bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Monarchical Republic
Authors: Dauber Noah
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines John Case's Aristotelian commonwealth as a form of monarchical republicanism. It analyzes Case's Sphaera Civitatis, a commentary on Aristotle's Politics that offered an Elizabethan conformist Aristotelianism that plotted a course between the more absolutist theories of Jean Bodin and the republican sympathies of Carlo Sigonio and Piero Vettori. Using a distinction between the form of sovereignty and the administration of government probably drawn from Bodin, Case argued that England was a monarchy with a broad-based administration. The chapter also considers Case's account of citizenship and the distribution of office as social stratification, his rejection of the idea of England as a society of orders, his vision of hierarchy, his treatment of citizenship, and his understanding of magistracy.
The Political Poetess
Authors: Lootens Tricia
Published: January 2018

This book challenges familiar accounts of the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, offering new readings of Poetess performance and criticism. In performing the Poetry of Woman, the mythic Poetess has long staked her claims as a creature of “separate spheres”—one exempt from emerging readings of nineteenth-century women's political poetics. Turning such assumptions on their heads, this book models a nineteenth-century domestic or private sphere whose imaginary, apolitical heart is also the heart of nation and empire, and, as revisionist histories increasingly attest, is traumatized and haunted by histories of slavery. Setting aside late-Victorian attempts to forget the unfulfilled, sentimental promises of early antislavery victories, this book restores Poetess performances like Julia Ward Howe's “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and Emma Lazarus's “The New Colossus” to view—and with them, the vitality of the Black Poetess within African-American public life. Crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline to “connect the dots” of Poetess performance, the book demonstrates how new histories and ways of reading position poetic texts by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Mulock Craik, George Eliot, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper as convergence points for larger engagements ranging from Germaine de Staël to G.W.F. Hegel, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Alice Walker, and beyond.
Introduction: Slaves, Spheres, Poetess Poetics
Authors: Lootens Tricia
Published: January 2018

This book examines the performance of the Political Poetess and its mythic, absolute identification with “separate spheres.” It explores the connection between “Political Poetess” and “Black Poetess” in relation to nineteenth-century women's patriotic poetry, “Politics” as practiced by nation-states, and ongoing conflicts around the histories of slavery and the meanings of “race.” The book is divided into three sections: the first considers racialized Poetess reception and performance, the second analyzes negotiations with the forms of “spheres” and of sentimental poetry, and the third deals with transatlantic readings. Each section focuses on a “nineteenth-century Poetess” who shifts, flickers, and mourns through the nineteenth century, the 1930s, the 1970s, the 1990s, and beyond.
Antislavery Afterlives: Changing the Subject / Haunting the Poetess
Authors: Lootens Tricia
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines mid- to late-Victorian attempts at self-distancing from triumphalist (and literalist) early antislavery promises, focusing in particular on how the themes of haunting, displacement, and denial threaded through many later Victorians' patriotic invocations of liberating empire. Drawing on emerging pedagogical and scholarly revolutions in studies of nineteenth-century British relations to slavery, the chapter considers histories of disciplinary reticence dating back in part to the Victorians themselves. It also discusses the increasingly iconic histories of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention and J.M.W. Turner's painting Slave Ship as well as Elizabeth V. Spelman's Fruits of Sorrow and her notion of “changing the subject.” Finally, it explores the discipline termed “ethical refocalization” by turning to three parallel scenes of interrupted Poetess performance, in Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and George Eliot's Spanish Gypsy.
“Not Another ‘Poetess’”: Feminist Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Poetry, and the Racialization of Suicide
Authors: Lootens Tricia
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines struggles to define relations between “Victorian femininity” and racialized Poetess reception, focusing in particular on early, explicitly racialized meditations on the loss of African American Poetess figures. Drawing on foundational Second Wave feminist texts such as Ellen Moers's Literary Women, Cora Kaplan's Salt and Bitter and Good, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic, Erlene Stetson's Black Sister, and Cheryl Walker's Nightingale's Burden, the chapter investigates how early strains in Second Wave thinking came to define feminist criticism itself as a politicized mode of crisis intervention. It also considers how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper came to be barred, explicitly, from the category of “poetess” and concludes with a reading of Alice Walker's 1976 Poetess novel Meridian.
Teaching Curses, Teaching Nations: Abolition Time and the Recoils of Antislavery Poetics
Authors: Lootens Tricia
Published: January 2018

