Author: Jeffrey Tucker File Type: pdf Bit by Bit How P2P Is Freeing the World argues that todays emergent technology is about more than new and cool toys. Jeffrey Tucker, CLO of Liberty.me and Distinguished Fellow of the Foundation for Economic Education, argues that peer-to-peer technology is forging a new and brighter social, economic, and political order. People tend to look at innovations in isolation. Here is my new e-reader. Here is an app I like. Here is my new mobile device and computer. Even bitcoin is routinely analyzed and explained in terms of its properties as an alternative to national currencies, as if there were no more than that at stake. But actually there is a historical trajectory at work here, one that we can trace through its logic, implementation, and spread. Its the same logic that led from the dial phone at the county store, operated by people pulling and plugging in wires, to the wireless smartphone in your pocket that contains the whole store of human knowledge. Its all about technology in the service of individuation. Once you understand the driving ethos voluntarism, creativity, networks, individual initiative you can see the outlines of a new social structure emerging within our time, an order that defies a century of top-down planning and nation-state restrictionism. It is coming about not because of political reform. It is not any one persons creation. It is not happening because a group of elite intellectuals advocated it. The new world is emerging organically, and messily, from the ground up, as an extension of unrelenting creativity and experimentation. In the end, it is emerging out of an anarchist order that no one in particular controls and no one in particular can fully understand. The building of universal prosperity is a process that unfolds bit by bit through decentralized decision making and improvements at the margin through trial-and-error. To continue this process, we need understanding, patience, and dreams. Jeffrey Tuckers book is an excellent guide to all three. ~ Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, from the introduction. In Bitcoins brief existence Jeffrey Tucker has become one of its leading proponents. In this book we can see exactly why. Many people think of bitcoin as just money, but Mr. Tucker is able to explain, in a way that is easily understandable by all, the tsunami of innovation that bitcoin is about to release upon the world. ~ Roger Ver, Bitcoin investor, from the Foreword **

Author: Claire Pajaczowska File Type: pdf

Author: Rita Copeland File Type: pdf p Segoe UI, serif 13pxThe Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research,employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. p Segoe UI, serif 13pxOHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary periods, the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of reception as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers own cultural context. p Segoe UI, serif 13pxThis first volume, and fourth to appear in the series, covers the years c.800-1558, and surveys the reception and transformation of classical literary culture in England from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the Henrician era. Chapters on the classics in the medieval curriculum, the trivium and quadrivium, medieval libraries, and medieval mythography provide context for medieval reception. The reception of specific classical authors and traditions is represented in chapters on Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, the matter of Troy, Boethius, moral philosophy, historiography, biblical epics, English learning in the twelfth century, and the role of antiquity in medieval alliterative poetry. The medieval section includes coverage of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, while the part of the volume dedicated to the later period explores early English humanism, humanist education, and libraries in the Henrician era, and includes chapters that focus on the classicism of Skelton, Douglas, Wyatt, and Surrey.p Segoe UI, serif 13px**h3 Segoe UI, serif 13pxAbout the Authorp Segoe UI, serif 13px font face=Segoe UI, serif size=2bRita Copelandb is Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. Her fields of research include the history of rhetoric, literary theory, and medieval learning. She is a founder of the journal New Medieval Literatures, and co-founder of Toronto Series in Medieval and Early Modern Rhetoric. In addition to many articles, she has published the following books Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (1991), Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (1996), Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages (2001), Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with Ineke Sluiter) (2009), and The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with Peter Struck) (2010).fontp Segoe UI, serif 13pxbContributorsbspan Segoe UI text-align -webkit-centerDavid Hopkins & Emeritus Professor Of Latin Charles Martindale & Professor Of English Norman Vance & Associate Professor Of English Literature Rita Copeland & P Cheney & Fellow Philip R Hardie & Lecturer In English & Comparative Drama Jennifer Wallacespan

Author: Larry Diamond File Type: pdf For almost a decade, Freedom Houses annual survey has highlighted a decline in democracy in most regions of the globe. While some analysts draw upon this evidence to argue that the world has entered a democratic recession, others dispute that interpretation, emphasizing instead democracys success in maintaining the huge gains it made during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Discussion of this question has moved beyond disputes about how many countries should be classified as democratic to embrace a host of wider concerns about the health of democracy the poor economic and political performance of advanced democracies, the new self-confidence and assertiveness of a number of leading authoritarian countries, and a geopolitical weakening of democracies relative to these resurgent authoritarians. In Democracy in Decline?, eight of the worlds leading public intellectuals and scholars of democracyFrancis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Philippe C. Schmitter, Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, Thomas Carothers, and editors Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattnerexplore these concerns and offer competing viewpoints about the state of democracy today. This short collection of essays is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the latest thinking on one of the most critical questions of our era. **