bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cognitive Media Ethics
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: July 2021

This chapter surveys a breadth of approaches to the ethics of film and other narrative media, both contemporary and historic, and positions them in relation to developments in cognitive media ethics. These include cine-ethics and film philosophy, phenomenological approaches, literary ethics and hermeneutics, notions of aesthetic autonomy, and ethics in narratology. The contributions and challenges of each approach are summarized, as are their uses in the development of a normative ethics for cognitive media studies. Throughout this chapter, a case emerges for the complementary, elaborative rigors of cognitive science, normative ethics, and consequentialism. The chapter concludes by indicating how methods for analysis developed at the center of these areas of study will inform the remainder of the book.
A Humanistic Consequentialism for Film and Media Studies
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: July 2021

This chapter outlines the framework for ethical analysis that will be carried through readings in the latter half of the book. It interrogates the reasons behind a dominant virtue ethics approach in film and media studies, and describes an alternative humanistic consequentialist approach. Consequentialism displaces the evaluation of others and their moral being, including the heroic or villainous qualities of fictive characters, in favor of a future-thinking concern that is more self-implicating, while humanist ethics integrates care and understanding of moral failures and the vagaries of moral luck. Humanistic consequentialism emerges as a pressure we can put on one another to be aware of the results of our behavior rather than a strict requirement to maximize the hedonic results of our actions; implications for the “thought experiments” of media are discussed.
Benign Violations in the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy
Authors: Moss-Wellington Wyatt
Published: July 2021

Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren’s benign violation theory (BVT) argues that humor is produced when three conditions are met: we perceive a situation as potentially violating, we perceive it also as benign, and the two perceptions occur simultaneously. This chapter mobilizes BVT in describing the cognitive dissonances inherent in comedy spectatorship, using a particular case study in dramedy cinema: the suburban ensemble film, including such works as The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, and American Beauty. After surveying some of the key humorous stimuli recurrent across the genre, I turn to other comedic texts that deal with family and domestic studies with a striking lack of pathos—in particular the television series Family Guy. This comparison underscores an analysis of the ethics of benign violations in narrative media that is centered on the resolution of its fundamental affective incoherence and the way this resolution might guide later critical thought. The chapter ultimately demonstrates the uses of BVT as a hermeneutic tool, and one that might help us isolate an ethics of comedy in media.
Issues in the Syntax of Polarity-Sensitive Items
Authors: Alqassas Ahmad
Published: July 2021

This chapter provides an overview of PSIs (polarity-sensitive items) in Arabic and briefly outlines the critical issues in the syntax of PSIs in Arabic and their contributions to Arabic syntax and linguistic theory. It also outlines the theoretical underpinnings of research on Arabic negation, relying on the author’s most recent publications. The author synthesizes the major and crucial findings from cross-linguistic studies on this topic and studies of PSIs in Arabic. This chapter also articulates the critical issues, methodology, and scope of content. A quick overview of polarity sensitivity reveals much of the microvariation in Arabic. Geographically, this variation comparatively grows at the phonetic, morphological, and lexical levels, moving from the west with the Moroccan dialect, into Egyptian and Jordanian along the Mediterranean, into the Arabian Peninsula with Qatari Arabic, and into the formal written Arabic.
Licensing Negative Polarity Items
Authors: Alqassas Ahmad
Published: July 2021

This chapter concerns the role that syntax plays in licensing NPIs (negative polarity items). Scholars have argued for a semantic approach to characterizing the unifying properties of the wide range of licensors, such as negation, disjunction, interrogation, and subjunctives, licensors that all share the semantic notion of nonveridicality. The author extends this approach to Arabic NPIs in this chapter but also argues that syntax is heavily involved in licensing these items. In particular, the role of the categorial status, syntactic configurations, and syntactic processes such as movement in licensing NPIs are discussed. The author argues for a unified analysis with a minimal set of basic syntactic operations such as Merge and Move, and licensing configurations of c-command and Spec-Head (specifier-head). The analysis captures the true nature of perceived mutual exclusivity between NPIs and the enclitic negative marker as an epiphenomenon of the availability of multiple loci for negation.
Licensing Negative Concord Items
Authors: Alqassas Ahmad
Published: July 2021

