bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Law and Love in Ovid
Authors: Ziogas Ioannis
Published: February 2021

In classical scholarship, the presence of legal language in love poetry is commonly interpreted as absurd and incongruous. Ovid’s legalisms have been described as frivolous, humorous, and ornamental. This book challenges this widespread, but ill-informed view. Legal discourse in Latin love poetry is not incidental, but fundamental. Inspired by recent work in the interdisciplinary field of law and literature, the book argues that the Roman elegiac poets point to love as the site of law’s emergence. The Latin elegiac poets may say ‘make love, not law’, but in order to make love, they have to make law. Drawing on Agamben, Foucault, and Butler, the book explores the juridico-discursive nature of Ovid’s love poetry, constructions of sovereignty, imperialism, authority, biopolitics, and the ways in which poetic diction has the force of law. The book is methodologically ambitious, combining legal theory with historically informed closed readings of numerous primary sources. It aims to restore Ovid to his rightful position in the history of legal humanism. The Roman poet draws on a long tradition that goes back to Hesiod and Solon, in which poetic justice is pitted against corrupt rulers. Ovid’s amatory jurisprudence is examined vis-à-vis Paul’s letter to the Romans. The juridical nature of Ovid’s poetry lies at the heart of his reception in the Middle Ages, from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Forcadel’s Cupido iurisperitus. The current trend to simultaneously study and marginalize legal discourse in Ovid is a modern construction that this book aims to demolish.
Love as a State of Exception
Authors: Ziogas Ioannis
Published: February 2021

In Latin love elegy, the disavowal of law for the sake of love is couched in courtroom rhetoric and is thus both a denial and an appropriation of legal discourse. The elegiac recusatio is a version of the recusatio imperii, Augustus’ strategy for establishing his sovereignty by setting himself outside or above formal procedures. Not unlike the prince, Ovid proclaims a sovereign exception; he controls the production of law by deciding what lies outside it. The chapter studies a number of key passages from Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid to show that the love poets anticipate Augustus’ claims to sacrosanctity and sovereignty. It further examines love elegy’s affinities with the Saturnalian spirit of Roman comedy in order to argue that the elegiac suspension of legal action affords space for the emergence of an alternative jurisprudence of love.
Property as Intangible Property
Authors: Wyman Katrina M.
Published: February 2021

Historically, property theory has focused on real property as the premier example of property, reflecting the longstanding importance of land as a source of wealth and political power. This essay argues that it is time for property theorists to pay more attention to intangible property. It makes three main points. First, it emphasizes the contemporary economic importance of intangible property, as well as its increasing social importance in everyday life, especially in highly urbanized, developed countries. Second, it posits that the currently prevalent thing-based understanding of property is sufficiently capacious to embrace intangible property. Third, it speculates about why property theory has remained largely focused on tangible forms of property. It concludes by underscoring potential benefits of property theory paying greater attention to intangible property: an expanded focus on intangible property might lead to greater recognition of the constrained character of property in the modern urbanized world, and greater acknowledgment of the potential for property—albeit likely in a constrained form—to play a role in addressing the consequences of modern technology.
Third Party Effects in Private Law
Authors: McFarlane Ben , Televantos Andreas
Published: February 2021

This chapter identifies and explores a core task of private law: to determine “third party effects” of transactions. We ask to what extent an A–B transaction may affect C, a party who enters into a subsequent transaction with A, or otherwise interferes with the right claimed by B. We show first that such third party effects are controlled not only by rules relating to legal property rights and equitable interests, but also by parts of the law of agency, of partnerships, and of tort. Secondly, whilst a range of doctrines thus share this function of controlling third party effects, it is important to distinguish between the precise legal form used by each doctrine. Thirdly, we argue that even when considering one particular form, such as that of a legal property right, third party effect is determined by the interaction of different types of rules, with the practical operation of one type of rule modified by the application of a different type. For this reason, attention must be paid to the interaction between the different forms used to govern third party effect. There is a question as to whether the law in this area is unduly complex, but we suggest that, so long as the range of forms tracks the diversity of ordinary transactions, private law usefully enhances party autonomy by offering parties these different means of casting their legal relations.
Macroeconomic Policy Issues in Fragile States
Authors: Chami Ralph , Coppo Mattia , Espinoza Raphael , Montiel Peter
Published: February 2021