This chapter offers a reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem “A Curse for a Nation”—a response to the proslavery, imperialist national sentimentality of the American “Ostend Manifesto” of 1854—and examines how it may intersect with the meanings of mid-century British antislavery poetics within our own time. “Curse” is set into circulation through and beyond the boundaries not only of Britain, the United States, and Italy, but also of the so-called “Abolition time.” Before showing how reading “Curse” brings us to the realm of “Abolition time,” the chapter considers Second Wave Poetess criticism on the poem and how reflections on “changing the subject” might help illuminate its cultural life within its own time—or times. It argues that “Curse,” once confronted as an act of conflicted, racialized ethical refocalization, might (re)emerge, in our own time, as a convergence point for Victorian studies, feminist theory, historical poetics, and critical race studies.
Asking the Right Questions
Authors: Edwards George C.
Published: January 2018

This book examines the role of presidential leadership in American politics, arguing that the key to successful leadership for the president is not persuasion but the president’s broad strategic position regarding the public, and that to reveal this position requires asking the right questions. It illustrates the advantages of focusing on the president’s existing opportunity structure by analyzing the first two years of Barack Obama’s second term. In particular, it considers Obama’s strategic position—his opportunity structure—with the public to explain why he faced such difficulties in obtaining the public’s support. It also explores the president’s opportunity structure in Congress and how he exploits existing public opinion on policies. Finally, it discusses the importance of strategic assessments in presidential leadership and the leverage they give us in evaluating the likely success of strategies for governing.
Constructivism
Authors: Baldwin David A.
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the constructivist approach to the study of power in international relations. It argues that far from serving as a battleground for the dueling forces of constructivism and rationalism, power analysis is a potential point of convergence for at least some members of each camp. Barkin's Realist Constructivism (2010) is a step toward such convergence. It is worth noting that Barkin makes no reference to Lukes or Foucault, but does include references to Lasswell and Kaplan, Dahl, and Wolfers. Constructivists may yet make significant contributions to power analysis but not so long as they cling to a concept of power rooted in Foucault and the 1974 edition of Lukes.
Introduction
Authors: von Schnitzler Antina
Published: January 2018

This book examines how residents' administrative links to the state emerged as a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa and the ways that this terrain persists in the postapartheid period. It explores the techno-politics underlying contemporary conflicts from the perspective of infrastructure by historically and ethnographically following the life of a small device: a prepaid water meter. Focusing on Operation Gcin'amanzi (“Save Water”) in Soweto, the book shows how, in the aftermath of apartheid and in a context of neoliberal reforms, many of the central questions of the antiapartheid struggle such as citizenship, social obligation, and the shape of democracy in the “new South Africa” were reframed as technical-managerial and procedural questions. This chapter provides an overview of the prepaid meter as well as the concept of techno-politics, along with the triumphalist rise of liberal democracy in postapartheid South Africa.
The Goods of Fortune
Authors: Mayville Luke
Published: January 2018

This chapter reconstructs John Adams' understanding of aristocratic power. Adams' preoccupation with aristocrats alienated him from all but a few of his contemporaries. Few would insist as Adams did that social and economic elites would continue to endanger republican institutions long after the prohibition of aristocratic titles. Adams warned of a powerful aristocracy that if left unchecked would undermine the functions of republican government. The chapter revisits Adams' debates with Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor of Caroline in order to recover the reasoning behind his bleak prediction that wealth and birth—and not talent and virtue—would enjoy the preponderance of power in republican America.
American Oligarchy?
Authors: Mayville Luke
Published: January 2018

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book traced Adams' fear of oligarchy to a more rational source. It argued that Adams was a practical political scientist who concluded through his studies and experiences that republican governments had always been threatened by elite domination and that America would be no different. It suggested that Adams deserves to be remembered not just as a statesman but also as a shrewd critic of oligarchy. In the American intellectual tradition he should be understood as a predecessor to Alexis de Tocqueville, the purveyor of a “new science of politics,” who would arrive in America from France just a few years after Adams' death.
Resolve in International Politics
Authors: Kertzer Joshua D.
Published: January 2018

