Through the work of leading African writers, artists, musicians and educators—from Nobel prizewinner Wole Soyinka to names hardly known outside their native lands—An African Voice describes the contributions of the humanities to the achievement of independence for the peoples of black Africa following the Second World War. While concentrating on cultural independence, these leading humanists also demonstrate the intimate connection between cultural freedom and genuine political economic liberty.

This novel approach to epistemological discourse explains the complex but crucial role that systematization plays-not just for the organization of what we know, but also for its validation. Cognitive Harmony argues for a new conception of the process philosophers generally call induction.

Relying on the root definition of harmony, a coherent unification of component parts (systemic integrity) in such a way that the final object can successfully accomplish what it was meant to do (evaluative positivity), Rescher discusses the role of harmony in cognitive contexts, the history of cognitive harmony, and the various features it has in producing human knowledge. The book ends on the issue of philosophy and the sort of harmony required of philosophical systems.

In Constitutional Revolutions Robert Justin Lipkin radically rethinks modern constitutional jurisprudence, challenging the traditional view of constitutional change as solely an extension or transformation of prior law. He instead argues for the idea of “constitutional revolutions”—landmark decisions that are revolutionary because they are not generated from legal precedent and because they occur when the Constitution fails to provide effective procedures for accommodating a needed change. According to Lipkin, U.S. constitutional law is driven by these revolutionary judgments that translate political and cultural attitudes into formal judicial decisions.
Drawing on ethical theory, philosophy of science, and constitutional theory, Lipkin provides a progressive, postmodern, and pragmatic theory of constitutional law that justifies the critical role played by the judiciary in American democracy. Judicial review, he claims, operates as a mechanism to allow “second thought,” or principled reflection, on the values of the wider culture. Without this revolutionary function, American democracy would be left without an effective institutional means to formulate the community’s considered judgments about good government and individual rights. Although judicial review is not the only forum for protecting this dimension of constitutional democracy, Lipkin maintains that we would be wise not to abandon judicial review unless a viable alternative emerges.
Judges, lawyers, law professors, and constitutional scholars will find this book a valuable resource.

After decades of marginalization in the secularized twentieth-century academy, moral education has enjoyed a recent resurgence in American higher education, with the establishment of more than 100 ethics centers and programs on campuses across the country. Yet the idea that the university has a civic responsibility to teach its undergraduate students ethics and morality has been met with skepticism, suspicion, and even outright rejection from both inside and outside the academy. In this collection, renowned scholars of philosophy, politics, and religion debate the role of ethics in the university, investigating whether universities should proactively cultivate morality and ethics, what teaching ethics entails, and what moral education should accomplish. The essays quickly open up to broader questions regarding the very purpose of a university education in modern society.

Editors Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben survey the history of ethics in higher education, then engage with provocative recent writings by Stanley Fish in which he argues that universities should not be involved in moral education. Stanley Hauerwas responds, offering a theological perspective on the university’s purpose. Contributors look at the place of politics in moral education; suggest that increasingly diverse, multicultural student bodies are resources for the teaching of ethics; and show how the debate over civic education in public grade-schools provides valuable lessons for higher education. Others reflect on the virtues and character traits that a moral education should foster in students—such as honesty, tolerance, and integrity—and the ways that ethical training formally and informally happens on campuses today, from the classroom to the basketball court. Debating Moral Education is a critical contribution to the ongoing discussion of the role and evolution of ethics education in the modern liberal arts university.

Contributors. Lawrence Blum, Romand Coles, J. Peter Euben, Stanley Fish, Michael Allen Gillespie, Ruth W. Grant, Stanley Hauerwas, David A. Hoekema, Elizabeth Kiss, Patchen Markell, Susan Jane McWilliams, Wilson Carey McWilliams, J. Donald Moon, James Bernard Murphy, Noah Pickus, Julie A. Reuben, George Shulman, Elizabeth V. Spelman

Erotic Morality examines the role of the senses and the emotions, especially touch, in moral reflection and agency. Moving from organic disorders such as autism to culturally induced feeling disorders found in dualistic philosophy, pornography, and some forms of sadomasochism, Linda Holler argues that reclaiming the sentient awareness necessary to our physical and moral well-being demands healing the places where we have become numb or hypersensitive to touch. By considering ascetic practices designed to produce what Buddhists call mindfulness, Holler presents alternatives to destructive patterns of actions dictated by desensitivity and habitual conditioning.

