The admiration of the Soviet Union amongst Britain's interwar scientific left is well known. This article reveals a parallel story. Focusing on the biologists Julian Huxley and Lancelot Hogben and the scientific journalist J.G. Crowther, I show that a number of scientific thinkers began to look west, to the US. In the mid- to late 1930s and into the 1940s, Huxley, Crowther and Hogben all visited the US and commented favourably on Roosevelt's New Deal, in particular its experimental approach to politics (in the form of planning). Huxley was first to appreciate the significance of the experiment; he looked to the Tennessee Valley Authority as a model of democratic planning by persuasion that could also be applied in Britain. Crowther, meanwhile, examined the US through the lens of history of science. In Famous American Men of Science (1937) and in lectures at Harvard University, he aimed to shed light on the flaws in the Constitution which were frustrating the New Deal. Finally, Hogben's interest in the US was related to his long-standing opposition to dialectical materialism, and when he finally saw the US at first hand, he regarded it as a model for how to bring about a planned socialist society through peaceful persuasion.

This article describes the federal government's little-known effort to remunerate civilians who lost private property during the War of 1812. It shows how wartime “sufferers” pressured their congressional representatives for redress. In response, their representatives created a new federal office to adjudicate claims for lost property. But this office quickly came under scrutiny for making allegedly erroneous disbursements. Although Congress curtailed the office's power, representatives of the claimants continued to push for a more generous policy. To garner more free state support, they pointed out that officials had sought indemnities for the slaves the British had liberated during the war, but not for other forms of lost property. To remedy this preferential treatment, most northern congressmen began to support enacting a more generous compensation policy. In response, southerners demanded payment for slaves who had been lost in the war. Ultimately, northerners joined with the representatives of the sufferers from the South to pass a new law. However, this law only offered remuneration for buildings, which, in effect, tabled the discussion over slavery. This article therefore reveals how legislators employed the politics of slavery to build a coalition to create a law, which, in turn, was limited by those same politics.

The contested nature of de facto states and their acceptance of dual citizenship results in the overlap of multiple citizenship regimes, leading to individuals living in de facto states possessing multiple citizenship statuses. Using the Most Similar Systems Design, this article explores the factors that influence the (divergent) citizenship regimes of Abkhazia and Transnistria; the former allows dual citizenship only with Russia, while the latter places no restrictions. The primary reason for the adoption of dual citizenship is for pragmatic reasons, as the secondary citizenship can compensate for the lack of benefits (such as international travel, diplomatic protection) afforded by the de facto state’s citizenship. This said, having an ethnicized national identity, in contrast to a civic (state-centered) national identity, can produce (dual) citizenship laws that give preferential treatment to the titular group and its diaspora. Additionally, the influence exerted by the patron state (Russia) and the severity of the conflict with the parent state (Georgia/Moldova) influences dual citizenship in becoming conditional and thus more exclusive.

Taking its theoretical orientation from Sherry Ortner's distinction between ‘power’ and ‘projects’, this article considers the relationship between local artistic projects and the cultures in which they participate. I focus on Pleasure Garden, a collaborative project that spans site-specific installations, concerts and an album. Exploring a wide range of issues at stake in the creative process, including collaboration, gender, aesthetics, colonialism, the work concept, and commodification, I trace how Pleasure Garden’s creators variously reproduced and reworked dominant conventions, while at the same time pursuing their own distinctive commitments. Through this, I argue that Pleasure Garden’s creators negotiated a space that was inside, yet sometimes out of alignment with what I call the ‘cultures of creativity’ associated with Western art music, the music industries, late capitalism, and neoliberalism. This highlights both the powerful forces affecting musicians today and the possibilities for making things otherwise.

In a recent article in this journal, Tobias Fuchs has offered a ‘working test’ for well-being. According to this test, if it is fitting to feel compassion for a subject because they have some property, then the subject is badly off because they have that property. Since subjects of deception seem a fitting target for compassion, this test is said to imply that a number of important views, including hedonism, are false. I argue that this line of reasoning is mistaken: seems fitting does not imply is badly off. I suggest that Fuchs's test can tell us little about well-being that we do not already know; and ultimately, tests of the sort he proposes can yield little insight into the nature of well-being.

