bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Poor First
Authors: Armbrust Walter
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on an influential post in June of 2011 by a blogger named Muhammad Abu al-Ghayt. Abu al-Ghayt's post frames class by reference to ʻashwa'iyyat, literally “haphazard” neighborhoods, meaning specifically the informal neighborhoods that were mentioned in the previous chapter as the social location of a substantial number of the fighters in street battles. In the imaginary of elites, many members of the middle class, and more than a few media professionals ʻashwa'iyyat are discursively marginal, or even liminal in the sense that they are often depicted as a morally compromised urban instantiation of precarious lives—morally compromised because of the alleged social pathologies that go with precarity, such as drug abuse, crime, and fanaticism. That sense of precarity, moreover, is an effect of the neoliberal ideology that formed the economic and social conditions of the revolution. Abu al-Ghayt never uses the term “neoliberal,” but the ʻashwa'iyyat were as much a product of it as the luxury housing developments that absorbed so much of the state's resources for the benefit of elites. Both the discursive sense of ʻashwa'iyyat as the urban expression of precarity and its associated pathologies, and the neoliberal order that structured poverty and wealth in the decades leading up to the revolution, are implicitly invoked by Abu al-Ghayt in his blog.
Taking the Floor
Authors: Beunza Daniel
Published: May 2020

Debates about financial reform have led to the recognition that a healthy financial system does not depend solely on how it is structured—organizational culture matters as well. Based on extensive research in a Wall Street derivatives-trading room, this book considers how the culture of financial organizations might change in order for them to remain healthy, even in times of crises. In particular, the book explores how the extensive use of financial models and trading technologies over the recent decades has exerted a far-ranging and troubling influence on Wall Street. How have models reshaped financial markets? How have models altered moral behavior in organizations? The book takes readers behind the scenes in a bank unit that, within its firm, is widely perceived to be “a class act,” and it considers how this trading room unit might serve as a blueprint solution for the ills of Wall Street's unsustainable culture. It demonstrates that the integration of traders across desks reduces the danger of blind spots created by models. Warning against the risk of moral disengagement posed by the use of models, the book also contends that such disengagement could be avoided by instituting moral norms and social relations. The book profiles what an effective, responsible trading room can and should look like.
Introduction
Authors: Beunza Daniel
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter considers recent developments in financial reform within the United States and the United Kingdom. What emerges from these developments is a novel approach to financial reform, ostensibly aimed at bank culture but substantively centered on morality in the financial industry. This approach, the chapter argues, is really about ethics and conduct. The bank culture agenda thus stands in contrast with the traditional regulatory emphasis on outlawing misconduct and aligning incentives. Moral norms, unlike laws or incentives, do not speak to interests, but to underlying assumptions, prevailing customs, and the institutionalized definitions of right and wrong. By underscoring the moral dimension of markets, the new approach equates to an implicit admission that no amount of tinkering with bonuses or legal rules can, in the absence of ethical change, address the shortcomings of the financial industry.
Models and Reflexivity
Authors: Beunza Daniel
Published: May 2020

This chapter considers what the distinctive advantages of using economic formulas on a trading floor are. It introduces Max, a senior trader at the merger arbitrage desk and a mathematically gifted trader. Max bet on whether announced mergers would actually be completed. More importantly, he was able to combine stock prices with economic models, plot them on a Bloomberg terminal, and estimate his rivals' expectations about a pending merger. He then used these inferred expectations to refine his own estimates of merger probability. This allowed him to test his own hypothesis against the rest of the market, question his assumptions, or ponder what he might be missing. Such possibilities reduced the risk of mistakes in Max's bets, allowing him to take larger positions and realize higher returns. The case of Max revealed what was truly new, different, and to some extent magical, about the use of models in trading.
Managers
Authors: Beunza Daniel
Published: May 2020

This chapter shifts the focus from the traders to the managers who supervised them. It considers in particular the issue of risk management through three different managers: the head of Risk Management at International Securities, a senior trader who was in charge of Todd's desk, and a manager whom Bob had tasked with promoting collaboration across desks. The challenges and difficulties these three individuals encountered revealed the organized and to some extent hierarchical nature of professional trading. It also highlights the need for an organizational lens. The chapter's observations of these managers also point to a difficult tension between technical and managerial expertise.
Norms
Authors: Beunza Daniel
Published: May 2020

