bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Adler Eric
Published: September 2020

The introduction examines the sorry state of the humanities in American higher education. Especially after the 2008 global financial meltdown, the contemporary humanities are increasingly embattled; downsizing and even program closures have become the norm. In such an environment, humanities professors and their supporters have written many defenses of the modern humanistic disciplines, eager to stave off their downfall. Unfortunately, these works tend to ignore the long history of the humanities and offer unsatisfying apologias for the modern humanities. For this reason, it seems valuable to examine the so-called Battle of the Classics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when educators hotly debated the role of the classical humanities in US higher education. Such an examination will allow educators to provide a satisfying contemporary case for the humanities.
Skills Are the New Canon
Authors: Adler Eric
Published: September 2020

This chapter examines recent defenses of the humanities, demonstrating that most of them present a portrait of the humanities strikingly bereft of content. Instead of stressing the need for students to encounter and contemplate particular works associated with the modern humanities, these defenses typically vouch for the humanities’ value on the basis of their purported ability to inculcate various skills in students. Such arguments, it is shown, possess intrinsic disadvantages and vulnerabilities. Many apologists, for example, highlight the notion that the humanities supply students with the skill of “critical thinking.” But they cannot claim that the humanities alone are conduits for this nebulous aptitude.
Humanism vs. Humanitarianism
Authors: Adler Eric
Published: September 2020

This chapter surveys Irving Babbitt’s writings in defense of the classical and modern humanities. It demonstrates that Babbitt’s critique of the American research university and its philosophical underpinnings provides a more satisfying intellectual foundation for the humanities than do typical contemporary defenses. The chapter demonstrates that Babbitt offered a radical critique of professionalized American higher education and the attractively romantic—but ultimately problematic—conception of human nature that informs it. It shows that Babbitt fundamentally recast the humanistic tradition to fit the needs of the contemporary world. Importantly, the chapter argues that Babbitt avoided the skills-based rationales for Latin and ancient Greek that had proved so underwhelming during the Battle of the Classics. In their place, Babbitt underscored the unique role that specific humanities content must play in American higher learning in order for the nation to flourish.
Staying on the Sidelines
Authors: Levin Dov H.
Published: September 2020

Chapter 4 includes the second set of case studies designed mainly to test this book’s arguments about the causes of such interventions. These are cases in which the U.S. (at the highest decision-making levels) is now known to have seriously considered doing an electoral intervention but eventually decided against that option. Accordingly, after fleshing out the theoretical predictions in each case, this chapter includes three detailed case studies of the decision-making process that led the U.S. to decide to not intervene: the 1958 Venezuelan election, the 1967 Greek election, and the 1965 Philippine election. These cases provide strong support for the theoretical model as well.
Private Militaries and the Security Industry in Civil Wars
Authors: Akcinaroglu Seden , Radziszewski Elizabeth
Published: September 2020

Whether they train police forces in Afghanistan or provide military assistance to governments in Africa that are battling rebel groups, private military and security companies (PMSCs), or corporations that provide security and military services for profit, have been present in numerous conflicts around the globe. In 1984 only one international PMSC intervened in a civil war; in 1989 there were 15 international PMSCs present in conflict zones, while from 2003 to 2019 over 120 of such companies provided services during the Iraq war. Why do international PMSCs sometimes help with conflict termination while in other cases their intervention is associated with prolonged wars? And in what ways does market competition affect PMSCs’ military effectiveness? Relying on quantitative analysis of original data on international PMSCs’ involvement in civil wars from 1990 to 2008 and PMSCs’ human rights and fraud violations in Iraq from 2003 to 2019, the book investigates how local and global competition impacts accountability of these non-state actors and their contribution to the termination of major and minor wars.
Private Military and Security Industry
Authors: Akcinaroglu Seden , Radziszewski Elizabeth
Published: September 2020

This chapter describes existing international, domestic, and industry-wide approaches to improving PMSCs’ accountability in conflicts. It argues that monitoring PMSCs in the conflict zone remains a challenge for weak and strong states, though the problem is less severe for the latter, and limits PMSCs’ military effectiveness. The chapter argues that local and global competition among international PMSCs has the potential to improve military effectiveness by increasing accountability and shifting the balance of power in favor of the government, the most lucrative client of international PMSCs, with positive impact on reducing war duration. The focus is on improving military effectiveness in the area of skill and corporate professionalism, specifically PMSCs’ adherence to international humanitarian law and commitment to anti-fraud practices. The chapter shows why corporate professionalism matters for military effectiveness. It then highlights initial insights about the nature of international PMSCs’ presence in conflict zones from 1990 to 2008.
Fraternal Enemies
Authors: Jones Clive , Guzansky Yoel
Published: September 2020