This chapter discusses the syntactic configurations and processes that are involved in licensing the various types of NCIs (negative concord items) in Arabic. The author argues for a revised syntactic agreement approach. In this way, the chapter explains the behavior of Arabic NCIs with extra mechanisms (positing an abstract negative operator) to explain non-strict NCIs by conceptualizing a revised inventory of abstract negation features that the various types of Arabic NCIs carry, thus partially building on and departing from analyses for Germanic languages. The coordinators laa-wala ‘neither-nor’ are conspicuous analogues of the NCI wala, which can combine with NPs to create person-NCIs such as wala-ħada ‘no body,’ in their ability to co-occur with the negative adverb maʕumrhiš ‘never’ in the CP (complementizer phrase) layers without triggering a double negation reading. A covert negative operator licenses the coordinators laa-wala as a last resort in the absence of overt licensors.
Summary and Conclusions
Authors: Alqassas Ahmad
Published: July 2021

This chapter summarizes the central points from each previous chapter and elaborates on the individual analyses of these PSIs (polarity-sensitive items) and their contributions to the critical issues in syntax and linguistic theory. This book studied the microvariation in the syntax of PSIs (negative and positive polarity, negative concord, and negative indefinites) in Standard Arabic and the major regional dialects represented by Jordanian, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Qatari. Overall, the syntactic licensing of PSIs in Arabic bears on key theoretical issues in the cross-linguistic studies of polarity sensitivity. Such issues include the syntactic licensing configurations for these items, the feature of structure/specifications of these items, and the availability of syntactic agreement in the context of negation. Lastly, the chapter presents residual issues for future research.
Hope Under Oppression
Authors: Stockdale Katie
Published: July 2021

This book explores the nature, value, and role of hope in human life under conditions of oppression. Oppression is often a threat and damage to hope, yet many members of oppressed groups, including prominent activists pursuing a more just world, find hope valuable and even essential to their personal and political lives. This book offers a unique evaluative framework for hope that captures the intrinsic value of hope for many of us, the rationality and morality of hope, and ultimately how we can hope well in the non-ideal world we share. It develops an account of the relationship between hope and anger about oppression and argues that anger tends to be accompanied by hopes for repair. When people’s hopes for repair are not realized, as is often the case for those who are oppressed, anger can evolve into bitterness: a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that injustice will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. But even when all hope might seem lost or out of reach, faith can enable resilience in the face of oppression. Spiritual faith, faith in humanity, and moral faith are part of what motivates people to join in solidarity against injustice, through which hope can be recovered collectively. Joining with others who share one’s experiences or commitments for a better world and uniting with them in collective action can restore and strengthen hope for the future when hope might otherwise be lost.
Losing Hope, Becoming Embittered
Authors: Stockdale Katie
Published: July 2021

This chapter considers what happens to anger when people’s hopes for repair in the face of injustice are not realized. It argues that anger can evolve into the emotion of bitterness. Bitterness is a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that an injustice or other moral wrong will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. And despite its unfortunate reputation as an inherently bad and destructive emotion, bitterness can be a prudentially rational, fitting, and morally appropriate response to injustice. Although it can lead to despair and inaction, some people who are bitter continue to be motivated to act against injustice even without hope that their efforts will be successful.
Aristotle's Empiricism
Authors: Gasser-Wingate Marc
Published: July 2021

Aristotle is famous for thinking that all our knowledge comes from perception. But it’s not immediately clear what this view is meant to entail. For it’s not clear what perception is supposed to contribute to the more advanced forms of knowledge that derive from it, or indeed how we should understand the nature of its contribution—what it might mean to say that these more advanced forms of knowledge are “derived from” or “based on” what we perceive. Aristotle is often thought to have disappointingly little to say on these matters. I argue here that this thought is mistaken: a coherent and philosophically attractive view of perceptual knowledge can be found in the various texts in which Aristotle discusses perception’s role in animal life, the cognitive resources on which it does and does not depend, and the relation it bears to practical and theoretical modes of understanding. What emerges from these discussions is a moderate form of empiricism—an empiricism on which we can develop sophisticated forms of knowledge by broadly perceptual means, but nonetheless rely on our intellectual powers for more advanced forms of understanding. I consider the role this empiricism plays in Aristotle’s account of our learning, and its implications for his views about practical wisdom and the cognitive lives of nonrational animals.
Perception, Experience, and Locomotion: Aristotle on Nonrational Learning
Authors: Gasser-Wingate Marc
Published: July 2021

I examine the zoological and psychological views that motivate Aristotle’s ambitious conception of perceptual learning. I focus on two key ideas. The first is the idea that perception can solicit some behavior from a perceiving subject: we and other animals perceive how things are, but also perceive what’s to be done in the situation we face. This is possible because we perceive things as pleasant and painful, and thus as objects of some of our appetites. The second idea is that perceptual phantasia makes possible the retention of past perceptions as memories, and the association of memories with some occurrent perception. This mechanism allows past perceptions to inform what we recognize perceptually, and accounts for the development of the complex dispositions that constitute the state of experience. I end by contrasting experience with forms of understanding that depend on our rational powers, and considering the limits of Aristotle’s empiricism.
Digital Imaging Technology
Authors: Thomson-Jones Katherine
Published: July 2021

