Private Ends Research Articles

Detection and imaging of piping sinkholes by integrated geophysical methods

ABSTRACTPiping sinkholes may naturally develop in the case of a thick overburden overlying calcareous bedrock. Their detection and imaging is a challenging task for geophysical methods, not only because of the required resolution and depth of penetration, but also because major pitfalls may arise, in such geologically complex areas, from the speculative interpretation of geophysical anomalies as geological features. Data integration from different geophysical methods is essential to remove these interpretation ambiguities, caused by large near‐surface gradients and heterogeneities in the soil properties, as well as by oscillations of the water table and anomalous water circulation.We present an investigation procedure consisting of the sequential application and integrated interpretation of Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT), Seismic Refraction Tomography (SRT) and Self Potential (SP) measurements for locating and monitoring piping sinkholes with application to a site in Central Italy. This approach is a compromise between resolution and cost‐effectiveness, and it is designed to be economically affordable by the private end user.In complex geological scenarios, it is usually not possible to rate a single geophysical technique as superior to all the others in terms of resolution, cost‐effectiveness and diagnostic capability. The independent information coming from the different geophysical methods is the key to removing interpretation ambiguity when evaluating the position and the development over time of the piping sinkholes. The application of the proposed investigation procedure allowed us to individuate a small area subject to the formation of a piping sinkhole. The geophysical results were confirmed about one year after the execution of the geophysical measurements, as the site exhibited surface evidence of a piping sinkhole, with the formation of a small pond filled with sulphurous water and gases coming from below.

Democracy as Public Law: The Case of Constitutional Rights

The distinctive domain and character of public law have become—and in certain respects always were—unclear and, to a degree, contested. As a result, any definition is likely to be to some extent stipulative. For my purposes, I want to refer to public law in two broad and related senses—as applying to a certain kind of body and its functions, and as requiring a certain kind of justification. The first sense refers to the actions of the state and its administration. Of course, it will be pointed out that these are increasingly performed by private bodies and often involve legal activities that have been associated with private parties and doctrines, such as procurement and contract. Nevertheless, government and the administrative apparatus more generally can still be considered as possessing distinctively broad, authoritative, and coercive powers which in various ways make their subjection to the law both problematic and pressing: Problematic in that they play a central role in the making and enforcement of the law, pressing in that this role renders them more powerful than other bodies. The second sense enters here. For the justification of state power has come to rest on its serving the public ends of the ruled rather than private ends of the rulers, and certain public qualities of law have been thought to oblige those who wield state power to do so in a publically justified and justifiable way. Ruling through laws has been viewed as different from rule by willful, ad hoc commands because laws have certain characteristics that render them capable of coordinating and shaping public behavior in consistent and coherent ways over time, while ruling under the law likewise forces rulers to adopt public processes and offers an additional incentive to devise laws that treat rulers and ruled equitably. Again, these matters are far from straightforward. How far laws need to, or even can, always possess the requisite qualities and the degree to which these do constrain power holders are matters of dispute. Yet, that all law has to have some public qualities—for example, that it be promulgated and capable of being followed in ways that make it publicly recognized as law—and that these features formalize power to a degree, is reasonably undisputed. Increasingly, though, and even more controversially, many jurists have wanted to suggest that legality also involves certain substantive qualities of a public kind—that laws must appeal to public reasons that all subject to them can accept as reflecting, or being compatible with certain basic interests or values that are equally shared by all. Such arguments have come to be identified with rights and in particular constitutional rights, which are deemed to set the terms of how and to what purpose political power may be legally exercised. In this way, the two senses of public law come together. Constitutional rights define and mark the limits of public power in ways that can be publicly justified, and thereby ensure it serves public ends. They thereby serve what Martin Loughlin calls the “basic tasks of public law;” namely, “the constitution, maintenance and regulation of governmental authority.”

Southeast Asia: Elites vs. Reform in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam

Abstract: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos share a number of similarities: All three countries are former colonies of France located next to one another on the Southeast Asian mainland; all three witnessed the rise of communist parties to nationwide power in the mid-1970s; and all three have also seen fast-rising economic growth and falling poverty since the 1990s, and are viewed as undergoing a process of "reform" involving a shift from central planning to a market economy. Yet Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia remain bastions of illiberalism and one-party rule despite rapid economic growth and falling poverty. What will it take to reform their elitist political cultures and curtail the use of public office for private ends?