Relations between Israel and the Gulf states are not anything new. In the immediate aftermath of the 1993 Oslo Accords, both Qatar and Oman established low-level yet open diplomatic ties with Israel. In 2010, Ha'aretz reported that the former Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, was on friendly terms with Shaykh Abdullah bin Zayed, her counterpart from the UAE, despite the absence of formal diplomatic ties between the two states. The shared suspicion towards the regional designs of Iran that undoubtedly underpinned these ties even extended, it was alleged, to a secret dialogue between Israel and Saudi Arabia, led by the late Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad.
Cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia in thwarting Iran's regional ambitions also casts light on Washington's lack of strategic leadership, which had previously been the totem around which Israel and the Gulf states had based regional security strategies.
Jones and Guzansky contend that, at the very least, ties between Israel and many of its Gulf counterparts are now more vibrant than hitherto realized. They constitute a tacit security regime which, while based on hard power interests, does not preclude competition in other areas. Ultimately, these relations are helping shape a new regional order in the Middle East.
Introduction
Authors: Jones Clive , Guzansky Yoel
Published: September 2020

Introduces the reader to the core concept of a Tacit Security Regime and how it now marks relations between Israel and the Gulf monarchies.
Israel’s Relations with the Gulf Monarchies
Authors: Jones Clive , Guzansky Yoel
Published: September 2020

Outlines the history and background of Israel’s relations with the Gulf monarchies from the early 1960s through to 2009.
Limits of Collusion
Authors: Jones Clive , Guzansky Yoel
Published: September 2020

While the TSR has acted as a coordinating mechanism, the limits of its reach were demonstrated by the Syrian civil war. Israel’s initial reluctance to get heavily involved was in marked contrast to the aid given by Riyadh to its proxies. Only with Iran and its militias operating ever closer to the Golan Heights did Israel scale up its intervention both overtly and covertly.
Conclusion: Scripts of Terror
Authors: Wilkinson Benedict
Published: September 2020

This chapter concludes the volume. It begins with a description of the strategic scripts encountered in the three case studies (Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) before moving on to a more in-depth discussion about why terrorist scripts (and terrorism) invariably fail. It looks at scripts as forms of narrative, and argues that as stories scripts are compelling, but as strategies they are unrealistic. It argues that terrorists are particularly susceptible to ‘narrative delusion’, but that it can affect all strategists, because the future is inherently unpredictable, and strategy is necessarily about coping with uncertainty.
The Necessary Double-Face
Authors: Gill Sam
Published: September 2020

The development of comparison as technique is essential to the development of a proper academic study of religion. Beginning with Smith’s groundbreaking study of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the several essays of Jonathan Smith are critically engaged to situate comparison in its long history as Smith documented it, including modes, styles, and classes. The chapter examines Smith’s careful consideration of the technical details and implications of the comparative method. Centrally, comparison must be motivated by difference to be interesting; things considered unique or sui generis are outside comparison. Comparison is engaged by the creative interests of the comparer rather than the naturalness of the items compared. Gill develops comparison as an ongoing iterative process, akin to joke and riddle, essential to persistent academic (and ordinary) engagement with the world, essential even to perception, classification, and the acquisition of all knowledge.
Juridical Politics
Authors: Field Sandra Leonie
Published: September 2020

This chapter sketches Hobbes’s early view of human collective power, arguing that he conceives of this power in exclusively juridical terms. Hobbes’s most obvious account of collective power is his theory of the sovereign state (or commonwealth, civitas), which possesses power as authority, potestas. The holder of potestas could be a popular sleeping sovereign, a more traditional ruling assembly, or a head of state, but in all cases the potestas itself can only arise when the powers of the individual members of the population are brought together in formal juridical union. This chapter argues that in Hobbes’s early view, there is no other kind of collective power; it offers no conceptual rubric to conceive of informal or emergent collective human power. This view is characterized as neo-scholastic; the conceptual limitation of the neo-scholastic view is undergirded by a practical confidence that informal collectivities will not be robust or politically troubling.
The Power of Producing Effects
Authors: Field Sandra Leonie
Published: September 2020

This chapter establishes a new interpretation of Spinoza’s political conception of potentia, from within his broader metaphysical framework. Centrally, the chapter distinguishes between, on the one hand, potentia operandi (power of producing effects, for better or for worse, with no particular connection to virtue), which is similar to Hobbes’s notion of power; and, on the other hand, potentia agendi (power of acting), associated with a thing’s essence and virtue. An entity may be extremely powerful in the first sense without being powerful in the second sense. Politically, this manifests as a distinction between merely having right and power, versus being in control of one’s own right (being sui juris). Sui juris status is normatively desirable, but in this chapter the relation (and possible divergence) between the sui juris status of a political collectivity and the sui juris status of the members making up that collectivity is not yet established.
The Cycles of Constitutional Time
Authors: Balkin Jack M.
Published: September 2020

