bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Theoretical Presentation of Modern and Post-Modern Principles
Authors: de Sadeleer Nicolas
Published: January 2021

This chapter begins by identifying the various elements that together define modern and post-modern law. How legal principles function within each of these legal models, for both international and municipal law, is explained, with particular attention to the role they assume in the field of environmental law. The chapter highlights the distinction that must be made between general principles of law, which are characteristic of modernity, and directing principles, which are better suited to adapting to the shifting forms that characterize current public policies including environmental policy. It demonstrates that directing principles do not represent a complete break with modernity, since they eventually result in the rediscovery of the same values upon which modernity is based. Finally, the chapter explains that post-modernity is not merely a chaotic system composed of anti-modern elements; rather, it is a system whereby chaotic elements are ordered differently from modern law.
The Legal Status of the Directing Principles of Environmental Law: From Political Slogans to Normative Principles
Authors: de Sadeleer Nicolas
Published: January 2021

This chapter explains that the fact that these directing principles are set out in texts of varying status does not deprive them of normative effect. On the other hand, by being recognized in provisions with normative effect, the polluter-pays, prevention, and precautionary principles have specific normative effect rather than being mere regulatory ideals. This chapter clarifies the fact that the legal status of the directing principles is quite unusual and typifies post-modern law in that they are akin to norms whose content is somewhat vague and that they therefore lend themselves to a wide range of applications.
Constituent Power in the European Union
Authors: Patberg Markus
Published: January 2021

The European Union (EU) has been through almost two decades of near-constant constitutional crisis. The failure of the Constitutional Treaty was followed in quick succession by the struggles about the Lisbon Treaty, the Eurozone emergency, Brexit, and, recently, Corona-crisis-induced conflicts about financial solidarity. Over the course of these events, it has become clear that the EU’s constitutional development largely evades popular control. At the same time, the EU faces increasing politicization from below. While Eurosceptic forces seek to ‘take back control’ at the national level, pro-European citizens challenge the role of the states as the ‘masters of the treaties’. They reclaim what—in their view—has been illegitimately withheld from them: the right to shape the EU polity. This book advances the argument that these developments prompt the need for a theory of constituent power in the EU. The reason why European integration eludes citizen control and meets with growing discontent is that it allows constituted powers to operate as de facto constituent powers. Starting from claims to founding authority articulated in public narratives, the book explores competing models of constituent power in the EU—regional cosmopolitanism, demoi-cracy, split popular sovereignty, and destituent power—revealing their respective strengths and weaknesses. Rationally reconstructing established democratic practices of EU constitutional politics, it develops a new theory of constituent power in the EU. Addressing questions of the adequate conceptualization, allocation, agency, and institutionalization of constituent power, the book opens up the prospect of a more democratic mode of European integration.
Conclusion
Authors: Ware Owen
Published: January 2021

This chapter concludes by drawing attention to a parallel between Kant’s early critics (including Karl Reinhold, Leonard Creuzer, and Solomon Maimon) and present-day Kantians. Surprisingly, the chapter shows that these contemporary arguments are closer, both in spirit and strategy, to those first post-Kantians who claimed to be revising or rejecting Kant’s position. Both seek to derive the normativity of moral requirements from a more basic conception of action, agency, or rationality. On the reading of Kant defended in this book, Kant himself was never attracted to such a foundationalist strategy of justification in his mature writings. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Kant’s reasons for resisting foundationalism in ethics give us reasons to critically reassess recent Kantian arguments for moral normativity.
Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence
Authors: Fleming Christopher T.
Published: January 2021

An account of theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (dāya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharmaśāstra). This book examines the evolution of different?juridical models of inheritance—in which families held property in trusts or in tenancies-in-common—against the backdrop of related developments in the philosophical understanding of ownership in the Sanskrit text-traditions of hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) and logic (Nyāya) respectively. Ownership and Inheritance reconstructs medieval Sanskrit theories of property and traces the emergence of various competing schools of Sanskrit jurisprudence during the early modern period (roughly fifteenth to nineteenth centuries) in Bihar, Bengal, and Varanasi. The book attends to the ways in which ideas from these schools of jurisprudence shaped the codification of Anglo-Hindu personal law by administrators of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While acknowledging the limitations of colonial conceptions of Dharmaśāstra as positive law, Ownership and Inheritance argues for far greater continuity between pre-colonial and colonial Sanskrit jurisprudence than accepted previously. Finally, this monograph charts the transformation of the Hindu law of inheritance—through precedent and statute—over the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.
The Theology of Prayer
Authors: Stokes Christopher
Published: January 2021

