Rome: Empire, City, and Church

Chapter 2 describes the Roman Empire in the fourth and early fifth centuries and important emperors of the period. Among imperial reforms was the introduction of a new form of coinage, the gold solidus. The chapter introduces the emperor Honorius’ important general of the western imperial troops, Stilicho, and his wife, Serena, who will figure in Melania and Pinian’s attempts at divestment. It describes the life of cities in that era, especially the city of Rome, and the role of Christianization in changing its urban landscape. Rome’s inhabitants were dependent on food brought from elsewhere and distributed to them by a system called the annona; disruption of the supply could lead to food riots, one of which plays a role in the couple’s attempts to divest. The building of churches and martyr shrines in and around Rome, importantly spurred by the emperor Constantine and his family in the early fourth century, later often became a cooperative venture between bishops (especially Damasus) and local elites. The cult of Saint Lawrence plays a significant role in the life of Melania: at his shrine or church, Pinian was persuaded to adopt a life of ascetic renunciation with her.

On Financial Nationalism and International Law: Sovereignty, Cooperation and Hard/Soft Governance in International Finance

The prevailing view among legal scholars over the last decade is that international financial collaboration is a resolutely cooperative venture that cannot be reduced to the interests or relative power of individual states. Moving along this line, the book under review shows that the protection of financial nationalism contributes to the creation of global systemic risks. In this review essay, I discuss the three overarching themes addressed in the book – namely, the logic of financial nationalism, the role of soft and hard law in the international governance of finance and the related problem of compliance. International financial law is still emerging as a discipline and the issues under discussion are at the heart of the ongoing debate about how to devise adequate international structures and international norms to govern markets and control systemic risks in finance. Proceeding from a critical approach to the international law of finance, I analyse the book’s focus on financial nationalism and the limits of its juxtaposition with the economic logic of externalities; the case for strengthened formalization; and, finally, the extent to which the theoretical framework proposed in the book is relevant for rethinking the logic and prospect of compliance in international finance.

A CORRELATIONAL STUDY OF LIFE INSURANCE PRODUCTS

Life Insurance companies provide different benefits to the policyholder. Insurance is Cooperative venture where risk and uncertainties are shared by many.A study of Life Insurance describes the meaning of various policies, comparison and analysis and changing market scenario. This survey and analysis to make a correlational performance of difference company life insurance products and suitable plans and can understand the position of Insurance Companies in the mind of the consumers.

Jürgen Habermas on the Way to a Postmetaphysical Reading of Kierkegaard

Habermas’s postmetaphysical reading of Kierkegaard is paradigmatic for his understanding of religion. It shows, why Habermas reduces religion to fideism. Therefore the paper reconstructs Habermas’s reception of Kierkegaard and compares it with the accounts of Dieter Henrich and Michael Theunissen. Furthermore it demonstrates how Habermas makes use of Kierkegaard’s dialectics of existence to formulate his postmetaphysical thesis of a cooperative venture.

Society Is Not a Race

We observed that educators and educational institutions have a twofold mission. Here is an implication: If we perform well in our role as educators, we make our classroom a society—a cooperative venture for mutual advantage. If we perform well as certifiers, we turn our classroom into something else: a race, albeit a fair one. Society, in any case, is not a race. No one needs to win. Therefore, no one needs an equal opportunity to win either. To prepare students for membership in society, the exact thing students need, no more and no less, is a genuine chance to make something of whatever potential they have.

Inside out, outside in: “supporting members” in multi-stakeholder cooperatives

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine multi-stakeholder cooperatives (MSCs), a relatively new and understudied type of cooperative, by focusing on the impact of a new member status: the “supporting member.” Supporting members are included in the ownership structure, participate in the decision-making process and contribute to the share capital without being formally defined as users of the cooperative’s services, an important disruption to the traditional cooperative venture. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on a qualitative study using in-depth interviews with 30 members (i.e. founders, managers, board members and employees) of 14 MSCs located in the Canadian province of Québec. Findings This study suggests that including supporting members in the cooperative venture impacts the three core features of cooperatives, which are traditionally user-owned, user-controlled and user-benefiting. Despite supporting members’ positive contributions to an MSC’s development and success, the inclusion of such members generates management challenges and organizational paradoxes. Social implications The inclusion of supporting members allows MSCs to become an experiment in “stakeholder democracy” and a space of negotiation between organizations, citizens and institutions, as MSCs represent and embody some of the community’s needs and desires. Originality/value This study constitutes an original contribution to paradox literature, as it describes the specific upward and downward spirals related to the inclusion of supporting members, highlights innovative responses to these paradoxes and extends understandings of cooperatives as hybrid organizations entangled in bundles of paradoxes.

The Work Society

This chapter argues that the work society operates on the basis of an individualist social ontology that needs a mechanism like that of paid work to bring individuals together in social order and harmony. It further argues that what makes work a particularly appealing mechanism for this purpose is the common tendency to view society or civilization as a whole as the product of work. To put the argument bluntly, the good citizen is a worker because society itself is commonly understood, as John Rawls famously put it, as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.”

INCENTIVES, OFFERS, AND COMMUNITY

A common justification offered for unequal pay is that it encourages socially beneficial productivity. G. A. Cohen famously criticizes this argument for not questioning the behaviour and attitudes that make those incentives necessary. I defend the communal status of incentives against Cohen's challenge. I argue that Cohen's criticism fails to appreciate two different contexts in which we might grant incentives. We might grant unequal payment to someone because they demand it. However, unequal payment might be an offer instead. I claim that incentives as offers promote the ideal of society as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.

ROBUST POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE PRIORITY OF MARKETS

This essay offers a “nonideal” case for giving institutional priority to markets and private contracting in the basic structure of society. It sets out a “robust political economy” framework to examine how different political economic regime types cope with frictions generated by the epistemic limitations of decision-makers and problems of incentive incompatibility. Focusing on both efficiency arguments and distributive justice concerns the essay suggests that a constitutional structure that prioritizes consensual exchange is more likely to sustain a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.