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For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. This pioneering book makes the case for considering the People as an ocular entity rather than a vocal one, arguing that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see, instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say. The Eyes of the People examines democracy from the perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it is customary to understand the citizen as a decision maker, most citizens in fact rarely engage in decision making and do not even have clear views on most political issues. The ordinary citizen is not a decision maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually experienced by most people most of the time. In approaching democracy from the perspective of the People's eyes, the book rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten “plebiscitarian” alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off the contributions of a wide range of thinkers — including Aristotle, Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others — it outlines a novel democratic paradigm, centered on empowering the People's gaze through forcing politicians to appear in public under conditions they do not fully control.

This book follows the flow of economic thinking from ancient times by observing how moral issues impacted economic ideas and social organization. Over the centuries, thinkers such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas emphasized what was right and good more than the pursuit of social efficiency. That changed when scientific methods no longer required moral considerations and economics adopted a values-free scientific methodology. A positive-normative dichotomy has served the profession well in many ways, but there have been voices arguing for a more values-oriented approach to the discipline. Now microeconomics is facing many new challenges as the complications of interdependence increase and behavioral, neurobiological, and other interdisciplinary perspectives need to be addressed. The search to understand and explain behavior is pushing the discipline to enlarge its methodology beyond the standard instrumental prediction goals. This complicates analysis as multiple motivations for behavior are considered and interest in the formation of utility functions begins to creep into economic consciousness again. Moral reflection is relevant as game theory, cooperation models, and theories of trust enter into the discussion. Psychological tendencies and institutional changes involve reference to the moral life as essential for social coordination. The final chapter offers an interdisciplinary framework to incorporate values more directly into economic methods by building on the human passions as discussed by Adam Smith and the behavioral instincts described by Thorstein Veblen. This enlarges the scope of economic actors beyond the homo economicus model without abandoning some of the valuable features of that model.

This book examines both the social and the political history of slavery. James Polk — President of the United States from 1845 to 1849 — owned a Mississippi cotton plantation with about fifty slaves. Drawing upon previously unexplored records, this book recreates the world of Polk's Mississippi plantation and the personal histories of his slaves, in what is arguably the most careful and vivid account to date of how slavery functioned on a single cotton plantation. Life at the Polk estate was brutal and often short. Fewer than one in two slave children lived to the age of fifteen, a child mortality rate even higher than that on the average plantation. A steady stream of slaves temporarily fled the plantation throughout Polk's tenure as absentee slavemaster. Yet Polk was in some respects an enlightened owner, instituting an unusual incentive plan for his slaves and granting extensive privileges to his most favored slave. By contrast with Senator John C. Calhoun, President Polk has been seen as a moderate Southern Democratic leader. But this book suggests that the president's political stance toward slavery — influenced as it was by his deep personal involvement in the plantation system — may actually have helped to precipitate the Civil War that Polk sought to avoid.

There are three essential differences between this book and most others in the field of ethics. First, instead of focusing on specific issues, it focuses on the process of ethical decision-making. Second, instead of writing for a specific profession, it is written for all mental health professionals working in elementary and secondary schools. Finally, most other books on ethics assume that they are writing for the individual ethical agent, it argues that the best ethical decisions are made in collaboration with others. The books examines a seven-step process for resolving difficult ethical dilemmas in schools: (i) knowing yourself and your professional responsibilities, (ii) analyzing the predicament, (iii) seeking consultation, (iv) identifying courses of action, (v) managing clinical concerns, (vi) implementing the decision, and (vii) reflecting on the process. Each chapter contains real-life scenarios based on real practice or actual cases in the public domain, ethical guidelines for addressing key points, exercises, and relevant internet sites.

Social security systems are being reviewed and changed in many countries around the world. This book considers some of the key policy issues for design of a social security reform, as well as reviewing much of the academic literature on the positive and normative aspects of social security. The first chapter provides an examination of key policy issues of general concern includes the funding of social security, the comparison of defined benefit and defined contribution systems, notional defined contribution accounts, alternative approaches to organizing individual defined contribution accounts, and the provision of survivor benefits. The book then turns to the academic literature on the interactions between social security and the labor and capital markets, providing a non-technical overview of the existing literature and pointing-out gaps in current research findings. The second chapter reviews the impact on retirement decisions of forced savings, the use of an earnings or retirement test, mandated annuitization, recognizing heterogeneity in both life expectancy and possibly in risk classification for annuity pricing, and treatment of the family, particularly the use of joint-life annuitization. Also reviewed is the impact on labor supply at younger ages, considering mandatory savings and annuitization, contrasting defined benefit and defined contribution systems, and analysing alternative approaches to redistribution within social security. The final chapter covers issues of aggregate capital accumulation and risk-sharing, with the latter including the risks in annuitization, in the returns to capital, and in aggregate earnings. Also considered are the risks in the political process.

Is truth objective or relative? What exists independently of our minds? This book is about these two questions. The essays in its pages variously defend and critique answers to each, grapple over the proper methodology for addressing them, and wonder whether either question is worth pursuing. In so doing, they carry on a long and esteemed tradition – for our two questions are among the oldest of philosophical issues, and have vexed almost every major philosopher, from Plato, to Kant to Wittgenstein. Fifteen contributors bring fresh perspectives, renewed energy and original answers to debates that have been the focus of a tremendous amount of interest in the last three decades, both within philosophy and the culture at large.

In How Women Represent Women: Political Parties, Gender and Representation in the State Legislatures, Tracy Osborn examines two avenues through which political parties fundamentally affect how women legislators represent women by creating women’s issues policies. First, women’s party identities shape the types of policy alternatives they offer to solve women’s policy problems. Second, parties organize the legislative process by holding majority control, to varying degrees, over agenda setting and policy creation, promoting some women legislators’ policy proposals over others. Osborn tests these two avenues of influence by comparing partisan women’s legislative behavior toward the creation of women’s issues policies across different party environments in the U.S. state legislatures. She uses original election, sponsorship, and roll call data in nearly all ninety-nine state legislative chambers in 1999-2000. She concludes that Republican and Democratic women offer different solutions to women’s policy problems based in their party identities. Depending on which party controls the legislative process and how strongly they do so, this party control promotes one set of partisan policy alternatives over the other. Thus, political parties determine which women’s issues policies become law. Ultimately, this book demonstrates how essential parties are to understanding how women elected to public office translate their interest in women’s issues into substantive public policy.

Some 80,000 British children – many of them under the age of ten – were shipped from Britain to Canada by Poor Law authorities and voluntary bodies during the fifty years following Confederation in 1867. How did this come about? What were the motives and methods of the people involved in both countries? Why did it come to an end? What effects did it have on the children involved and what eventually became of them? These are the questions explored in this book, which brings together economic, political, social, medical, legal, administrative, and religious aspects of the story in Britain and Canada. The author concludes with a review of evidence from more-recent survivors of child migration, discussing the lifelong effects of their experiences with the help of modern psychological insights. The book features the relatives and descendants, both in Britain and Canada, of the children around whom this study revolves.

Here, readers will find an overview of adolescent health issues and step-by-step prevention and intervention guidance. This Concise Companion covers major health issues that affect students' well being — from substance abuse to STDs to obesity — and presents strategies to improve student health by addressing risky behaviors. Each chapter is filled with charts, checklists and cases, organized around What We Know, What We Can Do, Tools and Practice Examples, and Key Points to Remember.