Author: Neil Kenny File Type: pdf Why did people argue about curiosity in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, so much more than today? Why was curiosity a fashionable topic in early modern conduct manuals, university dissertations, scientific treatises, sermons, newspapers, novellas, plays, operas, ballets, poems, from Corneille to Diderot, from Johann Valentin Andreae to Gottlieb Spizel? Universities, churches, and other institutions invoked curiosity in order to regulate knowledge or behavior, to establish who should try to know or do what, and under what circumstances. As well as investigating a crucial episode in the history of knowledge, this study makes a distinctive contribution to historiographical debates about the nature of concepts. Curiosity was constantly reshaped by the uses of it. And yet, strangely, however much people contested what curiosity was, they often agreed that what they were disagreeing about was one and the same thing. **

Author: E. Harrison File Type: pdf This book explores the paradox of the global spread of democracy in an era of Western decline. **Review It is so refreshing to read a political science book that is willing to tackle a big question and to put major events of our times in larger context. You may not agree with all of Ewan Harrisons and Sara McLaughlin Mitchells arguments, but you will think differently about the global order and the significance of the revolutions rippling across the Middle East. If I were teaching a course on international relations, foreign policy, or global studies, this book would find a place on my syllabus. Anne-Marie Slaughter President and CEO, New America Foundation, Bert G. Kerstetter 66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University, USA Ewan Harrison and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell start off by charting the rise of democratic norms and liberal international institutions. But their cogent analysis of recent and current developments quickly shifts to a compelling, counterintuitive conclusion. The West will be left behind by the revolution it has helped to bring about. A triumph of political insight and scholarly synthesis, this is the type of book that changes minds and policies. Those of us in the West can only hope that it has not come too late! - Erik Gartzke, University of Essex, United Kingdom, and University of California San Diego, USA A wonderfully refreshing and unfashionably optimistic discussion of the new world order in the making - one in which the current doom and gloom about a declining West, economic disintegration and the spread of intractable conflict is replaced by a sober yet utterly convincing vision of unprecedented opportunities for the old world powers and the newly emerging ones as well. More than a challenging read for our uncertain times. This is a reasoned manifesto of hope that will surely get - and definitely deserves - the widest readership possible. - Professor Michael Cox, Department of International Relations and Founding Director IDEAS, The London School of Economics, United Kingdom About the Author Ewan Harrison is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Political Science at Rutgers University, USA. He is author of The Post-Cold War International System Strategies, Institutions and Reflexivity (2004) and co-editor of Rethinking Realism in International Relations (2009). He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 1999, and was Hedley Bull Junior Research Fellow at St Annes College, Oxford 2001-2004. Sara McLaughlin Mitchell is Professor of Political Science and Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa, USA. She is co-author with Emilia Justyna Powell of Domestic Law Goes Global (2011), and with John A. Vasquez of Conflict, War, and Peace (2013). She is also co-editor of Guide to the Scientific Study of International Processes (2012). She is associate editor of Foreign Policy Analysis, and co-founder of the Journeys in World Politics mentoring workshop for women in international relations.