I met Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) twice at Stanford University, the place where he lived, taught, and researched for most of his life. The first meeting was on his invitation to join him for lunch at the Stanford Faculty Club to decide whether he would schedule a meeting with me later to do the actual interview. Being a warm day under the California sun and given that he was already in his nineties, I expected Arrow to be accompanied by his wife or some other relative who would give him a ride to the club and pick him up afterward. This quickly turned out to be a complete misconception. Arrow arrived in his silver Toyota Camry all by himself and dressed up with coat and tie; he quickly entered the club and was greeted by name by almost everyone working there – including the waiters and the young woman stacking white plates next to the salad bar. He had reserved a quiet table in the back of this bright and large restaurant room that he also preferred for his weekly lunches with Pat Suppes, which they apparently have held every Monday for many years. Almost two hours later, when we finished our ice cream and said goodbye, he added, to my relief, that he would be willing to meet again at his office to conduct the interview the next week. He sprinted to his car and drove away. So, lunch had gone well; I had survived the test. Next time, we met in his office at Stanford’s sandstone-colored Landau Economics Building. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his office was literally packed with books, files, and papers. At the same time, given the elegance and orderliness of Arrow’s mathematical abstractions, there was something thrilling and even life-affirming in seeing that he kept an office in such an improvisational state – a testament to his unfiltered and teeming curiosity. After removing and stacking even more books spanning topics from environmental economics to the history of economics – the desk had disappeared under piles of notes and annotated drafts – two chairs suddenly emerged somewhere in the middle of the room. Arrow sat down, almost disappearing between these mountains of sources he had engaged with over the years.

In section 11 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [EHU], “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State,” Hume attempts to sketch a method for natural theology, a method that establishes clear limits as to what natural theology can show. Unsurprisingly, he does so in the form of a dialogue. I argue that this dialogue is important because, in it, Hume offers a response to the reasoning Butler employs in the Analogy of Religion (1736) in order to establish the existence of a providential God, or what Butler calls a “moral governor” of the universe. Appreciating Hume’s strategy in this dialogue helps us better appreciate Hume’s more radical position in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and suggests a way of understanding the significance of Philo’s reversal in the final section. I claim that what appears to be a concession to religion actually turns out to have significant irreligious implications when considered as an extension of Hume’s response to Butler in EHU 11.

In 1973 Coetzee gave an early manuscript version of what would later become ‘The Vietnam Project’ to his friend Daniel Hutchinson. In a covering note he drew attention to the parallels between the two stories of Dusklands that were, on the face of it, worlds apart: ‘You will notice that these two stories are thematically and formally identical. I am puzzled by this phenomenon and would be most interested to have it explained to me.’1 ‘The Vietnam Project’ was set in contemporary America, and in the story’s centre is Eugene Dawn’s marital and mental breakdown against the background of his classified Vietnam War research; ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’ is a semi-fictionalised account of a late-eighteenth-century Cape frontiersman who embarks on an expedition to Namaqualand. In a subsequent interview with Joanna Scott, Coetzee thought that the two narratives shared ideas, ‘but otherwise the relation is loose’.

Chapter 3 investigates the reasons why many Chinese companies have decided to seek cross-border listings in the past three decades. It examines a variety of relevant theories, such as legal bonding, private benefits and market fragmentation and evaluates the extent to which they may apply to the case of Chinese companies. The overseas listing of Chinese companies offers a good case study due to the apparent disparity between China’s regulatory regime and those in the listing places. However, existing empirical research shows ambiguous or, at best, weak effects of legal bonding. This calls for a closer examination of how to interpret these empirical results and why the legal bonding effect is not as strong as expected.