Love and Solipsism: Law and Arbitrary Rule in Classical Drama

What distinguishes the rule of law from the lawless, arbitrary rule of brute force — which can almost interchangeably be described as tyranny or as anarchy — is that in a lawful rule the government’s coercive power operates according to principles of generality, regularity, fairness, rationality and public-orientation, whereas the arbitrary or lawless ruler wields power in the service of his (or their) own self-interest, or by mere ipse dixit. Law is to arbitrariness as reason is to mere will. In this paper, I explore the dichotomy between lawful and arbitrary rule as it has been represented in literature. I examine first the primal foundation of lawful rule, as depicted in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in which law is generated by domesticating the use of force, through persuasion and willing union. Athena creates lawful order, not by fiat, but by marrying the Furies to “Persuasion”: the ambient coercive powers of the people — morally justified, yet dangerously personal urges for vengeance — will now be rationalized in accordance with public, logical, and articulable principles. By contrast, in Shakespeare’s Richard III, we witness the subversion and near-destruction of lawful order by a man who will tear apart the newly framed lawful order and make the state serve his own private ends. The contrast of these two dramas reveals that the tyrant is essentially a solipsist: his ultimate goal is to make the real world obey his say-so. And if law is like love, the tyrant is like the rapist: the forced surrender of intimacy is the best facsimile of love the solipsist can create; but it can never actually be love, because the two are separated by the same invisible and impenetrable boundary that separates truth from falsehood, or genuine loyalty from the rule of terror.I conclude with a look at the dissenter living in a lawless order, as depicted in two variations on the story of Antigone — the first by Sophocles and the second by Jean Anouilh. In both, the lawless, arbitrary rule is challenged in the name of law, and in each, the ruler nearly succeeds in substituting his private realm of mere words for the public realm of actual things. What emerges from this study is that the basic premise of all lawful order — the root of all secure liberty — is that there is a gap between the will of the ruler and the genuine law. Whenever such a gap exists — whenever it is meaningful to deliberate over whether the ruler’s commands are, in fact, law — the society will, to that extent, become one of lawful order and of (at least some) freedom. The link between tyranny and solipsism is that where the ruler’s will is accounted the law, there can be no genuine law, and thus no freedom. The paradox whereby tyranny is lawless is explained by the fact that tyranny is an attempt to impose by convention what does not originate in nature — and in the end, neither physical nature nor the nature of human relationships can be subjected to such commands. The ultimate demand of the lawless ruler(s) is to substitute his (or their) word for the world — to compel the subject to love him (or them). And because that can never be accomplished, arbitrary rule is doomed to eventual collapse.

Sassywood

This paper analyzes trial by poison ingestion, or “sassywood,” as an institution of criminal justice in contemporary Liberia. We argue that effective criminal justice institutions must satisfy three conditions: they must be accessible to citizens, incentivize judicial administrators to pursue justice instead of private ends, and generate useful information about accused criminals’ guilt or innocence. Liberia’s formal criminal justice institutions fail to satisfy these conditions. Sassywood does a better job of fulfilling them. Sassywood is more accessible than Liberia’s formal criminal justice institutions. It provides judicial administrators stronger incentives to pursue justice. And, unexpectedly, it is capable of generating useful information about criminal defendants’ guilt or innocence where Liberia’s formal criminal justice institutions didn’t. The theory this paper provides offers a plausible explanation of why sassywood is a sensible institutional substitute for formal Liberian criminal justice.

“The Boys Are Coming to Town”: Youth, Armed Conflict and Urban Violence in Developing Countries

Young people are major participants in contemporary intra-state armed conflicts. Since the end of the Cold War there has been a trend to portray these as criminal violence for private (economic) ends, rather than politically or ideologically motivated. Hence, the perception of young people’s role has moved from “freedom fighters” to “violent criminals.” Our discursive and conceptual reconsideration based on a case study of Sierra Leone finds that the associated dichotomies (“new war/old war,” “greed/grievance,” “criminal/political violence”) are grounded in traditional modernization assumptions and/or constructed for policy purposes, rather than reflecting reality on the ground. Urban and rural youth violence in developing countries cannot be separated from its political roots. Moreover, the violent dynamics in which urban youth violence is embedded challenge our conceptions of what an armed conflict is. Including this form of violence in mainstream conflict theory would open the way for a new interpretation and more effective policy interventions. Extrapolating the experience of Latin American cities plagued by drug violence, the recent and significant increase in drug trafficking on the West African seaboard could mark the beginning of another armed conflict with high youth involvement, this time playing out in urban settings.

