Oxford University Press's Blog, page 1000
December 5, 2012
The familiar face of Winston Churchill
The steady flow of new books about Winston Churchill should confirm that the famous wartime prime minister is now the best known and most studied figure in modern British history.
Churchill, a tireless self-promoter in his own time, would undoubtedly have taken a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that the legend he helped to craft would endure well into the twenty-first century. Unlike most politicians, he was deeply concerned with how he would be remembered – and judged – by history. And, although the verdict today is by no means universally positive, there is no doubt that he has achieved a level of fame that few can rival.
Academic historians (like me) spend so much time immersed in the study of the past that we cannot help but see it as a crowded place full of familiar faces. And a figure like Churchill is impossible to ignore: his memory, like the man himself, positively demands our attention. But the full-time historian is generally able to tune Churchill out when necessary: for most of us, he remains just one of the many historical actors we must look at to understand the past.
For the public at large, however, the past is a very different place. Most people approach it as they would a party full of strangers: instinctively scanning the crowd as they enter in hopes of spotting a familiar face. But the more time that passes, the more unfamiliar the past becomes – and the fewer faces we are likely to recognize. Our collective historical memory is subject to a natural sort of attrition process. Most of Britain’s leading politicians, statesmen and warriors of the early twentieth-century, many of them household names in their own time, are now barely remembered at all. Lord Kitchener’s famous recruiting poster from the First World War is still instantly recognizable, but every year there are fewer and fewer people who can put a name to the face of a man who in 1914 was better known – and certainly more widely admired – than Churchill.
Winston Churchill in 1881
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Winston Churchill in 1904
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Winston Churchill in 1943
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Winston Churchill in 1944
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The process has distinctly Darwinian overtones, as the most famous figures of yesteryear gradually displace their lesser-known rivals – and eventually each other – in the competition for a place in our collective memory of the past. Only a handful of famous twentieth-century Britons can share the historical stage with Churchill and demand anything like equal billing. And even they do not seem to share his seeming immunity to the passage of time. Neville Chamberlain, for example, remains an iconic figure, although for many he is not an important historical actor in his own right so much as a supporting figure in a better-known, and implicitly more important, story: Churchill’s triumphant rise to power in 1940.
Britain has good reason to look back on the Second World War as the “People’s War”, but the fact remains that only one of “the people” could be reliably identified today in a police line-up. And he is recognizable precisely because of his role in this great conflict. Churchill’s near-mythical status was ensured by his leadership in the critical months between the army’s evacuation from Dunkirk and the Royal Air Force’s victory in the Battle of Britain. At a time when Britain’s defeat seemed not only possible but imminent, Churchill rallied and inspired the people as no other contemporary politician could have. In Britain’s national mythology, he almost single-handedly changed the course of the war by sustaining the morale of the British people at the height of the Nazi onslaught, and in so doing ensured Hitler’s ultimate downfall.
Even in 1940, there was already a tendency to regard Churchill as the personification of Britain’s collective war effort and the embodiment of the nation’s heroic defiance of Nazi Germany. Churchill himself once attempted to put his role into perspective when he declared that “It was a nation and a race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” How far Churchill really believed this is debatable. In his speeches and memoirs he consistently downplayed the doubts and fears that pervaded Britain after the fall of France. But he knew better than anyone how close Britain may have come to a negotiated peace with Hitler in 1940 – and how important was his role in preventing this.
As more and more of Churchill’s contemporaries have receded and then disappeared from public memory, the popular association of Churchill with this defining moment in Britain’s history has only grown stronger. He may soon be, if he isn’t already, the last (recognizable) man standing in the history ofBritainduring the first half of the twentieth century.
Churchill believed that history was made by “great men”, and it is hard to imagine him being troubled by this trend. Historians might lament the public’s disproportionate interest in any one particular individual, but this is not to suggest we don’t need any more books about Churchill. The central place he enjoys in our memory of the twentieth century makes it all the more important that the record is as full and accurate as possible. The challenge is to populate that history with real people, and recognize that Churchill was also a supporting character in their stories.
Christopher M. Bell is Associate Professor of History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the Wars (2000), co-editor of Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (2003), and author of Churchill and Sea Power (2012).
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December 4, 2012
In his own voice: H.L.A. Hart in conversation with David Sugarman
This recording of my lengthy interview with H.L.A. Hart (1907–1992) has been resurrected from my audio tapes and given new life. Dusted and digitalized, the result is something quite beautiful. Here is Hart in his own words recorded in 1988, reviewing his life, his work, and his significance. The interview presents Hart as three individuals: legal philosopher, interviewee, and critic. The recording adds another dimension to our understanding of Hart that must be incorporated into our collective memory.
