bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Buying and Selling Votes
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: November 2017

This chapter assesses whether vote buying and selling are morally wrong. It then argues that vote buying and selling are morally permissible provided that selling votes does not lead to violations of the duties described in earlier chapters. Thus, vote buying and selling are not inherently wrong. If it is morally permissible for someone to vote for a certain way for free, then it is permissible to vote that way for payment. However, vote commodification is not morally neutral. While selling one's vote cannot transform a right action into a bad one, it can amplify the wrongness of a wrong action. If one is paid to vote wrongly, this is often morally worse than doing so without payment.
How to Vote Well
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: November 2017

This afterword offers various ways to vote well. First, one must not label one's self. One must not join political parties or movements, at least not until one has minimized one's biases. Second, one has to seek out the smartest and best defenses of opposing views. Third, one has to stop, think, learn, and deliberate first to avoid hasty decisions. Fourth, one should avoid the news and focus on social science. The news throws some data but it doesn't give the background knowledge needed to understand it. Ultimately, voters can train themselves to overcome their personal biases, and to vote in a smart, thoughtful way.
The Tragedy of the Commons
Authors: Brennan Jason
Published: November 2017

ECOLOGISTS describe land as having a “carrying capacity,” the maximum population that land can sustain indefinitely. Once the carrying capacity of land is exceeded, resources are depleted faster than they can be renewed, and the terrain starts to become wasteland.

The ecologist Garret Hardin found that when land is held in common by many different people, this could often lead to what he dubbed “the tragedy of the commons.”...
Pericles and Eros: Caught between Civic Unity and Political Subversion
Authors: Azoulay Vincent
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines two contradictory aspects of eros in Pericles' life. In the Greek world, eros did not correspond to any romantic sentiment, nor did it bear any similarity to the wishy-washy notion nowadays conjured up by “love.” Whether homosexual or heterosexual, eros was first and foremost a connective force or, at times, a disconnective one. As a connective force, eros linked individuals together. As a force for disconnection, it was capable of turning the normal functioning of social life upside down. The chapter explains how Pericles' life combined eros's power of connection and disconnection. It shows that Pericles was an ardent defender of a veritable civic eroticism and that his story testifies to the subversive power of eros. It also considers the erotic dimension of Pericles' authority, his behavior in matters of sexual love, and his relationship with Aspasia.
The Way of the Humane Authority
Authors: Qing Jiang
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses Western-style democracy. Although democracy—more specifically, a form of government that grants ultimate controlling power to democratically elected representatives—is built on the separation of powers, the separation is a matter of implementation rather than legitimization. In a democracy, legitimacy is based on the sovereignty of the people. However, the chapter objects to the idea that there is only one source of legitimacy; one political alternative is the Confucian Way of the Humane Authority. According to the Gongyang Commentary, political power must have three kinds of legitimacy—that of heaven, earth, and the human—for it to be justified. All three forms of legitimacy must be in equilibrium, but the chapter notes that the equilibrium is not one of equality.
In Our Name
Authors: Beerbohm Eric
Published: November 2017

When a government in a democracy acts in our name, are we, as citizens, responsible for those acts? What if the government commits a moral crime? The protestor's slogan—“Not in our name!”—testifies to the need to separate ourselves from the wrongs of our leaders. Yet the idea that individual citizens might bear a special responsibility for political wrongdoing is deeply puzzling for ordinary morality and leading theories of democracy. This book explains how citizens may be morally exposed to the failures of their representatives and state institutions, and how complicity is the professional hazard of democratic citizenship. Confronting the ethical challenges that citizens are faced with in a self-governing democracy, the book proposes institutional remedies for dealing with them. It questions prevailing theories of democracy for failing to account for our dual position as both citizens and subjects. Showing that the obligation to participate in the democratic process is even greater when we risk serving as accomplices to wrongdoing, the book argues for a distinctive division of labor between citizens and their representatives that charges lawmakers with the responsibility of incorporating their constituents' moral principles into their reasoning about policy. Grappling with the practical issues of democratic decision making, the book engages with political science, law, and psychology to envision mechanisms for citizens seeking to avoid democratic complicity.
Introduction
Authors: Beerbohm Eric
Published: November 2017

