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Alvin Hansen and John Williams’ Fiscal Policy Seminar at Harvard University is widely regarded as a key mechanism for the spread of Keynesianism in the United States. An original and regular participant, Richard A. Musgrave was invited to prepare remarks for the fiftieth anniversary of the seminar in 1988. These were never published, though a copy was filed with Musgrave’s papers at Princeton University. Their reproduction here is important for several reasons. First, it is one of the last reminiscences of the original participants. Second, the remarks make an important contribution to our understanding of the Harvard School of macro-fiscal policy. Third, the remarks provide interesting insights into Musgrave’s views on national economic policymaking as well as the intersection between theory and practice. The reminiscence demonstrates the importance of the seminar in shifting Musgrave’s research focus and moving him to a more pragmatic approach to public finance.

This chapter compares a ‘deific decree’ insanity case with constitutional originalism debates as a way to understand the boundaries of the legal person and the nature of law. The criminal defendant who claims innocence on the ground that ‘God told me to’ does not embody a conflict between law and religion, but a conflict between law’s demand for intersubjectivity and the subjectivity of a ‘higher truth known only to me’. In the same way, the originalist interpreter of the constitution rejects precedent in favour of a higher truth that need not be ‘like’ anything before. One approach to broaching this conflict between law and revelation is to understand law’s domain as temporal and incomplete – to imagine a humble rather than absolute law. On this view, the person is also not ‘absolute subjectivity’, but is compelled by legal fidelity to treat like alike and therefore under an obligation to imagine a ‘me’ as ‘we’. Or, to put it another way, to bring the person and the law into relationship is to reject a ‘revelatory’ interpretation of ‘original’ or ‘divine’ law in favour of an incompletely intersubjective common law that links me to we through customs and time. At the same time, by acknowledging law’s incompleteness, we can see unreasonable revelation sometimes as a possibility and not always as an insanity.

Our children may learn about the heroes of the past.

Our task is to make ourselves architects of the future.

The twenty-first century confronts society with challenges that will determine the future of humanity and the planet. Such challenges defy traditional analysis. Paralyzed by the inadequacy of our standard logic, on which much of traditional scholarship relies, we search for meaningful and effective understandings that can guide us – understandings that seem inherently wise and just, and not simply empirically confirmable. Few of us question the need for wisdom, yet to date, academic scholarship has failed to address the role that it plays, and could play, in supporting international organizational processes capable of addressing the world’s most demanding societal challenges.² This chapter explores the nature of pragmatic wisdom – wisdom that incorporates both profound understanding and action. It uses the founding of an international development initiative, Uniterra, to highlight the need for and influence of wisdom in international organizational processes and outcomes. Uniterra’s core structure and central process involve partnering – forming networks of non-hierarchical relationships. The chapter therefore investigates the wisdom needed to create and maintain global partnerships. Given the chapter’s focus on pragmatic wisdom, it also explores the concepts of hope and courage, for without hope and courage, wisdom could never move beyond conceptualization to action. The writing style purposely differs from that of most scholarly articles. Beyond presenting a specific case, the writing offers readers the opportunity to experience wisdom via indigenous proverbs from a wide range of the world’s more pragmatic wisdom traditions. So as not to interrupt readers’ appreciation of the proverbs or reduce their impact or meaning merely to the underlying logical constructs, the chapter uses endnotes rather than more traditional text references.

