The freedom of the individual to aim high is a deeply rooted part of the American ethos but we rarely acknowledge its flip side: failure. If people are responsible for their individual successes, is the same true of their failures? The Failed Individual brings together a variety of disciplinary approaches to explore how people fail in the United States and the West at large, whether economically, politically, socially, culturally, or physically. How do we understand individual failure, especially in the context of the zero-sum game of international capitalism? And what new spaces of resistance, or even pleasure, might failure open up for people and society?

While the contemporary era has witnessed a series of spectacular failures with severe and widespread global consequences, failure is still broadly understood on an individual level, while its broader causes and consequences receive little attention. This book reconceptualises failure as a method for characterising and critiquing systems and institutions on both a global and a local level. It defines global failure as comprising global inequality, economic crisis, and ecological disaster, and as a condition which informs and is informed by localised failure. It examines the negotiation between global and local failure in narratives of failed quests by four contemporary authors: Cormac McCarthy, Julia Kristeva, Michael Ondaatje, and Basma Abdel Aziz. As a genre, the quest narrative is associated with the idea of hard-won success. The failed quest narrative, or the narrative of the failed quest, is therefore the ideal vehicle through which to examine the socio-political and institutional conditions of failure. Primarily a contribution to the field of world literature, this book is also relevant to those with an interest in the contemporary novel, failure studies, and the quest narrative.

This inter-disciplinary collection explores the wealth of nuances surrounding the concept and practice of forgiving. The essays within this work ask what it means to forgive, what constitutes an appropriate space to forgive, what is to be expected of the victim and wrongdoer, what actions must be connected to political forms of forgiveness?

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility comprehensively addresses questions about who is responsible and how blame or praise should be attributed when human agents act together. Such questions include: Do individuals share responsibility for the outcome or are individuals responsible only for their contribution to the act? Are individuals responsible for actions done by their group even when they don’t contribute to the outcome? Can a corporation or institution be held morally responsible apart from the responsibility of its members? The Handbook’s 35 chapters—all appearing here for the first time and written by an international team of experts—are organized into four parts: Part I: Foundations of Collective Responsibility Part II: Theoretical Issues in Collective Responsibility Part III: Domains of Collective Responsibility Part IV: Applied Issues in Collective Responsibility Each part begins with a short introduction that provides an overview of issues and debates within that area and a brief summary of its chapters. In addition, a comprehensive index allows readers to better navigate the entirety of the volume’s contents. The result is the first major work in the field that serves as an instructional aid for those in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, as well as a reference for scholars interested in learning more about collective responsibility.

In all of the contemporary economics textbooks that have been written there is typically at least one chapter that addresses 'market failure.' Markets Don't Fail! is a response to what author Brian Simpson sees as a fundamental error in the thinking of some economists. The chapter titles of this book are crafted against the premises of 'market failure' arguments, and a significant portion of this book focuses on exposing the invalid premises upon which the claims of market failure are based and providing a proper basis upon which to judge the free market. The material in this book provides a strong antidote to the arguments typically presented in contemporary economics textbooks. Through example and argument, Brian Simpson shows that the claims against the free market are not true. In fact, he demonstrates how free markets succeed, how they raise the standard of living of all individuals who live within them, and how free markets allow human life to flourish. However, the book goes much deeper than economics by providing a moral and epistemological defense of the free market. Markets Don't Fail! gets to the fundamental, philosophical reasons why the claims of market failure are false and why markets actually succeed. Through an integration of economics and philosophy Simpson is able to provide a comprehensive, rigorous, and logically consistent defense of the free market. The specific topics covered in the book include monopoly, antitrust laws and predatory pricing, 'externalities,' the regulation of safety and quality, environmentalism, economic inequality, 'public goods,' and asymmetric information. This book is an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to gain a sound understanding of the free market.