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The Age of Reconstruction: How Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom Remade the World (America in the World #59)
by Don H. DoyleA sweeping history of how Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements in Europe and the AmericasThe Age of Reconstruction looks beyond post–Civil War America to tell the story of how Union victory and Lincoln’s assassination set off a dramatic international reaction that drove European empires out of the Americas, hastened the end of slavery in Latin America, and ignited a host of democratic reforms in Europe.In this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the United States, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals, including Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, even called for a “United States of Europe.” Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this “new birth of freedom” was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the United States and abroad and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy—and a very different kind of model to the world.At home and abroad, America’s Reconstruction was, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.” The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.
The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe
by Steven OzmentCelebrating the fortieth anniversary of this seminal book, this new edition includes an illuminating foreword by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittges The seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that reshaped European thought in the 1500s were sown in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dissemination of dissenting intellectual trends through three centuries to their explosive burgeoning in the Reformations—both Protestant and Catholic—of the sixteenth century. He elucidates with great clarity the complex philosophical and theological issues that inspired antagonistic schools, traditions, and movements from Aquinas to Calvin. This masterly synthesis of the intellectual and religious history of the period illuminates the impact of late medieval ideas on early modern society. With a new foreword by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittgers, this modern classic is ripe for rediscovery by a new generation of students and scholars.
The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State
by Yascha MounkYascha Mounk shows why a focus on personal responsibility is wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe fellow citizens regardless of their choices, and blinds us to key values such as the desire to live in a society of equals. In this book he proposes a remedy.
An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain
by Emily NacolIn An Age of Risk, Emily Nacol shows that risk, now treated as a permanent feature of our lives, did not always govern understandings of the future. Focusing on the epistemological, political, and economic writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Nacol explains that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, political and economic thinkers reimagined the future as a terrain of risk, characterized by probabilistic calculation, prediction, and control. In these early modern sources, Nacol contends, we see three crucial developments in thought on risk and politics. While early modern thinkers differentiated uncertainty about the future from probabilistic calculations of risk, they remained attentive to the ways uncertainty and risk remained in a conceptual tangle, a problem that constrained good decision making. They developed sophisticated theories of trust and credit as crucial background conditions for prudent risk-taking, and offered complex depictions of the relationships and behaviors that would make risk-taking more palatable. They also developed two narratives that persist in subsequent accounts of risk--risk as a threat to security, and risk as an opportunity for profit. Looking at how these narratives are entwined in early modern thought, Nacol locates the origins of our own ambivalence about risk-taking. By the end of the eighteenth century, she argues, a new type of political actor would emerge from this ambivalence, one who approached risk with fear rather than hope.By placing a fresh lens on early modern writing, An Age of Risk demonstrates how new and evolving orientations toward risk influenced approaches to politics and commerce that continue to this day.
The Age of Secularization (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas #107)
by Augusto Del Noce Carlo LancellottiAugusto Del Noce is widely considered one of Italy’s foremost philosophers and political thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century. He is also remembered as an original and profound cultural critic, and in particular as a great scholar of the process of secularization that took place in the West during the 1960s. A collection of eleven essays and lectures by Del Noce that originally appeared between 1964 and 1969, and which the author published as a book in 1971, The Age of Secularization quickly became recognized as one of the most original and penetrating attempts to interpret the cultural and political turmoil of the period. In its pages Del Noce discusses, among other topics, the student protests of 1968, the counterculture of the 1960s, the significance of the sexual revolution, the nature of the technological society, and the relationship between Christianity and modern culture. The Age of Secularization documents the encounter between a key period of contemporary history and the full intellectual maturity of one of its most perceptive observers. It makes available to English-language readers a lasting reflection on the philosophical roots of contemporary culture, and it is just as illuminating and topical today as it was nearly fifty years ago.
The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973
by Mark GreifIn a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World War II. During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of humanity energized New York intellectuals, Chicago protoconservatives, European Jewish émigrés, and native-born bohemians to seek "re-enlightenment," a new philosophical account of human nature and history. After the war this effort diffused, leading to a rebirth of modern human rights and a new power for the literary arts.Critics' predictions of a "death of the novel" challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of human nature with flesh and detail. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright wrote flawed novels of abstract man. Succeeding them, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon constituted a new guard who tested philosophical questions against social realities--race, religious faith, and the rise of technology--that kept difference and diversity alive.By the 1960s, the idea of "universal man" gave way to moral antihumanism, as new sensibilities and social movements transformed what had come before. Greif's reframing of a foundational debate takes us beyond old antagonisms into a new future, and gives a prehistory to the fractures of our own era.
