bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Partisan Alignments, Voter Priorities, and Presidential Ballots
Authors: Wagner Regina L. , Shafer Byron E.
Published: October 2022

All the preceding chapters focus on eliciting the partisan alignments connecting policy preferences with social backgrounds. As such, they establish the backgrounds to party identification in the general public, where the most likely vote for a party identifier is normally the candidate of their chosen party. Yet an Afterword approaches voting the other way around, asking which of these alignments at what point have contributed to partisan defection. What emerges is an early period dominated by social welfare, a middle period where national security and civil rights come to life, and a modern world pitting social welfare against cultural values.
Sons of God in the Greco-Roman World
Authors: Bryan Christopher
Published: October 2022

The world into which Christianity spread was also a world in which there were, as Paulsaid, many Gods and many lords (2 Cor. 8.5). One claim to divinity and divine sonship that was evident and unavoidable was that made for Roman emperors and their families. Those claims were everywhere apparent. Inevitably, Christian claims for the divine sonship of Jesus of Nazareth stood in a degree of tension with such claims. Roman understanding of religion was a matter of praxis rather than belief. Refusal to sacrifice, as Christians refused, dishonored the gods. But Rome was understood to owe her greatness to the gods. To refuse to honor the gods was the therefore to be a threat to the security of the empire.
Paul and the Son of God
Authors: Bryan Christopher
Published: October 2022

Paul referred to Jesus as “Lord” and as “Son of God,” though he used the former much more often than the latter. Both expressions are clearly confessional, and sometimes occur as parts of a single assertion: so there is clearly no contradiction and even some overlap in meaning between them. But there is also a distinction between them. “Lord” is used primarily of Jesus’ in relation to his people—“my lord,” “our lord.” “Son of God” is used of Jesus’ unique relationship to God. God’s people also, however, become God’s “sons” (in Paul’s understanding evidently including “daughters”) of God by adoption and grace.
The Future of Liberal Democracy in the International Legal Order
Authors: Ginsburg Tom
Published: October 2022

This chapter asks the question: What will the international law of democratic governance look like in 2050? The question reflects the fact that notwithstanding pluralism, there is much normative architecture supporting liberal democratic norms on the international plane. This architecture is not matched by equally expansive enforcement, but weak mechanisms do exist. This chapter speculates on alternative scenarios and what they might mean for the persistence of liberal democracy as a going concern, through the lens of international law. One scenario is authoritarian dominance; a second is democratic revival; and a third is duopoly between the United States and China. Each scenario has profoundly different implications for democracy and for the character of international law.
Judicial Restraint (and Judicial Supremacy)
Authors: Michelman Frank I.
Published: October 2022

Debates in constitutional democracies over “restraint” (versus “activism”) in judicial constitutional review have typically turned on a bedrock political value of democracy. The debates may also, however, be understood in the light of a different bedrock value, that of political legitimacy. A focus on legitimacy (as informed by the constitutional-democratic thought of John Rawls) prompts a disbundling of three types of restraint in judicial review—here distinguished as “reserved,” “tolerant,” and “weak-form”—which a focus on democracy tends to run together. A result is to complicate the choices for institutional design, while also clarifying the stakes. A Rawlsian supreme court, this chapter suggests, would not be overly reserved from readiness to speak in the constitution’s name; its practice would be tolerant of normal and inevitable political disagreement over constitutional meanings; it would still, however, retain some element of strong-form final authority—all these conclusions springing from the idea of constitutional law as a procedural platform of justification for political power, among free and equal citizens in conditions of reasonable pluralism, in answer to the problem of political liberalism.
Delegation Applications
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Gilbert Michael D.
Published: October 2022

This chapter applies the theories of delegation developed earlier to problems in public law. To begin, the chapter studies judicial review of agency action. It discusses the Chevron doctrine, an important principle in administrative law, and the circumstances under which judges should defer to agencies. Next, the chapter studies legal limits on delegation. The “nondelegation doctrine” limits the power of one branch of government to delegate power to another branch of government. The chapter then turns to relationships between citizens and the state. Citizens can petition the government, seek subsidies, and even capture agencies. Officials can make public-spirited laws or hand out special favors. The chapter studies limits on these activities, including laws on lobbying, bribery, and campaign finance.
Adjudication Applications
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Gilbert Michael D.
Published: October 2022

This chapter applies the theories of adjudication developed earlier to problems in public law. To begin, the chapter contrasts two methods of legal interpretation, textualism and intentionalism. Concepts from economics, including coordination games and transition costs, illuminate the choice between them. Next, the chapter studies features of legal doctrine, including prophylactic rules, precedent, and slippery slopes. The discussion addresses stare decisis and cooperation in the judicial branch. The chapter concludes with some puzzles in adjudication by multimember courts. Sometimes courts issue plurality opinions, meaning opinions with no majority. Sometimes the outcome of a case diverges from its reasoning (the “doctrinal paradox”). Sometimes voting by judges runs in circles. Economics can illuminate these puzzles.
Enforcement Applications
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Gilbert Michael D.
Published: October 2022

