bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Is Cannabis Safe?
Authors: Iversen Leslie
Published: November 2018

The results of safety studies in animals have been negative. There are very few human cases of cannabis-related death, and these are probably related to other factors. This chapter discusses whether teenage cannabis use leads to subsequent psychotic illness. It also discusses the difficulty of proving cause and effect. Effects of cannabis on motivation and driving are considered. The teenage brain may be especially vulnerable. Tolerance and dependence are real. The special hazards of smoked cannabis are examined, as is whether cannabis is a “gateway drug.” Finally, the chapter discusses whether there any effects persist after cessation of cannabis use.
The Recreational Use of Cannabis
Authors: Iversen Leslie
Published: November 2018

Until relatively recently, the use of cannabis has occurred largely in an underground world of illegality. In most countries, cannabis is considered a dangerous narcotic. Possession of cannabis, cultivation of the cannabis plant, or trafficking are criminal offenses, some of which can carry severe penalties. Although this is the official policy of many countries (including the United States and the United Kingdom), in practice cannabis-related offenses are treated leniently. Despite legal bans, there is a large-scale prevalence of cannabis use. Although legalization has occurred in Europe and some US states, this has not led to large increases in consumption. This chapter discusses the recreational use of cannabis, including prevalence, how it is consumed, and where it comes from. It also provides snapshots of legal cannabis use in the state of Colorado and elsewhere.
Conclusion
Authors: Mauldin Erin Stewart
Published: November 2018

As Reconstruction ended and the “New South” dawned, the ever-expanding Cotton Kingdom and the coercive crop arrangements it engendered formed the basis of a stagnating regional agricultural system that would exist well into the twentieth century. The inability of southern farmers to revert to the environmental status quo of the antebellum period helped stoke the resentments that much later would congeal in the Populist movement and created the conditions of the cotton South as they existed at the time of the boll weevil’s arrival. In the unforgiving soils of the Cotton Kingdom, the ecological legacies of the Civil War eroded the promise of the New South.
Black and Blue
Authors: Gibson James L. , Nelson Michael
Published: November 2018

It is not hyperbole to proclaim that a crisis of legal legitimacy exists in the relationships between African Americans and the law and legal authorities and institutions that govern them. However, this legitimacy deficit has largely (but not exclusively) been documented through anecdotal evidence and a steady drumbeat of journalistic reports, but not rigorous scientific research. We posit that both experiences and in-group identities are commanding because they influence the ways in which black people process information, and in particular, the ways in which blacks react to the symbols of legal authority (e.g., judges’ robes). Based on two nationally-representative samples, this book ties together four dominant theories of public opinion: Legitimacy Theory, Social Identity Theory, theories of adulthood political socialization and learning through experience, and information processing theories, especially the Theory of Motivated Reasoning and theories of System 1 and System 2 information processing. Our findings reveal a gaping chasm in legal legitimacy between black and white Americans. More importantly, black people themselves differ in their legal legitimacy. Group identities and experiences with legal authorities play a crucial role in shaping whether and how black people extend legitimacy to the legal institutions that so much affect them.
Interracial Differences in the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court
Authors: Gibson James L. , Nelson Michael J.
Published: November 2018

Despite a series of high-profile confrontations between blacks and the U.S. legal system, ranging from protests in Ferguson, Missouri to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act, we know surprisingly little about interracial variation in support for the legal system. This chapter uses data from the Freedom and Tolerance Surveys (FATS) to describe how support for the U.S. Supreme Court differs by race and ethnicity. We provide evidence that whites, blacks, and Hispanics exhibit striking and systematic variation in their support for the U.S. Supreme Court and that these differences persist even after accounting for the most plausible alternative explanations for institutional support. We discuss how racialized institutional support for the U.S. Supreme Court may hinder its institutional efficacy.
Symbols of Justice or of Social Control? Legal Authority and the Views of African Americans
Authors: Gibson James L. , Nelson Michael J.
Published: November 2018

Extant research has established that black and white Americans hold vastly different explicit attitudes about law, justice, and the legal system. What has not been established, however, is whether implicit attitudes—such as the networks of considerations that are activated by the symbols of legal authority—differ between blacks and whites. Earlier research has shown that exposure to the symbols of authority can have legitimacy-enhancing consequences, increasing the likelihood that an unwelcomed court decision will be accepted. Given the negative experiences many African Americans have with legal authorities—and clear evidence that blacks learn vicariously from the experiences of their co-ethnics—it seems unlikely that the finding from earlier research that law is viewed as just and benevolent is widely shared in the black community. Instead, we hypothesize, legal symbols are likely to stimulate associations colored with thoughts of injustice and social control. The American legal system is developing a crisis of legitimacy among its black constituents; understanding how explicit and implicit information processing systems affect black attitudes is therefore of crucial scientific and political relevance.
Change in the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court
Authors: Gibson James L. , Nelson Michael J.
Published: November 2018

