History is always written from the perspective of the ruling or rising elite at the time of writing. Concepts like The Stone Age, The Bronze Age, etc. were of course unknown during the stone age and the bronze age. They were invented in the 1800s to make sense of a development that seemed to reach its climax with industrialisation...

The Internet has evolved as a free environment for information interaction under informal but strict technological, programmatic, and organizational control methods. This resulted in a paradoxical situation. The key areas of life of any state, have largely moved to the Internet. At the same time, the Internet, unlike the physical reality, does not recognize the post-Westphalian principles of international law. This book deals with the risks and challenges that ensued from this situation.

"Wikiworld" explores a revolution in the world of education. The way we learn is changing: institutionalised learning is transforming into new forms of critical learning and open collaboration. This book offers a historical and political framework to think about the future of learning and educational media.The authors provide an overview of the use of new technologies and learning practices, and assess how the changing nature of education can lead to a more socially just future. At the same time, they place their analysis of education within a wider social and economic framework of contemporary capitalism.

Throughout his many writings, Michael Novak, one of the leading Catholic social theorists of our times, has urged us to adopt a tripartite system of democratic capitalism including a market economy, a democratic polity, and a moral-cultural system that would nourish the values and virtues on which free societies depend. Three in One introduces the reader to Novak's portrait of democratic capitalism.

The Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. is the most famous and perhaps most nearly perfect example of direct democracy. Covering the period 403-322 B.C., Mogens Herman Hansen focuses on the crucial last thirty years, which coincided with the political career of Demosthenes. Hansen distinguishes between the city's seven political institutions: the Assembly, the nomothetai, the People's Court, the boards of magistrates, the Council of Five Hundred, the Areopagos, and ho boulomenos. He discusses how Athenians conceived liberty both as the ability to participate in the decision-making process and as the right to live without oppression from the state or other citizens. Equality was conceived of as an equality not of nature but of opportunity.

Shiach examines the ways in which labour was experienced and represented between 1890 and 1930. There is a critical tradition in literary and historical studies that sees the impact of modernity on human labour in terms of intensification and alienation. Shiach, however, explores a series of efforts to articulate the relations between labour and selfhood within modernism. Through readings of Sylvia Pankhurst and D. H. Lawrence, Shiach shows how labour underpins the political and textual innovations of the period. This study will be of interest to literary and cultural scholars alike.

Economics sometimes seems to be stacked against social, environmental and individual well-being. But it doesn't have to be like this. A new approach to economics - deriving as much from Ruskin and Schumacher as from Keynes or Smith - has begun to emerge. Skeptical about money as a measure of success, this new economics turns our assumptions about wealth and poverty upside down. It shows us that real wealth can be measured by increased well-being and environmental sustainability rather than just having and consuming more things. This book is the first accessible and straightforward guide to the new economics. It describes the problems and bizarre contradictions in conventional economics as well as the principles of the emerging new economics, and it tells the real-world stories of how new economics is being successfully put into practice around the world. An essential guide to understanding new economics for all those who care about making economics work for people and planet.

Quantitative Narrative Analysis focuses on the following issues: 1. the fundamental features of narrative (as a specific type of text genre with certain invariant linguistic properties); 2. how the invariant properties of narrative can be used to structure narrative information in ways that basic qualitative information can then be analyzed quantitatively (story grammars, or Subject-Action-Object and respective modifiers, such as Time and Space of Action); 3. reliability (and how the computer and linguistic framework of the approach greatly increase data reliability); 4. data analysis (the book does not focus on general problems of data analysis, it will show how textual data can be analyzed with numbers).

The central feature of every true lottery is that all rational evaluation is deliberately excluded. Once this principle is grasped, the author argues, we can begin to understand exactly what benefits sortition can bring to the political community. The book includes a study of the use of sortition in ancient Athens and in late medieval and renaissance Italy. It also includes commentary on the contributions to sortition made by Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Harrington and Paine; an account of the history of the randomly-selected jury; and new research into lesser-known examples from England, America and revolutionary France.

Understanding Social Networks explains the big ideas that underlie social networks, covering fundamental concepts then discussing networks and their core themes in increasing order of complexity.