bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Arithmetical Comprehension
Authors: Stillwell John
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on arithmetical comprehension. Arithmetical comprehension is the most obvious set existence axiom to use when developing analysis in a system based on Peano arithmetic (PA) with set variables. This axiom asserts the existence of a set X of natural numbers for each property φ‎ definable in the language of PA. More precisely, if φ‎(n) is a property defined in the language of PA plus set variables, but with no set quantifiers, then there is a set X whose members are the natural numbers n such that φ‎(n). Since all such formulas φ‎ are asserted for, the arithmetical comprehension axiom is really an axiom schema. The reason set variables are allowed in φ‎ is to enable sets to be defined in terms of “given” sets. The reason set quantifiers are disallowed in φ‎ is to avoid definitions in which a set is defined in terms of all sets of natural numbers (and hence in terms of itself). The system consisting of PA plus arithmetical comprehension is called ACA0. This system lies at a remarkable “sweet spot” among axiom systems for analysis.
Recursive Comprehension
Authors: Stillwell John
Published: May 2020

This chapter proves the equivalences between the weak König lemma and the Heine–Borel, extreme value, and uniform continuity theorems. It also discusses the equivalence of the weak König lemma with two famous theorems of topology: the Brouwer fixed point and the Jordan curve theorems. This latter collection of theorems, lying strictly between RCA0 and ACA0, establishes the importance of the system WKL0 whose set existence axiom is the weak König lemma. Between them, RCA0, WKL0, and ACA0 cover the basic theorems of analysis, and they sort them into three different levels of strength. Here, RCA0 can be viewed as an axiom system for “computable analysis.” Its set existence axiom, called recursive comprehension, states the existence of computable sets.
A Bigger Picture
Authors: Stillwell John
Published: May 2020

This chapter aims to pick up some of the ideas dropped from this book and set them in a bigger picture of logic and computability theory. It begins with a sketch of constructive mathematics. Originally developed by a minority of mathematicians opposed to using actual infinities, constructive mathematics contributed some useful techniques for computable mathematics in systems such as RCA0. This is followed by discussions on the completeness of logic and the incompleteness of Peano arithmetic (PA) and related systems. These results reveal mathematics as an arena where theorems cannot always be proved outright, but in which all of their logical equivalents can be found. This creates the possibility of reverse mathematics, where one seeks equivalents that are suitable as axioms. Next, the chapter explains how computability theory helps to distinguish the equivalence classes of theorems, and finally makes a few speculative remarks on the ordering of the equivalence classes, and how this throws light on the concept of mathematical depth.
Introduction
Authors: McAdams A. James
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter briefly examines the conception and demise of the communist party. It provides reasons for the communist party's striking record of resilience and its members' commitment to maintaining its leading role. The chapter also argues that single-party rule was, from the beginning, a compelling political idea. Even before it took organizational form, single-party rule garnered the loyalty of hopeful revolutionaries because it seemed to provide the solution to a multitude of different challenges—national liberation, economic modernization, cultural transformation—that went beyond the conventional Marxist focus on the class struggle over control of the means of production. Once in power, these parties evolved into viable organizations that, for the most part, proved up to the task of satisfying their members' political and personal desires.
A Revolutionary Party Emerges
Authors: McAdams A. James
Published: May 2020

This chapter traces the beginnings of a communist party under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and how that party came to be defined. When Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders spoke of their party in the early 1900s, they still viewed it primarily in revolutionary terms and only secondarily appreciated the benefits of greater organization. As revolutionaries, they viewed their mission in terms of working together to ensure that the proletariat followed through on its historically appointed task. Thus, there was considerably more room for debate among them about the party's purposes than is commonly assumed. The organizational structures would eventually come. But this would be a slow process, reflecting an abiding tension between the idea of the party's function in the Revolution and the organs that were required for effective governance thereafter.
Creating the Leninist Party
Authors: McAdams A. James
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the challenges of creating a ruling party as well as the powerful personalities who were involved in making it. For much of the 1920s, a group of so-called Right Bolsheviks led by Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin, and largely supported by Lenin before his death, had the upper hand in this endeavor. They pressed for a party with the capacity to lead Soviet Russia out of the turmoil of war and international strife. Another group, composed of left-wing Bolsheviks including Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev, favored a militant party that was attentive to the social and economic roots of the revolution and determined to drive the country toward the eventual realization of socialism. By the late 1920s, the Left opposition was soundly defeated. But this was a pyrrhic victory for the advocates of sobriety, especially Bukharin. Once one set of rivals was eliminated, a suddenly uncompromising Stalin turned on his former allies and transformed the party into a rigid organization that was expected to carry out an orchestrated revolution from above.