Why do some leaders and segments of the public display remarkable persistence in confrontations in international politics, while others cut and run? The answer given by policymakers, pundits, and political scientists usually relates to issues of resolve. Yet, though we rely on resolve to explain almost every phenomenon in international politics—from prevailing at the bargaining table to winning on the battlefield—we don't understand what it is, how it works, or where it comes from. This book draws on a growing body of research in psychology and behavioral economics to explore the foundations of this important idea. It argues that political will is more than just a metaphor or figure of speech: the same traits that social scientists and decision-making scholars use to comprehend willpower in our daily lives also shape how we respond to the costs of war and conflict. The book shows how time and risk preferences, honor orientation, and self-control help explain the ways by which leaders and members of the public define the situations they face and weigh the trade-offs between the costs of fighting and the costs of backing down. Offering a novel in-depth look at how willpower functions in international relations, the book has critical implications for understanding political psychology, public opinion about foreign policy, leaders in military interventions, and international security.
Resolve in International Politics
Authors: Kertzer Joshua D.
Published: January 2018

This book examines the concept of resolve and its role in international politics. It aims not to “bring resolve back in,” but rather, to lend it microfoundations, to help us understand what resolve is, and how—and whether—it works. Using a behavioral theory of resolve, the book suggests that variation in time and risk preferences, honor orientation, and self-control shape how actors respond to the situations they face. This chapter discusses the definition of resolve, the place of resolve in international relations, the prevalence of references to resolve in the international security literature, the relationship of resolve to capabilities and intentions, and situational and dispositional theories of resolve. It contends that the term resolve is often used in the study of international politics in imprecise and incompatible ways.
Experimental Microfoundations for Resolve: I
Authors: Kertzer Joshua D.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines individual-level microfoundations of resolve in the context of public opinion using a novel laboratory experiment that models both the selection into, and duration of support for, military interventions. The experiment manipulates situational features of the military intervention while measuring dispositional variables using techniques employed in behavioral economics and social psychology. The chapter first explains the rationale for using public opinion as the domain in which to construct a theory of resolve before discussing the study's experimental design. It then presents the experiment's findings and their implications for the study of public opinion, and for theories of resolve more generally. The results show that time and risk preferences can help account for variations in sensitivity to the costs of war: more patient respondents are less sensitive to casualties while more risk-averse respondents are more sensitive to the human costs of fighting as well as the reputational costs of backing down.
Conclusion: Taking Resolve Seriously
Authors: Kertzer Joshua D.
Published: January 2018

This book has investigated the microfoundations of resolve in international relations by connecting international relations scholarship with a burgeoning body of research on willpower and self-control in other disciplines. It has found relatively consistent evidence in favor of the importance of the costs of backing down, but less so with the costs of fighting. At a broader level, the book also finds evidence in favor of an interactionist theory of resolve. This concluding chapter discusses the ramifications of the book's findings for the rationalist international relations literature, the public opinion literature, and the literature evaluating the public's prudence, rationality, and consistency. In particular, it challenges the standard understanding of resolve as private information that decision-makers can access but foreign rivals cannot. It also considers the so-called “dark side of resolve,” the distinction between situations and dispositions, whether leaders are homogenous, and a pure dispositional theory of resolve.
Introduction
Authors: Wagner Roi
Published: January 2018

This book examines the force of mathematics, what this force builds on, and how it works in practice by discussing mathematics not only from the point of view of applications but also from the point of view of its production. It explores the function of mathematical statements, their epistemological position, consensus in mathematics, and mathematical interpretation and semiosis. It also considers the notion of embodied mathematical cognition as well as the limitations of the cognitive theory of mathematical metaphor in accounting for the formation of actual historical mathematical life worlds. This introduction provides an overview of the current state of the philosophy of mathematics and presents a vignette on option pricing to give a concrete example of how mathematics relates to its wider scientific and practical context, with particular emphasis on the Black-Scholes formula.
Histories of Philosophies of Mathematics
Authors: Wagner Roi
Published: January 2018

This chapter introduces some histories of canonized philosophies of mathematics and presents several historical narratives that follow some major trends in the philosophy of mathematics. These historical narratives are structured so as to highlight some overarching concerns that philosophical debates reflect, rather than the specific philosophical questions of the canon. The chapter examines the history of some philosophical discussions as revolving around metaphilosophical tensions: tensions between natural order and conceptual freedom; between mathematics as originally constitutive versus reducible to reason and/or nature; between reining in conceptual monsters and attempting to let them roam free; and between different ways to distribute authority over mathematical norms and standards.
Mathematical Metaphors Gone Wild
Authors: Wagner Roi
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines two case studies that illustrate the limitations of the cognitive theory of mathematical metaphor in accounting for the formation of actual historical mathematical life worlds. The first case study deals with four medieval and early modern examples of relating algebra to geometry. These examples show that when two mathematical domains are linked, what passes between them cannot be reduced to “inferences,” as assumed by the theory of mathematical metaphor. The second case study reviews notions of infinity since early modernity and demonstrates that these notions are far too variegated and complex to be subsumed under a single metaphor—namely, George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez's basic metaphor of infinity, which tries to read all mathematical infinities as metaphorically projecting final destinations on indefinite sequences.
Introduction
Authors: Vives Xavier
Published: January 2018