This chapter is about an observation that changed the author's preconceptions about the bank. It shows that the integration of knowledge across desks originally observed was not simply the result of material processes such as the rotation of the desks or a low-monitor policy. They were the result of organizational norms of collaboration that Bob enforced on the trading floor. Norms were enforced by Bob and a dedicated team of middle managers who fired or shamed deviant employees, constructed shared experiences in offsite meetings, and introduced a system of internal careers that rewarded following those norms with career promotion. Organizational norms, and not simply spatial features or material objects, were behind the remarkable degree of collaboration across desks that were observed.
Resonance
Authors: Beunza Daniel
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines Bob's handling of risk in light of his own reluctance to rely on the figures produced by the bank's Risk Management department. If not by means of numerical risk estimates such as Value at Risk, the chapter considers how Bob promoted restraint among his traders. It reveals that he limited the potential scope for losses by exercising judgment: he and his team considered potential scenarios, comparing alternative courses of action in the future. However, such judgment could also prove problematic. In 2001, Bob's judgment compounded the losses experienced by Max at the merger desk; upon further analysis the chapter shows that the losses were an instance of model-based loss amplification called “resonance.” Resonance here means the spurious confirmation of a trader's estimate arising from the use of economic models. The solution that Bob subsequently adopted entailed a greater reliance and appreciation for his traders' ability to intuitively sense danger.
Ambiguous and Interminable Emancipation
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Jews' “emancipation and civil rights.” The very term “emancipation” came to be widely applied to Jews after “Catholic emancipation” in England (1829). Thus, “Jewish emancipation” concerns first and foremost the Jews' inclusion, elevation, or equalization as a distinct religious group. Only in the twentieth century did emancipation come to designate alterations in the Jews' status as a “nation” or a “race.” The book analyzes the complex and multidirectional process whereby Jews acquired civil and political rights and came to exercise citizenship's prerogatives. Once one realizes that emancipation is an interminable process that is an integral aspect of Jews' contemporary experience, one is forced to acknowledge that there are in fact no settled answers to the most pressing political and indeed existential issues of Jewish life. Neither the establishment of the State of Israel nor the flourishing of American Jewry let alone the rebuilding of Jewish life in Europe has definitively answered emancipation's challenges. The larger struggle for political equality and the full exercise of citizenship, for Jews, by Jews, and for other groups, remains pressing. The only thing one can confidently assert is that this struggle is inherently protean: it will be populated by ever new issues and causes, by proponents and opponents whose appearance and actions one cannot predict.
Sanhedrin
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes how Napoleon's measures repudiated the unconditional emancipation of September 27, 1791. Napoleon reverted to a conditional emancipation reminiscent of Jean-François Reubell's punitive legislation of September 28, 1791. He drew on ancien régime precedents. The questions his commissioners drafted echoed those of the Malesherbes Commission (1787). The third article of the legislation of March 17, 1808, that came to be known as the Infamous Decree resembled Louis XVI's 1784 lettres patentes for the Jews of Alsace. In preparing the third article, Napoleon's ministers in fact consulted Joseph II's edicts. It had been no accident, then, that Napoleon said he was convening an “Estates General” for the Jews: for the Jews of Alsace, he had effaced the Revolution's “romance,” turning the clock back to May of 1789 to treat them as foreigners. In fact, the administrative location of the new Consistoire embodied this indeterminate status. If the Jews were a religious group, they should have been under the jurisdiction of the Minister of Cults, if a foreign group, then under the Ministry of the Interior. The legislation placed them under both ministries. The ambiguity of emancipation could not have been more manifest.
Partitions
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the second and third partitions of Poland (1793, 1795), which rivaled the French Revolution in destroying the ancien régime. The partitioning powers' conservative reaction to the French Revolution and Napoleon brought to the fore the tensions of partial or conditional emancipation. Although Joseph II's 1789 legislation remained the dominant influence, the partitioning powers introduced multiple restrictions that neutralized its ideal of parity. Prussia's 1797 legislation of conditional emancipation left Posen's Jews in limbo. It stripped them of communal autonomy yet still treated them as a community. Russia's 1804 legislation aimed to shift Jews out of the liquor trade and into education, artisan crafts, and farming. It integrated them “into” estates, albeit without parity of taxation. Meanwhile, Francis I's Western Galician Law Code (1797) aimed to introduce uniform law to the area; instead, it became one among multiple layers. Although de jure entitled to municipal citizenship, Jews were de facto excluded. They were also denied entry to many occupations Joseph II had opened.
Restoration
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter studies how, in establishing Europe's boundaries, the Congress of Vienna ratified emancipation's division into the three regions of western, central, and eastern Europe. The Congress affected the status of Jews in western Europe only in bringing equality to the Jews in Belgium. In eastern Europe, the Congress brought territorial adjustments; the larger legal arrangements remained in place. In contrast, in central Europe, the Congress failed to bring unification and a uniform law for Jews. The German states became a mosaic of disparate laws. Many polities revived the ancien régime. Moreover, the dualism of “state” versus “local” or municipal rights began to emerge. Italy offered a similar profile of multiple states, disparate legal statuses, and in many states a resuscitated ancien régime.
Central Europe, 1815–1847
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses how partial emancipation in the German states and Habsburg lands yielded varied and inconsistent statuses. Restrictions on population and residential rights were the basic holdover from the ancien régime: Baden's denial of local citizenship, Bavaria's Matrikel, Bohemia's and Moravia's Familiantengesetz. Posen's two-tier system—“naturalized” and “tolerated”—also echoed the ancien régime. These restrictions were the chief objects of the Jews' protests; they were also the chief impetus for emigration. Moreover, partial rights inspired public discussions of the Jews' regeneration in which Judaism was front and center. Although a vehement liberal opposition to emancipation was conspicuous, the tide began to turn in the 1830s and 1840s. Some liberals abandoned the policy of conditional emancipation or regeneration for rights; they instead embraced unconditional emancipation based on the principle of equality.
Russia and the Kingdom of Poland, I
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter details how Russia and the Kingdom of Poland displayed a specific pattern of emancipation. Significantly modifying central European legislation, tsarist governments held to a policy of regeneration for privileges that placed individuals “into” estates. Nicholas I employed regenerative policies of conscription and education. His codification of law solidified the Pale of Settlement. However, his effort to weaken the Polish nobility led to a concerted campaign to destroy the shtetl's economy. In the era of Great Reforms, Alexander II extended privileges to individual Jews considered deserving by integrating them “into” estates. His reform favored urban Jews; he continued to discriminate against rural and shtetl Jews. Indeed, his reforms gave rise to new urban Jewish communities. By the 1860s–1870s, the Jews of Russia and the Kingdom of Poland had begun to enjoy forms of equality, however circumscribed. Many Jewish leaders expected that in time the government would expand that equality.
Russia and the Kingdom of Poland, II
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter explains that as Alexander III and Nicholas II increasingly rejected the “west” and its reforms to search for an indigenous Russian alternative, they began to limit or abolish the privileges Alexander II's Great Reforms granted to the Jews and to impose ever harsher restrictions. Alexander III enacted a policy of “integral segregation” that differentiated the Jews from other minority and national groups. Meanwhile, Nicholas II's government propagated an ideology of “reactionary utopia” in which Jews were central, yet there were fundamental ambiguities. For example, his ministries were at odds and pursued contradictory policies. Moreover, the government promoted anti-Semitic literature, pogroms, and blood libel trials. In response to insurrections and the 1905 revolution, the autocratic tsars granted Jews political rights prior to civil rights, though Jewish leaders had to intercede to secure those rights. Ultimately, the tightening vise of tsarist repression resulted in endemic immiseration.
Mass Society, I
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter addresses how Europe became a mass society in the fin de siècle (1870–1914). Explosive population growth gave rise to major metropolises whose residents were divided by rank and religion, gender and class. The new conditions of the fin de siècle, mass migration from eastern Europe, and the rise of the new organized political anti-Semitism propelled Jews across Europe and in the United States to establish social welfare and civil defense organizations. The former practiced solidarity on a grand scale; the latter intervened to protect equality. The organizations' promotion of emancipation was predicated on Jews being a confession or religious group: by functioning under the guise of “welfare” and “civil defense,” they deliberately eschewed political claims. From the 1890s, new forms of mass Jewish politics emerged that contested that basic assumption.
Ottoman Empire and Danubian Provinces
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores how the Ottoman Empire comprised the fourth region of emancipation. Diverse Jews assembled in the Ottoman Empire as a result of conquest and migration: Romaniots, Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Arabic-speaking Jews of the Middle East. Living as a tolerated, inferior religious community, Ottoman Jewry became the largest and most prosperous in the world. After a period of economic decline in the eighteenth century, Ottoman Jews gained rights while retaining their religious community in the nineteenth century. Rights conjoined with the millet system comprised the Ottoman Empire's own version of emancipation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the multireligious empire grappled with how to transform itself, especially in light of the loss of its European territories and Christian populations. The Young Turks opted for “Turkification” and the erection of a secular nation-state. Romania's approach to the Jews' citizenship was probably closest to Russia's. Indeed, Romania seemed to emulate Russia's policies: after a brief period of inclusion it engaged in a prolonged campaign of exclusion, discrimination, and outright persecution. Romania defied the intervention of the Great Powers and Jewish diplomacy through prevarication and deception.
Minority Rights
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter studies how the Paris Peace Conference introduced national minority rights, thereby guaranteeing Jews equality under the League of Nations' supervision. Yet the signatory successor states pursued nationalist policies that in multiple ways subverted the Minority Rights Treaties. Some tried to deprive Jews of citizenship. Poland introduced a dual system of citizenship law; Austria tried to use racial categories; and Romania differentiated between Jews from the heartland and its newly acquired territories. All these states continued to use local citizenship law. Some states discriminated in still other ways. Hungary introduced quotas in education. Poland exploited the former partitioning powers' discriminatory legislation. Romania excluded Jews from the civil service. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union began by recognizing individual equality and extending minority rights, yet those auspicious developments did not hold. In the 1920s, the Soviet Union deprived inordinate numbers of individual Jews of rights and destroyed the shtetl economy.
United States
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This chapter looks at how the Great Migration from eastern Europe made the United States a center of world Jewry. The Nazis' murder of most of European Jewry magnified that status. While the migrants and their children were citizens, their rights were restricted. Thus, in the period after World War II, American Jewry's civil defense organizations engaged in a concerted emancipation campaign. Jews collaborated with African Americans, Catholics, and other minorities to end inequality. That campaign succeeded: from the 1940s to the 1960s, state and federal civil rights laws, and court rulings prohibiting discrimination, dismantled the structure of inequality. Those events constituted American Jews' second emancipation: it positioned the immigrant's children and grandchildren to realize the promise of American equality.
Ten Theses on Emancipation
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter presents ten theses on emancipation. One, emancipation is the principal event of modern Jewish history. Two, the term “emancipation” was historically polysemous: it referred to the liberation or elevation of numerous groups. Three, the emancipation process commenced around 1550 when Jews began to receive extensive privileges in eastern and western Europe and in some instances rights in a nascent civil society. Four, there were two legislative models of emancipation: conditional and unconditional. Five, there were three regions of emancipation: western, central, and eastern Europe. Six, the Ottoman Empire comprised a fourth region of emancipation. Seven, the equality of Judaism was fundamental to the Jews' equality. Eight, emancipation mobilized Jews politically. Nine, emancipation was ambiguous and interminable. Ten, emancipation was at the heart of the twentieth century's colossal events.
Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans
Authors: Whatmore Richard
Published: May 2020