Within the English-speaking world, Hart is frequently regarded as the twentieth century’s foremost legal philosopher. He revived the moribund discipline of jurisprudence, re-orientating it so that the qualities associated with analytical philosophy in the second half of the 20th century — rigorous standards of rational argument, clarity and lucidity, a preoccupation with subtle conceptual distinctions, and a sensitivity to language and its logic — were applied to the investigation of the most fundamental concepts of law and to major public issues, notably, the complex relation between law and morality. As a colleague, teacher, mentor and author, Hart exercised a profound influence, an influence that extended to the “real world” and “real issues”. From the late 1950’s onwards, he championed a new humaneness in punishment, speaking and writing for a right to abortion and against both the death penalty and the prosecution of people because of their sexual preferences. His exploration of the balance between the modern welfare state and individual liberty — in particular, the legitimate use of state power to impose standards of private morality — produced an eloquent and highly influential manifesto for modern political liberalism. As Tony Honoré, his close colleague at Oxford, put it, “He was the most widely read British legal philosopher of the twentieth century and his work will continue to be a focus of discussion.”
The present interview with Hart took place in his rooms at University College, Oxford, on 9 November 1988. The interview delineates the particulars of Hart’s life and work: his background, early education, and undergraduate studies; learning law, practising at the Bar, and journalism; working in military intelligence; the early years as a philosophy don and the principal philosophical influences that shaped his work; and the state of Oxford jurisprudence in the 1940s and 1950s. It then addresses Hart’s work and ideas between 1945 and the 1980’s: his appointment to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford; the Hart-Fuller Debate and his year at Harvard; the writing of Causation in the Law and The Concept of Law ; the 1950’s, the Cold War, and the 1960’s; “The Hart-Devlin Debate”; and what Hart called, “the Thatcher world”. The interview also illuminates Hart’s work beyond legal and political philosophy — the seminars to Labour Party groups on closing loopholes in the tax law; and the duties he undertook for the Monopolies Commission (1967-73) and the Oxford University Committee on Staff-Student Relations (the “Hart Report”, 1968-69). The interview includes Hart’s assessement of Bentham, Nozick and Dworkin, a general discussion of the virtues and limitations of sociology, sociological jurisprudence and analytical jurisprudence, of legal education, and the relationship between university legal education and the legal profession. A succinct summary of Hart’s contribution to legal philosophy brings the interview to a close. The interview is published verbatim — save for one brief comment by Hart that he asked me not to reproduce. Whilst the ordering of the interview was broadly chronological, the too-and-fro of conversation meant that subjects were returned to or introduced out of sequence.
The interview was one of a series that I have undertaken since 1986 with leading British legal scholars as part of an on-going research project mapping the history of modern English legal education and scholarship. Nicola Lacey’s illuminating biography of Hart used this interview as one of its main sources, and an edited version of the interview, excluding the material on legal education at Oxford, was published in 2005. Since its publication, the interview has been frequently cited. It was one of the main sources used by Brian Simpson in his Reflections on ‘The Concept of Law’. Simpson told me that he listened to the audio tape of the interview again and again as he was writing the book, and that hearing Hart’s voice inspired him in his struggle to complete it during his final battle with cancer.
At the time of the interview, Hart was 81 and physically frail. But he was one of the cleverest people I have ever met. His mind was sharp, and he tended to respond quickly and very clearly. Once the interview was under way, we both started to relax and enjoyed what became a friendly but challenging exchange. The interview reveals an unpretentious, reserved man, concise, diffident, and with a wry sense of humour. He talks of the enormous intellectual stimulus afforded by his visit to the United States in 1967-7 at the invitation of Harvard University, the pleasure he derived from his membership of the Monopolies Commission, and his outrage at the policies of the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher. The intellectual, moral, and political underpinnings of his work are apparent. Likewise, his limited intellectual interest in law and legal education, his elevation of the value of a philosophical approach to legal material, and his suspicion of sociology and the sociology of law are evident, as is his preoccupation with challenges to his work, in particular, by his successor in the Oxford chair, Ronald Dworkin. Also apparent is a poignant tension between intellectual confidence and self-doubt about his legacy.
At the end of the interview, and with the tape recorder switched off, Hart continued to talk about a variety of topics. He encouraged me to learn Italian, so that I could read the work of the Italian legal and political philosopher, Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004). Hart said that he knew, and corresponded with, Bobbio; and that Bobbio was the contemporary legal and political philosopher he most admired and related to. There was also more talk that evinced Hart’s sensitivity to criticism; and his preoccupation with writing an “Answer to Dworkin”, as Hart called it. Hart concluded by saying that I was free to publish the interview, and that he had no wish to review or revise it.
H.L.A. Hart on Childhood and Early Career
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H.L.A. Hart on Major Philosophical Influences
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H.L.A. Hart on his Early Philosophical Work
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H.L.A. Hart on his Harvard visit and Fuller Exchange
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H.L.A. Hart on the Major Works
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H.L.A. Hart on Dworkin and the Nature of Legal Philosophy
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H.L.A. Hart on Public Work
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H.L.A. Hart on Analytic Philosophy and Legal Scholarship
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H.L.A. Hart on his Political Views, Legal Education, and Legacy
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I feel sure that the importance of the interview rests primarily in the fact that you hear Hart’s voice, both his vivid cadences and also aspects of his character that other work on Hart tends not to evoke. Part of Hart was confused and diffident. Part of him was confident, acerbic and somewhat intolerant of anything beyond his own approach. Yet he was always open to argument and persuasion. These contradictions are the essence of his complexity.
