bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction: Looking for Effective and Legitimate Governance
Authors: Stollenwerk Eric
Published: January 2023

This chapter introduces the relevance of effective and legitimate governance in areas of limited statehood as the main focus of this book. By showing that governance is often ineffective and illegitimate in many parts of the world, this part of the study underscores that it is a pressing task for political science and policy makers to find an answer to the question of how effective and legitimate governance can be possible in areas of limited statehood. Ideas of virtuous circles of governance, where effective and legitimate governance become mutually reinforcing, are prominent in academia and the policy world. In such circles, more effectiveness leads to more legitimacy, and more legitimacy leads to more effectiveness in governance. This book asks how likely are virtuous circles of governance to evolve in areas of limited statehood? This section presents the state of the art on the topic and points out existing research gaps. The introduction also spells out the main argument of the book, which is that virtuous circles of governance are possible in areas of limited statehood, but more likely to evolve for external and non-state actors than for the state. This part also illustrates the research design and the empirical strategy of the analysis. Moreover, the chapter presents the research contributions of the book in the fields of international relations and comparative politics. Finally, the introduction includes a roadmap for the book.
Extraterritorial Authoritarian Practices
Authors: Glasius Marlies
Published: January 2023

This chapter considers two migrant groups that are affected by very different extraterritorial authoritarian practices in the same ‘host’ country. It begins by focusing on the Dutch-Turkish newspaper Zaman Vandaag, driven out of business by extraterritorial authoritarian practices, and on the murder of the Dutch Iranian separatist Ahmad Mola Nissi. The chapter then zooms out to demonstrate broader patterns of extraterritorial authoritarian practices vis-à-vis people of Turkish and Iranian descent in the Netherlands. It shows that national governments, or sections within them, have the ability to sabotage accountability to people beyond their borders, in particular their own nationals, disabling their voice and disabling their access to information through secrecy and lying. They do not do so alone. They engage in these practices together with and sometimes through other political actors, ranging from migrant community members and religious leaders to criminals. The vulnerability of the targets of extraterritorial authoritarian practices may depend on the bilateral relations between the country of residence and country of origin, but also on their own individual autonomy and positionality vis-à-vis home and host country.
Formal Multilateral Authoritarian Practices
Authors: Glasius Marlies
Published: January 2023

This chapter deals with the United Nations Security Council’s ‘ISIL (Da’esh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions List’, which mandates asset freezes and travel bans against terrorist suspects, as an example of a formal multilateral authoritarian practice. Neither the existence of the list nor the names of those who are on it is a secret. Yet the practice of listing is surrounded with secrecy (and, occasionally, lies) and disables the voices of those listed vis-à-vis the listing institution by putting a firewall between them. The chapter first examines two cases of listed individuals: the Belgian couple Nabil Sayadi and Patricia Vinck, and the Egyptian banker Youssef Nada. It then zooms out to establish a broader patter of disabling voice and disabling access to information. It concludes that the sanctions list and the accountability sabotage associated with it have become ‘stabilized’ since its inception in the wake of 9/11. The concepts of self-shielding, ally-shielding, and pre-emptive governance of risk are deployed to explain the stabilization and functioning of this formal multilateral authoritarian practice.
Institutional Authoritarian Practices
Authors: Glasius Marlies
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines institutional authoritarian practices surrounding child sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy. It starts with a focus on the handling of allegations against five priests at two sites within the Catholic Church: the Irish diocese of Cloyne and the Salesian order’s Australia-Pacific province. From there, it widens out to consider broader patterns associated with covering up clergy abuse in other Irish dioceses and elsewhere in the Salesian order, contextualizing them within to national-level Church initiatives to handle child sexual abuse complaints and the Vatican’s responses. By applying an authoritarian practices perspective, the chapter shows how the Catholic Church’s main organizational and cultural features—shared to a varying extent by other religious institutions—may foster silencing, secrecy, and lies. A culture of obedience impeded internal critiques and whistle-blowing. Church doctrines encompassed various forms of secrecy. Reputation was naturally believed to be best protected by secrecy, not by reform. The Church’s governance structure facilitated keeping sensitive information restricted. Sex in general, and ordained priests having sexual urges in particular, was a taboo subject. And a sense of clerical superiority facilitated devaluing and disbelieving the voices of victims. While Pope Francis I has made important changes in the Church’s handling of clerical abuse, the Catholic Church’s main organizational and cultural features persist.
The Politics of Accountability
Authors: Glasius Marlies
Published: January 2023