Much of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is spent debating the experimental design argument for the existence of God. A change of scene occurs in the ninth part of the Dialogues when the character of Demea presents an a priori cosmological argument that purports to demonstrate God’s necessary existence. The argument is then criticized by the characters of Cleanthes and Philo. The conversation in the ninth part of the dialogue has occasioned a mixed legacy. For some scholars, the objections raised by Cleanthes and Philo to the cosmological argument in Part 9 are persuasive and inspiring, whereas for others the objections are ineffective and overrated. This paper critically assesses the mixed legacy of Hume against the cosmological argument, in particular, one of Cleanthes’s famous objections to do with a collection of twenty particles of matter. This objection has had a lasting impact in the philosophy of religion literature in the form of the much disputed, ‘Hume-Edwards Principle’ (HEP). However, I claim that the HEP misrepresents the text on two counts, and that via the spokesperson of Cleanthes, Hume’s point against the cosmological argument has yet to be fully appreciated by critics.

Describes Meade’s involvement in economic policy debates during the 1960s.

Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to privatize infrastructure construction through the public-private partnership (PPP) market, the majority of investors in this sector are still state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, the government that contracts for the infrastructure construction and service usually holds a significant proportion of shares in PPP projects. This chapter explains this phenomenon using the legal theory of SOEs. It finds that, in practice, the government typically retains the power to terminate PPP projects in the public interest when new circumstances arise, while the courts offer limited protection to private investors. As a result, private investors may be deterred from investing due to concerns about government opportunism. Furthermore, it observes that a judicial reform enhancing the independence of judges is associated with an increase in the proportion of shares held by private investors and a decline in shares held by SOEs and local governments. These findings suggest that a robust legal system promotes the extent of privatization by boosting the confidence of private investors.

Chapter 1 is a general introduction to the book. It sets out the research context, key research questions, research methodologies and other relevant information about the book. This sets the stage for the discussion of substantive topics in the following chapters.

To open this eceletic book of ideas, we present the key themes and ask the question, Is our education system providing the right opportunities, knowledge and skills to empower children and young people to thrive on planet Earth? Introducing the concept of the series, we explain that there seem to be three existential uncertainties - the climate and environmental crises, fractured communities and insecurities about self and purpose - that require a diverse collection of voices and their ideas to bridge academia with the practitoner wisdom in classrooms.

Chapter 7 addresses changes in fundamental rights within the tension between social evolution and constitutional stability. How is constitutional thinking responding to the challenge posed to fundamental rights by non-state actors? How can we understand the increasing importance of technology for freedom of expression? These questions lie at the heart of the sociological view of fundamental rights as social institutions arising from modernisation. This perspective emphasises the function of fundamental rights and the emergence, growth, and impact of these norms, in contrast to the state-centred, mostly defensive understanding of fundamental rights that prevails in legal practice. The Swiss legal system provides an enlightening case study for the socially based expansion of fundamental rights. At the end of the 1950s, the Federal Supreme Court was a global pioneer in recognising various unwritten fundamental rights, resolving the tension between social change and constitutional stability through the imposition of strict conditions on the acknowledgement of unwritten rights. This makes it a remarkable example of how a national supreme court interprets its role as guardian of the development of fundamental rights with restraint, while appealing to social acceptance when democratic legitimacy was formally lacking.

This chapter advocates for Alter-Native Constitutionalism’s prioritisation of vernacular understandings of property and housing within South African law, challenging the colonial legacy of ‘lex nullius’ that undermines Black South Africans’ land claims. It critiques the uncommon law’s failure to recognise the Ntu’s historically-rooted, multigenerational land-based relationships and emphasises the interconnectedness of property and housing. The chapter uses Ntu Constitutionalism’s jurisprudential framework for constitutional and statutory interpretation set out in Chapter 6 to critique the ways in which, in its precedents, the Constitutional Court has interpreted the property and housing clauses to the near-complete exclusion of vernacular law’s layered property rights system. It argues that courts, as part of the state, should enforce these constitutional protections using Alter-Native Constitutionalism to uphold vernacular land rights. Further, arguing that the courts must prioritise equitable housing access over strict property rights, the chapter uses the Salem case’s limited ‘sharing model’ attempts vis-à-vis restitution to show that vernacular law’s ‘access-to-occupation’ could be feasibly extended throughout South African ‘property law’ in a manner that would reduce forced evictions and balance state, ‘owner’ and beneficial occupiers’ interests. The chapter thus illustratively pushes for judicial interpretations that better reflect ordinary people’s socio-economic realities, needs and sociocultural values, as well as constitutional commitments.