This chapter is archivally based: it lays out three broad traditions of thinking about prayer that were developed across the eighteenth century and inherited by the Romantics, drawing on sermons, essays, polemics, guides to prayer, and other genres of religious print culture. The mainstream tradition, associated with Anglicanism, is ‘reasonable devotion’, which attempts to give a pragmatic account of prayer as a duty and a discipline of self. Elements of this were extended in the rationalist tradition, which attempted to exorcise the archaic and supernatural overtones of prayer and ended up challenging some of its key elements (e.g. address to God, petition). Finally, the Evangelical Revival espoused an emotionally intense, transformational idea of prayer as the soul’s most fundamental voice of joy and despair. The chapter concludes by reviewing prayer, as an idea, on the cusp of the Romantic era.
‘Unlike the God of human Error’
Authors: Stokes Christopher
Published: January 2021

This chapter sets off from the nature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron as so-called atheist poets. What occurs to the historical and aesthetic affinity between poetry and prayer when prayer is abandoned as a viable language? For Shelley, the crucial thing is to position prayer as a political act. This chapter’s readings trace how he tries to move beyond a bleak connection between prayer and a theology implying a despotic and monarchical deity towards rehabilitating prayer as an act of love. For Byron, his own torn and troubled relation to religion finds expression in the prayerful prayerlessness of his anti-heroes, figures who reject prayer, but also cannot help but mimic or parody prayerful states. The analysis ends with an alternative devotional piety embodied in the figure of Adah, the heroine of Byron’s poetic drama of exile and rebellion, Cain.
Aristotle on Spontaneous Generation, Spontaneity, and Natural Processes
Authors: Kress Emily
Published: January 2021

Aristotle contrasts standard animal generation with ‘spontaneous generation’, which happens when some material putrefies and gives rise to a new organism. This paper addresses two interrelated puzzles about spontaneous generation. First, is it of the same ‘fundamental kind’ of causal process as standard generation? Second, is it ‘spontaneous’, as understood in Physics 2.4–6: rare, accidentally caused, and among things that are for the sake of something? I argue that both puzzles turn on the same questions about the process types involved. I show that the type putrefaction plays a more important role in spontaneous generation than has been recognized so far. Because putrefaction does not play this role in standard generation, the two processes are of different ‘fundamental’ kinds. Moreover, spontaneous generation happens rarely in that it is rare for processes of putrefaction to happen in such a way that they can also be described in terms of concoction.
The Congo Free State, Atrocity Tales, and Human Rights History
Authors: Nault Derrick M.
Published: January 2021

Chapter One, which explores the colonial roots of human rights, suggests that ideas resembling modern human rights first emerged in the 1890s in response to atrocities in the Congo Free State. It shows that as reports of horrific abuses of Africans under Belgian King Leopold II’s rule circulated worldwide, a shocked international community, using language and concepts resembling contemporary human rights discourses, was stirred to challenge violations of Africans’ rights, propose ways to prevent future infractions, and demand punishments for perpetrators of mass atrocities. While these nineteenth-century visions of human rights did not immediately lead to an international system of human rights protection, the chapter suggests that they nonetheless represented an important precedent for contemporary human rights norms and institutions.
Haile Selassie, the League of Nations, and Human Rights Diplomacy
Authors: Nault Derrick M.
Published: January 2021

Chapter Three proposes that former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I, a figure rarely mentioned in histories of human rights, made significant contributions in the realm of human rights diplomacy in the 1930s. Following Fascist Italy’s invasion of his nation in 1935, he persistently lobbied the League of Nations to uphold Ethiopia’s right to self-determination and punish Italy’s use of chemical weapons and other violations of the Geneva Protocol and Hague Conventions, raising international awareness of Italian war crimes in Africa. As is also shown, he adroitly drew attention to the shortcomings of the League’s Covenant, providing vital lessons for the founding of the United Nations (UN). While Selassie was deposed in the 1970s due to numerous failures as a leader, the chapter demonstrates that for almost three decades he enthralled the international community and prompted rethinking on Europe’s relations with its African colonies that had long-term significance for human rights.
Africa, the United Nations, and Third Generation Rights
Authors: Nault Derrick M.
Published: January 2021