The constitutional system in the United States evolves through the interplay between three cycles: the rise and fall of dominant political parties, the waxing and waning of political polarization, and alternating episodes of constitutional rot and constitutional renewal. American politics seem especially fraught today because we are nearing the end of the Republican Party’s long political dominance, at the height of a long cycle of political polarization, and suffering from an advanced case of constitutional rot. Constitutional rot is the historical process through which republics become increasingly less representative and less devoted to the common good. Caused by increasing economic inequality and loss of trust, constitutional rot seriously threatens the constitutional system. But the United States has been through these cycles before, and will get through them again. The country is in a Second Gilded Age, slowly moving toward a Second Progressive Era, during which polarization will eventually recede. The same cycles shape the work of the federal courts and theories about constitutional interpretation. They explain why political parties have switched sides on judicial review not once but twice in the twentieth century. Polarization and constitutional rot alter the political supports for judicial review, make fights over judicial appointments especially bitter, and encourage constitutional hardball. The Constitution ordinarily relies on the judiciary to protect democracy and to prevent political corruption and self-entrenching behavior. But when constitutional rot is advanced, the Supreme Court is likely to be ineffective and may even make matters worse. Courts cannot save the country from constitutional rot; only political mobilization can.
The Recent Unpleasantness
Authors: Balkin Jack M.
Published: September 2020

American politics appears dysfunctional because the country is going through a very difficult transition. Understanding politics in terms of recurring cycles can offer some hope in troubled times. There are three cycles at work: a cycle of the rise and fall of political regimes; a cycle of polarization and depolarization; and a cycle of constitutional rot and renewal. The United States is facing similar challenges as other constitutional democracies, but the US party system, institutional history, and constitutional structures affect the way that our politics processes these challenges. Hence there is reason for a guarded optimism. We are at the end of our Second Gilded Age, which will give way to a Second Progressive Era. Even in our bitterly polarized world, we can already see signs of how American politics will eventually depolarize, creating new opportunities for cross-party collaboration.
The Cycle of Regimes
Authors: Balkin Jack M.
Published: September 2020

American political history has featured a series of successive governing regimes in which political parties compete. During each regime one of the parties tends to dominate politics practically and ideologically. The regime rises and falls. We are at the end of the Reagan regime, which began in the 1980s. Stephen Skowronek’s model of presidential leadership in political time suggests that Donald Trump is probably a disjunctive president who brings the Reagan regime to a close. Politics during the last years of a regime are often confusing and dysfunctional, and this period is no exception. Trump may avoid disjunction and give the Reagan regime a second wind, like William McKinley did in 1896. Although this possibility is very real, it runs counter to long-term demographic trends. The next regime is more likely to feature the Democrats as the dominant party.
The Cycle of Constitutional Rot and Renewal
Authors: Balkin Jack M.
Published: September 2020

For the past thirty years the United States has been suffering from increasing constitutional rot. Constitutional rot is the decay of the features of a constitutional system that maintain it both as a democracy—responsive to popular will, and as a republic—devoted to the public good. The Constitution’s framers believed that all republics would eventually decay, so they designed the constitutional system so that things would bottom out before the country turned to mob rule, oligarchy, or dictatorship. They sought to buy time for democracy so that the inevitable periods of constitutional rot would be followed by periods of constitutional renewal. Constitutional rot often produces demagogues. Donald Trump is a demagogue. His rise to power was made possible because constitutional rot has been growing for a long time and is now very advanced. The good news is that political changes offer possibilities for renewal.
Underemployment in Industry and Services
Authors: Panagariya Arvind
Published: September 2020

This chapter shows that even industry and services in India are characterized by gross underemployment. The bulk of the workforce in industry and services is concentrated in informal unincorporated enterprises, where self-employment and casual employment dominate. The average value added by a worker in these enterprises is no higher than that in agriculture. Most enterprises have no hired workers, and when they do, annual wages are under 100,000 rupees. Whereas 75 percent of China’s manufacturing workforce is in medium and large enterprises, only 16 percent of India’s workforce is. The near absence of medium and large enterprises translates into very low productivity, not just overall but also in small enterprises. This is because medium and large firms produce greater competition and innovation in products, processes, and management. Medium and large firms also benefit from exposure to global markets. Creation of high-quality jobs requires an ecosystem conducive to the emergence of medium and large firms.
Walking on Two Legs
Authors: Panagariya Arvind
Published: September 2020