Positivity Theory suggests that increased exposure to the symbols of judicial authority stimulates positive associations within individuals that help courts build and maintain their legitimacy. Indeed, recent research suggests that exposure to the symbols of judicial authority negates the linkage between decisional disappointment and changes in judgments of institutional legitimacy. However, this research has been conducted on predominantly white samples and fails to account for the possibility that individuals’ group attachments and experiences with legal authorities might affect the extent to which they update their diffuse support for a court in response to a displeasing decision. We therefore examine changes in legitimacy, relying on a nationally-representative survey experiment. The results indicate that respondents are particularly likely to withdraw support from the Court under the condition of seeing the symbols of judicial authority if they have negative personal experiences with the police, and if they are both particularly disappointed in the decision and do not have any strong group attachments.
Darwinian Evolutionary Theory
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: November 2018

Charles Robert Darwin, the English naturalist, published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and the follow-up work The Descent of Man in 1871. In these works, he argued for his theory of evolution through natural selection, applying it to all organisms, living and dead, including our own species, Homo sapiens. Although controversial from the start, Darwin’s thinking was deeply embedded in the culture of his day, that of a middle-class Englishman. Evolution as such was an immediate success in scientific circles, but although the mechanism of selection had supporters in the scientific community (especially among those working with fast-breeding organisms), its real success was in the popular domain. Natural selection, and particularly the side mechanism of sexual selection, were known to all and popular themes in fiction and elsewhere.
Two Visions of War
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: November 2018

Jesus apparently proscribed violence, which meant that—as was understood by early Christians—war is prohibited. As Christianity became the state religion, by focusing on our innate unhappy nature—“original sin”—Augustine devised “just war theory,” legitimizing the Christian use of war and specifying the conditions under which it could be fought. Augustinian philosophy influenced Anglican theology, although, by the nineteenth century, thinking about war was fashioned more to the needs of empire building. Darwin discussed war in detail in the Descent, in respects accepting Augustinian thinking about our original violent nature, but putting this in the context of natural selection making for a progressive climb to humankind. Unlike the Christian who thinks that war will be with us always, Darwin envisioned a war-free future.
The Bomb and Vietnam
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: November 2018

After the Second World War, Elizabeth Anscombe continued strong, arguing against giving an honorary degree to atomic-bomb-dropper Harry Truman. With the Cold War now begun, worries about the Bomb continued to trouble Christians and were a major concern of Methodist theologian Paul Ramsey. Then the horrors of the Vietnam War started to predominate, leading to a return to just war theorizing, especially by Michael Walzer, a Jew and hence non-Christian although sympathetic to Augustinian thinking. The American Catholic bishops also got involved, inveighing against nuclear weapons. Pacifist voices like those of Stanley Hauerwas (Methodist) and John Howard Yoder (Mennonite) started to rise. Some, like philosopher Robert L. Holmes, worried that perhaps the Augustinian emphasis on original sin makes one almost complacent about the probability of war.
Rival Paradigms
Authors: Ruse Michael
Published: November 2018

We have two recent writers on war, one a Christian and the other a Darwinian, showing that the familiar themes continue strong. In In Defence of War, Oxford Regius Professor of Theology, Nigel Biggar, argues that an Augustinian position rightly acknowledges original sin and the need for Christians to take up arms. He thinks the slaughter on the Somme justified and endorses the propriety of the Second Iraq War. In The Better Angels of our Nature, Harvard Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker argues that innately we are violent but that, over the generations, thanks to culture, we are becoming less and less warlike. Biggar is strongly committed to Providence, all is in God’s hands, Pinker is strongly committed to progress, things have and will continue to get better. We have now certainly shown that the clash between Christianity and Darwinism is less science vs. religion and more one of religion vs. religion. The case is made for Darwinism as religion. Looking ahead, now discussing in its own right the nature and causes of war, has the comparison between Christianity and Darwinism on war mean we can now move the discussion forward?
Introduction
Authors: Maharaj Ayon
Published: November 2018

The introduction articulates the two main aims of the book. The book’s exegetical aim is to provide accurate and charitable reconstructions of Sri Ramakrishna’s philosophical views on the basis of his recorded oral teachings. Throughout the book, the task of philosophical exegesis goes hand in hand with a broader cross-cultural project: bringing Sri Ramakrishna into creative dialogue with recent Western philosophers, thereby shedding new light on central problems in cross-cultural philosophy of religion. As a contribution to this nascent field, the book participates in the recent movement away from comparative philosophy and toward more creative and flexible paradigms for engaging in philosophical inquiry across cultures.
A Cross-Cultural Inquiry into Divine Infinitude
Authors: Maharaj Ayon
Published: November 2018