The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 - Updated Edition (Princeton Classics #7)
by R. R. PalmerFor the Western world, the period from 1760 to 1800 was the great revolutionary era in which the outlines of the modern democratic state came into being. Here for the first time in one volume is R. R. Palmer's magisterial account of this incendiary age. Palmer argues that the American, French, and Polish revolutions—and the movements for political change in Britain, Ireland, Holland, and elsewhere—were manifestations of similar political ideas, needs, and conflicts. Palmer traces the clash between an older form of society, marked by legalized social rank and hereditary or self-perpetuating elites, and a new form of society that placed a greater value on social mobility and legal equality.Featuring a new foreword by David Armitage, this Princeton Classics edition of The Age of the Democratic Revolution introduces a new generation of readers to this enduring work of political history.
The Age of the Poets
by Bruno Bosteels Alain Badiou Emily ApterThe Age of the Poets revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger's famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the sole benefit of poetry or art. Instead, it must declare the end of what Badiou names the "age of the poets," which stretches from Hölderlin to Celan. Drawing on ideas from his first publication on the subject, "The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process," Badiou offers an illuminating set of readings of contemporary French prose writers, giving us fascinating insights into the theory of the novel while also accounting for the specific position of literature between science and ideology.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work
by Rey ChowMartin Heidegger once wrote that the world had, in the age of modern science, become a world picture. For Rey Chow, the world has, in the age of atomic bombs, become a world target, to be attacked once it is identified, or so global geopolitics, dominated by the United States since the end of the Second World War, seems repeatedly to confirm. How to articulate the problematics of knowledge production with this aggressive targeting of the world? Chow attempts such an articulation by probing the significance of the chronological proximity of area studies, poststructuralist theory, and comparative literature-fields of inquiry that have each exerted considerable influence but whose mutual implicatedness as postwar U. S. academic phenomena has seldom been theorized. Central to Chow’s discussions is a critique of the predicament of self-referentiality-the compulsive move to interiorize that, in her view, constitutes the collective frenzy of our age-in different contemporary epistemic registers, including the self-consciously avant-garde as well as the militaristic and culturally supremacist. Urging her readers to think beyond the inward-turning focus on EuroAmerica that tends to characterize even the most radical gestures of Western self-deconstruction, Chow envisions much broader intellectual premises for future transcultural work, with reading practices aimed at restoring words and things to their constitutive exteriority.
The Age of Violence: The Crisis of Political Action and the End of Utopia
by Alain BerthoExploring the fury of the young in a world or crisis that seems to offer no alternatives"Only martyrs know neither pity nor fear. Believe me, the day when the martyrs are victorious will be the day of universal conflagration". Jacques Lacan made this gloomy prophesy back in 1959: but doesn't it also apply to our own time? Faced with a rise in attacks around the world, can we really just blame the 'radicalization of' Islam'? What hope is there for the alienated youth, as the wars that have ravaged the Middle East spill out across the globe?For Alain Bertho, the mounting chaos we see today is above all driven by the weakening of states' legitimacy under the pressure of globalization. Add to this the hypocrisy of the elites who beat the drum of 'security measures', even as they sow the seeds of violence around the world. This disorder is the swamp of despair which can only produce fresh atrocities.Today's youth are the lost children of neoliberal globalization, the inheritors of the political and human chaos it produces. When they find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, their revolt tends to take the paths of martyrdom and despair. The closing of the revolutionary hypothesis allows only fury. The answer, Bertho argues, is a new radicalism, able to inspire a collective hope in the future.
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard HolmesThe Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an era whose consequences are with us still.BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Richard Holmes's Falling Upwards.
Ageing in a Nursing Home: Foundations for Care
by Rosalie HudsonSpending the final chapter of your life in a nursing home is considered, by many, a fate worse than death. Others, however, have found that through enlightened, imaginative care even the frailest of lives can flourish. The key to such a transformation is to replace the constricting custodial centres of the past with a more informed, research-based approach. This book is timely, responding to evidence of the urgent need for change described in the Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety Final Report: Care, Dignity and Respect and its predecessor subtitled Neglect. In this book, the author proposes a model of care that places the whole person at its centre, sidestepping the constraints of a reductionist funding model that focusses on residents' deficits – and the proprietor’s financial gain. Aged care requires a comprehensive research-based guide to fulfil this aim. Narratives are included throughout the book to reinforce the fact that nursing home care is about individual residents and their unique lives. Topics explored in various chapters include:· Ageing in a Changing Community· Social, Gerontological Care· A Palliative Approach· Community Expectations Ageing in a Nursing Home: Foundations for Care takes a realistic approach that draws on contemporary research and narratives from the unique lives of older Australians who, despite their frailty, teach us how to care. Such knowledge informs and influences their future. The book is a resource intended for all who have a stake in the provision of best practice residential aged care, and all who benefit from such care. Its academic appeal will include those who design and teach courses in aged care: gerontology, general practice medicine, nursing, attendant care, allied health, and chaplaincy. Academics and teachers will find useful, well-referenced material for their courses, together with ample scope for researchers.
Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics (Virtues and Economics #5)
by László Zsolnai Peter RónaThis open access book provides an exploration of the consequences of the ontological differences between natural and social objects (sometimes described as objects of nature and objects of thought) in the workings of causal and agency relationships. One of its important and possibly original conclusions is that causal and agency relationships do not encompass all of the dependent relationships encountered in social life. The idea that social reality is contingent has been known (and largely undisputed) at least since Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty”, but social science, and most notably economics has continued to operate on the basis of causal and agency theories borrowed or adapted from the natural sciences. This volume contains essays that retain and justify the partial or qualified use of this approach and essays that totally reject any use of causal and agency theory built on determined facts (closed systems).The rejection is based on the possibly original claim that, whereas causation in the objects of the natural sciences reside in their properties, human action is a matter of intentionality. It engages with critical realist theory and re-examines the role of free will in theories of human action in general and economic theory in particular.
Agency And Responsiblity: Essays On The Metaphysics Of Freedom
by Laura EkstromA companion volume to Free Will: A Philosophical Study, this new anthology collects influential essays on free will, including both well-known contemporary classics and exciting recent work. Agency and Responsibility: Essays on the Metaphysics of Freedom is divided into three parts. The essays in the first section address metaphysical issues concerning free will and causal determinism. The second section groups papers presenting a positive account of the nature of free action, including competing compatibilist and incompatibilist analyses. The third section concerns free will and moral responsibility, including theories of moral responsibility and the challenge to an alternative possibilities condition posed by Frankurt-type scenarios. Distinguished by its balance and consistently high quality, the volume presents papers selected for their significance, innovation, and clarity of expression. Contributors include Harry Frankfurt, Peter van Inwagen, David Lewis, Elizabeth Anscombe, John Martin Fischer, Michael Bratman, Roderick Chisholm, Robert Kane, Peter Strawson, and Susan Wolf. The anthology serves as an up-to-date resource for scholars as well as a useful text for courses in ethics, philosophy of religion, or metaphysics. In addition, paired with Free Will: A Philosophical Study, it would form an excellent upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level course in free will, responsibility, motivation, or action theory.
Agency Construction and Navigation in English Learning Stories
by Qiuming LinThis book presents a longitudinal research which covers a linguistic approach to understand and observe language learner agency. It makes connections between agency in discourse analyses and agency in applied linguistics by examining how learner agency is manifested in autobiographic oral narratives and influenced by contextual factors. This book also demonstrates that agency is not a fixed entity that English learners possess, but a dynamic construct constantly negotiated by the learners with the social world. It is the result of their identity positioning and repositioning within a complex and ever-changing context. Learner identities, either actual or imagined, are significantly correlated with their investment in English and their English learning process.This book sheds new light on teaching English as a foreign language and gives inspirations for enhancing English learners’ agency in contemporary context of China. As learner agency should be treated in a dynamic and process view, a low level of agency manifested in a particular period or in a certain context may not necessarily persist in later periods or extend to other contexts. Provided with supportive contextual conditions and taking on positive and powerful identities, language learners are well on the course for higher levels of agency.
Agency, Freedom and Choice (Theory and Decision Library A: #53)
by Constanze BinderIn this book, Binder shows that at the heart of the most prominent arguments in favour of value-neutral approaches to overall freedom lies the value freedom has for human agency and development. Far from leading to the adoption of a value-neutral approach, however, ascribing importance to freedom’s agency value requires one to adopt a refined value-based approach. Binder employs an axiomatic framework in order to develop such an approach. She shows that a focus on freedom’s agency value has far reaching consequences for existing results in the freedom ranking literature: it requires one to move beyond a person’s given all-things-considered preferences to the values underlying a person’s preference formation. Furthermore, it requires, as Binder argues, one to account (only) for those differences between choice options which really matter to people. Binder illustrates the implications of her analysis for the evaluation of public policy and human development with the capability approach: only if sufficient importance is ascribed to freedom’s agency value can the capability approach keep its promises.
