bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Epilogue
Authors: Goodman Adam
Published: January 2021

This chapter reviews the history of the deportation machine, dating back to the late-nineteenth century when Congress gave the federal government exclusive authority over immigration. It summarizes how Democratic and Republican politicians and private third parties have contributed to the growth of the deportation machine through implementation of punitive policies and budget with an equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars into enforcement efforts that have resulted in tens of millions of expulsions. It assesses the deportation machine's mechanisms that have largely remained the same over time and have functioned in unison, though at different levels at distinct moments. The chapter looks into persistent political economic realities, racial prejudices,and cultural concerns that have been a driving force behind anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictive measures. It also describes economic crises and wars that often led to rising xenophobia and dramatic spikes in deportations.
For the Masses, by the Masses
Authors: Howes Anton
Published: January 2021

This chapter describes the economic policy that the Royal Society of Arts has operated in since its founding in 1754. It describes the mercantilist operations of the Society in which they assumed that the most important matter in an economy was the amount of gold and silver it was able to obtain from its rivals. It also recounts how the Society encouraged industries to replace foreign imports and rewarded improvements that boosted exports, emphasizing that the more exports a country sold, the more gold and silver it acquired. The chapter looks into criticisms of the system of monopolies in the eighteenth century, arguing that monopolies allowed a handful of merchants to raise prices for consumers. It explains how the Society had tried to undercut the monopolists of domestic industries when it came to London's fishmongers or country millers.
Furious Brainstorming
Authors: Howes Anton
Published: January 2021

This chapter analyzes the Royal Society of Arts' renewed openness to ideas in the mid-1970s, which was led by its secretary, Christopher Lucas. It also mentions Arthur Aikin, who pioneered the practice of giving lectures for instruction and entertainment in the early nineteenth century. It also talks about how Samuel More used his connections to recruit members among the late eighteenth century's inventors, such as John 'Iron Mad' Wilkinson or Josiah Wedgwood. The chapter focuses on the secretary's job in the Society, which involved taking minutes at general and sub-committee meetings, listing of subscribers and drafts for the advertisements of the premiums, and managing the Society's correspondence. It also examines how the secretary combines their influence over recruitment with their ability to manipulate their unparalleled knowledge of the Society's administrative and electoral processes.
Inside the Mind of a Voter
Authors: Bruter Michael , Harrison Sarah
Published: January 2021

Could understanding whether elections make people happy and bring them closure matter more than who they vote for? What if people did not vote for what they want but for what they believe is right based on roles they implicitly assume? Do elections make people cry? This book invites readers on a unique journey inside the mind of a voter using unprecedented data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Africa, and Georgia throughout a period when the world evolved from the centrist dominance of Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela to the shock victories of Brexit and Donald Trump. The book explores three interrelated aspects of the heart and mind of voters: the psychological bases of their behaviour, how they experience elections and the emotions this entails, and how and when elections bring democratic resolution. The book examines unique concepts including electoral identity, atmosphere, ergonomics, and hostility. The book unveils insights into the conscious and subconscious sides of citizens' psychology throughout a unique decade for electoral democracy. It highlights how citizens' personality, memory, and identity affect their vote and experience of elections, when elections generate hope or hopelessness, and how subtle differences in electoral arrangements interact with voters' psychology to trigger different emotions. The book radically shifts electoral science, moving away from implicitly institution-centric visions of behaviour to understand elections from the point of view of voters.
A Day in the Life of a Voter
Authors: Bruter Michael , Harrison Sarah
Published: January 2021

This chapter details the sequences of Election Day to show how the electoral atmosphere builds up, and how people live the day, the moment of their vote, and Election Night. Election Day is probably the most democratically dense day in the life of democratic individuals. It is made up of multiple sequences, some wholly unconnected with the election itself, while others constitute successive layers of voters' electoral experience. Election Day is also a tale of multiple interactions. An election is eminently societal, and likely to be at the forefront of the news and of many people's conversations, but is also often played out in more intimate spheres. Many report it to be a family affair, involving taking their children to the polling station, going to vote with family, or bumping into neighbours, or because Election Night is often shared and ritualized. Then, within this, there is the individual sphere, because democratic systems aim by design to isolate voters, on the pretext of privacy, organizing the voting experience effectively to mimic a sense of solitude. The chapter then assesses how Election Day and Night differ for on-the-day voters, people who voted earlier, and those who do not vote at all, and for those who vote for ‘winners’ or ‘losers’.
Electoral Identity and Individual–Societal Dynamics
Authors: Bruter Michael , Harrison Sarah
Published: January 2021