In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the French Revolution, and the site of their demise was known as Genevan Barracks. The Barracks were the remnants of an experimental community called New Geneva, a settlement of Calvinist republican rebels who fled the continent in 1782. The British believed that the rectitude and industriousness of these imported revolutionaries would have a positive effect on the Irish populace. The experiment was abandoned, however, after the Calvinists demanded greater independence and more state money for their project. This book tells the story of a utopian city inspired by a spirit of liberty and republican values being turned into a place where republicans who had fought for liberty were extinguished by the might of empire. The book brings to life a violent age in which powerful states like Britain and France intervened in the affairs of smaller, weaker countries, justifying their actions on the grounds that they were stopping anarchists and terrorists from destroying society, religion, and government. The Genevans and the Irish rebels, in turn, saw themselves as advocates of republican virtue, willing to sacrifice themselves for liberty, rights, and the public good. The book shows how the massacre at Genevan Barracks marked an end to the old Europe of diverse political forms, and the ascendancy of powerful states seeking empire and markets — in many respects the end of enlightenment itself.
The Power of Place
Authors: Whatmore Richard
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes the origins of the Society of United Irishmen. This organization was inspired by republicanism. To many observers, creating a republic in Ireland presented an opportunity to create a nation in a unified sense, overcoming through shared commitment to republican ideas of equality the divisions that were responsible for the political corruption and economic backwardness of the country. This was what had happened in France, where a diverse and divided nation was becoming a unified, and singularly powerful, republican patrie. Indeed, the links between the United Irishmen and French republicans were especially strong from 1792, with many prominent figures in the movement spending time in Paris.
Extremism
Authors: Whatmore Richard
Published: May 2020