Around half of the world population living in extreme poverty resides in fragile states. The objective of this book is to develop our understanding of how state fragility must be accounted for in the design of macroeconomic policy. This chapter introduces the volume by presenting the concept of state fragility and by explaining how the macroeconomies of fragile states differ from those of other developing economies. The chapter also proposes a framework to illustrate how the poverty trap and the fragility trap interact, leveraging on the existing literature as well as on the new contributions presented in this volume. Finally, the chapter extracts policy lessons from the other 19 chapters in the book, in three increasingly specific steps: (1) General principles for policy engagement, (2) Policies to escape fragility, and (3) Macroeconomic policies to manage fragile economies, in particular in the areas of fiscal policy, monetary policy, and financial development.
Tax Experts’ Response to Regulatory and Institutional Triggers
Authors: Killian Sheila , O’Regan Philip , Lynch Ruth , Laheen Martin
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the situations in which tax experts are most likely to take an innovative or aggressive tax position, focusing on the self-perception of the experts themselves of the factors that may influence them in taking such a position. The results highlight the micro-influences on tax experts that may move them along the spectrum of tax avoidance, which has been acknowledged as posing a significant risk to public welfare, equality of opportunity, and the common good. The chapter presents findings from an international survey of tax professionals and experts and highlights some key risk factors. The factors that lead tax experts to take a position that pushes the envelope of regulation are explored in aggregate and compared across the jurisdictional boundary of high or low levels of financial secrecy. The findings have the potential to empower both regulators and professional bodies in addressing the problem of tax avoidance.
The Implications of Making Tax Crimes a Predicate Crime for Money Laundering in the EU
Authors: Rossel Lucia , Unger Brigitte , Batchelor Jason , Koningsveld Jan van
Published: February 2021

This chapter sheds light on the divergence of tax crimes and money laundering laws across Europe after the implementation of the 4th Anti Money Laundering Directive. Laws are a crucial part of the tax environment as they are one of the rules under which the tax ecosystem operates. Taxpayers should pay their taxes following the law, and tax experts should advise them within the realm of it. The chapter sees the 4th AMLD as a shock that put money laundering regulation inside the tax ecosystem, and the way that countries implement this in their regulation is the response to this shock; it uses an innovative comparative approach that involves the analysis of tax evasion through an empirical legal lens. The chapter includes a dataset built by the authors with the legislation of all European Union countries regarding tax crimes and money laundering, as well as other relevant legal variables.
Introduction
Authors: Collings Justin
Published: February 2021

This chapter introduces the topic of the book, which is how constitutional courts invoke historical evil as a reference and an aid in constitutional interpretation. The chapter sets forth the two principal modes by which courts do so: the redemptive mode, which treats the evil past as an aversive reference point against which the new constitutional order must aggressively define itself; and the parenthetical mode, which treats the evil past as an aberration from an otherwise noble tradition. It also discusses variations on these modes, as well as hybrid mergers of them. The chapter indicates how American mnemonic jurisprudence has tilted toward the parenthetical mode, South African toward the redemptive, and German toward a hybrid. The chapter also highlights the relationship of constitutional memory to topics such as constitutional identity, constitutional faith, and transitional justice.
Introduction
Authors: Kolb Laura
Published: February 2021

Fictions of Credit’s introduction lays out the book’s aims and methods. It argues for a revised understanding of England’s credit culture: the nexus of social relations, discursive forms, and economic practices to which the widespread use of monetary credit gave rise in the early modern period. To do this, it lays out the case made by economic historians that, because of cash shortages and expanding market activity in the period, the majority of transactions at all levels of society ran on credit. The introduction argues that the resulting social and economic indeterminacy gave rise to something more complex than either straightforward trust or blanket suspicion: rhetorical strategies intended to produce trust in one’s own soundness and interpretive strategies aimed at evaluating the trustworthiness of others. The introduction then turns to the book’s source texts and methods: plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries and practical handbooks written by and for merchants, retailers, householders, and farmers.
Coda
Authors: Kolb Laura
Published: February 2021

The coda tracks the afterlife of structures discussed earlier in the book, attending both to change and continuity. Today, personal creditworthiness is represented in numerical credit scores, and individuals often feel disconnected from the abstract, barely visible networks of global finance. Yet even within this economy—as different as it is from early modern England’s—the need for trust persists, and skills in rhetoric and interpretation remain valuable. The coda ends by linking classical theories of poetic and rhetorical efficacy to early modern practical literature, and both to modern advice on the importance of impression management in business and advertising.
The Spanish Attempt to Expand Unilateral Preferences
Authors: Guirao Fernando
Published: February 2021

After The Hague summit of the European Council in 1969 Madrid calculated that Spain’s terms of access to the Common Market would feasibly improve after the signing ceremony of the 1970 Agreement. The Spanish government was determined to continue the negotiations with the EEC for new concessions. First, the Spanish government battled for the EEC to grant them the benefits of the Generalized System of Preferences, which the French defeated. Second, Madrid requested further preference in agricultural trade, to the point of reaching a quasi-membership status in the CAP, without EEC membership. Third, Madrid pretended to use trade with Eastern Europe and closer relations with the EFTA to place pressure on EEC governments. The three attempts were unsuccessful because, as Chapter 7 shows, no alternative to the EEC existed for Spain to guarantee outlets for Spanish agricultural and industrial produce.
Agathokles of Syracuse
Authors: de Lisle Christopher
Published: February 2021