This chapter investigates the nature of divine infinitude from a cross-cultural perspective by bringing Sri Ramakrishna into conversation with classical Indian philosophers as well as Western philosophers and theologians. Maharaj identifies what is distinctive in Sri Ramakrishna’s conception of divine infinitude within the Indian philosophical context by comparing it with the Vedāntic views of the Advaitin Śaṅkara, the Viśiṣṭādvaitin Rāmānuja, and the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Viśvanātha Cakravartin. The remainder of the chapter ventures into cross-cultural territory. First, Maharaj briefly identifies some striking affinities between Sri Ramakrishna and the medieval Christian theologian Nicholas of Cusa. He then brings Sri Ramakrishna into dialogue with the contemporary analytic theologian Benedikt Paul Göcke, who claims that God is infinite in the radical sense that God “is not subject to the law of contradiction.” Finally, Maharaj triangulates Sri Ramakrishna and Göcke with the Continental philosopher Jean-Luc Marion.
John Hick’s Vedāntic Road Not Taken?
Authors: Maharaj Ayon
Published: November 2018

This chapter explores the British philosopher John Hick’s early and late views on religious pluralism in the light of Sri Ramakrishna. Between 1970 and 1974, the early Hick espoused a Vedāntic theory of religious pluralism—based explicitly on Sri Aurobindo’s “logic of the infinite”—that comes remarkably close to Sri Ramakrishna’s pluralist model. According to the early Hick, each religion captures at least one true aspect of the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality. By 1976, though, Hick abandoned this Vedāntic line of thought in favor of his now well-known quasi-Kantian theory of religious pluralism, according to which the personal and nonpersonal ultimates of the various world religions are different phenomenal manifestations of the same unknowable “Real an sich.” Maharaj argues that Sri Ramakrishna’s model of religious pluralism is more robust and philosophically coherent than Hick’s quasi-Kantian model.
Beyond Perennialism and Constructivism
Authors: Maharaj Ayon
Published: November 2018

This chapter draws upon Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings and mystical testimony in order to develop a new conceptual framework for understanding the nature of mystical experience. In recent analytic philosophy of religion, two approaches to mystical experience have been especially influential: perennialism and constructivism. While perennialists maintain that there is a common core of all mystical experiences across various cultures, constructivists claim that a mystic’s cultural conditioning plays a major role in shaping his or her mystical experiences. After identifying the strengths and limitations of these two positions, Maharaj argues that Sri Ramakrishna champions a “manifestationist” approach to mystical experience that provides a powerful dialectical alternative to both perennialism and constructivism. According to Sri Ramakrishna, mystics in various traditions experience different real manifestations of one and the same impersonal-personal Infinite Reality. Sri Ramakrishna’s manifestationist paradigm shares the advantages of both perennialism and constructivism but avoids their respective weaknesses and limitations.
A Cross-Cultural Defense of the Epistemic Value of Mystical Experience
Authors: Maharaj Ayon
Published: November 2018

This chapter explores how Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical testimony and teachings enrich contemporary analytic debates about the epistemic value of mystical experience. These debates center on a key question: are we warranted in taking mystical experiences—either our own or those of others—to be veridical? After briefly delineating Sri Ramakrishna’s views on the scope of theological reason, Maharaj argues that Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical testimony lends strong support to the philosopher Robert Oakes’s position that self-authenticating experiences of God are possible. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the argument from experience, the argument that it is reasonable to infer God’s existence from the testimony of people claiming to have experienced Him. Maharaj draws on Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings and mystical testimony in order to bolster contemporary philosophical defenses of the argument from experience. He contends, moreover, that Sri Ramakrishna’s distinctive approach helps defuse two serious objections to the argument from experience: namely, lack of adequate cross-checkability and the conflicting claims objection.
Risk, Failure, Play
Authors: O'Shea Janet
Published: November 2018

Decried as mere brutality on display and celebrated as viscerally real, combat sport has escaped nuanced reflection. Risk, Failure, Play addresses this gap, signaling the many ways in which competitive martial arts differentiate themselves from violence through risk-based play. Despite its association with frivolity and ease, play is not the opposite of danger, rigor, or failure. Indeed, Risk, Failure, Play demonstrates the ways in which physical recreation allows us to manage the complexities of our current social reality. This book suggests that play gives us the ability to manage difficult conditions with intelligence and that physical play, with its immediacy and its heightened risk, is particularly effective at accomplishing this task. Presented from the perspective of a dancer and writer, this book takes readers through considerations of the politics of everyday life exemplified in martial arts practices such as jeet kune do, Brazilian jiu jitsu, kickboxing, Filipino martial arts, and empowerment self-defense. Risk, Failure, Play intertwines personal experience with phenomenology, social psychology, dance studies, performance studies, and theories of play and competition in order to produce insights on pleasure, mastery, vulnerability, pain, agency, individual identity, and society. Ultimately, this book suggests that play allows us to rehearse other ways to live than the ones we see before us, challenging us to reimagine our social reality.
Introduction
Authors: O'Shea Janet
Published: November 2018

