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In this final chapter of Part Two, the author addresses arguably the central stumbling block for those who would enlarge international society to incorporate elements of world society, alternative levels of analysis, and subject matters: namely, the problem of order. He argues that a concern with order, in its methodological, theoretical, and empirical guises, is the principal feature of the understanding of international society by the English School of International Relations. While order may endorse methodological pluralism, the author argues that the approach does not embrace it and has powerful canons that structure its work, one being the requirement that to count as valid knowledge about international society, a piece of work must begin by referring to the established fathers of the tradition. This preoccupation with order carries over into the empirical and theoretical work conducted by those associated with the School, and the author attempts to critique this by challenging the assumption, central to English School theorizing since Henry Bull, that a degree of order is necessary for the achievement of social goods. Instead, he argues that an over‐preoccupation with order can serve the cause of oppression, and therefore insists that progressive change tends to come about through periods of disorder.

People split their time between living in the real world of everyday life and the mental world of self-thought that they create in their own minds. This chapter explores the nature of self-awareness, beginning with the question of “who is talking to whom” when people talk to themselves inside their own heads (self-talk). It then examines the negative consequences of living in one's own mind for social interactions, performance on mental and physical tasks, and decision-making. Topics covered include self-preoccupation, choking under pressure, insomnia, sexual problems, and interference with spontaneity, intuition, and flow. The chapter concludes with a discussion of meditation, which has been shown to quiet the self, reduce self-preoccupation, and help people to live more fully in the real world.

This book investigated the richness and the implicit gendering of ethical possibility in Chaucer’s writing as he negotiates the uneven Stoic-Christian territory of ethics. The overall position that emerges is that Chaucer especially articulates the sometimes comic, but also melancholy, contrast between ethical ideals of self-control and prudential contentment on one hand, and violence and uncontained passion on the other. After touching on various possible ways of explaining and historicizing this, the conclusion finds most plausible the suggestion that Chaucer’s ethical preoccupation was a way of expressing disquiet at the divisions and wreckage unleashed through English society in the 1380s.

This chapter describes how four men of different religious views and temperaments, Charles Kingsley, Edward Bouverie Pusey, Frederick W. Faber, and John Henry Newman, could define the Virgin Mary in such a way that they could construct a masculine self-identity in opposition to, or in conjunction with, the woman they envisioned. Individually these men offer proof that, while religious differences allowed the Marian debates to occur, the debates would not have been possible without the Victorian preoccupation with defining either gender as distinct from the other. They and the other Victorians whose voices are heard in this chapter show us that a Virgin Mary who was a source of controversy reveals far more about Victorian culture than does the passive model of domesticity scholars have assumed her to be.

This chapter discusses the recollection of both personal reminiscences and intertextual memories. It reveals that the moment of the “necessity” has been one of Beckett's major preoccupations throughout his career. Edgar Allan Poe advised the dismissmal of the necessity that prompted the act of composing, but in Beckett's case, it was the author himself who never stopped looking for the sources of this necessity.

Drawing on symbolic interactionism and social constructionism, the final chapter reexamines the biomedicalization of memory loss and sociological illness narratives. Since there is nothing intrinsic to the feelings expressed by these respondents that necessarily and inevitably leads to a definition of forgetfulness as a disease, the chapter contemplates how our current preoccupation with memory loss and its construction as a medical problem shape experiences of Alzheimer’s, the values of society members not directly affected by the condition, and our overarching cultural views on aging. Given the central place of memory in the lives of (many) Americans in modern times, this book asks readers to consider whether or not memory loss being seen primarily (or exclusively) as a medical problem is good for seniors (with or without reports of memory loss), is good for any of us as we ourselves are aging, and is good for society at large.

This chapter explores Emersonian Moral Perfectionism (EMP). It examines Cavell's interpretation of EMP and discusses Dewey's text in which he echoes the Emersonian voice. It shows that the preoccupations that run through Cavell's discussion of EMP are, in fact, very close to Dewey's central concerns with democracy, education, and growth. The chapter concludes that EMP can constitute an alternative framework to reevaluate Dewey beyond Hegel and Darwin.