Configurations of actors that have the power to significantly affect people’s lives, and that systematically seek to duck accountability by silencing, keeping secrets from, or lying to people they affect, should be considered as functional equivalents to authoritarian regimes. This chapter re-examines the definition of authoritarian practices, based on the preceding empirical chapters. It considers to what extent gaining knowledge about authoritarian practices is possible, and how to delineate the boundaries of the concept. It examines the two core components of authoritarian practices: disabling voice and disabling access to information. It then discusses configurations of actors engaging in authoritarian practices, and the common understandings between them. In the latter part of the chapter, the focus shifts to the accountability demanders, assessing sources of vulnerability and strength, and indicating significant global developments affecting the affordances of various groups of ‘information professionals’. It concludes by making the case for more research on transnational authoritarian practices.
Introduction
Authors: Ibsen Malte Frøslee
Published: January 2023

This introduction presents the project of the book as an ambition to make Frankfurt School critical theory come to terms with our emerging world society. It argues that the Frankfurt School’s waning influence in the academy in recent years is chiefly due to the silence of its standard-bearers on some of the defining concerns of contemporary world society, most centrally the postcolonial condition and anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, the idea of a critical theory of society is defined and explicated alongside a historical, a sociological, and a normative dimension, and with reference to its practical criterion of validity. Finally, the introduction offers an outline of the book’s structure and contents.
Habermas’s Communicative Paradigm and the Idea of Critical Theory of World Society
Authors: Ibsen Malte Frøslee
Published: January 2023

Chapter 6 shows how Habermas has in recent years sought to apply his communicative paradigm to world society in response to his increasing appreciation of the disruptive forces of economic globalization, developing a proposal for a multilevel global constitutional framework, which can re-establish the necessary legal and political conditions for democratic self-determination in the post-national constellation of powerful globalized market forces and fragmented states. Yet the chapter also argues that this concern with the legal and political conditions of autonomy is too restrictive, and that Habermas’s proceduralism ultimately blinds his theoretical gaze to profound injustices in contemporary world society. Moreover, the chapter argues that Habermas’s distinction between communicative, strategic, and instrumental action (where the latter refers to human relations with the natural world) renders Habermas’s social theory incapable of accommodating ecological concerns actualized by anthropogenic climate change, and, in this sense, that his communicative paradigm falls behind Adorno’s advances into the Promethean limitations of Horkheimer’s original paradigm. I also discuss Amy Allen’s recent critique that Habermas’s theory of social evolution commits him to a pernicious view of non-Western societies as developmentally inferior to modern Western societies. In response, I argue that although the global application of Habermas’s communicative paradigm leaves many questions unanswered, contrary to Allen’s claim he explicitly understands modernity as a truly global condition, in which no completely pre-modern societies remain.
Honneth’s Recognition Paradigm and the Idea of a Critical Theory of World Society
Authors: Ibsen Malte Frøslee
Published: January 2023

Chapter 8 observes that the phenomenon of globalization is strikingly absent from Honneth’s work and appears only in his mature theory as a mysterious external force that undercuts the promise of social freedom embodied in the institutional structure of modern Western society from without. The chapter argues that this lack of attention to existing forces of global integration—as well as concerns distinctive to the emerging world society such as climate change and the postcolonial condition—attests to the limits of Honneth’s Hegelian method of normative reconstruction, which presupposes the existence of already-if-imperfectly-realized institutions of social freedom. Such an encompassing ‘culture of freedom’ is conspicuously absent from contemporary world society, where the nature of globalized market forces seems better captured by Habermas’s systems-theoretical construal than by Honneth’s interpretation of the capitalist market as a genuine institution of social freedom. Although Honneth thus offers a sophisticated instantiation of the young Horkheimer’s idea of a critical theory of justice, which—in contrast to Habermas—is able to conceptualize structural autonomy-impairment across all the major social institutions of modern Western society, the chapter argues that his Hegelian reconstructive methodology ultimately precludes the application of his recognition paradigm to world society. Finally, although Honneth has largely remained silent on the relationship between society and nature, the chapter argues that Honneth’s recognition paradigm offers the conceptual resources for reconceiving the communicative conception of freedom so as to make room not only for social and psychological conditions but also natural conditions of individual autonomy.
The Tasks of a Critical Theory of World Society
Authors: Ibsen Malte Frøslee
Published: January 2023