The introduction launches an investigation into how martial arts differentiate themselves from violence, countering the commonplace assumptions that modern, hybrid sport fighting is a descent into brutality and that traditional martial arts transcend conflict. This section addresses the central paradox of combat sport training, that practicing actions associated with violence—punches, kicks, takedowns—can render a martial artist calmer, more focused, and more peaceful. The chapter illustrates how frames and devices associated with agonistic play allow fight sports to contend with the very risks they engage. Investigating the differences between fighting, as consensual and mutual, and violence, as non-consensual and one-sided, this chapter puts forward the central claim of Risk, Failure, Play: that play consists of techniques and practices that enable us to manage fraught realities with intelligence.
What’s There to Lose? Vulnerability in Combat Sport
Authors: O'Shea Janet
Published: November 2018

This chapter continues the investigation of the separation of form and function in sport fighting, considering it as a process, rather than a thing. It does so initially through an examination of sparring as a reflection on limitation as well as mastery. Aligning feminist philosophy with sport fighters’ accounts of introspection, the chapter defines limitation as the physical condition that sets parameters around ability; in contrast, vulnerability is the conscious awareness of that limitation. This section moves on to a consideration of self-defense, countering the social distribution of vulnerability along the lines of gender, race, ability, and socioeconomic status with a reflection on the ways in which normative men who act in violence shield themselves from retaliation and, thus, imagine themselves to be invulnerable. This inquiry challenges the idea of vulnerability as a weakness, considering vulnerability instead as generative of ethical action.
On the Line
Authors: O'Shea Janet
Published: November 2018

This chapter examines the relationship between risk and physical play, distinguishing between danger—that is, external conditions—and risk as the experience of those conditions. Here, through reference to sport fighting and other so-called extreme sports, the section presents risk as a means of managing dangerous circumstances rather than unleashing them. The pleasures of risk-taking can offset the fixations of a culture of fear. However, the treatment of risk in American sports is paradoxical: high-level competitive sport risks players’ physical well-being, while remaining risk-averse as to outcomes. Risk, then, like vulnerability, is value-neutral, and requires a consideration of its circumstances: here, consequence and blame.
Conclusion
Authors: O'Shea Janet
Published: November 2018

This section contends with a central irony: Americans are among the most competitive people in the world, and yet we are among the least likely to play competitive sports in adulthood. This exercise gap is usually treated as a public health problem; the goal of this section is to treat it as a social and cultural concern. The conclusion therefore investigates the social and political implications of an American tendency to outsource physical play to experts: higher levels of fear, increased preoccupation with success at all costs, decreased creativity, and increasing rigidity of perspective and position. Specifically, the conclusion maintains that a neglect of fair play has dire consequences for democracy, a suggestion born out by the recent swing toward right-wing populism in politics.
Global Gag Rule
Authors: Rodgers Yana van der Meulen
Published: November 2018

This chapter discusses the evolution of the global gag rule and the existing evidence on its effects. When it was announced in Mexico City, the policy created global uproar with its abrupt change in position on population control and abortion. Pressure from domestic antiabortion groups weighed heavily in the administration’s new policy stance on family-planning assistance. Subsequent rescissions and reinstatements of the global gag rule have caused large fluctuations in US funding for family planning, as demonstrated in the chapter’s analysis of aggregate data. Evidence from qualitative studies indicates that the restrictions on US family-planning assistance under George Bush beginning in 2001 caused major disruptions in service delivery, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. This evidence is crucial for understanding the channels through which women’s reproductive health outcomes are related to restrictions on US foreign aid.
Impact of the Global Gag Rule
Authors: Rodgers Yana van der Meulen
Published: November 2018

Chapter 6 offers new econometric estimates of the impact of the global gag rule on abortion rates. The analysis identifies the policy impact as the difference in abortion rates before and after the 2001 policy reinstatement and the difference between countries with high and low exposure to the policy. Abortion rates are constructed using Demographic and Health Survey data from 51 developing countries. Results from logistic regressions indicate that the global gag rule is associated with a threefold increase in the odds of women getting an abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean, a twofold increase in sub-Saharan Africa, and no net change in the Middle East and Central Asia. Results also indicate no consistent relationship between strict abortion laws and abortion rates. In the majority of developing countries exposed to the global gag rule, the policy failed to achieve its objective of discouraging women from getting an abortion.
Conclusion
Authors: Rodgers Yana van der Meulen
Published: November 2018