This chapter develops a model of electoral identity. The starting point is that virtually all electoral science is based on a silent assumption: that the vote is a direct translation of electoral preference. This corresponds to an intrinsic tenet of representative democracy, the idea that elections are intended to aggregate citizens' preferences, which representative institutions will thereby reflect. There is, however, nothing to suggest that those original intentions are necessarily confirmed by how citizens behave in elections. The chapter therefore asks a question which has the potential to invalidate the single most important premise of electoral research: what if citizens do not go to the polling booth to register a raw preference, but instead inhabit a certain role when they go to vote? It hypothesizes that the vote is not a straightforward measure of spontaneous preference, but that instead, citizens' behaviour is shaped by how they perceive the function of elections, and in turn their role as voters. Using the analogy of sports events, whereby parties and candidates represent the competing teams, the chapter identifies two key alternative perceptions of the role of voters: ‘referees’ and ‘supporters’.
Coda: Flipping the Electoral World Upside-Down
Authors: Bruter Michael , Harrison Sarah
Published: January 2021

This chapter summarizes the lessons learned about Homo Suffragator and the psychology of voters. Do personality, memory, and identity shape citizens' electoral experience and behaviour, and elections' capacity to bring democratic resolution; and what are the main determinants of each model? Has the book's attempt to turn electoral science upside-down by switching the dependent variable been successful? It may be of greater consequence to know whether elections make people happy, and whether they offer a continuous peaceful resolution to divergent preferences and beliefs, than to know whom people and nations vote for. Beyond summarizing the results of the static models explored so far, the chapter also reintegrates the original dynamic expectations into the model, and assesses the reciprocal causality between the three interrelated dependent variable sets—behaviour, experience, and resolution—using the panel study design in the US case.
What Are Jews For?
Authors: Sutcliffe Adam
Published: January 2021

What is the purpose of Jews in the world? The Bible singles out the Jews as God's “chosen people,” but the significance of this special status has been understood in many different ways over the centuries. This book traces the history of the idea of Jewish purpose from its ancient and medieval foundations to the modern era, showing how it has been central to Western thinking on the meanings of peoplehood for everybody. The book delves into the links between Jewish and Christian messianism and the association of Jews with universalist and transformative ideals in modern philosophy, politics, literature, and social thought. The Jews have been accorded a crucial role in both Jewish and Christian conceptions of the end of history, when they will usher the world into a new epoch of unity and harmony. Since the seventeenth century, this messianic underlay to the idea of Jewish purpose has been repeatedly reconfigured in new forms. From the political theology of the early modern era to almost all domains of modern thought—religious, social, economic, nationalist, radical, assimilationist, satirical, and psychoanalytical—Jews have retained a close association with positive transformation for all. The book reveals the persistent importance of the “Jewish Purpose Question” in the attempts of Jews and non-Jews alike to connect the collective purpose of particular communities to the broader betterment of humanity. Shedding light on questions of exceptionalism, pluralism, and universalism, the book explores an intricate question that remains widely resonant in contemporary culture and political debate.
Reason, Toleration, Emancipation
Authors: Sutcliffe Adam
Published: January 2021

This chapter centers on the eighteenth century as the period in which the primary purpose of Jews was to sharpen the elaboration of key philosophical concepts. It explores the work of Pierre Bayle, whose Historical and Critical Dictionary in the 1700s baffled eighteenth-century readers over its elusive positioning of Judaism as the marker of the limits of rational philosophy. It also reviews the vexed preoccupation of Voltaire with Jews that stemmed from his structurally similar but temperamentally different positioning of them as fundamentally antithetical to enlightenment reason. The chapter also explains the paradigm of exceptionalism that framed the work and reception of Jewish thinkers in the period, including Moses Mendelssohn. It describes the penetrating mind and noble character of Mendelssohn that became the model for the dramatic hero of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's masterpiece Nathan the Wise, in which Jewish purpose was cast as the exemplification of rational universalism.
Introductory Lectures on Equivariant Cohomology
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

