Final Chapter: The Past, Present, and Future of Central Banking

2019 ◽  
pp. 183-186
Author(s):  
Nils Herger
Keyword(s):  
Central Banking ◽  
The Past

Denouement: World Politics, Systemic Leadership, and Climate Change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Thompson ◽  
Leila Zakhirova
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
World Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Climate Fluctuations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
Historical Processes

In this final chapter, we conclude by recapitulating our argument and evidence. One goal of this work has been to improve our understanding of the patterns underlying the evolution of world politics over the past one thousand years. How did we get to where we are now? Where and when did the “modern” world begin? How did we shift from a primarily agrarian economy to a primarily industrial one? How did these changes shape world politics? A related goal was to examine more closely the factors that led to the most serious attempts by states to break free of agrarian constraints. We developed an interactive model of the factors that we thought were most likely to be significant. Finally, a third goal was to examine the linkages between the systemic leadership that emerged from these historical processes and the global warming crisis of the twenty-first century. Climate change means that the traditional energy platforms for system leadership—coal, petroleum, and natural gas—have become counterproductive. The ultimate irony is that we thought that the harnessing of carbon fuels made us invulnerable to climate fluctuations, while the exact opposite turns out to be true. The more carbon fuels are consumed, the greater the damage done to the atmosphere. In many respects, the competition for systemic leadership generated this problem. Yet it is unclear whether systemic leadership will be up to the task of resolving it.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 226-232
Author(s):  
Mary Jean Corbett
Keyword(s):  
Public Action ◽  
The Past ◽  
Over Time

This chapter cites Annie Ernaux's final chapter of The Years, which stages a series of conversations between members of the older and younger Pargiter generations as they gather for a family party. It offers an understanding about how Virginia Woolf's relationship to the late-Victorian past changed as she aged over time. It also looks at Woolf's writings that are considered as “novel of fact” rather than “vision,” which have many determinants of the female descendant who seeks something from the ancestor's portrait. The chapter elaborates how The Years turns away from an idealized maternal past that is predicated on the identifications with men. It talks about embracing the models for public action that is caused by the problematic commitments of most feminist reformers in the past.

The Modern Cyclops

Cyclops ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 305-376
Author(s):  
Mercedes Aguirre ◽  
Richard Buxton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Victor Hugo ◽  
The Past ◽  
Abstract Expressionist ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Modern Artists

The period from the eighteenth century till today has witnessed the most innovative explorations of Cyclopean myths since antiquity. Indeed, in visual art, reimaginings of the Cyclopes have arguably been more innovative over the past two-and-a-half centuries than at any time in the past, including antiquity. So far as literary retellings are concerned, the case for the parity of the modern with the ancient—let alone the case for the superiority of the modern—is more difficult to sustain. Nevertheless, some major modern writers have magnificently reappropriated the figure of the Cyclops, and the variety of modern literary takes on these myths is startling. Showing how all this is so is the project of this final chapter. Earlier literary examples include Raspe (on Baron Munchausen), Vico, and Victor Hugo (treated in particular detail); their contemporaries in visual art include James Barry, Flaxman, the Romantics Füssli and Böcklin, and the Symbolists Moreau and Redon. Closer to today, modern artists such as Paolozzi, Oppenheim, and the Abstract Expressionist Baziotes receive attention. In literature, a range of significant figures is discussed, not least Joyce and Ellison. Also covered are developments in cinema, where, even if it can be hard to claim aesthetic quality for many of the screen Cyclopes who appear, their role in forming popular consciousness can hardly be doubted.

Embodied Antiquity

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-226
Author(s):  
James Uden
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Emotional Connection ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Past ◽  
Verse Drama ◽  
The Last Man

The final chapter of the book turns to the nexus between classical antiquity, Romanticism, and the Gothic, as it is reflected in the writings of Mary Shelley. “Reanimation” has been frequently identified as a consistent trope in Shelley’s work. This chapter argues, by contrast, that Shelley repeatedly creates fantastic scenarios in which ancient and modern times meet, and modernity is revealed to be weak or insufficient when faced with the strength and vitality of the ancient world. The chapter turns first to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which Victor Frankenstein’s efforts at creation are implicitly compared to the ancient model announced in the subtitle, and judged a grotesque failure. Then, the chapter turns to a series of texts written while Shelley was living in Italy—the short story “Valerius, the Reanimated Roman,” her novella Mathilda, and her verse drama Proserpine—each of which dramatizes the unsatisfying and disappointed search for emotional connection with characters from antiquity. Finally, the chapter turns to Shelley’s end-of-days novel The Last Man (1826). This novel’s many allusions to Rome and antiquity reinforce the gulf that separates an idealized antiquity from a doomed, weakening present. Shelley’s writings vividly demonstrate the seductive pleasures of engaging with ideas from antiquity, but ultimately she expresses little hope that we can truly connect with the frightening giants of the past.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 322-336
Author(s):  
Malcolm Abbott ◽  
Bruce Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Impacts ◽  
Future Development ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Economic Regulation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Utilities Services

The final chapter provides a summing up of the book along with some speculation about the future development in this sector. In doing so it provides a description of some of the main issues that have arisen in the process of reform of the utilities sector. The chapter also raises a number of issues that need to be addressed looking forward, including the escalation in prices of many utilities services, environmental impacts, as well as the problems associated with economic regulation. Finally, this chapter reflects upon the manner in which reform of Australia’s utilities industries has taken place over the past three decades, and the implications this process may have for policy development and future reform more generally.