Agathokles of Syracuse ruled large areas of Sicily and southern Italy between 317 and 289 BC. This book argues that Agathokles was an important player in the Mediterranean world at a key moment in its history. His career has important implications for our definition of the Hellenistic world and its relationship to both the western Mediterranean and earlier Greek history. However, he has tended not to feature in studies of the Hellenistic world or of ancient Sicily. This work—the first book-length study of Agathokles in English in over a century—places him in the context of both the earlier history of Sicily and the developments in the eastern Mediterranean that mark the start of the Hellenistic era. In ancient discourse about Agathokles, in the coins he issued, in his interactions with the world around him, and in the way he ruled, Agathokles is simultaneously heir to a long tradition and actively engaged in his contemporary world. The failure to place Agathokles in both of these contexts has contributed to the development of an excessively deep separation between the western and eastern Mediterranean and between the Classical and Hellenistic periods.
Introduction
Authors: de Lisle Christopher
Published: February 2021

This introductory chapter identifies two trends in scholarship of ancient history, which are problematic for the understanding of the ancient Mediterranean as a whole and which the figure of Agathokles helps to demolish. The first of these is the tendency to study the western and eastern halves of the Mediterranean entirely separately. The second is the emphasis on the death of Alexander as a moment of rupture between the Classical and Hellenistic Ages. Agathokles is best studied through a paradigm which emphasizes continuity with earlier history and connectivity between different parts of the Mediterranean.
Violentologies
Authors: Olguín B. V.
Published: February 2021

Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature explores how various forms of violence undergird a wide range of Latina/o subjectivities, or Latinidades, from 1835 to the present. Drawing upon the Colombian interdisciplinary field of Violence studies known as violentología, which examines the transformation of Colombian society during a century of political and interpersonal violence, this book adapts the neologism violentology as a heuristic device and epistemic category to map the salience of violence in Latina/o history, life, and culture in the United States and globally. The term violentologies thus refers to culturally specific subjects defined by violence—or violence-based ontologies—ranging from Latina/o-warrior archetypes to diametrically opposed pacifist modalities, plus many more. It also signifies the epistemologies of violence: the political and philosophical logic and goals of certain types of violence such as torture, military force, and other forms of political and interpersonal harm. Based on one hundred primary texts and archival documents from an expansive range of Latina/o communities—Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, Salvadoran American, Guatemalan American, and various mixed-heritages and transversal hybridities throughout the world—Violentologies features multiple generations of Latina/o combatants, wartime noncombatants, and “peacetime” civilians whose identities and ideologies extend through, and far beyond, familiar Latinidades. Based on this discrepant archive, Violentologies articulates a contrapuntal assessment of the inchoate, contradictory, and complex range of violence-based Latina/o ontologies and epistemologies, and corresponding negotiations of power, or ideologies, pursuant to an expansive and meta-critical Pan-Latina/o methodology. Accordingly, this book ultimately proposes an antiidentitarian post-Latina/o paradigm.
{ Introduction }
Authors: Olguín B. V.
Published: February 2021

The introduction uses the 2005 memoir of a Mexican American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, along with accounts of other Latina/o soldiers who fought in France during WWI and WWII, to illustrate the inadequacy of extant paradigms and hermeneutic practices for explicating the expansive and ideologically discrepant range of Latina/o spatial ontologies and uniquely globalized identities from the midnineteenth to twenty-first centuries. It simultaneously introduces a new theory for Latina/o literature that draws upon the Colombian interdisciplinary field of Violence Studies—violentología—to adapt a flexible yet historically grounded method for identifying how Latina/o identities throughout time and place, or chronotopes, are undergirded by various forms of violence. These intersecting yet unique Latina/o formations extend through and beyond conventional theories of Latina/o citizenship, nationality, and history, as well as Latina/o identity, culture, and ideology—or Latininidades—and thus are identified as supra-Latina/o violentologies. This new and expansive category accommodates a fuller range of complex Latina/o modalities across geopolitical terrain and the ideological gamut. The subsequent introduction of proliferating and increasingly diverse Latinidades thus foregrounds a new era for Latina/o Studies.
Violence and the Transnational Question
Authors: Olguín B. V.
Published: February 2021

