bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Enter “Geoancestry”
Authors: McPherson Lionel K. 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
The widespread (mis)impression that racial thinking is central to social meanings of skin color comes from forgetting that continental color consciousness is rooted in continental ancestry, not in the race concept. To bypass obscure and irresolvable debate about “race,” this section recommends the concept of geoancestry to track Europe-, Asia-, and Africa-identified peoples. There can be no illusion, for example, that continental ancestry alone determines geoancestral identity for persons of substantial mixed continental descent such as Black Americans (an Afro-Anglo national people). The US government was never trying to track some “race” thing: race ideology mystified a fixed boundary between an Africa-identified “Slaves” caste and a Europe-identified “Free White” caste. In the early twentieth century, the US Census began normalizing distraction from caste slavery and segregation by turning continental “color” labels into “color or race” designation.
Negro Blood
Authors: McPherson Lionel K. 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
Being counted in America as “Slaves,” “black,” or “Negro” was never about race essences or natural categories. This section contends that equating monoracial blackness with non-northern African ancestry was a practical measure to ensure unambiguous whiteness during and after American slavery. White America’s law established guidelines for denying white caste status to persons known to have African ancestry: homegrown “blacks” were to comprise a group forever marked by the ascribed dishonor of slavery and subordinate personhood. Those guidelines in turn socially reinforced American color caste and racial thinking. Of special note was the state of Virginia’s “Racial Integrity Act” of 1924, which imposed the “one-drop rule” to assign everyone at birth to either a “white” or “colored” category.
Caste Impurity
Authors: McPherson Lionel K. 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
The purity doctrine of whiteness, as this section describes it, equates truly being white with having no traceable non-European ancestors. In America, persons of mixed continental descent who had African ancestry that was known were thereby “black.” Race law was never about who persons truly are by natural race, biological family, or personal identity. Virginia in 1662 legally established inherited slavery via the enslaved (Africa-identified) “condition of the mother.” Having mixed continental ancestry was always known to be compatible with black/Negro identity; “Negro blood” was merely a proxy for social lineage in the “Slaves” caste. The section argues that the purpose of America’s color caste hierarchy was to conserve unambiguous Anglo/European hegemony and an Africa-identified bottom caste marked by slavery. Yet, the section shows, living as white or “passing” has not required legal membership in the white caste or escape from legal blackness.
A Colored Breed Apart
Authors: McPherson Lionel K. 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
The wholeness claim emphasizes that for some persons of mixed continental descent, social affirmation of their mixed-raceness would remove a psychological obstacle to a complete racial self. This seems to imply a tight natural relation between alleged racial being and the facts of continental descent. Monoracial guidelines such as the one-drop rule tell a different story: the components of any person’s mixed continental ancestry are only a necessary and not also a sufficient condition for racial identification. This section argues that an ethical defense of multiracialism would refuse special pleading for persons whose visible African ancestry might be light enough for them to gain white affirmation as nonblack. Advocates often mention the darker, “more African” physical features of other people who have mixed continental ancestry—which in effect sets up a lighter-skinned contrast class against which to explicate multiracial identity.
Mixed Family Reunion
Authors: McPherson Lionel K. 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
This section explains that family as a social unit is not always and importantly defined by biological relations. American multiracialism presupposes the importance of a person’s raced genealogy to raced self-conception, then uses this in defense of an overarching claim that “mixed race” persons have a need to be recognized for what they racially are. But the facts of one’s continental ancestry ultimately bear the load of that circular reasoning: the genealogical facts are raced according to one’s continental origins. Without presupposing the importance of brute “biological family relations,” there would not be the appearance of a mystery about how one could endorse a racial identity that fails to allude to the purported race of some traceable lineal ancestors. Acknowledging raced forebears from different continents is not naturally connected with endorsing a racial identity that incorporates theirs.
Social-Political Lineage Matters
Authors: McPherson Lionel K. 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
In the spirit of Douglass, Harlan, Du Bois, and Morrison, Part III shows how the core of Black American social identity has been political, not racial. The argument is that foundational American caste, with its “colored” descendants of American slavery, will end only when a solid minority of White Americans make Black social equality a moral priority. Concrete policy will have to reckon with circumstances of Black American national specificity—not universalist antiracism, Africa-themed identity politics, or diversity “of color.” Part III outlines a non-racial, non-exclusionary, post-nationalist account of Black (American) political solidarity that welcomes all who oppose American color caste and support reparative justice. The epilogue, “Forgiveness on Layaway,” morally compares post–Jim Crow America and post-apartheid South Africa: Sincere “white” hopes for forgiveness cannot be squared with nonrepair of historical injustice that maintains vast “black” social inequality.