The article compares the post-Euromaidan Ukrainian politics in the domains of memory and language, two prominent aspects of the politics of identity that have been sites of controversy since the early years of independence. It examines the government’s behavior in the two domains, taking into account constraints presented by opposition parties, civil society, foreign states and international organizations, and the perceived preferences of the population. In both cases, the government must reconcile the active minority’s call for a radical break with the imperial legacy and the majority’s preference for the preservation of the accustomed environment. However, the Ukrainian leadership chose very different courses for the two domains. While pursuing a rather radical nationalist agenda with regard to memory, they largely refrained from a resolute promotion of the Ukrainian language. This difference does not reflect popular preferences and rather can be explained by politicians’ misperception of what the population wants, as well as their apprehension of policies that would radically change the country’s linguistic landscape and thus their own everyday life.

Satisficing consequentialism is an unpopular theory. Because it permits gratuitous sub-optimal behaviour, it strikes many as wildly implausible. It has been widely rejected as a tenable moral theory for more than twenty years. In this article, I rehearse the arguments behind this unpopularity, before examining an attempt to redeem satisficing. Richard Yetter Chappell has recently defended a form of ‘effort satisficing consequentialism’. By incorporating an ‘effort ceiling’ – a limit on the amount of willpower a situation requires – and requiring that agents produce at least as much good as they could given how much effort they are exerting, Chappell avoids the obvious objections. However, I demonstrate that the revised theory is susceptible to a different objection, and that the resulting view requires that any supererogatory behaviour must be efficient, which fails to match typical moral verdicts.

No one, not even those of us who sat at the center, can or will know the full outreach impact of IPY. If one remembers and trusts public reaction one can deduce that, for a short moment, IPY research and outreach worked together to put a good face on science.

Hobbes believed that the state of nature would be a war of all against all. Locke denied this, but acknowledged that in the absence of government, peace is insecure. In this paper, I analyse both accounts of the state of nature through the lens of classical and experimental game theory, drawing especially on evidence concerning the effects of punishment in public goods games. My analysis suggests that we need government not to keep wicked or relentlessly self-interested individuals in line, but rather to maintain peace among those who disagree about morality.

The history of labour on public works construction is usually presented as a masculine experience, either because the workforce studied is mostly male, or because the labour of women remains unrecorded. Does the history of labour and wage on public works undergo change if we account for women labourers? This article examines this question in the context of famine public works in the second half of nineteenth-century India. State employment on public works was part of a famine relief programme and women, largely from agricultural labouring and small peasant families, worked on the construction of roads, railways, canals, and tanks. The article traces the development of task-gender association on famine public works both as a norm and in practice. Further, it analyses the evidence on negotiations made by women labourers themselves with the existing gendered notions of work and wage. This study contributes to the historiography of labour in a colonial context in two ways: first, it adds to the existing corpus on forms of labour extraction for construction work; and, second, it explores the question of women's work and remuneration outside factories, mills, and mines.

The article discusses compound formation involving proper names from a comparative perspective. While proper names can appear within compounds in English, this is not possible in Greek. The article argues that this follows from a basic difference between English and Greek: English, but not Greek, allows phrases as non-heads of right-headed compounds. As proper names in English are referential in the absence of a determiner, due to the process of D-N merger, they can still be recognized as such within compounds. This is not possible in Greek, where proper names require the presence of a determiner to establish reference.

Population ethics is widely considered to be exceptionally important and exceptionally difficult. One key source of difficulty is the conflict between certain moral intuitions and analytical results identifying requirements for rational (in the sense of complete and transitive) social choice over possible populations. One prominent such intuition is the Asymmetry, which jointly proposes that the fact that a possible child’s quality of life would be bad is a normative reason not to create the child, but the fact that a child’s quality of life would be good is not a reason to create the child. This paper reports a set of questionnaire experiments about the Asymmetry in the spirit of economists’ empirical social choice. Few survey respondents show support for the Asymmetry; instead respondents report that expectations of a good quality of life are relevant. Each experiment shows evidence (among at least some participants) of dual-process moral reasoning, in which cognitive reflection is statistically associated with reporting expected good quality of life to be normatively relevant. The paper discusses possible implications of these results for the economics of population-sensitive social welfare and for the conflict between moral mathematics and population intuition.

This essay serves as an introduction to the special issue recognising the 60th anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty. It provides the geopolitical and scientific context informing the creation of the negotiations for a new treaty between October and December 1959. Thereafter, it identifies some of the challenges facing the contemporary Antarctic Treaty System. While none are thought to be threatening to the collaborative spirit that informs the legal and political status quo, there is no room for complacency either. Finally, the contributors and their essays are introduced for the reader. Taken together, it showcases the diversity of work being undertaken by scholars in the humanities and social sciences.