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To Kill Another: Homicide and Natural Law
by Graham McAleerBasing his argument on natural law, Graham J. McAleer asserts that only public authority has the right to intentionally kill. He draws upon the work of Thomas Aquinas and Francisco de Vitoria, defending the claim that these natural law theorists have developed the best available theory of homicide. To have rule of law in any meaningful sense, the author argues, there must be protections for the guilty and prohibition against killing innocents.Western theories of law have drifted steadily towards the privatization of homicide,despite the fact that it runs counter to rule of law. Public acts of homicide like capital punishment are now viewed by many as barbaric, while a private act of homicide like the starvation of comatose patients is viewed by many as a caring gesture both to patient and family. This subversion of the rule of law is prompted by humanitarian ethics.McAleer argues that humanitarianism is a false friend to those committed to the rule of law. The problem of human vulnerability makes political theology an inescapable consideration for law. Readers will find much to reflect upon in this book. McAleer's argument can be read as a cultural chapter in the history of moral ideas, but also as a close and timely reading of a grim subject.
Winter Passages: Reflections on Theatre and Society
by Robert BrusteinWinter Passages is Robert Brustein's nineteenth book of criticism. It includes his considerations of culture and politics over the past four years of American life, demonstrating how the imperfections of the government and economy have plunged the country into an artistic winter in which there is a troubling lack of support for, and understanding of, America's arts and artists. In a section on "Cultural Passages," Brustein includes chapters on compromised theatre institutions, auteur productions, the American musical, generational idiosyncrasies, and China's growing theatre culture, which contrasts with American culture. The second section, "Dramatic Passages," addresses twenty-seven great playwrights from Aeschylus to August Wilson and demonstrates how they have influenced our sense of history and human character. In "Laudatory Passages," Brustein discusses great American artists, living and dead, who continue to influence our sense of self as a nation and as individuals. Brustein concludes that we will be judged, like all cultures, by the quality of our arts and artists, and by our willingness to allow their insights to influence our behavior.
Witnessing Australian Stories: History, Testimony, and Memory in Contemporary Culture (Memory And Narrative Ser.)
by Kelly Jean ButlerThis book is about how Australians have responded to stories about suffering and injustice in Australia, presented in a range of public media, including literature, history, films, and television. Those who have responded are both ordinary and prominent Australians—politicians, writers, and scholars. All have sought to come to terms with Australia's history by responding empathetically to stories of its marginalized citizens.Drawing upon international scholarship on collective memory, public history, testimony, and witnessing, this book represents a cultural history of contemporary Australia. It examines the forms of witnessing that dominated Australian public culture at the turn of the millennium. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in Australia in response to the increasingly audible voices of indigenous peoples, migrants, and more recently, asylum seekers. As these voices became public, they posed a challenge not only to scholars and politicians, but also, most importantly, to ordinary citizens.When former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his historic apology to Australia's indigenous peoples in February 2008, he performed an act of collective witnessing that affirmed the testimony and experiences of Aboriginal Australians. The phenomenon of witnessing became crucial, not only to the recognition and reparation of past injustices, but to efforts to create a more cosmopolitan Australia in the present. This is a vital addition to Transaction's critically acclaimed Memory and Narrative series.
Women's Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe De Gouges
by Sophie MoussetWomen played a major part in the French Revolution of 1789, but have received very little recognition for their contributions. The many claims and protests put forth by women at that time were suppressed, women's clubs were banned, and Olympe de Gouges, a leading contemporary advocate for women's rights, was silenced and has since remained an obscure figure. This book is the first biography of this astonishing woman.After boldly publishing her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791, de Gouges was sent to the guillotine for having had the courage to mount the rostrum on behalf of women. Unlike many who have captured posterity's attention, de Gouges had great sympathy but no indulgence for her sex. Instead of considering her female colleagues as eternal victims, she understood that they were to some extent responsible for their misfortunes, and that if they united and devoted themselves to changing their image, they could become great. De Gouges called for the advent of a new woman, one who would relinquish the nocturnal administering of men.Olympe de Gouges rightly deserves the title of pioneer, prophet, and heroine. This long-overdue biography pays her due homage. It will be of interest to students of the French Revolution, women's studies, and biography.
Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary
by Thomas Szasz"The human mind abhors the absence of explanation, but full understanding is never possible. Human understanding is likely to be incomplete at best and, more often, utterly fallacious. To make matters worse, it is likely to be supported as truth and wisdom by religious and scientific authority, intellectual fashion and social convention. In Words to the Wise, Thomas Szasz offers a compendium of thoughts, observations, and aphorisms that address our understanding of a broad range of subjects, from birth to death.In this book, Szasz tackles a problem intrinsic to the human condition. What problem? In the words of the American humorist Josh Billings: ""The trouble with people is not what they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so."" Many of Thomas Szasz's books have been devoted to exposing what ""ain't so"" about mental illness and psychiatry. Here, Szasz applies the same skeptical spirit to the larger problem of people knowing much that ""ain't so."" About addiction, Szasz observes: ""If a person ingests a drug prohibited by legislators and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves he is an addict; if he ingests a drug prescribed by a psychiatrist and claims that it makes him feel better, that proves that mental illness is a biomedical disease."" About beauty: ""Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; ugliness is in the personality of the beholden."" About libertarians: ""Libertarians regard liberty as contingent on the right to property; scientists regard disease as contingent on pathological alteration of the body. All libertarians reject the notion of 'socialist liberty,' yet many accept the notion of 'mental disease.'"" Or about power: ""Many of my critics say I am hostile to medicine and physicians. They are wrong. I am hostile only to the power of the medical profession and of physicians.""Szasz notes that despite enormous social pressure for a shared perspective on how the world works and how we ought to live, every person'saunde"
Worlds Ago: A Memoir of My Journeying Years
by Walter LaqueurOriginally published in 1993, Worlds Ago is not only about the politics of the times, but also about the world into which Walter Laqueur was born and raised and the world that shaped him: pre-war Germany in 1921, where he witnessed the rise of the Nazi party. It is a story of families, friendships, and early love; achievements and disappointments; and facing and surviving dangerous circumstances in which many of those close to him lost their lives. It was a world where calm seas and waters were rare and survivors were lucky to escape the engines of war.This memoir further recounts his experience as an agricultural laborer on a kibbutz, in what was Palestine at the time, living among Bedouin and Arab herdsmen, sharing their labor and lifestyle. Laqueur became a journalist and writer in his twenties, and witnessed dramatic events in the Middle East and the emergence of Israel in the aftermath of World War II. He came to know many of the leading figures on both sides who were involved in the establishment of the State of Israel. Walter Laqueur went on to become one of the leading historians and interpreters of the Weimar period in Germany. This new edition, revised to tell his story up until 1948, also includes a new preface and conclusion.
Young Germany: History of the German Youth Movement (Routledge Revivals Ser.)
by Walter LaqueurYoung Germany explores the revolt of the younger generation in Germany from 1896 to 1933. It is a readable history of the Free Youth Movement, one of the most significant factors in shaping modern Germany. Laqueur, who grew up in Germany, retraces the history of the movement, its central ideas, and its cultural background.Today his study is of even greater interest and importance than when it was first published in 1962. In his new introduction to this edition, Laqueur shows that the German Youth Movement can be seen as a precursor of contemporary youth revolt. It inspired all of the ideas which continue to preoccupy proponents and students of generational conflict today.
The Turks and Islam in Reformation Germany
by Gregory J. MillerAlthough their role is often neglected in standard historical narratives of the Reformation, the Ottoman Turks were an important concern of many leading thinkers in early modern Germany, including Martin Luther. In the minds of many, the Turks formed a fearsome, crescent-shaped horizon that threatened to break through and overwhelm. Based on an analysis of more than 300 pamphlets and other publications across all genres and including both popular and scholarly writings, this book is the most extensive treatment in English on views of the Turks and Islam in German-speaking lands during this period. In addition to providing a summary of what was believed about Islam and the Turks in early modern Germany, this book argues that new factors, including increased contact with the Ottomans as well as the specific theological ideas developed during the Protestant Reformation, destabilized traditional paradigms without completely displacing inherited medieval understandings. This book makes important contributions to understanding the role of the Turks in the confessional conflicts of the Reformation and to the broader history of Western views of Islam.