From Eternity to Here: Shrinkage in American Thinking About Higher Education

Following WWII, America committed itself to a system of mass liberal education with a core component of the humanities, a system designed to improve the quality of people's lives and strengthen the social bond. This linkage of private and public ends was both symbolized and secured by the combination of public and private support for higher education. Today, the American system is in jeopardy because the private and public entities that support the university have largely turned away from the educational mission even as they have dramatically increased their support for research and other activities. The resulting alteration in the character of the university necessarily comes at a cost to the democratic aspirations and the vision of human flourishing that higher education has traditionally served.

Modern Piracy and International Law: Definitional Issues with the Law of the Sea

In recent years, piracy, particularly off the coasts of Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa, has become a major problem for global shipping and maritime safety. Piracy is an international problem, as it takes place outside state jurisdiction and affects the nationals of many states. Yet international law has proven unable to provide a framework for an effective solution to this problem. This is due in part to two main flaws in the treatment of piracy under the major document in international law, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. These two problems relate to the definition of the act, limiting piracy to events on the high seas caused for private ends between two ships, and the universal jurisdiction granted over it. The policy and scholarly communities have proposed many emendations of international law to better suit the reality of modern day piracy, but as yet none of these have gained any traction. Piracy continues to grow and alter in response to state actions, and it is too soon to tell whether any of the recent anti-piracy initiatives will have the appropriate effect.

Cloud Computing Storms

Cloud Computing (CC) is seeing many organisations experiencing the ‘credit crunch’, embracing the relatively low cost option of CC to ensure continued business viability and sustainability. The pay-as-you-go structure of the CC business model is typically suited to SME’s who do not have the resources to completely fulfil their IT requirements. Private end users will also look to utilise the colossal pool of resources that CC offers in an attempt to provide mobile freedom of information. However, as with many opportunities that offer legitimate users enormous benefits, unscrupulous and criminal users will also look to use CC to exploit the loopholes that may exist within this new concept, design and business model. This paper will outline these loopholes and attempt to describe the perfect crime conducted within a cloud environment.

Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution and Remembrance, 1789-1799

In this elegantly written book on commemoration during the French Revolutionary era, Joseph Clarke rebukes Philippe Ariès’ classic thesis that the 1790s ushered in a new relationship between the living and the dead. The Revolution, Clarke insists, did not create anything new. It merely intruded upon a pre-existing church-based relationship without providing a viable alternative to religious funeral rites. In six well-researched chapters, he shows how commemoration was an integral element of Revolutionary politics and culture from 1789 through to the Directory. By looking at how the Revolutionaries treated their dead, Clarke addresses a larger story about the problems of democracy during a time of change. Specifically, he argues that, throughout the 1790s, state-sponsored commemoration was a profoundly undemocratic and manipulative process that alienated the population and reflected the instability of the nascent republic. Clarke's book updates a familiar political and cultural narrative by taking ‘genuine human emotion’ seriously. This is a promising approach to Revolutionary culture that looks beyond the political meaning of celebration and mourning to assess how the changes of the 1790s actually served the private ends of French citizens. Clarke accesses the emotional world of the French population through their customary religious culture, which was inexorably bound up with commemoration during this time. During the first two years of the Revolution both the population and the state relied on traditional rites of mourning. This explains the very Catholic fêtes patriotiques that were held throughout France in honour of the vainqueurs de la Bastille and the Christian rituals that characterised Mirabeau's funeral and induction into the Pantheon in the spring of 1791. The masses and celebrations surrounding Mirabeau's death epitomise the synthesis of the sacred and the profane and demonstrate the cohesive power of ritual that bound the population to the new regime. Not since the Festival of the Federation, Clarke writes, had France been so united.

