Books on the topic 'Plato – Republic – Book 9'

This new edition provides a thorough reappraisal of one of the most remarkable and controversial sections of the Republic. Book 5's radical proposals for the ideal state include an argument for the essential equality of the sexes; provision for full female participation in the work of the Guardians (including warfare); the abolition of the family for this same ruling class, with a sexual as well as economic system of communism; and a policy of eugenic control. Plato feared that some of this material would arouse amusement in his readers; in fact, parts of Book 5 have been subsequently used to support a charge of totalitarianism against Plato, while other elements have led to description of him as the first feminist. Book 5 also examines the relation between knowledge and belief, and in doing so embarks on the great structure of metaphysical thought which forms the centrepiece of the entire work. All these topics receive fresh and detailed consideration in the introduction and commentary, which are designed to make this important work accessible to a wide range of readers. Greek text with translation, commentary and notes.

This edition offers a full and up-to-date commentary on the last book of the Republic, and explores in particular detail the two main subjects of the book: Plato's most famous and uncompromising condemnation of poetry and art, as vehicles of falsehood and purveyors of dangerous emotions, and the Myth of Er, which concludes the whole work with an allegorical vision of the soul's immortality and of an eternally just world-order. The commentary gives careful and critical attention to the arguments deployed by Plato against poets and artists, relating them both to the philosopher's larger ideas and to other Greek views of the subject. The sources and significance of the Myth of Er are fully studied. Among other topics, the Introduction places Republic 10 in the development of Plato's work, and makes a fresh attempt to trace some of the influences of the book's critique of art on later aesthetic thinking. Greek text with facing translation, commentary and notes.

This essay gives an interpretation of the character of Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic. Contrary to what recent commentators have claimed, Plato presents Thrasymachus as a horrifying figure, with a dark but coherent view of human life. According to this view, the principal good in life is domination over others: so in every significant interaction, one party is the winner, while the other is the loser. Justice is the vice of foolishly losing out to the more powerful, while injustice is the virtue of winning through one’s power and skill. Thrasymachus defends this account as revealing the deep phenomenon behind the law, and behind rulers’ declarations about justice and injustice. The Republic as a whole is a response to Thrasymachus’ view of the intrinsic benefits of injustice and intrinsic disadvantages of justice. But Thrasymachus represents this view in its most horrifying form—foreshadowing the discussion of the tyrant in book 9.

This book argues for four main theses: (1) The Republic is not just a work that has a lot to say about education; it is a book that depicts Socrates as attempting to engage his interlocutors in such a way as to help to educate them and also engages us, the readers, in a way that helps to educate us. (2) Plato does not suppose that education, properly understood, should have as its primary aim putting knowledge into souls that do not already have it. Instead, the education that Plato discusses, represents occurring between Socrates and his interlocutors, and hopes to achieve in his readers is one that aims to arouse the power of knowledge in us and then to begin to train that power always to engage with what is more real, rather than what is less real. (3) Plato’s conception of knowledge is not the one typically presented in contemporary epistemology. It is, rather, the power of conceptualization via exemplar representation. (4) Plato engages this power of knowledge in the Republic in a way he represents as only a kind of second-best way to engage knowledge—and not as the best way, which would be dialectic. Instead, Plato uses images that summon the power of knowledge to begin the process by which the power may become fully realized. The full realization of the power of knowledge, however, is not provided in the work, and could not be achieved by anything like reading a work of this sort.

The Oxford Handbook of Plato provides in-depth and up-to-date discussions of a variety of topics and dialogues in twenty-one articles. The result is a useful reference to the man many consider the most important philosophical thinker in history. Plato is the best known, and continues to be the most widely studied, of all the ancient Greek philosophers. Each article serves several functions at once: they survey the lay of the land; they express and develop the authors' own views; they situate those views within a range of alternatives. This book contains articles on metaphysics, epistemology, love, language, ethics, politics, art and education. Individual articles are devoted to each of the following dialogues: the Republic, the Parmenides, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Timaeus, and the Philebus. There are also articles on Plato and the dialogue form; on Plato in his time and place; on the history of the Platonic corpus; on Aristotle's criticism of Plato, and on Plato and Platonism.