This chapter asks whether India can rely on an export-led, manufacturing-fed growth model. The question stems in part from suggestions that, given its success in the software industry, India can jump the manufacturing stage and go straight to specializing in services. It is argued that India has no escape from manufacturing, though it should also continue to exploit its strength in certain services. The argument for manufacturing is that only it can create good jobs for the vast majority of the workforce, which has limited or no skills. Tradable services such as software cannot employ these workers, and demand for non-traded services depends on domestic income. Manufacturing, being tradable, can expand by exploiting the vast global market. Moreover, as well-paid workers in manufacturing spend their incomes, demand for non-traded services rises as well. The chapter also explains why rising protectionism and the threat of automation do not make an export- and manufacturing-led model unviable.
Urbanization: Making Room for Migrant Workers
Authors: Panagariya Arvind
Published: September 2020

Economic transformation involves a movement of workers out of agriculture and into industry and services. The latter are predominantly located in and around urban areas. Therefore, urbanization is integral to transformation and modernization. In India, the process of urbanization has been extremely slow. The high cost of living and a scarcity of low-cost rental housing have in turn impeded the faster movement of agricultural workers into industry and services. A key problem behind this situation is the high cost of urban land, a result of a very low floor space index, complex rules on the conversion of agricultural land on the periphery of cities, the difficulty of converting space from one use to another, and the large volume of unused land owned by sick firms or various government ministries; poor transportation networks add to the problem. The chapter spells out reforms to relax these constraints.
Investing Productively: The Securities Market
Authors: Panagariya Arvind
Published: September 2020

Relative to labor, capital is India’s scarce factor of production. Therefore, it is particularly important that it is allocated to the most productive activities. Well-functioning financial markets are critical to achieving this objective. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on the securities markets in India. In terms of new issues, private placements have dominated securities markets in India, both in equity and in debt. When it comes to public placements, while there is a bit of liquidity in equities, the same is not the case in the debt market. The market in publicly traded corporate bonds is thin, with limited liquidity. This chapter offers a number of ideas to deepen this market. For instance, rules governing investment in these bonds by pension, provident, and insurance funds may be liberalized. The government may also partially de-risk long-term bonds for infrastructure projects through provision of collateral.
Transforming Higher Education
Authors: Panagariya Arvind
Published: September 2020

Thanks to the rapid expansion of private colleges and universities, India has been able to raise gross enrollment ratios in higher education at a satisfactory pace during the last twenty years. There has not been similar success in raising the quality of higher education, however. India has no universities in the top one hundred in any international rankings, particularly lagging behind in social sciences and humanities. This chapter argues that the key bottleneck is the highly centralized governance system flowing from the archaic University Grants Commission (UGC) Act of 1956. Drawing on the experiences of the United States, United Kingdom, and China, this chapter suggests a complete overhaul of the system, giving autonomy to colleges and universities in all matters and establishing an accreditation system that would evaluate all institutions, with better-performing institutions receiving a larger volume of government funds. Institutions will also be freed to raise their own resources.
Governance
Authors: Panagariya Arvind
Published: September 2020

This chapter covers three areas of governance: consolidation of ministries, reform of bureaucracy, and some selected aspects of economic administration. On ministries, it argues that India needs to eliminate some ministries while consolidating others. This will minimize inter-ministerial turf battles and speed up decision-making. On bureaucracy, the chapter calls for opening senior positions to competition, as talent must be brought into the government from wherever it exists. Other recommendations for bureaucracy include allowing officials to take short-term positions in non-government sectors, greater use of young professionals, reining in vigilance agencies, reforming training institutions for officials, and ending colonial-era practices. On economic administration, the chapter recommends creating missions for speedy reforms, a focused strategy for the expansion of exports, creation of a separate office for trade negotiations directly under the prime minister, numerous improvements in tax administration, a sunset clause on all centrally sponsored schemes, and transparency in fiscal accounting.
Nuggets: A Miscellany of Reforms
Authors: Panagariya Arvind
Published: September 2020

This chapter considers reforms in a few selected areas. On macroeconomy, the key recommendation is an upward revision of the inflation target. It suggests that when public sector enterprises incur losses and serve no public purpose, the government should sell them if possible and close them if there are no potential buyers. It recommends consolidation of subsidies to farmers and conversion to a single cash transfer via the universal Aadhaar biometric identity. It also suggests scaling down the Food Corporation of India, splitting electricity distribution companies into network and supply businesses and opening entry into the latter, and amending the Right to Education Act to improve learning outcomes.
Pakistan
Authors: Abou Zahab Mariam
Published: September 2020

This chapter analyzes how “the militants” turned to autonomous action and imposed their own strategy while conserving their close connection with the Pakistani secret services (ISI). In order for the militants to regain their influence over the jihadi groups, the ISI had to orchestrate a split in their ranks or create new, rival groups. The chapter discusses the radicalization of the Deobandi movements, which can be traced to the policy of conservative re-Islamization instituted by General Zia ul-Haq. It also mentions the way in which mainstream parties patronized the movements without consideration of the strategies that played a decisive role in the rise of sectarianism in Pakistan, and describes the impact of state actors with foreign powers and local players in a multi-scalar approach.
The Politicization of the Shia Community in Pakistan in the 1970s and 1980s
Authors: Abou Zahab Mariam
Published: September 2020