Local democracy under siege: activism, public interests, and private politics

AcknowledgmentsPreface1. Experimenting with Democracy 2. Landscapes in Transition PART I: LIMITING DEMOCRACY3. Hope, Fear, and Political Autobiography 4. Racial Framing 5. Public Goods for Private Ends: The Redirection of Schooling PART II: GOVERNING UNDER NEOLIBERALISM6. Local Politics and the Contemporary American Scene 7. Imagining Local Futures: Who Sets Priorities for the Present?8. Public Business as Usual PART III: STRUGGLING FOR DEMOCRACY9. Against American Plutocracy: Democratizing Our Communities, One by One 10. Counter Experiments for Democracy: Activism on New Political Terrain 11. It's Up to Us: From Local Politics to a Democratic America? Appendix: Democracy and Political Theory: Why Participatory Democracy? Notes Bibliography Index About the Authors

Power After Power: Reflections on Liberalism in Politics and Vision

Power After Power: Reflections on Liberalism in Politics and Vision Wilson Carey McWilliams (bio) In Politics and Vision,1 liberalism — and specifically, Anglo-American liberalism — is nemesis, framing modern political thought as alpha and dark omega.2 Already in Part I (Chapter 9), liberalism is identified with the “decline of political philosophy,” and in Part II, liberalism — its great antagonists destroyed or self-destructed — is the official doctrine of “Superpower,” being promoted as the basis of a world system, a pax liberalis.3 Liberalism has had its conquests, but its characteristic triumphs have been won by insinuation and temptation, its happy accommodation to human frailty. One of Sheldon Wolin’s great contributions, in fact, has been to correct the notion that liberalism was rooted in rationalism and naive confidence in human goodness,4 in favor of a truer account of liberalism’s genealogy: “born in fear, nourished by disenchantment and prone to believe that the human condition was, and was likely to remain, one of pain and anxiety” (298). And, masterful in his account of liberalism’s past, Wolin is indispensable as a guide to its present and probable future. Of course, I am not objective where Sheldon Wolin is concerned. Wolin was my first teacher of political theory, and there is no way to disentangle my thinking from his; at every reading of Wolin’s work, I am shocked to discover how many of my best ideas have made their way into his writing. I do have some questions about his analysis: Wolin may understate both liberalism’s genuine charms and its tendency to self-contempt, and I worry that Wolin’s contemporary reflections may underrate the dependence of democracy — even “fugitive” democracy — on institutions and forms. But these are at most minor quarrels, and what follows amounts to a set of reflections on an argument that, in the main, I regard as unanswerable. In an age of spin and cant, in the academy as well as outside it, Wolin is a compelling voice for democracy and for politics, unsparing in his diagnosis of democracy’s bleak prospects and hence more credible in his whisper of hope. Most important, Wolin is a living rule, a constant exemplar of political theory as a vocation. Past: Natural Freedom and Liberal Politics Philosophically, if not anthropologically, liberalism begins with the individual.5 Human beings are bodies, naturally separate, who become conscious of others only when they “collide.” The other is she who resists my will and desire, and since human beings strive to overcome such resistances to their natural freedom, “conflict and friction are thus the sources of man’s awareness of man” (305).6 Liberty, rooted in nature, needs only more or less passive protection; order requires active construction. Yet liberal politics, a creative human achievement, is also “derivative” (259). Aristotle held that while human beings are partly moved toward politics by the goals of pre-political or sub-political relationships — by the desire for safety or gain — they are also drawn by their own political nature. The efficient causes of political life, in other words, are subordinate to its final cause; private goods constrain politics in practice, but the political good is naturally entitled to rule. Liberalism, by contrast, regards politics as naturally the servant of private ends. This does not at all entail a limitation on political power. Rather, as Wolin argues, liberal argument diminishes the status of the political, implicitly reducing it, in Thoreau’s dismissive description of government, to “an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone.”7 The ideal of liberal politics, as Wolin argues, is a “rediscovery” of Locke’s state of nature, in which human beings, informed by the Law of Nature, largely leave one another alone. Separating nature and war, Locke made the political a less “dramatic” achievement — hence less impelled toward absolutism — than Hobbes’ Leviathan, but Wolin aside, it is hard to call Locke’s imagined nature “political” (274).8 At bottom, Locke seems be describing a kind of companionable indifference, rather like the “parallel play” of children, interrupted only by an occasional squabble. In any case, Locke’s nature slides into war by way of what...

