bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Theory of Institutional Behavior
Authors: Hannah Allen Susan , Yuen Amy
Published: March 2022

This chapter begins with a spatial analysis of veto-member preferences and likely policy outcomes. It then develops a sequential, spatial model to show how anticipated policies affect decisions on whether and how to discuss issues under the Council's purview. In the model, public or private meetings result in different outcomes be-
cause of the influence public costs exert on how much each member can stray from its stated preferences. These different outcomes also affect whether a Council president will devote plenary time to the issue at all or ignore it. Because plenary time is finite, the model suggests that vetoes should not occur. The chapter explores why vetos happen, beyond the effects of uncertainty, and offers strategic grandstanding as an explanation. These models also explore the effects an outside option has on the range of policies that would be accepted by all members.
North Korean Nuclear Proliferation: A Dilemma in the Council
Authors: Hannah Allen Susan , Yuen Amy
Published: March 2022

This chapter examines the Council’s responses to North Korea’s nuclear program over more than twenty-five years. The case study explores China’s position in depth, highlighting the tension between China’s basic preference to prevent nuclear proliferation and its concerns with how the Security Council’s attempts to reign in North Korea might trigger catastrophic political collapse. Over this period, China has attempted to balance the unanimous desire to halt the nuclear program using harsh sanctions and even the possibility of military intervention with preventing political and economic collapse that would fundamentally alter the regional political dynamics. Thus, the Council has worked cooperatively, cautiously, and incrementally behind closed doors to manage North Korea’s proliferation.
‘Legitimation by Constitution’: An Introduction
Authors: Ferrara Alessandro , Michelman Frank I.
Published: March 2022

Introduced here are two closely related key ideas for the exchanges in this book, those of dualist democracy and ‘justification by constitution’ (our term). We show the encapsulation of both in the ‘liberal principle of legitimacy,’ proposed by John Rawls in his work on political liberalism to explain the possibility of legitimate democratic rule—majorities enacting laws with coercive effects on citizens who deeply disagree—among free and equal citizens divided by reasonable though incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines. Among contemporaneous, liberal-minded political theorists, instincts toward dualist democracy and legitimation by constitution have not been unique to the thought of Rawls. Despite notable differences from Rawls and each other in their respective takes on the moral call to democracy, we find participation in these ideas from Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin, and Jürgen Habermas. Ackerman relies on them to show a country’s people as self-governing despite obvious detachment of daily government from direct popular control, Dworkin to support attribution of contested government policies to an inclusive political membership, and Habermas to fill out a conception of political justification by appeal to procedural values only.
The ‘Most Reasonable for Us’, or ‘Irrecusability’ as Preserving Authenticity
Authors: Ferrara Alessandro
Published: March 2022

This chapter engages Michelman’s idea that our sense of certain rights and principles as ‘irrecusable’ for the people as charterers of a democratic regime can be best elucidated by Jürgen Habermas’s view of the ‘linguistic turn’ and, specifically, by the ‘pragmatic’ interpretation of the linguistic turn’s significance. The difficulties incurred by that Habermasian view are highlighted and contrasted with Rawls’s normative notions of the reasonable and the ‘most reasonable’. These two notions are argued to enable us to free our sense of the ‘irrecusability’ of basic rights and democratic principles from all residue of cognitive representation, and to understand ‘irrecusability’ as linked with the non-representational, but practical function of furthering and preserving our authenticity as democratic subjects.
From Decency to Democracy: Leading by Example
Authors: Ferrara Alessandro
Published: March 2022

In response to Michelman’s point that a society of peoples might inevitably have to settle for understanding itself as a ‘chequerboard structure’, this chapter explains why that is neither a necessary epilogue nor, in Ferrara’s view, the best transitional result to be looking for when compared with his alternative of a multivariate-polity model for the society of peoples. The chapter ends by noting areas of convergence and three respects in which the two models differ (concerning the transnational regime’s unified or partially integrated quality, its internal centre–periphery relations, and its different exposure to the risk of relapsing into modus vivendi).
On Arid Ground
Authors: Keating Jennifer
Published: March 2022

On Arid Ground focuses on the relationships between empire and environment in Central Asia, using environmental history to examine the practice of Russian imperialism in Turkestan at the end of empire, from the 1860s until 1916. It reveals for the first time a comprehensive assessment of the environmental imprint of Russian colonization, and shows how local ecologies fitted into broader repertoires of imperial rule, accommodation and resistance. Ranging widely above and below the surface in Turkestan, from the deserts of Transcaspia to the highlands and lowlands of rural Fergana and Semirech’e, the book explores infrastructure development, migrant settlement, land reclamation and dispossession, the commodification of nature, and environmental violence to reveal the ways in which ecological change was central to the building and breaking of empire. Attentive to connections, synchronicities, and scale, On Arid Ground makes the case for looking beyond cotton and water in a Central Asian context, for the powerful material role played by animals and plants, sand, silt, and salt in human histories, and for the less visible relationships between far-flung people and things within and beyond Turkestan’s borders. Laying bare the political roots and repercussions of environmental change, the volume brings fresh perspectives both to the history of Central Asia and to that of the wider Russian Empire across Eurasia.
(Re)Claiming Shade, Roots, and Water
Authors: Keating Jennifer
Published: March 2022

