bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Virtuous Action
Authors: Ullyot Michael
Published: March 2022

Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy encouraged Elizabethan and Jacobean rhetoricians to use exemplarity for instrumental ends. The former precipitated a shift from stylistic to behavioural examples, and provoked controversies among writers like John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare about misinterpreting the dead; Protestants inverted the late medieval ‘cult of the living in service of the dead’ to make the dead serve the living, free to interpret their biographies for moral import. Meanwhile, humanist rhetoricians emphasized the pragmatic application of knowledge to conduct, valuing efficacy in the present over true resemblance to past exemplars. This induced Philip Sidney to defend poetry on the rhetorical basis that it could be effective at fostering virtuous action.
The Exemplary Cycle
Authors: Ullyot Michael
Published: March 2022

Positive moral exemplarity is cyclical: rhetoricians cite subjects for the moral benefit of objects, so those objects might become new subjects for future objects. This is evident in the dedications of books to Essex and to Henry, many of which compared them to Sidney. Dedications reveal how public figures were perceived; the exemplars to which they are compared are an index of their reputations. Owing to both men’s public personae, the most prolific genre of these dedications were military manuals. They complemented Henry’s image as an object of pedagogy, which dominated his life due to his father’s Basilicon Doron and to his status as the first Prince of Wales in nearly six decades. Educators and rhetoricians undertook to turn his private virtues to public benefit as they anticipated Henry IX’s future reign.
The Poetics of Prose Cures
Authors: Bower Hannah
Published: March 2022

This chapter explores how the syntactic crafting and figurative language of certain prose remedies can bring the practical, playful, and poetic into conversation. Prose was increasingly popular as a mode of instruction in the later Middle Ages, and this chapter suggests that prose promoted particular kinds of textual crafting in medical texts. That crafting is often sporadic and intermittent and so prose recipes are shown to have a distinctive, fragmentary kind of poetics which was recognized by medieval writers and readers as both disruptive and desirable. These poetic fragments in recipes shape how medical knowledge was communicated, enacted, clarified, and (sometimes) confused. The fragments also create points of intersection and overlap between recipes and canonical literary writings, recontextualizing the language of those canonical texts and drawing attention to the shared communicative traditions both kinds of writing were drawing upon.
Making Verse Remedies
Authors: Bower Hannah
Published: March 2022

This chapter explores the range of uses that medical verse could have been put to and the range of effects it could have had in the later Middle Ages when the role and ubiquity of instructional verse was changing in relation to prose. The chapter contends that practical aims of memorability and accessibility did not delimit what the form of verse remedies and herbals could signify for late medieval readers. Instead, the experience of reading and writing medical verse was likely to be one in which the advantages and limitations of writing in verse were being constantly negotiated—from both a practical and an aesthetic perspective. This chapter therefore builds upon Chapter 1’s exploration of literary fragments in prose recipes by exploring the kinds of crafting and aesthetic effect that are distinctive to verse remedies: these include more concentrated semantic and syntactic play and greater experimentation with speaking voices.
Experiencing Boundaries
Authors: Bower Hannah
Published: March 2022

This chapter continues, and broadens, the themes of Chapter 4 by exploring the manifold ways in which remedy collections encourage readers to negotiate boundaries: in addition to boundaries between the marvellous and the mundane, the chapter explores those between the permissible and prohibited and the desirable and undesirable. The chapter also demonstrates how remedies in larger collections might move back and forth across these boundaries when copied in new contexts; each recipe within a collection can offer a new vantage point from which to view others. Remedies involving various human body parts are similarly shown to cross and recross the boundary between the licit and the illicit in relation to the surrounding texts. This topic of taboo and transgression is illuminated by a comparison between recipes and fabliaux. Theoretical understandings of play are also deployed to describe recipes’ peculiar combination of rules, boundaries, flexibility, and adaptability.
Conclusion
Authors: Bower Hannah
Published: March 2022

The Conclusion extends the previous chapters’ insights on the interplay between fragment and whole by considering how that interplay might also inform the mode of criticism and reading we practise in relation to medieval recipes. On the one hand, we need to practise a mode of reading that is more fragmentary—that does not try to construct a single narrative of practicality or impracticality but is open to a shifting and unpredictable relationship between these qualities and the individuals involved in the recipes’ production and reception. On the other hand, our way of reading needs to be more holistic and integrative, not only thinking about recipes and the manuscripts that contain them alongside literary texts and manuscripts, but also applying and testing out the same close-reading techniques in relation to both kinds of writing. The chapter ends by acknowledging the many stories left to be told about these quirky and adaptable texts, not least their reinterpretation and material reframing by early modern readers.
Introduction
Authors: Poellner Peter
Published: March 2022