This book explores three interlocking problems of the ethics of democracy, with the objective of solving them simultaneously: ethics of participation, ethics of belief, and ethics of delegation. Ordinary political morality holds that the denizens of a representative democracy—the electors and the elected—can bear responsibility for their shared terms of interaction. Because the citizens' primary mode of political agency is mediated, they are vulnerable to the charge of participating in the wrongdoing of another. The book considers the special agency relationship between citizens and representatives, the conditions under which injustice is committed in our name as citizens, and how we can void that relationship. Its central claim is that complicity is the professional hazard of democratic citizenship. This introduction provides an overview of the link between the liabilities of citizenship and the demands of citizenship, compares microdemocratic theory with macrodemocratic theory, and previews the chapters that follow.
How to Value Democracy
Authors: Beerbohm Eric
Published: November 2017

This chapter proposes a conception of democracy based on a system of shared liability and that captures the moral value of democratic institutions in a way that is more purely nonconsequentialist than ordinarily supposed. In this approach, citizens relate to each other horizontally and vertically—as cosubjects of the law and coauthors sharing authority over the coercive terms of our state. In Thomas Hobbes's elegant picture, we have to understand ourselves as simultaneously “makers” and “matter.” The chapter argues that what we ultimately value about democratic practice is that it makes possible for us to stand in a certain kind of relation with others—a relationship that recognizes them as mutually accountable, free, and rational persons. This is the sense in which democracy places us in an infrastructure of mutual liability.
Philosophers-Citizens
Authors: Beerbohm Eric
Published: November 2017

This chapter challenges an account of citizenship that treats us as political philosophers or perennial deliberators and instead proposes the model of the philosopher-citizen who exhibits a computationally intense life of the mind. It first describes the ideal of the philosopher-citizen before considering how a theory of justice is to be employed by well-intentioned citizens by taking into account the views of John Rawls. It argues that the model of the philosopher-citizens tends to be monistic, collapsing the diversity of moral achievements that citizens can make in a democracy, and that this ideal should be separated from an account of the citizen's decision-making obligations. The chapter also examines the principles for citizens and for representatives in the context of Justice as Fairness and concludes by outlining the essential assumptions of a nonideal democratic theory.
Superdeliberators
Authors: Beerbohm Eric
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that deliberative democracy is morally desirable but not strictly a moral requirement by focusing on superdeliberators and superdeliberation. The superdeliberator is a close relative of the philosopher-citizen. Each corresponds to the two meanings of “deliberation” in democratic theory, as reasoned thought and reasoned talk. The chapter first describes four necessary conditions that make a democratic theory deliberative before presenting two claims for the supererogation of deliberation at the micro- and macrodemocratic level. It then considers the belief by deliberativists that citizens have a standing obligation to participate periodically in contestatory forums. It also rejects the notion that the quantity and diffusion of public speech acts envisaged by deliberative theory is a necessary property of a morally acceptable social order. Finally, it examines the bare moral obligations that attach to citizens' reasoning about politics.
Democracy’s Ethics of Belief
Authors: Beerbohm Eric
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses democracy's ethics of belief and asks how we can reconcile our decision-making responsibilities, as morally momentous as they can seem to be, with our epistemic and cognitive vulnerabilities. More specifically, it considers the virtues of decision making of citizens by identifying instances of reckless or inattentive reasoning about politics. The chapter begins from the recognition that it is not possible for us to be well informed about the component parts of the modern democratic state. It insists that theory of citizenship owes us an account of permissible ignorance about political life. After considering the cognitive economy of democracy and the protective function of principles, the chapter presents a collection of counternormative cases that illustrate our intuitions about what constitutes negligent deliberation regarding justice's verdicts. It also describes three epistemic virtues—virtues of truth that bear on our limited decision making.
The Division of Democratic Labor
Authors: Beerbohm Eric
Published: November 2017

This chapter proposes cost-saving cognitive strategies for citizens to exhibit their decision-making virtues economically. It shows how individual citizens can come to rely on credentialed experts to form and act upon empirical beliefs that bear upon their judgments of distributive justice. Before explaining how the horizontal division of democratic labor works, the chapter considers the structure of the agency problem of representative democracy as well as the intuition that complicity remains a moral hazard of democratic citizenship. It then presents a thought experiment that illustrates how demanding and disruptive our decision making would be in a plebiscitary democracy. It also discusses three principles that can help citizens reduce the decisional burdens of their office: the usability principle, the peer principle, and the triage principle. The chapter concludes by defending a companion principle whose aim is to give citizens guidance when they can offload their decision-making responsibilities.
Democratic Complicity
Authors: Beerbohm Eric
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores how responsibility should be distributed for democratically sponsored injustice by focusing on two leading views of complicity, which produce either false positives or false negatives and overexculpate or overimplicate the democratic citizen. The first is participatory accounts, which condition complicity on citizens acting together with the intention of producing a collective outcome. The second is associative accounts, which hold that individual citizens, embedded in political systems, engage in a kind of mediated wrongdoing. The chapter views the two accounts as two implausible poles and proposes a democratic conception of complicity designed to avoid these two poles. It also considers how socioeconomic inequalities affect the distribution of responsibility and concludes by explaining how the ineliminable regret caused by participation in unjust structures can warrant the active taking of responsibility.
Not in My Name
Authors: Beerbohm Eric
Published: November 2017