In this chapter, I examine one sense in which digital images are digital; namely, in virtue of being made and presented with digital technology. I begin by outlining some general theoretical commitments regarding the nature and conditions of appreciation. Broadly speaking, the appreciation of art is to be understood in terms of the differential exercise of cognitive skills. Such skills can be exercised when an appreciator takes into account the distinctively digital technology involved in both the production and the screening of digital images. I give some important background on the functioning of computers and digital display tools. This background helps us understand the debate surrounding potential aesthetic losses and gains when working creatively with digital, as opposed to analog, tools.
Digital Media and Appreciation
Authors: Thomson-Jones Katherine
Published: July 2021

This chapter takes up the aesthetic implications of the technology of digital images. Taken together, digital technologies for production and presentation can be understood as the materials that, used for artistic ends, comprise the media of digital art. The challenge for this chapter is to defend medium-based artistic appreciation in the digital age. I argue that awareness of the uses to which an artist puts digital materials is crucial for understanding the particular embodied achievement that is that artist’s work. The kinds of image-based art examples used in this chapter are diverse. They include examples from earlier chapters but also films that rely on a digital workflow.
Introduction
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: July 2021

This introduction has two main aims: first, it argues that Newton’s evidential revolution and scientific achievements are significant to philosophy. It distinguishes four kinds of significance. Second, against recent historiography, it defends the legitimacy of ascribing a metaphysics to Newton.
The Certainty, Modality, and Grounding of Newton’s Laws
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: July 2021

Newton began his Principia with three Axiomata sive Leges Motu We offer an interpretation of Newton’s dual label and investigate two tensions inherent in his account of laws. The first arises from the juxtaposition of Newton’s confidence in the certainty of his laws and his commitment to their variability and contingency. The second arises because Newton ascribes fundamental status both to the laws and to the bodies and forces they govern. We argue the first is resolvable, but the second is not. However, the second tension shows that Newton conceives laws as formal causes of bodies and forces. This neo-Aristotelian conception goes missing in Kantian accounts of laws, as well as accounts that stress laws’ grounding in powers and capacities.
Newton’s Philosophy of Time
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: July 2021

This chapter explains what Isaac Newton means with the phrase “absolute, true, and mathematical time” in order to discuss some of the philosophic issues that it gives rise to. It describes Newton’s thought in light of a number of scientific, technological, and metaphysical issues that arose in seventeenth‐century natural philosophy. The first section discusses some of the relevant context from the history of Galilean, mathematical natural philosophy, especially as exhibited by the work of Christiaan Huygens. The second section offers a close reading of what Newton says about time in the Principia’s Scholium to the definitions. It argues that Newton allows us to conceptually distinguish between “true” and “absolute” time from the vantage point of Newton’s dynamics. The third section, in the context of a brief account of Descartes’ views on time, discusses the material that Newton added to the second edition of the Principia in the General Scholium
The Posidonian Argument
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: July 2021

*In this chapter I discuss the reception of a design argument by Cicero in the works of Holbach and Voltaire. This argument was directed against both the system of chance and the system of necessity. The chapter distinguishes three interpretations of this argument: (1) a prima facie interpretation; (2) a ‘neglected’ interpretation and (3) a ‘transcendental interpretation.’ It shows that in the early modern period Cicero’s argument was very widely discussed and its significance was not merely as a design argument; it connected scientific practice, even progress in science, to providential final causes. To show this I focus on Boyle and Locke before turning to Newton. In the final section, I return to Voltaire’s response to Holbach and show how Voltaire adapts the argument and uses Newton.
Probate and Domestic Relations Proceedings
Authors: Pfander James E.
Published: July 2021

This chapter examines the role of uncontested adjudication in probate and domestic relations proceedings. While state courts commonly issued constitutive decrees to recognize or create new legal relationships in these settings (to admit wills to probate or to confirm adoption of children), federal courts declined to hear uncontested proceedings to register or claim a right or title in these contexts. The federal courts lacked power to entertain uncontested applications for the issuance of constitutive decrees as to matters of state law. Such a finding lays the foundation for distinguishing between cases under federal law and controversies over state law, and helps explain the federal judicial reluctance to assert jurisdiction over matters of probate and domestic relations.
The Judicial Response to the Administrative State
Authors: Pfander James E.
Published: July 2021