It is in listening to Hart’s voice that we can get closer to Hart. There has been much critical analysis of his ideas — most recently in the context of commemorating the 50th anniversary of his landmark work, The Concept of Law. The images of Hart derived from his scholarship, diaries and other sources, including photographs, and from his personal relations, as a teacher, mentor, colleague, husband and friend, have generated multiple discourses in which commentators have appraised Hart the jurist and Hart the person. In the interview we hear Hart in conversation. As he and I speak about Hart’s ideas and the evolution of his life, there are interruptions, hesitations, and awkward silences which, like a work of scholarship or a diary entry, can be interpreted in many ways. One can imagine the conversation, the glances back and forth between the legal philosopher and his interviewer. Nervousness and unease are apparent; but so are authority and certainty.
The wider availability of this recording will generate new opportunities to understand and assess Hart’s personality and scholarly reputation. The poet, Sylvia Plath, wrote in her journal, “Recreate life lived: that is renewed life.” In bringing Herbert Hart’s voice to us now, this interview will do just that.
Professor David Sugarman, FRHistS, is the Director of the Centre for Law and Society at Lancaster University Law School. HLA Hart was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. He authored The Concept of Law, one of the seminal works of English-language jurisprudence. He passed away in 1992.
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Mars: A geologist’s perspective
By David Rothery
So Mars is ‘Place of the Year’! It has the biggest volcano in the Solar System — Olympus Mons — amazing dust storms, and the grandest canyon of all — Valles Marineris. Mind you, the surface area of Mars is almost the same as the total area of dry land on Earth, so to declare Mars as a whole to be ‘place of the year’ seems a little vague, given that previous winners (on Earth) have been islands or single countries. If you pushed me to specify a particular place on Mars most worthy of this accolade I would have to say Gale crater, the location chosen for NASA’s Curiosity Rover which landed with great success on 6 August.
This was chosen from a shortlist of several sites offering access to layers of martian sediment that had been deposited over a long time period, and thus expected to preserve evidence of how surface conditions have changed over billions of years. Gale crater is just over 150 km in diameter, but the relatively smooth patch within the crater where a landing could be safely attempted is only about 20 km across, and no previous Mars lander has been targeted with such high precision.
Perspective view of Gale crater. Curiosity landed in the ellipse within the nearest part of the crater. Image Credit: NASA
The thing that makes Gale one of the most special of Mars’s many craters is that its centre is occupied by a 5 km high mound, nicknamed Mount Sharp, made of eroded layers of sediment. To judge from its performance so far, the nuclear powered Curiosity Rover looks well capable of traversing the crater floor and then making its way up Mount Sharp layer by layer, reading Mars’s history as it goes. The topmost layers are probably rock made from wind-blown sand and dust. The oldest layers, occurring near the base of the central mound, will be the most interesting, because they appear to contain clay minerals of a kind that can form only in standing water. If that’s true, Curiosity will be able to dabble around in material that formed in ponds and lakes at a time when Mars was wetter and warmer than today. It will probably take a year or so to pick its way carefully across ten or so km of terrain to the exposures of the oldest, clay-bearing rocks, but already Curiosity has seen layers of pebbly rock that to a geologist are a sure sign that fast-flowing rivers or storm-fed flash-floods once crossed the crater floor.
Layers at the base of Mount Sharp that Curiosity will analyze. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
The geologist in me wants to study the record of changing martian environments over time, because I like to find out what makes a planet tick. However the main reason why Mars continues to be the target for so many space missions, is that in the distant past — when those clay deposits were forming – its surface conditions could have been suitable for life to become established. Curiosity’s suite of sophisticated science instruments is designed to study rocks to determine whether they formed at a time when conditions were suitable for life. They won’t be able to prove that life existed, which will be a task for a future mission. If life ever did occur on Mars, then it might persist even today, if only in the form of simple microbes. Life probably will not be found at the surface, which today is cold, arid and exposed to ultraviolet light thanks to the thinness of its atmosphere, but within the soil or underneath rocks.
Finding life — whether still living or extinct — on another world would offer fundamental challenges to our view of our own place in the Universe. Currently we know of at least two other worlds in our Solar System where life could exist — Mars and Jupiter’s satellite Europa. It has also become clear that half the 400 billion stars in our Galaxy have their own planets. If conditions suitable for life occur on only a small fraction of those, that is still a vast number of potential habitats.
So, are we alone, or not? We don’t know how common it is for life to get started: some scientists think that it is inevitable, given the right conditions. Others regard it as an extremely rare event. If we were to find present or past life on Mars, then, provided we could rule out natural cross-contamination by local meteorites, this evidence of life starting twice in one Solar System would make it virtually unthinkable that it had not started among numerous planets of other stars too. Based on what we know today, Earth could be the only life-bearing planet in the Galaxy, but if we find independent life on Mars, then life, and probably intelligence, is surely abundant everywhere. As the visionary Arthur C. Clarke put it: “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” Terrifying or not, I’d like to know the answer. I don’t think Mars holds the key, but it surely holds one of the numbers of the combination-lock.
David Rothery is a Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the Open University UK, where he chairs a course on planetary science and the search for life. He is the author of Planets: A Very Short Introduction. Read his previous blog post: “Is there life on Mars?”