Plessy on Being Colored
Authors: McPherson Lionel K. 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
White America’s “racial” logic led the US Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to reserve the term “colored” for persons who had any visible or reputational fraction of African ancestry. The contemporary liberal variant “people of color” (for certain non-Anglo groups) ignores the foundational caste division—“Free White” versus “Slaves”—constructed through more than two hundred years of enslaving Africa-identified persons in America. This section argues that replacing “colored” with the variant “of color” falsely implies roughly comparable American caste status and lived experience across nonwhite national peoples—which obscures the distinctive history and circumstances of Black Americans. The section also argues that the “racial” justice claims of Africa-identified descendants of American slavery have a moral urgency and priority in the United States.
Black Specificity in America
Authors: McPherson Lionel K. 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
This section argues that under American caste, “one drop” of “colored blood” was figurative for visible African ancestry as a telltale sign of homegrown slave lineage. The normalization of black “racial” identity in America is a prevalent effect, not a principal cause, of the bottom caste status of descendants of American slavery. After early preoccupation with trying to metaphysically specify racial blackness, Du Bois was satisfied loosely referring to Africa-identified Americans as “we who are dark”—from a Western perspective, by virtue of known African ancestry in domestic context of the former “Slaves” caste. The section explains why Black American identity is not merely a function of living in America, having African ancestry, looking black, and therefore being susceptible to experiencing some similar kinds of color-conscious maltreatment. Capital “B”-Black Americans are Africa-identified descendants of American slavery.
Anti-Caste Black Solidarity for All
Authors: McPherson Lionel K. 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
The exclusionary “racial” feature of black nationalist thought has been a hurdle for nonblack persons interested in supporting the Black American justice cause. Some now believe that the exclusionary feature is mistaken. This revisionist conclusion comes from a place of close sympathy with an account of “pragmatic black nationalism” as political, not racial or “ethnocultural,” solidarity. For the revisionist, being in Black political solidarity does not require being an Africa-identified person. Yet the animating vision of Black social equality remains the same. This view can be described as Black post-nationalist: Black political solidarity should welcome support from everyone moved, regardless of their social identity, by the moral urgency and priority of corrective justice for descendants of American slavery, which would finally dismantle color caste in the United States.
Introduction
Authors: Englert Gianna 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
This chapter begins with a contemporary dilemma: the dissolution of liberal democracies and the threat posed by illiberal and authoritarian forms of governance. But it also argues that the earliest liberals in nineteenth-century France confronted a similar dilemma for themselves. Accordingly, it draws readers’ attention to that period and its political thought. It homes in on liberals’ two responses to the rise of mass democracy: their concept of “political capacity” and their efforts to sever democracy from its ancient and political roots. This Introduction outlines the structure of the book, offers a brief note on its methodology, and introduces its leading cast of characters, from the canonical writers Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville to the statesman François Guizot and the forgotten figures of the French Second Empire. It argues that we cannot appreciate the depth of liberals’ vaunted commitments to individual liberty without understanding their initial objections to political democracy.
“The Regular Representation of Opinion”
Authors: Englert Gianna 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
If Chapters 1 through 4 featured specific moments and even incendiary arguments in the contested politics of the suffrage, Chapter 5 zeroes in on one proposed institutional solution to preserving liberalism and democracy together: the modern party system. It does so by illuminating the political thought advanced by Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne, a neglected voice in the liberal tradition. Like Tocqueville and Laboulaye, Duvergier de Hauranne looked to the American example to instruct an inexperienced French democracy, though his work was also indebted to Victorian British debates over the franchise. From his studies of America and Britain, Duvergier de Hauranne pressed his French contemporaries to overcome their existing hostility toward pluralism and the modern party. Parties provided the answer that liberals had been searching for; they would retain political capacity within a political democracy, thereby guaranteeing that liberal principles and universal suffrage could be mutually enhancing.
Introduction
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
Since the late eighteenth century in Europe it has become impossible to discuss religion and the history of religion other than in connection with the normative demands and history of political freedom. In that sense the dialogue on faith has, explicitly or implicitly, come under the “spell of freedom.” This chapter first demonstrates that, surprisingly, religion is a blind spot in much contemporary Hegelianism. It then develops the argument that our contemporary understanding has to move beyond Hegel with regard to his (intellectualist) understanding of faith, his teleological philosophy of history, his understanding of political freedom, and his Eurocentrism. These four aspects are crucial for the structure of the whole book.