This introductory chapter sets out an initial characterization of a paradigm in ethical and meta-ethical thought that the author labels existential modernism, whose representatives to be discussed in this book include Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Robert Musil. After an initial sketch of the general features of this paradigm, a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book’s itinerary explains why it is legitimate to speak of the distinctive common strands in these figures’ thought as instituting a tradition in ethical philosophy, which centres on a certain picture of the relation between affectivity and value and on a kind of ethical perfectionism.
Nietzsche’s Evaluative Practice
Authors: Poellner Peter
Published: March 2022

This chapter analyses some typical examples of the later Nietzsche’s evaluative practice, providing further evidence for his commitment to the kind of affective perceptualism attributed to him in Chapter 2. It is argued that Nietzsche’s first-order evaluative judgements are typically based on quasi-aesthetic experiences in a sense to be explained, many of which invite construal on the affective perceptualist model. The majority of these judgements concern the putative phenomenally intrinsic value of experiences, or patterns of experience (of others, or Nietzsche himself). Phenomenally intrinsic value of experiences thus provides the ground level of much of Nietzsche’s epistemology of value, and this concept is explained in some detail. In the last two sections two substantive Nietzschean commitments are discussed: the claim that the most significant (dis)values are associated with human or similar subjectivity, and the idea that ‘higher’ values cannot be fully conceptualized.
Indistinctness in Value Experience
Authors: Poellner Peter
Published: March 2022

This chapter examines two ways in which our experience of value is frequently indistinct or otherwise cognitively deficient without obvious irrationality being involved. The first is the case of apparently perceptual but indistinct conscious emotions about present objects or states of affairs. The chapter examines the view, suggested by Charles Taylor, that such emotions might involve non-conceptual experiences of determinate values that are then explicated by appropriate descriptive efforts. The chapter argues against this picture and outlines an alternative understanding of these experiences as typically involving only determinable evaluative contents. The second kind of indistinct or deficient value experience relates to affectively imaginative representations of future ends. These are often cognitively deficient and (according to Sartre) typically inflate the value of those ends, yet without obvious and easily detectable irrationality being involved. An expansion of Sartre’s account of this phenomenon is offered, building on his idea of ‘symbolic’ objects of desire.
Northern Ireland, the BBC, and Censorship in Thatcher's Britain
Authors: Savage Robert J.
Published: March 2022

This book addresses the British broadcast media’s coverage of the conflict in Northern Ireland throughout the 1980s, one of the most turbulent decades in post-war British and Irish history. It explores the incessant wrangling between the government of Margaret Thatcher and an aggressive broadcast media determined to provide objective news and information about the complexities of ‘the Troubles’ to regional, national, and international audiences. The Thatcher government was determined to protect its interests by shaping a narrative of the conflict in simplistic terms, presenting it as a fight between the democratic forces of law and order and ruthless terrorists hell-bent on carnage and chaos. Programming that questioned this simple paradigm by challenging the decisions, policies, and tactics of politicians, civil servants, and the army provoked outrage, angering governments intent on influencing how the conflict was presented at home and abroad. Senior officials employed a variety of tactics to try and shape a complex narrative, including threatening journalists with prosecution under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act. The constant pressure exerted by the government succeeded in encouraging self-censorship within both the BBC and IBA. Nevertheless, BBC and independent television companies remained determined to provide objective, cutting-edge reporting about the relentless violence of ‘the Troubles’. This resulted in the imposition of formal censorship in 1988. However, threatening, bullying, denouncing, and finally censoring the broadcast media did not enable London to control the contested narrative of ‘the Troubles’.
The Image of Northern Ireland
Authors: Savage Robert J.
Published: March 2022

This chapter explores the difficult task that confronted the Thatcher government when trying to influence how the Northern Ireland conflict was presented by domestic and international broadcast media. It pays particular attention to how the government tried to influence American perceptions of the violence, examining mostly futile efforts of the Foreign Office that tried to counter narratives developed by American critics of British policy. The chapter also addresses the depiction of Northern Ireland to ‘mainland’ British audiences by considering a controversial programme titled Britain’s Wasteland, a documentary that examined the dire state of the Northern Ireland economy. The programme created a tremendous discord within Northern Ireland for highlighting high rates of unemployment, economic stagnation, and what was considered a pervasive sense of hopelessness and despair that gripped the region. The chapter addresses how business leaders and their political allies within Northern Ireland tried to protect the image of a region challenged by relentless political violence.
Routine Chaos?
Authors: Savage Robert J.
Published: March 2022

