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Recent reforms in welfare states generate new challenges to social citizenship. Social citizenship depends on the readiness of voters to support reciprocity and social inclusion and their trust in welfare state institutions as services that will meet their needs. Reform programmes in most western countries combine New Public Management, linking market competition and regulation by targets to achieve greater efficiency and responsiveness to service-users, and welfare-to-work and make-work-pay activation policies to manage labour market change. Both developments rest on a rational actor approach to human motivation. The UK has pursued the reform programme with more vigour than any other major European country and provides a useful object less of its strengths and limitations. The book provides a detailed analytic account of social science approaches to agency. It shows that the rational actor approach has difficulties in explaining how social inclusion and social trust arise. Policies based on it provide weak support for these aspects of citizenship. It is attractive to policy-makers seeking solutions to the problem of improving the efficiency and responsiveness of welfare systems in a more globalised world, in which citizens are more critical and the authority of national governments is in decline. Recent reform programmes were undertaken to meet real pressures on existing patterns of provision. They have been largely successful in maintaining mass services but risk undermining social inclusion and eroding trust in public welfare institutions. In the longer term, they may destroy the social citizenship essential to sustain welfare states.

Life at the beginning of the 21st century is something the social theory of the last century would have found hard to explain. Science, capitalism, and politics are pervasive and powerful in the everyday lives of ever-expanding layers of the world’s population. But so is religion. This book is an attempt to let “everyday religion” raise critical questions about how we understand the role of religion in society. We take pluralism and choice as givens, for instance, but we find “rational choice” theories too thin to explain the religious expressions we document. We look for religion in both “private” and “public” spaces, and ask about the social circumstances of religion’s presence and absence. In the end, we find that no simple theory of secularization or revival can explain how modern religious lives unfold.

The humanity formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative demands that we treat humanity as an end in itself. Because this principle resonates with currently influential ideals of human rights and dignity, contemporary readers often find it compelling, even if the rest of Kant’s moral philosophy leaves them cold. Moreover, some prominent specialists in Kant’s ethics recently have turned to the humanity formulation as the most theoretically central and promising principle of Kant’s ethics. Nevertheless, despite the intuitive appeal and the increasingly recognized philosophical importance of the humanity formulation, it has received less attention than many other, less central, aspects of Kant’s ethics. This book is the most sustained and systematic examination yet of the humanity formulation. It argues that the ‘rational nature’ that must be treated as an end in itself is not a minimally rational nature consisting of the power to set ends or the unrealized capacity to act morally, but instead is the more properly rational nature possessed by someone who gives priority to moral principles over any contrary impulses. In other words, good will is the end in itself. This non-standard reading of the humanity formulation provides a firm theoretical foundation for deriving plausible approaches to particular moral issues. Contrary to first impressions, it does not impose moralistic demands to pass judgment on others’ character. This reading of the humanity formulation also enables progress on problems of interest to Kant scholars such as reconstructing Kant’s argument for accepting the humanity formulation as a basic moral principle, and allows for increased understanding of the relationship between Kant’s ethics and supposedly Kantian ideas such as ‘respect for autonomy’.

Illustrates relational approaches to the study of social movements and collective action. Contributors analyse most recent developments in the analysis of the role of networks as facilitators or constraints of individual recruitment, various forms of interorganizational networks, and the relationship between social networks and the political context in which social movements operate. They also relate the growing attention to social networks by social movement analysis to broader theoretical debates. Both quantitative and qualitative network analysis are considered, and attention is paid to the time dimension and the evolution of networks, through both simulation models and empirical data. Empirical chapters cover both contemporary and historical episodes of collective action, in reference to authoritarian as well as progressive, left‐libertarian movements. Chapters focusing on individual networks specify different effects of network embeddedness over participation in different types of collective action (Passy, Anheier). Interorganizational relations are explored by looking at leadership dynamics (Diani), the relationship between categorical traits and network position within coalitions (Ansell), and the role of individuals in linking different organizations both synchronically and diachronically (Osa). Network approaches to the political process illustrate shifts in alliance and conflict networks at a time of regime change (Tilly and Wood), the evolution of social networks during protest cycles (Oliver and Myers), and the role of local elites in shaping protest networks in the community (Broadbent). Theoretical chapters discuss network perspectives on social movements in relation to recent theoretical developments in rational choice theory (Gould), cultural analysis (Mische), and the analysis of social mechanisms (McAdam). A radical case is also made for a reorientation of the whole social movement agenda along network lines (Diani).

This book attempts to answer the challenge of showing that morality is not a confidence trick or a fetish. It does so by arguing that moral norms are those that rational, self‐interested people could accept. The problem is approached by asking by what right some people punish others, and by comparing recent developments in theories of distributive and retributive justice. The first part of the book considers retributive, utilitarian, and mixed theories of punishment. In the second part, recent theories of distributive justice, especially those of Rawls and Gauthier, are examined. It is argued that these theories cannot give an adequate account of punishment. In the final part, an argument is offered for a genuinely constructivist account of morality—constructivist in that it rejects any idea of objective, mind‐independent moral values and seeks instead to construct morality from non‐moral human concerns; genuinely constructivist in that, in contrast to Rawls, it does not take as a premise the equal moral worth of persons. The conclusion is that a genuine constructivism will show the need for, and justification of, punishment as intrinsic to morality itself.