A Different Type of Party
Authors: McAdams A. James
Published: May 2020

This chapter reveals that, although Mao Zedong would present the communist victory in 1949 as the inevitable result of the class struggle and the death battle with imperialism, his success in establishing his perspective as the predominant conception of political action was not the result of a logical progression from one stage of history to the next. Like Russia's revolutionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he benefited from the misperceptions and missteps of others, friends and foes alike. In fact, had certain events not occurred, it is conceivable that the ideas embedded within the Hunan Report would never have taken concrete form. To understand both the evolution of Mao's thinking and his circuitous path to power, the chapter turns to the circumstances more than a century before his travels to Hunan. These circumstances convinced legions of Chinese radicals like himself that the creation of a fundamentally different type of political order was necessary and achievable.
The Charismatic Leader and the Party
Authors: McAdams A. James
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at how Fidel Castro's personal domination of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) by the 1960s represented a clear break with the standard Soviet model of Leninist leadership. In contrast, it should be understood in terms of two factors. The first was Castro's agility as a guerrilla fighter in the 1950s and thereafter as Cuba's leader in tapping into nearly a century of popular frustration and anger at the failure of established organizations, and especially political parties, to meet the country's interests. The second factor was the successful propagation of a cult of “Fidel.” For this achievement, Castro owed much to his confederates and adulators.
The Revolution Returns
Authors: McAdams A. James
Published: May 2020

This chapter demonstrates how some of Mao Zedong's deputies had different ideas about what was, and was not, required for the successful construction of socialism. In fact, years later, in the late 1970s and 1980s, their conceptions of single-party rule would lead China down a path that was much less turbulent than the years of Maoist supremacy. Here, the difference between Mao's view of the party's destiny and a major strand of Marxist thought is not as great as it appears at first glance. At the heart of his thinking, Mao shared with predecessors like Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky the instinctive distrust of all political organizations, the party included. Such human constructs threatened to sap the revolutionary moment's potential. Later, and even more than these iconic figures, Mao extended his animosity beyond the state to the party. But his target was the organizational party, not the idea of the revolutionary group that he had cultivated in Yan'an. Far from abandoning this conviction, he aggressively returned to it again and again after the People's Republic of China's founding.
The Party Vanishes
Authors: McAdams A. James
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers three of prominent socialist states that were not directly affected by the revolutions of 1989–1991—North Korea, China, and Cuba. At the time, these states had recognized that they, too, were no longer living in the world of Marx and Lenin. In different ways, each of these states drifted away from the different conceptions of single-party rule. In North Korea, the break was complete. Under successive despots, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un, the party's leading role was fully supplanted by the institution of dynastic rule. In China, the shift was gradual and less conspicuous. A new generation of leaders, represented by Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping, routinely invoked the principle of party rule to justify their policies. But they did not necessarily practice it. Indeed, by the 2000s, one was hard-pressed to say what specifically made the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) communist. Only Fidel Castro showed any consistency, but in a way that did not serve the party idea. Although he had two options to institutionalize his vision, the party and the military, he evidently remained convinced until his final days that he was the epicenter of his country's revolution.
The Habsburg Puzzle
Authors: Mitchell A. Wess
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Austrian Habsburgs. Amassed over several centuries by marriage, war, diplomacy, and luck, the eastern realm of the Austrian Habsburgs was an omnium gatherum of tribes and languages—German, Magyar, Slav, Jew, and Romanian—bound together by geographic happenstance, legal entailment, and the person of the emperor who ruled them. The lands inhabited by this multiethnic menagerie were a place of war; in every direction, the Austrian Habsburgs faced enemies. Indeed, the outside environment placed Austria in a position of continual danger while the political and economic structure of the empire narrowed the range of viable tools for responding effectively to external threats and putting it on a secure long-term footing. Yet somehow, despite the seemingly insurmountable threats arrayed against it, the Habsburg Monarchy had survived. It outlasted Ottoman sieges, Bourbon quests for continental hegemony, repeated efforts at dismemberment by Frederick the Great, and no fewer than four failed attempts to defeat Napoleon Bonaparte. Each time, it weathered the threat at hand and more often than not emerged on the winning side. Thus, by virtually any standard measure, the Habsburg Empire must be judged a geopolitical success.