Equivariant cohomology is concerned with the algebraic topology of spaces with a group action, or in other words, with symmetries of spaces. First defined in the 1950s, it has been introduced into K-theory and algebraic geometry, but it is in algebraic topology that the concepts are the most transparent and the proofs are the simplest. One of the most useful applications of equivariant cohomology is the equivariant localization theorem of Atiyah–Bott and Berline–Vergne, which converts the integral of an equivariant differential form into a finite sum over the fixed point set of the group action, providing a powerful tool for computing integrals over a manifold. Because integrals and symmetries are ubiquitous, equivariant cohomology has found applications in diverse areas of mathematics and physics. Assuming readers have taken one semester of manifold theory and a year of algebraic topology, the book begins with the topological construction of equivariant cohomology, then develops the theory for smooth manifolds with the aid of differential forms. To keep the exposition simple, the equivariant localization theorem is proven only for a circle action. An appendix gives a proof of the equivariant de Rham theorem, demonstrating that equivariant cohomology can be computed using equivariant differential forms. Examples and calculations illustrate new concepts. Exercises include hints or solutions, making this book suitable for self-study.
Homotopy Groups and CW Complexes
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses some results about homotopy groups and CW complexes. Throughout this book, one needs to assume a certain amount of algebraic topology. A CW complex is a topological space built up from a discrete set of points by successively attaching cells one dimension at a time. The name CW complex refers to the two properties satisfied by a CW complex: closure-finiteness and weak topology. With continuous maps as morphisms, the CW complexes form a category. It turns out that this is the most appropriate category in which to do homotopy theory. The chapter also looks at fiber bundles.
Principal Bundles
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines principal bundles. Throughout the chapter, G will be a topological group. It then defines a principal G-bundle and provides a criterion for a map to be a principal G-bundle. This is followed by several examples of principal G-bundles. A principal G-bundle is a special kind of fiber bundle with fiber G such that the group G acts freely on the right on the total space of the bundle. Equivariant cohomology is defined in terms of a special principal G-bundle whose total space is weakly contractible. Such a bundle turns out to be what can be called a universal principal G-bundle.
Universal Bundles and Classifying Spaces
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter evaluates universal bundles and classifying spaces. As before, G is a topological group. In defining the equivariant cohomology of a G-space M, one needs a weakly contractible space EG on which G acts freely. Such a space is provided by the total space of a universal G-bundle, a bundle from which every principal G-bundle can be pulled back. The base BG of a universal G-bundle is called a classifying space for G. By Whitehead's theorem, for CW-complexes, weakly contractible is the same as contractible. In the category of CW complexes (with continuous maps as morphisms), a principal G-bundle whose total space is contractible turns out to be precisely a universal G-bundle.
A Universal Bundle for a Compact Lie Group
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter looks at a universal bundle for a compact Lie group. By Milnor's construction, every topological group has a universal bundle. Independently of Milnor's result, the chapter constructs a universal bundle for any compact Lie group G. This construction is based on the fact that every compact Lie group can be embedded as a subgroup of some orthogonal group O(k). The chapter first constructs a universal O(k)-bundle by finding a weakly contractible space on which O(k) acts freely. The infinite Stiefel variety V (k, ∞) is such a space. As a subgroup of O(k), the compact Lie group G will also act freely on V (k, ∞), thereby producing a universal G-bundle.
Basic Forms
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter describes basic forms. On a principal bundle π‎: P → M, the differential forms on P that are pullbacks of forms ω‎ on the base M are called basic forms. The chapter characterizes basic forms in terms of the Lie derivative and interior multiplication. It shows that basic forms on a principal bundle are invariant and horizontal. To understand basic forms better, the chapter considers a simple example. The plane ℝ2 may be viewed as the total space of a principal ℝ-bundle. A connected Lie group is generated by any neighborhood of the identity. This example shows the necessity of the connectedness hypothesis.
Vector-Valued Forms
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter studies vector-valued forms. Ordinary differential forms have values in the field of real numbers. This chapter allows differential forms to take values in a vector space. When the vector space has a multiplication, for example, if it is a Lie algebra or a matrix group, the vector-valued forms will have a corresponding product. Vector-valued forms have become indispensable in differential geometry, since connections and curvature on a principal bundle are vector-valued forms. All the vector spaces will be real vector spaces. A k-covector on a vector space T is an alternating k-linear function. If V is another vector space, a V-valued k-covector on T is an alternating k-linear function.
The Maurer–Cartan Form
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter illustrates the Maurer-Cartan form. On every Lie group G with Lie algebra g, there is a unique canonically defined left-invariant g-valued 1-form called the Maurer-Cartan form. The chapter describes the Maurer-Cartan form and the equation it satisfies, the Maurer-Cartan equation. The Maurer-Cartan form allows one to define a connection on the product bundle M × G → M for any manifold M. The Lie algebra g of a Lie group G is defined to be the tangent space at the identity. One will often identify the two vector spaces and think of elements of g as left-invariant vector fields on G.
Connections on a Principal Bundle
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses connections on a principal bundle. Throughout the chapter, G will be a Lie group with Lie algebra g. One possible definition of a connection on a principal G-bundle P is a C∞ right-invariant horizontal distribution on P. Equivalently, a connection on P can be given by a right-equivariant g-valued 1-form on P that is the identity on vertical vectors. The chapter shows the equivalence of these two definitions of a connection. A connection is one of the most basic notions of differential geometry. It is essentially a way of differentiating sections. From a connection, the notions of curvature and geodesics follow.