In a world where natural selection has shaped adaptations of astonishing ingenuity, what is the scope and unique power of rational thinking? This book looks at the twin set of issues surrounding the power of natural selection to mimic rational design, and rational thinking as itself a product of natural selection. While we commonly deem ourselves superior to other species, the logic of natural selection should not lead us to expect that nature does everything for the best. Similarly, rational action does not always promote the best possible outcomes. So what is the difference? Is the pursuit of rationality actually an effective strategy? Part of the answer lies in language, including mathematics and science. Language is the most striking device by which we have made ourselves smarter than our nearest primate cousins. Sometimes the purely instinctual responses we share with other animals put explicit reasoning to shame: the movements of a trained athlete are faster and more accurate than anything she could explicitly calculate. Language, however, with its power to abstract from concrete experience and to range over all aspects of nature, enables breathtakingly precise calculations, which have taken us to the moon and beyond. Most importantly, however, language enables us to formulate an endless multiplicity of values, in potential conflict with one another as well as with instinctual imperatives. This book shows how our rationality and our irrationality are inextricably intertwined. It explores the true ramifications of being human in the natural world.

This book presents a study of Hegel's hugely influential but notoriously difficult Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel describes the method of this work as a ‘way of despair’, meaning that the reader who undertakes its inquiry must be open to the experience of self-loss through it. Whereas the existential dimension of Hegel's work has often been either ignored or regarded as romantic ornamentation, this book argues that it belongs centrally to Hegel's attempt to fulfil a demanding epistemological ambition. With his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant expressed a new epistemological demand with respect to rational knowledge and presented a new method for meeting this demand. This book reconstructs Hegel's objection to Kant's Critical Philosophy, according to which Kant's way of meeting the epistemological demand of philosophical critique presupposes subjectivism, that is, presupposes the restriction of our knowledge to things as they are merely for us. Whereas Hegel in his early Jena writings rejects Kant's critical project altogether on this basis, he comes to see that the epistemological demand expressed in Kant's project must be met. This book argues that Hegel's method in the Phenomenology of Spirit takes shape as his attempt to meet the epistemological demand of Kantian critique without presupposing subjectivism. The key to Hegel's transformation of Kant's critical procedure, by virtue of which subjectivism is to be avoided, is precisely the existential or self-transformational dimension of Hegel's criticism, the openness of the criticizing subject to being transformed through the epistemological procedure.

Recent Western thought has consistently emphasized the individualistic strand in our understanding of persons at the expense of the social strand. Thus, it is generally thought that persons are self-determining and autonomous, where these are understood to be capacities we exercise most fully on our own, apart from others, whose influence on us tends to undermine that autonomy. This book argues that we must reject a strongly individualistic conception of persons if we are to make sense of significant interpersonal relationships and the importance they can have in our lives. It presents a new account of love as intimate identification and of friendship as a kind of plural agency, in each case grounding and analyzing these notions in terms of interpersonal emotions. At the centre of this account is an analysis of how our emotional connectedness with others is essential to our very capacities for autonomy and self-determination: we are rational and autonomous only because of and through our inherently social nature. By focusing on the role that relationships of love and friendship have, both in the initial formation of our selves and in the on-going development and maturation of adult persons, the book significantly alters our understanding of persons and the kind of psychology we persons have as moral and social beings.

The concept of rationality is a common thread through the human and social sciences — from political science to philosophy, from economics to sociology, from management science to decision analysis. But what counts as rational action and rational behavior? This book explores decision theory as a theory of rationality. Decision theory is the mathematical theory of choice and for many social scientists it makes the concept of rationality mathematically tractable and scientifically legitimate. Yet rationality is a concept with several dimensions and the theory of rationality has different roles to play. It plays an action-guiding role (prescribing what counts as a rational solution of a given decision problem). It plays a normative role (giving us the tools to pass judgment not just on how a decision problem was solved, but also on how it was set up in the first place). And it plays a predictive/explanatory role (telling us how rational agents will behave, or why they did what they did). This book shows, first, that decision theory cannot play all of these roles simultaneously and, second, that no theory of rationality can play one role without playing the other two. The conclusion is that there is no hope of taking decision theory as a theory of rationality.

Human beings are both supremely rational and deeply superstitious, capable of believing just about anything and of questioning just about everything. Indeed, just as our reason demands that we know the truth, our skepticism leads to doubts we can ever really do so. This book guides us through a contradiction that lies at the very heart of philosophical inquiry. The book argues that our rational faculties insist on a purely rational account of the universe; yet at the same time, the inherent limitations of these faculties ensure that we will never fully satisfy that demand. As a result of being driven to this point of paradox, we either comfort ourselves with what Kant called “metaphysical illusions” or adopt a stance of radical skepticism. No middle ground seems possible and, as the book shows, skepticism, even though a healthy dose of it is essential for living a rational life, “has an inherent tendency to become unlimited in its scope, with the result that the edifice of rationality is destroyed.” In much Postmodernist thought, for example, skepticism takes the extreme form of absolute relativism, denying the basis for any value distinctions and treating all truth-claims as equally groundless. How reason avoids disgracing itself, walking a fine line between dogmatic belief and self-defeating doubt, is the question the book seeks to answer.

Relying on the existence, in a complete market, of a pricing kernel, this book covers the pricing of assets, derivatives, and bonds in a discrete time, complete markets framework. It is primarily aimed at advanced Masters and PhD students in finance. Topics covered include CAPM, non-marketable background risks, European-style contingent claims as in Black–Scholes and in cases where risk-neutral valuation relationship does not exist, multi-period asset pricing under rational expectations, forward and futures contracts on assets and derivatives, and bond pricing under stochastic interest rates. All the proofs, including a discrete time proof of the Libor market model, are shown explicitly.