Empire of the Danube
Authors: Mitchell A. Wess
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes the Habsburg Monarchy’s physical environment, how it influenced Habsburg perceptions of space, and the vulnerabilities and advantages that it created in competition with other major powers. Like all states, the Habsburg Monarchy depended for its survival on the ability to exercise undisputed control over a clearly defined territorial space. This in turn involved two tasks: building a sound political and economic base, and providing security against internal or external attack. In the first task, the Habsburgs enjoyed the advantage of a compact, riparian heartland bounded on most sides by mountains. The second task was made difficult in the extreme by the empire’s wider east-central European security environment. This combination of defensible local terrain and geopolitical vulnerability influenced how Habsburg leaders thought about and conducted strategy by encouraging the development of strategic forms of knowledge to conceptualize space for defensive purposes, and pulling attention outward to the frontiers, while demanding the maintenance of a “big picture” capable of taking in the security position of the Habsburg Empire as a whole.
Damnosa Hereditas
Authors: Mitchell A. Wess
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the constitutional makeup of the Habsburg state and the limitations it placed on the mobilization of resources. In contrast to its physical geography, the political geography of the Danubian Basin greatly complicated the task of Habsburg empire building. Accumulated in a pell-mell fashion over several centuries, the territorial holdings of the Austrian Habsburgs formed a composite state made up of multiple, historically separate polities, each with its own separate constitutional arrangement with the ruling dynasty. Its human population consisted of more than a dozen ethnic groups, none of which was strong enough to dominate the others. This internal makeup impeded the monarchy’s evolution as a modern state in two ways: by hindering the development of a centralized, efficient state administration and implanting sources of domestic conflict into the social fabric of the state. Both factors shaped Austria’s behavior as a strategic actor, placing it at a disadvantage in competition with more centralized and unified Great Power rivals. Ultimately, these characteristics prevented the monarchy from mobilizing its full power potential, effectively removed territorial expansion as an option for increasing state security, and presented internal vulnerabilities for enemies to exploit in wartime.
Teufelfranzosen
Authors: Mitchell A. Wess
Published: May 2020

This chapter traces the contest with France, from the wars of Louis XIV to the bitter life-or-death struggle with the revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. More advanced than the Ottomans and bigger than Prussia, France was capable of fielding large modern armies and elaborate alliances to threaten the Erblände from multiple sides. In conflicts with France, Austria was not able to count on the military-technological advantage that it enjoyed against the Turks, or the greater size and resources that gave it an edge against Prussia. Instead, Austria learned over time to contain French power through the defensive use of space, building extensive buffer zones to offset France’s advantages in offensive capabilities. Habsburg strategy on the western frontier evolved through three phases. In wars with the Bourbon kings, successive Habsburg monarchs cultivated the smaller states of the German Reich and northern Italy as clients, committed to sharing the burden of defense through local armies and tutelary fortresses in wartime. Against Napoleon, these buffers collapsed, forcing Austria to use strategies of delay and accommodation similar to those employed against Frederick II to wear down and outlast a stronger military opponent. And in the peace that followed, Austria restored and expanded its traditional western security system, using confederated buffers and frontier fortresses to deter renewed French revisionism.
Epilogue
Authors: Mitchell A. Wess
Published: May 2020

This epilogue argues that many of the problems that the Habsburgs faced are present today. Geopolitics remains as a persistent and reintensifying force in which Great Powers seek to survive in competition with other large, purposeful actors. In this contest, geography remains both a key determinant of success and its ultimate prize. Advances in technology have only partially mitigated the effects of geography; even in the era of nuclear weapons, the search for security comes down to a battle for space in which finite resources must be arrayed in time to deal with virtually infinite challenges. As in the Habsburg period, the threats arrayed against today’s West are multidirectional in nature and vary widely in form, ranging from revisionist Great Powers with large conventional armies to economically backward but numerous and religiously motivated enemies employing asymmetrical weapons and tactics. The chapter then considers a few broad principles of Habsburg strategic statecraft which stand out as potentially relevant in any era.
Introduction
Authors: Robinson Geoffrey B.
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter provides some insights into the violence of 1965–66 against members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and builds on the rich body of existing work by Indonesian scholars. From here, the chapter suggests a new approach that addresses many of the issues surrounding genocide—and accounts for the variations and particularities of the Indonesian case—while also making possible its comparison to other instances of mass killing and detention. That approach entails three broad claims. The first is that the violence of 1965 cannot be properly understood without recognizing the pivotal role of the army leadership in provoking, facilitating, and organizing it. The second principal claim is that the actions of powerful foreign states—especially the United States and the United Kingdom—together with aspects of the international context were instrumental in facilitating and encouraging the army's campaign of mass violence in 1965–66. Lastly, the chapter highlights the role of historical conditions and antecedents in understanding the dynamics of the mass violence of 1965–66.