This chapter deals with macrodemocratic theory. It develops mechanisms of democracy designed to protect citizens against complicitous relations with the state. It first considers plebiscitary mechanisms for participation such as voting for initiatives and representatives, signing petitions, citizen juries, and participating in deliberative forums. It then discusses executive and judicial mechanisms, along with reforms that empower citizens to satisfy their obligations to reform injustice in their state. It also examines debates over popular constitutionalism and judicial review and concludes by proposing two kinds of mechanisms for complicity avoidance. The first helps ordinary citizens limit their moral exposure—to distance themselves from state actions. The second provides citizens with opportunities to offset injustices that are performed in their name.
Origins
Authors: McLean Ian W.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers Australia's historical narrative, beginning with an assessment of the Aboriginal contribution to the economy constructed by the first European settlers. In Europe, modern economic growth from the late eighteenth century onward occurred in the context of societies and economies that, though undergoing rapid changes in some regions and industries, also exhibited much continuity with centuries past. Furthermore, institutions and production techniques of ancient lineage persisted into the period of modernization, though undergoing varying degrees of adaptation. Similarly, when modern economic growth began in Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century, there was much to build on in terms of physical capital, human capital, social organization, and political institutions in order to facilitate the transition to industrialization and sustained higher levels of prosperity.
The Pacific War and the Second Golden Age
Authors: McLean Ian W.
Published: November 2017

This chapter details how the Second World War imparted a more favorable shock to the economy than the First. The postwar international economic environment was much more conducive to raising incomes than it had been after 1919. In the 1950s, prosperity was further underpinned by the Korean War wool boom, and by an intensification of the process of import substituting industrialization. In further narrowing the focus to civilian consumption, the massive diversion of resources into the defense sector predictably resulted in a decline in consumption expenditure per capita during both wars, but by less during the Second World War. With this caveat, it seems appropriate to describe the Second World War as delivering on balance a positive shock to the Australian economy.
Intuitions about Knowledge
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the intuitions elicited from knowledge stories. It remarks that intuitions can be useful but only as starting points, not rigid constraints. The chapter thus provides a framework that can be used to explain how and why intuitions arise. More importantly, this framework can be used to engage the various philosophical questions and puzzles that arise about knowledge, from why knowledge is valuable and what its relationship is with justified belief to whether it can be acquired by luck and why it is we are so often willing to admit that something we believe to be true is nonetheless not something we know.
Maximally Accurate and Comprehensive Beliefs
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that, just as it may be possible to argue that maximally accurate and comprehensive beliefs inevitably satisfy minimal standards of reliability, so too it may be possible to argue that they inevitably meet minimal standards of justification. It asserts that to know one must not lack important information. This test may not always resolve disputes over whether someone knows something, but it does suggest that as one's grasp of a situation becomes more and more complete, it ought to become more and more difficult to deny that one has knowledge. Merely accumulating truths is not enough, however. One can acquire numerous truths about a situation and still not be in a position to know if the truths are unimportant. Moreover, how truths are connected is itself information, indeed, often crucial information.
The Theory of Knowledge and Theory of Justified Belief
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: November 2017

This chapter returns to Gettier's article, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” and considers its impact on the theory of knowledge and the theory of justified belief. It first discusses the internalist and externalist accounts on true belief proposed by many epistemologists in response to Gettier's article. The chapter then turns to the working strategy that has dominated epistemology since Gettier's article—the employment of the assumption that knowledge and justification are conceptually connected to draw strong, and sometimes antecedently implausible, conclusions about knowledge or justification. The strategy can be thought of as an epistemology game—a “Gettier game”—and the chapter concludes by offering solutions to it.
The Value of True Belief
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers issues about the value of true belief. When we deliberate about what to believe, the value that usually occupies us is truth. We try to determine which beliefs would be true as opposed to which would be useful. We weigh evidence for and against a claim, but we do not very often weigh the practical benefits and costs of believing it as opposed to not believing it. More precisely, we do not do so explicitly. The chapter explains why this is so, as what a person believes, like what they do, decide, and intend, can have important practical consequences.
The Lottery and Preface
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: November 2017