"New theoretical propositions, original data, and rigorous empirical tests are what one looks for in cutting-edge social science. Fortunately, all three are apparent in Ethnic Cues. The author has pushed his thinking to develop new ways of understanding and explaining patterns of Latino voting behavior."
---Luis Ricardo Fraga, University of Washington, Seattle

"Matt Barreto investigates some of the ramifications of two new related developments in American political life: the stunning growth of the Latino immigrant population in recent decades and the accompanying exponential explosion in the number of Latino candidates running for political office at the local, state, and national levels."
---Reuel R. Rogers, Northwestern University

Until recently, much of the research on political participation has resisted the idea that Latino voters rely on ethnic cues. The discussion has become increasingly salient as political strategists have learned to define individual voting blocs and mobilize them in support of a candidate. Nourished by the debate over immigration, the search for the Latino voter has now blossomed into a national political obsession.

Against this background, Matt A. Barreto assays the influence of ethnic identification on Latinos' voting behavior. Barreto asks whether the presence of co-ethnic candidates actually does mobilize Latino voters in support of these candidates. His analysis of in-depth candidate interviews, public opinion surveys, official election results, and statistics finds that it does. He goes on to describe the dynamic of voting in the Latino community and sharpens our appreciation of how ethnic considerations influence the electoral choices of Americans more generally. In a time of intensely focused campaign appeals, Barreto's work has much to tell us about the mechanics of public opinion and the role of race and ethnicity in voting behavior.

Matt A. Barreto is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington and Director of the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Sexuality (WISER).

Cover art credit: © iStockphoto.com/P_Wei

Dr. Harold Koenig was recently interviewed by Newsweek (November 10, 2003) about his book Spirituality in Patient Care (Templeton Foundation Press) and his research in the area of religion and health. He has become the international voice on the subjects of spirituality, health, and aging. In this book he is joined by two other experts on aging and human development. They present a compelling look at one of the most serious issues in today’s society: health care in America.

How will we provide quality healthcare to older adults who will need it during the next thirty to fifty years? Who will provide this care? How will it be funded? How can we establish systems of care now to be in place as demographic and health-related economic pressures mount?

Alongside the sobering reality of the challenges our country faces, there are reasons for optimism. Innovative programs created and maintained by volunteers and religious congregations are emerging as pivotal factors in meeting health care needs. Summarizing decades of scientific research and providing numerous inspirational examples and role models, the authors present practical steps that individuals and institutions may emulate for putting faith into action.

This book examines the effectiveness and deficiencies of judicial intervention in solving the problems of discrimination in the nation’s schools. The authors present case studies, surveys, and interviews of the lawyers and judges who participated in the leading cases. And they analyze critical issues that remain unresolved, such as the battle over racial desegregation that still rages in Yonkers, New York.

Kant scholars since the early nineteenth century have disaxadgreed about how to interpret his theory of moral motivation. Kant tells us that the feeling of respect is the incentive to moral action, but he is notoriously ambiguous on the question of what exactly this means. In Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action, Iain Morrisson offers a new view on Kant’s theory of moral action.

In a clear, straightforward style, Morrisson responds to the ongoing interpretive stalemate by taking an original approach to the problem. Whereas previous commentators have attempted to understand Kant’s feeling of respect by studying the relevant textual evidence in isolation, Morrisson illuminates this evidence by determining what Kant’s more general theory of action commits him to regarding moral action. After looking at how Kant’s treatment of desire and feeling can be reconciled with his famous account of free maxim-based action, Morrisson argues that respect moves us to moral action in a way that is structurally parallel to the way in which nonmoral pleasure motivates nonmoral action.

In reconstructing a unified theory of action in Kant, Morrisson integrates a number of distinct elements in his practical philosophy. Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action is part of a new wave of interest in Kant’s anthropological (that is, psychological) works.

In Many Gods and Many Voices distinguished scholar Louis L. Martz addresses works by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, H. D., and D. H. Lawrence, with brief treatment of the relation of Pound's Cantos to Joyce's Ulysses. In a graceful, lucid style, Martz argues that a prophetic tradition is represented in the Cantos, The Waste Land, Paterson, and H. D.'s Trilogy and Helen in Egypt, along with Lawrence's Plumed Serpent and the second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Pound's often- cited view that an epic is a poem that "includes history" does not define epic alone, for the books of biblical prophecy also contain history: the history of Israel's misdeeds and continuous redemption.