This chapter describes the way a requirement of contestation was introduced into definitions of federal judicial power in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The case-or-controversy requirement arose as a tool with which federal courts could refrain from lending support to the investigatory and regulatory initiatives of the growing administrative state. Justice Stephen Field played a central role in the introduction of the contestation construct, and it took hold at the Supreme Court in the twentieth century, as progressive Justices came to embrace contestation as an essential limit on the judicial role in constitutional litigation.
Digital Disconnection as Othering
Authors: Musha Doerr Neriko
Published: July 2021

Digital disconnection is often considered a necessary condition for “authentic” experience of difference. However, this discourse others not only those whose lives are “authentically” experienced, but also those who thrive on digital connection. Three cases illustrate this effect. First, the discourse of immersion prevalent in study abroad encourages students to “live like the locals”—“authentically”—by forgoing cell phones and the Internet. Second, educational farms provided college students on alternative break trips with simulations of life in poverty through digital disconnection to cultivate empathy toward them. Although meant to eliminate distraction, the digital disconnection in both cases also linked the life of Cultural Others and people in poverty with digital disconnection, othering them. Third, frictions on another alternative break trip pitted mainstream “outdoorsy” students seeking digital disconnection for “authentic” nature experience against “non-outdoorsy” students who enjoyed nature while digitally connected. This chapter investigates the othering effects of the discourse of digital disconnection and suggests ways to learn about difference with digital connectivity.
Automating Digital Afterlives
Authors: Fordyce Robbie , Nansen Bjørn , Arnold Michael , Kohn Tamara , Gibbs Martin
Published: July 2021

The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.
Senses and Sensors of Sleep
Authors: Nansen Bjørn , Mannell Kate , O’Neill Christopher
Published: July 2021

This chapter analyzes sleep technology products designed to mediate and modulate patterns of sleep. Products analyzed include sleep-tracking applications and wearable devices for customizing personal phases of sleep architecture, and “smart” bedroom systems that use sensors and Internet connectivity to monitor and automate sensory environments to optimize the architectural spaces of sleep. Drawing on theories of digital disconnection, this chapter highlights how historical and theoretical notions of sleep as a site of subjective, social, and technological disconnection are reworked by contemporary media technologies. The now ubiquitous use of smartphones in bed reflects ongoing demands for digital participation and productivity. Yet such arrangements are unevenly distributed, with disconnective sleep technologies operating as a form of privilege and distinction for those who have the resources to reshape the architectures of personal sleep rhythms and spaces.
“Think on Paper, Share Online”
Authors: Yuan Yan
Published: July 2021

As a form of anti-mediatization movement, the call for “slow media” gains its popularity in many societies. How exactly are “slow media” different and disconnected from the digital media? Where is the sense of slowness and disconnection from? This chapter uses a case in the context of contemporary China to interrogate these questions: shouzhang (手账), a form of diary keeping turning back to pen and paper and performed by many Chinese millennials. Based on the investigations of both the products and users, it demonstrates that doing shouzhang in today’s China involves a media ensemble that goes far beyond the physical diary and stationery, such that digital media play a constitutional role. Even the design of the physical diary is permeated with the digital principles. As for the sense of slowness and disconnection, it does not come from any fixed materiality of paper and pen, but is produced by a series of technological and cultural operations under the logic of hypermediacy.
Retreat Culture and Therapeutic Disconnection
Authors: Hesselberth Pepita
Published: July 2021

Digital detox retreats, mindfulness retreats, yoga and health retreats, nature and wilderness retreats, the me-retreat. Within our current culture of connectivity to go on a retreat as a way to reduce stress and improve one’s quality of life by temporarily disconnecting from our everyday (media) environments has been a growing trend. While generally conceived to be beneficial to the well-being of those who partake in it, retreat culture has also been criticized (in public and scholarly discourse alike) for feeding into the neoliberal program of privatizing solutions to what are, in fact, social problems. Here, the retreat reveals itself to be part of a disciplining leisure industry that parasitizes on our need to disconnect. Expanding on this controversy, this chapter probes the retreat as an un/critical imaginary that discloses some of the cracks in our existing reality, opening up a transitional space in which change may take place.
Paradoxes of Disconnected Connection
Authors: Adams Paul C. , Behrens Vivie , Hoelscher Steven , Lavrenova Olga , Robinson Heath , Yuan Yan
Published: July 2021