This chapter points out the prominent role the Shias played in the struggle for Pakistan. It highlights how most of the leaders from Paskistan were westernized and saw politics as a collective secular activity separate from religion. Before 1977, Pakistan was neutral and had no sectarian agenda. Shias were well represented in the army and the federal and local bureaucracy, and there were Shia ministers in each successive government. The chapter focuses on the reign of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto from 1971 to 1977, during which communal disturbances erupted occasionally during the month of Muharram that sometimes led to riots. It also talks about the Islamization policy of General Zia-ul Haq's rule from 1977 to 1988 that was based on narrow Sunni interpretations of Islam.
The Sunni-Shia Conflict in Jhang (Pakistan)
Authors: Abou Zahab Mariam
Published: September 2020

This chapter highlights the violent clashes that mostly happened during Muharram when the Shias perform mourning rituals or azadari in public and take out huge processions. Since the mid-1980s, parties and violent groups, often sponsored by Islamic states, have emerged with a narrow sectarian agenda. The chapter discusses how the level and intensity of violence has tremendously increased in Afganistan and Kashmir due to the availability of weapons and easy access to training facilities. Sunnis and Shias have killed each other in the name of religion in the Punjab, in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), in Karachi, and in the Northern Areas of Gilgit and Baltistan. This chapter analyzes the internal and external causes of the emergence of the sectarian conflict in Pakistan at the macro level.
Pashtun and Punjabi Taliban
Authors: Abou Zahab Mariam
Published: September 2020

This chapter attempts to analyse the dynamics of the Pashtun–Punjabi nexus and the areas of competition and cooperation between Sunni sectarian groups and the Pakistani Taliban. It outlines the links between Sunni sectarian groups and the Afghan Taliban, the impact of the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the implications of the relocation of Punjabi jihadi/sectarian groups in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). It also focuses on the consequences of the storming of Islamabad's Lal Masjid in July 2007, and it investigates the re-emergence of sectarian groups in Karachi and in the Punjab and its implications for Pakistan. The Punjab and Karachi have been the primary hubs of sectarian violence in Pakistan since the 1980s, but in the post-9/11 environment the Sunni-Shia conflict has assumed a new dimension.
Connections and Dynamics
Authors: Abou Zahab Mariam
Published: September 2020

This chapter highlights transnational interactions that are exemplified by accounts of the interactions between Osama Bin Laden and Pakistani Sunni militant groups. It acknowledges the role of the army, specifically the military intelligence known as the Pakistani secret services (ISI), an institution which decided to use jihadi groups against India in a more systematic manner in the 1990s. Networks of personal relationships often played a substantial role, especially among the former Islamic volunteers who fought in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1992. The chapter also highlights the Uzbeks and Tajiks that fought shoulder to shoulder between 1992 and 1997. It discusses the consequence that members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan were able to find in the refuge and protection of the upper Gharm valley in Tajikistan between 1998 and 2000.
Introduction
Authors: Colls Robert
Published: September 2020

In this Introduction the author outlines his reasons for writing about sport in England and the difficulties he found researching it. ‘Sport’ can mean so much and so little. ‘Sport’ is so various it resists definition. The author explains how he stopped looking for a theory and came to embrace the difference and enjoy the detail, trying to situate himself inside the sporting experience rather than outside it. Above all the author recommends sport in England as essentially an expression of liberty and belonging.
‘Bottom’
Authors: Colls Robert
Published: September 2020

Chapter 3 explores the violent world of prize-fighting in London and New York. It starts with a fight in a field in Hampshire in 1860. A lot of people have come down on the train from London to see a young Irish American hard man called John Heenan take on the considerably older, and smaller, English champion Tom Sayers. The fight is serious, not fraudulent, but ends in farce, paving the way for a sport already in decline to be over and done with by the end of the century. The chapter spreads out from Sayers Heenan to take on the part prize-fighters played in a plebeian way of seeing the English in their history. The ‘Fancy’, so-called, saw themselves as keepers of the boxing constitution. The ‘Bloods’, so called, saw themselves as defenders of the country’s honour. No sport aroused as much popular excitement. Boxing was a literary subject too. It developed a way of speaking all of its own and, in essay and metaphor, fighters’ unique ability to fight fair (no knives) under rules while giving and taking no quarter (‘Bottom’) either in battle or the ring, were highly prized expressions of liberty. The chapter ends with the Queensberry Rules and the birth of modern boxing as a mainly Anglo-American affair, now performed in theatres not fields.
Custom
Authors: Colls Robert
Published: September 2020

