Lawrence R. Quill

• San Jose State University

Algorithms are a form of productive power – so how may we conceptualise the newly merged terrains of social life, economy and self in a world of digital platforms? How do multiple self-quantifying practices interact with questions of class, race and gender? This edited collection considers algorithms at work – for what purposes encoded data about b...

Algorithms are a form of productive power – so how may we conceptualise the newly merged terrains of social life, economy and self in a world of digital platforms? How do multiple self-quantifying practices interact with questions of class, race and gender? This edited collection considers algorithms at work – for what purposes encoded data about b...

The response to the COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted discussion across a range of fields and disciplines as numerous professions embrace an online or virtual environment. This paper focuses upon the provision of therapy in a digital environment specifically through the development of Mental Health Apps (mHealth). The latter are seen as a remedy to th...

The Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) is used in thousands of universities across the United States and internationally, with a strong and growing presence in K-12 and higher education markets. Analyzing the development of the Canvas LMS, we examine 1) ‘frictionless’ data transitions that bridge K12, higher education, and workforce data 2) in...

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and their application within the field of mental health provision raise issues that cross social, economic, and philosophical boundaries. While Therapeutic A.I. promises to disrupt the current provision of mental health services to reach populations without access to adequate mental health care ther...

While there have been numerous critiques of the ideology of technology, it is useful to situate technology within both a liberal and a conspiratorial framework. The early work of Auguste Comte offers an ideal vehicle for this kind of analysis. Liberalism’s embrace of technology is developed in Comte to produce a theory of scientific and technical e...

When the Occupy Wall Street movement burst on to the political scene in 2011 an analysis developed by the Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek (and others) became a critical lens by which to understand the events. Yet this was not the first instance of widespread dissent in the United States to follow from the crisis of 2008. In 2009, the Tea Party Movem...

In a recent edition of Society, Amitai Etzioni set out the case for a communitarian ethic (Etzioni 2013). Those familiar with Etzioni’s work will know how thoughtful and insightful he is, and how refreshing his candor with respect to the teaching of professional ethics in universities. He has long noted how ghettoized the teaching of ethics has bec...

Secrets and Democracy develops a new approach to understanding the centrality of secrecy to political life. From the ancient world to the modern, this book considers the growing importance of secrets, the dilemmas this poses to conceptions of democracy and the challenges that collecting secrets poses to publicity and privacy in the network society.

In December 2011, a report appeared concerning the discovery of a new form of deadly flu virus. The H5N1 virus was first identified in Hong Kong in 1997 in poultry, and was so contagious that the government ordered the destruction of over a million birds in order to limit the outbreak. Though few humans were infected as a result of contact — only 1...

In this chapter I want to consider, first, whether secrecy is inherently undemocratic. This proposition is not as fanciful as it might sound. Indeed, given the often repeated drive towards ‘open government,’ the very considerable move towards transparency that has occurred since the 1990s in many Western democracies (Roberts, 2008), and the almost...

If the opposite of secrecy is revelation, then one would expect one of the most important leaks in history to have had a profound effect on the life of liberal democracy. Yet, according to one astute commentator on the WikiLeaks phenomenon, after WikiLeaks everything changed and nothing changed.1 This chapter examines the basis for this rather puzz...

With some well-noted exceptions, there has been a general reluctance to consider secrecy within recent political theory. This reluctance can be explained because we do not, indeed cannot, know for sure what it is we are talking about. Only when there are official releases of documents, decades after the events took place, or a former government off...

The year 1859 was, in retrospect, a critically important one in the history of secrecy and democracy. John Stuart Mill published one of the most vigorous defences of individual liberty, privacy, and progressivism that year, in his On Liberty. At the same time, after a 20-year delay, Charles Darwin finally published On the Origin of Species, a book...

Nearly every major political theorist of the past 2,000 years has had something important to say about secrecy. The reasons for this are not difficult to understand. The ability to keep something secret is an exercise of power, and power is a concept that is integral to understanding how communities function. This chapter will be dedicated to recov...

It is possible to trace the emergence of the state, understood as an entity in its own right, to the sixteenth century, when states as we know them today were in their infancy. The ‘reason of state’ tradition, which emerged during this period, made some compelling and novel claims — claims that, arguably, were inherited by the liberal tradition (gr...

In 1982, Neil Postman wrote The Disappearance of Childhood. In that work, Postman recounted the invention of childhood in the modern world and its demise at the hands of, among other things, the electronic media (principally television). In Postman’s view, television had transformed education into ‘edutainment.’ The implications of this loss were d...

A pilot implementation of an experimental interdisciplinary course on climate solutions was undertaken at San José State University in the fall semester of 2008. The course, co-taught by seven faculty members from six colleges, was approved for a general education requirement and was open to upperclass students campus-wide. A course with such a bre...

