The foundations upon which our democracies stand are inherently flawed, vulnerable to corrosion from within. What is the remedy? A. C. Grayling makes the case for a clear, consistent, principled and written constitution, and sets out the reforms necessary – among them addressing the imbalance of power between government and Parliament, imposing fixed terms for MPs, introducing proportional representation and lowering the voting age to 16 (the age at which you can marry, gamble, join the army and must pay taxes if you work) – to ensure the intentions of such a constitution could not be subverted or ignored. As democracies around the world show signs of decay, the issue of what makes a good state, one that is democratic in the fullest sense of the word, could not be more important. To take just one example: by the simplest of measures, neither Britain nor the United States can claim to be truly democratic. The most basic tenet of democracy is that no voice be louder than any other. Yet in our ‘first past the post’ electoral systems a voter supporting a losing candidate is unrepresented, his or her voice unequal to one supporting a winning candidate, who frequently does not gain a majority of the votes cast. This is just one of a number of problems, all of them showing that democratic reform is a necessity in our contemporary world.

American Exception seeks to explain the breakdown of US democracy. In particular, how we can understand the uncanny continuity of American foreign policy, the breakdown of the rule of law, and the extreme concentration of wealth and power into an overworld of the corporate rich. To trace the evolution of the American state, the author takes a deep politics approach, shedding light on those political practices that are typically repressed in “mainstream” discourse. In its long history before World War II, the US had a deep political system—a system of governance in which decision-making and enforcement were carried out within—and outside of—public institutions. It was a system that always included some degree of secretive collusion and law-breaking. After World War II, US elites decided to pursue global dominance over the international capitalist system. Setting aside the liberal rhetoric, this project was pursued in a manner that was by and large imperialistic rather than progressive. To administer this covert empire, US elites created a massive national security state characterized by unprecedented levels of secrecy and lawlessness. The “Global Communist Conspiracy” provided a pretext for exceptionism—an endless “exception” to the rule of law. What gradually emerged after World War II was a tripartite state system of governance. The open democratic state and the authoritarian security state were both increasingly dominated by an American deep state. The term deep state was badly misappropriated during the Trump era. In the simplest sense, it herein refers to all those institutions that collectively exercise undemocratic power over state and society. To trace how we arrived at this point, American Exception explores various deep state institutions and history-making interventions. Key institutions involve the relationships between the overworld of the corporate rich, the underworld of organized crime, and the national security actors that mediate between them. History-making interventions include the toppling of foreign governments, the launching of aggressive wars, and the political assassinations of the 1960s. The book concludes by assessing the prospects for a revival of US democracy.

Some have asked for more attention to the virtues within the compass of familiar underlying approaches to morality like utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. However, others have argued that a freestanding and systematic form of virtue ethics would have advantages over other large-scale approaches. This work attempts the latter approach.

Reproduction of the original: Ethics by Aristotle

Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is often characterised in terms of competitive individuals debating orally with one another in public arenas. But it also developed over its long history a sense in which philosophers might acknowledge some other particular philosopher or group of philosophers as an authority and offer to that authority explicit intellectual allegiance. This is most obvious in the development after the classical period of the philosophical 'schools' with agreed founders and, most importantly, canonical founding texts. There also developed a tradition of commentary, interpretation, and discussion of texts which itself became a mode of philosophical debate. As time went on, the weight of a growing tradition of reading and appealing to a certain corpus of foundational texts began to shape how later antiquity viewed its philosophical past and also how philosophical debate and inquiry was conducted. In this book leading scholars explore aspects of these important developments.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 11th IFIP WG 10.3 International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing, NPC 2014, held in Ilan, Taiwan, in September 2014. The 42 full papers and 24 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 196 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on systems, networks, and architectures, parallel and multi-core technologies, virtualization and cloud computing technologies, applications of parallel and distributed computing, and I/O, file systems, and data management.

The complexities of financing, installing, implementing, and regulating public infrastructures, including empirical research, analytical models, and theoretical insights. Infrastructures—tangible, intangible, and institutional public facilities, from bridges to health care—are a vital precondition for economic and societal wellbeing. There has been an increasing awareness that we cannot rely on market forces for infrastructure investment and maintenance. In this volume, experts from Europe, North and South America, and Asia examine the complexities of financing, installing, implementing, and regulating public infrastructures. Their contributions span a range of methodological approaches, including historical and empirical research, analytical models, theoretical analysis, and sector and regional case studies; they consider the economics of infrastructure provisioning by government, through private-public partnerships, and privatization arrangements. The book first treats general investment, growth, and policy issues, and then offers sector-specific analyses of transportation, energy, telecommunications, and water infrastructures. The chapters cover topics that include the evolution of historical infrastructure; the relationships between the state and private finance in funding and financing infrastructure; and the relevance of infrastructure for economic growth. Contributors Julio C. Aguirre, Laure Athias, Stephen J. Bailey, Sumedha Bajar, Biswa Nath Bhattacharyay, Federico Boffa, Daniel Danau, Sumit S. Deole, Balázs Egert, Massimo Florio, Stephan Fretz, Asmae El Gallaa, Marco Giorgino, Hugh Goldsmith, Nico Grove, Markus Hofmann, Lynne Kiesling, Johann Kranz, Antonio Nunez, Arnold Picot, Michael Pollitt, Olivier Crespi Reghizzi, Martina Santandrea, Stéphane Straub, Annalisa Vinella