Work to reclaim and restore land that had once been productive but which was believed to have fallen into dis/mis-use was a key foundation of the imperial environmental enterprise, and an inherently political act. Chapter 2 looks at state efforts to reclaim land via planting and irrigation, examining anxieties over desertification and wind-drift sands, and the political symbolism of projects such as the Murgab Imperial Estate, an experiment in irrigation at the Murgab river delta in Transcaspia. Yet comparing and contrasting the actions of imperial outsiders and Central Asian villagers and tenant farmers reveals a vast gulf between the imagined worlds of restitution and the physical realities of land degradation. Corruption, salinization, erosion, and water disputes all came to characterize schemes that had been intended to project imperial power and to act as beacons for the acceptance of Russian subjecthood. As such, the chapter points towards the gradual discovery of the instabilities and intricacies of local ecosystems and, ultimately, the limits of state land reclamation efforts. In this reading, sand, silt, and mud were powerful material agents that both enhanced and undercut imperial projections of power.
Ecological Afterlives and Natural Tribute
Authors: Keating Jennifer
Published: March 2022

Just like infrastructure construction, land reclamation, and rural settlement, conversions from the animate to the inanimate, from living plant or animal to commodified resource were activities that offer insight into the political ecology of empire. The first of two chapters that focus on Turkestan as a commodity frontier, Chapter 4 considers the commodification of Central Asian nature by the state, settlers, and local communities. In doing so, it briefly discusses Turkestan’s famed ‘white gold’—cotton—but also looks at far broader contours of commodities including minerals, fruit, cereal, and vegetable crops. Exploring the social, political, and economic capital located in these resources, the chapter considers ideas about ‘abundance’, ‘value’, ‘tribute’, and ‘surplus’, and varied readings of resources by imperial actors, often external to Turkestan, who sought material recompense for the expenses of military conquest and budget deficits. Looking beyond the sale and transport of resources, however, towards the local display of commodities at exhibitions reveals that the afterlives of animals and plants were embedded in a range of conversations beyond imperial economic interest, becoming touchstones for assertions of regional agency, identity, enrichment, and community that often cut across settler and Central Asian societies.
Revisiting the Commodity Frontier
Authors: Keating Jennifer
Published: March 2022

Continuing the theme of the commodity frontier, Chapter 5 proposes a reassessment of how we think about resources in imperial Turkestan. While much of the discussion both at the time and in historical writing since has focused on cotton and water, in fact, imperial and local actors were resource-minded in ways far beyond these dual commodities. Shifting focus to explore ecological modification, biological exchange, and previously hidden commodities such as fossil fuels, precious metals, fodder crops, and pharmaceutical ingredients, the chapter reveals extractive mindsets that exceeded the limits of the state, claims to ‘botanical vandalism’, and global monopolies that created chains of dependence stretching across continents. In doing so, the chapter suggests that in focusing to a significant extent on centre–periphery chains of resource production (primarily cotton export), we have neglected far wider webs of global exchange, labour, and encounter, some of which mirrored longstanding local practices of trade, and others of which owed a good deal not simply to the mobilizing capacity of the imperial state, but to global demand for certain goods that was specific to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century moment. In many of these cases, looking at what might be considered ‘mundane’ resources exposes entanglements between subsistence, profit, and self-sufficiency, and conflicting processes of regulation and translation as local labour, traditions, and understandings of value faced off against the impositions of empire.
Conclusion
Authors: Keating Jennifer
Published: March 2022

The Conclusion reflects on the environmental imprint of empire in Turkestan by 1916, suggesting that in imperial thought and action, environmental transformation was a central part of the extension of sovereignty, the projection of power hierarchies, and the commercial development of a new borderland territory. Plans to transform local landscapes presumed the fundamental malleability of nature, but termites, camels, fish, sand, silt, crops, and water were powerful material agents in these processes, with more-than-human relations vital to both the consolidation and the demise of imperial power. The chapter assesses the intertwined roles of the state, Central Asian communities, settler society and Slavic migrants, alongside more removed actors—Namibian sheep breeders, French silkworm dealers, and Argentinian farmers. It closes by considering why thinking in terms of scale, synchronicities, connections, and more-than-human relations is important in understanding empire in the Russian context.
Insulin - The Crooked Timber
Authors: Hall Kersten T.
Published: March 2022