Introduction

‘Sin changes its quality as society develops’, the well-known American sociologist E.A. Ross wrote in 1907 (p.3), as he embarked on an analysis of the sins of his contemporaries. Notably, his concerns were the economy, the big corporations and the expanding market, where he saw an array of new ‘darling sins that are blackening the face of our time’ (ibid.: 6) ‘Incidental to the ruthless pursuit of private ends, and the essence of the wrongs that infest our articulate society, is betrayal rather than aggression’ (ibid). These new sins – often not yet criminalised in law (and not condemned in practice) – involved respectable people to a hitherto unseen extent, and harm was done not just to individual victims from all social strata, but also to our sense of the ‘just world’ – to morality, law and order in society. New opportunities for sins and crime had outbalanced morality, and U.S. society needed to rebalance its moral economy (ibid: p.69). About a century later, Ross’s call was echoed by demands from the public and politicians for ‘virtues’, moral values and generally a new ‘economic morality’ (Business Week, 2002) in the wake of cases like Enron and WorldCom that have since led to long prison sentences for key perpetrators.

The Transformation of Virtue in Montaigne's Essays

The Transformation of Virtue in Montaigne's Essays Ann Hartle Montaigne begins "Of Cruelty" with a distinction between virtue and goodness: virtue is "other and nobler than the inclinations toward goodness that are born in us."1 This is because virtue entails struggle and difficulty, whereas the inclinations are easy to follow. Virtue, then, requires the presence of vicious or evil inclinations that must be mastered and overcome. There is no merit without difficulty. But the matter cannot be left this way because Montaigne thinks of Socrates, the most perfect soul he knows, and he cannot imagine any struggle or difficulty in Socrates's practice of virtue. The same is true of Cato. Here we are at the extreme of virtue where virtue has become natural and has passed beyond the level of ordinary virtue, the essence of which seemed to be struggle. Montaigne describes himself as good or innocent rather than as virtuous: he is incapable of struggle within himself (VS427, F311). Goodness and innocence, when compared to the difficulty of virtue, look weak and imperfect, so that even the terms 'good' and 'innocent' are almost terms of contempt in common usage (VS426, F310). Just as goodness seems weak, so also the essay is a weak mode of writing when compared with traditional modes of philosophical expression. There are no arguments in the essays and no conclusions in the traditional, strong sense. Montaigne often speaks of the essays as almost contemptible. His ways of being, his mœurs, are revealed in a form that is perfectly suited to them. Montaigne must justify his self-revelation because he has no great deeds to tell. In this paper I will consider the puzzling fact of the self-revelation of this weak man. I will approach both the content and the form of the Essays from the perspective set out in the very first words: "This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one. I have had no thought of serving either you or my own glory. My powers are inadequate for such a purpose." He concludes "To the Reader" with the consistent admonition: "Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book: it is not reasonable that you employ your leisure on a subject so frivolous and vain" (VS3, F2). From the very beginning, he presents himself as weak: "my powers are inadequate." His weakness, then, is initially set out in terms of two related philosophical issues: final cause and the distinction between public and private. [End Page 3] "To the Reader" is clearly intended as a response to Aristotle: all four Aristotelian causes are brought in, only to be weakened. For Aristotle, the public realm is the master-end, the place of human fulfillment through the exercise of the moral virtues. The public realm is the space of appearances where individuals distinguish themselves by their noble deeds. The most complete manifestation of virtue is the excellent ruler who displays all of the virtues, including practical wisdom or prudence. A public space for the appearance of virtue depends upon a private realm in which the necessities of life are taken care of. The domestic and private, therefore, is the realm of necessity which makes possible the freedom that is the condition for public, political life. Freedom is this freedom from necessity, the freedom to participate fully in the activities of the citizen, activities that constitute human perfection. Montaigne's end is domestic and private, a weaker end than public service or glory, an end compatible with his "forces." In keeping with his domestic and private end, Montaigne presents himself in his "ordinary" and natural way, as he is "without striving." He does not hide his shortcomings but rather portrays his defects and imperfections. Thus, the posture in which he comes forward to the reader is one between the "studied posture" of the world of public appearance and the nakedness of "the sweet freedom of nature's first laws." The Essays are the emergence of this middle, private condition of men into the public realm. They precisely are this emergence because...