Cultural Encounters in India: The Local Co-workers of Tranquebar Mission, 18th to 19th Centuries
by Heike LiebauThe book is an English translation of an award winning German book. The history of social and religious encounter in 18th century South India is narrated through fascinating biographies and day to day lives of Indian workers in the Tranquebar Mission (1706-1845). The book challenges the notion that Christianity in colonial India was basically imposed from the outside. Liebau maintains that significant contributions were made by the local converts and mission co-workers who played an important role in the Tranquebar Mission.
Gandhi: Anti-Biography of a Great Soul
by Michaël de Saint-CheronThis book is not just another biography of Gandhi. It is valuable because it offers us a French view--- and Jewish too perhaps---- of a man and times so familiar to us and yet which acquires another dimension as it is represented through another culture. There are eloquent accounts in this book of philosophers like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda who influenced Gandhi’s thought and life. Rather than political events, Michaël de Saint-Chéron holds up the force and courage of a man who became a prophet in a blood-thirsty century. Interestingly, the author points out that it is only India and the Middle East which has given the world the two mother religions of Hinduism and Judaism. Neither China nor Europe, two major cultures, have produced a world religion. The book is further enriched by a discussion on Hindu mysticism and the concept of ‘love’ in Judaism. The author also looks at how Gandhi has played a major role on shaping French intellectuals such as Andre Malraux. At the end however, a central dilemma, and a painful one to the work, concerns Gandhi’s silence on the Holocaust. This book will be of interest to scholars working on Gandhian studies, Indian philosophy and Judaism, and to readers of politics, ethics and history.
A Dictionary of the History of Medicine
by Anton SebastianThis is a unique, extensively illustrated dictionary of terms, people, events, and dates spanning the entire history of medicine. It is a monumental work of scholarship totaling some 700 double-column pages with a large number of rare and exceptional illustrations from many original sources painstakingly compiled over years of far-searching inquiry involving more than 5,000 books and hundreds of journals. It is a major resource of hard-to-find information about notable medical figures, instruments, conditions, procedures, and dates and a storehouse of captivating anecdotes and background material. The book contains a wealth of material for concise historical introductions to a broad range of subjects and is the sine qua non authority on both well and little known facts of medical history. With this single volume-an unprecedented tour de force representing more than 7,000 hours of exhaustive research-clinicians and researchers from all fields of medicine can quickly and easily find authoritative, detailed definitions and descriptions, with dates, of medical terms and of the people and events contributing to the development of medicine from earliest times to the present day. The entries range widely from such as abacterial pyuria to zygote, including Latin and Greek origins of terms, compact biographies with dates, eponymic information of all kinds, and rarely seen drawings and photographs of antique medical instruments and little-known conditions.
Autonomous Maintenance in Seven Steps: Implementing TPM on the Shop Floor
by Fumio GotohAutonomous maintenance is an especially important pillar of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) because it enlists the intelligence and skills of the people who are most familiar with factory machines-- equipment operators. Operators learn the maintenance skills they need to know through a seven-step autonomous maintenance program. Most companies in the West stop after implementing the first few steps and never realize the full benefits of autonomous maintenance. This book contains comprehensive coverage of all seven steps--not just the first three or four.It includes:An overview of autonomous maintenance features and checklists for step audits to certify team achievement at each AM step.TPM basics such as the six big losses, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), causes of losses, and six major TPM activities.An implementation plan for TPM and five countermeasures for achieving zero breakdowns.Useful guidelines and case studies in applying AM to manual work such as assembly, inspection, and material handling.Integrates examples from Toyota, Asai Glass, Bridgestone, Hitachi, and other top companies.By treating machines as partners and taking responsibility for them, you get machines that you can rely on and help maintain an energized and responsive workplace. For companies that are serious about taking autonomous maintenance beyond mere cleaning programs, this is an essential sourcebook and implementation support.