Chapter Four assesses Africa’s contributions to ‘third generation’ rights—‘solidarity’ or ‘group rights’ that emerged in tandem with decolonization after World War II. It traces the genealogy of three such human rights incorporated into the mandate of the United Nations (UN) from the 1950s to 1980s—the right to self-determination, the right to racial non-discrimination, and the right to development—arguing that African political lobbying proved decisive for the recognition and codification of these interrelated rights at the UN. Through writings and speeches critical of colonialism, racism, and global inequality; cultivating alliances with non-African Third World nations; and making the United Nations a more inclusive and representative international body, African leaders, it is shown, helped redefine human rights at the UN in ways that continue to reverberate in our own era.
‘An Initiated Mystic’
Authors: Hewitt Seán
Published: January 2021

Opening with an anecdote about Synge’s attempts at telepathy, and using much archival material, this chapter reveals Synge’s engagement with occultism, showing it to be not only pervasive but integral to his work. Although Synge as occultist has never been granted credence in studies of the writer, he read widely in occult literature, covering theosophy, magic, telepathy, and other pseudosciences. This reading coincided with Synge’s engagement with socialism, and the two interests were closely linked. Focusing principally on Synge’s major prose work The Aran Islands (1907), the chapter draws on numerous drafts, along with Synge’s ‘Autobiography’ and ‘Étude Morbide’, to show that Synge made recourse to occult mysticism in response to moments of fragmentation, where modernity becomes most pressing and disruptive. In this way, the first chapter introduces Synge as a mystical thinker and a leftist writer whose works were a nuanced and self-reflexive reaction to modernity. It also introduces the key methodology of the book as a whole, mobilizing Synge’s archives and reading diaries, and bringing to light new source materials in order to illuminate the processes of influence and authorial revision at work behind his texts. Using works by Madame Blavatsky, Maurice Maeterlinck, Annie Besant, William Morris, W. B. Yeats, Laurence Oliphant, and others, this chapter places Synge back into the context of fin de siècle occultism, and in doing so reveals the roots of his synthesis of mystic and political thought.
Conspiracy Literature in Early Renaissance Italy
Authors: Celati Marta
Published: January 2021

The present work represents the first full-length investigation of Italian Renaissance literature on the topic of conspiracy. This literary output consists of texts belonging to different genres that enjoyed widespread diffusion in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the development of these literary writings proves to be closely connected with the affirmation of a centralized political thought and princely ideology in Italian states. The centrality of the issue of conspiracies in the political and cultural context of the Italian Renaissance emerges clearly also in the sixteenth century in Machiavelli’s work, where the topic is closely interlaced with the problems of building political consensus and the management of power. This monograph focuses on the most significant Quattrocento texts examined as case studies (representative of different states, literary genres, and of both prominent authors—Alberti, Poliziano, Pontano—and minor but important literati) and on Machiavelli’s works where this political theme is particularly pivotal, marking a continuity, but also a turning point, with respect to the preceding authors. Through an interdisciplinary analysis across literature, history, philology and political philosophy, this study traces the evolution of literature on plots in early Renaissance Italy, pointing out the key function of the classical tradition in it, and the recurring narrative approaches, historiographical techniques, and ideological angles that characterize the literary transfiguration of the topic. This investigation also offers a reconsideration and re-definition of the complex facets of fifteenth-century political literature, which played a crucial role in the development of a new theory of statecraft.
Introduction
Authors: Celati Marta
Published: January 2021

The first section is a general introduction to Italian Early Renaissance literature on the topic of conspiracies. It sets out the theoretical basis of this study, providing the definition of the ‘thematic genre’ of texts on political plots and contextualizing it within the historical, cultural, and political background of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. This substantial corpus consists of texts produced in different political centres and through different literary forms, but with significant thematic and ideological traits in common. The expansion of this kind of literature, in an epoch that can be rightly defined an ‘age of conspiracies’, is connected with the concentration of political power in the hands of newly established leaders. In this scenario, the fruitful interaction between literature and politics is evident in the development of two intertwined genres: historical-literary works on plots and political treatises de principe, texts that are informed by similar political perspectives and contribute to the legitimization of new types of authorities. The crucial implications that the issue of conspiracy had in the literary debate on princely power will also emerge clearly in the following century in Machiavelli’s thought. This chapter additionally introduces the crucial role played by the classical tradition in this ‘thematic’ literature. Sallust is predictably the chief source, but all texts are based on the recovery of manifold classical models and display a complex process of imitation that affects structural, thematic, stylistic, and ideological aspects. The last section offers an overview of the main fifteenth-century texts on plots.
Giovanni Pontano’s De bello Neapolitano
Authors: Celati Marta
Published: January 2021