This chapter identifies Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the overwhelming cause of the polarisation of Genevan politics. It was claimed at Geneva and across Europe that Rousseau wanted to replace Christianity with a new religion, purged of the corruption and fakery that he perceived all around him. As one aghast correspondent told Rousseau around 1762, he should either respect ‘the errors of the peoples among whom you live’ or ‘raise the standard of Reformation, and become an Apostle’. The term ‘combustible’ cropped up all the time in discussions of Rousseau, and was applied to his ideas about politics as well as to his view of religion. Rousseau was increasingly accused of seeking to foment a war between aristocrats and democrats. This was widely held to be the end point of his political theory, the necessary prelude to the reformation of commercial societies that he imagined, through the defeat of luxury and the establishment of the sovereignty of the people, as the vital principle of political legitimacy, and as the foundation of a prosperous household economy within an agrarian republic.
Revolution and Exodus
Authors: Whatmore Richard
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes the events of the revolution as well as its aftermath. The représentants intended gradually to take power at Geneva by means of a new law code. Law would place limits upon the powers of the magistrates by establishing a clear distinction between sovereignty and government. For the représentants, there came the point when the magistrates could not be trusted to pursue the public interest. Constitutional change, in the form of the new law code, was justified especially when the magistrates wanted to involve the French in day-to-day politics, seemingly handing over Genevan sovereignty to the foreign power. At the same time, the argument was reiterated that the représentants were protecting independence and the established constitution. It was the magistrates who had once been the fathers of the state, living honourable lives of simplicity and frugality, but who had turned to luxury and selfishness.
New Geneva
Authors: Whatmore Richard
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the circumstances relating to the establishment of New Geneva. If the Genevans were from the first associated with the Ulster Volunteers movement, members of the governments in London and Dublin had very different ideas about their purpose. Shelburne undoubtedly had in mind combating France, and proving that Britain, whatever the views of the North American republicans, remained an asylum for liberty. In other words, New Geneva was indissolubly tied to the existing state of international relations. For others, New Geneva yielded a more positive image of Ireland. The support of King George III for the project may well have been because it promised the promotion of forms of Protestantism, and of the morals associated with them that he admired.
Pirates and Publishers
Authors: Wang Fei-Hsien
Published: May 2020