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Oxford University Press’ annual Place of the Year, celebrating geographically interesting and inspiring places, coincides with its publication of Atlas of the World — the only atlas published annually — now in its 19th Edition. The Nineteenth Edition includes new census information, dozens of city maps, gorgeous satellite images of Earth, and a geographical glossary, once again offering exceptional value at a reasonable price. Read previous blog posts in our Place of the Year series.
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Is it music? A listener’s journey
2012 has been a poignant year for avant-garde music. German composer Hans Werner Henze passed away in October at age 86; a little over a week later American composer Elliott Carter passed away at the age of 103. The late John Cage was, as Musical America put it, “feted beyond his own wildest dreams” this year in celebration of his birth centenary.
All three of these composers wrote music that challenged listeners to reconsider the boundaries of what qualifies as music.
John Cage once stated, “I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, ‘You’ll come to a wall you won’t be able to get through.’ So I said, ‘I’ll beat my head against that wall.’”
Elliott Carter (touchingly eulogized by Paul Griffiths last month on the OUPblog) likewise acknowledged that most listeners did not understand his music: “One thing I can’t understand is why people have such trouble with modern music. It seems to me to be perfectly intelligible. When I hear one of my pieces again, or listen to the record, I don’t see why people could find this perplexing in any way. Yet audiences can’t make head or tail of it… I finally said the hell with that whole point of view and decided to write what I really always hoped to write, and what I thought was most important for me. I’ve taken that point of view ever since.”
Hans Werner Henze, according to Norman Lebrecht, knew that his music would not be fully understood or appreciated during his lifetime.
What is it about these composers’ music that “perplexes” people so, and yet holds their attention? What makes Howard Stern, listening to a young composer’s piece exclaim “We couldn’t even figure out if it was music” and then spend ten minutes of his show excoriating it?
I personally have long been fascinated by this type of music — highly structured, arcane music that challenges my ears, requiring deep listening, still managing somehow to stimulate my emotions. Really this music is why I studied music theory throughout my graduate years; I wanted to be able to talk about what I was hearing in a meaningful way.
My journey began with Morton Feldman’s music, but after I moved to New York City I quickly became involved with the thriving and vibrant community of avant-garde musicians that live here.
Last July I interviewed two composers about the progression of their compositional styles over their heretofore relatively short careers. One of the interviewees, Matthew Hough (who wrote the piece featured on Stern’s show), seemed to subconsciously channel Carter when he said “At a certain point [in my career] I realized I was thinking too much about how I was being perceived and not thinking hard enough about why I’m doing what I’m doing and what composition means for me.”
And here we get to the crux of the matter: Is it music when someone approaches composition in this way? Is it music when what we hear defies classification? Indeed, I use the term avant-garde here, but one of the challenges of talking about this music is terminology: What do we talk about when we can’t talk about chords, melodies, themes, etc.?
Ultimately, my answer to the first two questions is ‘yes’; my answer to the last question is ‘get creative’. Above all, open-mindedness and a willingness to listen actively and creatively are absolutely necessary if we’re going to appreciate avant-garde music on its own terms.
“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.” –John Cage.
Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.
Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
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December 3, 2012
Contraception, HSAs and the unnecessary controversy about religious conscience
By Edward Zelinsky
Among the bitter but unnecessary controversies of this election year was the dispute about the federal government’s mandate that employers provide contraception as part of their health care coverage for their employees. Employers religiously opposed to contraception believe this mandate infringes their right of Free Exercise of religion under the First Amendment. Advocates of the contraception mandate characterize it as vital to women’s health and choice.
This acerbic controversy is totally unnecessary. This dispute can be diffused by health savings accounts (HSAs) or similar employer-funded medical accounts under the employee’s control. Such a solution should be appealing to political leaders committed to civil discourse and mutual respect for opposing views. Unfortunately, such leaders appear to be in short supply.
Substantively, the most recent event in this controversy is the decision of US District Judge Reggie B. Walton. Judge Walton recently held that the contraception mandate violated the rights of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., a Christian publishing company opposed on religious grounds to certain of the mandated forms of contraception. Judge Walton held that the contraception mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Earlier in the year, Missouri’s legislature, overriding the veto of Governor Jay Nixon, declared that Missouri employers religiously opposed to contraception need not provide contraception as part of their employees’ medical coverage. This Missouri law directly defies the contrary federal mandate adopted as part of President Obama’s health reform package.
On this issue, serious and sincere people come to different conclusions. These differences can be accommodated by requiring employers with ethical or religious qualms about any particular type of medical care to fund HSAs or similar accounts under employees’ control. Such accounts enable the employees to make their own decisions about the medical services such employees obtain with their employer-funded health care dollars.
HSA supporters tout such accounts to control medical costs and to increase consumer autonomy. But HSAs can also diffuse religious and ethical controversy by shifting contentious choices from employers to employees.
If employers have religious or ethical scruples about providing contraception or other medical services, they should instead pay into independently-administered HSAs for their employees. Employees who want these services could then purchase such services with the pre-tax funds in these accounts – just as such employees can today purchase these services with their post-tax salary dollars.
Like all compromises, this proposal is imperfect. A religious employer might object that it knows that its payments to independently-administered HSAs are underwriting services to which the employer objects. But the employee can use his or her salary dollars in ways to which the employer objects. At some point, the religiously sincere employer must acknowledge that control of compensation has shifted from the employer to the employer’s employees. And health care dollars are part of the employee’s compensation package.