The introduction opens with a reading of Italo Calvino’s poignant short story “All at One Point.” It relies on statistical data, sociological studies, and historical facts to address the connections between emigration from Italy and immigration to Italy, as well as Italian colonialism in Africa and the Mediterranean, and its postcolonial legacy. This intersection prompts a re-mapping of the Italian nation and poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. The introduction explains the application of theories of space by de Certeau, Lefebvre, and Soja to the trans-national dimension of the Italian nation and highlights the main goals of the book. The introduction offers a fairly comprehensive survey of the fields that the book is in dialogue with by positioning itself vis-à-vis previous publications and also functions as an overview. It highlights the double approach of the book which is, on one hand to focus on texts that address both emigration and immigration or colonialism in conjunction; and, on the other, to connect texts that can be fruitfully read in tandem in order to create historical and cultural reverberations.

Part III (Workplaces) shifts attention to the theme of occupation in terms of working in a space and re-maps Italy along the routes of its outbound and inbound migrations. Of all the numerous job sectors related to Italian emigration abroad and foreign immigrants in Italy, two are chosen for their specific relevance in the historical and contemporary scenario: construction labor and domestic help. The Aperture introduces the topic through texts that focus on bricklayers (Gianni Rodari’s nursery rhymes from Favole al telefono) and baby-sitters (Gabriella Kuruvilla’s children’s story Questa non è una baby-sitter). The apparently light tone of these texts written for a young readership conceals a very subtle discussion of the abusive work conditions and prejudices that migrants face on construction sites and in domestic environments, and to which they react thanks to their ability to endure and question.

This chapter shows how the current exploitation of foreign immigrant workers in the construction sector in Italy today is not dissimilar from the experiences that Italian emigrants encountered some years ago: Mariana Adascalitei’s Romanian protagonists in her yet unpublished novella “Il giorno di San Nicola” are quite reminiscent of François Cavanna’s Italian bricklayers in France, as recounted in his 1978 novel Les Ritals.The chapter investigates the tension at work between ambitions of personal improvement and the dangers and invisibility intrinsic to construction sites, one of the most common workplaces for Italian male immigrants abroad in the past and for foreign male immigrants in Italy today.

The chapter explores the connection between emigration and immigration through a combined reading of texts where demographic movements are defined by colonial routes: Renata Ciaravino’s script for the 2005 play Alexandria directed by Franco Però about adventurous women from the Friuli region who emigrated to Egypt in the 1920s to work as wet nurses and maids anticipates the silent yet profoundly important role of today’s domestic helpers and caretakers in Italy as portrayed by Gabriella Ghermandi’s colonial/post-colonial “The Story of Woizero Bekelech and Signor Antonio,” included in her 2007 novel Regina di fiori e di perle. The two texts highlight the forms of emancipation that women migrants develop as part of relocations abroad as well as the forms of awareness about colonial power relations that they prompt among locals.

This chapter describes Nathalie Sarraute's day-to-day life that was arranged around the basic existential necessity that “writing was always difficult, but not writing was worse.” It reveals how Nathalie kept a disciplined routine of writing every morning for two or three hours in a café five minutes' walk away from home and kept domestic preoccupations and family responsibilities to a minimum. It also discloses how Natalie voiced every word in a low murmuring that went unnoticed in the surrounding hubbub and wrote slowly, which resulted to repeated corrections. The chapter emphasizes how Nathalie's books would take written shape only after pages and pages of fairly formless attempts and the beginning of the story in place for the rest to follow. It details Nathalie's writing process that would take about two years, after which she would revise exhaustively, before giving her manuscript to her husband to be typed.