Differential Graded Algebras
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter investigates differential graded algebras. Throughout the chapter, G will be a Lie group with Lie algebra g. On a manifold M, the de Rham complex is a differential graded algebra, a graded algebra that is also a differential complex. If the Lie group G acts smoothly on M, then the de Rham complex Ω‎(M) is more than a differential graded algebra. It has in addition two actions of the Lie algebra: interior multiplication and the Lie derivative. A differential graded algebra Ω‎ with an interior multiplication and a Lie derivative satisfying Cartan's homotopy formula is called a g-differential graded algebra. To construct an algebraic model for equivariant cohomology, the chapter first constructs an algebraic model for the total space EG of the universal G-bundle. It is a g-differential graded algebra called the Weil algebra.
Free and Locally Free Actions
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter addresses free and locally free actions. It uses the Cartan model to compute the equivariant cohomology of a circle action, so equivariant cohomology is taken with real coefficients. An action is said to be free if the stabilizer of every point consists only of the identity element. It turns out that the equivariant cohomology of a free circle action is always u-torsion. More generally, an action of a topological group G on a topological space X is locally free if the stabilizer Stab(x) of every point is discrete. The chapter then proves that the equivariant cohomology of a locally free circle action on a manifold is also u-torsion.
Borel Localization for a Circle Action
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores Borel localization for a circle action. For a circle action, the Borel localization theorem says that up to torsion, the equivariant cohomology of an S1-manifold is concentrated on its fixed point set and that the isomorphism in localized equivariant cohomology of the manifold and its fixed point set is a ring isomorphism. This is clearly an important result in its own right. Moreover, since the fixed point set is a regular submanifold and is usually simpler than the manifold, the Borel localization theorem sometimes allows one to obtain the ring structure of the equivariant cohomology of an S1-manifold from that of its fixed point set. The chapter demonstrates this method with the example of S1 acting on S2 by rotations.
Integration of Equivariant Forms
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter illustrates integration of equivariant forms. An equivariant differential form is an element of the Cartan model. For a circle action on a manifold M, it is a polynomial in u with coefficients that are invariant forms on M. Such a form can be integrated by integrating the coefficients. This can be called equivariant integration. The chapter shows that under equivariant integration, Stokes's theorem still holds. Everything done so far in this book concerning a Lie group action on a manifold can be generalized to a manifold with boundary. An important fact concerning manifolds with boundary is that a diffeomorphism of a manifold with boundary takes interior points to interior points and boundary points to boundary points.
Localization Formulas
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter highlights localization formulas. The equivariant localization formula for a torus action expresses the integral of an equivariantly closed form as a finite sum over the fixed point set. It was discovered independently by Atiyah and Bott on the one hand, and Berline and Vergne on the other, around 1982. The chapter describes the equivariant localization formula for a circle action and works out an application to the surface area of a sphere. It also explores some equivariant characteristic classes of a vector bundle. These include the equivariant Euler class, the equivariant Pontrjagin classes, and the equivariant Chern classes.
Proof of the Localization Formula for a Circle Action
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter provides a proof of the localization formula for a circle action. It evaluates the integral of an equivariantly closed form for a circle action by blowing up the fixed points. On the spherical blow-up, the induced action has no fixed points and is therefore locally free. The spherical blow-up is a manifold with a union of disjoint spheres as its boundary. For a locally free action, one can express an equivariantly closed form as an exact form. Since the localized equivariant cohomology of a locally free action is zero, after localization an equivariantly closed form must be equivariantly exact. Stokes's theorem then reduces the integral to a computation over spheres.
Some Applications
Authors: Tu Loring W.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores some applications of equivariant cohomology. Since its introduction in the Fifties, equivariant cohomology has found applications in topology, symplectic geometry, K-theory, and physics, among other fields. Its greatest utility may be in converting an integral on a manifold to a finite sum. Since many problems in mathematics can be expressed in terms of integrals, the equivariant localization formula provides a powerful computational tool. The chapter then discusses a few of the applications of the equivariant localization formula. In order to use the equivariant localization formula to compute the integral of an invariant form, the form must have an equivariantly closed extension.
The Rise of Challenger Parties
Authors: De Vries Catherine E. , Hobolt Sara B.
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses the rise of challenger parties. Challenger parties are those parties that have not yet held the reins of power: the parties without government experience. There are three main ways of distinguishing between challengers and mainstream parties in the existing literature. One focuses on the historical origins of the parties, another focuses on the specific issues they mobilize, and the third focuses specifically on populism as a distinguishing feature. The chapter then presents three examples of “waves” of challenger parties over the past century (social democratic parties, green parties, and populist radical right parties) and explores the commonalities in the strategies these parties have pursued, despite their very different ideological outlooks. It also considers the evolution of party competition in postwar Western Europe, demonstrating both the remarkable degree of stability the established party families enjoyed for much of the postwar period and then the increasing fragmentation resulting from the strengthening of challengers on both the right and the left.
Issue Entrepreneurship
Authors: De Vries Catherine E. , Hobolt Sara B.
Published: January 2021