Agency, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility
by Sergi Rosell Carlos Moya Andrei BuckareffIn recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in problems related to human agency and responsibility by philosophers and researchers in cognate disciplines. The present volume brings together original contributions by leading specialists working in this vital field of philosophical inquiry. The contents represent the state of the art of philosophical research on intentional agency, free will, and moral responsibility. The volume begins with chapters on the metaphysics of agency and moves to chapters examining various problems of luck. The final two sections have a normative focus, with the first of the two containing chapters examining issues related to responsible agency and blame and the chapters in the final section examine responsibility and relationships. This book will be of interest to researchers and students interested in both metaphysical and normative issues related to human agency.
Agency in Transnational Memory Politics (Worlds of Memory #4)
by Jenny Wüstenberg and Aline SierpThe dynamics of transnational memory play a central role in modern politics, from postsocialist efforts at transitional justice to the global legacies of colonialism. Yet, the relatively young subfield of transnational memory studies remains underdeveloped and fractured across numerous disciplines, even as nascent, boundary-crossing theories on topics such as multi-vocal, traveling, or entangled remembrance suggest new ways of negotiating difficult political questions. This volume brings together theoretical and practical considerations to provide transnational memory scholars with an interdisciplinary investigation into agency—the “who” and the “how” of cross-border commemoration that motivates activists and fascinates observers.
Agency in Transnational Memory Politics (Worlds of Memory #4)
by Jenny Wüstenberg and Aline SierpThe dynamics of transnational memory play a central role in modern politics, from postsocialist efforts at transitional justice to the global legacies of colonialism. Yet, the relatively young subfield of transnational memory studies remains underdeveloped and fractured across numerous disciplines, even as nascent, boundary-crossing theories on topics such as multi-vocal, traveling, or entangled remembrance suggest new ways of negotiating difficult political questions. This volume brings together theoretical and practical considerations to provide transnational memory scholars with an interdisciplinary investigation into agency—the “who” and the “how” of cross-border commemoration that motivates activists and fascinates observers.
Agency, Norms, Inquiry, and Artifacts: Essays in Honor of Risto Hilpinen (Synthese Library #454)
by Paul McNamara Andrew J. I. Jones Mark A. BrownThe book contains a collection of chapters written by experts from the fields of philosophy, law, logic, computer science and artificial intelligence who pay tribute to Professor Risto Hilpinen's impressive work on the logic of induction, on deontic logic and epistemology, and on philosophy of science.In addition to an introduction by the editors, a section on Professor Hilpinen’s positions, professional services and honors, as well as a complete bibliography of his writings, the editors, McNamara, Jones and Brown, have compiled a multidisciplinary global cross-section of academic contemporaries that provides insights and perspectives on Hilpinen's influence and legacy.The essays reflect central aspects of Risto Hilpinen's research interests, and offer further contributions to some of the philosophical fields for which he is best known: applied modal logic, including deontic logic (from the ancient Greek δέον déon, pertaining to the concepts of duty and obligation), the semantics of normative language, the logic of action, and the theory of practical reasoning; the analysis of the concept of artifact; and the theory of semiotics in the tradition of Charles Peirce. The presence in the collection of several papers relating to deontic logic underlines Hilpinen's importance in that area, in which his publications have long been recognized as standard works. The book is an essential collection of ideas for all those who feel at home in a variety of formal disciplines, from propositional logic to the logic of artificial intelligence.
Agency, Pregnancy and Persons: Essays in Defense of Human Life (Routledge Annals of Bioethics)
by Nicholas Colgrove Bruce P. Blackshaw Daniel RodgerThis book provides extensive and critical engagement with some of the most recent and compelling arguments favoring abortion choice. It features original essays from leading and emerging philosophers, bioethicists and medical professionals that present philosophically sophisticated and novel arguments against abortion choice. The chapters in this book are divided into three thematic sections. The first set of essays focuses primarily on unborn human individuals—zygotes, embryos and fetuses. In these chapters it is argued, for example, that human organisms begin to exist at conception and that zygotes, embryos and fetuses are persons. These chapters also explore questions about whether or not zygotes, embryos and fetuses are part of their mothers’ bodies. The second set of essays focuses primarily on elective abortion and the debates surrounding it. These chapters consider whether or not opponents of abortion are commonly hypocritical, how opponents of abortion should think about adoption, how emerging technologies may affect the current debate and whether or not those participating in the debate should rely on analogies to support their case. Finally, the third set of essays shifts focus from the legal and moral status of elective abortion to its place in medical practice. In these chapters it is argued that elective abortion embodies a kind of ableism, and that elective abortion is medically unnecessary, harmful to women’s mental health and that telemedicine abortion poses significant risks to women’s health. Agency, Pregnancy and Persons offers an up-to-date examination of unborn human beings, the debates surrounding elective abortion and the place of elective abortion within medical practice. It will be of interest to medical professionals and those who work in philosophy, bioethics and medical ethics alike.
