Introduction

Author(s):  
Jarred A. Mercer

The Introduction presents the central argument of the book and the rationale behind it. This involves placing the argument in conversation with past and current scholarship on Hilary of Poitiers, and clarifying why this study is needed. Hilary’s thought is often either overlooked in favor of more approachable figures of the period or seen to be incoherent, as readers have difficulty systematizing or categorizing his work. The Introduction states that it is by approaching Hilary’s thought through the framework of his overarching trinitarian anthropology that its ingenuity, impact, and internal coherence can be fully appreciated. An outline of the chapters of the book and their central arguments is also given.

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (01) ◽  
pp. 102-129
Author(s):  
ALBERTO MARTÍN ÁLVAREZ ◽  
EUDALD CORTINA ORERO

AbstractUsing interviews with former militants and previously unpublished documents, this article traces the genesis and internal dynamics of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People's Revolutionary Army, ERP) in El Salvador during the early years of its existence (1970–6). This period was marked by the inability of the ERP to maintain internal coherence or any consensus on revolutionary strategy, which led to a series of splits and internal fights over control of the organisation. The evidence marshalled in this case study sheds new light on the origins of the armed Salvadorean Left and thus contributes to a wider understanding of the processes of formation and internal dynamics of armed left-wing groups that emerged from the 1960s onwards in Latin America.


2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-43
Author(s):  
Justin Tse

This essay reviews Steven J. Sutcliffe and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus's New Age Spiritualities: Rethinking Religion. It shows that their attempt to redefine religion through new age spiritualities is actually an attempt to impose an economically elite social geography onto religious studies as a social fact. My central argument is that this effort in turn reveals that religious studies serves as a sociological factory for liberal economic ideologies. It suggests that to mitigate this ideological work, a shift toward critical geography in religious studies is the way forward.


Author(s):  
Penny Farfan

This introduction sets forth the book’s central argument and establishes the historical, theoretical, and critical context for its case studies. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern sexual identities emerged into view while at the same time being rendered invisible, as in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial on charges of gross indecency and the 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Early stage representations of homosexuality were typically coded or censored, yet the majority of the works considered in this book were highly visible in their subversions of conventional gender and sexual norms. Queer readings of these plays and performances establish connections across high and popular cultural domains, demonstrating that some of traditional modernism’s perceived failures, rejects, and outliers were modernist through their sexual dissidence. These insights in turn contribute to a more precise understanding of how modernity was mediated and how such mediations enacted change.


Author(s):  
David Dwan

Orwell’s writings repeatedly extol the virtues of solidarity, or what he liked to call brotherhood. But brotherhood was often something of an ordeal for Orwell as much as it was a coveted value and practice. The issue may be partly a question of character, but it also had a conceptual element: a) the compatibility of solidarity with other values, b) its internal coherence, as it sometimes re-enlists the social divisions it seeks to transcend, c) its problematic scope given its seemingly partisan nature, and d) its practicality in a modern social setting. This chapter examines these four issues in detail, showing how they contribute to the particular heft of Orwell’s writing—its angular sympathies and superbly uneven tone.


Author(s):  
Hannah Newton

Serious illness often left the body weak and lean, full of the ‘footsteps of disease’; it wasn’t until full strength and flesh had returned that the patient was pronounced back to health. This chapter explores the second stage of recovery in contemporary perceptions, the restoration of strength, or ‘convalescence’. It asks how the patient’s growing strength was measured and promoted, and unveils a concept of convalescent care, ‘analeptics’. The central argument is that both the mechanisms and the measures for the restoration of strength were intimately connected to the ‘non-natural things’, six dietary and life-style factors. The opening sections explain why the body was weak after illness, and categorize the convalescent within contemporary schemes of health. The rest of the chapter is structured around the signs of increasing strength, each of which was associated with a particular non-natural: ‘the final purge’, ‘sleeping through the night’, ‘feeling hungry’, ‘growing cheerful’, and ‘sitting up to going abroad’.