Normal academic life is a series of gatherings. The COVID-19 outbreak in spring of 2020 disrupted these gatherings and constituted not just a health crisis but also a profound alteration of academic life. Social distancing and quarantine accelerated historic processes of distanciation, as an increasing number of social situations were lifted out of the places in which they would have occurred. Teaching, learning, mentoring, and collaborating continued to “take place” but these newly mediated connections included experiences of disconnection. Auto-ethnography conducted by six academics at various levels during the COVID pandemic explores questions of space, place, pedagogy, and scholarship, comparing and contrasting our varied vantage points on transformations of spatial routines, the learning process, the academic community, and our lives. We show how disconnected connection was experienced differently, by differently-situated social actors, each of whom appropriated certain media according to his or her wants and needs.
Claiming the Call to Preach
Authors: Giver-Johnston Donna
Published: July 2021

Claiming the Call to Preach traces the history of call through the nineteenth century, at a time when the question of women’s call to preach, although seemingly fixed by ecclesial authority and cultural convention, was being raised by courageous women in different settings, through different genres, and to different effect. This book recovers the neglected narrative of women’s call to preach through the historical accounts and rhetorical witness of four groundbreaking women preachers: Jarena Lee, Frances Willard, Louisa Woosley, and Florence Spearing Randolph. Scholarship has been written on women who have preached in history, but not on how they managed to claim their call to preach despite the restrictions of gender inequality. This project explores the question: how did women claim their call to preach? Through feminist hermeneutics, this book examines call narratives which used rhetorical strategies to articulate effective arguments for women’s call to the preaching ministry of the church. In response, these women received endorsement of their claims to pulpit places, engaged in sacred persuasive speech, and preached as ministers of the sacred office. This project examines women’s call to preach—the history and theology, rhetoric and practice, struggle and success, and the necessary work of interpretation and re-interpretation through call narratives. This book concludes with practical applications for contemporary homiletics, showing how historical tradition can be re-invented in order to give women—and anyone struggling with their call to preach—rhetorical tactics and narrative scripts in order to make effective claims to preach today.
The Call to Preach
Authors: Giver-Johnston Donna
Published: July 2021

Chapter 1 defines the call to preach as containing two aspects, inward and outward, and identifies a gender gap or difference in how men and women can claim their call to preach. By identifying the central problem of gender inequality, this chapter establishes the fundamental concern of this book as a significant issue of patriarchy and ecclesiastical authority. Next, the chapter reviews relevant scholarship in homiletics and history of preaching to contextualize this issue. Drawing on social theorists, obstacles are identified and defined that have formed and maintained the dominant narrative limiting women preachers and their voice and agency. Utilizing feminist hermeneutics, this chapter argues that the historical women preachers of this work and their power of resistance still hold valuable lessons for people struggling to claim their call to preach today.
Jarena Lee
Authors: Giver-Johnston Donna
Published: July 2021

Chapter 3 presents the life, spiritual awakening, and preaching ministry of Jarena Lee. Beginning with a contextual description of the early United States of America, when freedom and equality were declared for all but were actually reserved exclusively for white men, this chapter narrates a black woman preacher’s fight against racial inequality and gender discrimination. Lee’s powerful experience of divine call enabled her to face her own doubts and confront the institutional obstacles toward accepting her religious vocation. The chapter sheds light on her resolve to do the work of evangelism as an unlicensed itinerant preacher. Through an analysis of the private rhetoric of her spiritual autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, this chapter reveals the tactics that Lee used in claiming her call and using her voice to construct a narrative to persuade others of the veracity of her divine call.
Introduction
Authors: Kachuck Aaron J.
Published: July 2021

This Introduction presents a study of Latin vocabulary for solitude as background for replacing bipartite divisions of Roman life (e.g., otium and negotium, “public” and “private”) with a tripartite model comprising public, private, and solitary spheres. It outlines this model’s applicability to Greek literature and philosophy, Roman religion, and Roman law, leading to a discussion of the Roman bedroom (cubiculum) and the solitary reading and writing to which it could be home. Reviewing the history of scholarship on Roman society, religion, and literature from antiquity through the present, it demonstrates how and why solitude has been written out of the study of Roman culture, and how the problem of solitude relates to the question of the individual in ancient society. Finally, it explores the relationship of literature to Rome’s solitary sphere in the age of Virgil, addressing problems of periodization, the relationship between literary criticism, philosophy, and literary production.
Love Elegy, Propertius, and Soliloquy
Authors: Kachuck Aaron J.
Published: July 2021