This chapter compares and contrasts lottery and preface cases. It first demonstrates some illustrative examples of both cases and then showcases their similarities. In the lottery example, the chapter's subject S has strong evidence that one ticket—she knows not which—is the winning ticket, and in the preface she has strong evidence that one of the book's claims—again she knows not which—is false; but in the lottery she seems to be in a position to know this proposition, while in the preface she seems not to be in a position to know the comparable proposition. The explanation for the difference here is that the gap in her information tends to strike us as significant in the one case but not the other.
Disjunctions
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers whether disjunctions create any special problems for the view that knowledge is to be understood in terms of adequate information. It illustrates a disjunction through the scenario of a flipped coin: suppose a fair coin has been flipped and lies covered on the back of S's hand. Let P be that the flipped coin has landed heads and Q that it has landed tails. S does not believe P and does not believe Q, but she does believe (P or Q). Suppose it is P that is true, that is, the coin has landed heads. Although P is a truth that S lacks, this does not prevent her from knowing the disjunction (P or Q), and the chapter explains why.
Fixedness and Knowledge
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: November 2017

This chapter illustrates fixedness of belief and how it can or cannot be considered knowledge. Ordinarily, when one has a true belief and also enough information to know, one's belief is neither impervious to change nor isolated from one's other beliefs about the situation. Fixedness as the chapter demonstrates can become something more akin to an obsession or a compulsion. Such a thing is not subject to the processes of regulation, revision, and influence that governs one's other opinions and thus looks more like a rigidified state external to one's belief system than something inside it, subject to the give and take of neighboring opinions.
Misleading Defeaters
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: November 2017

This chapter proposes a game in a similar vein to the Gettier game: when a subject has a true belief but seems not to have knowledge, it looks for some key aspect of the situation about which the subject lacks true beliefs. Defeasibility theorists make a strikingly similar recommendation. When confronted with cases in which a subject intuitively lacks knowledge despite having a justified true belief, they too recommend looking for a truth about the situation that the subject lacks, but because they are committed to the Gettier game, they link the subject's ignorance of this truth with the justification requirement. The chapter examines a story discussed by a leading proponent of the defeasibility theory, Peter Klein, before positing its own solution to the game.
Introspective Knowledge
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at cases where S has a true belief P but we are nonetheless inclined to say she does not know P. This is illustrated in a headache which S is hypothetically suffering. In everyday contexts it sounds odd to say of someone that she believes she has a headache, and equally odd to say she knows. This has encouraged some philosophers to conclude that it is inappropriate to talk of either belief or knowledge in such cases. An alternative diagnosis, however, is that the “owner” of a headache is in such a superior position compared with others with respect to determining whether she herself has a headache that it is usually enough to say of her that she has a headache and unnecessary, and hence odd sounding, to add that she believes or knows this.
Our Relationship
Authors: Keller Simon
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the relationships view about reasons of partiality. According to the relationships view, special relationships carry ethical significance in their own rights, and this ethical significance explains why relationships are sources of special reasons. Where the projects view finds the ground of your reasons of partiality in you, the relationships view finds the ground of your reasons of partiality in your relationships. There are several different versions of the relationships view. The most significant distinction among them is between those that begin with a claim about value or valuing, on the one side, and those that go straight to a claim about reasons, on the other. Most of this chapter focuses on the value-based relationships view.
Your Value
Authors: Keller Simon
Published: November 2017

This chapter gives an argument for the individuals view. The individuals view says that norms of partiality arise from facts about the individuals with whom our special relationships are shared. Your reasons to give special treatment to your friend, according to the individuals view, are explained by something about your friend: something that would be there even if she did not take a special place in your projects, and even if the two of you did not share a friendship. To find the source of our reasons of partiality, says the individuals view, we need to look more closely not at ourselves or our relationships but at the particular other people with whom our special relationships are shared.
International Courts and Democratic Politics
Authors: Alter Karen J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses how the new terrain of international law is an artifact of a number of indirectly connected decisions: the decision to expand the substantive reach of international law, to embed international legal rules into national legal orders, to expand the extraterritorial enforcement capacity of domestic judges, and to create more international courts with a compulsory jurisdiction and access for nonstate actors to initiate litigation. International law and the prospect of international court (IC) legal review are now creating a global judicialization of politics regarding a growing range of issues. As the various case studies in the book have demonstrated, international courts are now adjudicating issues that used to be entirely subjects of national determination. And their decisions are affecting both domestic and international politics.
Troubled Senses
Authors: Buchwald Jed Z. , Feingold Mordechai
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the roots of Isaac Newton’s interest in natural and historical knowledge. In the late seventeenth century, experiment-based knowledge remained suspect. Technical chronologers developed systems of concordances and sequences that located events of human history in time by means of their simultaneous occurrences with particular astronomical events, usually eclipses. It is precisely here that Isaac Newton, as a chronologer, differed programatically from his predecessors: he sought to use astronomical tools to mold singular events into a system for understanding ancient history, indeed for grasping the entire development of civilization—what’s more, a system that shared and exemplified the same evidentiary and argumentative structure deployed in his science.
Isaac Newton on Prophecies and Idolatry
Authors: Buchwald Jed Z. , Feingold Mordechai
Published: November 2017