Before the discovery of insulin, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was an inevitable death sentence. Little wonder then that when insulin was first used to treat patients in the early 1920s, diabetes specialist Elliott Joslin likened its power to the ‘Vision of Ezekiel’, the Old Testament prophet who is said to have seen a valley of dry bones rise up and be restored to life. Despite its life-saving power, however, little was known about the chemical nature of insulin, with one clinician describing it as being simply ‘thick brown muck’. Just over half a century later, insulin was again causing excitement when it became the first pharmaceutical to be produced using genetic engineering, making biotech company Genentech founders multimillionaires after a spectacular flotation on Wall Street. This book tells the stories of those involved in this act of modern-day alchemy. What emerges are sometimes monstrous egos, toxic career rivalries, and a few unsung heroes, such as the two little-known scientists whose work on wool fibres proved to be crucial not only in unravelling insulin but also in ushering in a revolution in biology. Perhaps most importantly of all, with science having become so prominent in all our lives during the past year, the story of insulin has lessons for us all about what technology can—and perhaps more importantly—cannot do for us.
A Boastful Undertaking
Authors: Hall Kersten T.
Published: March 2022

Archer Martin and Richard Synge realized that they had done much more than simply invent a new method of chemicals separation. Not only could partition chromatography separate the different amino acid components of wool proteins, but also it might be used to determine their precise linear order—or, as Martin and Synge called it, their sequence. To test this idea, they embarked on a ‘boastful undertaking’ with their colleagues Hugh Gordon and Raphael Consden to use partition chromatography to determine the order of amino acids in the antibiotic gramicidin S. To help with the study of gramicidin S, Synge also recruited Fred Sanger and Dorothy Hodgkin, two young scientists who would both go on to distinguish themselves through their respective work on insulin.
Introduction
Authors: Sutherland Kathryn
Published: March 2022

The Introduction provides an overview of the whole book, previewing its major case studies on Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen. It raises issues and topics that recur throughout the book’s argument: mess turned to some purpose as the normal condition of the draft literary manuscript; manuscript as evidence for a discipline called textual forensics, exposing either a unifying consciousness behind the printed page or the text’s relations to itself. It argues that manuscripts have multiple lives both before and after print, raising issues of property and ownership. Manuscripts are ‘curious’ objects: that is, objects of reverence and of knowledge, serving both magical and evidential purposes. They are also artefacts whose aesthetic dimension becomes apparent over time and as they assume new significance, inside the collection, beyond that of a tool for writing and transmission.
Dealing with the Leftovers
Authors: Sutherland Kathryn
Published: March 2022

This chapter explores the intertwined strains of aesthetic, heritage, and commercial value driving manuscript collection from the eighteenth century to the present day. Literary manuscripts become culturally venerated from the eighteenth century as a consequence of the industrial ascendancy of print. Their collection is the focus of competing and antithetical drives: conserved as national treasures and traded as commodities on international markets. They are also just so much waste paper, left over after their freight of ideas, and words has moved on. Manuscripts are among those things that challenge the view that price determines value.
Jane Austen Fragment Artist
Authors: Sutherland Kathryn
Published: March 2022

Jane Austen’s corpus constitutes a remarkable case of a binary division between print (the published novels, which have left no manuscript traces save for the cancelled version of the last chapters of Persuasion) and manuscript (the teenage writings and unfinished works left in draft—Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon). What happens if, rather than reading Austen’s manuscript works in the shadow of print (as critics have done in the past), we instead read print in the shadow of manuscript? We discover the novelist as a lifelong practitioner of a ‘fragment art’ that aligns her more closely than we have previously considered to her great Romantic contemporaries and also prefigures features of the next revolutionary aesthetic movement, Modernism.
The Residential Library
Authors: Hayes Kevin J.
Published: March 2022

“The Residential Library” examines the ideal private libraries of the future that the utopian novelists imagined, looking at the contents of the library and its place in the home. It projects the place of books in the home of the future. In addition, it studies the personal and social functions of the home library. In the ideal future, the utopian novelists foresaw the private library as both a place of refuge, where the homeowner could seek solace, and a social space, where homeowners could entertain guests and quietly show off their intellect. Some utopian novelists saw the ideal future differently, imagining communal dwellings with communal libraries. This chapter closes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of communal libraries.
Legitimacy as a Challenge to Compliance with the Norms on the Protection of Children in Africa
Authors: Miamingi Remember
Published: March 2022