This chapter evaluates issue entrepreneurship, an innovation strategy through which political parties mobilize a new or previously ignored issue. Political parties will engage in issue entrepreneurship when the electoral gains of doing so outweigh the costs. Challenger parties are more likely to act as issue entrepreneurs than dominant parties because the potential costs relating to possible bad reactions of the voter base or coalition partners are likely to be lower for the former. At the same time, the potential electoral gains are more uncertain for dominant parties than for challenger parties. Parties that wish to politically innovate by mobilizing new or previously ignored policy issues are likely to choose issues with a high degree of appropriability—that is to say, issues that are not easily subsumed in the dominant left-right dimension. These issues may drive a wedge in the constituencies of dominant parties and lead to internal rifts.
Bretton Woods and the Keynesian State
Authors: Green Jeremy
Published: January 2021

This chapter challenges the traditional international political economy (IPE) interpretation of Bretton Woods, which views it as the marker for a new era of US hegemony. Stressing the “uneven interdependence” characteristic of the postwar Anglo-American relationship, it reveals the continuing mutual dependencies between the two states and their expression within the formation of Bretton Woods. The UK's role in the creation and dynamics of Bretton Woods went far beyond the ideas of John Maynard Keynes. The continued importance of both sterling as a major international currency and of the financial infrastructure contained within the City of London, allied to the international limits of private US finance, ensured that the development of UK capitalism continued to be fundamental to postwar international finance. Tracing the struggle between economic orthodoxy and emergent Keynesian ideas within the national political economies of the UK and the US, the chapter shows that the continuing relevance of pre-Keynesian economic orthodoxy—represented most influentially by transatlantic bankers—laid the basis for the subsequent undermining of Bretton Woods and the relaunching of financial globalization from the 1950s.
Conclusion
Authors: Green Jeremy
Published: January 2021

This concluding chapter looks at the history and politics of capitalist development within Anglo-America. Viewed through a wide historical lens, a clear picture emerges: it is the postwar Keynesian transformation of Anglo-American capitalism that is the historical anomaly in need of explanation as an exceptional development, not the rise of a neoliberal order from the 1970s. Staggering levels of inequality and the limited capacity of democracy to rein in the forces of the market have been the normal condition of modern liberal capitalism. It took two violent cataclysms of total war and the existence of a Soviet alternative to shock the system into a more equitable and democratized reconfiguration—one that placed markets (albeit incompletely) in the service of communitarian ends. That this reconfiguration was already under threat from resurgent forces of political-economic orthodoxy by the early years of the Bretton Woods order speaks to another important lesson. The postwar embedding of liberalism within the national form of the social democratic state and the international regime of Bretton Woods did not go far enough; too much power was left to private finance in London and New York.
Russian Childhoods, 1900–05
Authors: Jefferson Ann
Published: January 2021

This chapter talks about Natalia Ilyinichna Tcherniak's birth to Ilya Evseevich Tcherniak and his wife Polina Osipovna on 5 July 1900 in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. It mentions the house on Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa in 1900 that had been converted from a pair of disused textile-printing workshops and rented out as living accommodation. It also describes the first two years of Natalie's life in Mikhailovskaya where she and her family occupied the first floor. The chapter delves into the documentary evidence of Natalie's birth that proved insubstantial. It points out that the file in the Ivanovo Regional State Archive recording births and deaths at the turn of the century contains no trace of Natalia Ilyinichna Tcherniak.
Schooldays, 1912–18
Authors: Jefferson Ann
Published: January 2021

This chapter recounts the end of Natalia Ilyinichna Tcherniak's childhood in 1912 when, at the start of the autumn term, she takes the tram to her new school, the Lycée Fénelon. It explains that Lycée Fénelon is the first lycée that provides state secondary education for girls in Paris, which was founded three decades following the Loi Camille-Sée of December 1880. It also points out Nathalia's consciousness of the differences between the education she was receiving and the experience on offer at the boys' lycées. The chapter mentions M. Georgin and M. Béthou, who supported Nathalia while she was preparing the baccalauréat in Latin and languages. It also discloses Nathalia's studies in philosophy, which she found unfavourable compared with her lessons in Latin and French.
Pierre Janet’s Patient, 1922
Authors: Jefferson Ann
Published: January 2021