Beyond Law and Development: Resistance, Empowerment and Social Injustice
by Sam AdelmanThe book highlights new imaginaries required to transcend traditional approaches to law and development. The authors focus on injustices and harms to people and the environment, and confront global injustices involving impoverishment, patriarchy, forced migration, global pandemics and intellectual rights in traditional medicine resulting from maldevelopment, bad governance and aftermaths of colonialism. New imaginaries emphasise deconstruction of fashionable myths of law, development, human rights, governance and post-coloniality to focus on communal and feminist relationality, non-western legal systems, personal responsibility for justice and forms of resistance to injustices. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of development, law and development, feminism, international law, environmental law, governance, politics, international relations, social justice and activism.
Rebels From the Mud Houses: Dalits and the Making of the Maoist Revolution in Bihar
by George J. KunnathThis book examines Dalit mobilization and the transformation of rural power relations in the context of intense agrarian violence involving Maoist guerrillas and upper caste militias backed by state forces in Bihar in the 1980s. The book investigates why thousands of Dalits took up arms and highlights the specificities of Dalit participation in the Maoist Movement and develops an anthropology of the Maoist Revolution in India.
The Limits of Law and Development: Neoliberalism, Governance and Social Justice (Law, Development and Globalization)
by Sam Adelman Abdul PaliwalaThe book examines the well-established field of ‘law and development’ and asks whether the concept of development and discourses on law and development have outlived their usefulness.The contributors ask whether instead of these amorphous and contested concepts we should focus upon social injustices such as patriarchy, impoverishment, human rights violations, the exploitation of indigenous peoples, and global heating? If we abandoned the idea of development, would we end up adopting another, equally problematic term to replace a concept which, for all its flaws, serves as a commonly understood shorthand? The contributors analyse the links between conventional academic approaches to law and development, neoliberal governance and activism through historical and contemporary case studies.The book will be of interest to students and scholars of development, international law, international economic law, governance and politics and international relations.
Law, Obligation, Community (Critical Studies in Jurisprudence)
by Daniel Matthews Scott VeitchAgainst an ever-expanding and diversifying ‘rights talk’, this book re-opens the question of obligation from not only legal but also ethical, sociological and political perspectives. Its premise is that obligation has a primacy ahead of rights, because rights attach to practices and modes of being that are already saturated with obligations. Obligations thus lie at the core not just of law but of community. Yet the distinctive meanings, range and situations of obligation have tended to remain under-theorised in legal scholarship. In response, this book examines the sense in which we are multiply ‘bound beings’, to law and legal institutions, as much as we are to place, community, memory and the various social institutions that give shape to collective life. Sharing this set of concerns, each of the international group of scholars contributing to this volume traces the specificity of the binding force of obligations, their techniques and modes of expression, as well as their centrally important role in giving form to lawful relations. Together they provide an innovative and challenging contribution to legal scholarship: one that will also be of relevance to those working in politics, philosophy and social theory.
Legal Pluralism and Indian Democracy: Tribal Conflict Resolution Systems in Northeast India (Transition in Northeastern India)
by Melvil Pereira Bitopi Dutta Binita KakatiThis book offers a multifaceted look at Northeast India and the customs and traditions that underpin its legal framework. The book: charts the transition of traditions from colonial rule to present day, through constitutionalism and the consolidation of autonomous identities, as well as outlines contemporary debates in an increasingly modernising region; explores the theoretical context of legal pluralism and its implications, compares the personal legal systems with that of the mainland, and discusses customary law’s continuing popularity (both pragmatic and ideological) and common law; brings together case studies from across the eight states and focuses on the way individual systems and procedures manifest among various tribes and communities in the voices of tribal and non-tribal scholars; and highlights the resilience and relevance of alternative systems of redressal, including conflict resolution and women’s rights. Part of the prestigious ‘Transition in Northeastern India’ series, this book presents an interesting blend of theory and practice, key case studies and examples to study legal pluralism in multicultural contexts. It will be of great interest to students of law and social sciences, anthropology, political science, peace and conflict studies, besides administrators, judicial officers and lawyers in Northeast India, legal scholars and students of tribal law, and members of customary law courts of various tribal communities in Northeast India.