This chapter critiques the normative framework on children’s rights in Africa. In 1979, in commemoration of the International Year of the Child declared by the United Nations General Assembly, African leaders within the framework of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) adopted the Declaration on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. The OAU considered the Declaration a first step in a process towards a regional binding instrument on children’s rights and welfare in Africa. In 1990, just a year after the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) came into force, the OAU adopted the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC). The chapter argues that the ‘continued inability of human rights norms and standards to effectively end impunity is forcing international and national policy makers to shift the policy battlefront to issues of compliance with human rights’. Through a reflection on the African Children’s Charter, it highlights the need to give attention to issues of legitimacy, particularly cultural legitimacy within the regional context in view of existing philosophies and cultural heritage on childhood in Africa.
Member States’ Compliance with the Recommendations of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights
Authors: Louw Lirette
Published: March 2022

This chapter assesses the compliance of AU Member States with the recommendations of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Commission) under the individual complaints system provided in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter). There is no direct reference in the African Charter authorizing the Commission to issue recommendations upon finding a state party in violation of the provisions of the Charter. The Commission has developed its mandate in a progressive manner by relying on the ‘implied powers doctrine’; to adopt recommendations upon having found a state party in violation of the Charter. Currently, it appears that some States still view the implementation of recommendations on Communications as voluntary because the Commission is viewed as a quasi-judicial organ. The chapter then argues that there are factors, both permanent and variable to the system, which if focused on could harvest positive results, in as far as securing improved state compliance to the African Commission’s recommendations and thereby contributing to the realization of human and peoples’ rights on the continent.
‘Horizontal’ Compliance with Decisions of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights
Authors: Abebe Adem K
Published: March 2022

This chapter develops an innovative approach to the furtherance of compliance with decisions of supranational human rights tribunals beyond the vertical context of decisions of these tribunals applying only to the respondent states. Through a reflection on the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Court), it introduces the idea of ‘horizontal’ compliance where the Court can seek to ensure compliance with its decisions involving the validity of laws vis-à-vis states with comparable legal provisions to the respondent state. Indeed, the pursuance of horizontal compliance would allow the Court to radiate its key decisions, involving the validity of legal provisions, beyond the specific respondent state. Horizontal compliance would also require an adaptation of the Court’s functions from merely serving as a reactive to a proactive protector of continental human rights standards. While this new function may be seen as crossing the blurry boundaries of the Court’s protective mandate towards a promotional mandate, this would not constitute an undue expansion of the Court’s reach as it will be limited to instances where the decision involves the validity of legal provisions, which is true in a small minority of cases.
Neoliberal Citizenship
Authors: Mavelli Luca
Published: March 2022

With cosmopolitan illusions put to rest, Europe is now haunted by a pervasive neoliberal transformation of citizenship that subordinates inclusion, protection, and belonging to rationalities of value. Against the backdrop of four major crises—Eurozone, refugee, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic—this book explores how neoliberal citizenship rewrites identities and solidarities in economic terms. The result is a sacralized market order in which those superfluous to economic needs and regarded as unproductive consumers of resources—be they undocumented migrants, debased citizens of austerity, or the elderly in care homes—are excluded and sacrificed for the well-being of the economy. Pushing biopolitical theorizing in novel directions through an investigation of the political economy of scarcity and the theology of the market, Neoliberal Citizenship reveals how a common thread connects the suspension of search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, the punitive bailout of Greece, the widespread adoption of austerity measures, the normalization of racism, the celebration of resilience, and the fact that in Europe and North America, during the first wave of the pandemic, almost half of all COVID-19 deaths were care home residents. This thread is the sacralization of the market that, by making life conditional upon its economic and emotional value, turns ‘less valuable’ individuals into sacrificial subjects. Neoliberal Citizenship challenges established understandings of citizenship, brings to light new regimes of inclusion and exclusion, and advances critical insights on the future of neoliberalism in a post-COVID-19 world.
If Europeans want to live, refugees must die
Authors: Mavelli Luca
Published: March 2022

Chapter 5 delves into the biopolitics of the refugee crisis by exploring the moral and political economy which makes it necessary to sacrifice—by killing or letting die—the undocumented migrants coming to Europe in order to enhance the life and well-being of its host populations. It introduces the concept of scarcity as a fundamental and largely neglected component of the neoliberal-biopolitical apparatus and shows how the latter incorporates important elements of Malthusianism, including a concern with surplus populations. This apparatus subverts and rewrites the grammar of solidarity grounded in human rights and protection of life. From this perspective, the 2014 suspension of search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, which has resulted in thousands of preventable deaths, is not just the outcome of the securitization of migration, but part of the very logic of solidarity of neoliberal citizenship. Letting some migrants drown becomes a market signal that indicates to prospective migrants that solidarity is in short supply and therefore they should not attempt the dangerous sea journey. This neoliberal humanitarianism, I argue, frames solidarity as a ‘perverse incentive’ that only aggravates the problem it aims to solve.
News from Moscow
Authors: Huxtable Simon
Published: March 2022

