bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Accidental Feminism
Authors: Ballakrishnen Swethaa S.
Published: May 2021

In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspaces? This book examines how a range of underlying mechanisms — gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories — afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers. Juxtaposing findings on the legal profession with those on elite consulting firms, the book reveals that parity arises not from a commitment to create feminist organizations, but from structural factors that incidentally come together to do gender differently. Simultaneously, the book offers notes of caution: while conditional convergence may create equality in ways that more targeted endeavors fail to achieve, “accidental” developments are hard to replicate, and are, in this case, buttressed by embedded inequalities. The book examines whether gender parity produced without institutional sanction should still be considered feminist. In offering new ways to think about equality movements and outcomes, the book forces readers to critically consider the work of intention in progress narratives.
The Accidental Emergence of India’s Elite Women Lawyers
Authors: Ballakrishnen Swethaa S.
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the emergence of India's elite women lawyers. Despite being agnostic to the cause of feminism, and using the governance language of meritocracy and modernity, many elite law firms in India have managed to produce the kinds of environments that more agentic organizations with committed interests in diversity have failed to produce in other sites. Not only are women well represented at entry and more senior levels in these law firms, they also experience their environments rather differently from their peers in similar kinds of organizations globally and locally. In doing so, these firms have not only managed to create historically unimaginable spaces of possibility for women, they have also managed to set path dependencies for organizations to have more (possible intentionally) feminist futures. These can be considered as accidentally feminist organizations. The chapter explains that the book reveals a set of structural conditions that fortuitously have come together to create environments of emancipation for these women lawyers: including organizational novelty and the imagined forces of globalization, a particularly receptive interactional audience, and the specific contingencies of a particular cultural moment in India's neoliberal history.
Families
Authors: Ballakrishnen Swethaa S.
Published: May 2021

This chapter traces the role of families and life course in determining the unlikely gender outcomes found in large law firms. The advantage of the legal profession is that the career trajectory allows for a more progressive work–family balance. In particular, women in elite law firms typically start their careers in their early twenties and are in a position to become partner in their early thirties — this timeline for promotion allows women to be in positions of power while they negotiate childcare and maternity leave, whereas women in other elite professions tend to be junior colleagues when they make agentic life-course choices and are penalized accordingly. Yet, the fact remains that the structural career trajectory in these law firms was not introduced to make women more competitive candidates for partnership, but instead, emerged as a response to a concentrated, high-growth legal services market. The chapter then highlights the ways in which this unprecedented success for Indian middle-class women in the workforce depends on two existing inequalities in the grander Indian system: a ready, caste-dependent labor force that supplies affordable housework support and childcare; and a penultimate generation of close female family members who are not in the workforce and are available to provide free and ready household support systems.
Lessons
Authors: Madariaga Aldo
Published: May 2021

This chapter considers the outcomes in terms of understanding the politics of neoliberal resilience and its implications for the future of democratic capitalism. It reflects on the apparent paradox that the cases of neoliberal resilience show a more stable democracy and less thoroughgoing penetration of populist political dynamics than in the cases of neoliberal contestation and discontinuity. It also reviews the analogy between the ability of General Augusto Pinochet to maintain his grip on political power in Chile in the face of many challenges, and the history of neoliberalism in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The chapter highlights the relationship between neoliberalism and constrained democratic rule that is characteristic of the relatively well-known and is a generalized pattern of the Chilean story. It talks about the establishment of neoliberalism that was pushed under outright authoritarian regimes and cites shock therapy conditions and its continuity.
The Third Man
Authors: Mandić Danilo
Published: May 2021

This chapter traces host state, separatist movement, and mafia relations in Serbia and Georgia (1989–2012). Kosovo and South Ossetia are the most similar pair of separatist stories in the ex-Yugoslav and ex-Soviet spaces. Their unique mix of wars (foreign and civil), separatist mobilizations (some successful, others less so), and mafia roles (sometimes tearing states, sometimes consolidating them) offers precious lessons on the agency of organized crime. In Serbia and Georgia, war was mafia as much as state business. Borders were made and unmade by smugglers. The black market was not an anomaly; the formal economy was. What separatists achieved depended tremendously on whether organized crime was multiethnic or not, violent or not, strong or not. Different mafia roles gave different results. Though organized crime in both countries began as a rejoicing third, the mafia's role in Kosovo evolved into a divider and conqueror, while in South Ossetia it evolved into a mediator. These differing trajectories account for the greater success of Kosovo's separatist movement.
The Autocratic Middle Class
Authors: Rosenfeld Bryn
Published: May 2021