I defend four main theses: (1) Knowledge, in Plato’s vocabulary, is a kind of conceptual competence, involving ‘knowing what it is’ about something like virtue or justice; (2) There is a corresponding special meaning of the verb ‘is’ that occurs in the expression ‘knowing what it is’, which is key to understanding what Plato means by claiming that Forms have a superior kind of being; (3) When one knows ‘what it is’ about such concepts, one knows neither a proposition, nor set of propositions, nor an object, but something like a type. Plato’s term is eidos. Plato rightly notes that, in ordinary experience, we never encounter types, only tokens; (4) Although encountering such tokens does not constitute knowledge, it can provide a ladder whereby philosophers can attain a better grasp of the truths in question. Plato’s preferred philosophical method turns out to be an ‘iconic method’—consciously using images and particulars as stepping stones in the enquiry. Via case studies from the Meno, Republic, and Theaetetus, I establish that these theses are not only compatible with the texts, but render some otherwise puzzling passages intelligible. I show that Plato diagnoses, and deliberately sidesteps, the impasse of Socrates’ fruitless quest for definitions, developing a new method inspired by geometry’s ability to deal pictorially with indefinable lengths. The book offers a novel picture of Plato as resisting and overcoming, not following, the Socratic obsession with definitions, and adopting, not resisting, the use of pictorial proofs and imagery.

Focusing on Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, this book compares their views on the persuasiveness of moral argument: how far did they think it could reach beyond a narrow circle of believers and influence people more generally? Answering this question requires a wide–ranging approach, which examines their views on such topics as rationality, moral psychology, rhetoric, education, and gender. The first part of the book shows that for Plato certain kinds of argument are beyond the reach of most people, specifically arguments that make appeal to transcendent Forms. But he still thought that there is another level of argument, restricted to human psychology and politics, which could have a much wider appeal, especially if supplemented by the appropriate rhetoric. The second half of the book turns to the Nicomachean Ethics to determine Aristotle’s views about the reach of moral argument, as well as its purposes. He is certainly very restrictive when it comes to the kinds of argument pursued in the work itself, proposing to talk only to those who are mature in years and well brought up. Like Plato, however, he also allows for the possibility of another type of discourse, which is more rhetorical in nature and could benefit those who are less mature. Though mainly focused on the Republic and Nicomachean Ethics, this book also examines relevant passages from Plato’s Laws and Aristotle’s Politics.

Text of panels and abstracts accepted for the international conference of the Gypsy Lore Society held in Prague in 2021 (GLS Annual Meeting and Conference on Romani Studies 2021, 8.-10. 9. 2021 - https://gls2021.ff.cuni.cz/). Introducing the context of the organization of the conference in 2021 and Romani studies structures in the Czech Republic, the book features three studies presenting: currently documented effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Romani communities worldwide (Tatiana Zachar Podolinská); the historical context of the establishment of the Seminar of Romani Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in 1991 and its developments until today (Helena Sadílková, Pavel Kubaník); a summary of Romani studies research, publications and theses focused on the Roma at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Sociological Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University (Zdeněk Uherek). The book includes an index of names of all contributors of the conference – authors of individual papers and panel convenors.

This book presents a collection of selected essays from the papers presented to the international conference on Plato’s Parmenides on the occasion of the 2nd Meeting of the Mediterranean Section of the International Plato Society (Coimbra, 14-16 June 2012). It opens with an introduction to the different approaches to this most challenging dialogue taken by the contributors of the volume. Samuel Scolnicov helpfully brings together the theoretical and ethical dimensions of the Parmenides. Luc Brisson, Néstor Cordero, Maurizio Migliori, Franco Trabattoni, Francesco Fronterotta, Mario Jorge Carvalho, J.D.Bares Partal, Beatriz Bossi, Francesca Pizzuti and Gabriele Cornelli present an in-depth analysis and commentary of the main topics of the first and second part of the dialogue from different points of view. The book also includes further clarification of interpretation problems and the reception of this dialogue in late Antiquity and Renaissance.

In this chapter, Lane argues that Plato in Republic Book 8 emancipates the logic of social change from the past while infusing it with normative content. From this perspective, Plato might be said to invent a logic of intelligible choice to explain social change in the form of an explanatory scenario rather than history. Whereas Herodotus and Thucydides investigated the record of observable social changes in the past and present, Plato undertakes a new intellectual enterprise: an exploration of the mechanisms of social change that is not merely adduced from the happenstance character of those events that have actually occurred. Furthermore, what Plato offers is a form of sociopolitical explanation that is premised on a normative account of the objective moral good, centered on the role of law as a principle of order oriented to the good, and on rule as essentially aiming to serve the good of the ruled.

Questions concerning the value of poetry have been of interest to philosophers and critics ever since Plato issued his challenge, in Book X of the Republic, to poetry's ‘champions’, to show that poetry is not, as he argued it to be, epistemically and morally a corrupting influence on individuals and society. Aristotle's Poetics is in effect in large part a response to that challenge. Where Plato argued that poetry's appeal to emotion in its audience was degrading, Aristotle argued that the capacity of tragedy to bring about the catharsis of pity and fear in the audience made it, in one way or another (unfortunately the obscurity of the notion of catharsis in the Poetics makes it very difficult to say precisely how), a force for good in the pursuit of psychological and moral health.