Chapter 4 looks at ‘custom’ from the point of view of the Poor who by and large saw it as a vital part of who they were and where they lived. Between 1833 and 1840 the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ sought to ban the annual bull-running in the Lincolnshire market town of Stamford. The rougher end of Stamford, including the magistrates’ bench, resisted. The nicer end stayed neutral, at least in public. Metropolitan liberals, meanwhile, pressed for a ban with the powerful backing of the Home Office, the NSPCA, and a young Queen. The issue was finally resolved by a court judgment backed by Dragoons and detachments of the Metropolitan Police who finally stopped the running in 1840. On the face of it, this was a simple matter of whether to torture or not to torture a bull. But the chapter takes Stamfordians at their word in their claim that the sport was an ancient custom, that custom was part of the constitution, and that the constitution was a vital part of their identity as free men and women (women featured prominently). Custom and practice was ingrained in the everyday lives of the people. ‘Being the People’ at festivals and fairs was a political as well as a sporting performance with a strong physical presence and plenty of showing off.
Moderns
Authors: Colls Robert
Published: September 2020

Chapter 8 examines the zeal for Association Football as the game moderns play. It starts by leaving the playing fields of Eton to describe an altogether different sort of sporting life on the streets of industrial Britain. Jack London remarked in People of the Abyss (1902) that a whole new sub race had grown up there, ‘the pavement people’ he called them, and although he doesn’t mention it, they were playing football far more than they were suffering from racial degeneration. For many working-class boys, football was a passion, their first craze, like rock n’ roll it was a way of feeling free in another otherwise hostile environment. Football for the workers was released by the factory acts in 1853 and by the 1880s it was an integral part of ‘the weekend’—a consumer economy that ushered in a new kind of urban life. Boys played football almost anytime anywhere. The chapter asks why the girls wouldn’t, or couldn’t. In the 1960s Arthur Hopcraft said football was ‘inherent in the people’ and so it was. Along with cinema, dancing, and popular music, it created new liberties and belongings. England won the World Cup in 1966. This was the pinnacle of footballing achievement by a class and a country that had given the world its favourite sport. Very soon after however, British football was in the doldrums, and it was violence that seemed inherent now.
Conclusion
Authors: Colls Robert
Published: September 2020

The Conclusion sums up and looks tentatively forward. By 1960, competitive sport was a vital and irreplaceable part of modern life. The older understanding of ‘sport’ as fun or showing off had lost some of its meaning. For most British history, the heroes had been military or naval, often posthumous. By the 1930s, they were increasingly sporting. From the 1950s, they were increasingly female and, from the 1960s, with the advent of television, they were increasingly seen as ‘personalities’ or ‘celebrities’ rather than heroes or champions. This experience was not unique to the British. All twentieth-century nation-states raised competitive sport as the mark of their success, nowhere more so than the Modern Olympiad, revived in 1896. In our own day, the commercialization of elite sport threatens to unhinge it from its roots in everyday life. But away from the glamour and the money, this sporting life still goes deeper than the agencies of the state and mass media. Although the meanings of sport have shifted, the shift has not been absolute, with no sharp divide between the traditional and the modern. The sporting life remains closely connected to liberty, to heart, to custom and practice, to a sense of belonging and to the bonds of friendship.
What is An Essay? Thirteen Answers from Virginia Woolf
Authors: Karshan Thomas
Published: September 2020

In her 1927 essay ‘Street-Haunting’, Virginia Woolf rambles across the history of the essay, realizing various metaphors which the essay has offered for itself. Being miscellaneous and anti-methodical, essays resist being placed generically or defined theoretically, while for these very reasons they are always required to explain themselves. The diverse and paradoxical answers which essayists have given as often as not derive from the meaning of the word essai in Montaigne or from his account of his writings, and give rise to metaphors which have in turn shaped the subjects of the essay over the centuries. The thirteen descriptions of the essay here brought to a focus through Woolf’s essay are that the essay is a destroyer of generic categories, an apprenticeship, a haunting, a room of one’s own, homework, a bookshop, an assay, a taste, a ramble, an assault, a deformity, a sport, and everything and nothing.
Of Sticks and Stones
Authors: Murphy Kathryn
Published: September 2020

In the seventeenth century, the words ‘essay’, ‘experience’, and ‘experiment’ could be synonymous. This chapter explores the relationship between these terms, taking Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Robert Boyle as key examples. It argues that the essay, throughout its history, asserts the value of experience, rather than metaphysics or abstraction, as the ground of knowledge, and establishes in the seventeenth century a dynamic oscillation between bodily experience, its written transmission, and the experience of reading which is still legible in contemporary essay writing. The relationship between scientific experiment in Bacon and Boyle and the literary form of the essay also suggests that one of the major axes of opposition which defines the essay, in Theodor Adorno’s account—a resistance to scientific rationalism—emerges, paradoxically, from the early essay’s simultaneous concern with experience and experiment.
Up to a Point
Authors: Phillips Adam
Published: September 2020