This chapter seeks to expand the grasp of authoritarian resilience and bottom-up pressures for democratization in states where economic growth is increasing the size of the middle-class. It explains why and under what conditions growth of the middle-class may not increase popular pressure on regimes to democratize. It also looks at a wide array of survey data on the political preferences and behaviors of the middle-classes in the post-communist countries. The chapter emphasizes that a variety of development strategies can drive an expansion of the middle-class, which differ in their effect on the formation of democratic constituencies. It examines multiple pathways to expansion of the middle-class that lead to greater support for democracy.
Conclusion
Authors: Rosenfeld Bryn
Published: May 2021

This chapter concludes with implications of the evidence presented for the literatures on development and democratization, resource states, and protest mobilization. It demonstrates that the logic of middle-class state dependency holds not only in states where the economy is based on extractive industries. It also places the argument in a broader comparative perspective. The chapter pays attention to the autocratic middle-class supported by state economic engagement, which helps make sense of delayed democratization and democratic failures in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. It points out how development increases the size of the middle-class, leads to democratization, and stabilizes authoritarianism.
Getting Rights ‘Right’
Authors: McIvor Méadhbh
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines how human rights language is deployed at Christ Church. Although Christianity and human rights are sometimes genealogically linked, English law's replacement of the 'passive accommodation' of religion with the more robust 'prescriptive regulation' of a positive right to freedom of religion is experienced by some conservative Protestants as a dilution of their religious liberty. Drawing on comparative Melanesian ethnography, the chapter discusses the values of individualism and relationalism in global Christianities to argue that, for those at Christ Church, the perceived egocentrism of rights-based claims is thought to undermine the relationality necessary for a successful gospel encounter. For this reason, Christ Churchites encourage one another to forgo their rights for the sake of the gospel. This suggests that, even among those who embrace the interior, conscience-driven understanding of religion privileged by Euro-American law, there is little faith in the state's ability to protect religious liberty, with positive rights seen to privilege secular norms over Christian morality.
The Council Estate
Authors: Wetherell Sam
Published: May 2021

This chapter tackles the history of the council estate in Britain. A council estate is a group of homes, usually in one or many buildings, planned as a totality that was owned and leased by municipal authorities. Although many council estates were low-rise suburban developments, the chapter focuses on the urban, high-density iterations of this form, which usually comprised a handful of high- and medium-rise apartment buildings connected by a mesh of public walkways, courtyards, playgrounds, and parking lots. This chapter also highlights the most conspicuous and arguably most consequential of the urban forms during this time — the high-density council estate. It discusses high-density council estate's rich historiography and why it was considered as the main protagonist in recent histories of working-class community formation, policy and political culture, gender, consumerism, and architecture. Ultimately, the chapter explores the two most striking and historically distinctive features of postwar, high-density council estates: their capacity to modernize domestic life and the hope that they could forge community out of proximity.
Introduction
Authors: Bell Duncan
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter explores some of the most ambitious ideas about the unification of Anglo-America, concentrating on the years between 1880 and the First World War. During that tumultuous period, numerous members of the intellectual elite on both sides of the Atlantic — scholars, journalists, novelists, preachers, and politicians — encouraged closer cooperation, even political integration, between the two powers. The chapter analyzes the boldest arguments about Anglo-America, the dreams that motivated and shaped them, and the discourses in which they were embedded, with the intention of illuminating a pivotal moment in both the intellectual history of world order and the development of modern utopian thought. Ultimately, the chapter sketches the political and geopolitical context in which the debates occurred, considers the self-consciously visionary character of many unionist claims as well as the conceptual elusiveness of racial categorization.
Beyond the Sovereign State
Authors: Bell Duncan
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores efforts to rethink the meaning of political belonging. It delineates various models of citizenship found in Angloworld debate, focusing in particular on isopolitanism. The chapter examines the most authoritative account of isopolity, propounded by the famed legal theorist Albert Venn Dicey, before surveying other articulations of the idea, including those of Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, and H. G. Wells. The penultimate section analyzes race patriotism. Just as citizenship was rearticulated as a form of identification with the Anglo-Saxon or English race, so too was patriotic regard: individuals owed allegiance to a nested set of communities, including their country and their race. Ultimately, the chapter offers a discussion of political symbolism, showing how race unionists designed rituals and markers of identity — from flags to public holidays — that evoked and glorified Anglo-America.
Religious Ardor
Authors: Manekin Rachel
Published: May 2021