Chapter 4 disentangles the distinct ideologies often conflated under the expansive and notoriously vague rubric of Latina/o “transnationalism.” It first interrogates the limits of Radical Regionalism Studies by explicating the specter of nationalism in Emma Pérez’s ostensibly contestatory Tejana lesbian feminist regionalist historical fiction. The chapter further deconstructs the Latina/o Studies fixation on hyperlocalities and celebratory transnationalisms by interrogating the various aestheticizations of violence in Latina/o literatures about Central American civil wars, femicide in the US-Mexico border, and revolutionary insurgencies throughout North, Central, and South America, in addition to the Caribbean. It closes by underscoring Pan-Latina/o political diversity through the recovery of testimonial prose and poetry from Latina/o internationalist partisans and combatants vis-à-vis the antitestimonial memoirs, novels, and poetry by and about right-wing Latina/o soldiers and CIA officers.
{ Conclusion }
Authors: Olguín B. V.
Published: February 2021

The conclusion assesses the 2015 Broadway hit Hamilton: An American Musical by mixed-heritage (Puerto Rican, Mexican, black, and white) Lin-Manuel Miranda, which emerges as the quintessential violentological text and supra-Latina/o chronotope. This sui generis phenomenon models all the conceits and contradictions explicated throughout this book, while also consolidating the vexed and vexing Latina/o move from the margins to the center. My assessment of this spectacle as part of the ever-more discrepant Latina/o archive, which consists of widely diverging supra-Latina/o and even post-Latina/o violentologies, underscores the need for a paradigm shift in our understanding of the ontological and epistemological pasts, presents, and futures of Latina/o Studies.
Universalists and Jacobins in Judith Sargent Murray’s The Gleaner
Authors: Murphy Gretchen
Published: February 2021

This chapter describes a perceived conflict between Judith Sargent Murray’s liberal religious Universalism and her identity as a Federalist. It argues that she attempted to address and resolve this perceived conflict in her writing. Drawing on legal discourse, newspaper writing, sermons, and letters, the chapter shows Murray situating her ideas in two related contexts. The first context is the debate around Massachusetts religious establishment, in which Universalists challenged orthodox ideas of divine justice and legally pursued religious equality, and the second is the transatlantic reaction to Jacobin de-Christianization during French Revolution. Responding to both conflicts in The Gleaner: A Miscellaneous Production, Murray seeks to differentiate Universalists from Jacobins, using the form of the miscellany to argue that privatized liberal Christianity can serve the public purpose that Federalists assigned to religion in a republic.
Lydia Sigourney in the Land of Steady Habits
Authors: Murphy Gretchen
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s early writing (Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse and Sketch of Connecticut) and her life writing to understand her projects of affiliating with Connecticut Federalism and narrating continuity between Connecticut Federalism its political successors after the War of 1812. It examines her historical portrayal of conflicts over social class, religion, and government, including the Hartford Convention and the state watershed election of 1818, Congregationalism and religious toleration, and Mohegan evangelism and Samson Occum, as well as Sigourney’s autobiographical portrayal of her own shifting position in these conflicts. This analysis complicates two scholarly tendencies: to portray Sigourney as a democratic, working-class poet and to oppose mass market sentimental piety with the old order of New England Puritanism and established religion. It shows instead that Sigourney represented herself as a Federalist daughter harkening back to and adapting the vision of a classically republican organic society. Her treatment of religious tolerance is shown to be central to this project insofar as it was both a means to deflect criticism of the Federalists and to adapt arguments for state religion to a new era of religious privatization.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Evangelical Story of Disestablishment
Authors: Murphy Gretchen
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines Harriet Beecher Stowe’s depiction of the separation of church and state in her regional New England novels, Oldtown Folks and Poganuc People, both set in the early republic. It argues that while Stowe’s evangelical vision of religion led her to praise the purification of religion from politics, her simplified story of disestablishment enables a more complicated intertwining of Christianity with democracy. Drawing on family lore and regional history for both novels, Stowe criticized the New England Federalists and Calvinists of her father Lyman Beecher’s generation for treating religion as a political tool, but she also credited them with safeguarding Christianity from the forces of secularization that she associated with the French Revolution. Her novels thus seek to adapt state religion by depicting sites of intense, irrational belief (Spiritualism in Oldtown Folks, Christmas wonder in Poganuc People) that leaven Federalist and Calvinist rationalism with enchantment for the purpose of democratizing Christianity. Stowe’s historical progress narrative depicts Christianity made more democratic when it is seized from the hands of elites and politicians, yet this shift transforms it into a more powerful tool for regulating society. Strengthening the moral efficacy of religion, Stowe’s vision depicts a weakening of the state and public polity, because in Stowe’s libertarian New England history, democracy of the “people” and the “folk” is reassigned to Christianity in the private sphere.
Conclusion
Authors: Murphy Gretchen
Published: February 2021