Preconditions
Authors: Robinson Geoffrey B.
Published: May 2020

This chapter offers a different perspective from mainstream scholarship regarding the mass violence of 1965–66. It emphasizes the historical forces, actors, and contingencies that were most important in facilitating and shaping the violence of 1965–66. The chapter begins with a brief look at Indonesia's colonial history, before tracing the emergence of leftist and nationalist movements in the early twentieth century, the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945, the struggle against Dutch rule that culminated in independence in 1949, and the first tumultuous decade and a half of independence. It then examines in more detail each of the principal political actors that emerged in the postindependence period and the tensions that developed among them. Finally, the chapter provides a description of the final year before the alleged coup when these tensions came to a head, and shows how a number of key decisions and events helped to create the preconditions for the events of October 1, 1965, and the violence that followed.
Pretext
Authors: Robinson Geoffrey B.
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers whether the army and those who supported its campaign to vilify, imprison, torture, and kill PKI members and other leftists did so on the back of a lie. After weighing the evidence, the chapter reveals that they did so quite deliberately. The chapter lays the foundation for that case in two parts. It opens with an account of the events of October 1 and their aftermath, based on the few historical facts that are not in dispute. It then outlines the various competing accounts of the movement, highlighting the implausibility and inconsistency of the official version, but also looking critically at the alternatives.
Introduction
Authors: Hurd Ian
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the politics of the international rule of law. The big debates in world politics today are inseparable from international law. Controversy over what is and is not legal is standard fare in international conflicts, and commitment to rule of law is presumed a marker of good governance. Yet the politics of the international rule of law are not so simple and are rarely investigated directly. This book shows that international law is properly seen not as a set of rules external to and constraining of state power but rather as a social practice in which states and others engage. They put the political power of international law to work in the pursuit of their goals and interests. Indeed, governments use international law to explain and justify their choices. This is both constraining and permissive. On the one hand, states must fit their preferences into legal forms. On the other hand, they are empowered when they can show their choices to be lawful. Thus, international law makes it easier for states to do some things (those that can be presented as lawful) and harder to do others (those that appear to be unlawful). The book then looks at how the concept of international law is used in world politics and to what ends.
The Rule of Law, Domestic and International
Authors: Hurd Ian
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the domestic rule of law and its uneasy translation to international politics. The central claim is this: the domestic rule of law is in effect when there exists a set of stable public laws binding in theory and practice on both citizens and the state. There are two main lines of debate in existing literature on the domestic rule of law. The first asks whether individual human rights and collective social welfare are effects of the rule of law or constitutive of it. The second debate involves how the rule of law can be distinguished from rule by law, in which the state uses the framework of law instrumentally to legitimate and reinforce its domination. Three claims about the rule of law are constant across these debates: that rules should be public and stable, that rules should apply to the government as well as the citizens, and that the rules should be applied equally across cases. None of these translates easily to the realm of international law. Thus, domestic rule of law provides an unsuitable model for an international equivalent.
How to Do Things with International Law
Authors: Hurd Ian
Published: May 2020

This chapter presents an account of the international rule of law that reflects the particular dynamics of international politics, drawing on legal realism and practice theory in international relations (IR). On this reading, the international rule of law is a social practice that states and others engage in when they provide legal reasons and justifications for their actions. The goal may be either political legitimation for oneself or delegitimation of adversaries. This sort of use of international law both relies on and reinforces the idea that states should act lawfully rather than unlawfully. The priority of lawfulness is taken for granted. The chapter then outlines an approach which helps to make sense of international law's contribution to contemporary disputes and crises.
The Permissive Power of the Ban on War
Authors: Hurd Ian
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines a classical area of international law: the use of force by states. The ban on war is often cited as the centerpiece of the modern international legal-political system and used to distinguish the contemporary age from earlier, less legalized periods. Liberal convention sees the ban on war as a legal constraint on states' political choices; states seeking to uphold the international rule of law are advised to refrain from using force against other states. However, this understanding is flawed. The UN Charter outlaws some kinds of war and permits others, such as those undertaken in self-defense. The chapter then demonstrates that the Charter is a mechanism by which law sorts the motivations for war into lawful (self-defense) and unlawful (all others) categories. It thereby creates a framework to legitimate wars and reduce their political costs. The Charter is not antiwar: it is explicitly permissive of war so long as the claimed motive is self-defense.