This chapter talks about Michalina Araten as one of the Galician runaway girls, who came from an affluent Hasidic home and enjoyed an education in a private prestigious primary school in Kraków. It recounts how Michalina was attracted to Catholicism while in school and initiated an acquaintance with a military officer, Dr. Philipp Müller, who lived across from her home. It also narrates Michalina's entry into the Felician Sisters' convent and later disappearance after her father informed her that she was about to be engaged to a man of his choice. The chapter details how Michalina's parents had planned for her future. It mentions the publication of the Araten affair in the Habsburg press and reported in major newspapers outside Austria.
Utopian Nemesis
Authors: Mao Douglas
Published: May 2021

This chapter shows that it is possible to dignify outrage at wrongness in human arrangements with a particular name, nemesis. Nemesis is an ancient Greek word whose meanings evolved in complicated ways over hundreds of years, but in most of its acceptations it suggests, directly or indirectly, umbrage taken at a state of affairs or an action that in some basic or absolute sense is not right. It marks anger at some violation of nomos, where the latter — a noun with an even more diverse array of significations — betokens an apposite arrangement of things, the order that should prevail. Nemesis matters because in Greek and Latin writings it was closely bound up with an ideal still widely cherished, and on behalf of which countless people struggle, at the present time. That ideal is justice. There is ample warrant for understanding justice as, fundamentally, a condition of right arrangement. And once we have this point before us, it becomes still clearer that discontent with inadequate arrangement is not merely some embarrassing compulsion that attached itself contingently to serious utopian speculation. Rather, this discontent proves a propelling source of that speculation — one that, once recognized, illuminates how the achievement of justice is utopia's essential project.
Workers in Motion
Authors: Mao Douglas
Published: May 2021

This chapter traces how the where of work and workers appears as a problem and a value in utopian writing, arguing that we misunderstand the justice utopia strives for if we think of it as a right allocation only of benefits resulting from (or emerging apart from) labor rather than, also, of benefits that can inhere in labor. It remarks a key change in utopian imagining in the years since the middle of the twentieth century: the abandoning, as a major constituent of utopian aspiration, of the dream of people working where and how they like. One can posit many reasons for this shift, including a general drift away from vocabularies of social amelioration that center on the worker, but the chapter concentrates on two significant developments. The first is an increasing concern with freedom to live as one chooses — that is, with liberty of lifestyle — that in the ambit of utopian writing seems increasingly to subsume specifically work-related prerogatives under a larger figure of mobility and whose arrival front and center in utopian thinking is registered by Robert Nozick's metautopia, or what Frederic Jameson has dubbed “the utopian archipelago.” The second is the ever increasing visibility of labor-driven migration as a fraught feature of life in the contemporary world.
Double Resonance: Forcing Equivalence
Authors: Vadim Kaloshin , Ke Zhang
Published: May 2021