News from Moscow: Soviet Journalism and the Limits of Post-war Reform is a history of the post-war Soviet press that takes readers from the tense ideological climate of the late Stalin era to the comparative freedom of the Thaw. Through a case study of one of the country’s most innovative and popular titles, the youth daily Komsomol’skaia pravda, the book shows how journalists attempted to remake the Soviet newspaper after Stalin’s death, but details the many obstacles they faced along the way. The book argues that Thaw journalism was characterised by an unresolvable tension between innovation and conservativism: the more journalists tried to devise new forms to attract readers, the more officials grew anxious about the potentially disruptive consequences of reform. Taking readers from the gloomy climate of late Stalinism to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the book’s six chapters offer examples of journalists attempts to innovate, from its advocacy for person-centred pedagogy in the late Stalin and Thaw periods, to the creation of the country’s first polling institute and its support for Brezhnev’s technocratic reforms in the 1960s. Drawing on a range of unseen internal documents, including transcripts of private editorial meetings, the book takes readers into the Soviet newsroom for the first time, and details the conversations—with colleagues, functionaries and readers—that characterised journalists’ daily work, and the conflicts with officials that came to characterise the Thaw project.
From Technocracy to Stagnation
Authors: Huxtable Simon
Published: March 2022

Though the Brezhnev era is often associated with ‘stagnation’, intellectuals were initially optimistic about the reformist bent of the country’s new leadership team. This chapter looks at the response of journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda to the change of leaders and to the Brezhnev–Kosygin tandem’s new, technocratic, direction. It shows how the paper’s journalists were captivated by the reforms of the early Brezhnev era and sought to educate themselves and their readers about the country’s new economic priorities. The Kosygin reforms introduced market principles into the Soviet press, and forced journalists to employ sociological research to learn more about their readers. As the chapter shows, this new sobriety affected journalists’ attitudes to exemplary individuals: lauded only a few years before as romantic heroes, individuals who sacrificed their comfort to build communism were now seen as an embarrassing anachronism as journalists sought out the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary. However, by the late 1960s, the paper’s technocratic direction was beginning to fizzle out: not only was the paper’s editor removed in 1965 for an article that the Kremlin’s top brass disliked, but amid a panic over domestic and international dissent, officials began to clamp down on journalists’ reformist ideas. By the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, journalists’ hopes for significant change had already started to fade.
Government Parties and Democratic Dominance
Authors: Carty R. Kenneth
Published: March 2022

Democratic dominance generates, and depends upon, the existence of a distinctive type of political party—the “government party.” These organizations, different than superficially similar catch-all parties, are integral to the definition, legitimation, and operation of the states they command as fundamental parts of a country’s political regime. Their long-term survival requires them to deal successfully with the problem of leadership succession as well as respond to any significant changes in the existential nation- or state-building challenges that called the parties into being. As the primary democratic political instrument of the state, a government party is forced to build and maintain an organization capable of reaching across and down into the society. Stratarchical organizational forms provide a frame for such democratic mobilization, but their decentralized and personalized forms require the discipline of institutionalized intraparty structures and norms. Practising an essentially conservative politics, government parties ultimately inhibit the development of a healthy responsible democratic parliamentary government.
Perceptions of Mortality
Authors: McGarry Kathleen
Published: March 2022

Financially successful retirement depends in large part on managing longevity risk: individuals need to save during their working lives to cover expenses in retirement, and then they must spend down those savings carefully so as not to outlive their assets. Despite the centrality of individuals’ expectations regarding life expectancy, little is known about how longevity expectations are formed and how they evolve as individuals age. This chapter assesses the evolution of subjective survival probabilities, defined as the probabilities that people believe they will live to at least 75 or 85 years of age. I examine the correlates of these reported probabilities when initially measured, how they change over time, and in particular, how they change with major life course events like the death of a parent, in-law, spouse, or sibling. I also examine how the subjective probabilities change in response to health shocks such as a heart attack or diagnosis of diabetes.
Innovative Strategies to Finance and Deliver Long-term Care
Authors: Super Nora , Burstein Arielle , Davis Jason , Servat Caroline
Published: March 2022

Policymakers have long tried and failed to solve the vexing problem of long-term care (LTC) insurance. The federal Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act, a voluntary, publicly administered LTC insurance program, was repealed in 2013, and the problem has gone from bad to worse. The number of private insurers offering LTC insurance has plummeted from over 100 in 2002 to about a dozen today. While some of this is due to consolidation, the larger force driving the exit is lack of profitability. This chapter explores issues surrounding the LTC market including pricing, modeling, and alternative payment models, to better understand the reasons for market failure. We provide a review of innovative approaches used successfully in other industries, which may serve as a model for new ways to finance and deliver LTC. Based on interviews with thought leaders across multiple disciplines and industries, we identify three of the most promising solutions: public and private LTC insurance, Medicare expansion, and technology.
Introduction
Authors: Athanassaki Lucia , Titchener Frances B.
Published: March 2022