This chapter presents a critical study of Giovanni Pontano’s De bello Neapolitano, the historical account of the ‘conspiracy of the barons’ against Ferdinando of Aragon, king of Naples, and the war that followed the rebellion (1459–65). Pontano’s work is contextualized in the historical and cultural scenario of the Aragonese monarchy and in the humanist’s broader literary and political activity, as a historian, political and literary theorist, and royal secretary. In particular the De bello Neapolitano can be placed in the realm of ‘political historiography’, a genre that enjoyed considerable fortune in Italian Renaissance. Pontano’s work is inspired by different models, both classical and contemporary, and continues the tradition of Aragonese historiography (inaugurated by Valla, Facio, and Panormita). Moreover, the chapter examines the text from a political angle by investigating its connections with Pontano’s most significant political-theoretical treatises: De principe and De obedientia. The analysis illustrates how the humanist’s princely ideology and his theory of statecraft is framed by means of different works, through the interplay of historical narrative and theoretical speculation. In this productive literary interaction, the topic of internal political conflict occupies a prominent position and its treatment in Pontano’s works reveals a developing idea of political realism. Pontano provides a concrete model of an ideal state that is based on the principle of obedience and on the hierarchical relationship between different social components: the prince, the barons, and the common people, components that play a key function, both narrative and exemplary, also in the humanist’s historical work.
Angelo Poliziano’s Coniurationis commentarium
Authors: Celati Marta
Published: January 2021

The fourth chapter focuses on Poliziano’s Coniurationis commentarium, the literary account of the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici brothers, Lorenzo and Giuliano (1478). The critical analysis reconstructs the circumstances of composition of the text, its publication in two printed editions, and its circulation in the manuscript tradition, revealing that the work enjoyed widespread diffusion as the central pillar of pro-Medici propaganda. The investigation into the text shows that it totally adheres to the guidelines of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s cultural politics in the aftermath of the plot. The thorough examination of the changes made by Poliziano in the second version of the text confirms that its political perspective also mirrored the evolution of the political situation in Florence and in Italy in 1480. Despite being a highly propagandistic work, Poliziano’s Commentarium is also a sophisticated piece of literature produced by the eclectic combination of manifold sources drawn from the classical tradition: a conflation that reflects the humanist’s principle of docta varietas . The main prototype of Sallust is combined it with multiple references to a variety of models: other classical historians (Suetonius, Caesar, and Livy), poetry, comic authors (most of all Terence), and even technical literature (Celsus, Pliny the Elder, etc.). In particular, the extensive use of Suetonius, especially his biography of Caesar, conveys particular political overtones. One of the crucial ideological elements in the text is the representation of Lorenzo de’ Medici as an actual heroic prince, who is loved by his people and embodies the idea of the whole state.
Jewish American Writing and World Literature
Authors: Zaritt Saul Noam
Published: January 2021

Jewish American Writing and World Literature studies Jewish American writers’ relationships with the idea of world literature—how they place themselves within its boundaries, outside its purview, or, most often, in constant motion across and beyond its maps and networks. Writers such as Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley all responded to a demand to write beyond local Jewish and American audiences and toward the world, as a global market and as a transnational ideal. At the same time, their work is deeply informed by an intimate connection to Yiddish, a Jewish vernacular with its own global network and institutional ambitions. This book tracks the attempts and failures, through translation, to find a home for Jewish vernacularity in the institution of world literature. Beyond fame and global circulation, world literature holds up the promise of legibility, in which a threatened origin becomes the site for redemptive literary creativity. But this promise inevitably remains unfulfilled, as writers struggle to balance potential universal achievements with untranslatable realities, rendering impossible any complete arrival in the US and in the world. The exploration of the translational uncertainty of Jewish American writing joins postcolonial critiques of US and world literature and challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American paradigms of literary study. In bringing into conversation the fields of Yiddish studies, American Studies, and world literature theory, the book proposes a new approach to the study of modern Jewish literatures and their implication within global empires of culture.
The emergence of international parliamentary institutions
Authors: Schimmelfennig Frank , Winzen Thomas , Lenz Tobias , Rocabert Jofre , Crasnic Loriana , Gherasimov Cristina , Lipps Jana , Mumford Densua
Published: January 2021

In this chapter, we provide statistical analyses of the establishment and empowerment of international parliamentary institutions (IPIs) in seventy-three relevant international organizations. We analyse whether IPI establishment was systematically associated with the conditions of parliamentarization and find robust and strong positive associations for general purpose and policy scope and robust but somewhat weaker positive correlations for diffusion. By contrast, neither authority nor democracy are systematically associated with the existence of IPIs. Governance failure is either insignificant or has a negative effect on IPI creation. Finally, we explore the correlation of the conditions of parliamentarization with IPI power and find a robust association of IPI authority with IPI legislative competencies.
Remarks on propositional nominalization
Authors: Moulton Keir
Published: January 2021