This chapter considers how the broadcast media addressed the continuing violence from the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement until the introduction of censorship in October 1988. It considers why television coverage, much of it transmitted to regional, national, and international audiences, continued to provoke the anger of British authorities. In 1988 the BBC and Thames Television not only reported news about the ‘Troubles’ but became entangled in the conflict. The Thatcher government already viewed television as part of the Northern Ireland problem and in the aftermath of the violence sparked by the Gibraltar killings, made clear its disdain for programming decisions made by both Thames Television and the BBC. For Margaret Thatcher the gruesome violence of 1988, especially the killings of two soldiers in Andersonstown, demanded a more aggressive focus on security. The appalling violence and relentless images of bombings, shootings, and rioting, along with stories critical of the security services, upset the Prime Minister and an exasperated British public that was fed up with a conflict that had no end in sight.
The End of Censorship?
Authors: Savage Robert J.
Published: March 2022

This chapter considers the persistence of the broadcasting ban and the failure of the BBC and independent television companies to mount a sustained and coherent effort to end censorship. It also addresses a renewed effort to introduce self-censorship by defining the language journalists used when describing the conflict. Twenty years after the outbreak of violence senior broadcasting officials tried to develop a ‘correct’ terminology for Northern Ireland reporting, illustrating that self-censorship remained part of Britain’s broadcasting culture. The chapter therefore addresses not only censorship but the continued issue of self-censorship that characterized British broadcasting throughout the long years of ‘the Troubles’. In addressing the notoriety of the broadcast ban, the chapter explores how American activists exploited Britain’s censorship of the broadcast media both to embarrass the British government and humiliate the BBC. The chapter concludes with the decision by John Major’s government to end the censorship of broadcasting in the United Kingdom. The unfolding peace process made the British government’s embrace of political censorship look increasingly foolish and proved unsustainable.
Introduction
Authors: Hannah Allen Susan , Yuen Amy
Published: March 2022

Even after seventy-five years, the UN Security Council meets nearly every day. They respond to a range of threats to international peace and security, but not all threats. Why does the Security Council take up some issues for discussion and not others? What factors shape the Council's actions, if they take any action at all? Adapting insights from legislative bargaining, this book demonstrates that the agenda-setting powers granted in the institutional rules offer less powerful Council members the opportunity to in uence the content of a resolution without jeopardizing its passage. The Council also decides when to conduct public or private diplomacy. The analysis shows how external factors like international and domestic public reactions motivate grandstanding behaviors and shape resolutions. New quantitative data on meetings and outside options provide support for these claims. The book also explores the dynamics of the formal analysis in three cases: North Korean nuclear proliferation, the negotiations leading up to NATO bombing in Serbia over Kosovo, and the elected member-led process to codify the principles of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. The book argues that while the powerful veto members do have great in uence over the Council, the rules of the most consequential security institution in uence its policy outcomes, just as they do in any other international institution.
Working Through the Council: A Test of Outside Options on UN Security Council Actions
Authors: Hannah Allen Susan , Yuen Amy
Published: March 2022

In this chapter, the implications of Voeten’s (2001) model about the impact that outside options on behavior inside the Security Council are tested empirically. As the most powerful state in the international system, the United States has the ability to intervene in any con ict in the world. The likelihood that it will do so, however, is not equal in all cases. After estimating the chance that the US will intervene in a particular con ict, the effect of that likelihood on the Security Council’s decision to send peacekeepers is explored. When the US outside option is credible, other permanent members are more willing to make concessions to facilitate action within the Council.
Conclusion
Authors: Hannah Allen Susan , Yuen Amy
Published: March 2022

This chapter summarizes the arguments and findings of the book. The interests of the permanent members matter, but bargaining happens among all Council members according to a set of established rules. These rules affect what the Council can and cannot agree to do. A strategic Council president chooses which issues are handled in public. Public discussions generate different possibilities than private ones, illustrating how agenda-setting matters. These insights suggest that black-boxing the Council misses the bargaining and cooperation that occurs among the permanent members, despite their disparate preferences.
Legitimation by Constitution
Authors: Michelman Frank , Ferrara Alessandro
Published: March 2022

This book recollects and extends a series of exchanges between the two authors, conducted over past decades and inspired by the constitution-centred ‘liberal principle of legitimacy’ proposed by John Rawls in his work on political liberalism. Rawls tied the possibility of a liberally just and stable democratic government in modern pluralized societies to a dualist conception of democracy—a subjection of ground-level majoritarian lawmaking to the constraints of a higher-law constitution that most or all citizens could find acceptable as a framework for their politics. From a shared standpoint of sympathy with the aims of the political-liberal philosophy and its contained idea of legitimation-by-constitution, the exchanges work their ways through difficulties standing in the way of that conception’s fulfilment on terms consistent with political liberalism’s ideas about political justification and avoidance of oppression. In three parts, these chapters focus first on tensions between government by the people and government by consent, and some resulting mysteries of democratic constitutional foundations. Next they take up challenges posed to judicial and other authorities charged with concrete applications of typically and necessarily abstract constitutional law. Finally, they turn to a magnification of these mysteries, tensions, and challenges under the lenses of ambition towards transnational legal ordering. Along the way, the discussions treat with works of other leading contemporary theorists of constitutional democracy, including Bruce Ackerman, Ronald Dworkin, and Jürgen Habermas.
The Challenge of ‘Most Reasonable for Us’
Authors: Michelman Frank I.
Published: March 2022