The proponents of birth control and other similar medical services can object that employees purchasing such services through HSAs or similar accounts will pay more than employers who can purchase such services more cheaply because of economies of scale. That is an argument for improving the operation of the market for medical services through better information about the prices of such services and for the proponents of such services to themselves harness economies of scale by aggregating purchasers.
Many details must be decided before implementing this proposal. Most obviously, we must decide how much the religious employer must contribute to each employees’ HSA for the employer to be released from the mandate he considers religiously objectionable. This concern, like others, can be resolved by those committed to civil management of our differences.
While the public discussion has to date been stimulated by employers religiously opposed to providing contraception and abortion services, there may be other employers whose religious convictions preclude them from providing other kinds of health care services. Some employers who are Christian Scientists, for example, might object to some or all of the package of medical services being mandated by the federal government. If so, these employers should also be given the alternative of funding HSAs or other similar accounts which shift control of health care dollars to the employees.
A genuinely diverse society must be tolerant of genuine diversity. In this spirit, employers with religious objections to particular medical practices and services should be given the alternative of funding employees’ HSAs instead.
Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.
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How we decide Place of the Year
Since its inception in 2007, Oxford University Press’s Place of Year has provided reflections on how geography informs our lives and reflects them back to us. Adam Gopnik recently described geography as a history of places: “the history of terrains and territories, a history where plains and rivers and harbors shape the social place that sits above them or around them.” An Atlas of the World expert committee made up of authors, editors, and geography enthusiasts from around the press has made several different considerations for their choices over the years.
Warming Island was a new addition to the Atlas and conveyed how climate change is altering the very map of Earth. Kosovo’s declaration of independence not only caused lines on the map to be redrawn, but highlighted the struggle of many separatists groups around the world. In 2009 and 2010, we looked to the year ahead — as opposed to the year past — with the choices of South Africa and Yemen. Finally, last year was an easy choice as South Sudan joined us as a new country.
We took a slightly different tact with Place of the Year this year. In addition to the ideas of our Atlas committee, we decided to open the choice to the public. We created a longlist, which was open to voting, and invited additions in the comments. After a few weeks of voting, we narrowed the possible selections to a shortlist, also open to voting from the public.
Four front-runners emerged in both the longlist and shortlist: London, Syria, Burma/Myanmar, and Mars. These places have changed greatly over the years, but 2012 has been a particularly special year for each. London hosted the Queen’s Jubilee and the Summer Olympics, as well as the Libor scandal and Leveson Inquiry. The Arab Spring has spread across the Middle East and North Africa, but after the toppling of dictators in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, civil war threatens to tear Syria apart. On the other side of the globe, the government of Burma (also known as Myanmar) is slowly moving to reform the country and only two weeks ago President Barack Obama made a historic visit to Rangoon. And finally, this August the Curiosity Rover landed on Mars. Although you can’t find Mars in our Atlas of the World (for obvious reasons), it captures the spirit of cartography: the exploration of the unknown and all that entails.
It was these four front-runners that we asked Oxford University Press employees to vote on and our Atlas committee to consider. Mars won the public vote, the OUP employee vote, and the hearts and minds of our Atlas committee.
Once we made our final decision on November 19th, we began contacting experts on Mars from around Oxford University Press to illuminate different aspects of the red planet. Inevitably, the first response we received asked us whether we had heard about the rumours surrounding NASA’s upcoming announcement. We took that as a good sign — and we’ll bring up An Atlas of Mars at our next editorial meeting.
Oxford’s Atlas of the World — the only world atlas updated annually, guaranteeing that users will find the most current geographic information — is the most authoritative resource on the market. The Nineteenth Edition includes new census information, dozens of city maps, gorgeous satellite images of Earth, and a geographical glossary, once again offering exceptional value at a reasonable price.
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And the Place of the Year 2012 is……
It’s a city! It’s a state! It’s a country! No — it’s a planet! Breaking with tradition, Oxford University Press has selected Mars as the Place of the Year 2012.
A close-up of Mars by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA
Mars, visible in the night sky to the naked eye, has fascinated and intrigued for centuries but only in the past 50 years has space exploration allowed scientists to better understand the red planet. On 6 August 2012, NASA’s Curiosity Rover landed on Mars’ Gale Crater, and by transmitting its findings back to Earth, Curiosity has made Mars a little a less alien. Among many other accomplishments, Curiosity has swallowed Martian soil and discovered an ancient stream bed. Today, NASA is expected to make a possibly mars-shattering announcement at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Mount Sharp, Curiosity Rover's goal. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
With an eye to the future of scientific discovery, Oxford University Press has chosen Mars in celebration of the place that has kept Earthlings excited and engaged this year. Your votes, combined with the votes of OUP employees, and the opinion of our expert Atlas of the World committee, easily led to Mars’s victory, outperforming Syria, London, Calabasas (California, USA), Greece, Istanbul, CERN, Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, Artic Circle, and Myanmar/Burma.
Here are some of the many reasons why we’re so excited about Mars:
While scientists have been mapping Mars from afar since the 19th century, it still represents the new and unknown — the fascination of cartographers and atlas-makers.