This chapter applies the theories of enforcement developed earlier to problems in public law. To begin, the chapter concentrates on the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures. The chapter summarizes the legal doctrine on searches and studies it from an economic perspective. The discussion covers warrants, qualified immunity for police officers, and the “exclusionary rule,” which forbids the government from using evidence in some cases. Next, the chapter addresses relationships between legal design and enforcement. The state can improve enforcement by adopting rules instead of standards, lowering the burden of proof, or adopting “insincerely” strict laws. Then the chapter moves beyond deterrence, studying how law can change people’s behavior without threatening punishment. Law can achieve this by supplying information, coordinating action, and possibly changing preferences. Finally, the chapter addresses judicial legitimacy and its connection to a venerable question: When will the state follow its own laws?
Introduction
Authors: Giles Cynthia
Published: October 2022

Most environmental regulations contain two foundational compliance errors: the belief that compliance with environmental rules is generally very good, and the assumption that it is up to enforcement to make sure compliance is strong. Both are wrong, a reality that has a profound effect on pollution and how well regulations achieve their public health purpose. In fact, widespread violations are the norm, and rule design controls on-the-ground results. Enforcement can never close the big compliance gap created by a poorly designed rule. There are many ways regulations can build in strong implementation outcomes, once regulators accept that they have to make compliance the path of least resistance. The introduction to the book explains the Next Gen thesis and why it matters, and outlines the organization of the book, from evidence to solutions, with a particular emphasis on the must-do climate rules.
Getting in Our Own Way
Authors: Giles Cynthia
Published: October 2022

Rampant environmental noncompliance is harder to fix because of inaccurate compliance assumptions baked into EPA’s written policy and practice. EPA’s Action Development Process Guidance allows rule writers to ignore compliance holes until it is too late to fix them. EPA’s Economic Analysis Guidelines for conducting benefit-cost analysis encourage rule writers to assume 100 percent compliance as if it happens by magic. These seemingly arcane agency policies and practices are almost never discussed in the fierce policy debates about EPA rules, although they have a powerful, and sometimes determinative, impact on the ultimate effectiveness of EPA rules. The chapter explores HFC phasedown, lead paint, and lead in drinking water rules as illustrations. And it references violations in programs run by FDA, IRS, HHS and FAA as evidence that pervasive violations aren’t just an EPA problem. This chapter explains how internal guidance goes awry, and what needs to change to turn it around.
Don’t Double Down on Past Mistakes with Low-Carbon Fuels
Authors: Giles Cynthia
Published: October 2022

The promise of renewable fuels is compelling: portable energy-dense fuels without the carbon. The actuality isn’t as good. This chapter explains the extensive carbon impacts that current strategies in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) overlook and why enforcement isn’t a solution. Carbon released from soils because of RFS-induced indirect land-use change turn out to be the Achilles heel of conventional biofuels like corn ethanol. The creative aggregate compliance strategy of RFS hasn’t had the intended protective effect, and there has been a stunning amount of fraud for biodiesel. As the search for alternatives to fossil fuels ramps up, regulators should not repeat past mistakes: renewable fuels require a much higher bar and should only be used when there is no alternative. And, like all environmental markets, biofuels require tight design to prevent widespread fraud that undercuts the carbon-reduction goal.
Environmental Enforcement in the Next Gen Era
Authors: Giles Cynthia
Published: October 2022

Tough enforcement—both civil and criminal—will always be essential to environmental protection. Next Gen doesn’t change that. By insisting that regulations force stronger compliance out of the gate, Next Gen allows enforcers to do what they do best: focus on new and unanticipated problems, emergencies, and the worst violators, including environmental criminals. It allows enforcers to be far more strategic, taking on the sectors causing disproportionate harm and elevating the urgency of environmental justice. Enforcement can also show environmental regulators how to make the most of new monitoring and analytic tools and explore creative solutions in both regulations and enforcement cases. Freed from the impossible burden of plugging gaping compliance holes created by bad rule design, enforcers can instead be leaders in the push for regulatory innovation and protecting the most vulnerable. This chapter describes the critical role of revitalized enforcement in the Next Gen era.
On Trauma, Trauma Narratives, and Social Movements
Authors: Eyerman Ron
Published: October 2022