This book reveals the unknown social and cultural history of copyright in China from the 1890s through the 1950s, a time of profound sociopolitical changes. It draws on a vast range of previously underutilized archival sources to show how copyright was received, appropriated, and practiced in China, within and beyond the legal institutions of the state. Contrary to common belief, copyright was not a problematic doctrine simply imposed on China by foreign powers with little regard for Chinese cultural and social traditions. Shifting the focus from the state legislation of copyright to the daily, on-the-ground negotiations among Chinese authors, publishers, and state agents, the book presents a more dynamic, nuanced picture of the encounter between Chinese and foreign ideas and customs. Developing multiple ways for articulating their understanding of copyright, Chinese authors, booksellers, and publishers played a crucial role in its growth and eventual institutionalization in China. These individuals enforced what they viewed as copyright to justify their profit, protect their books, and crack down on piracy in a changing knowledge economy. As China transitioned from a late imperial system to a modern state, booksellers and publishers created and maintained their own economic rules and regulations when faced with the absence of an effective legal framework. Exploring how copyright was transplanted, adopted, and practiced, the book demonstrates the pivotal roles of those who produce and circulate knowledge.
Introduction
Authors: Wang Fei-Hsien
Published: May 2020

This chapter provides a background on the new conceptual framework on unveiling the intertwined history of copyright and piracy in modern China that most scholars and commentators have so far neglected to see. The law that defines what constitutes copyright and piracy are never merely legal matters, but practices and concepts formed and evolved in the specific local nexus of cultural production and consumption. The chapter also talks about the potential users of copyright legislations. Authors, translators, publishers, and booksellers may not have the authority to make copyright law, but they hold dear the ownership of books and are more deeply concerned than the rest of society with the issues of piracy. This book explores how authors, translators, publishers, and booksellers received, appropriated, practiced, and contested the very concept of copyright or banquan in Chinese, literally “right to printing blocks.”
The Business of “New Learning”
Authors: Wang Fei-Hsien
Published: May 2020

This chapter demonstrates how the profound intellectual shift triggered a commodification of New Learning knowledge and the sudden popularization of banquan/copyright at the turn of the twentieth century. The conventional narrative about the introduction of copyright to China at the turn of the twentieth century is a story of how foreign powers imposed their Western legal doctrines and systems on China to protect their subjects' commercial interests. The Chinese were forced to “learn the law at gunpoint,” yet the attempt failed because the Chinese state cared only about controlling the press and Chinese society did not appreciate the notion. However, the chapter also argues that, at the turn of the twentieth century, what interested foreign booksellers also interested Chinese booksellers and authors. While treaty powers tried to make the Qing state adopt intellectual property laws at the negotiating table, the concept of banquan/copyright began to be embraced and promoted by Chinese booksellers and some authors for their commercial interests.
The Human Age
Authors: Duncan Ian
Published: May 2020