The conclusion restates the central systematic findings and arguments of the book. Moreover, it argues that Forst’s Kantian constructivism and Allen’s self-problematizing critique are both grounded in a dialectic between power and autonomy that runs through the whole Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, and that a constructive, a reconstructive and a self-problematizing moment must all be understood as integral to the project of a critical theory of world society. Finally, the conclusion argues that the Anthropocene requires an extension of the methodological holism of critical theory to include the relationship between ecosystems and society and, ultimately, the planetary perspective of the relationship between the Earth system and world society.
Exploring the Venerated House
Authors: Dark Ken
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses the twentieth-century archaeological work at the Sisters of Nazareth convent by Henri Senès, who devoted most of his career as a biblical archaeologist to trying to understand what had been found by the nuns. Senès did valuable work in collating earlier evidence, and conducted his own excavations, but published almost nothing on his decades of investigation at the site. The consequence of this was that Bellarmino Bagatti’s alternative interpretation of the Sisters of Nazareth site as unimportant for the archaeology of Nazareth held sway from the 1930s until the early twenty-first century.
The Daily Preoccupation with Reading Public Opinion
Authors: Walgrave Stefaan , Soontjens Karolin , Sevenans Julie
Published: January 2023

Given the importance politicians attach to reading public opinion, the chapter deals with how politicians go about assessing people’s preferences. How do politicians inform themselves about public opinion? How much time is spent on it? What sources do they employ? Most politicians say they primarily learn about public opinion by talking to ordinary people. Notwithstanding their often-fierce criticism on the news media, consulting the traditional media is their second most preferred source of public opinion information. Interest groups and social media are the respective third and fourth course of politicians’ public opinion diet. Remarkably, Belgian politicians are quite skeptical of social media as a useful source of public opinion information.
Confidence and Doubts about Reading Public Opinion
Authors: Walgrave Stefaan , Soontjens Karolin , Sevenans Julie
Published: January 2023

This chapter deals with how good politicians think they are at estimating public opinion. A majority of politicians are confident about the accuracy of their estimations of public opinion on specific policy proposals. Still, they also display awareness of some pitfalls. In particular, politicians realize remarkably well that the information environment in which they operate is skewed both ideologically—in the sense that they are surrounded by likeminded people more than by dissonant voices—and socially, as there is an underrepresentation of people from, for example, poor or lower-educated societal groups. Additionally, the chapter shows that having a good grasp of public opinion is something many politicians think especially top politicians are good at, it is considered a typical feature of politicians in the executive or of party leaders.
Lost in Representation
Authors: Walgrave Stefaan , Soontjens Karolin , Sevenans Julie
Published: January 2023

The concluding chapter reiterates the main findings of the book: politicians care intensely about public opinion, try hard to form a correct picture of it, and largely follow public opinion when acting. As much as they want to, they often cannot succeed in acting in a responsive way because of mistaken perceptions. The chapter argues that differing degrees of perceptual inaccuracy across issues might explain the selective responsiveness found at the aggregate policy level. A range of possibly negative implications of inaccuracy and bias in politicians’ perceptions are addressed. Inaccurate perceptions may lead to political action that does not match citizen preferences, it may spark ineffective explanations of policies, it could lead to a dissatisfied citizenry, to electoral volatility, and, ultimately, to mutual miscomprehension of politicians and citizens. Erroneous representation, the chapter argues, starts with the original sin of incorrect voting that then, via social projection, reverberates throughout the entire representational system. Finally, the chapter speculates about ways in which the perceptual accuracy of politicians may be enhanced; it argues that politicians’ information environment should be fixed somehow.
Elastic deformation of thick-walled cylinders
Authors: Anand Lallit , Kamrin Ken , Govindjee Sanjay
Published: January 2023

This chapter presents a detailed solution to the technologically important problem of an isotropic elastic thick-walled cylinder subjected to internal and external pressure. The solution is presented in cylindrical coordinates, and thus the chapter also introduces the concepts of the components of strain, the strain-displacement equations, stress, and the equations of equilibrium in cylindrical coordinates. The solution is developed for different common axial boundary conditions: unrestrained, plane strain, and capped.
Sites of Civil Society
Authors: Thorne-Murphy Leslee
Published: January 2023

Chapter 2, Sites of Civil Society: The Bazaar Woman in a Mimic Market, argues that the techniques used in staging fancy fairs fostered a distinct bazaar discourse. This discourse featured three consistent components: a radical revision of the traditional Lady Bountiful and allegorical Charity figures, an insistence on upending market norms, and an intermingling of advocacy and parody to create a self-critical mode within earnest philanthropic efforts. These variables were common to bazaar discourse throughout the century, and throughout diverse regions of the United Kingdom and its sphere of cultural influence. They enabled women to use bazaars to make key interventions in political and social affairs in surprisingly brash and transgressive ways.
“In My Broken Heart’s Disdain”
Authors: Thorne-Murphy Leslee
Published: January 2023