The theory of cultural trauma and the significance of trauma narratives are explained. Social theories of trauma are distinguished from individual-oriented psychological theories. Cultural is a non-pathological social theory of trauma that focuses on the construction of collective identity following incidents of mass suffering. Trauma is conceptualized as part of a discursive process, where individual suffering is given collective meaning through competing narrative accounts of what happened, who is responsible, and what is to be done.
Representing and Organizing Whiteness
Authors: Eyerman Ron
Published: October 2022

This chapter maps the evolution of the ideology of white supremacy as embedded in the tragic narrative of the Lost Cause in the post–Civil War. It reveals how carrier groups such as the KKK and more formal political organizations articulated and transmitted the narrative over generations. Insights from social movement studies are called upon in the analysis. This process of transmission was also carried through popular cultural forms, novels, and the graphic arts.
Introduction
Authors: Kekes John
Published: October 2022

This book is a defense of the American constitutional democracy against attacks on it by extremists on the left and the right. Each chapter defends one of the primary political values of the rule of law, justice, legal and political equality, liberty, and property, and guards against the extremists’ misunderstanding of them. It is a warning against the destructive consequences of the politicization of life by extremists both on the left and the right. It calls for moderation, civility, the respectful understanding of opposing political views, and the balance of the primary political values by which we live. The protection of our political system depends on flexibility and the willingness to change if conditions warrant it. The book is about contemporary politics. It is not a historical study of conservatism.
From Simplicities to Complexities
Authors: Kekes John
Published: October 2022

This chapter is about the assumptions we hold and the complexities of life to which we have to respond. The simple assumptions are about the nature of conventional lives, shared modes of evaluation, and common decencies that make it possible to live that way. The assumptions are called into question by the complex situations we face. The complexities are caused by the contingencies of life, conflicting modes of evaluations, and by uncertainties and ambivalence about finding reasonable ways of resolving conflicts between evaluations. These are unavoidable perennial problems we face and to which we must find reasonable ways of responding. The distinctive feature of moderate conservatism is the insistence that these problems are practical, context-dependent, particular, and that there is no reasonable theoretical, context-independent, and general response to them. Moderate conservatives reject the view of many political thinkers that the solution of these problems depends on a political theory that is universal, context-independent, and theoretical. This conflict between practical and theoretical response to complex situations runs through the book.
Perennial Problems
Authors: Kekes John
Published: October 2022

This chapter is about ineliminable perennial problems of human lives and societies. They are unpredictable contingencies caused by changing natural conditions that are beyond human control. Conflicts between political, moral, religious, scientific, prudential, and other evaluations of the available possibilities. And compromises that we all have to make because contingencies and conflicts make it impossible to have all that we reasonably value. The source of perennial problems is not failures of reason or foresight, but the indifference of natural conditions to human well-being. All approaches to politics must recognize and find ways of coping with perennial problems. Moderate conservatives accept that. Political theorists who think that there is an overriding political good reject it. This is one of the main differences between moderate conservative and many other political approaches to perennial problems.
Liberty
Authors: Kekes John
Published: October 2022

Moderate conservatives think that liberty is one of the primary political values. The difficult question is what its limits should be. Defenders of liberty who give priority to it over other political values claim that it is a condition of the pursuit of all values. The problem is that the same claim holds also for the other primary political values. Liberty can be pursued only if the rule of law, justice, equality, and property are protected. Their protection requires limiting both negative liberty, the absence of coercion, and positive liberty, the autonomous pursuit of individual aims. Liberty must be limited because it can be misused. Extremists who regard liberty as the primary political value are guided by secular faith in the basic human motivation to follow reason and morality. Moderate conservatives think that the secular faith is mistaken. As the sad history of humanity makes obvious, human motivation is basically complex, ambivalent, and mixed. Depending on the context, conditions, and available alternatives, human beings sometimes follow reason and morality, and sometimes they act unreasonably and immorally. Moderate conservatives are realistic about human motivation. Defenders of liberty as the primary political value are misled by an optimistic illusion about human motivation.
Private Property
Authors: Kekes John
Published: October 2022

According to moderate conservatives, private property is a primary political value. It provides the resources we all need to stay alive and pursue however we want to live. The justification of private property is controversial. Attempted justifications are based on self-interest, entitlement, and utility. Each recognizes an important component of the justification holding private property, but each in itself is too simple. Each is based on a principle, theory, or an ideal, but each has been reasonably contested by critics. Moderate conservatives propose a new justification of private property. It accepts the relevance of self-interest, entitlement, and utility, but regards each as necessary but not sufficient for its justification. The complex justification proposed by moderate conservatives relies on the conventional terms of cooperation that have passed the test of time in the history of the American political system. This justification is context-dependent, conditional, and recognizes that terms of cooperation slowly change and must be flexible.
Liberalism Ascendant
Authors: Boyer John W.
Published: October 2022