This introductory chapter discusses how the novel, the ascendant imaginative form in nineteenth-century Europe, did more than broadcast the anthropological turn of secular knowledge: it helped steer it and—under the license of fiction—it pressed it to its limits. As the history of man broke up among competing disciplinary claims on scientific authority after 1800, the novel took over as its universal discourse, modeling the new developmental conception of human nature as a relation between the history of individual persons and the history of the species. The novel's supposed aesthetic disability, its lack of form, now marked its fitness to model the changing form of man. Novels could offer a comprehensive representation of human life—a Human Comedy—in a general writing accessible to all readers, mediated not by specialist knowledge or technical language but by the shared sensibilities that constitute “our common nature.” Thus, novels became active instruments in the ongoing scientific revolution, advancing its experimental postulates that human nature may not be one but many, that humans share their nature with other creatures, that humans have no nature, that the human form is variable, fluid, fleeting—as well as developing a technical practice, realism, to defend humanity's place at the center of nature and at the end of history.
Lamarckian Historical Romance
Authors: Duncan Ian
Published: May 2020

This chapter addresses how the politics of the revolutionary era charged the intellectual debates and institutional rivalries that were agitating the emergent science of the forms of life, centered now in Paris. Arguing for the reform of knowledge as a necessary condition of political reform, scientific authors opposed to the Bourbon regime rallied around Lamarckism, and transformist natural history more broadly, throughout the 1820s. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's protégé Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, emerging as a leading light of the liberal movement, made monstrosity a key research program of the new philosophical anatomy. Geoffroy sought to reaffirm the orderliness of nature by insisting that monstrosities were natural phenomena, subject to natural law-deviations, on classifiable principles, from the archetypal regularity of the species, itself subject to the grand law of “unity of organic composition.” At the same time, monstrosity provided a mechanism for the transformation of species. The chapter then looks at examples of historical fiction and romances that feature powers beyond human nature, such as Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.
George Eliot’s Science Fiction
Authors: Duncan Ian
Published: May 2020

This concluding chapter focuses on George Eliot's Middlemarch. The main business of Middlemarch, formulated as the premise of its opening rhetorical question, is with a scientific project, “the history of man.” While George Eliot's literary career coincided with Charles Darwin's, she did not immediately digest his theory; her fiction activates other developmental forces besides natural selection, and deranges the scientific thought it brings into play. In doing so, it churns up the not-yet-settled, volatile currents of that scientific thought-including Darwin's, who was not always (himself) a pure Darwinist. With that, it deranges its own aesthetic protocols, so often read as an Olympian consummation of Victorian realism. “To a degree that the catchall term 'realism' obscures,” writes Lauren Goodlad, “Eliot's oeuvre is generically diverse, bold, and experimental.” The chapter seeks to recapture the unsettling force of that experimentalism: to make George Eliot strange again.
Beginnings
Authors: Stroumsa Sarah
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the earliest manifestations of systematic philosophy in al-Andalus, as well as their religious and political context. The second half of the tenth century was a watershed in Andalusian intellectual history. The story of this turning point is twofold. The first part relates to the introduction of sciences to al-Andalus, while the second relates to the censorship of philosophical and scientific books. The censorship of books was accompanied by the persecution of their readers, which drastically limited, and sometimes paralyzed, the Muslim practice of philosophy as it was prevalent at the time: Neoplatonic as well as mystical philosophy. Yet these restrictions were applicable to Muslims alone. Jewish thinkers, inspired by the same suspect sources, continued to develop the same sort of forbidden philosophy. Consequently, it is these Jewish thinkers who are prominent in the history of philosophy in al-Andalus in the eleventh century; and it is also they who served as custodians of the forbidden lore until better times. The chapter also studies Ibn Masarra, who is commonly considered to have been the first independent Andalusī Muslim thinker of local extraction.
Theological and Legal Schools
Authors: Stroumsa Sarah
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the theological and legal scene of al-Andalus. In the medieval Islamicate world, the development of philosophy was tightly linked to religion and religious thought. As such, theology and law are constitutive of the study of medieval Islamicate philosophy. Moreover, theological and legal schools were often more precisely delineated than philosophical ones, and individual allegiance to them tended to be more clearly identified, or at least was expected to be so. The chapter then considers two Muslim schools—the one theological (the Muʻtazila), the other legal (Ẓāhirism)—and their possible manifestations among contemporary Andalusian Jews, both Karaites and Rabbanites. The Muʻtazila, whose adherents were known as “the proponents of divine unity and justice,” firmly upheld the primacy of the intellect as a divine gift to humanity. They also believed that the revealed text-that is, the Qur'ān-which is also a divine gift, cannot possibly contradict the ordinances of the intellect, as one divine gift cannot counteract the other. With these presuppositions, the Muʻtazilites set out to harmonize the two divine sources of knowledge: the intellect and the Qur'ān. Meanwhile, the Ẓāhirites relied on two primary sources: the Qur'ān and the ḥadīth.
Worlds of the Bourgeoisie
Authors: Dejung Christof , Motadel David , Osterhammel Jürgen
Published: May 2020