This book explores the relationship between competition and stability in the banking sector as well as the policy consequences for regulation and competition policy. It asks whether excessive competition has helped the overexpansion of credit, mostly in the real estate sector, that is at the base of the 2007–2009 crisis, and whether excessive competition has destabilized the financial system. It examines whether competition policy is needed in the banking sector, and if so, how it has to interact with regulation. It also considers the implications for the regulatory financial policy and the institutional architecture of competition policy. The book provides an up-to-date review of the theory and empirics of banking competition and its relationship with stability, and incorporates the analysis of modern market-based banking, systemic risk, and macroprudential regulation. It also explains how crisis interventions have interacted with competition policy and the role that the latter should have in a crisis.
The Idea of the City of Refuge
Authors: Lewis Michael J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter begins by describing the meaning of “city of refuge,” which derives from the Bible, for it was only logical that Christian societies suffering persecution and seeking sanctuary look there to find solace and guidance. Because the city of refuge is a living tradition and not the exclusive property of any denomination, its boundaries are somewhat elastic. This book looks at sanctuaries built to house religious refugees (such as Freudenstadt and the settlements of the Moravians), those built by charismatic communal leaders (the three towns created by George Rapp), and even some that were purely imaginary (those planned by Albrecht Dürer and Johann Valentin Andreae). The socialist Utopias of the early nineteenth century stand at the culmination of this tradition, refuges not from religious persecution but industrial capitalism.
The Protestant Tempering of Utopia
Authors: Lewis Michael J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the notion of “Utopia.” It is widely known that Utopia means “no place.” However, few know that it is pronounced just the same as eutopoeia, meaning “good place.” In short, Utopia is that great good place that is nowhere to be found. And with this word, coined exactly five hundred years ago, Thomas More (1478–1535) gave us history's most famous pun. More hardly intended Utopia to be a manifesto for Protestant ideal communities. In writing Utopia, his goal was much the same as that of Plato's Republic, as a speculative philosophical essay as to what a perfectly ordered society should be. Yet there was much in Utopia that Protestants found congenial, including the emphasis on reason over superstition, the utopian practice of electing priests by popular vote, and the absence of all images of God in their temples. The most radical idea in Utopia is that in order to make an ideal city one must also make an ideal society.
Economy
Authors: Lewis Michael J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes Robert Owen (1771–1858), a Welsh industrialist and social reformer, and Johann Georg Rapp's equal as a utopian visionary. In the summer of 1824, Rapp bought three thousand acres on the Ohio River, twenty-four miles downriver of Pittsburgh, and sent his advance party of builders ahead to erect the first houses. There they would be joined by the rest of the Harmonists in the summer of 1825. In the meantime, Rapp put New Harmony and its thirty thousand acres on the market, and only one buyer was ever seriously considered, Owen. Owen was one of the most complicated and ambitious personalities of the Industrial Revolution who saw no reason why the principles of running a rational and efficient cotton mill could not be applied to all of human society. He sought to create a visionary town, to which he gave the stirring and poignantly hopeful name Village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation.
Investigations in the Age of Obama
Authors: Kriner Douglas L. , Schickler Eric
Published: January 2018

This chapter uses investigative activity during the Obama administration as a lens for evaluating presidential–congressional relations in the early twenty-first century. Investigative activity declined in intensity in the late 1980s through the first decade of the new century, but Republicans’ takeover of the House of Representatives in 2010 sparked a series of high-profile probes. None of these investigations hit their mark and became the next Watergate or provided the impetus for major policy changes. However, collectively they demonstrate the continued vitality of investigations as a mechanism for members of Congress to inflict damage upon the executive branch. In the intensely polarized contemporary era, forcing major direct policy change may have become increasingly difficult, but investigators in divided government have focused their investigative energies on imposing political costs on the president, and they have regularly achieved this goal to considerable effect.
Knowing Intimately
Authors: Shoshan Nitzan
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the elaborate web of neoliberal networks through which the German state renders its targets visible and knowable, often with an efficacy that police and policing could never hope to match, and how the capacity of these nonviolent forms of state mimesis to transact in knowledge rests on the manufacturing of opaqueness and illegibility. In particular, the chapter considers how state agents and technologies of knowing contrast sharply with the clandestine ambivalence of both police informants and neo-Nazi policemen. It also analyzes how street social workers embodied some of the mutations of governance under neoliberalism, focusing on their role in the neoliberal state's surveillance of young right-wing extremists. It concludes with a discussion of the constitutive dilemmas that haunt the entire field of the management of hate in Germany and that render the social workers' task riddled with contradictions.
Dictators and Democrats
Authors: Haggard Stephan , Kaufman Robert R.
Published: January 2018