This chapter assesses the choice of cohomology and Aubry-Mather type at the double resonance. It begins by choosing cohomology classes for the (unperturbed) slow mechanical system. As in the case of single-resonance, the strategy is to choose a continuous curve in the cohomology space and prove forcing equivalence up to a residual perturbation. To do this, one needs to use the duality between homology and cohomology. The chapter then proves Aubry-Mather type for the perturbed slow mechanical system and reverts to the original coordinates. As the system has been perturbed, one needs to modify the choice of cohomology classes to connect the single and double resonances. Finally, the chapter proves Theorem 2.2, proving the main theorem.
Choice under uncertainty
Authors: Kreps David M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines how many important consumption decisions concern choices, the consequences of which are uncertain at the time the choice is made. It begins with the theory of von Neumann–Morgenstern expected utility. In this theory, uncertain prospects are modeled as probability distributions over a given set of prizes. That is, the probabilities of various prizes are given as part of the description of the object. The chapter then takes up the special case where the prizes are amounts of money; then one is able to say a bit more about the nature of the utility function that represents preferences. It discusses a few applications of this theory to the topic of market demand. Finally, the chapter turns to a richer theory, where uncertain prospects are functions from “states of nature” to prizes, and where probabilities arise subjectively, as part of the representation of a consumer's preferences.
Imperfect competition
Authors: Kreps David M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores models of imperfect competition. Firms in these models have rivals, and the actions of their rivals affect how well they do. But at the same time, firms are not price takers; when they optimize, they take into account how their actions affect the prices they face both directly and, through possible reactions of their rivals, indirectly. The chapter examines the classic models of duopoly with undifferentiated goods: Cournot, von Stackelberg, Bertrand, and kinked demand. It then discusses some of the many important issues that impinge on the basic models. The problems present the opportunity to move beyond informal discussion.
Repeated play: Cooperation and reputation
Authors: Kreps David M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews the concepts of cooperation and reputation. It begins by looking at the game called the prisoners' dilemma. The basic structure of options and payoffs that characterize this game occur over and over in economics. In this basic structure, players can cooperate to greater or to lesser extent. If one player unilaterally decreases the lever of their cooperation, they benefit and their rival is made worse off. But if both decrease their level of cooperation equally, both are made worse off. The chapter then considers repeated games and reflects on variations of the general notion of a supergame, wherein a particular game called the stage game is played over and over by two (or more) players.
Introduction
Authors: Nugent Elizabeth R.
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Arab Spring protests, looking at how the cases of Egypt and Tunisia confirm a central lesson of past transitions: the collapse of an authoritarian regime may trigger a transition, but it does not always lead to successful democratic consolidation. A transition might instead result in reentrenched authoritarianism or any number of revolutionary alternatives. The successful progression from authoritarian breakdown to democratic consolidation is highly contingent on whether elites can compromise and cooperate during the transition, and make the necessary decisions and sacrifices to establish democratic norms and processes. Elite actors' ability to compromise and cooperate in turn depends on the level of polarization among them. This book argues that the political identities of opposition groups are shaped by their experiences of authoritarian repression; these identities in turn determine the levels of political polarization at the moment of transition.
The Big Room
Authors: Boyarin Jonathan
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes the rooms where all Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ) activities took place. It specifically mentions the smaller room, the library, wherein plenty of books on the walls of the beis medresh were stored. Here the Rosh Yeshiva holds his 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Talmud classes. The chapter also illustrates the big room, which a bimah, the platform from which the Torah is read on appropriate occasions, stands. They are all male, consistent with standards of modest comportment that dictate general segregation of males and females in public, and with the traditional Orthodox view that women are not obligated in Torah study generally, nor is it seemly for them to study Talmud. It analyses the volumes of the Babylonian Talmud, which are shelved on the rear right side of the beis medresh, right behind the table where the author is most frequently sat with his study partners. Ultimately, the chapter discusses the author's early kollel year during the Rosh Yeshiva's shiur (lesson), with his study partners Asher Stoler, Yisroel Ruven and Hillel. It highlights some of the yeshiva's routines, one of these is the annual procedure in which observant Jews, in preparation for Passover, formally transfer all of their chomets (leavened goods) to a non-Jew, who then inevitably transfers it back after the holiday ends.
Multiculturalism beyond the Human
Authors: Langlitz Nicolas
Published: May 2021