Space exploration! Astrophysics! Astronomy! Geophysics! Astrobiology! There’s much to know about the universe and Earth’s place in it, and Mars is just one fascinating piece in the puzzle.
Mars is home to the highest peak in the Solar System (Olympus Mons), but no life forms (as far as we know).
Space exploration poses problems for traditional international diplomacy. The Outer Space Treaty is only the beginning of a complex legal framework.
Although named after the Roman god of war, Mars acts as a muse to some of the great writers and artists, including H.G. Wells and David Bowie.
Did Mars Curiosity steal your iPod? Curiosity wakes up to these tracks and premiered will.i.am’s Reach for the Stars by beaming the song back to earth. Even Britney Spears wants to know more.
Mars continues to inspire new generations to study, to dream, and to stay curious.
We’ll be looking in depth at various facets of Mars on the OUPblog this week. You can check back here for the latest posts. We invite your comments and hope that you continue to stay curious!
Curiosity Rover takes a self-portrait, reminding you to stay curious, OUPbloggers. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
Oxford’s Atlas of the World — the only world atlas updated annually, guaranteeing that users will find the most current geographic information — is the most authoritative resource on the market. The Nineteenth Edition includes new census information, dozens of city maps, gorgeous satellite images of Earth, and a geographical glossary, once again offering exceptional value at a reasonable price.
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Challenges for international law
What is a state? We think we know but when we compare things that are (e.g. Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein) to things that are not (e.g. Scotland, Kosovo, Palestine) our understanding unravels. This is a core question of international law and the troubling thing is that the best experts in the subject wouldn’t give a consistent explanation for the differences between these examples.
The UN is the closest thing we have to a world government. It is founded on a legal document (The UN Charter), it has a Court to resolve disputes between members, it has a Parliament of states (the General Assembly), and crucially, unlike its predecessor the League of Nations, it can authorize collective enforcement of its will (via the Security Council). There are dozens of other international organizations getting on with regulating different aspects of the world’s behaviour, so how come in spite of this appearance of a legal order, international law seems incapable of addressing urgent problems of poverty, violence, and climate change? How come the powerful get away with breaking the law? Why does justice so often get trumped by expediency?
Maybe that’s not fair — our national governments suffer from these same failings too. They do some basic things well (international law does a great job co-ordinating postage and telecoms) but can’t seem to manage the big breakthroughs. Surely there is a difference though: we created the international system to improve on what our governments can achieve on their own. If it can’t do better, then what is the point?
Today more people than ever before are engaged with international law. Many are, as one would expect, learning and applying it, but an increasingly vocal proportion question its role, its effectiveness and even its very existence. If it is to fulfil its promise, international law needs to rise to the following challenges.
(1) Is it law or is it just about power?
International lawyers are tired of hearing this question but it isn’t addressed to them. It is addressed to the leaders who take part in a legal order yet subvert it at the same time. Every state sends and receives diplomats yet simultaneously carries out espionage. States choose to use law to enforce some obligations whilst insisting not to be bound by others. The late great Sir Ian Brownlie used to say “if you doubt the reality of international law, have a look at my bank balance”, i.e. his clients (states) were paying him so they must believe it in. But that is just the problem — the very actors that Brownlie cited as proof of the reality of the law are the ones who can also make it seem like an optional extra, not a source of obligation.
(2) Who does it apply to?
Nowadays many of the entities regulated by so-called international law are not nations: corporations, international organizations, indigenous peoples, individuals, armed resistance groups. Cases at the International Criminal Court pit its Prosecutor (an individual acting on behalf of an international organization) against an individual criminal defendant. Then a group comes along who certainly seem to merit the protection of international law, such as the Guantanamo detainees, and we find that they don’t fit into any accepted legal category. If states can insist that only those laws they consent to can bind them, what about all of these other entities? Do they get more of a say in the content and application of the law? Should there be gaps in protection from human rights abuses?
(3) Where does it reach?
This follows from the last question. International law claims to reach directly into domestic legal systems; treaties apply to situations and places that nobody ever expected when they were first agreed. Then we have the increased use of outer space and the virtual arena of cyber space to contend with. Will these develop as adaptations of international law and if so would that not begin to stretch “international law” to the point where it is so diverse as to be meaningless?
(4) Are we expecting too much from a legal system?
International law can only move forward when there is a political consensus that it should. In the absence of political will, it is impossible to subject new areas to international law or to increase its reach. It is hard to square this compromising approach with international law’s progressive and at times utopian spirit. The planned recognition of Palestine as a state is a good illustration of the pragmatic dilemma: the legal order is advanced (by recognizing a new state) whilst also undermined (by restricting what statehood means).
(5) How can we know the content of international law?
The two primary sources of international law are custom and treaties. Whilst nothing involving lawyers is ever clear cut, treaties are vastly easier to engage with than custom, the exact nature of which remains shrouded in mystery. How customary law is formed and who is bound by it are matters that are crying out for authoritative resolution. For international law to be taken more seriously it is vital that the processes and content of custom are clarified and made available to all those who might use it or be affected by it.