This chapter describes the first twelve years of the new German-speaking Liberal political system and parliamentary institutions that were put in place in 1867. It includes a detailed discussion of political leadership of the Liberal Cabinet (Bürgerministerium) and their major policy initiatives from 1868 to 1871. It also presents an account of the Hohenwart Interlude of 1870‒1, during which the Emperor was asked to sanction concessions to the Czechs, both by enlarging the purview of the Crownland diets of Bohemia and Moravia and the authority of regional administration, including allowing the diets to modify or change state-level legislation as applied to the special conditions of each province. Given that Hohenwart’s strategy failed and the Czech boycott of parliament continued, the Liberals regained power in 1872, ruling the Austrian state until the international crisis involving Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1879. The chapter includes a detailed discussion of the crash of 1873 and corruption in the state railway system in the 1870s as a case study of how Liberal economic theories impacted the development of major new corporate institutions and of the intimate connections between the Austrian civil service and private commerce and industry in which the regulators and the regulated had intimate and often mutually beneficial ties.
Horizontality: Presuppositions and Functions
Authors: Weinrib Ernest J.
Published: October 2022

This chapter examines the presuppositions and functions of the horizontal application of constitutional rights to private law. Inaugurated in Germany in the famous Lüth case and subsequently elaborated in the constitutional jurisprudence of Germany and other jurisdictions, horizontality (Drittwirkung) is the most far-reaching international development in private law since the end of the Second World War. The chapter avoids the standard taxonomy of the direct and indirect application of constitutional rights, focusing instead on what horizontality presupposes and on the different functions that horizontality might serve. Drawing on Hans Carl Nipperdey’s path-breaking exposition, the chapter notes that horizontality presupposes the commonality of rights, and the juridical unity of the entire legal order. The chapter then elaborates, in order of their increasing robustness, the three different functions that might be ascribed to horizontality: to render legal norms more determinate, to shape the incremental development of private law, and to give expression within private law to the equal human dignity of the interacting parties. Throughout the chapter the most salient illustrations are cases on privacy from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
Horizontality: Scope and Operation
Authors: Weinrib Ernest J.
Published: October 2022

Continuing with the treatment of horizontality from the previous chapter, this chapter discusses two issues regarding the workings of horizontality in its most robust version. The first issue is that of scope, that is, the conceptual boundaries beyond which constitutional rights cannot be applicable to private law. The second issue is that of operation, that is, the process of balancing the rights invoked by the two parties. Because horizontality combines private law and constitutional law, the scope of horizontality becomes visible at the seam between these two varieties of legal ordering. One such circumstance is when the constitutional right is incompatible with the structure of the private law relationship, as when the constitution specifies socio-economic rights that are distributive in nature. The chapter discusses this possibility in the context of the South African case on the right to a primary education, Juma Masjid. A second such circumstance is when the supposed exercise of the constitutional right does not fulfill its constitutional purpose or negates the rights of others. Examples are the German cases of Blankfüer and the Sprayer of Zurich, as well as the facts of the US case of Snyder v Phelps. The balancing that characterizes horizontality’s operation is best understood as a form of proportionality that aims at a practical concordance, in which the operation of each contending right is adjusted because of the presence of the other. In this context, balancing so understood differs from public law’s use of proportionality to justify the infringement of constitutional rights.
Practice Studies
Authors: Rouleau Linda
Published: October 2022

Practice studies have gained momentum in organization theories (OTs) over the past two decades. They bring us back to where it all began; that is, managerial work and managerial activities. Practice studies aim at achieving a better understanding of how organizational members—managers and non-managers alike—accomplish their work through multiple micro- and macro-level activities. A practice perspective calls on OTs scholars to consider organizing as a craft activity in which mind, body, and materiality engage in a complex synthesis. This chapter offers a selective immersion in the world of practice studies in OTs by targeting research streams based on different views of practice: practice as managerial work, practice as social accomplishment, practice as (socio)materiality, and practice as embodiment. The polysemic nature of the practice notion and its implications for advancing our knowledge of what people in organizations do and accomplish are discussed.
The Agreement
Authors: Rowan Solène
Published: October 2022

This chapter discusses the reforms in the new Civil Code’s section of contractual negotiation and formation. Negotiations often precede the formation of a contract, especially substantial commercial contracts. In France, the freedom to collaborate on a contract is primarily limited by the principle of good faith since it sets the standards on how the parties would conduct themselves during negotiation. Moreover, the Civil Code imposes the general responsibility to provide information on negotiating parties. On the other hand, the chapter distinguishes the difference between offers, invitations, and withdrawals of offers and acceptance. It also compares the process of negotiating contracts between France and England.
Unfair Terms and the Rebalancing of Contracts
Authors: Rowan Solène
Published: October 2022