On the other hand, Martz suggests that the term prophecy should not be limited to works that foretell the future, arguing that the biblical prophet is concerned primarily with the present. The prophet is a reformer, a denouncer of evil, as well as a seer of possible redemption. He hears "voices" and transmits the message of those voices to his people, in the hope of moving them away from wickedness and toward the ways of truth. According to Martz, such was the mission that inspired Walt Whitman and that Whitman passed on to Pound, Eliot, Williams, and Lawrence. (H. D. found her own sources of inspiration in Greek and Egyptian lore.)

Martz's premise is that biblical prophecy, with its mingling of poetry and prose, its abrupt shifts from violent denunciation to exalted poetry, provides a precedent for the texture of these modernist works that will help readers to appreciate the mingling of "voices" and the complex mixture of elements. Examining their interrelationships and their common themes, Many Gods and Many Voices offers fresh insights into these modern writers.

The recent wave of immigration into this country has given rise to myriad concerns—from the worries about the impact of immigration on the nation's economy to questions about whether multilingual education should be used in public schools. The resulting debates have overshadowed some very good news: this influx of New Immigrants has resulted in an astonishing rebirth of many of our older, decaying cities. Nowhere has this demographic renewal been more apparent than in New York City, as Louis Winnick demonstrates in New People in Old Neighborhoods, a timely and perceptive study of the effects of immigration in Brooklyn's Sunset Park. Sunset Park was born of the late nineteenth century flood of immigrants who developed a prosperous waterfront commerce; by the end of World War I the community had achieved a thriving maturity. Yet the decades following World War II brought about a period of urban decay lifted only by the post-1965 influx of more than 20,000 immigrants, most notably from Asia and the Caribbean Basin. These New Immigrants not only revived the dying community but enriched it with greater ethnic diversity than it had ever known. Winnick combines data on ethnic change and living patterns with data on employment, housing, school enrollment, and subway ridership to study the revitalization of Sunset Park. He discusses the ethnic composition and characteristics of the new immigrants; trends in self-employment and entrepreneurship ("microcapitalism"); immigrant impact upon retailing, manufacturing, and the lower echelons of the service industries; skill and education levels; and presence in the professions. Winnick also discusses the immigrants' positive effect on faltering New York systems, such as the subways and public schools, and places immigrant renewal within the larger context of overall housing and economic regeneration in New York City. New People in Old Neighborhoods views today's immigrants as the historic heirs to the community builders of the last century, and offers important insights into the often-troubled yet transforming relationship between the nation and its foreign-born population. The future of these immigrants will be a yardstick to measure the quality and performance of our cities and their neighborhoods in the years ahead.

Mixed-race Asian American plays are often overlooked for their failure to fit smoothly into static racial categories, rendering mixed-race drama inconsequential in conversations about race and performance. Since the nineteenth century, however, these plays have long advocated for the social significance of multiracial Asian people.
 
Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Experience in American Drama traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and explores the ways that mixed-race Asian identity transforms our understanding of race. Mixed-Asian playwrights harness theater’s generative power to enact performances of “double liminality” and expose the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.

More than any other art form, literature defined Eastern Europe as a cultural and political entity in the second half of the twentieth century. Although often persecuted by the state, East European writers formed what was frequently recognized to be a "second government," and their voices were heard and revered inside and outside the borders of their countries. This study by one of our most influential specialists on Eastern Europe considers the effects of the end of communism on such writers.

According to Andrew Baruch Wachtel, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of fledgling societies in Eastern Europe brought an end to the conditions that put the region's writers on a pedestal. In the euphoria that accompanied democracy and free markets, writers were liberated from the burden of grandiose political expectations. But no group is happy to lose its influence: despite recognizing that their exalted social position was related to their reputation for challenging political oppression, such writers have worked hard to retain their status, inventing a series of new strategies for this purpose. Remaining Relevant after Communism considers these strategies—from pulp fiction to public service—documenting what has happened on the East European scene since 1989.

The international flow of long-term private capital has increased dramatically in the 1990s. In fact, many policymakers now consider private foreign capital to be an essential resource for the acceleration of economic growth. This volume focuses attention on the microeconomic determinants and effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the East Asian region, allowing researchers to explore the overall structure of FDI, to offer case studies of individual countries, and to consider their insights, both general and particular, within the context of current economic theory.

