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The memorial is an account of Smith's personality and work by a former and favored student. It is a sustained personal reminiscence backed by the reminiscences of others who admired Smith together with an account of Smith's working practices and of his main texts. It is in this sense subjective as well as objective. It is not a full-scale biography, rather a biographical sketch and it is necessarily limited by its very proximity to the subject. The principal and other informants knew Smith and liked him. However, given Stewart's own profession, the work is more than this. It was written in the context of the consequences for Smith's reputation in the light of the French Revolution. Stewart is anxious, given the sensitivities concerning the destructive radicalism in France and in the context of the conservative reaction in Britain, to distance Smith's ideas on liberty and on policy from those ideas as they were being expressed in revolutionary France. In this way, Stewart's biographical work is both an account of Smith's life and works and a politicized interpretation of his principle economic ideas.

For much of its 43-year history, the community college sector in Jamaica has been plagued by perceptions of inferior status and mediocre tertiary education offerings. The Jamaican colleges have responded to the criticisms by aggressively pursuing quality assurance initiatives such as program accreditation, expanded course offerings, and ongoing curriculum review. This chapter traces the birth and development of the community college movement in Jamaica and the Caribbean and acknowledges the significant achievement of the Jamaican colleges in increasing access to tertiary education. The chapter also examines threats to the open access policy that may have serious implications for education equity and quality. These include inadequate funding, limited infrastructure to support the curriculum, low enrolment of specialized groups, and unsatisfactory completion and graduation rates. Recommendations for policy and practice are proposed.

I suggest that the search for Adam Smith’s theodicy is likely to be in vain. The paper begins with a brief history of approaches to evil, emphasizing the context in which they arose, and the questions authors were addressing. Approaches most relevant to Adam Smith include those of Augustine and Calvin, and the early modern theodicies of Leibniz, Samuel Clarke and William King, as well as the attacks on them by Bayle and Voltaire. Scottish Enlightenment writers were not terribly interested in theodicy, though Hutcheson and Kames did devote space to their versions of problems of evil. David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion are often taken to be classic statement of the problem of theodicy and argument against religious belief, but his concern was to demolish rationalistic theodicies rather than religious belief or practice. The paper then turns to Smith’s writings, considering similarities and differences to these approaches to evil. Smith emphasizes the wisdom and beneficence of God, and that evils we observe are part of a larger providential plan. He makes no attempt to justify the God in the face of evil, and in this respect Smith shares more with Augustine and Calvin than he does with the early modern theodicists. Smith’s approach to evil is simple and ameliorative. Smith’s approach contrasts with early nineteenth century English political economists, from Malthus onwards, for whom theodicy was important. Whatever view we take of the theodicists project of justifying an all-powerful and good God in the face of evil may, we still struggle to make sense of economic suffering and evil.

In this chapter, we develop a conceptual framework on how cultural value can be lost in conflict and created by the arts, artists and arts organisations again and how the arts may also help victims of conflict. We explore examples of the different ways that the effects of cultural engagement are manifested and articulated in the depiction of armed conflict, especially looking at the civil war in Syria (2011–present as of 2020) and discuss three stages in the life-cycle of cultural value. Our conceptual framework of cultural value in the depiction of armed conflict is based on the multifaceted private, public, intrinsic and instrumental benefits of the arts as well as the cultural value created by arts, artists and arts organisations. We discuss universal value at the first stage of a potential loss of cultural value. The second stage addresses the politics of aesthetic value, as the cultural value created by artists and artistic activities which may evolve during armed conflict with examples of two international war artists, John Keane and Ben Quilty. Finally, we review social value as the impact of the cultural value created in overcoming armed conflict as well as restoring and transforming impaired individuals, communities and societies. Within this context, we reinforce the notion of cultural value as an alternative framework for understanding the value constructs surrounding the creation of art in this chapter.

The purpose of this chapter is to study the mathematisation of finance – excessive use of mathematical models in finance – which has been widely blamed for the recent financial and economic crisis. We argue that the problem might actually be the financialisation of mathematics, as evidenced by the gradual embedding of branches of mathematics into financial economics. The concept of embeddedness, originally proposed by Polanyi, is relevant to describe the sociological relationship between fields of knowledge. After exploring the relationship between mathematics, finance and economics since antiquity, we find that theoretical developments in the 1950s and 1970s lead directly to this embedding. The key implication of our findings is the realization that it has become necessary to disembed mathematics from finance and economics, and proposes a number of partial steps to facilitate this process. This chapter contributes to the debate on the mathematisation of finance by uniquely combining a historical approach, which chronicles the evolution of the relation between mathematics and finance, with a sociological approach from the perspective of Polyani’s concept of embedding.