How can we purge from a liberal polity’s regnant conception of rightness or fitness in politics all traces of ‘modern universalism’ (natural law), while still maintaining a liberal commitment to government by consent among free and equal persons? Joining with Alessandro Ferrara in pursuit of that question, this chapter by Michelman draws heavily from Michelman’s 1999 commentary on work of Jürgen Habermas, where Habermas (by Michelman’s reading) showed how an experience of the universal and unconditional bindingness of a certain set of reasons for action can be salvaged from the effect of a philosophical ‘linguistic turn’, according to which a people’s morality is a particular product of its language broadly understood. Michelman reads Habermas to show how a people can share a wholly valid experience of the unconditionally obligatory in social relations, through a moral conception that is nevertheless language dependent and so not necessarily accessible from within every human form of life.
Constitutional Interpretation: A Dualist Democrat’s Dilemma
Authors: Michelman Frank I.
Published: March 2022

In his book The Democratic Horizon (2014), Alessandro Ferrara takes up two kinds of recently developing, severe impediments to a felt experience, in countries of the constitutional-democratic West, of self-government by the people. One is a daily subjection of citizens to sundry regulatory regimes—bureaucratic or privatized—of which they cannot plausibly see themselves as authors. The other is an increasingly insistent presence in our countries of populations who do not include themselves within the tradition we know as constitutional democracy. This chapter shows how Ferrara’s book offers the idea of ‘dualist’ democracy—the conduct of a country’s daily government under judicially administered direction from a higher-law constitution attributable to the political agency of the people of that country—as a response to both these problems (as the chapter names them) of ‘occlusion of authorship’ and ‘shortfall of agreement’. The chapter draws parallels between Ferrara’s treatments and the ‘liberal principle of legitimacy’ proposed by John Rawls. It claims that a simultaneous pursuit, through dualist democracy, of both government by the people and government by consent poses a non-resolvable dilemma for judicial constitutional interpretation.
Can Legitimation by Constitution Apply Beyond the State?
Authors: Ferrara Alessandro
Published: March 2022

This chapter addresses Michelman’s account of a possible transposition of the model of legitimation-by-constitution to the transnational level. At the domestic level, the constitutional essentials supposedly reflect some underlying shared political conception of justice, such as justice as fairness. Reasons are offered, in the chapter, to doubt an assignment of equivalent status—that of a shared conception of justice for a well-ordered global society—to Rawls’s proposed eight chartering principles for a society of peoples. More specifically, in order to be more normatively binding than just the outcome of the incidentally converging wills of the signatory states, the principles of justice for a worldwide political association would have to reflect some political conception of justice for the global level. Justice as fairness cannot play that function, on account of its individual-egalitarian premises, uncontested only at the domestic level. Towards the end of the chapter, the normative notion of ‘the good or flourishing of humanity as a whole’ is propounded as an alternative for the role of a ‘political’ conception of justice undergirding the constitution for a society of peoples.
A Political Conception of a People (and its Consequence)
Authors: Michelman Frank I.
Published: March 2022

Accepting from Ferrara that Rawls preserves the democratic underpinnings of his conception for a society of peoples (‘SOP’) by scaling up the constituent membership from the level of persons to that of peoples, legitimacy for the SOP must still attend to matters of the distributions of authority within the states correlative to the constituent peoples. Just as the political conception of a morally justified state order requires for its construction a ‘political conception of the person’, so does a parallel political conception for the SOP require a political conception of a constituent people (to be distinguished from a political conception of humanity as offered by Ferrara in Chapter 10). Such a conception is to be found in a constituent people’s convergence on a set of constitutional essentials conforming to principles and ideals uniting them as a people. It follows that any coercive powers of the SOP must be framed so as not to clash with the internal essential constitutional guarantees of any constituent people or state. The result will be a ‘chequerboard’ structure for the coercive powers of any SOP. Following Ferrara’s hope in Chapter 10 for benign effects from the force of the example, that might not be so bad.
Concluding Reflections
Authors: Ferrara Alessandro
Published: March 2022