On February 9, 1674/5, Isaac Newton left Cambridge for London, remaining there some five weeks. His main purpose was procuring a Royal dispensation from the statutory requirement of Trinity College that senior fellows take holy orders within seven years of election or forfeit the fellowship. As Newton had been elected senior fellow on March 16, 1668, the matter of ordination had become rather urgent. Newton’s eagerness to obtain a dispensation from ordination is significant, for it has prompted scholars to impute religious motivation to the action. It has been argued that by 1673, at the latest, Newton had become a heretic and that his concentrated effort to evade ordination was spurred by his newly found anti-Trinitarianism. However, this chapter shows that Newton’s initial forays into heresy commenced only in the late 1670s, gaining intensity in subsequent decades. His course of action with respect to the ordination was motivated, not by religious objection per se, but by a strong sense of propriety shared widely by contemporaries who found themselves deep into secular pursuits and painfully aware of the resulting incompatibility with a calling to the ministry.
The Persistence of Unequal Voice
Authors: Schlozman Kay Lehman , Verba Sidney , Brady Henry E.
Published: November 2017

This chapter investigates the differential voice of the advantaged and the disadvantaged. It first considers whether the participatory advantage of those who are high in socio-economic status (SES) persists over time and, in particular, whether the widely noted increase in economic inequality since the late 1970s has been matched by increasing socio-economic stratification of political voice. Then the chapter uses three-wave panel surveys to ask whether ongoing inequalities of political voice reflect not just continuing activity by the same kinds of people but persistent activity by the same individuals. It shows not only that political voice is characterized on an ongoing basis by bias in the direction of the well-educated and affluent but also that, among those who are politically active at any particular time, high-SES political activists are more likely than activists who are lower on the socio-economic ladder to continue to take part politically in the future.
Political Voice through Organized Interests: Introductory Matters
Authors: Schlozman Kay Lehman , Verba Sidney , Brady Henry E.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers several matters that complicate the understanding of inequalities of political voice through organized interests. It first differentiates between, on the one hand, the view of organized interest influence that emerges from the periodic scandals involving the use of illicit cash and favors to buy policy benefits from public officials and, on the other, the ordinary, and completely legal, inequalities intrinsic to organized interest politics. The chapter also discusses the multiple factors that make it even more difficult than it is for individual input to identify in practice when a circumstance of equal political voice has been achieved for organized interest input. Finally, a large section of this chapter is devoted to considering whether organized interest activity can make a difference for political outcomes.
Beyond Organizational Categories
Authors: Schlozman Kay Lehman , Verba Sidney , Brady Henry E.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers several kinds of data that might show evidence of reinforcing or ameliorating tendencies in the paucity of organized representation for the resource deprived. It investigates whether, within any category, the organizations that have Washington representation are stratified by organizational size or budget. The chapter uses survey data about individual members of voluntary associations to query whether those who are active or are mobilized to political action in organizations and those who consider that the organization represents them are representative of all organization members. Finally, this chapter scrutinizes evidence gathered from organizations' websites to inquire whether the resource disadvantaged are gaining representation from other, perhaps more privileged, organizations in the pressure system.
Breaking the Pattern through Political Recruitment
Authors: Schlozman Kay Lehman , Verba Sidney , Brady Henry E.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers to what extent political recruitment can bring in a more representative set of activists and thus moderate the accent of the political chorus. It investigates ways to break a cycle deeply embedded in ongoing social and political processes, zeroing in on the possibility that the processes by which people are recruited to political activity might act as the circuit breaker. Moreover, this chapter finds that there is a process called “rational prospecting” in which those who wish to get others involved in politics follow a strategy of seeking out those prospects who are likely to assent to a request for political activity and to participate effectively when they do, with the result that ordinary processes of recruitment are actually amplifying the class bias in political voice rather than reducing it.
Scholars, Transmitters, and the Making of Talmud
Authors: Vidas Moulie
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines three passages that associate with the “conservative,” transmission-oriented aspects of Torah study the occupation with the two bodies of knowledge that the rabbis received: the Written Torah (Scripture) and the Oral Torah (rabbinic tradition). These passages are all premised on a dichotomy between the “received” knowledge of Scripture and oral tradition, on the one hand, and the innovative, creative aspects of study on the other. Building on the work of Daniel Boyarin, Jeffrey Rubenstein, and others who showed that the Babylonian Talmud places a high value on dialectic and analysis at the expense of tradition and memorization, the chapter demonstrates the centrality of this preference to the self-perception of the Talmud's creators and situates it within a polemical conversation among Jews in late ancient Mesopotamia.
The Debate about Recitation
Authors: Vidas Moulie
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines discourses about recitation in Zoroastrian and Christian literature. It first considers a Zoroastrian distinction similar to the one the Babylonian Talmud makes between the reciter and the scholar. It then looks at a Christian author who is also using a negative portrayal of Zoroastrian recitation and argues that in both the Talmud and the Christian text, the representation of Zoroastrian practice is employed to promote particular visions of Judaism and Christianity and dehabilitate others. Both texts contrast the performative, embodying practice of recitation with the scholarly approach that they promote, and by associating that recitation with Zoroastrian ritual they seek to mark it as foreign, as non-Jewish or non-Christian. It is possible that the encounter with Zoroastrian culture, in which recitation took a central role as a main component of ritual and as the exclusive interface to sanctified traditions, increased the importance of recitation for some Mesopotamian Jews and Christians.
Conclusion
Authors: Vidas Moulie
Published: November 2017