Chapter 4 explores a poem written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning for publication in the 1848 volume of The Liberty Bell, an annual compiled by Maria Weston Chapman to be sold at the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society’s yearly Christmas bazaar. In keeping with the purpose of the bazaar, Barrett Browning’s poem advocates for the abolitionist cause, but it also problematizes the radical Garrisonian rhetorical technique, moral suasion, that was most often used in The Liberty Bell. Though many scholars have examined the poem as an example of antislavery literature, reading it as a part of the specific rhetoric espoused at the bazaar where it was originally distributed brings an entirely different sense of its relationship to, and resistance to, the larger field of abolitionist literature.
Bazaar Authorship
Authors: Thorne-Murphy Leslee
Published: January 2023

Charlotte Yonge, as a self-professed novelist of the Oxford Movement, used her literary career to represent and advocate for her religious position, and ultimately to inspire what she would consider moral action in her readers. Chapter 5 examines Yonge’s The Daisy Chain, in which a neighborhood bazaar to raise funds for a school models the type of behavior Yonge hoped her readers would emulate, and the type of behavior Yonge herself utilized in her literary career. In essence, Yonge treated the actual literary market as a bazaar, as she offered her products for sale in an effort to raise funds for charitable giving. Twenty years later, as a mature author who had perfected her specific literary brand, Yonge again utilized a fictional charity bazaar to reflect on her role in the literary market. In The Three Brides, a bazaar acts as an agent of contagion, revealing the need for the guiding intervention of an authorial philanthropist like Yonge herself.
Introduction
Authors: Rudolph John L.
Published: January 2023

This chapter describes the importance of using science education to build public trust in science and its institutions as an alternative to the more common general-education goals of personal utility, better thinking, and democratic decision-making. The core issue society needs to grapple with is how to accommodate scientific expertise in a democratic political system and developing public trust is central to this. To accomplish this, the chapter argues for teaching how scientists know what they know (to foster public recognition of the legitimacy of scientific knowledge) and about the scientific enterprise in society (so that the public understands their role in the funding, direction, and oversight of science). This radical approach is necessary to address issues of science denial and disinformation that are rising in society around important science-related social issues and to develop a productive relationship between science and the public.
The Science Education We Have
Authors: Rudolph John L.
Published: January 2023

This chapter describes what the general public as well as policymakers and many science educators think of as high-quality science education. It is characterized by a focus on the mastery of disciplinary content knowledge in science subjects such as biology, chemistry, and physics. A sound program of science education, moreover, typically aspires to have students engage in authentic scientific research or practice in a “hands-on” way. Many believe that good schools should focus on providing “rigorous” teaching in the sciences, including courses that prepare students for technical careers and college through expanding access to Advanced Placement coursework. Such rigorous coursework, it’s believed, will also produce many of the other general-education benefits of learning science. All these approaches to science education heavily emphasize student learning of disciplinary content, that is, the facts and theories of each subject.
Democratic Backsliding in Africa?
Authors: Arriola Leonardo R. , Rakner Lise , van de Walle Nicolas
Published: January 2023

Contrary to broad claims regarding democratic backsliding across sub-Saharan Africa, our study of democratic processes indicates no such trend. We find instead that the region’s democratic experience over the past two decades largely reflects status quo politics, meaning neither substantial progress nor regression in advancing political and civil liberties since the initial transitions of the early 1990s. This seeming stagnation in African democratization belies ongoing efforts by incumbent leaders to actively undermine key actors (e.g. civil society) or structural conditions (e.g. growing urbanization) that might otherwise lead to greater liberalization. To account for the uneven progress in democratization, despite growing political participation across the region, we argue that Africa’s incumbent leaders have sought to contain democratizing pressures through two interacting processes largely overlooked in the existing literature: legal institutions and international relationships. First, incumbent leaders have relied on the law and courts to curtail the ability of domestic actors to mobilize against them. The strategic use of the law with the aim of holding onto office and strengthening executive powers has undermined other institutions. Second, incumbent leaders have been able to manipulate their international relationships to neutralize the democratizing influence of external actors such as foreign donors and transnational civil society. This includes the strategic use of sovereigntist claims against external intervention in domestic politics.
Political Participation and Regime Responses
Authors: Dupuy Kendra , Arriola Leonardo R. , Rakner Lise
Published: January 2023

The chapter confronts a key paradox of political participation in Africa´s multiparty era: Political mobilization among African citizens has not led to greater democratization. Across countries, citizens have not only continued voting at high rates, but they are also increasingly confronting their governments through street-level protests. The youth, in particular, have become critical actors in making democratic claims on political space. Nevertheless, despite the surge in political participation seen in many African countries, their democratic progress has stalled. We explain this paradox by describing how incumbent leaders have responded to increased political mobilization by strategically clamping down on key arenas of citizen participation in politics, thereby insulating their regimes. We show that incumbents seek to constrain three interrelated arenas where mass participation is most often mobilized: the realm of rights-promoting civil society organizations (the civil society arena), the realm of elections (the contestation arena), and the realm of information technology (the digital arena).
Ghana
Authors: Oduro Franklin , Selvik Lisa-Marie , Dupuy Kendra
Published: January 2023