Our exchange, in Part III, on a possible distillation of a justification-supportive political reasonability for the case of a transnational order has brought us full circle to a deepened appreciation of the depth of the problem in the domestic-state case. We offer, then, these separate concluding reflections. Ferrara highlights two major contributions of the later Rawls: (a) a singularized normativity of the ‘most reasonable’, which breaks through the post-Wittgensteinian sterile clash between renewed programmes for lifeform-independent foundations and mere reconstructions of locally prevailing codes; (b) a reformulation of the ‘consent of the governed’ as ‘legitimation by constitution’, in response to circumstances of heightened complexity and pluralism. Full fruition of these contributions will still require expansions of Rawls’s constitutional theory with reference to (a) a political conception of the demos; (b) application of the standard of the most reasonable to constitutional adjudication; (c) implicit limits of the voters’ power to amend the constitution.
Ecologies of War and Revolt
Authors: Keating Jennifer
Published: March 2022

Just as ecological crisis has often prefigured renewed waves of imperial expansion, so it also has the capacity to significantly destabilize empires. The final chapter closes the volume with a discussion of the years of the First World War in Turkestan. During this period, escalating tensions generated by the expropriation of rural land prior to 1914, coupled with the environmental pressures of global warfare—which included the requisitioning of plants, animals, and labour alongside the renewed exploitation of nature above and below ground—culminated in a massive anti-colonial uprising in the summer and autumn of 1916. The chapter suggests that the uprising had very clear environmental dimensions in its form as well as its causes, and traces the strategies of Central Asians, settlers, and state officials in which attacks on livestock, standing crops, railway and telegraph infrastructure, and land expropriation and forced resettlement were all commonplace. In this sense, the chapter suggests that many contemporary sources can be read against the grain: rather than being a period of lawlessness and chaos, these were months when the environment became an object and subject of resistance and retribution, with violence neither ahistorical nor anarchic, but value-laden and deeply political. The revolt ultimately heralded the disintegration of imperial power in Turkestan, and brought front and centre the ecological roots of political instability.
The Pissing Evil
Authors: Hall Kersten T.
Published: March 2022

The name ‘diabetes’ derives from the ancient Greek word meaning ‘to flow’ or ‘siphon’ and describes one of the most common symptom of diabetes—the passing of large amounts of urine, for which it was given the far more colourful name of ‘The pissing evil’ by seventeenth-century English physician Thomas Willis (1625–1675). First mentioned on an ancient Egyptian papyrus as a disease of sweet urine, it was physicians like Matthew Dobson (1735–1784) and John Rollo who showed it was due to high levels of sugar; both proposed that the condition might therefore be controlled by dietary restriction. In the late nineteenth century, Oskar Minkowski and Josef von Mering demonstrated that the pancreas played a central role in controlling blood sugar levels. This information led French physiologist Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard (1817–1893) to speculate that this might be due to the action of a hormone.
‘In Praise of Wool’
Authors: Hall Kersten T.
Published: March 2022

By the mid-1920s, insulin was saving the lives of diabetic patients, but its chemical nature remained a mystery. This chapter uses novel archival sources to show how work in an unlikely field of science far removed from biomedical research played a crucial role in unravelling the chemical mystery of insulin. Working at the Wool Industries Research Association in Leeds, UK, Archer Martin and Richard Synge developed partition chromatography, a method for the chemical analysis of proteins in wool fibres. Although this method was originally intended for the benefit of local textile industries, it left a legacy beyond the wool mills of West Yorkshire. It helped to overturn the then-dominant idea held by eminent biophysicists like William Astbury that amino acids were arranged in orderly mathematical patterns and to lay the ground for a revolution in biology.
The Blobs That Won a Nobel Prize
Authors: Hall Kersten T.
Published: March 2022

Insulin was the very first protein to have its complete sequence of amino acids determined. Accomplished by Fred Sanger in 1953, The Times compared his achievement with running the four-minute mile and five years later Sanger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Sanger himself was adamant, however, that he could not have achieved this without the use of Martin’s and Synge’s method of partition chromatography, and his success, in turn, inspired Dorothy Hodgkin to return to solving the three-dimensional structure of insulin using X-ray crystallography. Hodgkin had started working on insulin in 1935 and in the meantime had solved the structures of vitamin B12 and penicillin, for which she was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Five years later, she finally solved the structure of insulin. Sanger’s and Hodgkin’s successes inspired attempts to synthesize the molecule artificially.
The Prophet in the Labyrinth
Authors: Hall Kersten T.
Published: March 2022