This chapter offers a historical account of the chimpanzee culture wars. Scientifically, the debate pitted field biologists against experimental psychologists, and proponents of human–animal continuity against those interested primarily in what set Homo sapiens apart from other primate species. Chimpanzee ethnographers struggled with the question of whether they had to exclude genetic and ecological explanations to determine the cultural nature of behavioral differences. Politically, challenges to the dualist ontology of one nature and many human cultures became part of a much larger battle over biological humanism that had emerged after World War II to rein in the excesses of Nazi racial ideology. In the culture wars, a new ethnos-centered left broke with this false universalism in the name of multiculturalism. In the chimpanzee culture wars, cultural primatologists suggested extending multiculturalism beyond the human. But just as they adopted the culture concept, many cultural anthropologists decided in the late 1980s to write against culture. They now suspected that talk about cultural differences served the very racist “othering” that it had been meant to replace. Alienated by the moralism of their colleagues in the humanities, cultural primatologists continued their exploration of chimpanzee cultures in a positivist vein.
Chimpanzee Ethnography
Authors: Langlitz Nicolas
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines how chimpanzee ethnographer Christophe Boesch and his group studied the social transmission of cultural traits in the chimpanzee communities of Taï Forest, Côte d'Ivoire. This ethnographic account of primatological fieldwork in the mid-2010s measures the historical distance to the 1960s when Jane Goodall and others sought to take part in the social life of great apes. In contemporary Taï, by contrast, disengaged observations of habituated chimpanzees served to protect both Pan and Homo. Despite the researchers' efforts to keep human–animal relations as neutral as possible, different chimpanzee communities related to their observers differently. In the forest, chimpanzee ethnography could hardly be distinguished from other forms of fieldwork. Boesch's approach to writing wild cultures turned out to share an important feature with humanities scholarship: references to philosophical classics gave it an intensely polemic bent rarely found in the scientific literature.
Epilogue
Authors: Cordelli Chiara
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews the abstract reflection on the philosophical foundations of democratic state authority and the more mundane details of administrative decision that make their contextual bases. It covers a set of theoretical spaces that range from Kantian universalism to moral particularism, from conceptual analysis to the interpretation of legal doctrines, and from political philosophy to organizational theory. It also discusses the principle of politics that is drawn from experiential cognition of human beings, which have in view the mechanism for administering right and how it can be managed appropriately. The chapter analyses the claim that neoliberalism, of which the privatization of governance is a signature feature, is haunted by an internal and irresolvable contradiction between ideology and practice. It explores neoliberalism as an ideology that promises a free world where individuals or entrepreneurs can fully realize and express their independent selves through free and competitive markets.
Persuasive Peers
Authors: Baker Andy , Ames Barry , Rennó Lúcio
Published: May 2021

In Latin America's new democracies, political parties and mass partisanship are not deeply entrenched, leaving many votes up for grabs during election campaigns. In a typical presidential election season, between one-quarter and one-half of all voters change their voting intentions across party lines in the months before election day. Advancing a new theory of Latin American voting behavior, this book argues that political discussions within informal social networks among family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances explain this volatility and exert a major influence on final voting choices. The book shows that weakly committed voters defer to their politically knowledgeable peers, creating vast amounts of preference change as political campaigns unfold. Peer influences also matter for unwavering voters, who tend to have social contacts that reinforce their voting intentions. Social influence increases political conformity among voters within neighborhoods, states, and even entire regions, and the authors illustrate how party machines use the social topography of electorates to buy off well-connected voters who can magnify the impact of the payoff. The book demonstrates how everyday communication shapes political outcomes in Latin America's less-institutionalized democracies.
Discussion Networks, Campaign Effects, and Vote Choice
Authors: Baker Andy , Ames Barry , Rennó Lúcio
Published: May 2021

This chapter demonstrates that the dynamics of vote choice described in the previous chapter are caused by the discussion and social ties described in Chapter 2. During campaigns, discussion with disagreeing partners tends to induce preference change in voters, while discussion only with agreeing partners reinforces vote intentions, causing preference stability. The chapter illustrates this relationship at multiple levels of analysis, estimating relationships in the Brazilian and Mexican panel surveys in ways that address threats to causal inference. Quotations from the qualitative data also reveal social influence in action, showing vividly that many voters defer to their more politically knowledgeable social ties. In short, the votes cast on election day in Brazil and Mexico are socially informed. The chapter also shows that the social influences that occur during campaigns determine who wins elections. Candidates whose mid-campaign supporters encounter high rates of disagreement from social ties struggle to hold on to these voters through election day. These voters' preferences are less reinforced in conversation, so many switch to different candidates. The candidate they previously supported collapses in the polls.
Introduction
Authors: Payne Mark
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on postapocalyptic fiction, which imagine the life that human beings might lead after the apocalyptic event has passed. It references large-scale works of literary fiction that stage how new forms of life emerge from catastrophe, how survivors adapt to the altered conditions of existence, and the various ways in which the past asserts its claims on them. It also elaborates the immediate past of the world that is lost and the deep past of prehistory and the anthropological imagination that returns with this loss. The chapter describes postapocalyptic fiction as political theory and a mode of persuasion in fictional form, which shows what it would be like to live that life. It discusses modern postapocalyptic fiction with Mary Shelley's The Last Man in 1826, which stages the return of small-scale agrarianism in the aftermath of catastrophe.
The Author of Himself
Authors: Reich-Ranicki Marcel
Published: May 2021