Ainslie’s picoeconomics of gambling provides the basis for a case study of the way in which mentalistic and neuroscientific models of behaviour can be used to complement one another in furnishing relatively complete explanations. Ainslie’s model explains the complex ambivalence experienced and reported by addicts. However, this ambivalence is also experienced, with respect to certain consumption targets by non-addicts. Attention to the neurocellular dynamics of addictive choice is necessary to explain a further property of addiction, namely, preoccupation and crowding out of attention to alternative activities and objects of thought. All addicts suffer from overdrafts of willpower accounts in Ainslie’s sense; but not all people whose wills are bankrupt with respect to a consumption target are addicted to that target. Furthermore, deficits of willpower can cause addiction – but only to targets over which agents can exercise fine control of consumption intervals.

This chapter looks at the life of Robinson Crusoe and how he made things around him for his convenience and comfort. To Derrida, Robinson's situation brings up questions of autobiography and the world that would result from an analysis of Crusoe's creations or inventions. An autobiography is compared to the figure of a wheel where the self takes a detour but eventually returns to himself in the process of self-discovery. The main theme of Derrida in these terms is the impossibility of returning home, or the point of one's departure, or even the preoccupation of deconstruction. Deconstruction is even considered as the beginning of the reinvention of the wheel, the end of the circle of thinking to start and take on a new journey and new self-identity. He questions the importance of returning, circularity, and homecoming in “Violence and Metaphysics.” In the end, Derrida speaks that in returning, there is always iteration, original difference, and supplementarity because for every one turn of the wheel, there is always added another point of departure where one can start from.

This chapter analyses the narratives of men who worked in reserved occupations in Clydeside to explore wider aspects of their individual subjectivities other than gender. Areas of subjectivity examined include national identity (picking up from the discussion in Chapter 3 and looking at men of non-British or Scottish nationality), class consciousness and political identity, religion and social activities. This chapter widens the picture of how men in reserved occupations experienced the war, arguing that male reserved workers were aware of ‘imagined’ collective subjectivity on a national level, and that important similarities existed between the subjectivities of men who worked in different regions of Britain, particularly those with higher proportions of men working in reserved occupations. The chapter re-enforces the notion that the subjectivities of such men existed on different levels and reflected to varying degrees the concepts of ‘imagination’ and ‘living’, making clear that the subjectivities of male civilian workers in wartime Clydeside comprised different national, ethnic, religious, class and political attributes, all integral and important to reserved men before, during and after the Second World War. Arguably, however, men were often aware of these integral aspects of their subjectivities on an ‘imagined’ level, and many aspects of them were superseded by a pre-occupation with everyday living, also continuous and fundamentally unchanged by wartime. In arguing for the continuity of different ‘imagined’ and ‘lived’ forms of subjectivity among men in reserved occupations in wartime Clydeside, this chapter re-enforces the notion that, although integral to masculinity, temporary wartime ideals did not fundamentally change the masculine subjectivities of male civilian workers.

Emotional disorders in children with ADHD are often difficult to detect. The emotional problems that occur in children with ADHD fall into three categories: emotional characteristics of ADHD (low frustration tolerance, preoccupation, thrill-seeking, dysthymia, and overexcitability), reactive emotions to having ADHD, and coexisting emotional disorders (depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder). Inefficient inhibitory processes in the brain are the basis of these emotional difficulties. It is essential to be aware of the frequent occurrence of emotional disorders in children with ADHD. This chapter discusses emotional disorders in ADHD, including the emotional characteristics of ADHD, reactive emotions, and coexisting emotional disorders.

The gun control debate is often cast as if there were two options: we either have it or we don’t. This is a mistake. Our real options lie along five different, albeit overlapping, continua. The first three concern public policy: who should be permitted to have which firearms, and how should we regulate the guns we permit people to have. The fourth and fifth continua concern prudential and moral judgments: whether it would be wise or moral for people to own firearms independently of the how we answer the policy questions. I outline the history of firearms from their inception into the early twentieth century. I explain when and where they were initially used, how they were refined and developed, and why they played a special role in the history of the United States. This history isolates three key facts about firearms that inform the gun control debate.