Sanger’s application of partition chromatography to the analysis of insulin was crucial in showing that different proteins have a defined sequence of amino acids arranged in a specific order. But thanks to its application by Erwin Chargaff, Martin’s and Synge’s method was also central in explaining how DNA carried genetic information. Using partition chromatography, Chargaff found striking differences in the relative amounts of nucleotide bases from nucleic acids in different species. This offered the first hint that genetic information might reside at the level of the sequence of bases. Chargaff’s analysis also played a crucial role in Watson’s and Crick’s double-helical model of DNA, first published in 1953, after which a number of scientists (George Gamow, Francois Jacob, Jacques Monod, Marshall Nirenberg) showed how the sequence of nucleotide bases in DNA determined the precise order of amino acids in a protein.
‘Don’t You Want Cheap Insulin?’
Authors: Hall Kersten T.
Published: March 2022

The flotation of Genentech on the US stock market in 1980 turned its founders Bob Swanson and Herb Boyer into multimillionaires. Although human insulin caused great excitement for traders on Wall Street, however, the medical community was sober. Some clinicians felt that it offered no real clinical benefit over existing porcine and bovine insulins with which patients had treated their diabetes since the 1920s. What was the point of the frantic race between rival researchers to be the first to produce human insulin? This chapter explores this, and some of the wider social and political questions, raised by new medical technologies like human insulin and its subsequent analogues. Moreover, as we face a world shaped by the current Covid-19 pandemic, the chapter argues that the story of insulin has lessons for us all, whether or not we have diabetes.
‘this warm scribe my hand’
Authors: Sutherland Kathryn
Published: March 2022

Two ideas of literature, as reading and writing, emerge from the eighteenth century, with reading a function of books and writing—the realm of drafts and revisions in the author’s hand—opening onto a private space promising personality and authenticity. The period saw various attempts to bridge the gap that mass printing opens between the spaces of writing and reading, among which is the Romantic-era cult of the autograph. The Romantic period saw the emergence of the writer as celebrity. The writer’s autograph combines the literary history of Romanticism with the material history of the collectible.
The Public Library
Authors: Hayes Kevin J.
Published: March 2022

A parallel chapter to the first, “The Public Library” examines the public libraries of the ideal future that the utopian novelists imagined. Many of the innovations they imagined correct problems that real public libraries faced in late-nineteenth-century America. They make public libraries convenient to all utopian citizens, who enjoy using them regularly. Many utopian novelists give the public library a prominent place in town, giving it symbolic value: A great city must have a great library. In the ideal future, the public library would open its shelves to everyone instead of cautiously guarding its books against the public. Many of the utopian novelists imagined ways to manage the proliferation of print. Their solutions often sound more dystopian than utopian: many foresaw the destruction of many books in the future.
Compliance Studies and the African Human Rights System
Authors: Biegon Japhet
Published: March 2022

This chapter discusses the compliance/implementation studies in the African human rights system, in which Frans Viljoen has a proven record of thought leadership. It begins by tracing the evolution of the African human rights system, looking at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR); the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC); and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR). The chapter then identifies five major trends in compliance/implementation studies. These include the increasing usage of empirical research; the seeming preference for in-depth case studies of particular cases or countries; the interrogation of unexamined truisms or assumptions; the redirecting of the analytical lens to sub-regional courts and tribunals; and the evaluation of the mechanisms of the regional bodies for monitoring compliance. The chapter argues for more energy to be channelled towards generating interdisciplinary research, a task that calls for greater involvement of non-lawyers in the enterprise of studying compliance and implementation in the African system. It also suggests that much more attention should be directed at understanding the broader impact of the decisions of regional bodies, that is, the indirect effects of the decisions at the domestic level such as changes in societal attitudes and public discourse.
Compliance with Prohibition of the Death Penalty in Africa
Authors: Chenwi Lilian
Published: March 2022

This chapter investigates the issue of death penalty in Africa. The application of the death penalty on the African continent continues to be an issue of debate and concern. Over the years, there has been a growing trend towards the abolition of the death penalty with emphasis on the need to enhance and protect human rights. Arguably, this trend emanates from the recognition of the death penalty’s inconsistency with international human rights law. Although there is no explicit general prohibition of the death penalty in international law, existing human rights instruments have become significant in orchestrating a continent-wide shift. The chapter then looks at the position of the death penalty in international human rights law with reference to key UN human rights treaties – which African states are parties to – and their subsequent interpretation. It considers the extent of compliance with these instruments in the prohibition of death penalty in Africa.
Citizenship for sale
Authors: Mavelli Luca
Published: March 2022