Chapter 7 concludes by highlighting the three biggest messages from the analysis presented in this book: (1) the global gag rule has failed to achieve its goal of reducing abortions; (2) restrictive legislation is associated with more unsafe abortions; and (3) the expanded global gag rule is likely to have negative repercussions across a range of health outcomes for women, children, and men. They are simple but powerful messages that should be heard by policymakers over the voices calling for an ideologically based policy that fails to achieve its desired outcome. The chapter closes with a more constructive and cost-effective approach for US family-planning assistance that targets integrated reproductive health services.
'Siva's Saints
Authors: Ben-Herut Gil
Published: November 2018

The Vīraśaiva tradition, which developed over the last eight centuries in the Kannada-speaking region of the Deccan plateau in India, holds a unique place in Hindu society. Its members do not adhere to the hierarchical structures of Brahminical-centered society, and they practice a distinct set of rituals, such as carrying a personal liṅga on their body and worshiping it individually (as well as in groups). The roots of the tradition are linked to a revolutionary community of devotees of the Hindu god Śiva from the twelfth century, headed by the saintly figures Basavaṇṇa, Allama Prabhu, and Mahādēviyakka, whose poetry is the most translated and read literature ever produced in the Kannada language. This book takes a pioneering approach to understanding the origins of Vīraśaivism by focusing for the first time in English-language scholarship on a corpus of hagiographies about the twelfth-century devotees that was produced at a very early stage of the tradition. This untitled collection of narrative poems, commonly called the Śivaśaraṇara Ragaḷegaḷu (“Poems in the Ragaḷe Meter for Śiva’s Saints”), is the first written account of the devotees of the Kannada-speaking region, and its author was an accomplished poet called Harihara. By closely reading the saints’ stories in this text, the book takes a more nuanced historical view than commonly held notions about the egalitarian and iconoclastic nature of the early tradition, arguing instead that early bhakti (devotionalism) in the Kannada-speaking region was less radical and more accommodating toward traditional religious, social, and political institutions than thought of today.
Who Is a Bhakta?
Authors: Ben-Herut Gil
Published: November 2018

Chapter 2 considers the multiple ways in which the characters of the Ragaḷegaḷu embody the ideal of worshiping Śiva and seeks to identify the constitutive and recognizable component that is shared among the various model devotees that populate the corpus. I argue in the chapter that such a component can be located in the interiority of the Bhakta figure, an interiority that is indicated in the Ragaḷegaḷu through a specific set of key terms, the element that is most clearly shared among the text’s bewildering variety of Śaiva characters with their different religious behaviors, and is expressed through actions that point to an uncompromising devotional stance.
The Society of Devotees
Authors: Ben-Herut Gil
Published: November 2018

The book’s third chapter examines the devotees’ society as it is described in the saints’ stories against the background of the tradition’s ideal of egalitarianism. The Kannada Śivabhakti tradition is famed for its uncompromising resistance to the Brahminical ideology of social supremacy, and the Ragaḷegaḷu stories exhibit different aspects of this resistance, one of which is the social diversity of the Śaiva protagonists. But it is exactly this diversity that distinguishes the social terrain of devotees in the stories from modern notions about egalitarianism. After noting Harihara’s apparent lack of interest in social issues having to do with the greater society beyond the Śaiva community, I consider how, by addressing in complicated ways specific social areas such as work, wealth, and the roles of women, the Ragaḷegaḷu stories qualify certain features of the egalitarian ideal.
The Contemplative Elite and Capitalism
Authors: Kucinskas Jaime
Published: November 2018

This chapter introduces the contemplative mindfulness movement, its successes in legitimizing and popularizing mindful meditation, and its shortcomings. This case demonstrates how elite movements can initiate widespread cultural change by combining elements of social movement mobilization, institutional entrepreneurship, field theory, and cultural diffusion. Investigating the contemplatives sheds light on how a movement can support elites’ cultural pet projects across multiple powerful institutional fields. This approach to cultural change is particularly efficacious for elites’ and professionals’ initiatives for social reform, as they can draw upon their social networks, institutional resources, and symbolic power to advance their causes in the course of their everyday lives at work. While such movements may succeed in spreading compelling new cultures, they may struggle to initiate deeper structural social reforms.
The Contemplatives (1979–)
Authors: Kucinskas Jaime
Published: November 2018

