Unlike the (non)institution of academia discussed in the previous chapter, our supposedly “free” political system must strike one as something of an oxymoron. Indeed, as A. Bartlett Giamatti pointed out, in 1810 James Madison argued that “a national university <should> deny its national character”: “Such an institution, says Madison, though local in its legal character, would be universal in its beneficial effects.” In taking the name “university” literally, it is hard to see how the freedom that, as we just saw, defines the university might extend to the body politic. Moreover, Giamatti also notes that, in 1848, the great educational reformer Horace Mann argued that education would free one from the “domination of capital and the servility of labor,” thus also agreeing with Madison that it is education, and not Realpolitik, that sets us free from what is at best the negative freedom of this or that political system, including our own.

And yet, it is “political freedom” that, for most of us, comes to mind first when thinking about freedom. It is, for many, Realpolitik that constitutes real freedom. Thus, while acknowledging that positive freedom is different from the merely negative freedom of “independence,” which is the name given to the holiday when Americans supposedly celebrate their political freedom from England, I would argue for a middle ground between the two in which the ideal of positive freedom in the terms we have argued for throughout this book informs the latter in a positive way.

The goal here is to examine political freedom, which is largely “negative” in its concern with removing obstacles and other untoward infringements upon our independence, in relation to the more “positive” forms of freedom discussed here, such as “artistic” freedom, “academic freedom,” and, as we have defined it, the “divine” freedom to act “as God would,” that is, to do something in the best way possible regardless of the consequences. Indeed, it is noteworthy that all the forms of “positive freedom” discussed thus far have often been merely tolerated by the supposedly free society that contains— and often constrains—them.

Introduction: Setting up the Paradox

Role and cognate terms point to fundamental building blocks of social structure, enacted by people and used as descriptive and analytical tools by sociologists. Shakespeare provides a good introductory example with his famous comment that “all the world's a stage” and his status-sequence of the seven ages of man.

Through the several post–World War II (WWII) decades, broadly yoked to the development of “structural functionalism” (or functional analysis), a structural analysis was developed which centered on people's statuses and roles, usually referred to generically as “role theory” or “role analysis.” Frameworks for role analysis steadily accumulated and were widely deployed through the sociology community, especially in the USA. It was also a favored vocabulary, at that time, for working through broader theoretical issues, including in Germany debates around “homo sociologicus” (Dahrendorf 1973). It became a standard entry in textbooks, was often used as a central concept in introductory sociology teaching, and was the framework for many sociological investigations and ideological interventions. Alongside the path of the broader structural–functional framework, status-and-role theory has had a similar trajectory—peaking in the 1960s—but has since lost its central place in sociological discourse, albeit still extensively utilized by a wider array of disciplines and various “social engineers” and practitioners.

Recorded 5 January 2010

Translated and annotated by Guo Chao

Lecturer

Hou Shaokui 侯少奎 (b. 1939) is a Northern Company actor and the son of Hou Yongkui 侯永奎 [Appendix H]. Best known for powerful martial roles, including Lord Guan 關公 (Guan Yu 關羽) in this scene as well as the wusheng 武生 Lin Chong 林沖 in “Fleeing by Night” (“Yeben” 夜奔), Hou won the Plum Blossom Prize (Meihua jiang 梅花獎) in its second installment in 1985. His autobiography provides rich materials on twentieth-century northern kunqu history and practice (Hou Shaokui and Hu Mingming 2007).

Synopsis

“Sword Meeting” (“Daohui” 刀會) is the fourth and final act of the zaju play The Great King Guan Attends a Meeting with a Single Sword (Guan Dawang du fu dandaohui 關大王獨赴單刀會), more usually known as Single Sword Meeting (Dandaohui 單刀會), by the great fourteenthcentury playwright Guan Hanqing 關漢卿 [Appendix G]. “Sword Meeting” is perhaps the best-known kunqu scene to directly derive from northern “variety plays” (zaju 雜劇). The lyrics of the version performed were adjusted to be singable for kunqu, though the qupai 曲牌 and their sequence are largely the same as in the zaju script. Two early versions of the full play are translated in Wilt L. Idema and Stephen H. West (2012).

The play's hero is the Three Kingdoms figure Guan Yu, better known as Lord Guan. This scene depicts a meeting between major figures from two of these Three Kingdoms, the states of Wu 吳 and of Shu 蜀. After the Battle of Red Cliffs (Chibi zhi zhan 赤壁 之戰) in the winter of 208–209 ce, Wu and Shu formed an alliance against Wei 魏. Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223 CE), emperor of Shu, temporarily borrowed Nanjun 南郡, part of Jingzhou 荆州, from Wu as a base to resist the aggression of Wei. However, Liu Bei later refused to return Nanjun when Wu claimed sovereignty, and sent Lord Guan, one of the most important Shu generals, to defend it.

Introduction

Robert K. Merton's standing among sociologists has been variously described but the influence of his contributions is rarely questioned – in the discipline itself or in the social sciences, broadly conceived. His ideas have also affected the thinking of humanists and natural scientists to an uncommon degree given the barriers in the academy that separate the divisions of intellectual labour.