This book examines Walter Pater’s deep engagement with Platonism throughout his career, as a teacher of Plato in Oxford’s Literae Humaniores, from his earliest known essay, ‘Diaphaneitè’ (1864), to his final book, Plato and Platonism (1893), treating both his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth. Pater is influenced by several of Plato’s dialogues, including Phaedrus, Symposium, Theaetetus, Cratylus, and The Republic, which inform his philosophy of aesthetics, history, myth, epistemology, ethics, language, and style. As a philosopher, critic, and artist, Plato embodies what it means to be an author to Pater, who imitates his creative practice from vision to expression. Through the recognition of form in matter, Pater views education as a journey to refine one’s knowledge of beauty in order to transform oneself. Platonism is a point of contact with his contemporaries, including Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde, offering a means to take new measure of their literary relationships. The philosophy also provides boundaries for critical encounters with figures across history, including Wordsworth, Michelangelo and Pico della Mirandola in The Renaissance (1873), Marcus Aurelius and Apuleius in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and Montaigne and Giordano Bruno in Gaston de Latour (1896). In the manner Platonism holds that soul or mind is the essence of a person, Pater’s criticism seeks the mind of the author as an affinity, so that his writing enacts Platonic love.

This chapter gives an overview of the argument in the book. It explains how Plato’s ideal state in the Republic has virtuous expert rulers; in the later Laws the citizens of the ideal state strictly obey laws. This is not, as often thought, to be viewed as a ‘pessimistic’ downgrading of the need for citizens to be virtuous in order to live happily; rather it is that Plato develops a new account of the relation of virtue and law. In the ancient world this new attempt leaves no tradition, but Cicero and Philo of Alexandria independently take it up in interesting ways.

Some time before we arrive at the famous Allegory of the Cave, a passage to which The Republic is perhaps too often reduced, Plato tells the story of another cave – one in which the main character goes down into the earth, rather than emerging from it, and becomes, not transparent and visible, or awash in the penetrating light of the sun, but invisible, concealed, or hidden from the realm of phenomena and appearance. The story in question is sometimes called the Myth of Gyges, or the story of the Ring of Gyges, and it is recounted by Glaucon in Book Two. And while it is obviously well known, or at least familiar to anyone interested in philosophy and ideas, it rarely receives the attention I think it merits or deserves....

This book argues that Plato’s epistemology is radically different from our own. Unlike knowledge and belief as nowadays conceived, the central players in his epistemology are each essentially to be understood as cognition of a certain kind of object. Epistêmê is cognition of what Is—where this turns out to mean that it is a deep grasp of ultimate reality. Doxa is cognition of what seems—where this turns out to mean that it is atheoretical thought that mistakes images for reality. These objects-based characterizations, inchoate in the earlier dialogues and fully developed in the Republic, are the bedrock conceptions of epistêmê and doxa that explain all their other features, including the restriction of epistêmê to Forms and doxa to perceptibles. Moreover, Plato does epistemology this way because his epistemological projects are motivated by his central ethical and metaphysical views. He holds that there is a crucial metaphysical distinction between two levels of reality: genuine Being, which is hidden and difficult to access, and something ontologically inferior but readily apparent, presenting itself to us as real. He also holds that there is a crucial ethical distinction stemming from this metaphysical one: to be in contact with Being is to be living well, while to rest content with the inferior level is not only to fail to live well, but to hinder oneself from aspiring to do so. Therefore, when Plato turns to epistemological investigations, the distinction he finds most salient is that between cognitive contact with what Is and cognitive contact with what seems.

Aristotle’s theories of truth, practical reasoning, and action are some of the most influential theories in the history of philosophy. It is surprising, then, that so little attention has been given to his notion of practical truth. In Aristotle on Practical Truth, C. M. M. Olfert gives the first book-length treatment of this notion and the role of truth in our practical lives overall. She offers a novel account of practical truth: it is the truth, in the technical Aristotelian sense of “truth,” about what is good simpliciter (haplôs) for a particular person in her particular situation. Olfert argues that, understood in this way, Aristotle’s notion of practical truth is an attractive idea that illuminates the core of his practical philosophy. But it is also an idea that challenges a common view that in practical reasoning, we aim at action or acting well as our primary goals, not at truth and knowledge. Contrary to this common view, Olfert shows that in dialogues such as Charmides, Protagoras, and Republic, Plato describes practical reasoning as being concerned equally with grasping the truth and with acting well. She argues that Aristotle develops this Platonic picture with the notion of practical truth and with a technical notion of rational action as fitting ourselves to the world. Using key texts from the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics, as well as De Anima, Metaphysics, De Interpretatione, and Categories, Olfert demonstrates that practical truth deserves to be treated as a central and plausible Aristotelian idea.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.