BiblioVault - Books about Common

The Common

Gail Mazur

University of Chicago Press, 1995

At the heart of Gail Mazur's The Common is the refusal to simplify what is paradoxical in our world and a recognition of the tensions in our own divided nature. These unflinching poems create a place where wisdom and foolishness, fear and courage, rage and pity, love and diffidence, naturally co-exist.

Desire, ambition, devotion, and devastating loss are all subjects for Mazur's clear-eyed poems, which resonate with the contradictions between the body's yearning and the mind's acknowledgment of the consequences of our choices. In a poetry driven by unrelenting questioning, Mazur tries, in Rilke's worlds, "to love the questions themselves."

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Dear Colleague

Common And Uncommon Observations

Yi-Fu Tuan

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

A long-awaited collection of highlights from a scholar's renowned letters. "Maybe the most influential scholar you've never heard of" was how a feature article in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently described Yi-Fu Tuan, a widely traveled Chinese-American geographer whose letters to his friends and colleagues, distilling observations, ideas, and experiences, have carried his insights, and his reputation, far beyond his chosen field. Culling the most characteristic thoughts and compelling moments from these prized letters, Dear Colleague at long last gives readers near and far the opportunity to share what Tuan's correspondents have already enjoyed-and to discover the pleasures of the underlined passages in a book of life at once edifying, entertaining, and exemplary. Reflecting on personal encounters and impersonal forces, Tuan conducts us along a path that leads from nature to human nature, through society and culture, geography and history, morality and religion, life and death. By turns playful and aphoristic, these essays hold revelations both humorous and harrowing. Whether browsed for their considerable incidental pleasures or perused in depth from beginning to end, they afford their reader the rare interior knowledge of another human being and his world, and an even rarer glimpse of the connections between sensation and intellect that lie at the very heart of the humanistic enterprise. Imparting the insights of a revered scholar, revealing the tensions-and contradictions-that exist between life and thought, remarking on ideas from other thinkers, and expanding on perennial matters of morality and meaning, religion and ritual, pleasure and pain, Dear Colleague maps Tuan's own humanity in a lucid, elegant, and memorable way. Yi-Fu Tuan is professor emeritus in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin. He is widely considered the founder of human geography, and is the author of many books, including Cosmos and Hearth (1996) and Space and Place (new edition, 2001), published by the University of Minnesota Press. He is also the author of books on desert landforms, China, the history of ideas, and an autobiography, Who Am I? (1999).

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Design for Liberty

Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law

Richard A. Epstein

Harvard University Press, 2011

Following a vast expansion in the twentieth century, government is beginning to creak at the joints under its enormous weight. The signs are clear: a bloated civil service, low approval ratings for Congress and the President, increasing federal-state conflict, rampant distrust of politicians and government officials, record state deficits, and major unrest among public employees.

In this compact, clearly written book, the noted legal scholar Richard Epstein advocates a much smaller federal government, arguing that our over-regulated state allows too much discretion on the part of regulators, which results in arbitrary, unfair decisions, rent-seeking, and other abuses. Epstein bases his classical liberalism on the twin pillars of the rule of law and of private contracts and property rights—an overarching structure that allows private property to keep its form regardless of changes in population, tastes, technology, and wealth. This structure also makes possible a restrained public administration to implement limited objectives. Government continues to play a key role as night-watchman, but with the added flexibility in revenues and expenditures to attend to national defense and infrastructure formation.

Although no legal system can eliminate the need for discretion in the management of both private and public affairs, predictable laws can cabin the zone of discretion and permit arbitrary decisions to be challenged. Joining a set of strong property rights with sound but limited public administration could strengthen the rule of law, with its virtues of neutrality, generality, clarity, consistency, and forward-lookingness, and reverse the contempt and cynicism that have overcome us.

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Making Sense in Common

A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse

Isabelle Stengers

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A leading philosopher seeks to recover “common sense” as a meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy

With her previous books on Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers not only secured a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but also inspired a rethinking of critical theory, political thought, and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines. Here, Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading of Whitehead.

Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the growing group of scholars who use Stengers’s work on Whitehead as a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse domains of inquiry: environmentalism and ecology, animal studies, media and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, feminism, and capitalism. On the other hand, the significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead. Instead, it lies in Stengers’s recovery of the idea of “common sense” as a meeting place—a commons—where opposed ideas of science and humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society forward. Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially urgent today—when climate disaster looms all around us, when the values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity are discredited, and when expertise of any kind is under attack.

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Nature in Common?

Environmental Ethics and the Contested Foundations of Environmental Policy

Ben A. Minteer

Temple University Press, 2009

This important book brings together leading environmental thinkers to debate a central conflict within environmental philosophy: should we appreciate nature mainly for its ability to advance our interests or should we respect it as having a good of its own, apart from any contribution to human well-being? Specifically, the fourteen essays collected here discuss the “convergence hypothesis” put forth by Bryan Norton—a controversial thesis in environmental ethics about the policy implications of moral arguments for environmental protection. Historically influential essays are joined with newly-commissioned essays to provide the first sustained attempt to reconcile two long-opposed positions. Bryan Norton himself offers the book’s closing essay.

This seminal volume contains contributions from some of the most respected scholars in the field, including Donald Brown, J. Baird Callicott, Andrew Light, Holmes Rolston III, Laura Westra, and many others. Although Nature in Common? will be especially useful for students and professionals studying environmental ethics and philosophy, it will engage any reader who is concerned about the philosophies underlying contemporary environmental policies.

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Perpetual Motion

Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common

Harmony Bench

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A new exploration of how digital media assert the relevance of dance in a wired world

How has the Internet changed dance? Dance performances can now be seen anywhere, can be looped endlessly at user whim, and can integrate crowds in unprecedented ways. Dance practices are evolving to explore these new possibilities. In Perpetual Motion, Harmony Bench argues that dance is a vital part of civil society and a means for building participation and community. She looks at how, after 9/11, it became a crucial way of recuperating the common character of public spaces. She explores how crowdsourcing dance contributes to the project of performing a common world, as well as the social relationships forged when we look at dance as a gift in the era of globalization. Throughout, she asks how dance brings people together in digital spaces and what dance’s digital travels might mean for how we experience and express community.

From original research on dance today to political economies of digital media to the philosophy of dance, Perpetual Motion provides an ambitious, invigorating look at a commonly shared practice.

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Poverty in Common

The Politics of Community Action during the American Century

Alyosha Goldstein

Duke University Press, 2012

After the Second World War, the idea that local community action was indispensable for the alleviation of poverty was broadly embraced by US policymakers, social scientists, international development specialists, and grassroots activists. Governmental efforts to mobilize community action in the name of democracy served as a volatile condition of possibility for poor people and dispossessed groups negotiating the tension between calls for self-help and demands for self-determination in the era of the Cold War and global decolonization. In Poverty in Common, Alyosha Goldstein suggests new ways to think about the relationship among liberalism, government, and inequality in the United States. He does so by analyzing historical dynamics including Progressive-era reform as a precursor to community development during the Cold War, the ways that the language of "underdevelopment" articulated ideas about poverty and foreignness, the use of poverty as a crucible of interest group politics, and radical groups' critical reframing of community action in anticolonial terms. During the mid-twentieth century, approaches to poverty in the United States were linked to the racialized and gendered negotiation of boundaries—between the foreign and the domestic, empire and nation, violence and order, and dependency and autonomy.

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The Signature in Law

From the Thirteenth Century to the Facsimile

Stephen Mason

University of London Press, 2022

This book considers the judicial development of the signature—its definition, purpose, and legal functions.

Since the thirteenth century, the signature has been used to demonstrate proof of intent. This book puts the concept of the signature into a broad legal context, setting out the purposes and functions of a signature. Drawing on cases from common law jurisdictions across the world, this book demonstrates that judges expanded the meaning of the signature as technologies developed and were used in unanticipated ways.

Following an overview of the historical methods used to demonstrate proof of intent and authentication, the book considers the judicial response to the variations in form that signatures have been subject to over the past two hundred years, from initials, partial signatures, and fingerprints to rubber stamps and typewriting. Past judicial decision-making not only demonstrates the flexibility of the form a signature can take but also confirms that judges had the flexibility of mind to accept the first forms of electronic signature (telex, facsimile transmission) without the aid of special legislation. In this way, the signature is a prime example of the inherent flexibility of the English common law.

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