Scholarly legal publishing has its part to play. We cannot of course makes statesmen and women take their obligations more seriously nor put in place the economic prosperity in which ideas of justice and fairness have a better chance of taking root. We can however nurture scholarship which looks to clarify the nature, content, and scope of international law.
John Louth is editor-in-chief of academic law books, journals and online, and head of Oxford University Press’ US law office. Merel Alstein is commissioning editor for books in the area of international law.
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Musical ways of interacting with children
What does the baby have to learn in these first 12-18 months (before they can speak)? The list includes what you do with your eyes when with another, how long to hold a mutual gaze, what turn-off head movements work, and with whom, how close you should let the other come to you… how to read body positions… how to enter into turn taking when vocalizing with another… how to joke around, negotiate escalate, back off… make friends, and so on.
Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality (OUP, 2010) p. 110-111
As a music therapy scholar, teacher, and practitioner for more than 20 years, I have been able to learn from many sources about the crucial role our early years play in our lives. The ability to reflect on challenges experienced in our adult lives by linking back to childhood experiences is an essential aspect of the way that many music therapists practice. Rather than using descriptions of family histories to apportion blame, the therapist tries to understand the current experience of the patient and their worldview through the lens of past experience, to see if there is some way to make sense of self-destructive behaviours, or difficulties experienced in creating meaningful and satisfying relationships with others.
I began my early music therapy practice in mental health services and in nursing homes, working with people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease or other types of dementia. Many people, whether in group or individual music therapy programmes, offered reflections on their early life, and described aspects of their parents’ availability or unavailability; referring to the quality of these first relationships in ways that helped me to understand something of what might have been unresolved or unsatisfying for them. Eventually I found myself very keen to work with people much earlier in life to see whether music therapy could ameliorate some of the issues my older patients were facing.
Although I worked in paediatric music therapy for seven years at a children’s hospital, it was only when I was writing the first proposal to found the (now) international parent-infant support programme Sing & Grow that I had the chance to bring all of my past experience to bear: to make a case for the importance of promoting loving, playful, and nurturing interactions between parents and infants where vulnerability was in evidence. Through my work in this field, I have become increasingly aware of an unrecognised field of practice in music therapy: parent-infant work. This involves the referral of vulnerable parents to a music therapy service. Parents usually attend with their infants and the music therapist provides a safe and accepting space in which the parent and infant pair or group can be encouraged to play and interact in supportive and mutually satisfying ways. This is not always ‘music’ as it might be generally understood; rather it is a musical way of interacting that the therapist encourages.
When adults speak to infants we use particular ways of interaction that seem to be the same across the world. But we should ask why do we use such an exaggerated, playful, and musical way of speaking to infants? The obvious answer is because the infants like it — they raise their eyebrows, fix their gaze on the speaker’s face, and sometimes smile quite quickly on hearing us say ‘ooohhh whooo is my little baaaby?’ This is especially true if the speaker is a family member but it also can occur in new encounters when the conversational partner knows and can offer this communication in a playful and experimental way. However, there are many more powerful scientific and theoretical findings that indicate how this type of interaction builds the bonds of trust and love between parents and infants.
Work by psychobiologist Colwyn Trevarthen, the ethologist Ellen Dissanayake, and researcher Sandra Trehub and her team at the University of Toronto, has paved the way in showing how the functions of this interaction have less to do with entertaining and engaging the baby and are more aligned with the infant’s ability to evoke and interpret these signals from adults and their siblings within weeks of birth. For me, and for the researchers mentioned above, these interactions are easily identified as musical. Observations of the nature of these interactions between parents and infants led Stephen Malloch to coin the term ‘Communicative Musicality’, to capture the unique pitch and rhythmic structures that communicative partners use.
This type of interaction is, as the quote from Stern at the opening attests, playful, rich, and highly involved. It teaches the many skills we need in being able to be with people successfully in intimate relationships, in relationships involving teachers and students, and in work groups. When we do not have adequately rich and supported experiences of attachment in infancy there can be lifelong consequences. Therefore, offering support to parents and infants in difficulty can provide long term benefits. Music therapy is uniquely poised to make a useful contribution to this work as infants are receptive to musical and music-like interactions from sensitive and responsive adults.
Professor Jane Edwards is an Associate Professor at the University of Limerick where she directs the Music & Health Research Group and is co-ordinator of the MA in Music Therapy in the Irish World Academy of Music & Dance. She was formerly a guest professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin (2004-2011). She is President of the International Association for Music & Medicine. She has published extensively in the field of music therapy including Music Therapy and Parent-Infant Bonding (OUP, 2011), and is sole editor for the first Oxford Handbook of Music Therapy (forthcoming).
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Image credit: ‘Mother Kissing Baby’ By Vera Kratochvil (public domain via Wikimedia Commons).
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December 2, 2012
Personality disorders, the DSM, and the future of diagnosis
Ben Carey’s thought-provoking article in the New York Times about the treatment of personality disorders in the forthcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association raises two questions:
1. Do disorders of “personality” really exist as natural phenomena, comparable to mania or dementia?
2. If they do exist, do they belong to the clinical specialty of psychiatry, or are they better considered characteristics of the human condition that have little to do with illness? Psychosis and melancholia are real illnesses, comparable to tuberculosis and mumps. Do personality disorders have that status?