Ghana remains one of the few countries on the continent where elites have not deliberately employed legal mechanisms to restrict contestation and participation rights or to lock out the opposition from the electoral playing field. At the same time, the country’s political elites have also actively resisted legal reforms aiming to deepen democratic developments beyond holding elections. Thus, while Ghana has made steady and incremental progress toward democratic consolidation since 1992, the quality of the country’s democracy has stagnated. The chapter argues that Ghana’s political elites have sought to limit further democratization and actively worked to constrain actors promoting enhanced democratization. They have done so primarily through the strategic use of law, including a seeming unwillingness to adopt progressive legal measures that would expand participatory rights. Ghana’s political elites have resisted efforts to restrict executive power, as manifested in continued failures to implement needed constitutional reforms, and they have delayed adopting and implementing key civil liberties legislation to improve minority rights and actively attacked media pluralism and freedoms. Ultimately, this undermines the country’s democracy as elites consolidate power and as popular trust erodes in the key institutions underpinning Ghana’s democracy.
Zimbabwe
Authors: Gloppen Siri , Hinfelaar Marja , Rakner Lise
Published: January 2023

Zimbabwe’s contemporary political history as a post-liberation militarized regime displays both a willingness and a capacity for violence and manipulation. The Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) elite has consistently relied on legal strategies to legitimize its rule since independence. The use of legal strategies (lawfare) puts a veneer of legality on repression, notably for a foreign audience, but its primary purpose is not legitimacy but power maintenance. Yet, at the same time, legal strategies and the courts have provided space for the opposition and civil society to contest executive abuse of power and advance their political agendas. The regime has relied on discourses of sovereignty to justify the closing of political space. Across a wide range of issues, from multiparty elections and land allocations to human rights and LGBT issues, the incumbent regime has relied on sovereigntist arguments. In other instances, the ruling party has sought to accommodate support from international development actors, most notably through advancing gender and gender norms. Mirroring the dual function of the legal strategies, at critical junctures, the international relationships—through funding for democracy support—have provided the opposition and civil society with legitimacy and financial clout to challenge the authoritarian regime.
Against Reading
Authors: Day Frank Morgan
Published: January 2023

Chapter 2 investigates educational reformers’ suspicion toward reading after the Civil War alongside scenes in literary fiction where characters are explicitly and self-consciously not reading. For Progressive educators, reading was a stubborn pedagogical problem that threatened to cut readers off from the broader world of social experience. The educators’ insistence on this point was itself caught up in the modern school’s own crisis of relevance, its reputation as a purveyor of mere “book-learning.” Though the proliferating scenes of not-reading in postbellum fiction appear to reproduce the educators’ hostility toward reading—casting reading as subordinate to the “real” experience the characters enjoy once they set aside their books—in fact these scenes represent a complex act of literary defiance against an institutional system that increasingly served as a hub of cultural administration. By disavowing reading, writers affirmed the capacity of their fiction to incorporate the reality of non-readerly life into readerly experience.
In Defense of Punctuality
Authors: Day Frank Morgan
Published: January 2023

Chapter 3 explores the origins of modern academic time after the Civil War and writers’ dissatisfaction with this emergent institutional temporality. Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, developed the “course unit” to integrate schoolwork from kindergarten to college and give the educational system’s middle-class graduates a sense of collective identity based on the shared experience of time. Yet Henry Adams and Gertrude Stein—both of whom witnessed Eliot’s work at Harvard firsthand—blamed the educational system for the feelings of chronological loneliness they suffered under industrial modernity. In response to this systematic failure, Adams and Stein theorized new institutional modes in their writing—the “period” and the “continuous present”—to standardize their readers’ experience of time. By making students read about the lonely, out-of-sync college graduates in Adams’s and Stein’s work, instructors have in turn produced a more standard temporal experience across the school system.
Secret Societies
Authors: Day Frank Morgan
Published: January 2023