This chapter argues that soliloquy as problem and opportunity was central to the aims of Latin love elegy, especially to Propertius’ Elegies. Drawing comparisons with the Lydia, Dirae, Tibullus’ elegies, Virgil’s tenth Eclogue, and Propertius’ elegiac predecessors, it studies Propertius’ corpus to demonstrate the relationship between the poet’s insanity and his solitude. It shows how seasonal indications inscribe this solitude in time and space, and how Propertius worked to rewrite love as a secret fiction. Propertius’ elegies, it argues, use solitude to shape the harmonization of elegiac subjectivity and the poets’ other political personae, culminating in the last of his elegies (4.11), which encapsulates the relegation of truth telling, love, and poetry to the solitary sphere, thus embodying new coordinations of public, the private, and the individual. In conclusion, it points to the impact of Propertius’ solitude on Renaissance literature, including the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili and Ben Jonson’s Poetaster.
Conclusion
Authors: Kachuck Aaron J.
Published: July 2021

The conclusion re-articulates the book’s model of the solitary sphere in the age of Virgil within the context of imperial politics, showing how this sphere helped shape new coordinations of cosmos, imperium, and the individual. It shows the role played in this process by newly popular genres like pantomime and the newly (or newly fashioned) subjective element of literary characterization, and demonstrates how this sphere’s new forms are embodied by two work from after the age of Virgil: Manilius’ Astronomica and one of Marcus Argentarius’ epigrams. Following comparison of their figures of the solitary singer with the companionate model of reading evinced by other works before, during, and after the age of Virgil, it shows how Tiberianus’ Amnis ibat took up the age of Virgil’s terms for the solitary sphere in order to invite the reader to think of oneself, with his poem, as an imperium of one.
Information and Power
Authors: Gandy Jr. Oscar H.
Published: July 2021

This chapter develops an understanding of the relationships between information and power, in part through an examination of the uses and activities to which the panoptic sort has been applied. Panopticism and structuration are explored in considerable detail, but with special emphasis on their social and technical characteristics of different markets and cultural spheres. Of particular importance is this chapter’s emphasis on measurement and calculation, and its focus on prediction and coordination, representing a substantial step beyond more traditional efforts at description, and occasionally explanation. It is the pursuit of efficiency and effectiveness in the rationalization of control. It is not only control of production and distribution but the management of the purchase and consumption of goods, services, and experiences that dominates concern with the development of the panoptic sort.
Relationships and Expectations
Authors: Gandy Jr. Oscar H.
Published: July 2021

This chapter is focused on the perceptions of the public about the panoptic sort and its likely influence on society. Although the focus within the scholarly community was on surveillance, the term was not in broad use within the population, and as a result, estimates of public opinion at the time were limited to a focus on privacy as an issue of public concern. A broad variety of issues and concerns were explored in previously published and specially designed surveys of the U.S. public. The approach taken to understand the views of the public was shaped by the analysis of a series of focus group interviews that are described within this chapter. In addition to seeking discussants’ understanding of the generation and use of consumer and citizen profiles, the members of these focus groups were also invited to share their views about the kinds of limits they thought needed to be established to govern the use of profiling technologies. Of particular importance were their views about the sharing of personal and transaction-generated information with third parties. Most of these focus group members were quite knowledgeable about marketing activities, and only a small minority expressed strong criticism of their use.
The Bolshevik Seizure of Power
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

The Bolsheviks were able to seize power in Russia in November 1917 because World War I decimated Russian society and created conditions for revolution. But after the resignation of Tsar Nicholas in February 1917, the liberal-parliamentary regime that followed resisted withdrawal from the war, which deepened the polarizations within society and created the conditions for the Bolshevik coup.
Respite
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

After winning the Civil War, the Bolsheviks had to decide how and when to proceed to the stage of building socialism, given that they had come to power in a peasant society. The New Economic Policy, and the policy of “peaceful coexistence” toward foreign powers, were efforts to buy time to get the economy back on its feet, to prevent another foreign intervention, and to allow the regime to consolidate its monopoly further over the political realm. This period was also marked by debates over how to make the transition to socialism after this respite, debates that took place during a power struggle over the succession to Lenin.
The Great Terror and Stalinist Despotism
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

From 1936 to 1939, the Soviet Union underwent a whirlwind of violence, geared toward creating a “patrimonial” state, under the rule of a despot. The principal targets for this violence were officials of the party and state and the critical intelligentsia. These were to be replaced by obedient recruits who would labor continuously under fear for their jobs and lives. The Great Terror was justified as a national-security imperative to root out subversives.
Was Stalin’s Revolution from Above a Rational Strategy of Modernization?
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

Strategies of modernization are legion within the social science literature. Stalin’s Revolution from Above—but not the Great Terror—is set within this literature as a revolutionary, as opposed to a reformist, strategy. Features of the revolutionary strategy may have been considered necessary to urgently create the capacity to defend the country in a hostile world. But the extent of revolutionary violence against the peasantry cannot be justified in those terms.
Stalinism and World Communism in the 1930s
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