This chapter explores the omission of the essay from psychoanalytic literature, both as a form to which analysts refer, and as one in which they write. The absence of the word from the titles of professional publications, and the sense that the essays of psychoanalysts are a truancy from institutional forms, suggest that the essay’s scepticism and unfinishedness are in opposition to psychoanalytic expertise. The avoidance, even repression, of the form reveals what psychoanalysis denies in order to become an institution. As the example of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality shows, however, the essay’s experimentalism, provisionality, and incompletion are in fact analogous both to Freud’s account of desire and sexuality, and to the serial process of psychoanalytic treatment. The essay’s privileging of the useful and interesting over the right and perfected offers both a model for psychoanalysis, and, despite its neglect, an apt form for its insights.
The Later Institution of Renunciation
Authors: Hausner Sondra L.
Published: September 2020

Renunciation plays a particular cultural role in the social worlds of both historical and contemporary South Asia. As the practical manifestation of a philosophical legacy that in its many schools emphasizes the importance of cosmic unity and transcendental knowledge—the capacity to overcome human emotion and physical shortcomings—as the way to achieve it, the rejection of worldly pursuits through renunciation has become a core tactical and symbolic solution to religious attainment. The person who embodies that goal—he (or, more rarely, she) who ably renounces the otherwise assumed life course of marriage, parenthood, ritual action, and community involvement—thus occupies a special place in the religious life of the sub-continent. A textual renouncer lives the philosophical dictum to renounce society, pursuing full-time the religious attempt to transcend earthly limitations, in a worldly body all the while. This chapter examines these developments.
Vaiṣṇava Practice
Authors: Lutjeharms Rembert
Published: September 2020

This chapter attempts to offer not a historical overview of Vaiṣṇava practice, but an overview of the ways Vaiṣṇavas have viewed their own practice. Given the enormous variety of Vaiṣṇava traditions and their very regional nature, any overview of Vaiṣṇava practice is necessarily selective. The chapter draws upon the writings of Vaiṣṇavas from most major traditions, and on a wide range of scriptural texts. After an analysis of the Vaiṣṇava understanding of bhakti, I discuss just four distinct Vaiṣṇava practices, which Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas proclaim to be the principal practices for the four cosmic ages (yuga): Vedic ritual, image worship, praising God, and meditation. Examining the various practices indicated by just these four, while not exhaustive, does demonstrate the great diversity of Vaiṣṇava practice, and also brings to light how these practices, despite their apparent differences, are all interconnected and, in the Vaiṣṇava mind, all have the same aim: constant remembrance of God.
Women’s Observances
Authors: Pintchman Tracy
Published: September 2020

The Sanskrit term vrata, often translated as ‘vow’ or ‘votive ritual’, refers in contemporary Hinduism to a specific type of Hindu religious observance with a set of defining characteristics. South Asian Christians, Muslims, Jains, and Buddhists may also perform religious vows but the word vrata refers in particular to this type of ritual in its Hindu contexts. Hindus practise vratas under different vernacular names as well—vrat, brata, and nōṉpu, for example—all over India and across regional, sectarian, caste, linguistic, and class boundaries. In contemporary Hinduism, the term has come to refer primarily to a religiously sanctioned votive rite performed at a particular time with particular desires or intentions in mind on the part of the petitioner. Vratas usually entail some kind of promise directed towards a deity, often in exchange for a boon, and a predetermined form of ritual observance. Men, women, boys, and girls may all perform various vratas. There are many vratas, however, that only females undertake in contemporary Hindu practice. In fact, vratas are among the practices most broadly associated with contemporary Hindu women’s religious observance. The meanings and practices evoked by the word vrata are nevertheless historically and textually contingent and have evolved over the course of many centuries.
Introduction
Authors: Dinter Martin T. , Guérin Charles
Published: September 2020

This introduction explains the nature of ‘declamation’, not only in terms of the genre’s specific attributes but also in comparison with other Latin literary forms such as epic, satire, historiography, and philosophy. It also contains chapter summaries for the volume as a whole and outlines major trends in recent scholarship on Seneca the Elder. In the process, it outlines the characteristics which differentiate Seneca’s writings on declamation from those of other Roman writers, and suggests that the role of ancient declaimers is similar to that of modern scholars: both groups are tasked with organizing, evaluating, ranking, and reinterpreting declamatory speeches.
The Bitter Medicine of History
Authors: Baraz Yelena
Published: September 2020