This chapter discloses Natalia Ilyinichna Tcherniak's return to Paris after almost two years of living in Berlin, Germany. It emphasizes how Natalia was in a state of some distress as the emotional disarray she experienced in Berlin worsened on home territory. It also delves into Natalia's experience as a patient of France's top clinical psychologist, Pierre Janet. The chapter reviews the underlying principle of Janet's practice as a clinical psychologist, which emphasizes that the minds of patients are quite unlike the minds of their doctors. It talks about Natalia's refusal to the distinction between the normal and the abnormal mind, which she ended up writing about with the very angst that initially led her to Janet's consulting room.
The First Tropism, 1932–34
Authors: Jefferson Ann
Published: January 2021

The chapter details the frame of mind that possessed Nathalie Sarraute to compose the first of the short texts that eventually became “tropisms” after a holiday in England. It discloses Nathalie's Russian émigré contemporaries that were still drawing on a Russian identity and frequently describing Russian and Russian-émigré worlds, while she was embarking on tropisms. It also notes how Nathalie's Russianness insured her against any unwanted association with French literary groupings, while her rootedness in the French language served to mark her off from her Russian-born contemporaries. The chapter explores tropisms, which was written very slowly with numerous revisions over the course of the next six years and assured a remarkable achievement for a first publication. It explains that tropisms focuses on a momentary impression experienced by an anonymous character in the context of family or domestic circumstance.
“The Heroine of Post-Stalin Russia,” 1960–67
Authors: Jefferson Ann
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses the new dimension that was added to Nathalie Sarraute's life when she renewed contact with Russia after the political climate in the Soviet Union has eased. It details her visit to Russia as a tourist to visit friends and reconnect links with surviving relatives whom she had not seen for twenty years. It also mentions that Nathalie's brief stay in Russia left her with two very different visions of her native country. The first was of a Soviet Russia bearing few signs of any relaxation despite Joseph Stallin's death, while the other vision was of a traditional and timeless Russia, which was vividly captured in a scene that she described to Claude Mauriac. The chapter concludes with a description of the Russian dimension of Nathalie's life that was once again a world of exiles and émigrés after her last visit to the Soviet Union in 1967.
Radio Plays, 1962–72
Authors: Jefferson Ann
Published: January 2021

This chapter narrates Nathalie Sarraute's contact with Germany in 1962 that led to a new departure as she embarked on writing plays for radio. It details Nathalie's acquisition of German readership due to Elmar Tophoven's translations. It also mentions Nathalie's friendships with the German-speaking Swiss critics Gerda Zeltner and François Bondy that contributed to the softening of her attitude and made it possible for her to conceive a Germany other than the one she had known during the Occupation.
The Writing Life, 1964–68
Authors: Jefferson Ann
Published: January 2021

This chapter describes Nathalie Sarraute's day-to-day life that was arranged around the basic existential necessity that “writing was always difficult, but not writing was worse.” It reveals how Nathalie kept a disciplined routine of writing every morning for two or three hours in a café five minutes' walk away from home and kept domestic preoccupations and family responsibilities to a minimum. It also discloses how Natalie voiced every word in a low murmuring that went unnoticed in the surrounding hubbub and wrote slowly, which resulted to repeated corrections. The chapter emphasizes how Nathalie's books would take written shape only after pages and pages of fairly formless attempts and the beginning of the story in place for the rest to follow. It details Nathalie's writing process that would take about two years, after which she would revise exhaustively, before giving her manuscript to her husband to be typed.
Israel, 1969
Authors: Jefferson Ann
Published: January 2021

This chapter recounts how Nathalie Sarraute cancelled a government-sponsored lecture tour to Israel as she disapproved the French government's policy. It explains that the policy prevented Nathalie from going to Israel under the aegis of diplomatic services. It also points out that the French's condemnation of Israel was due to an attack on Lebanon by the Israel Defense Forces in December 1968, which prompted French president Charles de Gaulle to announce a blanket embargo on arms sales to Israel. The chapter implies how Nathalie continued to feel strongly about the issue in Israel, which was evident in Monique Wittig's letter to her two years later following a discussion about the Palestinian question. It also looks into Nathalie's eventual assumptions of her parents' generation and considered that there was simply no way of talking about Jewishness without raising the resurgent spectre of anti-Semitism.
The Closet
Authors: Bobker Danielle
Published: January 2021