Departing from Alexis de Tocqueville’s discussion of American religion as a political institution that strengthens the moral tie as political ties are relaxed, the conclusion briefly restates the major arguments of the book: (1) that the authors discussed treated the issue of religion in a republic by using ideas and tropes drawn from New England anti-Jacobin sentiment during and after the French Revolution; (2) that this led them simultaneously to oppose and to reinforce secularity as it appeared in various forms: Enlightenment reason, pluralistic belief, and the technocratic utility of state church establishment; and (3) that their writings thus engage with enduring questions regarding whether and how morality and virtue should be fostered in a diverse republic for the common good, avoiding pitfalls of narrow-minded bigotry or neoliberal elevation of private individual interest. The conclusion also considers how these arguments and the book as a whole responds to two trends in literary scholarship: the study of women writers rooted in feminist recovery and the turn away from historicist critique seen in recent work by Rita Felski and others.
Beyond Chance and Credence
Authors: Myrvold Wayne C.
Published: February 2021

Probability concepts permeate physics. This is obvious in statistical mechanics, in which probabilities appear explicitly. But even in cases when predictions are made with near-certainty, there is are implicit probabilistic assumptions in play, as it is assumed that molecular fluctuations can be neglected. How are we to understand these probabilistic concepts? This book offers a fresh look at these familiar topics, urging readers to see them in a new light. It argues that the traditional choices between probabilities as objective chances or degrees of belief is too limiting, and introduces a new concept, called epistemic chances, that combines physical and epistemic considerations. Thinking of probabilities in this way solves some of the puzzles associated with the use of probability and statistical mechanics. The book includes some history of discussions of probability, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and introductions to conceptual issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. It should be of interest to philosophers interested in probability, and to physicists and philosophers of physics interested in understanding how probabilistic concepts apply to the physical world.
Introduction
Authors: Kettemann Matthias C.
Published: February 2021

The chapter introduces the book’s key themes. Regulating communicative spaces is shown to be a historical constant. The chapter then situates the study within internet scholarship and defines key concepts, such as internet, internet law, internet governance, and the concept of normative orders. Next, it sets out the six hypotheses that are tested, developed, and ultimately upheld in the study, followed by an explanation of the methodological approaches taken for the analysis contained within each chapter. The chapter also contains an overview of the study’s chapters, including sections on the genealogy, ontology, legitimacy, finality, and impact of the internet’s normative order.
The Subject Matter of Metaethics
Authors: Sinclair Neil
Published: February 2021

Moral practice is picked out by a distinctive moral terminology as used in discourse, thought, and action-guidance. One mark of this use is that it serves to give recommendations for action whose force is independent of the desires of both judger and subject. The task of metaethics is to provide a systematic account of the metasemantics, psychology, metaphysics, and epistemology of moral practice. This will involve, at least, an account of those facts about our uses of moral expressions in virtue of which they have the meanings they do. Metaethical theories are to be judged by their ability to accommodate (that is, make purpose-relative sense of) the important forms and assumptions of moral practice, within the terms of our wider understanding of the world and our place in it. I take this understanding to be provided by naturalism, although this is a working assumption rather than an indubitable axiom.
Practical Expressivism, Morality’s Function, and Moral Attitudes
Authors: Sinclair Neil
Published: February 2021

Practical expressivism is the view that moral judgements do not offer moral descriptions or express moral beliefs but do express moral attitudes. The conventionally-enshrined purpose of this expression is the interpersonal coordination of attitudes and action. More generally the function of moral practice is to produce, test, refine, and sustain mutually beneficial patterns of coordination through a distinctive, linguistic, means of collective problem-solving, viz. moral discussion. This purpose suggests that moral attitudes are typically stable, reflectively endorsed, general attitudinally ascended states of approval and/or disapproval.
Mind-Independent Moral Truths and Categorical Moral Reasons
Authors: Sinclair Neil
Published: February 2021

Moral practice embodies the assumptions that moral truths are mind-independent and moral reasons are categorical. According to the practical expressivist account, both assumptions can be understood as claims about the application conditions of moral terms. In both cases, the practical expressivist goes on to understand these claims to voice positions about which moral sensibilities agents ought to adopt. The former voices the claim that agents ought not form their moral attitudes on the basis of their own endorsement of those attitudes; the latter that agents ought not form their structured-approvals purely on the basis of the existing desires of the target agent. In both cases, these substantive moral positions are also constitutive of competence with moral concepts, since agents who generally denied them would not be able to use those concepts to coordinate in the ways distinctive of morality.
From Main Street to Wall Street
Authors: Rangvid Jesper
Published: February 2021