The author of this book was born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1920, and he moved to Berlin as a boy. There he discovered his passion for literature and began a complex affair with German culture. In 1938, his family was deported back to Poland, where German occupation forced him into the Warsaw Ghetto. As a member of the Jewish resistance, a translator for the Jewish Council, and a man who personally experienced the ghetto's inhumane conditions, the author gained both a bird's-eye and ground-level view of Nazi barbarism. His account of this episode is among the most compelling and dramatic ever recorded. He escaped with his wife and spent two years hiding in the cellar of Polish peasants. After liberation, he joined and then fell out with the Communist Party and was temporarily imprisoned. He began writing and soon became Poland's foremost critical commentator on German literature. When he returned to Germany in 1958, his rise was meteoric. He claimed national celebrity and notoriety as the head of the literary section of the leading newspaper and host of his own television program. He frequently flabbergasted viewers with his bold pronouncements and flexed his power to make or break a writer's career. This, together with his keen critical instincts, makes his memoir an indispensable guide to contemporary German culture as well as an absorbing eyewitness history of some of the twentieth century's most important events.
1938-1944
Authors: Reich-Ranicki Marcel
Published: May 2021

This part describes how Warsaw became the author's home in 1938. He held various jobs until he was forced to live in the ghetto, where he was employed as a translator and interpreter by the Jewish Council. At the beginning of 1943 he became a member of the Jewish resistance and managed to escape the ghetto with his wife after their parents and relatives had been sent to concentration camps where they were murdered. His account of the sordid and humiliating conditions of life in the ghetto is an important document of the barbarism of the Nazis and the valor of the Jews, especially because he worked in the offices of the council and was privy to major encounters with high-ranking officials on both the German and Jewish sides. Moreover, he experienced the daily deprivation as most of the Jews did and worked clandestinely with members of the resistance. Once he and his wife managed to get outside the ghetto, they were hidden by simple Polish peasants in a crude cellar for close to two years.
Succession
Authors: Fleming Sean
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines issues of identity, such as whether changes in a state's population, territory, government, or constitution alter its personality and hence negate its responsibilities. According to Thomas Hobbes, the corporate identity of the state is created and sustained by representation. The state has a corporate identity because it has an authorized representative who speaks and acts in its name. This identity persists as long as the state has a continuous 'chain of succession', or an unbroken series of representatives. The chapter shows that this Hobbesian account of corporate identity solves many of the identity problems that arise in cases of revolution, annexation, secession, absorption, unification, and dissolution.
Distribution
Authors: Fleming Sean
Published: May 2021

This chapter assesses issues of fulfilment, such as why subjects ought to bear the costs of their state's debts and reparative obligations. There are two common answers to this question. According to the authorization account of distribution, subjects should bear the costs if they have authorized the state, such as by accepting its protection. According to the participation account, subjects should bear the costs if they have participated in the state, such as by voting or using public services. The problem with both of these accounts is that they cannot justify distributing liability across generations. The chapter develops a Hobbesian account of distribution that explains why subjects who are neither authors nor participants should nevertheless be liable for acts of state. The central idea is 'authorization by fiction', which is based on Thomas Hobbes' idea of 'representation by fiction'. Much as guardians authorize representatives for wards, subjects authorize representatives for the people among them and after them — children and future subjects — who are incapable of authorizing representatives on their own. Authorization by fiction gives the young and the unborn a vicarious 'presence' in the state's actions, which renders them liable for the costs of discharging the state's responsibilities.
Introduction
Authors: Vergara Camila
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes representative democracy as an artificial political infrastructure designed by citizens themselves, which as it was first established can similarly be overhauled. It theorizes the crisis of democracy from a structural point of view. It also argues that liberal representative governments suffer from systemic corruption, a form of political decay that manifests itself as an oligarchization of power in society. The chapter traces the concept of political corruption in Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, and Niccolò Machiavelli and offers a critique of the current juridical and individual understanding of corruption. It emphasizes the significance to move away from the “bad apples” approach, the view that corruption exists only because there are corrupt people in office, and analyzes the structure in which the corrupt elites are embedded.
Epilogue: What Is to Be Done?
Authors: Vergara Camila
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses possible scenarios in which plebeian power could be institutionalized from the point of view of revolutionary politics. It argues that if the aim of revolution is liberty, which demands self-emancipatory political action, then revolutionary change could be achieved without the need of an outright revolution. It also refers to the redistribution of political power that could be done by revolutionary reformers within the boundaries of the Constitution or by the people themselves, claiming collective power and authority by disrupting the ordinary administration of power with their extraordinary political action in local assemblies. The chapter emphasizes that the only power with enough authority to lead structural reforms would be the one exerted by the assembled many themselves. It reviews the proposed blueprint for institutionalizing the power of the many that contributes to guiding prudent and able leaders, revolutionary vanguards, and commonsense people.
Prototype Nation
Authors: Lindtner Silvia M.
Published: May 2021