Moulton’s ‘Remarks on propositional nominalization’ investigates nominalization at the highest reaches of the extended verbal projection, finite CPs. While CPs can express propositions, Moulton puts forward the novel claim that only nominalization of CPs by a semantically-contentful N can deliver reference to propositional objects. This conclusion is in contrast to the propositional nominalization operations proposed in Chierchia (1984), Potts (2002), and Takahashi (2010). Evidence comes from a correlation between two types of D+CP constructions in Spanish (Picallo, 2002; Serrano, 2014, 2015) and the kind of propositions they can describe. Moulton then shows that a similar pattern arises in the case of exophoric propositional proforms, a novel observation. Putting the two case studies together, the following picture emerges: Natural language does not permit reference to proposition-like objects directly by adding a D to a CP, but only via some content-bearing entity (e.g. Moltmann’s (2013) attitudinal objects). In the case of propositional nominalizations, this entity must come in the form a lexical N; in the case of propositional discourse anaphora, this must come in the form of a discourse referent that bears propositional content, such as an assertion event (Hacquard, 2006). <189>
Incurability and the Clinic
Authors: Arnold-Forster Agnes
Published: January 2021

This chapter shows how the hospitalization of cancer gave the care of the disease new legitimacy, tied it closely to the investigative and charitable projects of the metropolitan medical elite, and provided cancer with a presence in London’s built environment. It was in this early nineteenth-century moment that the disease moved out of the confines of the sickbed and entered the culture, politics, and social world of the early Victorian metropolis. The chapter reveals how, because of their new, concentrated, and hospital-based study of the disease, the capital’s medical elite defined cancer as an incurable malady and as a problem that they, as a collective, needed to overcome. It argues that the hospitalization of the disease codified cancer and transformed characteristics—such as incurability—that had long been observed by practitioners into essential, identifying features.
Cancer under the Microscope
Authors: Arnold-Forster Agnes
Published: January 2021

This chapter reveals how mapping was only one of the tools deployed to decode the ‘cancer problem’ in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Running parallel to the activities of Haviland, Moore, and Green, biologists, pathologists, and histologists took up the microscope with gusto and spawned a vibrant debate among cell theorists, bacteriologists, and parasitologists. This chapter thus traces the introduction of the microscope into the landscape of cancer theory and practice, explores the development of cell theories of malignancy, and interrogates the many and various ‘germ theories’ of the disease. It argues that despite their close relationship with the microscope and its scientific and progressive associations, all three theories appealed in part because they recapitulated and reframed very old ideas about cancer’s causes and characteristics.
How Growth Strategies Evolve in the Developed Democracies
Authors: Hall Peter A.
Published: January 2021

This chapter charts the shape and movement of the growth strategies of the developed democracies since 1945 across three periods: an era of modernization, one of liberalization, and an era of knowledge-based growth, with an emphasis on the relationship between developments in the political economy and changes in the character of electoral politics. It argues that economic policy-making always entails assembling coalitions for policy in both the arenas of electoral politics and of producer group politics. Accordingly, economic policy responds, not only to secular economic developments, but also to shifting political conditions and notably to changes in the cleavage structures underpinning electoral politics, which are themselves influenced by preceding economic developments. Growth strategies are conditioned by how an evolving “economic gestalt” portrays the problems of the economy and by processes of coalition formation in the electoral arena. The chapter devotes special attention to the growth strategies of the UK, France, Germany, and Sweden.
The Democratic Design Framework: Relational Elements and Guiding Precepts
Authors: Saward Michael
Published: January 2021

This chapter describes key aspects of the building and explication of the new democratic design framework, extending the examination of the relations and interactions between the framework’s two core elements, principles and practices. In that context, the chapter explores procedure and proceduralism to ground subsequent accounts of procedural sequencing, ordering, phasing, and incentive effects for democratic designs. The chapter then offers a set of guiding design precepts—factors crucial to the deployment and character of the democratic design framework. The key precepts discussed are systemic design and reflexive design, the latter including the nature and importance of context to design. The complexities—the messiness—of both system and context in reality are covered in some detail.
Word and Image
Authors: Wyke Maria
Published: January 2021