This book has argued that it is precisely when the Babylonian Talmud's creators seem most conservative—when they preserve traditions rather than reject or revise them—that we find their most profound break with tradition. It has examined recitation as a practice against which the Talmud's creators shape their own literary practice, as well as the authority of the Talmud as an important factor in the reception of the layered structure. This conclusion recapitulates the book's central arguments and considers their implications. It also offers some reflections on developments in Jewish history that directed rabbinic culture away from the concerns and contexts studied in this book. It suggests that even if the Talmud's negotiation of tradition and its ideology of scholarship were born out of a particular historical dynamic, they still belong in the longer intellectual history of Judaism.
FDR and World Order: Globalizing the Monroe Doctrine
Authors: Smith Tony
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines Franklin D. Roosevelt's liberal democratic internationalism and his efforts to assure American national security by constructing a stable world order based on the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which the United States sought to globalize in the aftermath of the Axis defeat in World War II. It first considers how FDR infused American liberalism with a healthy dose of realism about the appropriateness of democracy for other countries in the aftermath of World War II before discussing anti-imperialism as a component of American foreign policy. It also explores the United States's promotion of democracy and pursuit of a liberal world order as a means of countering Soviet imperialism. It argues that liberal democratic internationalism has been the American way of practicing balance-of-power politics in world affairs, and that the dominant logic of American foreign policy was dictated by concerns for national security.
Liberal Internationalism from George W. Bush to Barack Obama
Authors: Smith Tony
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the United States' liberal democratic internationalism from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. It first considers the Bush administration's self-ordained mission to win the “global war on terrorism” by reconstructing the Middle East and Afghanistan before discussing the two time-honored notions of Wilsonianism espoused by Democrats to make sure that the United States remained the leader in world affairs: multilateralism and nation-building. It then explores the liberal agenda under Obama, whose first months in office seemed to herald a break with neoliberalism, and his apparent disinterest in the rhetoric of democratic peace theory, along with his discourse on the subject of an American “responsibility to protect” through the promotion of democracy abroad. The chapter also analyzes the Obama administration's economic globalization and concludes by comparing the liberal internationalism of Bush and Obama.
Adaptation
Authors: Cronk Lee , Leech Beth L.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the concept of adaptation and how it is applied (and sometimes misapplied) to cooperation. It starts with George C. Williams's idea that adaptation is a “special and onerous concept that should be used only where it is really necessary,” which he articulated in Adaptation and Natural Selection. It then considers different levels of explanation that help clarify the notion of adaptation, fortuitous benefits and by-product mutualism in relation to adaptation, and the link between adaptation and natural, artificial, social, and sexual selection. It also explores how phylogeny constrains natural selection, the ways that adaptations solve specific problems found in specific environments, and how adaptation influences judgment. Finally, it analyzes the role of culture and language in adaptation and evolutionary explanations of morality.
Cooperation and the Individual
Authors: Cronk Lee , Leech Beth L.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the evolutionary roots of the proximate psychological mechanisms that underlie cooperation. The idea that there are specific biological mechanisms behind at least some aspects of cooperation is supported by recent work in behavior genetics. One common technique in behavior genetics is to compare identical twins to fraternal twins. Another study, using a different technique, found a relationship between voter turnout and two specific genes. Hormones provide another window onto the proximate psychological mechanisms underlying cooperation. The chapter first considers the most basic form of cooperation, reciprocity, before discussing its relation to culture, the avoidance of individuals prone to free riding, and detection of cheaters. It also explores indirect reciprocity, generosity as performance, and hard-to-fake signals.
Cooperation Emergent
Authors: Cronk Lee , Leech Beth L.
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores the concept of emergence in relation to cooperation, and more specifically how social interactions can lead to the spontaneous emergence of norms, conventions, and other social institutions that help coordinate social behavior. People can coordinate their social behaviors if they have common knowledge both about how to do so and about the fact that everyone else also knows how to do so. Such common knowledge is often enshrined in norms about social behavior, for example, which side of the road to drive on. The chapter first provides a brief historical background on the importance of emergence in the social sciences before discussing instances in which emergent phenomena help people cooperate. It also considers how mathematics helps shape cooperation and the ways that power law curves, criticality, and assurance games contribute to the study of cooperation.
Meeting at Grand Central
Authors: Cronk Lee , Leech Beth L.
Published: November 2017