Long before it was a hidden storage space or a metaphor for queer and trans shame, the closet was one of the most charged settings in English architecture. This private room provided seclusion for reading, writing, praying, dressing, and collecting—and for talking in select company. In their closets, kings and duchesses shared secrets with favorites, midwives and apothecaries dispensed remedies, and newly wealthy men and women expanded their social networks. This book presents a literary and cultural history of these sites of extrafamilial intimacy, revealing how, as they proliferated both in buildings and in books, closets also became powerful symbols of the unstable virtual intimacy of the first mass-medium of print. Focused on the connections between status-conscious—and often awkward—interpersonal dynamics and an increasingly inclusive social and media landscape, the book examines dozens of historical and fictional encounters taking place in the various iterations of this room: courtly closets, bathing closets, prayer closets, privies, and the “moving closet” of the coach, among many others. In the process, it conjures the intimate lives of well-known figures such as Samuel Pepys and Laurence Sterne, as well as less familiar ones such as Miss Hobart, a maid of honor at the Restoration court, and Lady Anne Acheson, Swift's patroness. Turning finally to queer theory, the book discovers uncanny echoes of the eighteenth-century language of the closet in twenty-first-century coming-out narratives. The book offers a richly detailed and compelling account of an eighteenth-century setting and symbol of intimacy that continues to resonate today.
What Happens When We Practice Religion?
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: January 2021

Religion is commonly viewed as something that people practice, whether in the presence of others or alone. But what do we mean exactly by “practice”? What approaches help to answer this question? This book delves into the central concepts, arguments, and tools used to understand religion today. Throughout the past few decades, the study of religion has shifted away from essentialist arguments that grandly purport to explain what religion is and why it exists. Instead, using methods from anthropology, psychology, religious studies, and sociology, scholars now focus on what people do and say: their daily religious habits, routines, improvisations, and adaptations. The book shows how four intersecting areas of inquiry—situations, intentions, feelings, and bodies—shed important light on religious practice, and it explores such topics as the role of religious experiences in sacred spaces, gendered social relationships, educational settings, the arts, meditation, and ritual. The book provides insights into the diverse ways that religion manifests in ordinary life.
Introduction
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores what it means when people say that they practice religion. It focuses on what people do and say rather than only on what they think and believe. It explains how practices are the interconnected strings of activity that constitute personal lives and social relationships that shape the contours of people's collective existence. All practices are an interplay of habit and improvisation, of choice and constraint. The chapter also talks about the practice in the study of religion, which is an emerging and yet insufficiently elaborated development. It directs attention to how religion is enacted within the everyday settings of people's personal lives and in the public discourse and power arrangements that govern their lives together. It boldly challenges the notion that religion can be understood in terms of predefined categories of affiliation and belief or that religion is too subjective, too idiosyncratic to be a focus of academic inquiry at all.
Intentions
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses intentions and confirms the difficulty of its effective study due to it being subjective. As an example, the chapter explains that a person who intends to pray but does not is hard to think about because the intention may be known only to the person. It also points out how religions frequently emphasize intentions, stating, for instance, that what a person intends by helping the poor may be as important as helping itself. The chapter also mentions advances in the philosophical and linguistic study of intentions that offer useful insights. It highlights practice approaches on what people do and say instead of what they think and believe, which represents a significant bias toward neglecting intention and minimizing its importance.
The Joshua Generation
Authors: Havrelock Rachel
Published: January 2021

No biblical text has been more central to the politics of modern Israel than the Book of Joshua. Named after a military leader who became the successor to Moses, it depicts the march of the ancient Israelites into Canaan, describing how they subjugated and massacred the indigenous peoples. This book examines the book's centrality to the Israeli occupation today, revealing why nationalist longing and social reality are tragically out of sync in the Promised Land. Though the Book of Joshua was largely ignored and reviled by diaspora Jews, the leaders of modern Israel have invoked it to promote national cohesion. Critics of occupation, meanwhile, have denounced it as a book that celebrates genocide. This book looks at the composition of Joshua, showing how it reflected the fractious nature of ancient Israelite society and a desire to unify the populace under a strong monarchy. The book describes how David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, convened a study group at his home in the late 1950s, where generals, politicians, and professors reformulated the story of Israel's founding in the language of Joshua. The book traces how Ben-Gurion used a brutal tale of conquest to unite an immigrant population of Jews of different ethnicities and backgrounds, casting modern Israelis and Palestinians as latter-day Israelites and Canaanites. Providing an alternative reading of Joshua, the book finds evidence of a decentralized society composed of tribes, clans, and woman-run households, one with relevance to today when diverse peoples share the dwindling resources of a scarred land.
The Joshua Study Group at the Home of David Ben-Gurion
Authors: Havrelock Rachel
Published: January 2021