This chapter focuses on unfair terms and the rebalancing of contracts. While some contracts can end due to procedural unfairness, substantive fairness is mostly regarded by the parties than the courts. However, courts could still interfere under the name of substantive fairness. Civil Code's Article 1168 covers the new articles regulating the equilibrium of the contract as the validity correlates to consent, capacity, and content. Thus, parties are free to determine their respective bargains’ substantive content and economic balance. On the other hand, articles 1169, 1170, and 1171 introduced new exceptions to article 1168 through its Civil Code reforms to preserve the interests of the alleged weakest party.
The Political Elements of Silence
Authors: Freeden Michael
Published: October 2022

The study of concealed silences is predicated on an expansive view of the political developed in my book The Political Theory of Political Thinking. The features of political thinking differ among cultures and periods, yet share omnipresent characteristics in all walks of life and interaction: (1) having the last say in decision making for collectivities; (2) distributing ideological and ethical importance through prioritizing specified social arrangements above others; (3) mobilizing or withholding public support for communal and group discourses and activities; (4) articulating and implementing cooperative or conflictual measures in managing social interaction; (5) constructing and projecting collective future-oriented plans and visions; (6) exercising power and influence by employing persuasion, rhetoric, emotion, and menace as well as through operating cover-ups. Each of those involve silences that: (1) underline conclusivity and endorse boundaries or compliance; (2) eliminate challenges to the prominence of political actors, or veil their shortcomings; (3) filter the consent, acquiescence, or dissent on which political agents, institutions, and ideologies depend; (4) smoothen or dislocate the socio-political order by affecting stability or conflict through supplying uncontested continuity or introducing rupture; (5) manage the political construction of time necessary to aid or resist political identities and futures, including the reconstruction of collective memory; (6) intensify or quash the impact of ideas, arguments, and events by modulating their circulation, reception, and transformation. The emphasis is not on the ethical propriety of silences or their function in democratic traditions, but on their empirical centrality in analysing political thought.
Absence, Lack, and Removal
Authors: Freeden Michael
Published: October 2022

Silence is thought of both as an absence (whether desirable or deplorable) and as a lack (indicating a potentially retrievable deficiency). Each dialectically points to its opposite: a presence in the first case, and a sufficiency or an abundance in the second. Absence relates to concepts such as void and nothingness, and is associated with a non-specific invisible and inaudible state. It may be wordlessly sensed or intuited. Identifying putative absences depends on the epistemologies at the disposal of the student of silences. Lack calls attention to a particular incompleteness that can be named. It entails the political unfolding of a process and possesses a teleological undertow. Silence as absence has a different order of inaudibility. As a form of elimination it is itself patently political. Lacanian radical lack has its own peculiarities. It too is non-specific, pertaining to an underlying Real that cannot be articulated or communicated, and for which inadequate terms of language must be substituted. The defective symbolic representation of the Real stands in for an ineluctable lack, a perpetually inexpressible voice. Removal relates to the erasure, loss, or entombment of what had previously existed and was perceptible—often hiding the act of concealment itself, most commonly found in the palimpsests of changing historical narratives.
The Dog that Did Not Bark: Listening for Silence
Authors: Freeden Michael
Published: October 2022

This chapter focuses on how concealed silences can be accessed, if at all. Concealed silences elude both participants and observers, being not only physically soundless but conceptually ‘inaudible’. They necessitate a switch from listening to silence to listening for silence, in order to detect profoundly non-agentic silences. That requires imaginative deduction and exogenous social epistemologies through which to employ cultural detective work or ideological decoding, achievable only when assumed absences and lacks are replaced with a missing piece of hitherto obscured evidence. Various theories that account for them—Lyotard’s differend, the study of negativity in literature—are mooted. Some profound silences remain deeply unconceptualizable to certain groups or cultures where persistent questioning is not at a premium. The scholarly study of silences is prone to its own concealments. Immutable dichotomies erode scalar distinctions. Subscribing to unpatterned ruptures underplays subtle continuities. Disciplinary suspicion of other methodologies results in turning a deaf ear to significant findings that can illuminate silences.
“Cloak, Tunic, Book, Cell”
Authors: Michelson David A.
Published: October 2022

