A Third Concept of Liberty

This chapter analyses Sir Isaiah Berlin's theory of liberty, In particular, it focuses on Berlin's most celebrated contribution to the debate, his essay entitled ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. Berlin identifies two concepts of liberty, one positive and the other negative. He assumes that, whenever we speak about negative liberty, we must be speaking about absence of interference. The chapter isolates a third concept of liberty. It attempts to show that we have inherited two rival and incommensurable theories of negative liberty, although in recent times we have generally contrived to ignore one of them.

Prosperity and Power in the Age of Bede and Beowulf

This chapter considers the evidence for rural wealth in the seventh and eighth centuries in the country which was to become England. It demonstrates that the expansion of international trade and the proliferation of coinage created the conditions for a shift in balance, and for the first time the means became available to turn rural surpluses into something like treasure. The movement of two separate economies towards convergence increased the potentiality of kingship.

The Origins of Chinese Mountain Painting: Evidence from Archaeology

Mountainous landscapes, with massive crags and narrow fissures between rocks, through which water spouts, are among the principal subjects of paintings in China. This chapter addresses the question, why, in the first place, were these subjects chosen? It focuses on developments made during the Qin (221–207 bc) and Han (206 bc–ad 220) dynasties, from the third century bc onwards. It explores the ways in which the conditions prevailing in the Qin and Han periods moulded some aspects of the later Chinese practice. It is argued that the ways in which the Chinese from the Han period onwards viewed the cosmos determined their choice of mountains as a major subject for painted images. The chapter discusses attitudes to the cosmos and the aesthetic consequences of these views. It considers the whole range of ideas about the universe and not simply with depictions or models of mountains as representing one part of the cosmos.

Two Enlightenments: A Contrast in Social Ethics

This chapter highlights the differences between the British and French Enlightenments by focusing upon a subject that has not received much attention: the distinctive social ethics in the two traditions. The political and institutional reasons for the disparities between the two Enlightenments include the differing relationship of the monarchy to the aristocracy in the two countries, of the aristocracy to the middle classes, of the central government to local government, and of the state to the church. No less important, however, were the philosophical differences. Where the British idea of compassion lent itself to a variety of practical, meliorative policies to relieve and improve social conditions, the French appeal to reason could be satisfied with nothing less than the ‘regeneration’ of man.

A World Elsewhere: Shakespeare’s Sense of an Exit

Shakespeare, it has been claimed, was the first to translate into English words the laws of vanishing-point perspective. So, according to art historians, Edgar's projection in King Lear of the view of the Channel from ‘the extreme verge’ of Dover Cliff was unprecedented in its analysis of how the planes of space diminish in proportion to distance. Decades before other writers conceptualised space as a continuum, Shakespeare had internalised the scale which determines how from a distance ‘fishermen, that walk upon the beach, / Appear like mice’, enough to define such a reductive way of seeing as ‘deficient sight’. By staging ‘the question of its own limits’ with this paradox of vision as a form of blindness, his play seems to sense something terrifying in the great unseen space which would soon surround the theatre of the baroque, and into which an exit would be the equivalent of a sentence of death.

Gertrude Stein’s Differential Syntax

This chapter suggests that the poetics of T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein may be seen as two sides of the same coin. It begins by examining that coin itself, which is the Modernist aesthetic, shared by Eliot and Stein, even as it was shared by Pound and Joyce, and the other central figures of the period.

The Disease of Language and the Language of Disease

This chapter raises some of the interlinked matters that have been very much at issue in press, television, and the world wide web since September 11. First is the role of the imagination itself, and of the unimaginable, in experiencing and categorising what we have difficulty understanding, and its role in our coming to terms with and coping with difficult matters of any kind. Second are the social interaction processes of categorisation and re-categorisation. Third is the contribution to our understanding provided by attention to the play of tropes in social life, and to the importance of tropology to our anthropology. Fourth are the multitude of moral issues and their claim upon our actions and reactions: the morality present in religious fundamentalism, for example. But also now under intense and renewed debate is the morality of political assassination, of racial profiling, of the employ of weapons of mass destruction. And fifth, in all of this and everywhere we find the disease of reification/entification of our newly realised world historical problem, the increasing disparity of well being. These are the diseases of language investigated here.

The Life of Learning

Four hundred years ago, scholars enjoyed much higher esteem than they do now. Rulers competed for their services and their work was assumed to be of crucial importance to everyone. This chapter reflects on the life of learning in early modern England to shed some light on the very different position of those who lead that life today. It asks what led these men to devote their energies to editing texts and investigating forgotten antiquities. But the main concern is their role in the society of their day. The chapter seeks to view them, as it were, ethnographically, to consider the relationship between their lives of learning and the larger world in which they lived, and to contrast it with the position of their modern counterparts. The focus is on scholars who were engaged in the recovery and interpretation of the past, and not on those who were concerned with mathematics, philosophy, or the nature of the physical world.

Welfare-to-Work: Which Policies Work and Why?

This chapter considers the arguments behind the expansion in welfare-to-work programmes that occurred over the last decade, and reviews the effectiveness of alternative approaches to enhancing labour-market attachment and earnings among the low skilled. It concerns the ‘iron triangle’ of welfare reform — that is the three, often conflicting, goals: raising the living standards of those on low incomes; encouraging work and economic self-sufficiency; and keeping government costs low. Section 2 considers the labour-market trends that stimulated the New Deal and Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) reforms in the UK. Section 3 considers a number of central design features, focusing on time limits, means testing and implicit tax rates, minimum hours requirements, welfare receipt eligibility, and wage progression. This is done in the context of the design of the New Deal and of the WFTC. Section 4 moves on to evaluate specific aspects of the New Deal and WFTC reforms. Section 5 concludes with an overview of these schemes and their effectiveness, and an assessment of the appropriate design of welfare-to-work and make-work-pay programmes.

Elementary, my dear Watson, the clue is in the genes…or is it?

This chapter argues that there is no one-to-one, direct mapping between specific sets of genes and cognitive-level outcomes. Rather, there are very indirect mappings, with the regulation of gene expression more likely to contribute to very broad differences in developmental timing, neuronal type, neuronal density, firing thresholds, neurotransmitter types, etc. It presents the neuroconstructivist framework where gene/gene interaction, gene/environment interaction and, crucially, the process of ontogeny itself (pre- and postnatal development) are all considered to play a vital role in how genes are expressed and how the brain progressively sculpts itself, slowly becoming specialised over developmental time. The infant brain is not simply a miniature version of the adult brain.