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This chapter reviews property law theory and its literature that aims to show how developments in general property theory may be relevant for energy and natural resources. It focuses on liberal Western understandings of property, and primarily those within the common law tradition. The chapter is organized as follows. Section I takes a broad look at the literature addressing the question of ‘what is property?’ and the issues raised by that question. It discusses a number of conceptualist and instrumentalist approaches to the matter of definition, looks briefly at the issue of commodification, and examines the literature on the categories of property. It concludes with a consideration of the numerous clauses principle. Section II addresses the problem of justifying property, or at least private property. It outlines the various explanations, dividing them into four types: the labour, desert, first possession (or occupation), and economic theories; personhood theories; liberty-based theories; and pluralist theories. It then looks at explanations for the movement of property from one category to another. The section concludes with a study of the justifications for (private) property as applied to the issue of expropriation.

Annual special issues of Scientific American enabled the public to learn about a scientific topic and sometimes to see that scientific knowledge was provisional, the subject of dispute within the profession itself. Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island responds to the divisions about nuclear energy revealed in two special issues on energy and ecology. The chapter offers a detailed close reading of George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” in the context of a special issue of Scientific American on the city. Whether or not Oppen read the magazine, he responded to current debates among social scientists about how to solve the problems of the metropolis, especially their use of the calculative rationality that Heidegger deplored. In one article, Kevin Lynch claims that the city is a work of art. Oppen’s poem disagrees, and the chapter shows just how extensively he works to challenge the aesthetic vision of the city as art. The final section of the chapter places Amiri Baraka’s poem “Ka ‘Ba” in the context of the mostly liberal discussions of race science in Scientific American, and also discusses the wider debates about the persistence of eugenicist racial science in other scientific journals.

In the first chapter, Nancy addresses concepts of communism, community, and the common, outlining the significance of each of these terms and distinguishing his approach from other attempts to define the relation between these terms. Following a proposal to rethink community in terms of “number” by Jean-Christophe Bailly, the chapter approaches community in terms of “number” or “the numerous.” It is this term that allows one to understand community as a plurality rather than as commonality. The chapter outlines the circumstances in which Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community was written as a response Nancy’s essay “The Inoperative Community.” It also addresses how Blanchot’s response already invited further reflection on his exchange with Nancy, which is then taken up in The Disavowed Community.

The first epilogue considers a resonant phrase, “the bright light of shipwreck,” from George Oppen’s 1967 poem, “Of Being Numerous.” The second dives down after The Bookfish, a seventeenth-century illustration of a North Sea codfish with a tiny book in its belly, published and perhaps caught near Cambridge. The final epilogue, “Seven Shipwrecked Ecological Truths,” suggests directions for future inquiry and scholarship.

This chapter points out that in proposing to explore, as George Openn later puts it, the condition of ‘What it is’ rather than ‘That it is’, he opens the new serial poem, ‘Of Being Numerous’, from which his 1968 volume took its title. In his compilation, Oppen attempts to show ‘Man embedded in the sensory and the historic’. In line with this shift of focus, the volume is strongly marked by the political pressures of the time; the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 has opened what for Oppen was to be ‘a period of crisis’. This chapter also emphasizes that for Oppen, American culture is mired in ‘rootless speech’, language which has no relation to being and which betrays any sense of historical ‘continuation’.

This chapter states that George Oppen finished ‘Of Being Numerous’ early in 1966 and in mid-February of the following year the he and his wife moved to San Francisco, a relocation which would have a significant impact on the form and content of the poetry of his later years. The new volume appeared at the end of March 1968 and Oppen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in May of the following year. He was now 60 years old and a poet with a secure reputation, but none of this curbed his desire to reckon with the new youth culture around him. This chapter also confirms that while distaste for contemporary avant-gardism had made itself felt in ‘Of Being Numerous’, another event earlier in 1969 had incited Oppen to think through issues involved.

This chapter accounts for differences within the class of collective predicates, as exemplified by the contrast between all the students gathered and *all the students were numerous (Dowty 1987, Winter 2001), for the limited ability of all to take part in cumulative readings, and for its ability to license dependent plurals (Zweig 2009). Stratified reference is used to formulate meaning postulates that capture the fact that predicates like gather that give rise to distributive inferences to subgroups, and to formulate the semantics of all in terms of a subgroup distributivity requirement.

The characterization of yardstick competition elaborated in this chapter and adopted throughout the book starts from a distinctive critical assumption about the agency setting in which it operates. In this electoral agency setting, the principals are the individual members of large heterogeneous electorates or, more generally, large populations of citizens. Individual voters or citizens differ in how they interpret their role and incumbents can treat citizens’ response to their actions as a non-strategic aggregate relation between comparative performance and expected electoral support. The chapter goes on to show that the difficulties associated with this hypothesis are mitigated by the crucial assumption that voter response is not linear but S-shaped—the effects of insignificance, ambiguity, or confusion on the aggregate response tend to dissipate when differences in comparative performance get larger. The possibility is also acknowledged that in real-world settings, depending on circumstances, the mechanism may not work.