From Main Street to Wall Street examines the relation between the economy and the stock market. It discusses the academic theories and empirical facts, and guides readers through the fascinating interaction between economic activity and financial markets. Itexamines what causes long-run economic growth and shorter-term business-cycle fluctuations and analyses their impact on stock markets. From Main Street to Wall Street also discusses how investors can use knowledge of economic activity and financial markets to formulate expectations to future stock returns. The book relies on data, and figures and tables illustrate arguments and theories in intuitive ways.In the end, From Main Street to Wall Street helps academic scholars and practitioners navigate financial markets by understanding the economy.
Economic growth and drivers of stock returns
Authors: Rangvid Jesper
Published: February 2021

This chapter studies how yields, growth, and valuation changes, introduced in the previous chapter, relate to economic activity in the long run.The chapter discusses reasons why there could be a relation between drivers of stock returns and economic growth in the first place. It also presents the empirical evidence. Aggregate earnings has historicallylined up with growth in total economic activity.Also, GNP per capitahas grown alongside stock prices, dividends per share, and earnings per share. Since the 1980s, though, share prices have risen relative to earnings and dividends, partly because firms have used earnings to buy back shares. Similarly, the aggregate value of the stock market has outpaced aggregate GDP during recent decades. The chapter discusses potential explanations.
The equity premium
Authors: Rangvid Jesper
Published: February 2021

This chapter explains ‘the equity premium puzzle’ and ‘the risk-free rate puzzle’. The chapter starts out comparing historical returns on stocks to historical returns on bonds, as well as the risks associated with these returns. The standard models economists use to explain the relative sizes of stock and bond returns, and hence the equity risk premium, are based on the exposure of stocks and bonds to economic growth. The chapter explains why these standard theories fail to explain the size of the equity premium. The chapter also explains how economists have changed their workhorse models to reconcile why returns on stocks are so high compared to bond returns. Another key insight in the chapter is that the equity premium does not depend linearly on economic growth in itself, but on the volatility of economic growth and its correlation with stock returns. Two countries can experience the same level of average economic growth, but different volatilities of consumption growth and correlations between consumption growth and stock returns, causing stock returns to differ between countries. This is one more reason why Chapter 6 finds that economic growth does not line up with stock returns across countries.
Business-cycle fluctuations in economic activity
Authors: Rangvid Jesper
Published: February 2021

This chapter explains what the business cycle is and what causes business-cycle fluctuations. We call fluctuations in economic activity around the long-term growth trend ‘the business cycle’. The business cycle consists of two phases. The first is a period of strong economic activity. The second, following the first, is a period of weak economic activity. We call the first phase of the business cycle an ‘expansion’ and the second phase a ‘contraction’ or ‘recession’. The chapter explains what causes business cycles, and examines the empirical evidence on the lengths and strengths of the typical business cycle. It finds that expansions typically last longer than recessions. The chapter also shows that the length of expansions has increased during recent decades.
Privatizing Welfare Services
Authors: Jordahl Henrik , Blix Mårten
Published: February 2021

The Swedish welfare state is known for providing extensive services to its citizens. Much less well known is that a fair amount of the services are delivered by private for-profit firms. The first steps of privatization were taken in the mid-1980s for childcare services at the municipal level, and the government often found itself scrambling to introduce regulation afterwards. Other sectors were subsequently privatized, most notably through an extensive voucher scheme to provide choice in compulsory and upper-secondary education. A key question throughout this process has been how to maintain the Swedish egalitarian ethos while undergoing extensive privatization. How has the country managed to reap the benefits from market forces without endangering equitable outcomes? The Swedish system is no middle road between socialism and capitalism. Instead, it is more akin to a large-scale laboratory for institutional design with lessons that should be of broad relevance to other countries aiming to get high-quality welfare services while containing costs. Focusing on what others can learn from Sweden, the book makes accessible original research on schools, health care, and elderly care. The privatization of service production has occurred despite major political controversy between two competing visions for the welfare state. Successful experiments have spread organically to neighbouring municipalities. What was done well in this process and what were the mistakes? The book addresses the fundamental economic challenges, the trends of the future, and the implications for institutional design
Quasi-Markets
Authors: Blix Mårten , Jordahl Henrik
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of introducing market forces in the public sector, drawing on pioneering work by the British academic Julian Le Grand. Creating market-like conditions in tax-financed welfare services (so-called quasi-markets) is a way to empower users and introduce competition among providers. Ideally, service provision will be efficient, responsive, equitable, and of high quality. Such ideal outcomes are, however, far from guaranteed to materialize. A crucial and defining characteristic of quasi-markets is that the end-users do not pay for the services consumed. As a result, care needs to be taken that the incentives of the buyer (the public sector) and the sellers (private firms) are properly aligned. The chapter also brings out the main challenges for quality and contract design that are discussed in depth in later chapters. A fundamental challenge for the government is to assess and monitor quality in welfare services, be they provided directly by the public sector or by the private sector.
Controlling Public Spending and Striving for Efficiency
Authors: Blix Mårten , Jordahl Henrik
Published: February 2021