The Introduction first relates this volume to earlier scholarship and sets out its contribution as the first comprehensive assessment of the significance of the polis in Plutarch’s works from several perspectives, namely the polis as a physical entity, a lived experience and a source of inspiration, the polis as a historical and sociopolitical unit, the polis as a theoretical construct and paradigm to think with. It continues with an overview of the use of the terms πόλις‎ and ἄστυ‎ (asty) and their semantic overlaps in four authors who exercised great influence on Plutarch, namely Homer, Pindar, Thucydides, and Plato, and concludes with a brief presentation of individual contributions and the remarkable corrections they offer to Plutarch’s conventional image as a desk-bound scholar: he emerges here as a keen observer of his physical surroundings and material evidence, on the basis of which he reconstructed the past and contemplated ideal cities.
Plutarch’s Chaeronea
Authors: Bowie Ewen
Published: March 2022

Chapter 1 looks at (a) Plutarch’s involvement in local politics and his posthumous reception as the most eminent citizen of Chaeronea of all times; (b) Plutarch’s reconstruction of the political and military history of Chaeronea from its foundation down to the Roman civil wars, arguing that the sparing display of his local historical and topographical knowledge is due to concern for his non-Boeotian audiences; (c) his representation of elite life in Chaeronea, focusing on local cults and on the settings of the Sympotic Questions and arguing for a systematic patterning of their locations: Chaeronea is repeatedly juxtaposed with much grander cities—Delphi, Corinth, and Rome as well as Athens. The discussion brings out the sharp contrast between Chaeronea’s historical fame as the location of major battles and its cultural significance in Plutarch’s time thanks to his literary elevation of his small city as a centre of Greek paideia.
Why the One Did Not Remain Within Itself
Authors: O’Connor Timothy
Published: March 2022

Why did the omnipotent, omniscient, unsurpassably, and perfectly good being who is necessary in Himself, and having a supremely rational will, contingently create ex nihilo? What motivation could account for such freely undertaken activity, displaying it as neither necessary nor less than fully rational? The chapter considers and criticizes answers recently offered by Mark Johnston and Alex Pruss. It is argued that creation of some contingent reality or other is necessary, and that plausible reflections on the ordered complexity in God’s motivations indicate that the scope of contingency regarding what to create is highly constricted—though not to the point of complete modal collapse. A perfect creator would create either an infinite and richly varied multiverse or an infinitely improving universe realizing a wide array of kinds of goods. Finally, a rebuttal is given to the contention that any element of contingency in a divine choice entails a rational-explanatory deficiency.
A New Grand Strategy
Authors: French David
Published: March 2022

The National Government was elected to engineer a recovery from the Slump. But they were also concerned that British interests were threatened in the Far East by Japan and by Germany in Europe, and that to meet these threats it was necessary to make good the worst deficiencies under which the armed services laboured. The DRC’s report promised not only to rectify the worst deficiencies of all three of the armed services, but it would also constitute a revised grand strategy. By 1939 Britain was to be ready to meet the new security challenges it faced, and the British public was to be primed to make the necessary sacrifices. But the program that the ministers finally agreed in July 1934 was heavily circumscribed, not just by economic constraints, but by what they believed would be acceptable to the electorate. The preparation of even a small regular field force for war on the continent was postponed, whereas the creation of an air force larger than even the Air Staff wanted was accepted on the grounds that ministers believed that was what the electorate wanted. Neville Chamberlain’s vision, which had come to dominate the Cabinet’s thinking about grand strategy by the second half of 1934, put the defence of the British Isles, and in particular its defence against a German air attack, far ahead of the demands of the Far East, or of the need to prepare a field force to go to the continent to support France.
‘I wish I saw a real policy emerging, but frankly I don’t’
Authors: French David
Published: March 2022

The Stresa front was intended to be the lynchpin of a strategy to contain Hitler and eventually persuade him to return to the conference table and settle all outstanding questions by peaceful negotiations. But the British themselves then began the process that led to its unravelling. The accelerating pace of German rearmament, and the pressing need to ensure that the fleet would not be tied down in European waters if it was needed at Singapore, persuaded them to grab at Hitler’s offer of an Anglo-German naval arms limitation agreement. This was a blunder which represented the first nail in the coffin of the Stresa front. The second, and far more decisive, blow to that agreement came in October 1935, when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. The central premise of the grand strategy that the Cabinet had adopted in July 1934, that Britain faced only two potential enemies, was now redundant and policy-makers had to decide how to confront not only Germany in Western Europe, and Japan in the Far East, but Italy in the Mediterranean. The manifold difficulties of creating a new grand strategy to replace the DRC’s blueprint were quickly made apparent when the German remilitarized the Rhineland, when a major revolt against British rule broke out in Palestine, and when Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union began to fish in the troubled waters created by the Spanish civil war.
The Grand Strategy of Fortress Britain, May 1937–September 1938
Authors: French David
Published: March 2022

As Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was infused by a determination to do what he thought was right, regardless of what his critics might say. The policies he chose were not forced upon him by circumstances beyond his control. They were choices which he made when he was faced by possible alternatives. Appeasement was not the only choice open to him. He could have opted for Eden’s policy of hastening rearmament and working with other powers to contain the dictators, or Churchill’s Grand Alliance. He deliberately chose neither. Chamberlain abandoned any attempt to maintain a balance of power in the three key regions of the world, Europe, the Mediterranean and Middle East, and the Far East that mattered most to Britain, and focused all efforts and resources on transforming Britain itself into a fortress. He also turned his back on the policy that had played a crucial role in making and sustaining Britain’s great power status since the eighteenth century: a willingness to work in concert with allies. Instead, his grand strategy was based on the assumption that what he regarded as massive spending on defence sustained over a prolonged period would convince Britain’s rivals that it would not tamely surrender to their demands. It was a measure of the failure of his policy that at Munich in September 1938 he did just that.
Sculpture between the Graceful and the Heroic
Authors: Fitzgerald William
Published: March 2022

This chapter discusses the focus of neoclassical idealization of antiquity on sculpture, comparing the work of Antonio Canova to that of Bertel Thorvaldsen. Antonio Canova’s Theseus and the Minotaur has been described as the first neoclassical sculpture. This chapter begins with a discussion of the fluctuating reputation of Canova as a diagnosis of the mixed feelings aroused by neoclassicism. It contains close reading of Canova’s Theseus as a neoclassical work, and of his Three Graces, particularly in relation to the role of grace as a quality attributed to the ancient world, and to the equivocation between marble and flesh in its figures. The second part of the chapter considers the sculptures of Bertel Thorvaldsen as neoclassical ‘correctives’ to Canova and compares their different approaches to the same subjects or ancient models. Canova’s Three Graces and Perseus are compared to Thorvaldsen’s Three Graces and Jason, and the chapter ends with a comparison between the two sculptors’ treatment of the figure of Hebe, a neoclassical icon. Throughout, attention is paid to the reinterpretation of ancient models, such as the Apollo Belvedere.
Modernism, Neoclassicism, and Irony
Authors: Fitzgerald William
Published: March 2022

This chapter discusses the relation between neoclassicism and modernism. It sets Satie’s ‘Symphonic Drama’ on texts of Plato, Socrate, in the context of post-First World War neoclassicism in France. In this work, Satie presents a ‘white’ antiquity, and his provocative cultivation of boredom and monotony is read as an embracing of qualities decried by the critics of neoclassicism. The trademark irony of Plato’s Socrates emerges in Satie’s work as a modernist deadpan. The figure of Socrates familiar from the earlier neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Socrates taking the hemlock is shorn of ethical and philosophical content by Satie, and Socrates’ exemplarity is located purely in gesture. The chapter analyses the poetics of simplicity, which in this work leaves the audience suspended between sublimity and boredom. Taking the story up to more recent times, the chapter ends with Robert Mapplethorpe’s classicizing photography of the naked body and his close-up on the face of the Apollo Belvedere (in the photograph Apollo) and also briefly considers Leo Caillard’s playful clothing of a neoclassical sculpture with a Nike T-shirt.
Conclusion
Authors: Fitzgerald William
Published: March 2022

This chapter outlines some threads running through the book and pays particular attention to the different temporalities activated by neoclassicism and the value of studying it as a phenomenon.
Saving the Community
Authors: Jim Theodora Suk Fong
Published: March 2022

In contrast to Christianity, the Greek concept of soteria had an important public dimension as well as a private one. This chapter investigates the wide-ranging power of ‘saviour’ gods in the lived religious experience of Greek communities. Drawing on honorific decrees, dedicatory inscriptions, so-called sacred laws, and epiphanies and miracles performed by the gods, it explores the full range of saving experiences and concerns of communities at various levels (Panhellenic, polis, sub-polis). Under what circumstances, and with what expectations, did the Greeks establish cults of ‘saviours’? How were communal experiences of divine deliverance commemorated, propagated, and exploited by Hellenistic cities in inter-state competitions? It also examines the growth of festivals called Σωτήρια‎ in various parts of the Greek world, which celebrated the power of their ‘saving’ gods on the one hand and the special ‘protected’ status of the polis concerned on the other.
Individual ‘Salvation’
Authors: Jim Theodora Suk Fong
Published: March 2022

