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Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History
Get PDFThis is a Chapter 4 from Liberalizing Contracts. In this book, Rosenberg examines nineteenth-century liberal thought in England, as developed through, and as it developed, the concept of contract, understood as the formal legal category of binding agreement, and the relations and human practices at which it gestured, most basically that of promise, most broadly the capitalist market order. She does so by placing canonical realist novels in conversation with legal-historical knowledge about Victorian contracts. Rosenberg argues that current understandings of the liberal effort in contracts need reconstructing from both ends of Henry Maine's famed aphorism, which described a historical progress "from status to contract." On the side of contract, historical accounts of its liberal content have been oscillating between atomism and social-collective approaches, missing out on forms of relationality in Victorian liberal conceptualizations of contracts which the book establishes in their complexity, richness, and wavering appeal. On the side of status, the expectation of a move "from status" has led to a split along the liberal/radical fault line among those assessing liberalism's historical commitment to promote mobility and equality. The split misses out on the possibility that liberalism functioned as a historical reinterpretation of statuses – particularly gender and class – rather than either an effort of their elimination or preservation. As Rosenberg shows, that reinterpretation effectively secured, yet also altered, gender and class hierarchies. There is no teleology to such an account.
Chapter 4 examines the liberal association of contract with freedom. With George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) and Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Castebridge (1886) we see a move from the midcentury project of pressing on readers the importance of relationality for individual agency and for the morality of choice, toward explorations of the constraining implications of living in a web of relationships.
In Middlemarch, the chapter reads the parallel stories of three protagonists, Lydgate, Dorothea, and Fred, where the fictionalization of promises – most significantly the men’s contractual debts and Dorothea’s deathbed never-made-promise to her husband – is pivotal to the unfolding of plots dealing with relational interdependence, with all the suffocation involved. Eliot gave artistic expression to the concerns of liberal philosophy with voluntary submission as an everyday necessity. Her striking tool for negotiating promissory suffocation was the practice of economy. She incorporated popular political-economic advice about economic prudence into the terms of meaningful existence in the web of constraints. Yet the advice finally falters and reveals Eliot’s hesitation. Her ultimate achievement was in giving expression to a non-naïve liberal consciousness: Eliot's liberalism offered a sense of hope that one could embrace without thereby being the fool who doesn’t realize how limited it is, a position that resonates with us still.
Hardy, writing at the outskirts of high Victorianism and the margins of realism, was far more pessimistic. The Mayor of Castebridge examined contractual constraint through the problem of masculinity in contract. Reading Hardy’s protagonist, Henchard, with histories of Victorian masculinity, the chapter shows how an atomistic approach to contract is associated with a particular vision of conventional masculinity, and represented as ruinous in a capitalistic world of tamed passions, where relational awareness is key to prosperity. The chapter begins with the novel’s brutal opening scene of wife sale, which foretells Hencahrd’s downfall. The downfall plot is then narrated through junctions of promissory overload, in which the character of Farfrae appears as a foil for the novel’s protagonist without the rigid masculine debasement. Viewing conventional masculinity as a victimizing imperative in modern capitalism, Hardy’s art compensates for a blindspot in contract histories, which have read the gender of contract from the perspective of women’s exclusions, and have too often left the positive content of contract – its inclusions, to nongendered readings. Hardy highlighted the inescapable relationality of the capitalist order, but viewed it from a distanced suspicion
Profession and Performance: Aspects of oratory in the Greco-Roman World
Get PDFThis volume brings together six papers relating to oratory and orators in public fora of Classical Greece and Rome. Edwards and Bers explore aspects of oratorical delivery in the Athenian courts and Assembly, including the demands placed on orators by the physical settings. Tempest examines the conceptions of oratorical competence and incompetence, particularly in respect of performance, as they are implied in Cicero’s criticisms of the rival prosecutor in the trial of Verres. Papers by Karambelas and Powell look at evidence for the importance of advocacy in the Second Sophistic and the late Roman Empire respectively. In an introduction, the editors discuss recurrent themes connected with the orator’s competence and performance, while the final paper of the volume, by Lord Justice Laws, reflects on the continuing relevance of rhetoric in the modern, highly professionalised practice of the law in England
Generalized Movement Representation in Haptic Perception