This chapter provides an overview of what the contemplative founders stood for and why they sought to spread meditation into professional sectors. From the beginning, contemplative leaders sought to legitimize and popularize Buddhist-inspired meditation by institutionalizing their programs in powerful organizations and institutional fields in order to initiate progressive social change. The contemplative movement is an alterative one, operating on the theory that partial change in individuals’ cognitive patterns and behavior will gradually lead them to fully transform. The movement leaders hoped that spreading contemplative practices would promote and increase personal development and awareness of interdependence with others. They thought that this, in turn, would aid democratic processes and counter materialism and greed.
Accessing Institutions
Authors: Kucinskas Jaime
Published: November 2018

Through the accounts of contemplative leaders, this chapter shows how the mindful elite promoted meditation across a variety of secular institutional fields. They began by convening elite sympathizers and using their social influence as insiders in wide-ranging professional organizations to bring contemplative intervention programs into their workplaces across institutions. Once their programs were established, interventions in reputable organizations, such as Google and Stanford University, became benchmark programs. Others in similar kinds of organizations, and the public, could refer to these programs as exemplars demonstrating the efficacy and legitimacy of contemplative practice. From there, as scientific research and media accounts of mindfulness were published and gained traction, the legitimacy of mindfulness was bolstered and the practices diffused more widely in mainstream culture.
The Construction Site
Authors: Slobin Mark
Published: November 2018

The chapter opens with the author’s personal and family musical formation as examples of how family, school and other early settings shape urban musical lives. Next comes a collage of short quotes from a couple dozen Detroiters to suggest how different types of early influences form musicians’ identities more generally. A short closing section discusses how the availability of many different musical sources within a metropolis helps to shape personal profiles, even as social distance keeps some styles and performances of music inaccessible.
The Traffic Circle
Authors: Slobin Mark
Published: November 2018

This chapter examines the formative role of public school music in shaping the lives and careers of Detroit’s stellar cast of kids who became major jazz artists and eminent classical music figures. A discussion of national trends in music education shifts to Detroit’s school music history. There follows a detailed account of music in a junior high and a comparison and contrast of two remarkable high schools: the all-black Miller High and the nationally renowned music program of the magnet school Cass Tech, exploring figures such as Yusuf Lateef and Ron Carter and looking at the career paths that followed high school training.
Merging Traffic
Authors: Slobin Mark
Published: November 2018

This chapter surveys the institutions and movements that brought together the city’s musical life with the aim of merging disparate styles, trends, and personnel. First comes the auto industry, based on archival sources from Ford and General Motors that show how the companies deployed music for worker morale and company promotion. The complementary work of labor follows, through the United Auto Workers’ songs. Next comes the counterculture’s musical moment in the age of the folk revival and the artist collectives of the 1950s–1960s. Motown offers a special case of African American entrepreneurial merging of musical talent and style. The chapter closes with a look at the media—radio and newspapers—with their influential role in bringing audiences together, through music, in a city known for segregation, oppressive policing, and occasional outbursts of violence.
The City in the Rearview Mirror
Authors: Slobin Mark
Published: November 2018

This chapter mines the retrospective, reflective work of writers and artists who grew up in Detroit and have looked back at how the city shaped their work, particularly in terms of music. Quotes from poems and writings show how the book and its author’s stake in memory as history and source material is shared by a number of creative Detroiters. Featured artists include Philip Levine, Mike Kelley, Marge Piercy, and Crystal Williams. Philip Levine Mike Kelley
Reviving and Reforming Calcutta’s Hindu Past
Authors: Moodie Deonnie
Published: November 2018

In their English- and Bengali-language journal articles and books, middle-class Bengali Hindu authors at the turn of the twentieth century lifted Kālīghāṭ out of the realm of mythology and superstition and embedded it in the realm of linear history and rationality. They further wrote Kālīghāṭ’s ritual practices into a monolithic, non-violent form of Hinduism using rhetoric that was deeply ensconced in the then-emerging language of Hindu reformers. The work of these men in particular would be deemed incorrect or unimportant to many Hindus of their own time. Yet they set the precedent for later middle-class actors to embrace Kālīghāṭ as a symbol of Hindu identity, while also reforming it so that it might symbolize a Hindu identity that is modern.
Conclusion
Authors: Moodie Deonnie
Published: November 2018

Modernizers work to refine the behavior and decorum of Hindus and to cleanse the goddess Kālī for bourgeois global consumption. They work together with state bodies to make Hindu temples part of the modern urban skyline and to facilitate transportation between them, creating pilgrimage circuits in their cities. Even as they are contested, such efforts are sure to affect some changes in the ways that Hinduism is practiced and in the ways India’s urban landscapes are experienced. When temples change, so does Hinduism, and so do Indian cities. In order to understand the role that Hinduism plays in modern Indian society—and the kinds of major temple-building and -renovating projects that are so ubiquitous throughout India today, from Kolkata to Chennai, Delhi, and Bangalore—scholarly attention must be trained more closely to the intertwined discourses of temples and modernity as they have developed in India from the colonial period to the present.
Introduction
Authors: Hunt Luke William
Published: November 2018