The Global Cultural Commons after Cancun: Identity, Diversity and Citizenship

The cultural politics of global trade is a new and unexplored terrain because the public domain of culture has long been associated with national sovereignty. States everywhere have invested heavily in national identity. But in an age of globalization, culture and sovereignty have become more complex propositions, subject to global pressures and national constraints. This paper argues three main points. First, new information technologies increasingly destabilize traditional private sector models for disseminating culture. At the same time, international legal rules have become more restrictive with respect to investment and national treatment, two areas at the heart of cultural policy. Second, Doha has significant implications for the future of the cultural commons. Ongoing negotiations around TRIPS, TRIMS, GATS and dispute settlement will impose new restrictions on public authorities who wish to appropriate culture for a variety of public and private ends. Finally, there is a growing backlash against the WTO’s trade agenda for broadening and deepening disciplines in these areas. These issues have become highly politicized and fractious, and are bound to vex future rounds as the global south, led by Brazil, India and China flexes its diplomatic muscle.

Economic Efficiency of Public Interest Litigations (PIL): Lessons from India

Past interest in the phenomena of Public interest litigation has concentrated on a legal justification of PIL and on arguments based on “access to Justice” for the poor. There seems to be scant literature that looks at PIL from a Law and Economics perspective. This paper sets up a framework to analyze the economic efficiency of public Interest Litigation in the Indian context. We argue that PIL can be justified as an economically efficient choice of redressel if certain conditions are fulfilled. These are, insufficient incentive for private litigation, regulatory failures and the inability of class action to counter harm due to high transaction costs. Thus PIL is seen as an efficient method of bundling interests wherever there are failures of the kind mentioned. We delineate the kinds of economic activity that generate these specific conditions and analyze if PIL has been successful in such cases. We show that PILs filed in India do seem to stem from considerations of Economic efficiency, but there are instances where PIL may be used strategically to pull off private ends and open up a floodgate of litigation. We present only a basic direction of the research since this is still a part of on going research.

Maritime Security: Consequences for the Maritime Transport Industry

This paper describes how the problem of maritime security has become rather acute since the early 1980s. The alarming number of incidents of piracy and armed robbery against ships obliged the member state of IMO to adopt in 1983 a resolution on “measures to prevent acts of piracy and armed robbery against ships.” Although measures were imposed, piracy and armed robbery against ships remained a rather serious problem for international maritime transport. In 1985, the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro was seized by four extremists of the Abu Abbas Palestine Liberation Front who checked in as ordinary passengers. The incident did not fall under the definition of piracy in Article 101 of the 1982 United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), as only one vessel was involved and the act was not committed for “private ends” but rather for political reasons. The measures adopted at IMO to enhance a maritime security will lead to fundamental changes in maritime shipping. Rising costs for goods will probably be the obvious and final result after a long chain of changes. The decisions taken by the international community, both on a national as well as on an international level will impose a heavy burden on the maritime transport industry. Meanwhile, IMO member states are asked “to start putting in place methodically, systematically and as soon as possible, all the legislative, administrative and operational infrastructure needed to give effect to the decisions of the Maritime Security Conference without waiting until the entry-into-force date of July 1, 2004, so as to avoid having to take action at the last minute.” A positive effect of this most recent attempt is that many of the activities against terrorism at sea also enhance maritime security as a whole, that is, also fighting piracy, which is to be considered as the greater threat to the maritime transport industry.