The pioneering Italian film Quo vadis? (1913, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) is widely recognized as a turning point in both film history and the popular reception of the ancient world. Its feature-length adaptation of the Polish novel sought to nationalize the Italian public through the presentation of a common cultural heritage in the Roman past, to raise the commercial prestige of the Italian film industry in global markets, and to increase the artistic status of cinema and legitimate it as a respectable form of entertainment. Its use of nineteenth-century historical fiction also provided a radically new way of experiencing Neronian Rome, related to but distinct from the reconstruction of the Roman past in other high cultural forms. The film achieved substantial success, reaching spectators of all classes throughout Italy and across the world. Yet when it was first released, some critics deplored it as cheap, facile ‘wordless images’—a harbinger of a ‘cinema age’ that would threaten the survival of theatre, the book, and even literacy itself. This chapter draws on recent work in adaptation studies to reconceptualize the relationship between the Italian film and the Polish novel as more complex than image to word. And, through its analysis of the afterlife of Sienkiewicz’s novel on screen, this chapter explores cinema more broadly as a mode of expression that is not inferior to the book but more varied, and in possession of extensive ideological and aesthetic, as well as mass-market, reach.
‘A more permanent world’
Authors: Stubbs Jonathan
Published: January 2021

This chapter traces the long production history of Quo Vadis at MGM, beginning in the mid-1930s and including an unsuccessful attempt to bring Sienkiewicz’s novel to the screen during the Second World War. It examines the predominantly economic factors which led to the film being made as a ‘runaway’ production, initially bound for locations in Italy and studios in London but ultimately realized as an all-Italian production based at the revived Cinecittà studio. MGM’s need to repatriate revenues which had been temporarily blocked by the Italian government was instrumental in this decision: their money could not be withdrawn from Italy directly, but it could be invested in local production and then exported back to America as materials for a film. This chapter also considers the legacy of Quo Vadis, both in Italy and America. The film’s success not only propelled a cycle of highly profitable epic movies set in the ancient world but also established a model for relocating big-budget film production overseas. Giulio Andreotti later claimed that the film ‘did more for Italy than the Marshall Plan’, but others have been less sanguine about the industrial restructuring which occurred in its wake. More than sixty years later, overseas production (buttressed by an array of tax-incentive schemes) remains a key element in the American film and TV industry’s global reach. In this context, the transnational production history of Quo Vadis is perhaps more relevant than ever.
Ursus as a Serial Figure
Authors: Dall’Asta Monica , Faccioli Alessandro
Published: January 2021

This article examines the transtextual legacy of Ursus in Italian cinema from the silent period to the popular ‘sword-and-sandal’ genre of the 1950s and 1960s. We discuss Ursus as a blueprint for Maciste, the iconic strongman created by Gabriele D’Annunzio for one of the biggest international hits of early Italian epic cinema, Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914). We then discuss the persistence of the strongman icon in the following years, in relation to such topics as the emergence of physical culture during the first decades of the twentieth century, and the escalation of fascist culture and politics in the 1920s. The reappearance of Ursus in the late 1950s, in the second wave of the strongman genre, offers the opportunity to further discuss this figure in terms of both transnational reception and gender representation, exploring the multiple paths of its cultural circulation and appropriation.
International Courts as Coordination Devices for Opposition Parties
Authors: Gathii James Thuo
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines how opposition political parties have sought to overcome repressive practices in four of the six East African Community Member States: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and South Sudan. Opposition political parties and politicians from these countries have prodded the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) to use a treaty remedy for violations of rules governing the elections of members to the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) in each of these countries. They have done so by pursuing a judicial remedy in the EACJ to resolve a coordination problem that opposition parties face when their opportunity to participate in an above-board election is compromised. These cases show how challenging the electoral malpractices of dominant parties in the EACJ facilitate opposition mobilization in ways that are not always possible, or even anticipated, in their home country. The EACJ has facilitated this coordination by consistently affirming that above-board elections are the only permissible mode of electing members of the EALA. This has helped opposition political parties to know when they have a factual basis with a likelihood of success so they could bring cases against dominant political parties in the EACJ. By contrast, the lack of cases from Burundi and Rwanda shows that the clamp down on organizational rights in these countries have made it impossible for opposition parties and politicians to bring election cases before the EACJ.
Reference Guide to Africa’s International Courts
Authors: Gathii James Thuo , Otieno Mbori Harrison
Published: January 2021