This chapter describes the second phase in the development of East Syrian contemplative reading, its theological definition in the works of Babai the Great, an abbot of the Great Monastery on Mt. Izla. In the early seventh century, Babai wrote three commentaries on the fourth-century author Evagrius of Pontus, an influential theorist of Egyptian asceticism. Babai sought to harmonize Egyptian and East Syrian ascetic theologies. His reinterpretation exemplifies Evagrius’ reception into Syriac monasticism (the so-called “Evagriana syriaca”). This chapter documents how Evagrian literature served as staple ascetic reading materials in seventh-century Mesopotamia. The textual structure of the Evagriana syriaca itself modeled and embodied a variety of ascetic reading practices including: commentary, antirrhetical reading, psalmody, and contemplative reading. Babai sought to promote these practices within a framework of spiritual progress inherited from John the Solitary and Evagrius. Babai taught monastic readers both how to read Evagrius and how to read in an Evagrian contemplative manner, that is, as a step toward the divine vision found in theoria (contemplation). Babai’s works reflect a growing separation between the literary cultures of school and monastery in the Church of the East. Contemplative readers, influenced by Babai and Evagrius, rejected forms of scholastic reading as incompatible with their pursuit of divine knowledge. The end result of this phase in the development of East Syrian contemplative reading was that monks in the Church of the East now claimed their own distinctly Evagrian purposes for reading. The “book” had joined the cloak and cell as monastic essentials.
Born Out of Fire and Chaos
Authors: Marchi Simone
Published: October 2022

This chapter covers the concept of the Solar System’s origin and formation. It discusses how the Earth revolves around the Sun. The current paradigm of planetary formation needs collisions to form large rocky planets. Moreover, the slow accretion of a planet is mostly characterized by violent and massive collisions. The accretion of the Earth is also vital to the understanding of the origin of the ocean. Thus, the collisions play a role in shaping physical properties and indicating the differences between planets, such as Earth and Venus. The chapter also expounds on the celestial bodies found in the Solar System.
A Clash of Giants
Authors: Marchi Simone
Published: October 2022

This chapter explains the geometric nature of the universe. According to Johannes Kepler in 1596, the hierarchical organization of planets at the time was Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn with the sun in the centre. Kepler’s geometric universe was deemed to be heliocentric. The size of a plant’s feeding zone and radial extent is set through the balance between the gravitational attraction of the planet and the Sun. Moreover, planetary migration can occur by various processes such as the Nice model. The chapter also explores the respective theories of planet formation by Kepler and Gerard Kuiper. The chapter also recounts the exploration of the Moon through the Luna and Apollo missions.
Using English
Authors: Machan Tim William
Published: October 2022

This chapter considers various ways by which usage can organize historiography, focusing on two issues in particular. First, it considers how a usage-based historiography can impact, and circularly be justified by, language periodization, grammatical description, and assertions about the essence of English. Like other narratives, the cultivation of Standard English in particular creates its own evidence and complicates any attempts to see a different way to approach what Genette would call the story of the English language. And second, it argues that such historiography depends fundamentally on extralinguistic issues like emigration and national identity. At the most general level, suppressed or even excluded in such narratives are the genealogies and grammatical accounts that dominate other narratives. More particularly, any narratives rooted in belletristic remains and a standard language likewise overwrite competing accounts of change and variation in L2 speech communities.
Families and friends
Authors: Machan Tim William
Published: October 2022

At their most abstract level, genealogies and periodizations, like the other narrative paradigms discussed here, merge the story of a language history with its narrative—the facts of what happened with an account of them. Genealogies and periodizations are in reality declaratives that produce meaningful categories from isolated language phenomena. The categories themselves, in turn, produce still more phenomena, such as phonological shift, that can account for the process by which one period becomes another. This chapter consider genealogy and periodization in conjunction with one another, then, since both narratives focus on similar phenomena with similar results. As inevitable and valuable as each may be, they also obscure not only their own formations but also their impact on the story of English. Each naturalizes, the chapter argues, what are ultimately interpretive impositions on historical data.
When speakers make the difference
Authors: Machan Tim William
Published: October 2022

Drawing on an increasing critical emphasis on historical pragmatics, the final chapter pursues a thought experiment about how the history of the language might appear in a user-based narrative about the period after English might be said to have left England. The chapter uses Anglophones as a general organizing principle and focuses on the dynamics between L1 and L2 speakers in order to consider how these data might produce a history of the language perhaps complementary to but certainly distinct from other narratives. The chapter does not so much offer a pragmatic history of English as, beginning with an account of the linguistic significance of Jamestown, identify the kinds of data on which a modern-era speaker-based narrative in particular would rely, including domains and usages as well as speakers. To put the matter concisely, a user-based narrative would conflate the question “What is English?” with “Who speaks it?”
Unpacking Economic Evidence
Authors: Mantzari Despoina
Published: October 2022

This chapter begins with some essential preliminary work that distinguishes economics from natural sciences and then explains how economic evidence is incorporated in rulemaking and adjudication and the specific challenges it raises for the error-correction function of judicial review. It specifically draws attention to regulatory disputes that present ‘polycentric’ elements and argues that such disputes invite a case-by-case assessment of the factors that may attenuate their polycentric dimension making them amenable to the adjudicative process; a task undertaken in Chapter 7. The chapter finally considers how the distinct rationalities of the legal and scientific-economic processes act as limits to the import of economic evidence in courts, foreshadowing the discussion in Chapter 4.
Imperfect Alternatives
Authors: Mantzari Despoina
Published: October 2022