From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy across the developing and postcommunist worlds transformed the global political landscape. What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? This book takes a comprehensive look at the transitions to and from democracy in recent decades. Deploying both statistical and qualitative analysis, the book engages with theories of democratic change and advocates approaches that emphasize political and institutional factors. While inequality has been a prominent explanation for democratic transitions, the book argues that its role has been limited, and elites as well as masses can drive regime change. Examining seventy-eight cases of democratic transition and twenty-five cases of reversion to autocracy since 1980, the book shows how differences in authoritarian regimes and organizational capabilities shape popular protest and elite initiatives in transitions to democracy, and how institutional weaknesses cause some democracies to fail. The determinants of democracy lie in the strength of existing institutions and the public's capacity to engage in collective action. There are multiple routes to democracy, but those growing out of mass mobilization may provide more checks on incumbents than those emerging from intra-elite bargains. Moving beyond well-known beliefs regarding regime changes, this book explores the conditions under which transitions to democracy are likely to arise.
Introduction
Authors: Haggard Stephan , Kaufman Robert R.
Published: January 2018

This book examines regime change during the so-called Third Wave by focusing on transitions to and from democratic rule, taking into account factors such as the nature of authoritarian and democratic institutions, regime performance, and capacities for collective action on the part of civil society. Drawing on seventy-eight discrete democratic transitions and twenty-five cases of reversion to autocracy that occurred between 1980 and 2008 as coded in two widely used datasets, the book considers how structural factors affect transitions to and reversions from democracy. It shows that democratization driven by mass mobilization appears to hinge on political factors: how exclusionary or co-optive authoritarian regimes are and the extent to which publics are capable of mobilizing grievances into the political arena. This introduction defines core terms and justifies the book's focus on the Third Wave. It also previews the book's empirical findings and concludes with a note on the research method used.
Modeling Democratic Transitions
Authors: Teo Terence
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines why some democratic transitions were driven by mass mobilization, while others appeared to be predominantly elite processes, with a greater role for international influences as well. It first outlines core theoretical arguments about the way authoritarian regimes and the capacity for collective action influence transitions to democracy before discussing some statistical modeling of transitions during the Third Wave. Contrary to “prairie fire” models of political mobilization, this chapter shows that enduring social organizations play a major role in fomenting the mass protest that drives distributive conflict transitions, particularly unions and ethnonationalist organizations. Moreover, it provides evidence that these factors do not give us purchase in explaining elite-led transitions.
Learning from Anomalies
Authors: Haggard Stephan , Kaufman Robert R.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the effects of political institutions and economic performance by considering two sets of cases that run counter to the expectations of modernization theory: low-income countries that survive and the handful of more developed middle-income countries that revert. It begins with a discussion of factors that enable poor democracies to beat the odds, noting that international actors constituted a check on coups and backsliding in a number of cases. It then explores the reasons for the incremental erosion of democracy in middle-income countries, revealing outright reversion to autocracy via backsliding in three cases—Venezuela (2006), Ecuador (2007), and Russia (2007)—and reversion in the case of Thailand (2006) through a military coup. The chapter also finds evidence showing that differences in praetorianism, institutional strength, and economic performance made an important difference for reverters and survivors.
Thinking through Plural Images of Logic
Authors: Berger Susanna
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the Descriptio, the Typus, and the Logicae universae typus (plates 1 and 2 and Fig. 12). These engravings depict entire systems of philosophical knowledge in a comprehensive manner and a hierarchical format, by showing, on a single page, how individual elements of the system relate to the whole. The analysis shows how these plural images are organized by conceptual relationships; their unity is primarily theoretical. The chapter also mentions philosophical plural images in the logic textbook of Johann Justus Winkelmann (1620–1699), which was first published in 1659 and appeared again in 1725. Winkelmann's visual representations combine details of the earlier plural images and show how this genre continued to be employed in the teaching of philosophy well into the eighteenth century. The ideas of Aristotle's logic held sway for over two thousand years, until the work of Gottlob Frege (1848–1925). Whereas much scholarship on the ‘scientific revolution’ focuses on discontinuities and ruptures. The chapter examines the prolonged and relatively stable dominance of Aristotle in the field of logic in the context of universities.
Visual Thinking in Logic Notebooks and Alba amicorum
Authors: Berger Susanna
Published: January 2018

