From climate change to nuclear war to the rise of demagogic populists, our world is shaped by doomsday expectations. In this path-breaking book, Alison McQueen shows why three of history's greatest political realists feared apocalyptic politics. Niccolò Machiavelli in the midst of Italy's vicious power struggles, Thomas Hobbes during England's bloody civil war, and Hans Morgenthau at the dawn of the thermonuclear age all saw the temptation to prophesy the end of days. Each engaged in subtle and surprising strategies to oppose apocalypticism, from using its own rhetoric to neutralize its worst effects to insisting on a clear-eyed, tragic acceptance of the human condition. Scholarly yet accessible, this book is at once an ambitious contribution to the history of political thought and a work that speaks to our times.

Many instances of socio-technical systems in the digital society and digital economy require some form of self-governance. Examples include community energy systems, peer production systems, participatory sensing applications, and shared management of communal living areas or workspace. Such systems have several features in common, of which three are that they are rule-oriented, self-organising, and value-sensitive, and in operation, this combination of features entails self-modification of the rules in order to satisfice a changeable set of values. This presents a fundamental dilemma for systems design. On the one hand, the system must be sufficiently unrestricted (resilient, flexible) to enable a diverse group but with a shared set of congruent values to achieve their joint purposes in collective action situations. On the other hand, it must be sufficiently restricted (stable, robust) to prevent a subset of the group from exploiting self-determination ‘against itself’ and usurp control of the system for the benefit of its own narrow interests. To address this problem, we consider a study of classical Athenian democracy which investigates how the governance model of the city-state flourished. The work suggests that exceptional knowledge management, i.e., making information available for socially productive purposes, played a crucial role in sustaining its democracy for nearly 200 years, by creating processes for aggregation, alignment, and codification of knowledge. We therefore examine the proposition that some properties can be generalised to resolve the rule-restriction dilemma by establishing a set of design principles intended to make knowledge management processes open, inclusive, transparent, and effective in self-governed social technical systems. We operationalise three of these principles in the context of a collective action situation, namely self-organised common-pool resource allocation, and present the results of a series of experiments showing how knowledge management processes can be used to obtain robust solutions for the perception of fairness, allocation decision, and punishment mechanisms. By applying this operationalisation of the design principles for knowledge management processes as a complement to institutional approaches to governance, we demonstrate empirically how it can satisfice shared values, distribute power fairly, and apply “common sense” in dealing with rule violations. We conclude by arguing that this approach to the design of socio-technical systems can provide a balance between restricted and unrestricted self-modification of conventional rules, and can thus provide the foundations for sustainable and democratic self-governance in socio-technical systems.

The Ghost in the Constitution offers a reflection on the political use of the concept of historical memory foregrounding the case of Spain. The book analyses the philosophical implications of the transference of the notion of memory from the individual consciousness to the collective subject and considers the conflation of epistemology with ethics.

Time preferences may explain public opinion about a wide range of long-term policy problems whose costs and benefits will be realized in the distant future. However, mass publics may discount these costs and benefits because they are later or because they are more uncertain. Standard methods to elicit individual-level time preferences tend to conflate attitudes toward risk and time and are susceptible to social desirability bias. A potential solution relies on a costly lab-experimental method, convex time budgets (CTB). We present and experimentally validate an affordable version of this approach for implementation in mass surveys. We find that the theoretically preferred CTB patience measure predicts attitudes toward a local, delayed investment problem but fails to predict support for more complex, future-oriented policies. These results have implications for studying the mass politics of dynamic policy problems.

An introduction to the new area of ignorance studies that examines how science produces ignorance—both actively and passively, intentionally and unintentionally.

Edited by Sarah Ogilvie and Gabriella Safran

• Advances new arguments and theories about the development of lexicography and how changes in the nineteenth century resonate today
• Covers a wide range of languages, and represents the first time some of these dictionaries have been addressed by academic scholarship
• Draws on unpublished and archival material not previously analyzed in the literature

Dans ce travail d'ethnographie urbaine qui la conduit de San Francisco à la Silicon Valley, de Los Angeles à San Diego, Marie-Pierre Ulloa se penche sur les diasporas maghrébines qui se sont installées en Californie.

En croisant des voix de différents genres, classes sociales et générations, elle montre comment les Maghrébins vivent le rêve américain dans cet Extrême-Occident qu'est la Californie. Loin des stigmatisations liées au lourd héritage colonial entre la France et l'Afrique du Nord...

À partir d'une centaine d'entretiens et d'une enquête de terrain allant des mosquées aux salles de concerts, des locaux d'associations aux jardins d'enfants, des festivals aux restaurants " ethniques ", Marie-Pierre Ulloa éclaire la construction d'une maghrébinité californienne différente de celle des populations d'origine nord-africaine en France.

En son sein sont aussi pris en compte les Juifs d'Afrique du Nord qui s'en distinguent, tout en s'y incluant. Outre la gastronomie, ce qui unifie ces populations, c'est la langue française, leur lingua franca avec l'anglais. Sans faire preuve d'angélisme, la vision offerte dans cet ouvrage est celle d'une intégration réussie, sans pour autant occulter les ratés du rêve américain.