The Independence of Religion: Ernst Troeltsch
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
Ernst Troeltsch, the Protestant theologian and pioneer of a historical sociology of Christianity, is a crucial figure in the rise of a post-Hegelian and non-Nietzschean theory of religion. This chapter restricts itself to an interpretation of one of his early pieces originally published in 1895–1896. His thesis of the “independence” of religion is a means of resisting both every reductionism and every essentialism in the study of religion. The chapter demonstrates how Troeltsch turned this doubly negative attitude into a methodological program. Special emphasis is given to Troeltsch’s attempts to defend a study of religion that is free of tacit presuppositions of both an apologetic and secularist character; it must neither presuppose the truth claim of a particular religion nor declare every truth claim of every religion to be illusory. This means that the specific character of religious truth claims has to be clarified.
Self-Evidence or Sense of Self-Evidence?: Max Scheler
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
While the other major contributions to the modern discourse on religion in the early twentieth century either had a Protestant or a secular Jewish background, Max Scheler not only was a Catholic but saw his own phenomenology-based understanding of religion as a fundamental renewal of the message of faith in a time of tremendous historical upheaval. This chapter asks whether Scheler, in his philosophy of religion, managed to go beyond the descriptive ascertainment of the fact that religious faith is based on feelings of self-evidence and succeeded in demonstrating the self-evidence of certain religious beliefs of a particular faith. This question is explored in both the philosophical and sociological fields and by contrasting Scheler’s ideas with pragmatist philosophy and theory of religion.
The Sacralization of Democracy: John Dewey
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
In the work of John Dewey, as in no other philosopher’s work before him, democracy stood at the center as a political ideal and a moral guideline. While his original view of history was optimistic-progressive, later he increasingly probed what binding forces democracy itself might develop without recourse to the traditions of Christianity. This chapter focuses on Dewey’s 1934 book A Common Faith and discusses the plausibility of Dewey’s view that secularization entails liberation from dogmatism and elimination of artificial barriers within a polity. This question is also discussed against the background of Dewey’s own theory of religion.
Post-totalitarian Christianity
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
This chapter deals with religion in the work of one of the greatest German novelists of the twentieth century, Alfred Döblin, and specifically with his two religious dialogues of 1942–1943 and 1950–1952. In the literary form of a dialogue between a believing older man and an unbelieving younger one, Döblin articulates in argumentative form his own journey from the secular Judaism of his early years to the Catholic Christianity of his later life. For him this was a path leading not to the restoration of Christianity as it had been, but to a “post-totalitarian” Christianity, that is, to a Christianity shaped by the experiences of totalitarianism and the twentieth-century history of violence.
The Secular Option, Its Rise and Consequences: Charles Taylor
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is perhaps the most important and influential present-day thinker when it comes to the relationship between secularization and the modern history of freedom. This chapter focuses on his monumental study A Secular Age (2007), with a particular interest in the connection between Taylor’s original Hegelianism and his theory of secularization. This theory is also criticized in several historical respects (understanding of medieval Europe, claim of a “vector” of reform) and contrasted with an alternative conception, based on a political understanding of the history of religion and a different view of transcendence and sacredness in our time.
Introductory Remarks
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
The search for a “different kind” of freedom does not refer to the Hegelian critique of a purely negative conception of freedom as emphasized in present-day Hegelianism, but aims at an understanding of the “indebtedness” of human freedom. This idea was already inherent in the work of Troeltsch, but was elaborated more systematically by Paul Tillich in his reflections on “theonomy.” It was then taken up in the important writings of the French philosopher Paul Ricœur. In a different way, the ideas about “communicative freedom” in the writings of the German Protestant theologian Wolfgang Huber also point in a similar direction.
Introductory Remarks
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
Almost a century after Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, which amalgamated contemporary knowledge on the history of religion and political freedom, the great studies in the sociology of religion emerged in Germany and France (Weber, Troeltsch, Durkheim, Mauss). For all of them, the assumption shared by Hegel and his adversary Schleiermacher that Christianity is undoubtedly the highest form of religion was no longer tenable. The introductory remarks to Part IV of the book have two aims. The first is to characterize the most important ways in which the project of a historical sociology continued over the course of the twentieth century, namely in the work of those authors to whom the following five chapters are dedicated and a few others (Will Herberg, Shmuel Eisenstadt). The second is to delineate the attempts to overcome Eurocentrism and Christianocentrism in the course of these developments.