This chapter turns to the notebooks of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century students of logic in Paris and Leuven to demonstrate further the ways in which visual representations, including diagrams of the Porphyrian tree and the square of opposition, along with allegorical and figurative illustrations, were critical in the teaching and development of Aristotelian scholastic philosophy. It shows that lecture notebooks, as well as contemporaneous alba amicorum, incorporate visual materials as a mode of philosophical thought in itself. The visual representations of lecture notebooks and friendship albums are discussed in the same chapter as both these bound manuscript sources functioned as a locus in which students could manipulate visual materials to reflect on philosophical questions in their own voices and with a certain amount of freedom. Furthermore, it shows the iconographic overlaps among the prints and drawings found in these sources.
Introduction
Authors: Gunitsky Seva
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to offer an explanation for the timing, intensity, and content of regime waves during the twentieth century. The central argument is that abrupt hegemonic shocks—moments of sudden rise and decline of great powers—act as powerful catalysts for cross-border bursts of domestic reform. These intense geopolitical disruptions not only alter the global hierarchy of leading states but also shape the wave-like spread and retreat of democracy and its rivals. As a result, the volatile evolution of domestic regimes during the twentieth century has been closely linked to sudden tectonic shifts in the structure of global power. The remainder of the chapter defines the meaning of hegemonic shocks and how shocks lead to regime waves. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Two Ways of Life
Authors: Gunitsky Seva
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the early Cold War period, focusing on how the two triumphant superpowers oversaw institutional waves that embodied their competing visions for the world. The aftermath of the Second World War left in place two rising powers, creating two institutional waves and two visions of the modern state. This rivalry set the tone for the rest of the twentieth century until the collapse of the Soviet alternative in the early 1990s. Both countries used their military might to impose their regimes on others through coercion. Both countries used their economic and diplomatic influence to exert political pressure and encourage other states to adopt their institutions. Both also created and used international institutions to shape and direct their power, and to embed both themselves and their followers in a web of political and economic linkages.
The Ottoman Origins of Arab Patriotism
Authors: Mestyan Adam
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the Ottoman origins of Arab patriotism. The construction of a new political community as related to a new regime type in Ottoman Egypt can be defined by two problems in the first half of the nineteenth century. The first was the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its Egyptian province under the rule of Mehmed Ali. The second was the relationship between the governor and the local elites. These problems were interrelated in the legitimacy structure of power, and provided the conditions for the rise of political nation-ness in Arabic. It was the Crimean War, in which Egypt and other Arab provinces participated, that forcefully brought to the surface patriotism in Arabic as a discursive strategy of constituting political solidarity in public. The idea of the homeland became a means to make sense of new politics through old media and new media, such as the modern Arabic theater in Ottoman Beirut.
The European Aesthetics of Khedivial Power
Authors: Mestyan Adam
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on the creation of spaces which brought a new political aesthetics—the European political aesthetics. Strikingly different from Muslim patriotism, images of Ismail Pasha as a sovereign ruler were created according to western European styles of representation. This representation system was a tool to fabricate the sovereign image of the khedive, to obscure his Ottomanness. The government production of a history of “independence” started at this moment with the instrumentalization of European art. The chapter then looks at the life of Paul Draneht Bey, who helped to fabricate this “internal Europe” and directed the theaters between 1869 and 1878. It concludes with an exploration of the “portrait of the pasha” and the main product of early khedivial culture: Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Aida (1871).
Constitutionalism and Revolution: The Arab Opera
Authors: Mestyan Adam
Published: January 2018