This chapter is a general introduction to the eight active international courts in Africa, and the ninth inactive court, the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) Judicial Organ. The international courts in Africa stem from two sources: from the sub-regional economic integration arrangements and the regional human rights system of the African Union. The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights is the regional human rights court in Africa. The chapter presents an overview of the general characteristics of these courts. First, excluding the AMU Judicial Organ, they all allow, or have allowed, cases from individuals and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in addition to states against states. Second, excluding the African Court for cases by individuals or NGOs, these courts have compulsory jurisdiction. Third, although all of these courts allow states to file cases against each other, bar one exception, there have been none. The guide starts with the human rights-oriented courts: East African Court of Justice (EACJ); Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS) Community Court of Justice (ECCJ); South African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal; and the African Court and Commission. It then discusses the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Court of Justice, and courts that focus on economic disputes: Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa Common Court Justice and Arbitration (OHADA CCJA); Court of Justice of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) Court of Justice; the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) Court of Justice; and the least active of them, the AMU Judicial Organ.
Introduction
Authors: Mendola Joseph
Published: January 2021

This is an introductory chapter. It sketches the project of the book, which is to understand the ontology of a central class of particulars, and of their most basic and central properties and relations. This central class encompasses the commonsense entities that our experience seems naïvely to reveal. First of all, there are ordinary visible objects like balls and cars. The book investigates the kind of particularity they present in experience. Second, there are locations in space and time that such ordinary things occupy, and which have a somewhat different sort of particularity. Third, there are the material bits that make up the balls and cars. The proper understanding of both the particularity and the concrete properties and relations of ordinary concrete objects like these demands certain metaphysical novelties. It requires a return to the ancient conception that there is a difference between different ways of being, specifically between the existence of actual tables and chairs with their evident colors and shapes on one hand, and what might be called “the subsistence” of certain merely possible beings on the other. But it also requires the recognition of various sorts of unity relations less than strict identity, which for instance relate determinable and relevantly determinate properties. All these novelties involve distinctive forms of modal structure.
Problems of Individuation
Authors: Mendola Joseph
Published: January 2021

This chapter is an introduction to problems regarding the individuation of the ordinary concrete particulars of our experience. There are three problems of unity. These are what makes up the unity of the parts of a single particular at a time, what makes for the unity of a particular over time despite change, and what makes for its identity across possible worlds. There are also corresponding problems of difference, regarding what makes two otherwise identical particulars distinct. This chapter explore serious difficulties—especially modal difficulties—that arise when we place standing solutions to these problems in juxtaposition.
Haecceities
Authors: Mendola Joseph
Published: January 2021

This chapter is an account of the particularity of ordinary concrete objects like balls and bikes that appear within our experience. It argues that certain sorts of haecceities, which is to say irreducible individualities or bare particularities, are required to account for the particularity of such things. These haecceities involve modal structure of a distinctive sort. Various accounts are explored. But the central model developed involves haecceities of minimal spatial and temporal material bits, which help in turn to constitute the present time slice of a perceived object. This time slice could occur at different times or in different possible worlds, and instantiates a substantial form that constrains, in a perdurantist manner, available forms of identity over time rooted in concrete relations.
Capitalism Before Corporations
Authors: Televantos Andreas
Published: January 2021

This book considers to what extent English law was able to facilitate trade before the advent of general incorporation and modern securities law. It concentrates on the period from 1790 to 1827 — the period after Lord Mansfield's well-known contributions to commercial law, and examines the extent to which legal institutions of that time were sympathetic to the needs of merchants and willing to accommodate their changing practices and demands within established legal doctrinal frameworks and contemporary political economic thought. It concentrates on cases of fraud and business failure, and the extent to which the English courts would shield society and third parties from the harmful effects of agreements reached by traders with one another. More technically, it deals with the organisational law of the period: the extent to which traders were able to create funds of assets for the purposes of trade and security, and to ‘ringfence’ those funds from their other dealings, and so to create ‘workable organisational law’ out of the ‘basic concepts of contract, property and debt priorities’. This book thereby seeks to show that a key economic function of law is to split property into different pools which can be bonded to different creditors, with a close textured legal historical understanding of how lawyers and judges understood the law which played this function at a particularly crucial time in English commercial law's development.
The Use of Trusts in Business Structures
Authors: Televantos Andreas
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines the ways in which trusts could be used by stock traders to stabilise business structures and emulate some of the benefits of incorporation, and even limited liability in the testamentary context. One of these ways was settling legal title to the assets of the business on a fixed body of trustees, who acted as its legal personality, and held the assets for the benefit of the business owners. This chapter explores the way that traders could make use of this device to try and emulate some of the benefits of incorporation, despite the business's lack of its own legal personality, and in the face of the perception of the owner-run partnership as the most stable and moral form of trading. In that way, it examines the extent to which the law of trusts met the needs of traders in the Regency era and so facilitated trade. In so doing, it shows that Regency era trusts were not simply part of the law of real property, as has commonly been supposed, but could be used in two forms of business: the deed of settlement company and the testamentary trading trust.
Time, Temporality, and History in Process Organization Studies
Authors: Reinecke Juliane , Suddaby Roy , Langley Ann , Tsoukas Haridimos
Published: January 2021