Christianity and the Dangers of Self-Sacralization: Werner Stark
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
This chapter deals with the ambitious work of the Catholic sociologist Werner Stark, one of the sharpest critiques of a Protestant bias in Max Weber’s sociology, particularly his five-volume Sociology of Religion. The chapter first discusses the validity of his criticism and then turns to the alternatives Stark proposes, especially his ideas on the potential institutionalization of charisma in the church and the focus he advocates on the role of monasticism and religious orders in the history of Christianity. Finally, his emphasis on the “universality” of the church (as distinct from its national organization) and his plea for an unabridged Christian universalism are discussed.
More Weberian Than Weber?: David Martin
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
This chapter offers a portrait of the lifework of the British sociologist of religion David Martin. Its starting point is the possible discrepancy between Weber’s de facto research in historical sociology and his famous notion of a world-historical process of rationalization and disenchantment. Martin has been called “more Weberian than Weber” because he adhered to Weber’s research methods but was skeptical of his grand statements about historical tendencies. His approach is characterized as a “political sociology of religion” and a crucial challenge to the secularization thesis. Martin’s controversial contributions to the study of global Christianity, particularly Pentecostalism in Latin America, are also discussed.
Religious Evolution and Symbolic Realism: Robert Bellah
Authors: Joas Hans 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
The greatest scholar in the field of the historical sociology of religion after the classical figures was Robert Bellah. This chapter delineates his intellectual development from the 1950s onward and then focuses on his synthesis of Parsons’ sociological theory and the theology of Paul Tillich. The existing volume of the universal history of religion he aimed to write (Religion in Human Evolution) is presented here as an epoch-making achievement, particularly because of its inclusion of Chinese and Indian history. I argue that nobody has moved so decisively beyond both Hegel’s philosophy of history and Max Weber’s historical sociology as Robert Bellah.
Development, Trajectories, and Catch-Up
Authors: Bravo-Ortega Claudio , Eterovic Nicolas 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
This chapter examines the long-term development experiences of Latin American and Scandinavia, with particular reference to the case of Chile. The Scandinavian comparator is of interest from a Latin American perspective since both regions have strong established comparative advantages in the natural-resource-intensive sectors. It is found that superior growth performance was generally achieved in Scandinavia as result of greater openness to world trade and greater proximity to key markets. Despite the fact that Scandinavia (like Latin America) was heavily reliant on natural-resource-intensive exports, its higher levels of human capital formation enabled it to sidestep into related sectors, creating the basis for superior growth. The chapter ends with a detailed review of the Chilean experience. It finds that Chile’s recent embrace of openness, combined with capabilities inherited from a more interventionist era, have allowed it to close the income gap with Scandinavia.
The Extractive Sector and Development in Latin America
Authors: Villar Paul Fenton , Papyrakis Elissaios , Pellegrini Lorenzo 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
The ‘resource curse’ literature suggests that resource abundance, far from propelling development forward, might instead undermine it. Still, it is increasingly argued that with appropriately implemented governance frameworks, resource-rich countries might mitigate some of the negative externalities associated with natural-resource extraction. Focusing on Latin America, this chapter analyses the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and its potential role in improving development outcomes arising from the operation of the extractive sector. The chapter shows that EITI membership in the region is growing, but it still remains limited and that progress among those countries that have joined has been slow. However, there are some unfolding contributions concerning the EITI’s practical development of transparency standards in Latin America, especially in Peru and Colombia. The chapter suggests that more progress of this nature will need to be made if the region is to realize fully the development potential of the natural resources sector.
Digitalization in Latin America
Authors: Carlos Ferraz João , Torracca Julia , Arona Gabriela , Peres Wilson 
Published: March 2024

Abstract
This chapter assesses the extent to which the diffusion of digital-related technologies may contribute to development catching-up processes of nations, with particular reference to Latin America. The chapter finds that developing nations, including Latin America, were able to significantly evolve and to extend the most basic form of digitalization (internet access) to an important proportion of their population, while still lagging in costs, skills, and infrastructure relative to higher-income countries. The chapter also finds that the productivity gap of the informal sector, in comparison to its formal counterpart, has increased during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, despite substantial progress in the expansion of digital access in all selected countries of the region. The infrastructure, skills, and cost issues that hold Latin America back in realizing its digital potential are not insuperable. However, tackling then will required well-considered policies that are cognizant of the structural realities of the region’s diverse economies.