Extensive welfare services require corresponding revenue. Large spending commitments imply that Sweden’s public sector finances are particularly sensitive to changing trends in demography and hours worked. A particular concern is that productivity growth in labour-intensive services is relatively difficult to uphold, the so-called Baumol effect. Increasing costs and spending pose a severe risk to the welfare state, but a risk that should be possible to handle. Though Sweden’s public finances remain among the strongest in the OECD, it will be a delicate balance to increase spending on welfare services at the desired rate. A continued focus on improving public sector efficiency will need to be coupled by a suitable balance between tax-funded services and parts that people will have to pay for privately.
Protecting China's Interests Overseas
Authors: Ghiselli Andrea
Published: February 2021

Many countries in history have faced the problem of how to defend their interests overseas. China is not different. China’s Interest Frontiers: The Making of an International Strategy sheds light on the tortuous securitization process that pushed the Chinese foreign and security policy machine to evolve in order deal to the new threats to Chinese assets and nationals in the Middle East and North Africa. Based on a vast number of Chinese language sources, the analysis presented in the book finds that crises, especially the evacuation from Libya in 2011, deeply influenced how Chinese civilian and military elite think about the protection of the country’s interests overseas. Consistent with this development, the emphasis on ensuring that the People’s Liberation Army can play a larger role, along with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has become a crucial issue for Chinese policymakers. Yet, the presence of many bureaucratic actors, each with its own priorities and interests, was a challenge for the creation and implementation of a clear strategy. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, it seems that the situation has been improving slowly but steadily, although some changes will take more time than others to be completed. Vis-à-vis an extremely complex challenge, China’s cautiously incremental approach to the use of its military has, so far, spared it from strategic overstretching. Yet, the reactive nature of its strategy makes it vulnerable to shocks. This is especially true as Chinese public opinion has become increasingly interested in how the country’s overseas interests are protected.
Introduction
Authors: Moss Jessica
Published: February 2021

Throughout the dialogues Plato contrasts epistêmê, a superior kind of cognition, with doxa, an inferior one. It is widely assumed that Plato is discussing knowledge and belief. But many of his epistemological views are so hard to construe as views about knowledge and belief that it is worth questioning this assumption. Moreover, the history of Plato scholarship shows us that the assumption is quite recent. Once we accept that Plato’s central epistemological concepts may be radically different from ours, however, we must reassess his whole project: what is he doing when he does epistemology, and what is his epistemology about? The project of the book is to answer these questions by taking as a starting point what is arguably the most radical difference between Plato’s epistemology and ours: his claim, in the Republic and other dialogues, that epistêmê is of being and doxa of something inferior.
Epistêmê Is of What Is
Authors: Moss Jessica
Published: February 2021

If Plato’s epistemology is indeed objects-based, then he conceives of epistêmê first and foremost as the cognition of a certain kind of object. What is this object? We find a clear answer in the powers argument: epistêmê is of what is, or being. Indeed throughout the dialogues Plato treats this claim as a basic principle, something that everyone will accept. But this may seem an unhelpful answer, for Plato’s talk of being is famously ambiguous, and much debated. I will argue that there is nonetheless a general characterization available: in contexts relevant to the correlation of epistêmê with being, regardless of what ‘being’ or variants mean, the label ‘being’ serves a common function: it privileges certain items above others. The key notion should be understood as the ontologically superior, or of what really is, by contrast with things that have some derivative or inferior status. Epistêmê’s defining object is Being in this sense.
Conclusion
Authors: Mauldin Joshua
Published: February 2021

This study has explored how Barth and Bonhoeffer provide resources for a chastened defense of the politics of liberal modernity. This chastened defense acknowledges the tensions inherent in modern politics, including the potential for violence and terror in the utopian strand of modern thought. For Barth and Bonhoeffer, a theological account of history liberates politics from salvation history. These theologians saw the hopes of the modern age shipwrecked during their lifetimes. Yet even in the midst of this crisis, they sought neither the retrieval of a premodern synthesis, nor the supersession of modern politics by some postmodern alternative. The goal of this study has been to show how Barth and Bonhoeffer responded to the crisis of modernity in their own historical context, avoiding despair as well as the temptations of political utopia.
Caritas
Authors: Barclay Katie
Published: February 2021