Chapter 5 argues that Progressives sought to understand and shape the modern school’s role in the reproduction of social relations through the secret society. One prominent Progressive genre, early campus fiction, cast its meritocratic vision of the undergraduate experience against the secrecy of secret societies, all while secretly seeking to disqualify certain student populations, based on race, from academic rewards and credentials. Thomas Dixon Jr.’s Reconstruction Trilogy, meanwhile, celebrated the Ku Klux Klan but insisted counterintuitively that secrecy should have no part in modern institutions and that schools should enforce the social order through explicit and visible acts of coercion. Though campus fiction helped higher education establish itself in the popular imagination as a worthwhile endeavor, the enduring presence of Dixon’s work in the educational system suggests that the school hasn’t always successfully indoctrinated students with its meritocratic ideology—that it has had to keep students in line with those un-secretive and punitive practices that, as a “modern” disciplinary institution, it purportedly abandoned long ago.
Really, Really Secret Societies
Authors: Day Frank Morgan
Published: January 2023

Chapter 6 examines the secret society in the black institutional imaginary after Reconstruction. Secret societies became the subject of much speculation in African American discourse for the same reason they did in the culture at large—because they promised to explain the existence of social inequality and perhaps transform the institutions responsible for reproducing it. Some black writers during this period insisted that secrecy was an unacceptable feature of modern institutions and in doing so demystified the racism embedded in the middle class’s meritocratic worldview. Other black writers embraced secrecy as a revolutionary organizational principle. The uptake of these works in the educational system after the protest movements of the sixties and seventies has enabled the school to more plausibly present itself as a multicultural institution capable of credentialing a diverse population of middle-class students; yet, as we’ll see, the school system has taken up this renovated ideological program just as formal education has itself become dispensable as a mechanism of social control.
Introductory discussion
Authors: Mander W. J.
Published: January 2023

This chapter introduces the basic idea of the volitional theory of causation, the proposal that volition, or will, of broadly the same kind as that which we experience in our own deliberate and voluntary doings, should be taken as the basis for all causality. The chapter proceeds by contextualizing the topic within current scholarly debate, outlining the methodology adopted, setting out the two basic elements of the causal theory of volition (specifically, the claim that, even if external reality seems to be wholly inert, within inner experience we find a sense of causal power, and the further highly expansive proposal that such intuitions give us the model for causation more generally), detailing the main issues which any adequate formulation needs to address, distinguishing the theory from superficially similar rivals and, finally, offering a preliminary taxonomy of different ways of thinking about the notion of will.
Hume and Hartley
Authors: Mander W. J.
Published: January 2023

Scarcely had it been advanced by Berkeley than the volitional theory of causation received its first critical assault, at the hands of David Hume. Since Hume’s objections have been widely regarded as significant and even decisive ones, colouring both the reputation and the subsequent development of the volitional theory, this chapter examines them in turn and in close detail. It is demonstrated that since each of his objections admits of a possible rational response, his opposition to the volitional theory is far from the last word on the matter that many modern philosophers take it to be. The chapter concludes with an examination of the views of his near contemporary, David Hartley, with respect to causation and volition, noting both similarities and differences.
Reid and Kames
Authors: Mander W. J.
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines how Reid sets out a view of active causal agency in opposition to Hume’s causal scepticism. After explaining the difference between the principles of causality and the idea of causation itself, it is explained how Reid thinks that we possess an idea of active power revealed to us only through our own activity as free and personal agents. The chapter then looks at Reid’s argument that, since causation is only exercised by spirits but the majority of natural phenomena are clearly not brought about by any finite spirit known to us, such events must be thought of as being brought about by God. The implications of this position for science are examined through a consideration of Reid’s distinction between scientific causes and true causes. After considering Reid’s positions on free will and on the self, the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of Lord Kames, demonstrating the way in which his understanding stands mid-way between those of Hume and Reid.
Maine de Biran and Schopenhauer
Authors: Mander W. J.
Published: January 2023

The first part of this chapter examines the causal theory of Maine de Biran, noting his distinctive epistemology of introspection (sense intime) and his claim that this reveals to us a primitive fact of willed effort (effort voulu). Close attention is paid to the detailed arguments de Biran offers against Hume’s rebuttals of the volitional theory of causation, to the importance for him of the idea of resistance, and also to the difference of opinion between de Biran and Victor Cousin about extending the argument from personal agency to causation in general. The second part of the chapter examines the causal theory of Schopenhauer, noting that he may be read as both a critic and a supporter. His view of causality as but a spatio-temporal rule of ordering imposed by subjects on their own experience motivates explicit criticism of the efforts of philosophers like Maine de Biran, but his own metaphysical conception in which the whole of reality is but the outward expression of an underlying Will shows many of the typical features of a volitional theory of causation.
Critics of the volitional theory
Authors: Mander W. J.
Published: January 2023