The Rule of No Law
Authors: Hurd Ian
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the legality of latter-day weapons—specifically, nuclear arms and lethal drones—to consider the potential for voids in the coverage of international law. When technological or other developments enable previously inconceivable kinds of warfare, states face open legal questions. Recent debates over the legality of U.S. drones illustrate this, as do earlier debates about the legality of nuclear arms. The weapons arise in a kind of legal vacuum, empty of specific regulation. Drawing on these examples, the chapter considers the power of the international rule of law in situations where there may be no law. With respect to nuclear weapons, the International Court of Justice decided that despite there being no directly applicable laws, use is nonetheless governed by international law. Rules designed for other weapons are relevant, as is a general principle that in the end, international law must defend states' rights to protect their national security as they see fit. These two sets of resources—general principles and analogies to other laws—are also important in legal debates over drones today: the lawfulness of drones as instruments of war is inferred from the legality of what are said to be analogous weapons from earlier times, and the needs of the state are internalized in legality debates through the mechanism of self-defense.
Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism
Authors: Leffler Melvyn P
Published: May 2020

This book gathers together decades of writing by the author, to address important questions about U.S. national security policy from the end of World War I to the global war on terror. Why did the United States withdraw strategically from Europe after World War I and not after World War II? How did World War II reshape Americans' understanding of their vital interests? What caused the United States to achieve victory in the long Cold War? To what extent did 9/11 transform U.S. national security policy? Is budgetary austerity a fundamental threat to U.S. national interests? The wide-ranging chapters explain how foreign policy evolved into national security policy. The book stresses the competing priorities that forced policymakers to make agonizing trade-offs and illuminates the travails of the policymaking process itself. While assessing the course of U.S. national security policy, the author also interrogates the evolution of his own scholarship. Over time, slowly and almost unconsciously, the author's work has married elements of revisionism with realism to form a unique synthesis that uses threat perception as a lens to understand how and why policymakers reconcile the pressures emanating from external dangers and internal priorities.
Introduction
Authors: Leffler Melvyn P.
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter chronicles how the author's study of American foreign policy over the decades gravitated toward an analysis of the meaning of national security. This was not intentional. It resulted from a long struggle to wrestle with evidence that led to attempts to synthesize the three levels of analysis that scholars of international relations often talk about: the individual, the domestic/state, and the international. By using the concept of national security, the author was able to analyze the motives shaping U.S. policymakers, examine their perception of threat and opportunity, assess their willingness to incur commitments and responsibilities abroad, study their readiness to employ military power, and gain an appreciation of how they saw the links between external configurations of power and the preservation of democratic capitalism at home. As the author embraced complexity, studied the evolving literature on grand strategy, and grappled with contingency, his empathy for the policymakers grew.
Victory
Authors: Leffler Melvyn P.
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that the West “won” the Cold War because statesmen made systems of democratic capitalism and social democracy work effectively. The challenge for democratic leaders throughout the world was to thwart the appeal of communism and co-opt revolutionary nationalist movements. To do so, they had to reinvent the role of government—not to supplant markets, but to make markets work more effectively and equitably. They avoided intracapitalist conflict, won the support of their own peoples, and created a culture of consumption that engendered the envy of peoples everywhere. In this contest over rival systems of political economy, the role of government was not the problem; it was part of the solution. But it had to be calibrated carefully.
9/11 and American Foreign Policy
Authors: Leffler Melvyn P.
Published: May 2020

This chapter emphasizes that 9/11 dramatically altered the threat perception of U.S. policymakers. “The greater the threat,” said the strategy statement, “the greater the risk of inaction.” In this new threat environment, policymakers declared that the old tactics of deterrence and containment could not work. Although the employment of preemptive or preventative action was not entirely new in the U.S. diplomatic experience, the emphasis accorded to it was much more pronounced. Threat perception altered tactics, not goals. To justify the new tactics, President George W. Bush raised the rhetorical trope of democracy promotion to a new level of importance, and this was even more true after weapons of mass destruction were not located in Iraq. For this chapter, 9/11 raised interesting and complicated questions about the relationships between interests, values, threat perception, and the employment of power.
Austerity and U.S. Strategy
Authors: Leffler Melvyn P.
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that austere times presented opportunities to reassess strategic concepts, think rigorously about goals, recalibrate priorities, and link means and ends. Constraints on defense spending forced policymakers to think more creatively about diplomatic solutions. This sometimes catalyzed bold initiatives to reassure friends and engage adversaries. In the past, budgetary austerity also forced officials to wrestle more forthrightly with the trade-offs between priorities at home and commitments abroad. It was an exercise that invariably reminded all Americans that the real sources of U.S. strength in the world were the health of its domestic economy, the vitality of its people, and the resilience of its political institutions.
Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam’s Utopian Anti-Utopianism
Authors: Kotin Joshua
Published: May 2020

This chapter concerns two anti-Soviet texts: Osip Mandel'shtam's so-called Stalin epigram and his widow's Nadezhda's memoirs. Here, Mandel'shtam accepts the “lures of liberalism” despite the antiliberalism of the Soviet Union. He develops the most radical project of all: composing a poem that links his independence to his death. His performance of an epigram mocking Stalin in 1933 anticipates Isaiah Berlin's claim that the “logical culmination of the process of destroying everything through which I can possibly be wounded is suicide.” Mandel'shtam's performance led to his arrest in 1934 and his death in a Gulag transit camp in 1938. “Total liberation in this sense,” Berlin laments, “is conferred only by death.”
Anna Akhmatova’s Complicity
Authors: Kotin Joshua
Published: May 2020

This examines Anna Akhmatova's two great late poems Requiem (1935–62) and the famously difficult Poem without a Hero (1940–65). In Requiem, Akhmatova embraces her role as a “world-historical personage.” In a sequence of ten lyrics and various supplementary texts, she challenges Soviet historiography and, as a result, the Soviet Union itself. Requiem, as this chapter shows, is continuous with both the Stalin epigram and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's memoirs. Meanwhile, Poem without a Hero considers if complicity is always a condition of dissent and if there is a way to oppose totalitarianism without replicating its worldview. The poem attempts to realize a different kind of dissent—one that does not promote Soviet utopianism or the Mandel'shtams' utopian anti-utopianism.
Wallace Stevens’s Point of View
Authors: Kotin Joshua
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes Wallace Stevens's pursuit of value from his point of view—especially during the act of writing. It begins with an account of his attitude toward his metaphysical need and then examines how three poems fail to satisfy it: “Sunday Morning” (1915, 1923), “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1934), and “Credences of Summer” (1947). Each poem, the chapter argues, approaches the problem of value as a problem of community formation. Each poem is an experiment—an attempt to coordinate a collective solution to the fact/value dichotomy that avoids both nihilism and what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the “supernatural.” Ultimately, the chapter details how a fourth poem, “The Auroras of Autumn” (1948), solves the problem of value (for Stevens) by abandoning the idea of community altogether. The poem's success hinges on its inaccessibility—how it prevents readers from sharing Stevens's point of view.
Reading Ezra Pound and J. H. Prynne in Chinese
Authors: Kotin Joshua
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines Ezra Pound's and J. H. Prynne's use of Chinese poetry to understand the problem of motivation—and the incentive structures that govern modern life. It considers how difficult poetry illuminates the difficulty of motivating social change. Here, Prynne's work, “Jie ban mi Shi Hu,” exemplifies a problem for readers of his work, and for literary and social theory: How and why should we read texts that make extravagant, even impossible demands? The question asks us to justify the value of particular texts and the values of the world that receive them. To put this point a different way, when we ask for reasons to accept a poem's invitation to do work, we should also ask what kind of world would have to exist to make the invitation seem reasonable, and whether we would want to live in that world. Similar questions are relevant to debates about utopianism.
Good Form
Authors: Rosenthal Jesse
Published: May 2020

What do we mean when we say that a novel's conclusion “feels right”? How did feeling, form, and the sense of right and wrong get mixed up, during the nineteenth century, in the experience of reading a novel? This book argues that Victorian readers associated the feeling of narrative form—of being pulled forward to a satisfying conclusion—with inner moral experience. Reclaiming the work of a generation of Victorian “intuitionist” philosophers who insisted that true morality consisted in being able to feel or intuit the morally good, this book shows that when Victorians discussed the moral dimensions of reading novels, they were also subtly discussing the genre's formal properties. For most, Victorian moralizing is one of the period's least attractive and interesting qualities. But this book argues that the moral interpretation of novel experience was essential in the development of the novel form—and that this moral approach is still a fundamental, if unrecognized, part of how we understand novels. Bringing together ideas from philosophy, literary history, and narrative theory, the book shows that we cannot understand the formal principles of the novel that we have inherited from the nineteenth century without also understanding the moral principles that have come with them. The book helps us to understand the way Victorians read, but it also helps us to understand the way we read now.