This chapter briefly discusses multiple factors which have come to shape global social history by the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that the making of the middle classes across the world can be explained only by considering the increasing worldwide circulation of people, ideas, and goods. It was from its start closely connected to global interactions and interconnections in the age of empire. In fact, the middle classes, whether in European metropoles or in colonial peripheries, were deeply affected by global entanglements. Many social structures that emerged in the long nineteenth century can be traced back to activities of such cosmopolitan bourgeoisies and in turn can be considered a reason for the emergence of these groups. Still, these structures were shaped by, and often the result of, highly uneven power relations, such as imperialism and the emergence of a global economy that was increasingly dominated by Western Europe during the long nineteenth century.
The Rise of the Middle Class in Iran before the Second World War
Authors: Chehabi H. E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter traces the formation of a modern middle class that emerged as a result of Reza Shah's rigorous modernization policies in the 1920s and 1930s. The state expanded the educational system and bureaucracy, reaching down from the court to the village level. At the same time, it fostered lifestyles and consumption patterns modeled on those of Europe, which this new and increasingly secular middle class embraced, setting it apart from the rest of society. Given its reliance on state employment, this was not a bourgeoisie stricto sensu. This new middle class existed next to the traditional mercantile elite, which was centered on the bazaar and closely allied to the clergy. In the 1920s, however, many Iranian businessmen adopted a middle-class lifestyle, and, as a consequence, a modern business bourgeoisie gradually emerged that was to some extent a link between the traditional mercantile elite centered on the bazaar and the modern middle class.
Cosmopolitan Consumption
Authors: Ray Utsa
Published: May 2020

This chapter demonstrates that, while scholars have long focused on the economic origins of the middle class, it is crucial to understand the ways in which it fashioned itself. Although the universe of the Indian middle class revolved around contesting colonial categories, the chapter shows that the project of self-fashioning of the Indian middle class was not an instance of alternative modernity, nor did the locality of the middle class in colonial India result in producing some sort of indigenism. This middle class borrowed, adapted, and appropriated the pleasures of modernity and tweaked and subverted it to suit their project of self-fashioning. An area in which such cosmopolitan domesticity can be observed was the culinary culture of colonial Bengal, which utilized both vernacular ingredients and British modes of cooking in order to establish a Bengali bourgeois cuisine. This process of indigenization was an aesthetic choice that was imbricated in the upper caste and in the patriarchal agenda of middle-class social reform, and it developed certain social practices, including imagining the act of cooking as a classic feminine practice and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. It was often this hybrid culture that marked the colonial middle classes.
Worlds of a Muslim Bourgeoisie
Authors: Motadel David
Published: May 2020

This chapter explores the bourgeois world of an exile group. Looking at the sociocultural milieu of the Muslim minority in interwar Berlin, the chapter shows that they combined Islamic and bourgeois lifestyles and values into a hybrid form of Islamic bourgeois culture. The majority of the Muslim community in Berlin was financially independent and highly educated. Most of them came from the upper middle classes of their home countries. In the diaspora situation, they could base their community on two bonds—class and religion. The sociocultural background of the Muslims in Berlin, their lifestyles, and the nature of their associations meant that they came into contact with educated middle-class Germans, particularly academics, students, diplomats, and businessmen, and to some extent were able to connect with bourgeois segments of the majority society.
From Global Civilizing Missions to Racial Warfare
Authors: Dejung Christof
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes civilizing missions which were organized by philanthropic societies that were established by bourgeois circles in both the European and non-European worlds. The emerging middle classes in the Middle East or in India, for instance, became engaged in civilizing missions in quite a similar manner to the European home missionary movement. In addition, journalists, scholars, and members of philanthropic societies time and again compared the European underclasses to colonial subjects and used their alleged “primitiveness” in order to claim the modernity of the European bourgeoisie. This may be evidence of the fact that the European middle classes did not consider social developments in European and non-European regions as distinct phenomena but rather as shared aspects of worldwide modernization—without, however, taking into account the emergence of colonial middle classes in that very period. The chapter further demonstrates that the belief that social problems could be solved by social modernization under bourgeois hegemony was ever more challenged after the mid-nineteenth century.
Race, Culture, and Class
Authors: Drayton Richard
Published: May 2020

