When a government regulates an enterprise, regulatory costs arise due to bounded rationality, uncertainty, and asset specificity. To preserve flexibility, regulators are sometimes granted discretion by law to respond to new circumstances. However, such discretion can be abused to expropriate the interests of private investors, especially when private investments become specific assets that cannot be easily used for other purposes. State ownership alleviates regulatory costs by aligning the interests of the government and the enterprises, although it incurs higher ownership costs. In sectors where regulatory costs are low, private enterprises prevail because of their advantages in reducing ownership costs. Conversely, in sectors where regulatory costs are high, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are more likely to prevail and are not easy to privatize. The degree of regulatory costs depends on several factors, including the need for intense regulation in a particular sector, the degree of uncertainty, and the availability of alternative institutions that support effective regulation.

Self-love is a central yet somewhat neglected theme in Works of Love. While the mission of this text is to distinguish the spiritual from the worldly conception of love, when it comes to self-love commentators tend to presuppose our merely worldly understanding. But there is an essential split between the spiritual and worldly conceptions of self-love, hence this cannot be what Kierkegaard has in mind. To illustrate this, I identify two places where the worldly conception and Kierkegaard’s claims clash. My aim is to explain the spirit’s conception of self-love, thereby to explain Kierkegaard’s claims. I propose to reduce self-love to "willing to be oneself," a self-relation figuring in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death. A person loves herself in that she wills to be herself. Yet she may do this properly or improperly: properly when she takes God as the criterion for the self she wills to be, improperly when she takes a merely human criterion. This account clarifies Kierkegaard’s claims about self-love in Works of Love.

Chapter 6 is Senecan in theme. While it includes some discussion of various classical concepts – casus and occasio in particular – which are picked up by Machiavelli to talk about the effects of chance and contingency in the world of states which he wishes to analyse, the chapter is mainly devoted to staking out the philosophical opposition which Machiavelli’s contentions about fortuna in his theory of the state are designed to overturn; and that opposition is deeply Senecan. The chapter lays out an account of the role of fortuna in Seneca’s moral philosophy. It illuminates the providentialism and determinism underpinning all his thinking about the concept, and draws particular attention to Seneca’s persistent tendency to personify Fortuna as a mistress of slaves and to pictorialize a tyrannical realm under her arbitrary government. The chapter then shows how this Senecan treatment becomes central to humanist thinking about Fortuna from Petrarch onwards and explains why Machiavelli is profoundly bothered by its currency in his own day. Machiavelli takes it as a form of delusion emanating from beliefs about a providentialist world emptied of all the contingencies which must be countered by any truly virtuoso agent in charge of governing the state.

By 1230, with the Lancelot-Graal Cycle, the contours of the Arthurian universe and the chronology of events leading from the invention of the Grail to the disappearance of the emblematic king were given their first definitive form. However, in French, other medieval works continue to use the same characters and events to recount what happens after, before or elsewhere. With the Prose Tristan, the Cycle of Guiron le Courtois and Prophéties de Merlin, Arthurian prose romance enters a new phase, characterised by complex rewriting and a multiplication of versions and particular redactions. This chapter offers an assessment of the three works, taking into account the most recent critical debate.

Towards the end of 1979, soon after the Waiting for the Barbarians manuscript had been completed, Coetzee began thinking about his next book and embarked on a lengthy writing process that would eventually result in the publication of Life & Times of Michael K (1983). As discussed more fully in Chapter 4, the influence of photography and film on Coetzee’s second book, In the Heart of the Country, was formative and pervasive and was also acknowledged by Coetzee.1 But it is not generally recognised that this interest in the montage effects of avant-garde cinema persisted in subsequent fictions. Precisely during the formative period of the genesis of Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee was drafting a screenplay version of In the Heart of the Country, and these parallel creative writing processes, in different genres, led to fascinating intermedial entanglements that were ultimately generative for the emerging novel. While writing Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee was re-envisaging his earlier novel as a film, in effect re-imagining its story through the cinematic lens.

At points in the Dialogues Philo appears to favor the Stratonian theory that matter is endued with an inherent principle of self-organization—the hypothesis that order is endogenous to matter, and need not be imposed by any external organizing principle such as thought, design, cosmological pollination or insemination. Moreover, on two occasions Philo seems to say that it is “plausible” or even “probable” that the self-organization of matter proceeds by absolute necessity, such that if we could “penetrate into the intimate nature of bodies”, we would be able to see that it “was absolutely impossible, they could ever admit of any other disposition.” (DNR 6.12, 9.10) I first consider Philo’s purposes in advancing the Stratonian hypothesis, and in framing this theory in the language of absolute necessity. I show that Philo’s reasoning here is ad hominem, and proceeds upon a number of methodological assumptions that Philo himself does not share. I also consider Hume’s own purposes in having Philo feint in this way, and suggest that Hume intends to deliver a message about the pointlessness of hankering after ultimate explanations in natural theology and philosophy.

The emergence of vernacular French prose at the dawn of the thirteenth century gave rise to a new form of Arthurian romance. Prose allowed the development of lengthy cycles of interconnected romances that functioned autonomously while also forming an overarching story. The most popular of these cycles, the Vulgate or Lancelot-Grail Cycle, became the canonical version of the Arthurian narrative for the rest of the medieval period, influencing subsequent texts in the French-speaking world (Guiron le Courtois, the Prose Tristan, etc.) and beyond (the Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation, Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, etc.). This chapter details the circumstances that made the Vulgate Cycle possible, its inner workings and dynamics, popularity, audience and legacy. It ends with a survey of the Post-Vulgate texts that were composed shortly after the initial cycle and examines the hypothesis of a ‘Post-Vulgate Cycle’ that may have connected them.

Positing the question concerning the meaning of life in terms of "how should one live so that the value of life be accessible to one," my claim is that Kierkegaard’s answer to this question is "by loving." To explain this answer, I focus on the idea of "God as a middle term" that Kierkegaard presents in Works of Love. Further to interpreting this as saying that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis for loving, I claim that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis also for living. Having God as "the middle" in love, I suggest, is in fact to experience goodness, and by this to affirm one’s existence as valuable. Experiencing this goodness, however, depends on becoming oneself, which, for its part, depends on loving another. Thus, in the context of loving, one in fact sustains three sets of relationships: with God, with the beloved, and with oneself. In the chapter I demonstrate the interdependency of these relationships, and how they constitute a meaningful life.

The twentieth century saw a considerable number of rewritings and adaptations of the Arthurian legend, in as many styles and purposes as there were writers, cultures and national heroes. Two main and sometimes paradoxical tendencies appeared: a quest for a supposedly deeper historical knowledge, and a need to popularise Arthurian themes. As Nazis launched their own quest for the Holy Grail, a subsequent need to re-enchant the world was expressed throughout the century. By adapting medieval texts to insist on their modernity for a contemporary readership, authors, artists and creators insisted on the universal aspects of the Matter of Britain, using it to emphasise the disillusionment in our modern Western societies, or on the contrary to expose the alleged wonders of an immutable human nature. The twentieth century confirmed this wide malleability, as Continental Europe regularly found in King Arthur a symbol of its own preoccupations.

This chapter examines various ways in which Arthur and Arthurian legend have been visualised between 1500 and 1800; not confined to manuscripts, it offers a cross-medium account of the legend’s visual representation, including physical installations, engravings, antiquarian juvenilia, as well as architecture and applied art. It examines the ways in which these visualisations present their narratives and how the figures are defined. This chapter also explores how Arthurian figures are identified and located within history, notably by devices including heraldry and architecture, and how these devices are employed to afford various senses of the antique, status and significance.