exhibits that the more national-level politicians a prefecture produced, the slower its adoption of the Single Whip, if it was adopted at all.
The Long Shadow of the Empire
Authors: Wang Yuhua
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses the broader implications of the findings for our understanding of the developing world. It takes a tour of the developing world in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East and shows how the three ideal types of elite social terrains (star, bowtie, and ring) help us understand state-building experiences in other regions of the world. The chapter emphasizes how the author's China-based theory resonates with state-building experiences observed in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, and generates an important lesson: state weakness is a social problem that cannot be resolved with a bureaucratic solution. Ultimately, the chapter studies how imperial legacies have created key challenges in China's modern state building as well as aspects of Chinese historical state development that can help us understand state building today.
An Example of Hope
Authors: Lamb Michael
Published: July 2023

This chapter references Augustine of Hippo's letters in an effort to highlight the political hope in his life. According to scholars, Augustine's letters illuminate and amplify Augustine's political concepts and commitments in a way that applies his theological and political ideas to practical contexts and lived experiences. Moreover, the letters unveil Augustine as a bishop committed to active citizenship in the Roman Empire. The chapter notes Augustine's explicit claim that Christianity is not incompatible with commonwealth practices. It explains how Augustine commends a liturgy of citizenship that sheds light on his political thought and challenges those who summon his authority to recommend worldly withdrawal or ecclesial isolationism.