Time and history have emerged as prominent subjects of interest in organization studies. This volume stands testament to the recent foregrounding of time and history as focal objects of organizational study and scholarship. The precise relationship of temporality and history to processes of change remains under-theorized, and we lack a coherent set of conceptual tools that can be applied to ongoing research directed to addressing the puzzle. The chapters in this volume, devoted to understanding temporality and history as a central element of process, offer a glimpse of both a defining puzzle and a set of emergent conceptual tools that might be useful for scholars engaged in historical and temporally sensitive organizational research. Before elaborating their contribution to the emergent theoretical scaffolding of historical and temporal organizational scholarship, this chapter presents the puzzle and its evolution in prior literature.
Memory Work
Authors: Foster William M. , Wiebe Elden , Coraiola Diego M. , Bastien François , Suddaby Roy
Published: January 2021

Past research on organizational memory has mainly focused on the short term and the way information is acquired, retained, and retrieved. Instead, we argue that historical and long-term memory play an important role in organizations and we focus on the work of corporate historians and archivists in constructing long-term organizational memory. We analyzed the activities of corporate archivists and historians in eleven Fortune 500 firms. Our findings suggest that present strategic agendas drive mnemonic processes in organizations. In addition, longer-term memories offer richer possibilities for reinterpreting and reconstructing the past. Moreover, re-engagements generate additional layers of meaning that enrich and expand the possibilities of memory work for the future. We thus redefine organizational memory as an ongoing, dynamic process of memory work that encompasses both the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of information from the recent past and the recollection, reinterpretation, storytelling, and memorializing of issues and events from the longer past.
Brexit and the Future of the European Union
Authors: Fabbrini Federico
Published: January 2021

This book examines how the European Union has changed during Brexit and because of Brexit, while also reflecting on the developments of the EU besides Brexit and beyond Brexit. It argues that the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU—the first ever case of disintegration since the start of the European integration process—creates an urgent need to reform the EU. In fact, while the EU institutions and its Member States have remained united in their negotiations vis-à-vis the UK, Brexit has created transitional problems for the EU, and exposed other serious fissures in its system of governance which need to be addressed moving forward. As the EU goes through another major crisis in the form of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the case for increasing the effectiveness and the legitimacy of the EU grows stronger. In this context, the book analyses the plan to establish a Conference on the Future of Europe, considering its precedents and discussing its prospects.
Introduction
Authors: Fabbrini Federico
Published: January 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how the European Union has been affected by the United Kingdom’s decision to leave, and what this means for the future of European integration. The departure of a large, rich, and influential Member State must prompt a rethink of the EU constitutional settlement. Immediately after the Brexit referendum, the EU and its Member States started a debate on the future of Europe—and this process is now moving from rhetoric to reality with the institution of the Conference on the Future of Europe. The Conference on the Future of Europe can serve as an innovative means to reform the EU, tackling the transitional issues left by the UK’s withdrawal and addressing the more structural, substantive, and institutional weaknesses dramatically exposed by the plurality of other crises the EU has recently weathered. In fact, the Conference on the Future of Europe is made all the more urgent by Covid-19, and the exigencies of the EU post-pandemic recovery plan, which will entail important adjustments to the EU structure of powers and responsibilities. Ultimately, this book utilizes Brexit as a prism to shed light on the necessity and urgency of constitutional reforms in the EU.
Conclusion
Authors: Fabbrini Federico
Published: January 2021

This concluding chapter explores the connections between Brexit and EU reforms. The case for reforming the EU is not new. In recent years, multiple national and supranational leaders have put forward proposals to overhaul the EU and make it fit for the new challenges it faces. Moreover, think tanks, public intellectuals, and academic scholars have increasingly been reflecting on the future of Europe and suggesting plans ahead. This book joins this lively debate, but seeks to go beyond it by contributing with ideas on how to move the EU forward, post-Covid-19. In particular, as the launch of the Conference on the Future of Europe approaches, this book not only supports this effort, claiming that this is an indispensable step following the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. It also provides insights for policy-makers involved in the process, especially suggesting that a Political Compact for a more democratic and effective union can represent the avenue to relaunch the project of integration and renew Europe’s future.