The introduction situates the book in the present global context while at the same time highlighting specific concerns within the United States. Some of those concerns are based upon the view that liberal states are drifting toward “fascist” policies, from mass surveillance and police militarization to the backlash against ethnic and cultural minorities. With this in mind, the book aims for a general analysis of policing in the liberal tradition that draws upon US jurisprudence for examples of that tradition. This approach is based upon the idea that different liberal societies have deep jurisprudential and political resonances (rooted in, say, John Locke’s philosophy) that connect them philosophically in a very basic way. The result is a multidisciplinary book that develops organically by engaging in discussions about political philosophy, constitutional law, institutional materials and regulations, and the details of police work.
The Role and Legitimacy of Police in the Liberal Polity
Authors: Hunt Luke William
Published: November 2018

Chapter 1 begins with a broad introduction to the police by pursuing the seemingly simple question: What do the police do, and why do they have authority to do it? After sketching several aspects of the police’s law enforcement role—such as the use of deadly force, deception, surveillance, and discretion—the chapter considers the basis of the police’s authority to engage in such acts. Even if everyone agrees that such actions are justified, that does not necessarily answer the question about authority. One way to answer the question is to say that police have authority in virtue of the state’s legitimacy—the moral right to command and be obeyed. After a discussion of reciprocation theories of legitimacy and their relation to the liberal tradition, the chapter closes with a brief examination of alternative approaches that one might take in identifying the limits of the police’s power.
Policing as Nonideal Governance by Law
Authors: Hunt Luke William
Published: November 2018

The goal of this chapter is, first, to set forth a principled method for the evaluation and pursuit of nonideal policies that address injustice and, second, to describe the broad outline of an ideal theory of justice for which those nonideal policies might aim. Building upon work by A. John Simmons, the chapter first embraces a Rawlsian methodology in which nonideal policies must (1) be morally permissible, (2) be politically possible, (3) be effective, and (4) prioritize grievances based upon severity. The chapter then sets forth some of the central components of a broadly defined ideal theory of justice in the liberal tradition, including a pre-political conception of persons as free and equal, a conception of political community as a cooperative scheme in which persons reciprocate, and a commitment to the rule of law in balancing competing claims of liberty where persons do not reciprocate.
Policing and the Priority of Liberal Personhood
Authors: Hunt Luke William
Published: November 2018

This chapter suggests that the state’s power to address injustice is constrained by a priority rule regarding the liberal conception of persons. Although the prior chapter described how a broadly outlined ideal theory includes the pre-political conception of persons as free and equal, this chapter describes how a richer conception of liberal personhood is illuminated through the interplay between ideal theory and the reality of law-breaking with which nonideal theory is concerned. The upshot is that if the elements of the yielded conception of liberal personhood track the principles of a broadly defined ideal theory of justice in the liberal tradition, then the commitment to that conception of the person is foundational to liberalism itself. Any affront to one would be an affront to the other. The chapter develops a tripartite conception of liberal personhood: reciprocator and moral agent, which illuminate the third facet of human dignity.
Confidential Human Sources and Unconscionability
Authors: Hunt Luke William
Published: November 2018

Chapter 4 begins the applied part of the book by examining modern law enforcement tactics in light of the theoretical framework from the prior chapters. The chapter explores the extent to which agreements between the police and informants track the structure of legal contracts. The central argument is that the underlying normative principles of the legal doctrine of unconscionability provide weight in determining whether these agreements are justified. In the cases in question, the state leverages its bargaining power over a person to facilitate an agreement in which the person acts in a way that is (otherwise) illegal, as well as in a way that subjects the person to the risk of harm. If these sorts of interactions are unconscionable in the sense that they constitute an affront to liberal principles—including liberal personhood—then they cannot be construed as just even if they achieve a competing state end.
Entrapment, Prerogative Power, and the Rule of Law
Authors: Hunt Luke William
Published: November 2018

Chapter 5 first argues that the subjective test for entrapment is a theoretically and practically untenable method of evaluating sting operations: the test is based upon a decision procedure that gives rise to questions about the metaphysics of counterfactual conditionals, which raise more pressing epistemological, ethical, and political problems. Accordingly, the second goal of this chapter is to examine the limits of sting operations more broadly. This is done by examining the extent to which the police are justified in using discretionary power to break what would otherwise be the law. The chapter concludes by setting forth a theory regarding the limits of such powers—limits that correspond to the limits of executive national security emergency powers in the liberal tradition. The upshot is that any theory of entrapment and sting operations must exist within the broader constraints upon the police’s power to break the law.
Surveillance and the Rule of Law
Authors: Hunt Luke William
Published: November 2018