This chapter takes a broader perspective, demonstrating that the middle class in every society has been both “middle” in terms of status, and “middle” in terms of its capacity for engagement with social groups above or below. The history of the global middle class is in essence the history of global processes of mediation. The post-1500 early modern forms of globalization had three key effects. First, the moment of European hegemony in the period from circa 1750 to 1950 was correlated with the internal integration of Western Christendom and its diasporas on the basis of ideas of “civilization” and “whiteness” and with an ever-expanding external regime of links between Western European and non-European social formations. Second, connected to these processes of integration and external linkages was the production, and growth in importance, of mediating groups in every corner of the globe, of which the European bourgeois was a local and privileged expression. Third, linked to this violent integration of international society, and the associated primacy of mediation and mediators, was a process of standardization of social imaginaries, manners, and customs, a pressure toward the reduction of specific complexity into general categories, toward uniformity.
The Lone Star Challenge
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the Advanced Placement (AP) program in Texas. No place in America offers a larger or more vivid example of AP's recent history, its widening mission, and the challenges of carrying out that mission than Texas. The Lone Star State illustrates the complex interplay of traditional AP success in upscale schools; ambitious efforts to extend it to more disadvantaged youngsters; robust, AP-centric charter schools; and an exceptionally bumptious and varied array of dual-credit alternatives. As in most of the nation, AP participation has surged in Texas for four straight decades, and the upward slope has recently steepened. The number of exams per pupil rose, too, spurred by governmental and philanthropic moves to grow the program as well as intensifying college competition among high school students. The chapter then evaluates the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI). The Fort Worth experience with NMSI—and the Texas experience more generally—illustrates the challenge of expanding AP to students who have not historically had much access to it or enjoyed great success with it.
Competition Stiffens
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses dual credit (DC) in its complexity, with a particular focus on how it has unfolded in Texas. It also looks at several other alternatives to Advanced Placement (AP): the International Baccalaureate (IB) program and the College Level Examination Program (CLEP). Dual credit has become a sizable part of what many Texas colleges now do—and for many it is now a vital part of their revenue stream. As a result, Texas today has more DC students than any other state, and the number is rising fast. Yet it is struggling to balance that expansion with concerns about consistency and quality across its many providers and instructors. The National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships is doing its best to establish quality standards for DC programs and is keen to accredit programs that comply with those standards. As of 2018, 107 programs in twenty-two states were on that list—but none was yet to be found in the Lone Star State. Nothing is simple in the vast and varied state of Texas—and how it handles dual credit in the years ahead will, at minimum, be instructive for forty-nine other states.
Does Platinum Bend? Standards under Stress
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that the greatest asset of the Advanced Placement (AP) program over nearly seven decades has been its capacity to set and maintain lofty academic standards for high school students and to sustain those standards during times when many forces push to relax them. That is an extraordinary accomplishment, considering all that has happened in American education during this period. Academic standards of various kinds have become a big deal, a growth industry, and an endless source of controversy, especially when accompanied—as they usually are—by student tests. Advanced Placement's nongovernmental character is rare in the world of education standards, at least since 1989. That was the year that state governors and President George H. W. Bush convened in Charlottesville, Virginia, and emerged from their “summit” with an ambitious set of national education goals for the year 2000. Congress created the National Council on Education Standards and Testing to “explore the desirability and feasibility of establishing national education standards and a method to assess their attainment” and a National Education Goals Panel to monitor and report on how the country was doing in pursuit of the summit targets. Many complications, modifications, and pushbacks followed. Ultimately, the entire quarter-century sequence left many hostile both to governmental micromanagement of schooling and, especially, to anything that smacked of government-prescribed standards, curricula, and tests. With just a few exceptions and caveats, the AP program has been immune to this suspicion, rancor, and resistance.
Elite Dropouts
Authors: Finn Chester E. , Scanlan Andrew E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines how elite private schools rejected the Advanced Placement (AP) program. Advanced Placement emerged in large part from the labors of a small cadre of representatives from privileged private schools and colleges. A one-line version of its original mission was to ease the transition of high achievers from prep schools into Ivy League institutions and colleges, giving those kids a leg up—literally “advanced placement”—on their baccalaureate studies based on college-level work that they completed during high school. Today, AP can be found in many places and, while solid scores on its exams still denote serious academic accomplishment in high school, that is no longer exceptional. One need not enroll in a posh prep school to participate in AP. What does this mean for elite private schools? In practice, it means that a handful of them have in various ways distanced themselves from AP—and their number is likely to grow, albeit in slightly hypocritical fashion. At the postsecondary level, it means that selective colleges, again mainly the private kind, are making it harder to earn credit via AP exams—and much harder to shorten one's time to degree.