The discussion focuses on one of the most visible manifestations of the neoliberalization of citizenship: the proliferation of citizenship-by-investment schemes. It contends that these schemes exceed commodification in its narrowest sense (the fact that citizenship is traded for money) and are part of a broader process of economization that, by extending the logics and metrics of the market to all spheres of human activity, rewrites in neoliberal terms the criteria required for the protection and recognition traditionally associated with citizenship. Neoliberal citizenship is thus a regime of differential inclusion based on a logic of valuation that encompasses both economic and emotional attributes regarded as valuable for the host community. This logic is applied to nominal citizens and non-citizens alike. To substantiate this argument, the chapter explores a series of illustrations from New Zealand, a country whose image of ‘social laboratory’ for progressive policies evokes the famous notion of the ‘European social model’. These illustrations are relevant to appreciating the global reach of neoliberal citizenship and how the pervasive penetration of neoliberal rationalities has been particularly pernicious in welfare-oriented democracies. The New Zealand case offers crucial insights to explore the neoliberalization of citizenship in Europe and shows how, under specific circumstances, the decisions to include wealthy billionaires and disabled refugees, while excluding disabled residents, respond to the same neoliberal rationality of value.
Satire, Sensations, and Slander
Authors: Huxtable Simon
Published: March 2022

‘Criticism and self-criticism’ [kritika i samokritika]—the belief that constant exposure and discussion of errors would help perfect the system—was a flagship Soviet ritual. Within the press it took the form of exposés, critical essays, or satirical feuilletons, often prompted by a letter from a reader. However, as this chapter suggests, even as they proclaimed the importance of criticism, officials also considered the press’s exposure of ‘shortcomings’ to be damaging to communist rule. Focusing on the evolution of press criticism from the end of World War II to the end of 1956, this chapter shows how criticism was both encouraged and punished, its fate depending on the social and political climate and the Party’s diagnosis of the potential harm criticism could cause to the Soviet state. The chapter homes in on a crucial moment following Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ of February 1956, when journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda used criticism to eliminate the remnants of Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ from the Soviet Union. Believing that Khrushchev’s words validated their critical line, journalists printed articles that exposed a range of official misdeeds, ranging from wrongful imprisonment to bureaucratic interference. However, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in the autumn, officials began to take fright at rebellious moods within the intelligentsia and saw the paper’s stream of critical articles as potentially subversive. The chapter shows how journalists’ attempt to rid the country of corruption and judicial abuse thus ended in reprimands from officials and recriminations within the paper.
Far from Moscow
Authors: Huxtable Simon
Published: March 2022

This chapter examines Komsomol’skaia pravda journalists’ attempts to mould a new hero for a new era, focusing in particular on a series of autobiographical writings—diaries, letters and memoirs—published by the paper over the course of the late 1950s and 1960s. Soviet culture, from Stakhanov to Chkalov, had always assigned pride of place to those individuals thought to exemplify the best traits of humanity: heroes. But after Stalinist models had been discredited, what would the contemporary hero look like? By printing the unvarnished stories of young people travelling to Siberia and the Arctic, journalists hoped to create a new, ‘sincere’ hero, quite different from the square-jawed exemplars of the Stalin era. Journalists framed their texts as authentic documents of ‘romanticism’, a term that became ubiquitous during the Thaw, and conveyed the joy of communing with nature, a belief in the future—but also a vague sense of rebellion. Despite journalists’ rosy-tinted framing of these texts, journalists were never quite sure where these ascetic individuals fitted into the values of the Thaw. As Khrushchev and Nixon argued over kitchens in Moscow, these young heroes’ rejection of comfort seemed out of place. As this chapter argues, journalists’ confused reactions to this new cast of heroes reveals some of the aporias of Khrushchev’s new-found commitment to his citizens’ wellbeing.
From Word to Deed
Authors: Huxtable Simon
Published: March 2022

Khrushchev’s vision of communism envisaged a key role for grass-roots initiative. Journalists supported energies from below in the belief that smaller collectives were crucial carriers of communist ideas. This chapter focuses on one attempt to build communism from the grass-roots: the Communard Method, a pedagogical movement started by activists in Leningrad and which, with the support of journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda, became a national phenomenon. The method offered an antidote to traditional Komsomol and Pioneer activities by placing children at the heart of learning: children would decide on activities, take the lead in implementing new ideas, and later debate the effectiveness of their efforts. Adult involvement was kept to a minimum. Journalists at Komsomol’skaia pravda publicised the new method, printing articles that reported on the new phenomenon, devising new rubrics to encourage young people to become involved. This chapter places the Communard Method, and Komsomol’skaia pravda’s involvement with it, within a broader pedagogical and political context, linking it to the ideas of Ukrainian pedagogue Vasyl Sukhomlinsky as well as Khrushchev’s work-based school reforms. However, it also shows how the Communard method challenged the status quo by painting run-of-the-mill youth activities as top-down and dull. After Khrushchev’s ouster in October 1964, the new leadership placed pressure on Communard leaders to return to the political mainstream and forced many of its leading exponents—and their supporters in the press—to leave their positions.
Europe’s Greatest Electoral Machine
Authors: Carty R. Kenneth
Published: March 2022