Arendt’s theoretical influence is generally traced to Heidegger and experientially to the traumatic events that occurred in Europe during the Second World War. Here, we suggest that Arendt’s conception of politics may be usefully enriched via a proto-anthropic principle found in Augustine and adopted by Arendt throughout her writings. By appealing...

Over the past two decades, a variety of approaches to teaching and encouraging public administration ethics have been advanced. To that end, theories of social justice, citizenship claims, integrity-based approaches, moral leadership, and a renewed emphasis on professionalism have all made significant contributions to the discussion. This article o...

Higher education within the USA is increasingly perceived to be in a state of crisis. This crisis exposes the USA and its citizens to risks that spell out disaster whether it is from a loss of national global competitiveness, a reduction in the standard of living and/or deep challenges to social cohesion. The suggested remedy to this condition is t...

In the last decades of the twentieth century there was a marked change in interpreting and understanding the significance of ‘the revolutionary tradition.’ As the authors of a recent collection of essays on the subject note, this new interpretation of history, and consequently ‘the present day’, corresponded to events of global significance and a c...

I began this enquiry into civil disobedience by suggesting that this form of collective activity constituted an act of uncommon sense. While common sense leveled down political options so that alternatives played out within a field defined by the existing institutional order, civil disobedience (at least in some forms) held out the possibility of r...

In 2003, the Countryside Alliance, a collection of organizations with an interest in promoting ‘the rural way of life’ in Great Britain, threatened to engage in civil disobedience should a ban on hunting with hounds come into effect in the UK. Alliance representatives defended the breaking of a proposed law; the Hunting Act of 2004, which came into...

Knowing when to disobey legitimate authority is an acute problem for those who live in modernity’s wake. The political and social requirement to obey government must be weighed against the knowledge that this fundamental requirement of civilized societies can lead, indeed has lead, to some of the worst crimes committed against human beings. While t...

The story of the pirate and the emperor, already famous by the time that Saint Augustine cited it in his City of God was designed to illustrate a defining, qualitative distinction between different kinds of human organization. What this meant was that although there might be a presumptive duty to obey civil authorities, it was necessary to judge be...

On the second floor of the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, in a room dedicated to the city’s ruling council of nine (Sala dei Nove) there are three frescos painted between 1338–1340 by the Italian master Ambrogio Lorenzetti. The first is an image of the city in a state of corruption. The horned, cross-eyed figure of Tyranny presides over a state where it...

The term ‘globalization’ refers to a cluster of interrelated concepts covering different dimensions: economic, ideological, technological, political, and cultural. However, it is the economic dimension that has provided the most salient and controversial features of globalization to date. As Kacowicz (2007) notes, the increasing integration of econ...

Contemporary social and political life is most closely associated with the state, in actuality and idea. The state, more properly that collection of institutions that we call ‘the state’, regulates all types of human activity from cradle to grave. It provides protection for individual citizens and their property via a permanent and professional pol...

The title of the present work, Liberty after Liberalism, was chosen to reflect the deep ambiguity of the present political condition — both for liberalism and for the citizens of liberal-democratic states. Citizens today, not by any means all but a significant and growing number, are presented with opportunities for political participation that wer...

The historical fact that republicanism’s spatial concerns and corresponding cultural prerequisites for political action have not been rooted in the context of the nation-state make it a relevant theoretical addendum to theories of global governance. As one author notes, because of these hitherto considered structural weaknesses, in the present cont...

The previous chapter examined the political space of liberalism and it is to that context we return now to examine the approach taken by contemporary republican authors. To date, the latter have tended to adopt a conciliatory tone. All too conscious of the more outmoded and dubious elements of their own tradition, contemporary republicans approach...

Francis Cornford, writing a paper on the notion of physical space a few years after Einstein had released his Special Theory, suggested that physics had made the universe appear less ‘a steel structure’ and more like ‘India rubber’ where ‘the India rubber itself exists only as an arbitrary figment of the human brain’ (Cornford, 1936, p. 216). Such...

If cosmorepublican citizens are to be understood as the necessary countervailing power to both state and suprastate institutions of governance the question invariably arises, ‘is it possible to educate for this kind of citizenship?’ The subject of political education has long remained a point of contention between state-bound liberals and republica...

Shortly before he died, Pierre Bourdieu had this to say about globalisation that as an economic doctrine it relied upon a false notion of the inevitability of economic laws, a ‘reality’ that, in turn, required a politics of depoliticization. In response, what was required was a new kind of politics, ‘capable of addressing itself beyond the nation-s...

This book started life as an attempt to think about a tradition of political freedom that, supposedly, had no place in the modern world. As I finished the book, it occurred to me that the title ‘Liberty after Liberalism’, while it might refer to a reconstructed and revised form of this ancient liberty, might just as well refer to a period in the hi...

Liberty After Liberalism frees the concept of the active citizen from both the territorial confines of the nation-state and the limits imposed by republican, city-state models. Lawrence Quill advances a theory of global republicanism, one that is able to respond directly to the changing realities of political life. By adopting a publicly ironic app...