This book starts with the radical premise that the most coherent way to read the Zhuangzi is through Guo Xiang (d. 312 CE), the classic Daoist text's first and most important commentator, and that the best way to read Guo Xiang is politically. Offering an investigation of the notions of causality, self, freedom, and its political implications, the book provides a comprehensive account of freedom that is both ontological and political, using Guo's notion of self-realization (自得 zide). This is a conception of freedom that introduces a "dependence-based autonomy," in which freedom is something we achieve and realize through our connection to others. The notion that a subject is born with freedom—and that one can return to it by isolating oneself from others—would be a strange idea not just to Guo but to most Chinese philosophers. Rather, freedom is complex and frail, and only the kind of freedom that is collectively attained through radical dependence can be worth having. In sum, the book makes a new contribution to Chinese philosophical scholarship as well as philosophical debates on freedom.

A Frail Liberty traces the paradoxical actions of the first French abolitionist society, the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of Blacks), at the juncture of two unprecedented achievements of the revolutionary era: the extension of full rights of citizenship to qualifying free men of color in 1792 and the emancipation decree of 1794 that simultaneously declared the formerly enslaved to be citizens of France. This society helped form the revolution’s notion of color-blind equality yet did not protest the pro-slavery attack on the new citizens of France. Tessie P. Liu prioritizes the understanding of the elite insiders’ vision of equality as crucial to understanding this dualism. By documenting the link between outright exclusion and political inclusion and emphasizing that a nation’s perceived qualifications for citizenship formulate a particular conception of racial equality, Liu argues that the treatment and status distinctions between free people of color and the formerly enslaved parallel the infamous divide between “active” and “passive” citizens. These two populations of colonial citizens with African ancestry then must be considered part of the normative operations of French citizenship at the time. Uniquely locating racial differentiation in the French and Haitian revolutions within the logic and structures of political representation, Liu deepens the conversation regarding race as a civic identity within democratic societies.

How do we realize our best selves and flourish in the face of our frailty, vice, and suffering? This work addresses the human condition in its entirety and discusses the pathways to flourishing in light of the everyday limitations that we all must face.

Readers will find in the pages of this book a treatment of the statistical analysis of clustered survival data. Such data are encountered in many scientific disciplines including human and veterinary medicine, biology, epidemiology, public health and demography. A typical example is the time to death in cancer patients, with patients clustered in hospitals. Frailty models provide a powerful tool to analyze clustered survival data. In this book different methods based on the frailty model are described and it is demonstrated how they can be used to analyze clustered survival data. All programs used for these examples are available on the Springer website.

Family caregiving affects millions of Americans every day, in all walks of life. At least 17.7 million individuals in the United States are caregivers of an older adult with a health or functional limitation. The nation's family caregivers provide the lion's share of long-term care for our older adult population. They are also central to older adults' access to and receipt of health care and community-based social services. Yet the need to recognize and support caregivers is among the least appreciated challenges facing the aging U.S. population. Families Caring for an Aging America examines the prevalence and nature of family caregiving of older adults and the available evidence on the effectiveness of programs, supports, and other interventions designed to support family caregivers. This report also assesses and recommends policies to address the needs of family caregivers and to minimize the barriers that they encounter in trying to meet the needs of older adults.

More than any other people on earth, we Americans are free to say and write what we think. The press can air the secrets of government, the corporate boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. This extraordinary freedom results not from America’s culture of tolerance, but from fourteen words in the constitution: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment.InFreedom for the Thought That We Hate, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis describes how our free-speech rights were created in five distinct areas—political speech, artistic expression, libel, commercial speech, and unusual forms of expression such as T-shirts and campaign spending. It is a story of hard choices, heroic judges, and the fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face to face with one of America’s great founding ideas.

Human rights have become a defining feature of contemporary society, permeating public discourse on politics, law and culture. But why did human rights emerge as a key social force in our time and what is the relationship between rights and the structures of both national and international society? By highlighting the institutional and socio-cultural context of human rights, this timely and thought-provoking collection provides illuminating insights into the emergence and contemporary societal significance of human rights. Drawn from both sides of the Atlantic and adhering to refreshingly different theoretical orientations, the contributors to this volume show how sociology can develop our understanding of human rights and how the emergence of human rights relates to classical sociological questions such as social change, modernisation or state formation. Making Human Rights Intelligible provides an important sociological account of the development of international human rights. It will be of interest to human rights scholars and sociologists of law and anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of one of the most significant issues of our time.