Author(s):  
David M. Willumsen

The central argument of this book is that voting unity in European legislatures is not primarily the result of the ‘disciplining’ power of the leadership of parliamentary parties, but rather the result of a combination of ideological homogeneity through self-selection into political parties and the calculations of individual legislators about their own long-term benefits. Despite the central role of policy preferences in the subsequent behaviour of legislators, preferences at the level of the individual legislator have been almost entirely neglected in the study of parliaments and legislative behaviour. The book measures these using an until now under-utilized resource: parliamentary surveys. Building on these, the book develops measures of policy incentives of legislators to dissent from their parliamentary parties, and show that preference similarity amongst legislators explains a very substantial proportion of party unity, yet alone cannot explain all of it. Analysing the attitudes of legislators to the demands of party unity, and what drives these attitudes, the book argues that what explains the observed unity (beyond what preference similarity would explain) is the conscious acceptance by MPs that the long-term benefits of belonging to a united party (such as increased influence on legislation, lower transaction costs, and better chances of gaining office) outweigh the short-terms benefits of always voting for their ideal policy outcome. The book buttresses this argument through the analysis of both open-ended survey questions as well as survey questions on the costs and benefits of belonging to a political party in a legislature.


Author(s):  
Diane-Laure Arjaliès ◽  
Philip Grant ◽  
Iain Hardie ◽  
Donald MacKenzie ◽  
Ekaterina Svetlova

Chapter 1 introduces the idea of the chain as related to investment management. It highlights the increasing importance and influence of the asset management industry and argues that, despite this fact, the behaviour and decision-making of asset managers has been little studied. The chapter suggests that investment decisions today cannot be understood by focusing on isolated investors. Rather, most of their money flows through a chain: a sequence of intermediaries that ‘sit between’ savers and companies/governments. The chapter introduces the central argument of the book that investment management is shaped profoundly by the opportunities and constraints that this chain creates.


Author(s):  
Andrea Henderson

Victorian England witnessed a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice—as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. The value of a mathematical claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. Victorian mathematics thus contributed to the development of liberal capitalism by justifying abstraction: liberals proclaimed that formal consistency was the foundation of a rational, equitable order, and marginalist economists insisted that value was not inherent but relational, and made economics a branch of mathematics. Marx, meanwhile, profited from the insights of mathematical formalism even as he resisted its mystification. In its privileging of formal relationships Victorian mathematics redefined all fields around it, even redefining Kantian formalism such that mathematics and art came to share the same virtues: they couldn’t claim to offer truths about the world itself but they insisted that they told a deeper, formal truth.


2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-59
Author(s):  
Jim van der Meulen

AbstractThis article charts the long-term development of seigneurial governance within the principality of Guelders in the Low Countries. Proceeding from four quantitative cross-sections (c. 1325, 1475, 1540, 1570) of seigneurial lordships, the conclusion is that seigneurial governance remained stable in late medieval Guelders. The central argument is that this persistence of seigneurial governance was an effect of active collaboration between princely administrations, lords, and local communities. Together, the princely government and seigneuries of Guelders formed an integrated, yet polycentric, state. The article thereby challenges the narrative of progressive state centralisation that predominates in the historiography of pre-modern state formation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-277
Author(s):  
Ranjana Saha

This article focuses on the Health and Child Welfare Exhibition held in colonial Calcutta in 1920. Despite a few scholarly references, however, there has been no detailed study till date. The vicereines of India launched child welfare exhibitions motivated by the transnational exhibitory baby health week propaganda initiative to curb infant mortality. These exhibitions were also locally organised and collaborative in nature with an urgent nationalist appeal. The study critically engages with select Exhibition lectures about so-called ‘clean’ midwifery and ‘scientific’ motherhood given by famous Bengali medical practitioners and other prominent professionals, predominantly men and a few women. These drew intimate sociobiological connections between the problems of ‘dirty’ midwifery, ritual pollution, improper confinement, insanitary childbirth, insufficient lactation and the excessive maternal and infant deaths in Calcutta. The central argument is that these public lectures primarily focused on the very making of the ‘ideal’ Indian nursing mother, often imagined as the traditional yet modern bhadramahila mother figure, for rejuvenating community and national health and vigour. Correspondingly, it highlights the transnational resonance of famous Frederic Truby King’s ‘mothercraft’ popularised as childcare by the clock. The paper is, therefore, guided by the twin purposes of filling the gap in our knowledge about child welfare exhibitions in colonial India and illuminating extant scholarship on the global infant welfare movement.


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