How did China's mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? This book offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China's governance and global image. The book reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation. The book draws on research in experimental work spaces in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production. It examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, the book demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation. The book shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence.
Introduction
Authors: Lindtner Silvia M.
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the spatial and temporal contingencies of technological promise. The endurance of technological promise works through its displacement to sites formerly conceived of as the tech periphery, once portrayed as incapable of innovating and “in need” of technological intervention and economic development. This book focuses on China and how its image began shifting in the broader tech imagination at the very moment that the promise of making took shape and modernist ideals of technological progress were more broadly challenged. It shows how China, and more specifically the city of Shenzhen in China's Southeastern province of Guangdong, alongside other regions were rearticulated by a range of actors in the global tech industry, investment, policy, and politics as places where the future was now made, as newly innovative exactly because they were considered to be backward and thus not tainted by capitalism or modernity the same way. These displacements of technological promise co-produced China as a prototype nation. The chapter then turns to 2015, when a high-profile Chinese politician and a well-known figure of the American maker movement each articulated a vision of making that was — without any explicit reference to the other — aligned in seemingly paradoxical ways.
The Machine Has a Soul
Authors: Hull Katy
Published: May 2021

In the interwar years, the United States grappled with economic volatility, and Americans expressed anxieties about a decline in moral values, the erosion of families and communities, and the decay of democracy. These issues prompted a profound ambivalence toward modernity, leading some individuals to turn to Italian fascism as a possible solution for the problems facing the country. This book delves into why Americans of all stripes sympathized with Italian fascism, and shows that fascism's appeal rested in the image of Mussolini's regime as “the machine which will run and has a soul” — a seemingly efficient and technologically advanced system that upheld tradition, religion, and family. This book focuses on four prominent American sympathizers: Richard Washburn Child, a conservative diplomat and Republican operative; Anne O'Hare McCormick, a distinguished New York Times journalist; Generoso Pope, an Italian-American publisher and Democratic political broker; and Herbert Wallace Schneider, a Columbia University professor of moral philosophy. In fascism's violent squads they saw youthful glamour and impeccable manners, in the megalomaniacal Mussolini they perceived someone both current and old-fashioned, and in the corporate state they witnessed a politics that could revive addled minds. They argued that with the right course of action, the United States could use fascism to take the best from modernity while withstanding its harmful effects. Investigating the motivations of American fascist sympathizers, the book offers provocative lessons about authoritarianism's appeal during times of intense cultural, social, and economic strain.
Introduction
Authors: Hull Katy
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter discusses how the representation of fascism as a machine with a soul explains why Italian fascism appealed to some Americans in the interwar years. Although Richard Washburn Child, a former ambassador to Italy, and other fascist sympathizers echoed their contemporaries in their critiques of American modernity, they parted ways with most other Americans in their interpretation of Benito Mussolini and his government. In their telling, fascism was an effective system for managing contemporary challenges because it delivered the material benefits of the machine age while protecting Italians from its emotionally draining effects. These observers claimed that the fascists had intentionally reformed democratic institutions to create a government that was more receptive to the needs of ordinary people. In each case, they asserted that fascism produced a different kind of modernity from that which prevailed in the United States — one that upheld traditions, restored connections between government and the governed, and rebalanced the relationship between men and machines. The chapter then provides a background of the four individuals selected for the in-depth study of fascist sympathies: Richard Washburn Child, the diplomat and writer; Anne O'Hare McCormick, the New York Times journalist; Generoso Pope, the Italian-American community leader; and Herbert Wallace Schneider, the professor of moral philosophy.
The Dream Machine
Authors: Hull Katy
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the fascist sympathizers' accounts of the destruction of democracy and the creation of the corporate state in Italy. In the late 1920s, Herbert Schneider, Richard Washburn Child, Anne O'Hare McCormick, and Generoso Pope presented a three-part argument about democracy and political reform in Italy and the United States. First, they harked back to the time of a multiparty system in Italy to imply a cautionary tale for the United States. Even if American democracy had not sunk to the same nadir as Italian democracy, a lack of congressional expertise, the rise of special interest groups, and popular disillusionment meant that it was experiencing similar symptoms of decay, they suggested. Second, they insisted that, through the corporate state, the fascist government had adapted political institutions to contemporary exigencies, enabling expert and efficient management of economic problems, and advancing policies in the direction of the general good. Last, these observers argued that the United States, too, needed to look beyond its preexisting institutions of government to create a state that was adept at dealing with the problems of modernity. They used fascist Italy to transport Americans to a different place, where policies were better managed, and the government was more popular, than in the United States.
Historical Development
Authors: Peebles P.J.E.
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents the origins of quantum mechanics. The story of how people hit on the highly non-intuitive world picture of quantum mechanics, in which the physical state of a system is represented by an element in an abstract linear space and its observable properties by operators in the space, is fascinating and exceedingly complicated. The much greater change from the classical world picture of Newtonian mechanics and general relativity to the quantum world picture came in many steps taken by many people, often against the better judgment of participants. There are three major elements in the story. The first is the experimental evidence that the energy of an isolated system can only assume special discrete or quantized values. The second is the idea that the energy is proportional to the frequency of a wave function associated with the system. The third is the connection between the de Broglie relation and energy quantization through the mathematical result that a wave equation with fixed boundary conditions allows only discrete quantized values of the frequency of oscillation of the wave function (as in the fundamental and harmonics of the vibration of a violin string).
Measurement Theory
Authors: Peebles P.J.E.
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews measurement theory in quantum mechanics. The measurement prescription in quantum mechanics can be stated in a few lines and has found an enormous range of applications, in all of which it has proved to be consistent with logic and experimental tests. However, the implications seem so bizarre that people such as Albert Einstein and Eugene Wigner have argued that the theory cannot be physically complete as its stands. The chapter then extends the prescription to the case where the state vector is not known. It also discusses some of the “paradoxes” of quantum mechanics. Finally, the chapter presents Bell's theorem, which shows that there cannot be a local underlying deterministic theory for which quantum mechanics plays the role of a statistical approximation.
Against the Death Penalty
Authors: Pelli Giuseppe
Published: May 2021