Having left the critical case to one side since Hume, this chapter returns to look at challenges to the volitional theory of causation, examining four voices in particular. Thomas Brown and James Mill are significant for the developments they propose respecting the empiricist theory of the will, which both regard as being a product of the laws of association; while William Hamilton and John Stuart Mill are important contributors to the story for the direct arguments they offer against the volitional theory. Hamilton questions how introspection could possibly yield the concept of necessity which the theory calls for and Mill highlights the difficulty in moving from the fact that volition is the only known cause to the conclusion that it is the only kind of cause there can be.
Mansel, Martineau, and others
Authors: Mander W. J.
Published: January 2023

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of four figures, Taylor, Herschel, Whewell, and the American, Francis Bowen, whose ready adoption of the volitional theory of causation illustrates how popular a theory this had become by the early nineteenth century. The main discussion of the chapter concerns Henry Mansel and James Martineau, who took the theory to new heights of development and sophistication. Both regard this conception of causality as closely linked to the notion of selfhood and as a fundamental constituent of their theism. Martineau in particular had significant influence, and the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of two of his followers, Hutton and Upton.
Recent critics
Authors: Mander W. J.
Published: January 2023

If the growth of psychology encouraged some to focus on notions of agency, it encouraged others to develop new ways of dismissing such ideas, and this chapter begins by considering the renewed efforts of such late-nineteenth-century British empiricists as Spencer, Bain, and Lewes to undermine any sense of will in a revitalized Humeanism. Such lines of work were not exclusively British, and an interesting parallel debunking of the notion of volitional causal power may be observed in the work of Nietzsche. The chapter continues by charting the way in which turn-of-the-century neo-positivists, such as Mach, Pearson, Russell, and Ayer continued that sceptical challenge, going on to explore the way in which, in the hands of Wittgenstein and Ryle, the critique became an increasingly linguistic one.
Recent advocates
Authors: Mander W. J.
Published: January 2023

The final historical chapter begins by exploring the work of four early-twentieth-century metaphysicians, William James, F. C. S. Schiller, Hastings Rashdall, and the later work of G. F. Stout—each of whom bucked the trend of the time and developed versions of the volitional theory. The chapter continues by examining the work of Jean Piaget, whose 1927 book The Child’s Conception of Physical Causality conceptualized the development of human understanding of causality in essentially the same way that the volitional theory charts, even if the metaphysical conclusions he drew from that story were somewhat different. There can be no doubt that the dominant naturalism of the twentieth century made it a time largely unfriendly to the volitional theory of causation. However, it never quite went away, and the chapter concludes with an examination of one contemporary philosopher, John Searle, who in his 1983 work, Intentionality, puts forward a theory in which the intentional state of volitional is an integral part of the content of our concept of causality.
Concluding discussion
Authors: Mander W. J.
Published: January 2023

In part to recap some of the points that have been made along the way, and in part to recap what insights of enduring philosophical value we might draw from the long story of development, the final chapter puts forward a case for the volitional theory of causation. The discussion argues in support of six distinct points: that reflection upon the experience of passing time shows that we must accept the reality of genuinely efficient causation; that there obtains a felt sense of agency; that this sense of agency cannot be illusory; that volitional causality is best understood in a teleological and holistic fashion; that such volition provides us with the very meaning of what it is to be causal; and that considerations of causal continuity make it reasonable to think that such causality operates, not just in ourselves, but in the universe at large.
The Nature of Endangerment in India
Authors: Rashkow Ezra
Published: January 2023

Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more preservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India’s ‘tribes’ really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is this threat somehow comparable to the threat of extinction facing tigers and other wildlife? Combining years of fieldwork and archival research with intensive theoretical interrogations, this book offers a global intellectual history of efforts to ‘protect’ indigenous peoples and their cultures, usually from above. It also offers a critique of the activist impulse to cry ‘Save the tigers!’ and ‘Save the tribes!’ together in the same breath. It is not a history or an ethnography of the tribes of India but rather a history of discourses—including Adivasis’ own—about what is perceived to be the fundamental question for nearly all indigenous peoples in the modern world: the question of survival. Examining views of interlinking biological and cultural (or biocultural) diversity loss in western and central India—particularly in regard to Bhil and Gond communities facing not only conservation and development-induced displacement but also dehumanizing animal analogies comparing endangered tigers and tribes—the book problematizes the long history of human endangerment and extinction discourse. In doing so, it shows that fears of tribal extinction actually predated scientific awareness of the extinction of non-human species. Only by confronting this history can we begin to decolonize this discourse.
Human Endangerment Discourse
Authors: Rashkow Ezra
Published: January 2023