Stalin attempted, during the 1930s, to use diplomacy to avert war while he built the industrial and military capacity of the country. This diplomacy entailed multiple shifts in doctrine, especially the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939—a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Nonruling parties within the world communist movement had to adjust to these shifts repeatedly. But they kept the faith.
Consolidating Power and “Building Socialism” in China
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

After victory in the civil war in October 1949, the Chinese communist regime followed the Soviet template, by now ideologically obvious, of dispossessing or killing the pillars of the old regime: landlords, large-scale capitalists, officials of the Nationalist government, and clergy. The new regime simultaneously started to “build socialism,” but were challenged to get the devastated economy and society back on their feet. The Communist Party of China’s early policies on this score mirrored the Soviets’ New Economic Policy of 1921–1928.
Communist Parties Come to Power in Korea and Vietnam
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

In Korea, the USSR occupied the northern half of the country after Japan withdrew its occupation forces. The Soviets installed a regime of North Korean communists who enjoyed popular support due to their sacrifices in fighting the Japanese during World War II. The leadership convinced Moscow and Beijing to sanction and support an invasion of South Korea that they hoped would reunify the country. This led to the Korean War, which merely restored the status quo ante at the expense of millions of lives. The pathway was different in Vietnam, where a guerrilla war against Japanese, then French, occupation led to the victory of the Vietnamese communist party in the North.
What Follows Stalinism in the USSR?
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

After Stalin’s death in March 1953, his successors did not have the unity or the confidence to try to continue a regime of mass terror, consumer austerity, strict monolithism within the world communist movement, and nuclear confrontation with the outside world. They stepped back from each of these, but then found that they faced contradictions as to how much criticism, and of what kind, to allow their society to engage in; how much pluralism within the world communist movement; and how much concession to make to the West to reduce tensions. A similar dilemma concerning the role and scope of societal criticism was revealed in the same time period in China, where the Hundred Flowers campaign was launched and then revoked.
“Building Communism”
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

In 1958–1959, Khrushchev launched his program for the “full-scale construction of communism.” Not coincidentally, in the same time period, China’s Mao launched his disastrous “Great Leap Forward,” Yugoslavia generalized its program of “workers’ self-management” as a blueprint for the communist world moving forward, while North Korea presented the late-Stalinist policy of monolithic, terroristic control as the only true path to communism.
Alternatives to Utopia in China, 1960–1965
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

After the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, which led to the death of some thirty million Chinese, Mao’s associates in the leadership were charged with getting the economy back on its feet. They did so employing methods that were similar to what Brezhnev would later employ in the USSR: deference to cadres, rationalization of economic planning, and tolerance of intensified social inequality.
Maoism
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

Mao Zedong and his legacy may be given credit for effective innovation in conducting guerrilla warfare and mobilizing the peasantry to win a fifteen-year battle against the Guomindang and the Japanese. Stains on his legacy are the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
The Collapse of the World Communist Movement and the Rise of Détente
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

At the peak of the Cultural Revolution, China’s army initiated confrontations and battles with Soviet troops along their contested border. Schism within the world communist movement now amounted to warfare among established communist states. Under these conditions, US-Soviet détente and the opening to China by the Nixon administration were made possible by skilled diplomacy and the fact that both the USSR and the People’s Republic of China came to view themselves each as closer to the United States in defending their national interests than they were to each other. Pragmatism prevailed over proletarian internationalism.
Market Leninism in Vietnam
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

After a decade of recovery from the decades-long Vietnam War, a reunified Vietnam began a process in the 1990s of privatizing and opening its economy on the Chinese model. It also abandoned anti-imperialist struggle in favor of pragmatic relationships with China and broader capitalist countries.
Assessing the Communist Experience: Tragedy or Achievement?
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: July 2021

Beyond matters of causal explanation, this chapter turns to an assessment of the communist experience: was it, on balance, an achievement or a tragedy? The answer depends in part on one’s values. Weighing the price paid in human life, suffering, and oppression against achievements in state-building, industrialization, military capability, public health, education, and social policies can lead an analyst in one or the other direction.
The Origin and Evolution of Revisionism
Authors: Chan Steve , Feng Huiyun , He Kai , Hu Weixing
Published: July 2021