This chapter provides a map of the relevant institutional landscape and sets the scene for the comparative institutional analysis. It first introduces the main actors involved in the regulatory process in the US and the UK and then examines, in a systematic and comparative manner, the various procedures available for the review of economic evidence included in regulatory agencies’ decisions and the various types of scrutiny applied to agencies’ action; a highly complex area that has never been clearly stated. This exercise offers a useful institutional map of regulatory appeals in the two comparator jurisdictions that facilitates the examination of the rationales and determinants of the reception of economic evidence in the US and UK courts, undertaken in Chapters 5 and 6 respectively.
Towards a Complementary Relationship between the Court and the Regulatory Agency in the Realm of Utility Regulation
Authors: Mantzari Despoina
Published: October 2022

This chapter considers the institutional disadvantages of the courts that may warrant a high degree of deference, namely lack of economic expertise, limited access to information, lack of requisite institutional legitimacy, and courts’ susceptibility to ‘minoritarian bias’. It also highlights several institutional realities and procedural developments that may attenuate the weight of such comparative institutional disadvantages, such as courts’ specialisation in regulatory matters and the courts’ rules of procedure. The chapter then examines the institutional alternatives to a specialist court. It concludes that the best way to promote the error-correction function of judicial review in the assessment of economic evidence requires a balance to be struck, in which deference is accorded to regulatory agencies on institutional competencies grounds and some degree of epistemic diversity is introduced in courts.
Cassian the Oneirologist
Authors: Zecher Jonathan L.
Published: October 2022

This chapter turns from Evagrius to John Cassian (c.362–435) and his persistent interest in nocturnal emissions and the related phenomenon of sexual (wet) dreams. Not only medical, but philosophical and other accounts of nocturnal emissions provide context for Cassian here, with special attention given to Aristotle, Caelius Aurelianus, and late antique physicians who considered wet dreams as sites of illness and therapy. Cassian develops and in some ways transforms the medical approach to nocturnal emissions by including demonic instigation and refusing pharmacological or surgical therapies. In his fullest discussion (Conl. 22) Cassian uses a story of an anonymous monk to craft a diagnostic flowchart and therapeutic hierarchy for emissions. For him, they are indicators of ascetic progress, but also inescapable features of (male) embodiment, and the rules of engagement in the war of flesh and spirit. In this way, we can understand his distrust of eunuchs as masking the symptom rather than the cause, and also critique the popular, Foucauldian, reading and develop a more fluid understanding of Cassian’s ascetic subjects.
John Cassian’s Nosology of the Soul
Authors: Zecher Jonathan L.
Published: October 2022

This chapter continues studies of Cassian while shifting focus from dreams to passions, or vices (vitia). Cassian develops Evagrius’ “eight wicked thoughts” into the “eight principal vices.” He experiments over the course of the Conferences with several ways of organizing these and other related vices, though he generally relies on taxonomic approaches that differentiate between genera (the principal vices) and species (more specific manifestations). Cassian’s approach is best contextualized against Evagrius and wider traditions of organizing passions, virtues, and vices, in lists. However, Cassian inflects his lists of vices through a diagnostic study of thoughts and strong emotions as exteriorizations of interior dispositions. Thus, he ultimately hangs the eight principal vices on the tripartite soul in a complex medical analogy that provides a stable nosology of passions, relating transient emotional states to biopsychosocial disorders in interior dispositions.
Pathologies of Passion and Embodiment in the Ladder
Authors: Zecher Jonathan L.
Published: October 2022

Pathologies of thought, passion, and embodiment are at the heart of John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent. John draws together ideas from Evagrius, Cassian, Mark the Monk, and others to construct a schema for the development of trains of thought from a bare suggestion to a habitual way of thinking. This, combined with his attention to the mutual affectivity of soul and body, allows John to fashion a pathology of thought. For the passions, John develops and expands on the Evagrian “eight thoughts” through a series of demonic family trees. Using imagined tribunal scenes, which owe something also to magical texts, John examines the origins and manifestations of generic passions like anger, for example, from self-esteem to derisive laughter. For embodiment, John again uses family trees to describe the operation and dysfunction of digestion and sexual activity in relation to thought and ascetic practice. The conclusion explores John’s approach to fasting, its medical background, and the relation of all these points to confession.
Basil of Caesarea on the Spiritual Physician and His Galenic Competitor
Authors: Zecher Jonathan L.
Published: October 2022