No full textThe extraction of spatial information by touch often involves exploratory movements, with tactile and kinesthetic signals combined to construct a spatial haptic percept. However, the body has many sensory surfaces that can move independently, giving rise to the source binding problem: when there are multiple tactile signals originating from sensory surfaces with multiple movements, are the tactile and kinesthetic signals bound to one another? We studied haptic signal combination by applying the tactile signal to a stationary fingertip while another body part (the other hand or a foot) or a visual target moves, and using a task that can only be done if the tactile and kinesthetic signals are combined. We found that both direction and speed of movement transfer across limbs, but only direction transfers between visual target motion and the tactile signal. In control experiments, we excluded the role of explicit reasoning or knowledge of motion kinematics in this transfer. These results demonstrate the existence of two motion representations in the haptic system—one of direction and another of speed or amplitude—that are both source-free or unbound from their sensory surface of origin. These representations may well underlie our flexibility in haptic perception and sensorimotor control
Voices of the Commonwealth
No full textThis article describes a major exercise undertaken by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, to put together an oral history of the modern Commonwealth. The project was set in the context of a wider research agenda aimed at investigating whether the Commonwealth has made any difference globally in policy terms. As part of the exercise, the author, who was the lead researcher on the project, interviewed senior figures within the Commonwealth who played key roles in shaping the destiny of the organization and in influencing policy. The article is a personal account of the exercise
Sensing the Worst: Neurophenomenological Perspectives on Neutral Stimuli Misperception in Schizophrenia Spectrum
No full textWhile investigating social cognitive impairments in schizophrenia, prominent evidence has been found that patients with schizophrenia show a tendency to misclassify neutral stimuli as negatively valenced. Within this population, patients presenting delusions are more prone to this phenomenon. In a previous study, Schizophrenia spectrum (SzSp) patients rated positive, negative and neutral stimuli that were multimodally presented, while assessed with a checklist exploring anomalous subjective experiences and evaluated for positive and negative symptomatology. In the present work, we aimed to further explore the relationship between neutral stimuli misperception, anomalous experiences and positive/negative symptoms in SzSp patients. To this end, we adopted a dimensional approach by reconstructing from available data: (1) four a priori scales representing essential dimensions of SzSp experiential pathology following Parnas et al. (2005); and (2) five clinically meaningful factors to describe illness severity derived by Toomey et al. (1997). Results showed that although overall patients correctly recognized the target emotions, those who misinterpreted neutral auditory cues as negatively valenced also presented higher scores in Perplexity (PY), Bizarre Delusions (BD) and Disorganization (Di) dimensions. Moreover, a positive association between BD and both PY and Self-Disorder (SD) dimensions emerged, suggesting that psychotic symptoms may be directly linked to patients’ subjectivity. In an attempt to comprehensively capture the multilayered neutral stimuli misperception phenomenon in SzSp, we aimed at bridging phenomenology and neurobiology by connecting the levels of molecular neurochemistry (i.e., altered dopaminergic neurotransmission), system neuroscience (aberrant salience of perceptual details) and psychopathology (the chain involving hyper-reflexivity, self-disorders and the emergence of delusions)
‘Frisket Sheet for Printing Text in Red Ink’
Get PDFA beautiful parchment manuscript was cut up and used for its strength, twice
The International Law Collections of IALS Library
No full textHester Swift, Foreign and International Law Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), describes the extensive international law collections available at IALS Library, tracing their development from the establishment of the IALS in 1947
The Future of Refugee Law: RLI Working Paper Series Special Edition (Papers 16–22)
Get PDFContents
16. International refugee law – yesterday, today, but tomorrow?
- Guy S. Goodwin-Gill (page 1)
17. The universal asylum system and the 2016 New York Declaration: towards an improved ‘global compact’ on refugees?
- Terje Einarsen and Marthe Engedahl (page 10)
18. The origins of ‘burden sharing’ in the contemporary refugee protection regime
- Claire Inder (page 25)
19. Bilateral resettlement agreements: any promising future for expanding refugee protection space? A case study of the Guantanamo ex-detainees seeking asylum in Central Asia
- Khalida Azhigulova (page 42)
20. Non-refoulement under the Inter-American Human Rights System
- Rodolfo Marques (page 58)
21. Resettlement mission: under international law, can the Security Council issue resolutions obligating states to resettle displaced persons?
- Margarita Fourer (page 70)
22. The European Union Temporary Protection Directive: an example of solidarity in law but not in practice – a review of temporary protection in the European Union (1990–2015)
- John Koo (page 96
The East Asian Journal of British History, vol. 6
Get PDFThe East Asian Journal of British History is produced by the East Asian Society of British History, and supported by the Institute for Historical Research.
The Institute of Historical Research is pleased and proud to be supporting this recent addition to British history scholarship. Developing out of the IHR’s long-standing collaborative partnership with Japanese universities, and now in its fourth year, the East Asian Journal of British History features some of the best emergent scholarship from Anglophone historians working in China, Japan, and South Korea.
Divided between an articles section and one devoted to reviews, the journal’s remit wide-ranging covering all fields and periods of British history. It complements the triennial Anglo-Japanese Conference organised by the IHR and Japanese historians based at the universities of Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, and the conference of the East Asian Society of British history, in which we are joined by our colleagues from South Korea. In future, we hope that more contributions will be featured in the journal from the Chinese mainland and from Taiwan