Caritas, a form of divine grace that transformed neighbourly love into moral action, was a key concept in early modern Europe, guiding ideas about morality, the self, and becoming an embodied ethic. This book introduces the concept of an ‘emotional ethic’ to help explain the role of caritas in early modern communities, where love was not simply how one should feel about one’s neighbour but the ways that our bodies and emotions guide us to ethical action. It explores how an emotional ethic operates through a study of how caritas was deployed amongst the lower orders in eighteenth-century Scotland. With chapters that focus on marriage, childhood and youth, ‘sinful sex’, privacy and secrecy, and hospitality towards the itinerant poor, the ways in which caritas was learned and deployed as part of everyday social practice are highlighted. Caritas enjoined Christians to modesty, chastity, control of dress, and passion, but also to a generous love and care, imagined in familial terms. As an ethic that was enacted through the body, caritas produced a particular form of sociable self. Over the eighteenth century, new ideas of romantic love, as well as more secular social emotions like fraternity and benevolence, offered alternative mechanisms for justifying feeling and behaviour. This book explores how new ideas about emotion intertwined with an older model of neighbourly love, explaining not only deviant behaviours but also how the self came to be formed in this new context.
Living Outside of Love
Authors: Barclay Katie
Published: February 2021

Charity and hospitality are perhaps the most well-recognized components of caritas in the historiography. This chapter explores the hospitality offered to the itinerant poor in Scotland, highlighting how the practice of charitable giving enabled the reincorporation of a group that lived on the edges of community. Many of these people lived outside of formal family structures because of the legal practice of banishment following criminal activity. This chapter also explores this formal process of exclusion and how providing hospitality not only allowed such people to survive but also acted as an opportunity to encourage moral reform. Those who lived in the margins were often thought of as ‘lonely’, structurally distanced from the connections that brought comfort and security, and pushed to locations—the spaces between towns and villages—imagined as lonely. Importantly, as caritas was an embodied ethic, punishment here was imagined in physical, not just symbolic, terms.
Non-Factualism about Composite Objects (or Why There’s No Fact of the Matter Whether Any Material Objects Exist)
Authors: Balaguer Mark
Published: February 2021

Chapter 4 provides an argument for a non-factualist view of the composite-object question; i.e., it argues that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as composite objects like tables and rocks and cats (where a composite object is an object that has proper parts). In addition, this chapter explains how the argument can be extended to establish the much more general (and much more radical) conclusion that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any material objects at all—including mereological simples (i.e., objects that don’t have any proper parts). The argument proceeds by undermining the necessitarian and contingentist views of the composite-object question; so, roughly speaking, the idea is that there isn’t a fact of the matter about the existence of composite objects like tables because there isn’t a necessary fact about this and there also isn’t a contingent fact about it.
Non-Factualism about Abstract Objects
Authors: Balaguer Mark
Published: February 2021

Chapter 5 provides an argument for a non-factualist view of the abstract-object question; in other words, it argues that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as abstract objects like numbers and sets and propositions (where an abstract object is a non-physical, non-mental, unextended, acausal, non-spatiotemporal object). Roughly speaking, the argument proceeds by showing that the sentence ‘There are abstract objects’ is catastrophically unclear and indeterminate—i.e., that it’s so unclear that it doesn’t have any truth conditions and, hence, doesn’t have a truth value. In addition, the chapter also argues against necessitarian versions of platonism and anti-platonism.
Conceptual Analysis
Authors: Balaguer Mark
Published: February 2021

Chapter 8 argues that neo-positivists can endorse scientistic views of conceptual-analysis questions—i.e., questions like ‘What is free will?’, ‘What is a person?’, and so on. Very roughly, scientism about a question Q is the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific question about some aspect of physical reality. This chapter argues for scientism about conceptual-analysis questions by arguing that these questions are completely settled by physical-empirical facts about us—in particular, by psychological facts about what we mean by our words. This is an important part of the neo-positivist argument; for in connection with almost all metaphysical questions, one of the main subquestions that neo-positivists need to address is (or is something like) a conceptual-analysis question. So if neo-positivists can endorse scientistic views of all conceptual-analysis questions, then this simplifies things for them considerably (it makes it much easier for them to motivate neo-positivist views of specific metaphysical questions).
Widespread Non-Factualism
Authors: Balaguer Mark
Published: February 2021

Chapter 9 briefly explains how we could go about arguing for neo-positivist views of several different metaphysical questions. The chapter focuses mostly on cases in which neo-positivists endorse non-factualist views of the central controversial subquestions—e.g., questions about Aristotelean properties, tropes, coincident objects, essential properties, non-natural moral facts, and certain kinds of facts about grounding and Lewis-Sider-style joints in reality. But the chapter also briefly addresses some cases in which neo-positivists endorse scientistic views, rather than non-factualist views, of the central controversial subquestions—e.g., questions about libertarian free will, non-Humean causation, Lewisian possible worlds, and immaterial Cartesian souls.