This chapter investigates how Seneca the Elder negotiates the generic position of declamation in his Controversiae and Suasoriae. It argues that his practice shows a perception of close generic affinity between declamation and poetry, and focuses on his attempt to force his readers into a closer engagement with historiography. In the course of critiquing declamations, Seneca not infrequently offers as extra-declamatory comparanda examples from poetry, and especially from epic. He appears to take for granted his audience’s acceptance of the models of poetic description and poetic pathos. History, by contrast, does not appear as a parallel genre in the Controversiae and is cited only in the divisio of the sixth suasoria, on whether Cicero should ask Antony to spare him. Seneca expects his audience to be distressed by the introduction of historiographical texts, but insists on an extensive engagement with historical treatments as non alienum to the subject. This juxtaposition of attitudes suggests awareness on the part of Seneca’s audience of a generic identity centred on fictionality (a crucial distinction from traditional oratory). By centring his discussion on this exemplum, moreover, Seneca uses the most temporally proximate subject, Cicero’s death, to make the strongest possible argument for the potential benefit of history to the future development of the declamatory genre.
Greek Declaimers, Roman Context
Authors: Guérin Charles
Published: September 2020

This chapter compares the two main groups of declaimers in the Controversiae and Suasoriae: the oft-maligned ‘Greeks’ and the ‘Latins’, whom Seneca favours. By analysing how these factions competed with one another and thought of each other, this chapter suggests that these rigid categories did not exist in reality, but were superimposed retroactively by Seneca upon his corpus of declamatory speeches as an organizing principle. In reality, Greek and Latin declaimers coexisted in greater harmony than Seneca’s comments would suggest. Similarly, declamation is not a Roman practice, as Seneca implies in Book 1 of his Controversiae, but a Graeco-Latin phenomenon which at times necessitated bilingual knowledge of both cultures’ literatures. This chapter demonstrates, moreover, that the true differentiating factor within the community of declaimers was neither origin nor language, but social and economic issues along with personal rivalries.
Physical Excess as a Marker of Genre in the Elder Seneca
Authors: Corbeill Anthony
Published: September 2020

This chapter stems from the observation that physical eloquence is often relegated to lesser importance than its linguistic counterpart in Senecan declamation, especially when compared to the wealth of information we have on Cicero’s use of gesture. However, actio remains a pivotal element of Roman declamation. To draw attention to this element, this chapter outlines several types of bodily movement and vocal modulation which Seneca attributes to his declaimers in the Controversiae and Suasoriae. In so doing, it not only describes the practice and function of these actions but also explores how they build into the characteristics of Senecan declamation, which range from the use of personae and sententiae to prose rhythm and the figure of the ideal orator. The analysis ultimately explains why declaimers’ gestures, which are often dismissed as ‘excessive’ by modern readers, acted as effective tools for communication within their original context.
Between Real and Fictional Eloquence
Authors: Balbo Andrea
Published: September 2020

In his critical edition of fragmentary Roman oratory of the Augustan and Tiberian periods, Andrea Balbo has dealt with many declaimers who were active both in the schools and the forum or during centumviral trials. We know about their activity in particular from Seneca the Elder: among those are L. Arruntius Pater, C. Albucius Silus, M. Porcius Latro, and T. Labienus, as well as Cassius Severus. This chapter examines some of the school speeches witnessed by Seneca with regard to their stylistic features and compares the characteristics of these fictional orations with fragments of real oratory, giving particular attention to rhetorical elements that can be ascribed to actio, and special emphasis on the declamatory contributions of Albucius Silus and Porcius Latro.
The White Snake, Apollonius of Tyana, and John Keats’s Lamia
Authors: Murray Chris
Published: September 2020

The many details shared by John Keats’s Lamia and Feng Menglong’s treatment of the White Snake legend are evidence of a series of exchanges between Europe and Asia over the course of centuries. Ultimately these originated in Indian folklore which was transmitted to China, where it became Buddhist myth, and to the Hellenistic world in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Keats amplified these commonalities by using Philostratus’ serpent tale as a vehicle for considerations of Orientalism. In Apollonius he chose a figure that generated considerable controversy among Anglican theologians, both for the parallels in Philostratus’ hagiography to the life of Christ, and by his associations with Asian philosophy. Feng Menglong’s treatment of the White Snake legend was prominent in eighteenth-century China, and is likely to have been known to European visitors.
Introduction
Authors: Fogarty Michael J. , Collie Jeremy S.
Published: September 2020

Fisheries provide critical contributions to global food security and are important in the fabric of human societies throughout the world. This chapter provides a brief history of fishery development and the evolution of scientific understanding and approaches so critical to effective fisheries management. It shows how processes at the population, community, and ecosystem levels are manifest in complex ways in even simple descriptors such as catch histories. Although many aspects of conventional fisheries management center on equilibrium concepts, the empirical record suggests a much more complex reality with the possibility of alternate stable states and non-linear dynamics. This chapter provides the motivation for exploring alternative models of fishery dynamics in a broader ecological context. Confronting complexity is essential if we are to move toward operational Ecosystem-based Fishery Management on a global basis.