Chapter 6 consists of three case studies that represent three models of surveillance in the liberal polity: (1) rule of law surveillance, (2) direct rule of law departure surveillance, and (3) indirect rule of law departure surveillance. Each of these three models is intended to illustrate the extent to which police surveillance is consistent with the basic liberal tenets discussed in the prior chapters—particularly the rule of law and the police’s use of discretion. US cases are used to help draw out these tenets, but the reach of the cases’ underlying principles extends well beyond their locality. This chapter is especially attuned to the way that technological developments have enhanced the police’s capability to engage in discretionary surveillance. The goal of this chapter—like the underlying goal of the book—is to identify the limits of the police’s power given the basic tenets of the liberal polity.
Land of Tomorrow
Authors: Mangrum Benjamin
Published: November 2018

This book analyzes changes in American intellectual life after the Second World War. It argues that sweeping cultural and intellectual trends undermined the legacy of social-democratic reform instituted by the New Deal. Land of Tomorrow offers a genealogy of these changes within American liberalism by looking to writers and intellectuals such as Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, J. D. Salinger, Ken Kesey, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and many others. It also considers the reception of many prominent European thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Franz Kafka. The major ideas and developments considered include American existentialism, theories of corporate management, aestheticism, the reception history of modernism, postwar anxieties about totalitarianism, and the history of cultural support for the welfare state in the United States
Introduction
Authors: Mangrum Benjamin
Published: November 2018

The introduction begins by assessing standard historical accounts about the fracturing of the Democratic Party during the 1967–1968 presidential election. The standard account presents the period from 1945 to 1968 as the “apex of American liberalism,” presenting the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 as a result of Democratic conflicts over the Vietnam War and civil rights legislation. This book shows, however, that the cultural ideas that received intellectual prestige during the postwar decades complicate this standard narrative. The character of liberal thought underwent vast changes long before the mid-1960s, turning against the legacy of Roosevelt-era reform. The contrast between the political fiction of John Steinbeck from the 1930s and Norman Mailer from the 1950s illustrates one version of the transformation of liberal political culture. The introduction also describes the methodology of the book and outlines the subsequent chapters.
Aestheticism, Civil Society, and the Origins of Totalitarianism
Authors: Mangrum Benjamin
Published: November 2018

This chapter argues that ongoing concerns about the rise of totalitarianism led writers and intellectuals in the United States to oppose social-democratic institutions after the Second World War. Familiar accounts about opposition to these institutions center on conservative politics. In contrast, this chapter argues that liberal thinkers invoked forms of aestheticism to combat what they perceived as the possible rise of totalitarianism in the United States. In order to document this under-explored trend in American political culture, this chapter establishes connections across writing by Lionel Trilling, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Hayek, the New Critics, and the American reception of Friedrich Nietzsche. These figures in postwar cultural life invoked aestheticism in the arenas of literature, philosophy, political action, and economics as a prophylactic to the perceived intrusions of an activist-managerial state.
Southern Comfort
Authors: Mangrum Benjamin
Published: November 2018

Southern writers Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor present the collusion of the American welfare state and a consumer economy as a source of existential alienation. This chapter considers their objections to the social-democratic institutions created during the New Deal era. Percy and O’Connor present versions of Christian existentialism as an alternative to bureaucratic politics. In addition to joining the concert of intellectual challenges to the legacy of reform established during the New Deal, their related responses represent the splintering of American existentialism in the 1960s. The political vocabulary of the New Left represents a competing faction of American politics informed by existentialism. These differing responses share a common valorization of private judgments of value. Both responses are related to another phenomenon, which political scientists call the rise of an “independence regime,” or partisan disaffiliation, in the American electorate.
Straightening Out the Gods’ Gender
Authors: Self Kathleen
Published: November 2018

Drawing on Bruce Lincoln’s argument that Snorri Sturluson’s Edda provides an explicit, indigenous pantheon, this chapter examines the place of gender in a part of the Edda, Gylfaginning. This text divides the Old Norse deities in a relatively rigid binary of male and female, a binary that provides one of structures that organizes Snorri’s explicit pantheon. This gender binary further intersects with other binaries such as those of light and dark, and of god and giant. Snorri’s systemization of gender certainly has an impact on modern scholars and neopagan, but not as much as Lincoln’s argument would predict. Instead, intermediaries such as Jacob Grimm elaborate on Snorri’s text to a significant extent. Frigg, the case study for this chapter, becomes a goddess of weaving, family, and domesticity in Grimm’s reworking. This image of Frigg is widespread among contemporary neopagans, especially the more conservative subset of neopagans. The result is that the complex and sometimes non-heteronormative Old Norse myths are re-read and redeployed to support the more “traditional” gender binary of male and female roles championed by contemporary, conservative neopagan communities.