This chapter talks about “The Joshua Study Group at the Home of David Ben-Gurion,” which invited leading minds in Israel into Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's home to ponder together the Book of Joshua in 1958. As it analyzes the interpretations and discussions of the Joshua Study Group, the chapter also highlights the degree to which the participants reflected on the 1948 war through passages in Joshua. It explains how the group explicitly made a connection that is already evident in the name of Operation Bin-Nun, the 1948 battle at Latrun that intended to open the road to a besieged Jerusalem, after the biblical Joshua Bin-Nun. It also describes Ben Gurion, who declared that no one had better interpreted Joshua than the Israeli Defense Forces in 1948 and saw the enactment of biblical archetypes as the most fitting form of biblical commentary. The chapter also points out how the official Israeli interpretation of Joshua sought to unify the disparate Jewish immigrant communities through a war story.
Reading against Time
Authors: Nicholson Catherine
Published: January 2021

This chapter addresses the concept of “reading against time”: reading that invokes a pressing sense of necessity in order to license a departure from established readerly norms and values. Book 5 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene has long frustrated those who look to Spenser's poetry for wit, subtlety, and profound spiritual insight, and who expect to work hard and slowly for such rewards. Inspired in part by sympathy for the character of Cymoent, who reminds one that taking one's time with a text is not only a readerly achievement but a readerly luxury, the chapter makes a case for the unpoetic reader, for whom the demands and the insights of the moment supersede the values of patience and diligence on which poetic reading depends. The degree to which such readers have succeeded in extracting value from a part of Spenser's poem that has left more conscientious readers cold suggests that there is something to be said for urgency, haste, brute force, crude approximation, and willful anachronism: for all of the straitening and reductive tendencies of reading in a state of emergency. To put it another way, it is worth considering the etymological link between criticism and crisis.
Introduction: The Decline of the Enlightenment
Authors: Shklar Judith N.
Published: January 2021

This chapter focuses on the disappearance of political philosophy in recent years and the prevalence of theories that arose in opposition to the Enlightenment. It talks about Romanticism as the earliest and most successful antagonist of the Enlightenment, which has numerous successors in existentialism and in the various philosophies of the absurd. It also analyzes the revival of social thought, gradual decay of the radical aspirations of liberalism, and evaporation of socialist thought that have left the Enlightenment without intellectual heirs. The chapter describes Enlightenment as the historical and intellectual starting point of contemporary social theory. It emphasizes how the Enlightenment is still the intellectual focus for many who no longer share its beliefs, and who develop their own viewpoint in refuting the attitudes of a past era.
Christian Fatalism
Authors: Shklar Judith N.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explains the condition of the absence of all faith that creates the unhappy consciousness and assumes that Christianity could assuage its restless longing. It discusses the loss of all social allegiance as the real source of romantic feeling today and confirms that Christians also feel estrangement from modern history. It also emphasizes how the new secular doctrine could present itself as an alternative since the origin of romantic alienation is now social and not solely religious in character. The chapter addresses why romantics can no longer endure their predicament that tend to seek self-immolation in totalitarian movements. It describes Catholicism as a familiar haven for tired romantics in the 19th century.
Conclusion
Authors: Shklar Judith N.
Published: January 2021

This chapter reviews why the disgust with omnipresent political activity is the greatest incentive to Romanticism. It highlights how politics induced an estrangement from the entire social world and with it a mixture of hatred and anxiety about the future of European culture as a whole. It also explains the reasons why the romantic suffers from political claustrophobia while the social theologian allowed political and cultural involvement to encompass its faith. The chapter analyzes how the new justification of some form of politics as culturally valuable and intellectually necessary answers the quasi-politics of despair. It also talks about skepticism as an attitude of expectation that leads to the unhappy consciousness.
The Movement
Authors: Neier Aryeh
Published: January 2021

This chapter begins with an account of Natalya Estemirova, a Russian human rights organization Memorialand former history teacher who was abducted and murdered in Chechnya in 2009. It focuses on the international human rights movement that is made up of men and women who gather information on rights abuses, lawyers and others who advocate for the protection of rights, and medical personnel who specialize in the treatment and care of victims. It also points out how human rights was recognized in international agreements such as the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights since the end of World War II. The chapter highlights the widespread agreement on the international human rights movement that include a prohibition on the arbitrary or invidious deprivation of life or liberty. It also recounts the emergence of the international human rights movement as a force in world affairs in the late 1970s.