Psychiatry’s involvement with personality disorders goes back to the early nineteenth century and the diagnosis of “hysteria”: the female character was considered weak and vulnerable. Women by virtue of their very personalities were deemed more vulnerable than men to feelings and emotional changability. Viennese psychiatry professor Ernst von Feuchtersleben wrote in 1845, “[The causes of] hysteria include everything that increases sensitivity, weakens spontaneity, gives predominance to the sexual sphere, and validates the feelings and drives associated with sexuality.”
In terms of the scientific assessment of personality and its breakdowns, this was not a promising beginning.
Things got worse. In 1888 German psychiatrist Julius Koch said there was such a thing as a personality that was “psychopathically inferior,” a product of genetic degeneration. Such degenerates were not exactly mentally ill, he said, merely unable to get their act together, and also showed “a pathological lack of reproductive drive.”
So psychiatry has always thought there were people who had something really wrong with their characters without being necessarily depressed or psychotic. But how to classify them?
Classification is obsessing the current debate. The struggle over what disorders to identify began with the great German classifier of disease (nosologist) Emil Kraepelin who, in the eighth edition of his Psychiatry textbook in 1915 expanded to seven types the list of “psychopathic personalities” with which he and his colleagues had been working. The list is interesting because it is very different from our own: the “excitable”; the irresolute; those driven by pleasure to seek out alochol, gambling, and who generally become wastrels; the eccentric; the liars and swindlers; and the quarrelsome, sometimes called the querulants.
Doesn’t sound very familiar, does it? That’s because each culture compiles a list of the personality traits it dislikes, or that are harmful to the further flourishing of things; and in Imperial Germany being querulous by challenging authority or being irresolute by not seeing France as the enemy were viewed as disorders.
There was lots yet to come, that I’m going to skip over. But what has most greatly influenced the current debate is the concept of personality disorders laid down by the psychoanalysts, the followers of Freud. Their list is quite different from Kraepelin’s because they were not interested in making war on France but on inner conflicts within the psyche. In 1908 Freud suggested the existence of an “anal” character, poeple who were orderly, tidy and meticulous and who in childhood had somehow come to dwell upon the anal region.
Freud’s followers came up with a whole list of character pathologies: Fritz Wittels’ “hysterical character,” Wilhelm Reich’s notion of “character armor” and its various guises, such as the “compulsive character,” the “phallic-narcissitic character,” and so forth.
We’re getting hot now. The modern concept of personality disorder comes directly to us from the psychoanalysts and from their current desperate desire to stay relevant. In 1938 Adolph Stern laid out a kind of personality disorder that was unresponsive to psychoanalysis, calling it “borderline personality disorder.”
Fourteen years later, in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association took a first cut at personality disorders, in its new DSM series, assigning them to three groups: (1) Those that were constitutional (inborn) in nature and unresponsive to change though psychotherapy, including “inadequate personality” and “paranoid personality”; (2) Those individuals with emotionally “unstable” and “passive aggressive” personalities; and (3) the sociopaths, such as the homosexuals, fetishists and other deviants.
American society in the early 1950s did not like those who deviated from the missionary position, who were inadequate to the challenges of empire-building, and who accepted authority but badmouthed it at the water-cooler.
Wilhelm Reich had laid out the concept of “narcicism” in 1933 and New York psychiatrist Heinz Kohut gave it pride of place in 1971. We are totally mired in the swamp of psychoanalysis here, a swamp that DSM-II in 1968 and DSM-III in 1980 failed to pull us out of, though DSM-III constructed an “axis II,” along which personality disorders could be arrayed, in addition to axis I for the real psychiatric disorders.
So this brings us to the current scene. The most recent edition of the DSM series, DSM-IV in 1994, had a whole slew of personality disorders, including histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, and so forth. The editor of DSM-IV, Allen Frances, was a psychoanalyst, and the list is a kind of last gasp. The problem is that patients who qualified for one, tended to qualify for almost all of them. The individual “disorders” were quite incapable of identifying individuals who had something psychiatrically wrong with them; the “disorders” had become labels for personality characteristics that are found in abundance in the population.
Moreover, who needed labels? Psychiatrists had a seat-of-the pants definition of a PD: “If your first impression of your patient is that he is an asshole, then he probably has a personality disorder.”
And what kind of disorder was this anyway, an illness in which the identified patient thinks he personally is fine but is making everyone around him unhappy? This is not like psychosis.
You can see why the drafters of DSM-V, due this May, have despaired. They wanted something clinically relevant and that also would sound vaguely like science (which psychoanalysis certainly didn’t). It will be interesting to see how the APA sorts this out. Personality disorders exist not as natural phenomena but as cultural phenomena: We as a society need some way of identifying people who can’t quite get it all together. But is this an illness that psychiatrists can treat? In the way that they treat schizophrenia with Zyprexa and depression with Prozac? What do we, as a society in 2012, do with people who can’t quite get it all together? I’m asking you.
Edward Shorter is an internationally-recognized historian of psychiatry and the author of numerous books, including A History of Psychiatry from the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (1997), Before Prozac (2009), and the forthcoming How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown. Shorter is the Jason A. Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine and a Professor of Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. Read his previous OUPblog posts.
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