Scribleriana Transferred: Printed Matter, 1999–2001, Part 2

84 in Reformation textuality. She needs to ask of poetic miscellanies, platonic and Ovidian letters, drama, romances and romans à clef, and amatory fiction: how did we get here? How did we get from the Reformation’s true Word to the Restoration ’s endless artifices? How did we get from Cavendish, lucidly publishing her privacy in fictional form, to Behn, in whose mystifying stories we cannot tell where private ends and public begins, where the line between inner and outer lies (if anywhere), or what her ultimate authority is (if it is not fiction itself)? Ms. Jagodzinski outlines these complexities nicely, and though she does not adequately explain them—her tortured claim that Behn frees a Magdalen-story from religion to eroticism misses Letters ’s romance origins—she does enable insight. What makes Behn’s fictionmaking so unsettling is a spectral Calvinism that inheres not in the novel’s plot or characters, but in its manipulations of reading, writing,secrecy,andexposure— and in our own experience of reading it, in private, for truth(s). Paula Loscocco Sarah Lawrence College SCRIBLERIANA TRANSFERRED: PRINTED MATTER, 1999–2001, PART 2 James E. May I continue with major authors, beginning with Defoe. Yale acquired an apparently unrecorded edition of Defoe’s A Letter from Captain Tom to the Mobb, now rais’d for Dr. Sacheverel, describing it, ‘‘n.p. 1710. Probably a Dublin piracy.’’ To judge from Furbank and Owens’s 106P, unless Yale has the London piracy known only from an advertisement (‘‘For the Booksellers’’) in the Daily Courant 19 April 1710, this indeed is an unrecorded Irish reprint. Yale also purchased the anonymous poem sometimes attributed to Defoe Ye True-born Englishmen Proceed, one of four 2-leaf, 2-column quarto editions published in 1701 without imprint or title [L, 1701], 4 pp., Foxon Y9 noting stanzas 31–33 are ‘‘all numbered ‘31’’; it is bound with Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman. A Satyr, 1701, 4to, distinguished in Foxon D155 by pagination errors from two other impressions of the first edition. Johnson offered Defoe’s Observations on the Fifth Article of the Treaty of Union [Edin., 1706], 2 4to leaves, disbd, 1st ed., Furbank & Owens[F&O]citing 11 copies;andhisQuarreloftheSchool-boysatAthens, as lately Acted at a School near Westminster (J. Roberts, 1717), 1st ed., 8vo, disbd, F&O 187 citing 12 copies, but failing to distinguish issues or states noted in ESTC (in this copy, p. 7’s catchword is ‘‘ing’’; in the other, it is ‘‘being’’). Finch’s 39 listed the 1st ed. of Defoe’s The Experiment: or the Shortest Way with the DissentersExemplified, 1705, 4to; rebd in green half morocco; F&O 67 noting ‘‘pp. i–vi, 1–58’’ and failing to note this variant state, which Finch describes: pp. [x] 58 pp., with dedication to the Queen printed on one side only of 4 leaves; an asymmetrical ornament and a printer’s dagger on the title; and p. 7, ll. 24–25 have the correct spelling ‘‘Hubbart.’’Finch also here listed the first Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, 1727, giving the pagination listed by F&O 238, xii ⫹ 395 [1 blank], but noting ‘‘without the two final 85 blanks’’—unlikely leaves not noted by F&O, nor found in Penn State’s copy (A2 a4 BBb8 Cc4 Dd2 );—in cont. panelled calf with early inscription of William Davison. A collector acquired from Quaritch’s 1273 Defoe’s Hymn to the Pillory, 1703, 1st ed., with hft., rebd in blue morocco gilt; F&O 43; Foxon D115 (£3200). Quaritch’s Sept. 2001 list included three first editions of Defoe: Atalantis Major, 1711, F&O 122P; A Friendly Epistle by Way of Reproof from one of the People Called Quakers to Thomas Bradbury, 1715, F&O 170; and A Sharp Rebuke from One of the People Called Quakers to Henry Sacheverell, 1715, F&O 172. Ximenes’s 99-3 listing of Authentic Memoirs of the Life and surprising Adventures of John Sheppard (Jos. Marshall, 1724), a rare reissue with plates—later bought by Yale—makes some important observations on Defoe attributions. Stephen Weissman and Kathryn Tempest observe that remarks in the dedication here, signed ‘‘E. G.,’’ support the attribution of two biographies of Sheppard formerly ascribed to Defoe but doubted by Furbank and Owens: ‘‘To my...

The Marketization of Education: Public Schools for Private Ends

This article argues that the neoliberal renaissance of the 1980s marketized education, with distinctly negative social consequences. We examine the emergence and promotion of a national‐level discourse that positioned schools in the service of the economy. Based on ethnographic research conducted in North Carolina, we then show how local growth elite utilized this discourse to further their own race and class interests to the exclusion and detriment of poorer, African American parents and students. We suggest that ethnographic studies of policy formation help to socially and historically contextualize contemporary debates and denaturalize unwarranted assumptions about the public good.

Shoes, lies and videotape: Corruption and the French state

The frequency of corruption scandals in contemporary France is linked to various institutional and political factors. Recent affairs have highlighted the personal transgressions of the perpetrators while anti-corruption legislation has distinguished between corruption for private and public ends. But in the Elf, party-financing and contaminated blood scandals corruption may be seen as intrinsic to the interaction between political and economic elites. Above all, recent scandals, and the mixed record of attempts to deal with them, highlight the social fracture between elites and society at large, whose alienation from mainstream institutions intensifies as the affairs continue.