Fianna Fáil was democratic Europe’s most electorally successful political party of the twentieth century. It was, from the early 1930s, Ireland’s dominant party, always winning the most votes and normally forming the government. After tracing the story of its dominance, the analysis explores the party’s conception of itself as a “moral community” committed to defining the bounds of national politics and the country’s constitutional governance. With a decentralized and highly personalized organization whose operation was shaped by the political incentives of a Single Transferable Vote system, party life was long marked by a disciplined political loyalty to the national leadership. The party’s easy dominance was eroded as intraparty conflict was accentuated by the slow erosion of Irish party identifications and an increased fragmentation of the party system. By the century’s end, the party was forced to engage in coalition politics and then saw its support collapse in the wake of a financial crisis that suddenly ended eight decades of one-party dominance.
The Perpetual Government
Authors: Carty R. Kenneth
Published: March 2022

The Liberal Democratic party emerged as an instrument for the political management of a democratic state being constructed in post-war Japan as part of the capitalist West. It quickly developed the ’55 system that saw it operate as the political ringmaster balancing a diverse set of group interests and linking them to the state bureaucracies. Practising a politics of pragmatic patronage, its multi-headed organization was marked by a highly developed system of factionalism that linked party elites to local representatives serving their constituents in the context of a Single Non-Transferable Vote electoral system. The party survived an attempt to break it by electoral reform and then went on, in the new regime, to slowly transform a leadership politics from a politics of weak, short-term, old men placeholders to one in which the prime minister came to dominate the organization and government agenda-making. This success has allowed the Liberal Democrats to survive the decay suffered by other dominant parties and remain as Japan’s seemingly perpetual government.
A Dominant Generation
Authors: Carty R. Kenneth
Published: March 2022

Italy’s Christian Democratic party emerged after the country’s defeat in World War II and was at the centre of every government until its collapse and disappearance in the early 1990s. Described as a catholic catch-all party, it practised a pragmatic, non-ideological politics that fed off of the resources and structures of the state and, in the process, becoming an essential operational element of the constitutional regime. Highly factionalized, its organization was directed by a cohort of regional bosses who controlled personalized patron-client networks able to mobilize electoral support in exchange for the patronage they could deliver. This leadership cohort shared the offices of state in a game of rotating chairs that saw governments come and go with remarkable regularity but with no substantial change in the players running them. The Christian Democrats hold on the system was weakened when the cold war context that had called it into being dissolved and the party collapsed in the wake of a series of patronage scandals that brought the entire party system down.
Competition in Dominant Party Systems
Authors: Carty R. Kenneth
Published: March 2022

The dynamics of competition in party systems characterized by one party dominance reflects both the trajectory of the dominant party’s support—in most cases one of long-term decline—and the range and structure of the opposition parties. The evidence suggests that dominance is compatible with quite different electoral systems. If the electoral system neither fosters nor inhibits dominance, it does have an impact on the internal structure and life of the dominant party. Although dominance favours centrism, opposition can take distinctive forms. In the two oldest nation-building systems, it came from the ill-defined right, in two state-building systems from a more ideological left, and in developing India it was scattered across the spectrum until one opposition party emerged in an attempt to redefine the nature of national politics. In all cases, dominance ensures that intraparty conflict in the government party defines much of the real competition in the system.
On Believing
Authors: Hunter David
Published: March 2022

This book develops original accounts of the logical, psychological, and normative aspects of belief, grounded in ontological views that put the believer at the heart of the story. Hunter argues that to believe something is to be in position to do, think, and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. The logical aspect is that being right depends only on whether that possibility obtains. The psychological one concerns how that possibility can rationalize what one does, thinks, and feels. But, Hunter argues, beliefs are not causes, capacities, or dispositions. Rather, believing rationalizes because possibilities are potential reasons. Hunter also denies that believing is a form of representing. The objects of belief are possibilities, not representations, and belief states are not themselves true or false. Hunter defends this modal view against familiar objections and explores how objective and subjective limits to belief generate credal illusions and ground credal necessities. Developing a novel account of the normativity of belief, he argues that voluntary acts of inference make us responsible for our beliefs. While denying that believing is intrinsically normative, Hunter grounds the ethics of belief in attributive goodness. Believing something is to our credit when it shows us to be good in some way, and what we ought to believe depends on what we ought to know, and not on the evidence we have. The ethics of belief, Hunter argues, concern how a believer ought to be positioned in a world of possibilities.