This chapter, instead of a linear progress to revolution, highlights two traits: the return of Egypt's Ottoman attachment in public texts and the relationship of intellectuals to power. The Egyptian army's intervention into the affairs of governance made it possible to formulate national images in which the khedive no longer figured. This change symbolizes a break in ideology, or, in the learned imagination about the army, since legally the khedive remained the leader of the army but his loss of control had already been expressed on the Arabic stage. This was an unprecedented development: a radical change in the realm of ideas before the actual revolt. Through the intersection of patriotism and theater, the chapter then explores how revolutionary culture informed the forgotten origins of Egyptian stardom.
Introduction
Authors: Turnaoğlu Banu
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter discusses the rich intellectual heritage of Turkish republican thinking and the resources through which the change from the monarchy to the Republic came about. The works of Feroz Ahmad, Bernard Lewis, Serif Mardin, Stanford Shaw, and Tarik Zafer Tunaya have acknowledged the debt of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reforms, the political thinking of the Young Ottomans and Young Turks, and intellectual developments in the Second Constitutional period (1908–18). These works, nevertheless, remain limited by their singular focus on Westernization as a response to external pressure, and fail to appreciate the full intellectual richness and originality of Ottoman thinkers. The chapter argues that modern-day Turkish republicanism represents the outcome of centuries of intellectual disputes between Islamic, liberal, and radical conceptions of republicanism.
The Tanzimat Era and the Republicanism of the Young Ottomans
Authors: Turnaoğlu Banu
Published: January 2018

This chapter demonstrates how during the Tanzimat era, the emphasis of reforms was on the modernization and Westernization of the Ottoman administrative system, and the fostering of full participation in the Concert of Europe, all to be enacted through a series of legal codes and institutional reforms. Under a triad of grand viziers—Mustafa Resid Pasa, Mehmed Emin Âli Pasa, and Kececizâde Mehmed Fuad Pasa, collectively the Tanzimatçilar (the Tanzimat-men)—the civil bureaucratic elite consolidated its hold as the most influential branch of the administration, leading to a shift from sultanic power to bureaucratic authoritarianism. This “bureaucratic despotism” and Westernization of sociopolitical and moral life instigated the birth of the first organized intellectual opposition movement, the Young Ottomans.
The Political Thought of the Young Turk Revolution
Authors: Turnaoğlu Banu
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes how the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 had provided a different conception of what politics should mean and how it should operate in the Ottoman Empire, along with a new conception of state and society. Drawing on the political language of the French Third Republic, democracy and liberal republican ideas slowly transformed the terminology and categorization of central issues in Ottoman politics and laid the most salient intellectual and institutional foundations for the young Republic. The revolution opened the Second Constitutional period (1908–18). Its first phase revitalized the liberal constitutionalism of the Young Ottomans. Political thinking drew heavily upon Montesquieu's formula for the separation of powers in combination with the ideas of the Third Republic and Ottoman positivism.
Introduction
Authors: Galichon Alfred
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book discusses the problem of optimal transport (OT), which can be best exemplified by the problem of assigning workers to jobs: given the distribution of a population of workers with heterogeneous skills, and given the distribution of jobs with heterogeneous characteristics, how should one assign workers to firms in order to maximize the total economic output? The economic output will depend on the complementarities between workers' skills and job characteristics; some assignments generate higher total output than others. The remainder of the chapter covers economic applications of OT, OT as a mix of different techniques, history of OT, and sources on OT in the mathematical literature.
Monge–Kantorovich Theory
Authors: Galichon Alfred
Published: January 2018

This chapter states the Monge–Kantorovich problem and provides the duality result in a fairly general setting. The primal problem is interpreted as the central planner's problem of determining the optimal assignment of workers to firms, while the dual problem is interpreted as the invisible hand's problem of obtaining a system of decentralized equilibrium prices. In general, the primal problem always has a solution (which means that an optimal assignment of workers to jobs exists), but the dual does not: the optimal assignment cannot always be decentralized by a system of prices. However, the cases where the dual problem does not have a solution are rather pathological, and in all of the cases considered in the rest of the book, both the primal and the dual problems have solutions.
Introduction
Authors: Auyero Javier , Berti María Fernanda
Published: January 2018

This book focuses on the collective trauma created by the constant and implacable interpersonal violence in Arquitecto Tucci, a marginalized neighborhood in the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It examines the hows and whys of the copresence and concatenations of different forms of violence that encircle the lives of the urban poor in the community. It considers the ways in which scared residents—men and women, adults and children—establish routines and weave relations to cope with (and respond to) the constant danger that besieges them and their beloved ones by exercising what anthropologists Veena Das and Michael Lambek call “ordinary ethics.” This introduction provides an overview of violence in urban areas in Latin America, the book's ethnographic reconstruction of violence at the urban margins, the research method used, and the chapters that follow.
Introduction
Authors: Bell Daniel A.
Published: January 2018