The Subject of the Newgate Novel: Crime, Interest, What Novels Are About
Authors: Rosenthal Jesse
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines a central moment in the development of moral narrative practices—one that is, at the same time, a moment in the coming into being of “the Victorian novel.” Looking at Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and the “Newgate novel” controversy of the 1830s, it offers an example of one way in which the experience of diachronic reading could be interpreted in an explicitly moral fashion. Oliver Twist was to be distinguished from other similar novels, and particularly from William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, because of the ways in which it appealed to the moral sensibilities of its reader: “natural sentiment,” “moral sense.” The general implications seem clear enough: Oliver Twist is more appealing to its readers' moral feelings because it has other, “healthier,” focuses than crime alone. According to the novel's reviewers, Oliver Twist might feature crime, but unlike Jack Sheppard, crime is not the novel's subject. Ultimately, what a survey of the discourse surrounding Newgate novels makes clear is how debated this question of subject matter actually was.
Getting David Copperfield: Humor, Sensus Communis, and Moral Agreement
Authors: Rosenthal Jesse
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at another narrative mechanism that an author could use to imply that there was a “law” governing the text: humor. This is not, as the chapter shows through a discussion of Romantic and Victorian writings on the subject, a humor that was defined by its ability to make a reader laugh. Rather, humor was a strategy used to produce, in the reader, the experience of unspoken agreement and shared community with others. Unlike Oliver Twist, David Copperfield does not rely on an inaccessible back-story. Instead, it relies on a shared understanding, but one so implicit that it seems to be more of an intuitive sense than any sort of rational knowledge. It relies, in other words, on the idea of sensus communis (common sense). The narrative of David's progression is always measured against this backdrop of an anonymously judging public of which he is part, and the novel's narrative method seeks to move him into agreement with that public. The novel thus uses humor to underscore the idea that one's individual intuitions are shared, though in ways that are difficult to conceptualize. Charles Dickens's narrative technique makes use of an externalization, into the social sphere, of a reader's individual feeling.
The Middle Niger in Pre-Antiquity and Global Context
Authors: Gomez Michael A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the consistent omission of early and medieval Africa in world and imperial histories. West Africa is certainly left out of the narrative of early human endeavor, and only tends to be mentioned, with brevity, in conjunction with European imperialism. Nevertheless, substantial archaeological work has been underway in West Africa for decades, particularly in the middle Niger valley. For it was during the period of the Shang, Chou, Shin, Han, and Tang dynasties of China, the Vedic period in India, and the Mayans in central America, that another urban-based civilization flourished in West Africa, in the Middle Niger region. The chapter then considers the history of civilization in the Middle Niger, which is a study of the multiple ways in which communities continually adjust to and engage with one of the more “variable and unpredictable” environments in the world. Indeed, the story of the Middle Niger connects directly with the celestial preoccupations of big history in that much of its climatic variability is explained by slight alterations in solar radiation, produced in turn by the intricacies of the sun's cyclical patterns.
Early Gao
Authors: Gomez Michael A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines Gao's early historical significance, which is often relegated in the scholarship on early West Africa. This tendency issues from a failure to more critically assess the region's two most important thirteenth/seventeenth-century chronicles; a far more plausible rendering of Gao's importance forms when considering those chronicles in conjunction with the external sources, the archaeological record, and the epigraphic evidence. Further contesting the secondary literature is the conclusion that these very different sources are far more harmonious than has been represented. But in closely examining the sources, the very concept of bilād as-sūdān, or “land of the blacks,” must be attenuated, as it does not conform to the demographic realities of North and West Africa. The chapter then explains that Gao represents a crossroads to and through which migrated whole communities across an often artificial divide between Sahara and Savannah.
Slavery and Race Imagined in Bilād As-Sūdān
Authors: Gomez Michael A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at the trans-Saharan slave trade and its imbrications with developing notions of race and gender. The fifth/eleventh century transition to reform Islam in the western Sahel was coterminous with an intensification in slaving, generating a lively discourse regarding eligibility, within which notions of race and gender unfolded. The imbrication of slavery, race, and gender would partially inform processes by which West African elites claimed archaic origins in the central Islamic lands, creating distance from the land of their actual birth. From the beginning, external sources associate bilād as-sūdān (land of the blacks) with slaving in an entirely unremarkable manner. The chapter then discusses how slavery's development would help shape views of West African women as well as concepts of blackness. Slaving, together with Islam's continued rise, would constitute the double predicate upon which polity in the region would greatly expand over the next three centuries.