Agenda 2030 – Armut: Die Einhaltung der Nachhaltigkeitsziele in der medizinischen Versorgung (essentials)
by Heiko HerwaldIn diesem essential werden die aktuellen Probleme der Agenda 2030 zur Umsetzung der Nachhaltigkeitsziele im Bereich Gesundheit erläutert. Das weltweite Aufkommen von Zivilisationskrankheiten und die explodierenden Kosten in der medizinischen Versorgung stellen die Weltgemeinschaft in Zeiten von Corona und Krieg vor große Herausforderungen. Um einen weiteren Rückschritt in der globalen Gesundheitsversorgung zu vermeiden, müssen gemeinsame und nachhaltige Lösungen gefunden werden. Hierzu müssen Stakeholder aus allen Sektoren, öffentlichen wie privaten sowie nationalen als auch internationalen, in die Verantwortung genommen werden.
Agenda 2030 – Bildung: Wertevermittlung und Werteorientierung (essentials)
by Heiko HerwaldDie Agenda 2030 hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, eine Welt ohne Armut, Hunger und Krankheit zu schaffen und dafür zu sorgen, dass jeder Mensch ein Leben frei von Furcht und ohne Unterdrückung führen kann. Um dies zu erreichen, muss jeder Mensch auch ein Recht auf Bildung haben. Ganzheitliche Bildungskonzepte sind hierbei von großer Bedeutung, da mit ihnen ein Umdenken zu einer nachhaltigen Lebensweise in allen Gesellschaftsbereichen erzielt werden kann. Denn ohne eine breite Unterstützung in der Bevölkerung können die Ziele der Agenda 2030 nicht umgesetzt werden. Eine weitere Aufgabe von Bildung ist es, soziale Klassenunterschiede abzubauen. Nach wie vor ist es in vielen Ländern aufgrund von fehlenden Ausbildungsmöglichkeiten nicht möglich, gesellschaftliche Klassenunterschiede zu überwinden. Im vierten der siebzehn Agenda 2030 Nachhaltigkeitsziele spielt das Thema Bildung eine zentrale Rolle. Es wird unter anderen gefordert, flächendeckend Bildungseinrichtungen zu schaffen, damit bis 2030 allen Menschen Zugang zu einer gleichberechtigten und hochwertigen Bildung gewährleistet werden kann.
Agent, Action, and Reason
by R. N. Bronaugh Robert W. Binkley Ausonio MarrasThis volume contains the papers and commentaries presented at the fourth philosophy colloquium at the University of Western Ontario in November 1968. The papers examine, from different points of view, the central problems in the philosophy of action. They include: "Agency" by Donald Davidson with comments by James Cornman; "On the Logic on International Action" by Roderick Chisholm with comments by Bruce Aune and a reply by Roderick Chisholm; "Wanting: Some Pitfalls" by R.M. Hare with comments by David Gauthier and D.F. Pears; "Two Problems about Reasons for Actions" by D.F. Pears with comments by Irving Thalberg. Also included is an extensive bibliography of recent work in the philosophy of action. The contributors are all well known for their work in this branch of philosophy; their papers present a cross section of the best work being done in the area at the present time.
Agent-Based Modelling of Worker Exploitation: Slave from the Machine (Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research #5)
by Thomas ChesneyThis book illustrates the potential for computer simulation in the study of modern slavery and worker abuse, and by extension in all social issues. It lays out a philosophy of how agent-based modelling can be used in the social sciences. In addressing modern slavery, Chesney considers precarious work that is vulnerable to abuse, like sweat-shop labour and prostitution, and shows how agent modelling can be used to study, understand and fight abuse in these areas. He explores the philosophy, application and practice of agent modelling through the popular and free software NetLogo. This topical book is grounded in the technology needed to address the messy, chaotic, real world problems that humanity faces—in this case the serious problem of abuse at work—but equally in the social sciences which are needed to avoid the unintended consequences inherent to human responses. It includes a short but extensive NetLogo guide which readers can use to quickly learn this software and go on to develop complex models. This is an important book for students and researchers of computational social science and others interested in agent-based modelling.