This book argues in favor of political meritocracy using China's one-party political system as example. It considers four key flaws of democracy, along with theoretical and real meritocratic alternatives for each: “the tyranny of the majority,” “the tyranny of the minority,” “the tyranny of the voting community,” and “the tyranny of competitive individualists.” The book also discusses three key problems associated with any attempt to implement political meritocracy and asks whether it is possible to address these problems without democratic elections: the problem of corruption, the problem of ossification, and the problem of legitimacy. Finally, it explores the pros and cons of different models of “democratic meritocracy” as well as three basic planks of the China model and how political reform in the post-Mao era has been guided by the principles of “democracy at the bottom, experimentation in the middle, and meritocracy at the top”.
Is Democracy the Least Bad Political System?
Authors: Bell Daniel A.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines whether democratic elections lead to good consequences, and more specifically whether democracy is the least bad political system. It considers four key flaws of electoral democracy: the tyranny of the majority, the tyranny of the minority, the tyranny of the voting community, and the tyranny of competitive individualists. Using examples primarily from the United States, the chapter challenges the idea that one person, one vote is the least bad way of choosing leaders to enact good policies, rather than provide a comprehensive defense of political meritocracy as an alternative to electoral democracy. It suggests that there may be morally desirable and political feasible alternatives to electoral democracy that help to remedy its major disadvantages. It also discusses examples of actually existing political meritocratic arrangements in China and/or Singapore that may minimize the flaws of electoral democracies.
What’s Wrong with Political Meritocracy
Authors: Bell Daniel A.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines three key problems associated with any attempt to implement political meritocracy: the problem of corruption, the problem of ossification, and the problem of legitimacy. Given that electoral democracy at the top is not politically realistic in China, the chapter asks whether it is possible to address these problems without democratic elections. The problem of corruption can be addressed by mechanisms such as independent supervisory institutions and improved moral education, whereas the problem of ossification of hierarchies can be addressed by means of a humble political discourse, or opening the ruling party to diverse social groups. On the other hand, the problem of legitimacy can be addressed only by providing more opportunities for political participation. The chapter considers whether political meritocracy can be reconciled with democracy in morally desirable ways without multiparty competition and free and fair elections for top leaders.
Confronting Political Islam
Authors: Owen IV John M.
Published: January 2018

Political Islam has often been compared to ideological movements of the past such as fascism or Christian theocracy. But are such analogies valid? How should the Western world today respond to the challenges of political Islam? Taking an original approach to answer this question, this book compares Islamism's struggle with secularism to other prolonged ideological clashes in Western history. By examining the past conflicts that have torn Europe and the Americas, the book draws upon six major lessons to demonstrate that much of what we think about political Islam is wrong. The book focuses on the origins and dynamics of twentieth-century struggles among communism, fascism, and liberal democracy; the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contests between monarchism and republicanism; and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. It then applies principles learned from the successes and mistakes of governments during these conflicts to the contemporary debates embroiling the Middle East. The book concludes that ideological struggles last longer than most people presume; ideologies are not monolithic; foreign interventions are the norm; a state may be both rational and ideological; an ideology wins when states that exemplify it outperform other states across a range of measures; and the ideology that wins may be a surprise. Looking at the history of the Western world itself and the fraught questions over how societies should be ordered, the book upends some of the conventional wisdom about the current upheavals in the Muslim world.
Ideologies Are (Usually) Not Monolithic
Authors: Owen John M.
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the second lesson that is relevant to political Islam and secularism today: ideologies are (usually) not monolithic. It first considers the situation in Europe in the early nineteenth century, when European conservatives claimed that the divide between republicanism and constitutional monarchism was a distinction without a difference. It then examines the dilemma faced by the House of Habsburg in Europe during the early seventeenth century: since Protestantism seemed to be polylithic, should they try to exploit divisions among the Protestants? The chapter proceeds by discussing the fault lines separating communists and socialists in the twentieth century before concluding with some reflections on the lessons that can be drawn from Western history for the United States in dealing with Islamists today. It suggests that whether Islamism is monolithic or polylithic is a question that matters, especially for U.S. foreign policy.
A State May Be Rational and Ideological at the Same Time
Authors: Owen John M.
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the fourth lesson: a state may be rational and ideological at the same time. Islamism is the ruling ideology of several countries, led by Saudi Arabia and Iran. In non-Muslim countries such as the United States, the question that often arises is whether Islamist states, or their governments, are rational or fanatical. In truth, a state may appear irrational to outsiders, but may be rationally pursuing goals shaped by its ideology. The chapter looks at three such states: the Palatinate, a German estate in the old Holy Roman Empire; the Soviet Union; and the United States. It concludes with an assessment of the rationality of Islamist states by distinguishing their ends from their means.