This chapter summarizes the book's findings regarding cooperation, coordination, and collective action as well as adaptation and the role that organizations play in fostering cooperation. It first considers four vignettes, each highlighting a contrast between a situation in which cooperation did occur and one in which it did not: water as a common-pool resource, grassroots justice in Tanzania, slave rebellions, and coordinated and uncoordinated air traffic. It then offers some observations regarding the relationship between the social and life sciences, with particular emphasis on consilience, emergence, and the scientific division of labor. The chapter explains how consilience is made possible by emergence and cites the study of cooperation as an excellent example of how the division of labor among the sciences can lead to a wide range of complementary insights regarding specific social phenomena.
The Road to War
Authors: Ferris Jesse
Published: November 2017

This chapter outlines the course of events from Syria's decision to secede from the United Arab Republic in September 1961 to Egypt's decision to intervene in the incipient civil war in Yemen exactly one year later. Sparked by humiliation at the Syrian secession, the intervention was the culmination of a decade of support for revolutionary movements on the Arabian Peninsula, which ultimately aimed at toppling the Saudi monarchy. The hastily made decision to send military forces to San‘ā’ was taken under the cloud of a power struggle within the Nasser regime, which carried serious consequences for military preparedness in June 1967.
The Six-Day War and the End of the Intervention in Yemen
Authors: Ferris Jesse
Published: November 2017