The chapter presents a broad, global, overview of the emergence of the concepts of endangerment and extinction with reference to indigenous peoples and the environment. It argues that long before there was even scientific awareness that non-human species could become extinct, there was a growing acknowledgement that cultures coming into contact with Europeans in the age of empire were vanishing; by the early nineteenth century, while the phenomenon of species extinction was still disputed, the extinction of so-called primitive races was widely accepted. And by the late nineteenth century, the fates of those offensively labelled ‘wild tribes’ and ‘wild animals’ were frequently and explicitly linked in colonial discourse. Studying the history of this racist, imperialist analogy reveals that postcolonial era conservation efforts have roots in, and are often guilty of repeating, the colonial past. Tracing the interwoven tropes of human and wildlife endangerment from their colonial manifestations through to their postcolonial reverberations, clear connections between contemporary agendas and long repudiated positions emerge, particularly in the burgeoning field of biocultural diversity conservation.
A National Park for the Gond & Baiga
Authors: Rashkow Ezra
Published: January 2023

Chapter 6 draws on fieldwork conducted with Gond and Baiga Adivasis in and around Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh to discuss the problematic history of the idea of preserving human communities today referred to as ‘indigenous’ in parks. In 1939, anthropologist Verrier Elwin proposed a plan to establish ‘a sort of National Park, in which not only the Baiga, but the thousands of simple Gond in their neighbourhood might take refuge’. This park was to be established in a ‘ “wild and largely inaccessible” part of the country’, exactly where Kanha National Park now stands. Today, still, many activists claim that what is ‘endangered’ in Kanha is ‘not just tigers’ but also ‘indigenous communities’. In the very first-ever call for a national park, as well as in frequent proposals for national parks throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and now the twenty-first century, protected areas have been envisioned as places of conservation, study, and display not only of endangered species but also of human groups perceived to be endangered. The problem is not only that Adivasis have long been perceived as in danger of becoming extinct, and therefore paternalistically projected as in need of protection. It is also that these peoples, who have long suffered dehumanizing animal analogies, are envisioned as endangered like wildlife, and in need of protection in parks.
Apex of Power
Authors: Ura Karma
Published: January 2023

The Legal Decree of 1729 remained in force more or less till the mid-20th century. While it aspired to be consistent with the thriving of Buddha dharma and ten virtues, it had to deal with the reality of selfishness, crime, fraud, forgery, and bribery. It spoke to a range of offences such as murder, theft, unfair trade, excess taxation, excess requisition of workers, deception by religious figures, unfair investigation, sexual mistreatment, and officials’ intoxication. It attempted to enforce non-vegetarianism during funerals and ban tobacco. Flogging and fines seem to have been popular punishments. The Legal Decree pitched high standards for monks and officials, and set out the main contours of consensus and force, sanctions and punishments in the society. While presenting sanctions, it often recommended decision based on customs and conventions of a community without specifying these numerous mores. The entitlements of officials in terms of supply of horses, foods, and retainers, in station or on the road, were stipulated clearly. The Decree urged the officials to ‘illuminate like the sun possessing the magical wheel of intelligence that allows them to master the elaborate display of the four noble karmas’. After presenting compressed provisions on soldiering, it enjoined the combatants ‘to act with immense bravery of a lion that shines with majesty in the midst of wild beasts’.
Monks and Monasteries
Authors: Ura Karma
Published: January 2023

After the 12th century, Bhutan attracted a series of religious masters and treasure revealers (tertons) who rejuvenated teachings by revealing ters hidden by Guru Rinpoche and Khando Yeshey Tshogyal. Overtime, the country came to be dotted with temples. Buddhism flourished and has been perpetuated, since the 17th century, as the state religion, with Kagyud and Nyingma existing in harmony. Learning in the state monasteries were divided into the father-guru’s dharma (pha chos) and the son-disciple’s dharma (bu chos). Guru’s dharma consisted of the three interwoven instructions and the disciple’s dharma referred to ritual dance, sand mandala art, and ritual chants. Levels of vows among the monks as they progressed through the monastic hierarchy culminated in full bodhisattva and secret-mantra vows. The hierarchical ranks among monks were indicated by their dress styles. The chapter goes into routines of their sleep, study, prayers, meals, washing, and bathing, and provides glimpses of the state monasteries’ kitchens and refectories. Daily food offerings have been made to the founder of Bhutan, Zhabdrung Rinpoche, whose holy body is preserved in a golden stupa in Punakha dzong and which plays a profound role in the life of the nation.
Math and Stats
Authors: Trappenberg Thomas P.
Published: January 2023

Like the programing tool of the previous chapter, this chapter is a summary outline of the mathematical and probabilistic concepts used in this book. This language is convenient to describe concepts with detail that can be translated directly into simulation programs. Thus, we are here mainly users of a useful scientific language rather delving into the science of mathematics itself.