This chapter uses Basil of Caesarea as interlocutor for a study of ascetic Christian ambivalence toward medicine. Authors from Origen to Diadochos of Photice differentiated between those who “use” medical healing and those who, out of faith or virtuosity, refuse it. In some stories, like Theodoret of Cyrus’ Religious History or the Apophthegmata Patrum, miraculous healings take place when professional physicians have failed. Basil of Caesarea offers a unique insight into the reason for using or refusing medicine, and the limits of its capacity, in his Fifty-Fifth Long Response in what is generally called his Asceticon. Basil argues that medicine is a divinely ordained art, built into creation prior to the damage of Adam’s fall and a means of God’s desire that humans assist each other. However, he also argues that not every disease requires or can even be helped by medical means. Those that arise from natural causes, which include morally condemnable modes of living, can be aided by medicine, though not always. Others are sent by God for moral correction or discipline, others by the devil out of malice, and some just to remind the very holy that they are still human. Medicine can do nothing for these, because their etiology lies outside its realm of expertise. The spiritual director, however, is tasked with differentiating these kinds of illness and recommending therapies accordingly. Thus, Basil presents the spiritual director as a greater expert than their medical counterpart, but in the same area of expertise.
Patient Physicians and Patient Disobedience in Cassian
Authors: Zecher Jonathan L.
Published: October 2022

This chapter falls into two parts, the first of which draws out the qualities of an ideal spiritual “physician” from Cassian’s Conferences; the second traces the limits of a medical model in his Institutes. Cassian uses imagery of trailblazing to describe the importance of confession and self-disclosure to spiritual directors, but medical imagery to describe its dynamics. He presents the qualities needed for spiritual physicians through a story of failed direction and its correction by one Abba Apollo in the Second Conference, who teaches the importance of compassion and patience in cultivating trust and effecting healing. Likewise, Abba John in the Nineteenth demonstrates how to test possible directors as one would test physicians, and how they should demonstrate their spiritual expertise as medical. In Book 9 of the Institutes, Cassian reads the Apostle Paul’s Thessalonian correspondence as a director dealing with disobedient monks afflicted with acedia. He shows that Paul follows a therapeutic hierarchy but, faced with intransigent patients, resorts to sterner discipline as a teacher and then threats of punishment as a judge. In each persona, Cassian treats Paul as a monastic spiritual director but embeds him in the cultural discourses appropriate to each profession. An inverse proportionality emerges between efficacy and coercion, and so while directors may resort to punishment, they are at their best when operating as physicians.
A Physician, a Judge, and a Shepherd Walk into a Monastery…
Authors: Zecher Jonathan L.
Published: October 2022

This final chapter returns to the Ladder, but also takes in John Climacus’ other work, To the Shepherd. In these, John multiplies images for his spiritual director, favoring especially those of physician, judge, king, and shepherd. John uses these different images to explore both degrees of coercion in spiritual direction and different contexts for it. He is especially interested in expanding and nuancing the therapeutic hierarchy on display in church-order literature by means of a detailed analogy with a physician’s toolkit and expertise in dosimetry. The director learns to alternate harsher and gentler disciplines as well as to reserve more painful ones for more serious or persistent problems. These nuance John’s description of a monastery’s abbot as a king dispensing orders, while the regal imagery locates practices of confession and penance in a disciplinary organization. At other points, John describes private confessional encounters in medical terms, drawing especially on the manners of physicians and patients in intimate settings. For more public confessions, the same relationship is described through judicial imagery as John develops manners appropriate to that profession. Like Cassian and Basil, he deals with intransigent monks for whom he recommends amputation, in contrast to the “prison” he gleefully imagines in the Ladder’s Fifth Rung. Finally, John reconceives the monastic space as a clinic and its daily activities as a drama through which hidden realities come to light and the sick find healing.
Conclusions, and Prognoses
Authors: Zecher Jonathan L.
Published: October 2022

In the conclusion, after a brief recapitulation of points covered in the book, some consequences are drawn, especially as regards medical metaphors. Paul Ricoeur’s claim that metaphor works by seeing one thing as another leads to ultimately to one thing being another. In this case, through conceptualizing and interpreting practices of spiritual direction as medical encounters, expertise, and art, monastics and others formed through consumption of this literature learn to see themselves in those roles and to act accordingly. Spiritual direction becomes a medical art. Likewise, a medical conceptualization inflects the economies of power operative in monastic settings while opening the possibility of an upward spiritual mobility—the sick can not only be healed but also become physicians themselves. There is, therefore, a tension in the asymmetric relationships of spiritual direction and monastic communities. Finally, it is suggests that this study provides the basis for much-needed analysis of Byzantine penitential practices and a more nuanced understanding of Byzantine spiritual direction.