The Year of Blood: Essays on the Revolt of 1857
by Rudrangshu MukherjeeRudrangshu Mukherjee places the ‘soldier-peasant’ at the forefront of the Revolt. Violence has rarely been described with so much realism and subtlety. The imaginative use of primary source materials adds clarity to accounts such as the massacre in Satichaura Ghat and the trial of Mangal Pandey. The layers of complexity that defined the relationship between the rulers and the subjugated are also exposed.
The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature
by Tina SkouenThe stigma of haste pervaded early modern English culture, more so than the so-called stigma of print. The period’s writers were perpetually short on time, but what does it mean for authors to present themselves as hasty or slow, or to characterize others similarly? This book argues that such classifications were a way to define literary value. To be hasty was, in a sense, to be irresponsible, but, in another sense, it signaled a necessary practicality. Expressions of haste revealed a deep conflict between the ideal of slow writing in classical and humanist rhetoric and the sometimes grim reality of fast printing. Indeed, the history of print is a history of haste, which carries with it a particular set of modern anxieties that are difficult to understand in the absence of an interdisciplinary approach. Many previous studies have concentrated on the period’s competing definitions of time and on the obsession with how to use time well. Other studies have considered time as a notable literary theme. This book is the first to connect ideas of time to writerly haste in a richly interdisciplinary manner, drawing upon rhetorical theory, book history, poetics, religious studies and early modern moral philosophy, which, only when taken together, provide a genuinely deep understanding of why the stigma of haste so preoccupied the early modern mind. The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature surveys the period from ca 1580 to ca 1730, with special emphasis on the seventeenth century. The material discussed is found in emblem books, devotional literature, philosophical works, and collections of poetry, drama and romance. Among classical sources, Horace and Quintilian are especially important. The main authors considered are: Robert Parsons; Edmund Bunny; King James 1; Henry Peacham; Thomas Nash; Robert Greene; Ben Jonson; Margaret Cavendish; John Dryden; Richard Baxter; Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope. By studying these writers’ expressions of time and haste, we may gain a better understanding of how authorship was defined at a time when the book industry was gradually taking the place of classical rhetoric in regulating writers’ activities.
Medicine, Health and Being Human (Routledge Advances in the Medical Humanities)
by Lesa SchollMedicine, Health and Being Human begins a conversation to explore how the medical has defined us: that is, the ways in which perspectives of medicine and health have affected cultural understandings of what it means to be human. With chapters that span from the early modern period through to the contemporary world, and are drawn from a range of disciplines, this volume holds that incremental historical and cultural influences have brought about an understanding of humanity in which the medical is ingrained, consciously or unconsciously, usually as a mode of legitimisation. Divided into three parts, the book follows a narrative path from the integrity of the human soul, through to the integrity of the material human body, then finally brought together through engaging with end-of-life responses. Part 1 examines the move from spirituality to psychiatry in terms of the way medical science has influenced cultural understandings of the mind. Part 2 interrogates the role that medicine has played in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in constructing and deconstructing the self and other, including the fusion of visual objectivity and the scientific gaze in constructing perceptions of humanity. Part 3 looks at the limits of medicine when the integrity of one body breaks down. It contends with the ultimate question of the extent to which humanity is confined within the integrity of the human body, and how medicine and the humanities work together toward responding to the finality of death. This is a valuable contribution for all those interested in the medical humanities, history of medicine, history of ideas and the social approaches to health and illness.
Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)
by Beth LauThe essays in this volume interpret Jane Austen’s fiction through the lens of various sciences of the mind and brain, especially the cluster of disciplines implicated in the term cognitive science, including neuroscience, evolutionary biology, evolutionary and developmental psychology, and others. The field of cognitive literary studies has rapidly developed in the last few decades and achieved the status of an established (if still evolving) critical approach. One of the most popular authors to analyze from this perspective is Jane Austen. As numerous critics have noted, Austen was a keen observer of how the mind operates in its interactions with other minds, both when it functions successfully and when, as often happens, it goes awry, and her perceptions are often in synch with current neuroscientific and psychological research. Despite the widespread recognition of the special congruity between Austen’s novels and cognitive science, however, no book has been devoted to this subject. Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind is the first monograph wholly comprised of readings of Austen’s oeuvre (juvenilia as well as all six completed novels) from cognitive and related psychological approaches. In addition, the volume operates under the assumption that cognitive and historicist approaches are compatible, and many essays situate Austen within the climate of ideas during her era as well as in relation to current research in the sciences and social sciences. Jane Austen and Sciences of the Mind offers a new lens for understanding and illuminating the concerns, techniques, and enduring appeal of Austen’s novels.
Xinjiang and the Chinese State: Violence in the Reform Era
by Debasish ChaudhuriThis book focuses on the nature of ethno-national conflicts and impacts of ideological orientation of the Communist Party of China (CPC) towards the national question in the context of Han nationalism and political, economic and security policies towards Xinjiang. Violence in Xinjiang since the mid-1990s is projected as one of the major national security challenges for China, along with issues pertaining to Tibet and Taiwan. The author argues that the post-Mao reformist model may have been a beneficial economic and political innovation, but failed in dealing with regional conflicts and unrests arising out of the demands for independence, freedom, greater autonomy and assertion of democratic and civic rights. The book discusses Chinese nationalism and the construction of Uyghur national identity, consequences of economic modernisation in the region, ethnic conflicts and coercive measures, the security and social stability situation in Xinjiang, intensification of violence in Xinjiang under the new leadership, vision of the ‘Chinese dream’, key policies and programmes, post-riot fallouts and social contradictions manifest in discourses surrounding development, separatist violence, religious fundamentalism and international terrorism. With its in-depth, accessible and comprehensive analyses, this book will be a valuable addition to scholars and researchers of Chinese studies, politics and international relations, security and strategic studies, sociology, social anthropology and ethnic studies.
Flexibility and Design: Learning from the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) Project (Routledge Research in Architecture)
by Joshua D. LeeThis book questions flexibility as a design approach by providing a longitudinal analysis of an innovative architectural experiment called the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) project. The SCSD pioneered the use of performance specifications to create an open, prefabricated, and integrated system of building components that provided four modes of flexibility. Educational facilities throughout California used the SCSD system and it spawned a variety of similar projects throughout North America. This book traces the development and subsequent use of the system over 50 years through archival research, personal observations, re-photography, re-surveying, plan evaluations, interviews, and an advertisement analysis. These new findings provide useful insights for architects, educators, historic preservationists, and others about the affordances of spatial flexibility, the difficulties associated with technological transfer, the impact of unstable market conditions, the importance of user input during the planning process, and the need for long-term social relations to sustain architectural experiments.
Alcohol Flows Across Cultures: Drinking Cultures in Transnational and Comparative Perspective (Routledge Studies in Modern History)
by Waltraud ErnstThis book maps changing patterns of drinking. Emphasis is laid on the connected histories of different regions and populations across the globe regarding consumption patterns, government policies, economics and representations of alcohol and drinking. Its transnational perspective facilitates an understanding of the local and global factors that have had a bearing on alcohol consumption and legislation, especially on the emergence of particular styles of ‘drinking cultures’. The comparative approach helps to identify similarities, differences and crossovers between particular regions and pinpoint the parameters that shape alcohol consumption, policies, legal and illegal production, and popular perceptions. With a wide geographic range, the book explores plural drinking cultures within any one region, their association with specific social groups, and their continuities and changes in the wake of wider global, colonial and postcolonial economic, political and social constraints and exchanges.
Judgment in the Victorian Age
by James Gregory Daniel J.R. Grey Annika BautzThis volume concerns judges, judgment and judgmentalism. It studies the Victorians as judges across a range of important fields, including the legal and aesthetic spheres, and within literature. It examines how various specialist forms of judgment were conceived and operated, and how the propensity to be judgmental was viewed.