In 1764, a Milanese aristocrat named Cesare Beccaria created a sensation when he published On Crimes and Punishments. At its centre is a rejection of the death penalty as excessive, unnecessary, and pointless. Beccaria is deservedly regarded as the founding father of modern criminal law reform, yet he was not the first to argue for the abolition of the death penalty. This book presents the first English translation of the Florentine aristocrat Giuseppe Pelli's critique of capital punishment, written three years before Beccaria's treatise, but lost for more than two centuries in the Pelli family archives. The book examines the contrasting arguments of the two abolitionists, who drew from different intellectual traditions. Pelli was a devout Catholic influenced by the writings of natural jurists such as Hugo Grotius, whereas Beccaria was inspired by the French Enlightenment philosophers. While Beccaria attacked the criminal justice system as a whole, Pelli focused on the death penalty, composing a critique of considerable depth and sophistication. The book explores how Beccaria's alternative penalty of forced labour, and its conceptualisation as servitude, were embraced in Britain and America, and delves into Pelli's voluminous diaries, shedding light on Pelli's intellectual development and painting a vivid portrait of an Enlightenment man of letters and of conscience. With translations of letters exchanged by the two abolitionists and selections from Beccaria's writings, the book provides new insights into eighteenth-century debates about capital punishment and offers vital historical perspectives on one of the most pressing questions of our own time.
Context
Authors: Pelli Giuseppe
Published: May 2021

This chapter reviews the early and formative years of Giuseppe Bencivenni Pelli in a Tuscan, an imperial and a Roman Catholic context. It introduces the top officials with whom Giuseppe Pelli had to deal when he was embarking on his career in the late 1750s and early 1760s. The chapter recounts the time when he was composing a draft of his treatise Against the Death Penalty, which provides valuable information about the opportunities that were opening up for new men to work in the local and imperial administration, and about the nature of the relationship between the seat of power in Vienna and the provincial capital of Florence. The chapter also details the more dynamic phase of reform in Tuscany, included, and culminated in, the publication of a new code of laws which, among other things, abolished torture and the death penalty. Ultimately, it elaborates the power of the Papacy and the influence of the Church in the society, culture, economy, law and legal practice.