As its title suggests, this chapter discusses the sources of revisionism and the various conditions that influence its development. It introduces historical cases such as Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union during the Cold War and contemporary Russia, imperial Japan between the 1880s and 1940s, the United States during its years of ascendance and today, and China during the Maoist years and since its reform under Deng Xiaoping. Whether a state becomes revisionist is not in its genes but is in part dependent on how it perceives its treatment in the hands of other established countries. States’ domestic and foreign circumstances interact to shape their foreign policy orientation.
Anti-Zionism and Anti-Israel Behavior and Sentiment
Authors: Fox Jonathan , Topor Lev
Published: July 2021

This chapter examines whether anti-Israel sentiment and behavior predicts discrimination against Jews. It discusses the history of anti-Zionism and demonstrates that at least in some instances it can instigate discrimination against Jews. The authors also discuss general social science theories which address whether the behavior or existence of a country can instigate discrimination against a diaspora from that country. They focus on securitization theory, which has been used to explain levels of discrimination against Muslims, as well as other prominent theories drawn from a wide variety political science and social science literatures. The authors argue that both the anti-Semitism and the general political science literatures can benefit greatly from this cross-fertilization and suggest some theoretical innovations based on this discussion. Empirically they find that both anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Israel voting by governments in the UN General Assembly predict government-based discrimination against Jews. However, these do not predict societal discrimination against Jews.
Introduction: A Different Kind of Protestant
Authors: Hart D. G.
Published: July 2021

The Introduction addresses the question that has long absorbed the biographers of Benjamin Franklin: how to regard his writing about religion as well as many of his endeavors that were friendly to religion. The question of Franklin’s spirituality is even more pressing thanks to his Puritan upbringing in Boston and his marriage to an active Anglican. This chapter lays out the debates and suggests an alternative to the interpretations that historians have offered. Roman Catholics and Jews refer to non-observant members of their groups as “cultural”—people who observe parts of the faith and live with an awareness of it but do not join the church or synagogue. Subsequent chapters attempt to do this for Franklin as a cultural Protestant.
Growing up Puritan
Authors: Hart D. G.
Published: July 2021

Chapter 1 chronicles the family background of Benjamin Franklin, whose English Protestant father, Josiah, emigrated from Northampton in England to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1683. The chapter describes Franklin’s childhood, including the Boston background of his maternal grandfather, Peter Folger, also an English emigré, and the influence of his uncle, Benjamin Franklin the elder. The chapter indicates the family’s religious affiliations, including their close associations with pastors Samuel Willard and Ebenezer Pemberton. Family friends included the parents of Charles Chauncey, whose adult convictions differed from those of Benjamin. The chapter explains how Josiah originally intended his youngest son to take up a career in the ministry, but came to understand that he lacked some of the requisite convictions. It relates how the search for alternative work in various trades led to an onerous apprenticeship in printing under his brother James. Ben learned about both the trade and himself—by his late teens, he realized that he needed other outlets for his independence of mind.
Young, Restless and Deist (Briefly)
Authors: Hart D. G.
Published: July 2021

Chapter 2 traces the intellectual genealogy of the young Benjamin Franklin during a time when he was the most free-spirited and least restrained by social conventions. At age seventeen, having learnt the printing trade, he left Boston. For almost three years, while attempting to find regular work as a printer first in Philadelphia and then London, Franklin continued to read widely and think deep thoughts about his place in the universe. This was the period when he espoused deism and wrote (and published) a short treatise on predestination and determinism (subsequently destroyed) as well as A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity. The chapter discusses the influence on Franklin of the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke, and William Wollaston. In 1726, Franklin produced Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion.
The Way of Print
Authors: Hart D. G.
Published: July 2021

Chapter 4 discusses how, in addition to printing a newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin produced books, documents, and records as part of his successful print shop. One of his most celebrated best-sellers was Poor Richard’s Almanac: one part diary for its owners, several parts trivia, and advice from the fictious Poor Richard. The chapter shows how, throughout his publications, Franklin’s understanding and sympathy for aspects of Christianity became apparent. His interest in making a profit was part of his larger effort to improve the morals of fellow colonists. Franklin’s work in an industry that was crucial to the spread of Protestantism reveals another link between his life and the world that the Reformation made.
Church Life
Authors: Hart D. G.
Published: July 2021

Chapter 7 examines how Franklin was a keen observer of religion in Philadelphia and even took sides in the disputes that were likely to develop amid the Protestant diversity of Pennsylvania. In particular, he followed closely and was vocal about the heresy trial of Samuel Hemphill, that revealed doctrinal differences among Presbyterians. This was surprising if only because of his own counsel to himself to avoid public controversy. Franklin also befriended the evangelist and Anglican priest, George Whitefield, the figure who inspired a trans-Atlantic awakening. Franklin’s involvement in colonial religious life was one more indication of the hold that Protestantism had on him.