This chapter brings the story of the Egyptian intervention to a close. Covering the momentous year of 1967, it exposes the little appreciated link between inter-Arab tensions and the Arab–Israeli conflict and provides a revisionist interpretation of the Six-Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi–Egyptian struggle over Yemen. Egypt's defeat forced Nasser to confront the necessity of withdrawing his forces from the Arabian Peninsula and accepting Saudi financial aid. Both acts presaged a crucial shift in the regional balance of power in the late twentieth century as a result of the civil war in Yemen: the decline of Egypt and the rise of Saudi Arabia.
Walking on Stilts
Authors: Prendergast Christopher
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines Marcel Proust's use of the term “metaphor” in À la recherche du temps perdu, focusing in particular on a paragraph in which the image of heights is transferred to the aged Duc de Guermantes, figured as walking on living stilts from which one must inevitably fall. The metaphor of stilts is a clownish transformation of the metaphor of altitude, but the comedy has perhaps more than just thematic value, in the implied contrast between youth and age. The chapter also considers Proust's explicit comparison of Elstir's painting to poetic metaphor that is suggestive of an unstated similarity to—or tacit mise en abyme of—his own writing. The analogical track, the chapter asserts, is a self-confirming circle in which poetic metaphor furnishes an analogue for Elstir's painterly art, while the latter in turn stands as an analogue of Proust's literary art.
Why Theorize and Can You Learn to Do It?
Authors: Swedberg Richard
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter begins with a description of a crime solved in the summer of 1879 to shed some light on the importance of theory in social science. The victim of the crime, and also the person who solved it, was philosopher and scientist Charles S. Peirce. In a letter to his friend, he described what had happened as an instance of the “theory why it is so that people so often guess right.” Guessing, in Peirce's view, plays a crucial role in scientific research. It is precisely through guessing that the most important part of the scientific analysis is produced—namely, the explanation. The term that Peirce most often used in his work for the guess of a hypothesis is abduction. Human beings, as he saw it, are endowed by nature with a capacity to come up with explanations. They have a “faculty of guessing,” without which science would not be possible in the first place.
Imagination and Art
Authors: Swedberg Richard
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the role of imagination and the arts in helping social scientists to theorize well. However deep one's basic knowledge of social theory is, and however many concepts, mechanisms, and theories one knows, unless this knowledge is used in an imaginative way, the result will be dull and noncreative. A good research topic should among other things operate as an analogon—that is, it should be able to set off the theoretical imagination of the social scientist. Then, when a social scientist writes, he or she may want to write in such a way that the reader's theoretical imagination is stirred. Besides imagination, the chapter also discusses the relationship of social theory to art. There are a number of reason for this, including the fact that in modern society, art is perceived as the height of imagination and creativity.
The Long Swings of Employment, Investment, and Asset Prices
Authors: Zoega Gylfi
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the long swings of employment, investment, and asset prices. It highlights one stylized fact that a model of the natural rate of unemployment should be able to take into account: the relationship among unemployment, investment, and share prices that is observed in the data. Although this relationship is often ignored, it provides a justification for some recent models of the natural rate. The chapter first considers a moving natural rate of unemployment before discussing the relationship between the long swings of employment and asset price swings. It then introduces a stripped-down natural rate model that generates a relationship among the natural rate of unemployment, investment, and asset prices. It also describes how financial crises are linked to changes in asset prices, investment, and employment.
Imperfect Knowledge, Asset Price Swings, and Structural Slumps
Authors: Juselius Katarina
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the relationship between speculation in the currency markets and aggregate activity in the real economy by drawing on the Structural Slumps theory and the theory of Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE). It first considers exchange rate determination in two models, one based on the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) and the other on the theory of IKE, before discussing some general principles for how to structure the observed persistence in the data, and how these principles can be used in the cointegrated vector autoregressive model. The chapter also explains how foreign currency speculation under IKE interacts with a customer market economy where profit shares are adjusting to fluctuations in real exchange rates and where the natural rate of unemployment is a function of nonstationary real long-term interest rates.
India, Tibet, China, Byzantium, and Other Control Cases
Authors: Beckwith Christopher I.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the essential elements that produced a full scientific culture in Western Europe by comparing the constituent elements in the one culture in which it developed with other cultures that had the same constitutive elements but did not develop science. These are the control cases, which include India, Tibet, China, and the Byzantine Empire. The first civilization in the world to develop a full scientific culture was medieval Western Europe. It led directly to the scientific revolution—during which some changes to the details of the constituent elements took place—and continued on down to modern science. The essential elements of medieval science were introduced to Western Europe via Classical Arabic civilization. The chapter describes the appearance of science in Medieval Latin Europe and the decline of science in the medieval Islamic world.
Boilerplate
Authors: Radin Margaret Jane
Published: November 2017

Boilerplate—the fine-print terms and conditions that we become subject to when we click “I agree” online, rent an apartment, or enter an employment contract, for example—pervades all aspects of our modern lives. On a daily basis, most of us accept boilerplate provisions without realizing that should a dispute arise about a purchased good or service, the nonnegotiable boilerplate terms can deprive us of our right to jury trial and relieve providers of responsibility for harm. Boilerplate is the first comprehensive treatment of the problems posed by the increasing use of these terms, demonstrating how their use has degraded traditional notions of consent, agreement, and contract, and sacrificed core rights whose loss threatens the democratic order. This book examines attempts to justify the use of boilerplate provisions by claiming either that recipients freely consent to them or that economic efficiency demands them, and it finds these justifications wanting. It argues that our courts, legislatures, and regulatory agencies have fallen short in their evaluation and oversight of the use of boilerplate clauses. To improve legal evaluation of boilerplate, the book offers a new analytical framework, one that takes into account the nature of the rights affected, the quality of the recipient's consent, and the extent of the use of these terms. It goes on to offer possibilities for new methods of boilerplate evaluation and control, and concludes by discussing positive steps that NGOs, legislators, regulators, courts, and scholars could take to bring about better practices.