Personal Ruin Research Articles

Editor's Introduction to the 1988 AIDS Edition

Editor's Introduction to the 1988 AIDS Edition Arien Mack the papers in this issue were presented at a public conference entitled "In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease," sponsored by Social Research. It was held in January at the New School for Social Research and was the first in what we hope will be a series of such conferences. The conference was made possible by the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. The initial plans for this conference emerged at a planning meeting in the fall of 1986 attended by Gert H. Brieger, William H. Welch Professor of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins; John Hollander, poet and professor of English at Yale University; Shirley Lindenbaum, anthropologist and colleague at the Graduate Faculty of the New School; Dorothy Nelkin, professor, Program on Science, Technology and Society, Cornell University, currently Clare Boothe Luce Visiting Professor, Department of Sociology, New York University; Kenneth Prewitt, political scientist and vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation; Susan Sontag, novelist and critic; Paul Starr, sociologist and professor at Princeton University; Jamie Walkup, editorial associate and co-organizer of the conference, and myself. An exhibit, "In Time of Plague: Five Centuries of Infectious Disease in the Visual Arts," was held at the American Museum of Natural History in conjunction with the conference. It was made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Its curators were Daniel Fox, professor of humanities in medicine, State University of New York, Stonybrook, and Diane R. Karp, art historian and freelance curator. The exhibit was jointly sponsored by the American Museum of Natural [End Page xxxv] History and the New School for Social Research. The medal pictured on the cover is one of the artifacts from that exhibit. The conference was organized with the expectation that an open discussion among scientists and scholars might help to place the current alarming outbreak of AIDS in perspective by considering it in the context of the social history of past lethal epidemics. We thought that focusing attention on the many ways in which diseases, particularly catastrophic infectious and contagious diseases, are and have been both biologically and socially defined might help lead the way to a calmer and more effective public response to the problem. Why, you might well ask, if we hoped the conference and this subsequent issue of Social Research might help create the possibility of a calmer and more reasoned response to AIDS, did we give it so ominous and threatening a title as "In Time of Plague"? There are at least two reasons. First, for good or ill the word "plague" effectively captures the emotional associations frequently engendered by reports about AIDS. The word acknowledges the unfamiliar fears it has awakened. After decades of dividing our time between apocalyptic fears of nuclear holocaust and private fears of personal ruin, we now face a threat that is profoundly social, requiring a public, community response. Most of us until recently have assumed, perhaps without thinking, that the number of life-threatening infectious diseases was finite, soon to be cured and prevented by medical science. So the study of plagues was delegated exclusively to medical and social historians. Now it appears that this idea that we stand outside our own history, that we, unlike our forebears, are immune to widespread medical disasters, is very doubtful. The word "plague" appears in the title for a more specific reason as well. Its presence points the way to the problem that must be addressed. In fact, the problem we face can be seen in the very considerations that made the word seem appropriate, for the exotic connotations of the term exercise their influence over our emotions, even when the word itself is not spoken. The fact is that the past is both too much and too little with us in our public deliberations about [End Page xxxvi] AIDS; its images of disease affect us precisely because we so rarely take them into account. The hope is that these scholarly discussions will allow our present and our past to speak with each other. With luck they may permit us to discern the similarities between...

Tale of Loss & Personal Ruin in Response to Time of Crisis in Selected Plays by Christopher Shinn & Jon Robin Baitz

Dying City by Christopher Shinn, an American playwright, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London 2006. Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz, also an American playwright, premiered at Off-Broadway in January 2011. Both plays deal with Iraqi war in apolitical way. However, Dying City puts into focus conflicting identities as a result of social and political context that threatens individuals’ agency and concepts about themselves. Meanwhile, Other Desert Cities investigates domineering paternal relationships that produce passive/docile subjects. This study demonstrates that individuals’ agency and identity could be affected by domination relationship, limiting individuals’ choices and eliciting rebellion. This is undertaken by investigating characters’ ability to resist hegemonic relationships and endure controversial war debate. Characters’ subordination and resistance are also discussed. However, Shinn and Baitz’s aims are not to deal with the war but to underline its influence on personal relationships.

Zjawisko migracji mieszkańców Afryki do Europy. Wyzwania wspólnego

The cohabitation in a multicultural society asks for an inter-subjectivity in terms of unity and specificity. It requires that the individual be recognized, and together become authentic partners of dialogue. In encountering others, some points of insertions may be needed but with the necessity to respect the principle of distinction, and to have an objective to look on the risk of separation or the one of confusion. Cultural diversity allows then the dialectic that will be shown in the training liberties by constructive dialogue. When diversity, an archetypal value of cohabitation breaks the challenges of the exclusivist “we” and the one of a bitter “they”, it results in a cross-culturality, as long as self and other gratitude, and to an interior and exterior reconciliation. Living together in a world of a plurality of culture, is not an impoverishment, or a personal ruin, because every cultural identity can reveal itself and transform our life.

“My Personal Ruin Passes Unnoticed”: Russell, Harvard, and the 1940 William James Lectureship

This article analyzes the contentious debate among senior administrators of Harvard University regarding the choice of Russell as the 1940 William James Lecturer. In the aftermath of the City College of New York controversy, influential Harvard bureaucrats, alumni, and members of the general public pressured Harvard President James B. Conant to rescind Russell’s appointment. Utilizing the Russell Archives, Conant’s private papers and Corporation records held at the Harvard Archives, and Grenville Clark’s papers at Dartmouth College, the nature of the complex deliberations surrounding Russell’s appointment and his status as a controversial public figure can be ascertained. Ultimately, Harvard stood by Russell, who delivered the James Lectures in the autumn 1940 term without incident, an engagement that ended Russell’s formal involvement with Harvard extending back to the pre-World War 1 period.