This chapter shifts attention from Greek communities to ordinary individuals, a group which has often been neglected in existing studies of Greek religion. Soteria was sought in an array of circumstances ranging from seafaring to childbirth, healing, farming, herding, warfare, material security, and so on. What connected soteria in these seemingly distinct spheres of activities? What roles did ‘saviour’ gods play in the everyday life of the Greeks? How did individuals communicate and negotiate with the gods for soteria? The chapter goes beyond ritual performance to investigate worshippers’ religious world-views and perceptions of the divine. By exploiting the innumerable dedicatory inscriptions commemorating individuals’ ‘saving’ experiences, it seeks to reveal the Greeks’ religious beliefs, relations with the gods, and day-to-day concerns. The chapter further illuminates role of individual agency and the flexibility of Greek religious language: rather than simply taking over existing forms of epithets used by the polis or by other worshippers, individuals might coin new epithets or adapt existing ones accordingly to their needs with a certain originality and creativity.
The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism
Authors: Canuel Mark
Published: March 2022

What did Romantic writers mean when they wrote about “progress” and “perfection”? This book shows how Romantic writers inventively responded to familiar ideas about political progress which they inherited from the eighteenth century. Whereas earlier writers such as Voltaire and John Millar likened improvements in political institutions to the progress of the sciences or refinement of manners, the novelists, poets, and political theorists examined in this book reimagined politically progressive political associations in multiple genres. While embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement—increasing freedom, equality, and protection from injury—they also cultivated increasingly visible and volatile energies of religious and political dissent. Earlier narratives of progress tended not only to edit and fictionalize history but also to agglomerate different modes of knowledge and practice in their quest to describe and prescribe uniform cultural improvement. But Romantic writers seize on internal division and take it less as an occasion for anxiety, exclusion, or erasure, and more as an impetus to rethink the groundwork of progress itself. Political entities, from Percy Shelley’s plans for political reform to Charlotte Smith’s motley associations of strangers in The Banished Man, are progressive because they advance some version of collective utility or common good. But they simultaneously stake a claim to progress only insofar as they paradoxically solicit contending vantage points on the criteria for the very public benefit which they passionately pursue. The “majestic edifices” of Wordsworth’s imagined university in The Prelude embrace members who are “republican or pious,” not to mention the recalcitrant “enthusiast” who is the poet himself.
Thomson, Barbauld, and the Progress of Liberty
Authors: Canuel Mark
Published: March 2022

This chapter explores representations of enlightenment progress that influence many other writers throughout this book. James Thomson offers a striking instance of poetry’s uncomfortable embrace of an enlightened figurative apparatus of progressivism. Thomson explicitly works within the genre of the “progress” poem to deploy the allegorical apparatus of progressive philosophy and history. In poems such as The Seasons, material change over time is organized and guided by the figure of “Philosophy”: philosophy provides the ungovernable forces of human and natural life with a seemingly inviolable sense of direction. But the errant “wondering” and “enchantment” that Thompson strives to dispel with his “philosophic eye” is precisely what attracts Anna Letitia Barbauld in her adventurous revision of Thomson’s writing. I show how works such as Barbauld’s Corsica tentatively identify the politics of Corsican independence with an “urbanity” and “polish’d grace” reminiscent of Thomson and legions of progressive historians. But urbanity and polish are all but lost in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a poem that documents Britain’s decline in the wake of its involvement in foreign wars. Instead, Barbauld celebrates a still-continued “light” emanating from the works of British authors: this is not the light of conventional enlightened progress—a light now faded—but a light that nourishes Dissenting reading practices with a “fearless spirit” and “patriot zeal.”
Dry skin and eczema
Authors: McPherson Tess
Published: March 2022

This chapter looks at the difficulties associated with dry skin, with particular focus on eczema and the symptoms and treatment of this condition. Skin relies on moisture in order to act as a barrier, and eczema can therefore lead to both aggravating symptoms of itch, redness, and soreness, as well as subsequent infection. The different types of eczema are briefly outlined, before discussion of the underlying risk factors and potential triggers for each of these types. Finally, this chapter looks at treatment, which is primarily based on managing symptoms, and the various cream and tablet options available to do this are all explained.
Psoriasis
Authors: McPherson Tess
Published: March 2022

This chapter covers a skin condition known as psoriasis—one that often appears during teenage years—causing red, itchy, dry skin to appear in various areas of the body. The two forms of psoriasis that most commonly affect young people, guttate and plaque psoriasis, are discussed in detail, with focus on the potential causes and common symptoms of these conditions. Treatment of psoriasis is then covered, with options including creams, tablets, and phototherapy; given psoriasis can affect many parts of the body however—not just the skin—the symptoms and treatment of psoriasis in other areas are also briefly explained.