A dog’s breakfast Brexit, 2016-18

2019 ◽  
pp. 201-224
Author(s):  
Sally Tomlinson
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
European Union ◽  
Education System ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Positive Interventions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Minority Writers

The final chapter covers a turbulent period in British politics as Parties and politicians fought to present their version of a Brexit to the British public, which remained divided by nation, class, race, age, gender and geography. Civil servants joked about the creation of an Empire 2.00, and in July 2018 Prime Minister May produced a ‘Chequers Plan’ for a ‘soft Brexit’ which caused the resignation of several ministers, who were determined on a ‘hard Brexit’ which would decisively cut the country off from a European Union. Black and other minorities had made advances in plural coexistence in a reluctant society and many younger people were learning to live together. But there were few signs that the those in charge of education were willing or able to think what a system for a more equal, globally oriented, socially and racially just education system and curriculum would look like. There is little evidence that schools or higher education have come to terms with a post-imperial role and Britain’s changed position in the world, despite positive interventions by black and minority writers, academics and students. The consequences of xenophobic and racist understandings of past decades will not be changed by teaching questionable ‘British Values’ and continuing to blame migrants and minorities for the consequences of austerity programmes. Ignorance of the past and presentation of a future where Britain is ‘Great’ again is more likely to lead to hostile nationalist sentiments and continued blaming of migrants and minorities as the country comes to terms with its waning influence on world affairs.

DEATH

Think ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (35) ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
Clement Dore
Keyword(s):  
Derek Parfit ◽  
Thomas Nagel ◽  
Rational Person ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
The Way

In the final chapter of his book, The View from Nowhere, the American philosopher, Thomas Nagel, writes as follows about death:We do not regard the period before we were born in the same way we regard the prospect of death, yet most of the things that can be said about death are equally true of the former. Lucretius thought this showed that it was a mistake to regard death as an evil. But I believe it is an example of a more general future-past asymmetry... [Derek] Parfit has explored the asymmetry in connection with other values such as... pain. The fact that a pain (of ours) is in prospect rather than in the past has a very great effect on our attitude toward it, and this effect cannot be regarded as irrational... [the former asymmetry] can't be accounted for in terms of some other difference between past and future nonexistence, any more than the asymmetry in the case of pain can be accounted for in terms of some other differences between past and future pains, which makes the latter worse than the former.Nagel is maintaining in this quote that it is rational for a person to view pains which he is apt to experience in the future in a manner different from the way in which he views pains which he has experienced in the past. Nagel is saying that it is rational for a person to think of his future pains as more undesirable than his past ones. And Nagel claims that there is a similar asymmetry between a rational person's attitude towards a past in which he did not exist and a time in the future when he will not exist. In Nagel's view, just as a rational person will think of pains which he will experience as more undesirable than pains which he had in the past, he will think of his not existing in the future as much more undesirable than his not having existed in the past.

‘Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so, | Lest child, child’s children, cry against you woe!’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Scott
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
The Past

The final chapter offers a conclusion through a reflection on some of the major concerns of the book. Centrally, this chapter returns to the figure of the child and its affective presence on stage, the early modern contexts through which children were both celebrated and disenfranchised, and the unique position that Shakespeare takes in supporting and developing their role on the early modern stage. The book demonstrates that the child was a vital figure in the development of early modern drama, not through their presentation in children’s playing companies but through the plays’ exploration of what children mean to those who love them, as well as those who destroy them. Considering the shape of history, the images of responsibility through which societies organize their value systems, the structures of power and responsibility through which parents determine both their love and their separation, the book concludes with the feelings that shape the children of the past, whether recollected in tranquillity or violence.

Medea Overlived: The Future of Catastrophe

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-198
Author(s):  
Juliette Cherbuliez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Isabelle Stengers

The final chapter turns to the particular nature of a Medean tragedy—that is, the tragedy of what Isabelle Stengers has called the “challenge” of a mother who kills her children but does not perish and is therefore without issue or, paradoxically, finality. This idea of tragedy in the neoclassical age is taken up through this temporal lens, by considering primarily Racine’s last play Athalie (1690). Through the idea of “lastness,” the chapter considers how tragedy demands a peculiar reading of time, of history, of our place in time, and of our relationship to a temporality out of our control. It considers the changing concept of “catastrophe,” originally a theatrical term that originally meant the final steps of a tragedy’s resolution, but shifted, in the eighteenth century, to designate an unpredictable cataclysm. Both within its verse and in its reception Athalie is the drama of a shift in temporalities, from one in which we lived history as an unfolding of events in the past, present, and future; to one in which the future’s devastations are always a surprise.

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