Sunni ‘Alī and the Reinvention of Songhay
Authors: Gomez Michael A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter studies the onset of Songhay, which was in fact a reemergence, in that it recentered the ancient town of Gao, capital of the novel experiment. Inheriting the mantle of Mali, Songhay would undertake important innovations in meeting the demands of international commerce, ethnic diversity, and Islam's expansion. By way of serial effort, experimentation, and even regime change, Songhay boldly attempted the realization of a pluralist society fully reflective of its multiple constituencies—an approach premised on a new theory of governance in which spheres of influence were distributed to shareholders as self-organized groupings or communities. Informed by both local practice and international engagement, Songhay would eventually achieve a remarkable social compact by which new levels of mutual respect and tolerance were reached, and through which Songhay came to be characterized. In this way, it distinguished itself from its Malian predecessor, for the Malian empire was first and foremost a Mande operation, in which the Mande sought to control all levers of political, social, and cultural power. In contrast, Songhay would evolve differently, becoming a much more ethnically heterogeneous society in which allegiance to the state transcended loyalties to clan and culture, with its leadership becoming much more diverse.
The Sunni and the Scholars: A Tale of Revenge
Authors: Gomez Michael A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter highlights the antagonisms between Timbuktu's scholarly community and Sunni ʻAlī. The chroniclers characterize the tensions with sweeping generalizations, but the sunni's relationship with the scholars was in fact more complicated than straightforward, with some in persecuted families willing to broker an accommodation with the ruler. In the end, however, the sunni seriously miscalculated in alienating such a powerful coalition of the learned and the moneyed. The chapter then illustrates how Sunni ʻAlī sought to balance his fear of opposition in Timbuktu with his need for alliances by which he could rule the city. He would embark upon a strategy of attacking one community of scholars associated with his political nemesis, while embracing an alternative group of more neutral elites. Other important aspects of early imperial Songhay are visible during Sunni ʻAlī's tenure. These include the origins and interconnections of Timbuktu's powerful Muḥammad Aqīt and Anda ag-Muḥammad families; the emergence of the oft-overlooked Mori Koyra, a scholarly community with a major role in the unfolding of Songhay history; and the ways in which servile formations impacted Songhay policy and military operations.
Renaissance: The Age of Askia Al-Ḥājj Muḥammad
Authors: Gomez Michael A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the reign of Askia Muḥammad. Originally affixed to clerical and commercial interests, the askia's arrogation of power would encourage a review of those relations, leading to a series of challenges to Timbuktu and Jenne's self-promotion as bastions of autonomy and self-regulation. The askia's policies are therefore not unlike those of Mansā Mūsā, who paired internationalism with indigenization. These challenges would endure throughout Songhay's existence, and require rethinking Timbuktu exceptionality. Notwithstanding difficulties, Songhay's cosmopolitanism reached a height of sophistication never before witnessed in the region. More specifically, it is with Songhay that a variety of ethnicities undergo a process through which their allegiance to the state begins to supersede group loyalties, resulting in the formation of a new political identity. As an experiment in pluralism, it was unprecedented. Like Mansā Mūsā, Askia Muḥammad would also embark upon a campaign of significant territorial expansion, extending well into the northern Sahel, while evincing substantial interest in the Hausa city-states to the east. Notwithstanding his accomplishments, Songhay would be slowly circumscribed by breathtaking transformations on a global scale.
Surfeit and Stability: The Era of Askia Dāwūd
Authors: Gomez Michael A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter details the thirty-four-year reign of Askia Dāwūd, which punctuates the bloodletting of the nadir, with Dāwūd turning from his remaining brothers to his own children to fill key positions of authority. This essentially meant the descendants of Askia Muḥammad, the Mamar hamey, were now favored over the scions of Kanfāri ʻUmar, the third royal branch. In the process, Dāwūd reclaimed some of the power previously ceded to Songhay's stakeholders. Askia Dāwūd's reign also saw the dramatic expansion of domestic slavery. Though significant throughout the dynasties of the Sunnis and the Askias, the numbers under Dāwūd became so pronounced, their exploitation so extensive, that the period constitutes a stage of evolutionary development. Slavery as qualified reciprocity is the mechanism by which its relationship to servitude and caste will be explored, as well as its intimate connection to spirituality.
The Rending Asunder: Dominion’s End
Authors: Gomez Michael A.
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes how, between Askia Dāwūd's death in 990–91/1582–83 and the Battle of Tondibi in 999/1591 that marked the beginning of Morocco's occupation, the empire endured the tumultuous reigns of four askias, the depravations of famine, and a civil war so destructive that Timbuktu's religious elites felt compelled to intervene. Less than ten years following the death of Askia Dāwūd, imperial Songhay lay in utter ruin, never more to rise. It is no small irony that an enslaved official was at the epicenter of exigency, nor that slaves were strategically positioned to influence events, nor that those events prominently featured enslaved soldiers. Elites, whether political actors or shaykhs, were therefore as dependent on as they were dominant over slaves. The Moroccan invasion would arrive at a most unpropitious time.