"My Personal Ruin Passes Unnoticed": Russell, Harvard, and the 1940 William James Lectureship

This article analyzes the contentious debate among senior administrators of Harvard University regarding the choice of Russell as the 1940 William James Lecturer. In the aftermath of the City College of New York controversy, influential Harvard bureaucrats, alumni, and members of the general public pressured Harvard President James B. Conant to res­cind Russell’s appointment. Utilizing the Russell Archives, Conant’s private papers and Corporation records held at the Harvard Archives, and Grenville Clark’s papers at Dartmouth College, the nature of the complex deliberations surrounding Russell’s appointment and his status as a controversial public figure can be ascertained. Ultimately, Harvard stood by Russell, who delivered the James Lectures in the autumn 1940 term without incident, an engagement that ended Russell’s formal involvement with Harvard extending back to the pre-World War I period.

“The Master-Key of Our Theme”: Master Betty and the Politics of Theatricality in Herman Melville's “The Fiddler”

In what is by now among the more famous personal histories in American studies, by 1852 Herman Melville was facing bankruptcy and personal ruin after the financial failures ofMoby-DickandPierre. Under the guidance of the new editor ofPutnam's Magazine, Charles Briggs, Melville turned to writing magazine fiction. Building upon work that seeks to show how Melville in his short stories negotiated the terrain between the riotous world of the popular press and the sanctified realm of high art, this article looks at a frequently neglected work by Melville from 1854, “The Fiddler,” as a response to this personal crisis. I show how Melville's story resurrects a forgotten transatlantic history (the life of the Irish actor Master William Henry West Betty) as a means to explore his own search for an aesthetic that could adequately serve both the demands of the spectacular world of antebellum publishing and his own high literary ambitions.

Personal ruin versus corporate profit: why individual risk attitudes lessen economic outcomes

Previous work on utility theory has highlighted value lost as a result of companies’ non-risk-neutral behaviour. Prospect theory, however, extends utility theory to describe how individuals make decisions under uncertainty. Key features include: use of decision weights rather than probabilities, and asymmetry between losses and gains, with losses weighted more heavily. Both effects impact on peoples’ risk tolerance (i.e., how risk averse or risk seeking they are). Given the petroleum industry’s reliance on decisions made under uncertainty, prospect theory can significantly impact on the value of decisions. This paper presents multiple studies highlighting the impact of prospect theory on decision value and, in particular, the changes in value resulting from differences between individual and company risk tolerances. Results indicate that prospect theory effects cause changes in risk tolerance, resulting in lost value compared to risk-neutral decisions and that this is strongest when probability of success is low—as is often the case in petroleum exploration. Differences between individual and corporate risk tolerances also impact value. The presented studies, however, demonstrate why it can benefit an individual to be risk averse even when their employer would prefer risk-neutrality, as this reduces the chance of personal ruin and increases personal expected value (EV). Finally, the implications for oil and gas decision makers are discussed. It is argued that corporate risk tolerances are, in fact, aggregated individual risk tolerances, which should be compared to ideal corporate risk tolerances calculated using the chance of ruin for a company with a particular portfolio of investments.

United States of America: A Third World Country

Dedicated to those individuals, who, because of the selfish reasons of others who conspired for their false imprisonment resulting in malicious prosecution, judicial injustice and impropriety, prosecution for the sake of prosecution, lack of funds for legal aid to prove their innocence and/or other errors of one kind or another, have been wrongfully accused and wrongfully convicted of a crime which they did not commit and have been left to languish resulting in loss of liberty, civil rights, productive lifestyles, financial and personal ruin, mental anguish, social condemnation and personal and family embarrassment for the remainder of their lives.

The Machiavellian Challenge to Business Ethics

No political philosopher is better known in the business world than Niccolo Machiavelli, whose fame there rests entirely on his authoring of The Prince. Over the last two decades, no less than ten books have been published in the popular business press on the Renaissance Italian thinker, most of them attempting to show the relevance of his realpolitik world-view to the sorts of issues that a contemporary manager is apt to face. The popular view, though, of Machiavelli as a hard-headed thinker has been challenged by scholars pointing to his advocacy of republics in the Discourses on Livy, his other great work. Interpreted along these lines, Machiavelli can be invoked to support participatory structures in business along with the cultivation of publicly spirited virtues. We argue that the common perceptions of Machiavelli are on the right track. His analysis of republics uncovers weaknesses germane to business that render The Prince more suitable to commercial life. As such, Machiavelli's overriding point is that in a competitive arena, like that of modern-day business, individuals holding leadership positions, or aspiring to them, must be prepared to go beyond conventional morality and live by a different and, indeed, icy set of rules. Being good in business, Machiavelli warns, will only lead to personal ruin. Machiavelli goes further than this, calling for a trans-valuation of values, wherein the praiseworthy qualities of leaders are redefined so as to take into account the competitive realities of business. In this new ethic, virtue is connected to acquisitiveness, moral flexibility, image management, reaching its culmination in the entrepreneurial task of founding a great company.

Compensating victims of international aviation terrorism: A short flight through relevant literature

The history of international air carrier liability for passenger death and injury is long and complex, predating the Warsaw Convention of 1929. The intervening years have witnessed protracted political and legal battles involving airlines, governments and lawyers intent on securing, through global agreement, adequate protection for the industry, tax‐payers and passengers. Two decades of aviation terrorism have heightened the risks faced by travellers, many of whom are inadequately protected against personal ruin in the event of terrorist attack.