The Role of Government in the History of Economic Thought examines a controversial area of economic analysis: the appropriate role of government within the economic system. If the first two-thirds of the twentieth century were dominated by the active involvement of economists in government policymaking, blurring the lines between the spheres of economics and politics, then the last several decades have witnessed something of a reversion to the classical economics of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. This volume offers a comprehensive and integrated history of the evolution of the relationship between governments and economies, examining the British classical tradition, the American progressive movement, and corporatist ideology.

The Role of Islam in the Public Square tackles the critical role of religion in the development of democratic institutions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Constitutional debates, Abdulaziz Sachedina asserts, have yet to address the role of religious convictions alongside their citizens’ basic freedoms and rights. Sachedina argues that the way in which religious values are defined in Afghanistan and Iraq remains a major stumbling block, and that an inclusive sense of citizenship—one that transcends doctrinal and theological uniformity—is needed if democracy is to succeed in both countries.

This book is the first collection of essays to explore the changing relationships between war, media, and the public from a multidisciplinary perspective and over an extended historical period. It is also the first textbook for students in this field, discussing a wide range of theoretical concepts and methodological tools for analyzing the nature of these relationships. Shedding new light on conflicts spanning from World War I through the so-called War on Terror, the contributors explore the roles of traditional media, war blogs, and eyewitness reporting; of war correspondents and embedded journalism; and of propaganda, wartime public relations, and information warfare.

The conventional wisdom holds that the Supreme Court provides the final word—as the Court tells the people what the Constitution commands. In interpreting uncertain constitutional text, however, the Court is not provided with a single answer but must, itself, make hard choices. Such choices by an unelected Court appear to conflict with the basic principle of majority rule by the people through their elected representatives in our democracy. Over time, however, through public debate, new arguments before the Court, legislation, new appointments to the Court, and constitutional amendments, the Court's prior judgments evolve, are distinguished or modified, and are even directly overturned. Viewed from this longer term perspective, the Court's supposedly final rulings can therefore be seen as an integral part of an ongoing national dialogue over the meaning of the Constitution. This understanding makes judicial review more consistent with our tradition of government by the people rather than by the Court. To explore this understanding, The Supreme Court and Judicial Choice develops a provisional approach to judicial review under which a surprisingly large number of judicial rulings would be subject to modification by ordinary legislation enacted by Congress. Far from rendering the Court a powerless subject of Congress, this proposal would enhance the vital role of the Court in stimulating and shaping the ongoing dialogue with the people over the meaning of the Constitution.

Faced with a global threat to food security, it is perfectly possible that society will respond, not by a dystopian disintegration, but rather by reasserting co-operative traditions. This book, by a leading expert in urban agriculture, offers a genuine solution to today’s global food crisis. By contributing more to feeding themselves, cities can allow breathing space for the rural sector to convert to more organic sustainable approaches. Biel’s approach connects with current debates about agroecology and food sovereignty, asks key questions, and proposes lines of future research. He suggests that today’s food insecurity – manifested in a regime of wildly fluctuating prices – reflects not just temporary stresses in the existing mode of production, but more profoundly the troubled process of generating a new one. He argues that the solution cannot be implemented at a merely technical or political level: the force of change can only be driven by the kind of social movements which are now daring to challenge the existing unsustainable order. Drawing on both his academic research and teaching, and 15 years’ experience as a practicing urban farmer, Biel brings a unique interdisciplinary approach to this key global issue, creating a dialogue between the physical and social sciences

Taking “free markets” from rhetoric to reality

In Unselfishness, Nicholas Rescher criticizes the stance of many contemporary moral philosophers and social theorists-that rationality conflicts with morality, and instead defends the position of historical thinkers who believed that the worth of altruism is irreducible and that its rationalization does not require recourse to prudential self-interest. To support his position, Rescher provides detailed examples, and a theoretical critique of utilitarian morality.

Wild West Frisia reconstructs the daily lives of Bronze Age farmers and analyzes the separate components comprising Bronze Age subsistence (i.e. crop and animal husbandry, hunting and gathering) rather innovatively. Instead of summarizing the known data for each subsistence strategy and drawing conclusions solely based on these observations, this study first determines what may have been present yet perhaps is no longer visible. In doing so, the author learns that the exploitation of wild resources was perhaps just as important as crop domestication for those living in the Bronze Age.