The 21st century confronts society with challenges that will determine the future of humanity and the planet. Such challenges defy traditional analysis. Paralyzed by the inadequacy of our standard logic, on which much of traditional scholarship relies, we search for meaningful and effective understandings that can guide us—understandings that seem inherently wise and just, and not simply empirically confirmable. Few of us question the need for wisdom, yet to date, academic scholarship has failed to address the role that it plays, and could play, in supporting international organizational processes capable of addressing the world’s most demanding societal challenges. ² This chapter explores the nature of pragmatic wisdom—wisdom that incorporates both profound understanding and action. It uses the founding of an international development initiative, Uniterra, to highlight the need for and influence of wisdom in international organizational processes and outcomes. Uniterra’s core structure and central process involve partnering—forming networks of nonhierarchical relationships. The chapter therefore investigates the wisdom needed to create and maintain global partnerships. Given the chapter’s focus on pragmatic wisdom, it also explores the concepts of hope and courage, for without hope and courage, wisdom could never move beyond conceptualization to action. The writing style purposely differs from that of most scholarly articles. Beyond presenting a specific case, the writing offers readers the opportunity to experience wisdom via indigenous proverbs from a wide range of the world’s more pragmatic wisdom traditions. So as not to interrupt readers’ appreciation of the proverbs or reduce their impact or meaning merely to the underlying logical constructs, the chapter uses endnotes rather than more traditional text references.

In this short chapter, we seek to begin to understand what it might mean to ‘interrupt the legal person’. We do this in two parts. In the first part, we begin with the phrase itself and interrogate its components. Interrogating these components leads us to think of the legal person as a technical and grammatical question that varies across different legal traditions and jurisdictions, i.e., across different ways of living and speaking law (recall that juris-diction says to speak the law). In the second part, we briefly explore four versions or declinations of interruptions, each corresponding to a different kind of juris-diction or legal tradition. We see this chapter as itself a friendly interruption in (or of) a broad and rich conversation so as to encourage ourselves to be struck again by some things we may take for granted.

A synthesis of the various strands of macro-sociology that is commensurate with a more robust theory of evolutionary institutionalism.

Drawing from what may be conceived of as classical institutionalism and from neo-evolutionary sociology and other related traditions, this chapter endeavors to provide a general theory of evolutionary institutionalism as an overview of institutions and institutional autonomy (along with the underlying forces driving the process of autonomy), to present a theory of institutional evolution that delineates the relevant units of selection and evolution, the types of mechanisms that facilitate institutional evolution, and a typology of the sources of variation.

The chapter constitutes the attempt to provide a theoretical framework intended to engender an improved historical-comparative institutionalism inspired by the works of Max Weber and Herbert Spencer.

The purpose of the theoretical framework presented should not be misconstrued as a general, “grand” theory for the discipline of the sociology as a whole, but rather understood as the model of a common vocabulary for sociologists interested in macro-sociology, institutions, and socio-cultural evolution designed to complement other available models.

As a synthesis, the originality of the theoretical framework presented lies in (1) elucidation of the idea that institutional autonomy as the “master” process of institutional evolution, (2) more precise delineation of the link between meso-level institutional entrepreneurs and institutional evolution, and (3) combination of a body of complementary – yet often loosely linked – bodies of scholarship.

A long tradition in social science research emphasizes the potential for knowledge to flow among firms colocated in dense areas. Scholars have suggested numerous modes for these flows, including the voluntary transfer of private knowledge from one firm to another. Why would the holder of valuable private knowledge willingly transfer it to a potential and closely proximate competitor? In this paper, we argue that geographic concentration has an effect on the expected compliance with norms governing the use of transferred knowledge. The increased expected compliance favors trust and initiates a process of reciprocal exchange. To test our theory, we use a scenario-based field experiment in gourmet cuisine, an industry in which property rights do not effectively protect knowledge and geographic concentration is common. Our results confirm our conjecture by showing that the expectation that a potential colocated firm will abide by norms mediates the relationship between geographic concentration and the willingness to transfer private knowledge.

Library storage is traditionally viewed as a space management strategy, a way of dealing with overcrowded buildings and growing collections. Storage also is implicitly a preservation strategy: an alternative to weeding, cramming books tightly on shelves, stacking them on the floor, or not purchasing them in the first place. Among its obvious preservation benefits, storage provides security from theft and vandalism, and protection from spills and pests caused by increasingly prevalent food and drink in library buildings. Although transfer to storage may be risky for fragile materials, leaving them in stacks that are constantly being shifted is likely to be more damaging. Many storage facilities provide better environmental conditions for collections than old or poorly maintained modern library buildings.