His sociological interests were broad, beginning with the sociology science and knowledge and extending to deviant behaviour and anomie, race and ethnic relations, and also touched on bureaucratic organizations, mass communications, the professions and, of course, theory construction and theorizing. He thought of himself as a theorist but if the problem he addressed called for empirical research, that was what he chose to do. He followed the principle of what he called “disciplined eclecticism” in this and other matters of intellectual choice. Thus, he cannot now, nor could he during his lifetime, be easily type-cast.

He insisted that sociological theorizing and empirical research were mutually sustaining and most effectively pursued in “the middle range” (1968a), that is located between the grand theories of society that were dominant in sociology from the nineteenth century onward and descriptive research that had no specific theoretical impetus. Neither end of the continuum in styles of inquiry, he thought, was conducive to identifying regularities in social life, as the discipline had the potential to do.

He also had the wit to identify unnoticed, persisting and significant social phenomena in various domains of society, including “self-fulfilling prophecies”, “unintended consequences” and “role models”, for just a few examples. He focused on the nature of the phenomena involved in each of them, sought to discover how they came about (that is, to earmark the social mechanisms that produced them), and to detect their consequences. As one who understood the practical as well as the substantive importance of terminology, he invented a battery of terms for the phenomena that interested him. Many of these are still in use among sociologists and many have diffused into the popular language.

Some maintain he was mainly an inventor of terms. Others believe the influence he acquired was excessive. Still others considered his work deeply flawed. Such is the nature of ranking and rating in the world of science and scholarship, especially in assessing the impact of exceptionally dominant contributors.

The 1948 declaration of Israeli statehood cited the Palestine mandate document as an affirmation of Jewish legal rights. Moshe Sharett, who would become prime minister of Israel, called the mandate document “an open covenant, openly agreed to by the League of Nations.” “With the Balfour Declaration,” Sharett said, the Palestine mandate document was “an international instrument guaranteeing to the Jewish people special facilities for immigration and settlement throughout Palestine.”

Yoram Dinstein put Sharett's statement into legal terms. “The Mandate for Palestine,” wrote Dinstein, “was an international agreement concluded between the League of Nations, on the one hand, and the Mandatory Power (Britain), on the other. It was not only Britain that was bound by the instrument, but also the League of Nations (the international organization in which most of the then-existing states of the world were members).” “International agreement” is another way of saying “treaty.”

We have just seen, of course, that the mandate document was never finalized. Since Britain never gained sovereignty in Palestine, it could not hold a mandate. Even if one overlooks that defect, however, the Palestine mandate document would not qualify as a treaty.

Dinstein did not elaborate to explain his characterization of the mandate document. On its face, the document does not bear the appearance of a treaty. Its full text can be found in the Documents Annex. It begins with the phrase “The Council of the League of Nations” and then recites terms. It reads like a document that, as is stated in it a few lines later, “confirms” what has been submitted to it. A treaty, at least one that is memorialized in a single document, would bear the names of the parties as having come to an agreement. Britain's name does not appear as a party to the document.

A treaty is normally signed on behalf of the parties. The Palestine mandate document bore no signatures. Signatures attest that a treaty was negotiated by persons with the authority to do so on behalf of the parties. Treaties on significant matters are normally signed subject to ratification. No ratification was contemplated for the Palestine mandate document.

Cliff Westlund was an unusual high school teacher. He encouraged you to think for yourself. As a sophomore in Mr. Westland's English class at Wausau (Wisconsin) Senior High in 1953/1954 this was a new experience for me. For example, when Mr. Westland asked each of us to select a favorite poem and recite it to music for the class each student had to make decisions.

Similarly, when he assigned class members to write a story of their lives 10 years into the future each of us had to think for ourselves. This exercise brought me face-to-face with the reality that over the next 10 years I would certainly be subject to the draft. I had an obligation to serve my county in the military. How would I do this? I hardly knew anyone who had served in the military. My father, an immigrant from Norway, where he performed his sixmonth long Norwegian service obligation in a chemistry lab, knew absolutely nothing about the US military. So he could not provide an example or even offer valuable advice. I would have to think for myself.

I had heard of Wausau high schoolers receiving congressional appointments to a military academy. One of my best friends, taking lessons to earn a pilot's license, told me that his father was already working on getting him an appointment to the newly founded Air Force Academy (which he subsequently received). But the military academies held little attraction for me.

The University of Wisconsin in Madison is where I wanted to study. I wanted to be a Badger. At college I would be deferred from the draft for the duration of my studies. Then, as a college graduate, perhaps I would be qualified to become an officer. This appeared to me to be a more attractive alternative than being drafted for two-year's active duty or enlisting in the reserves with a six-month active duty and a very long commitment in the reserves.

So, I started to research in the school library how one could become a military officer without graduating from one of the academies. This is where I learned about the ROTC. Little did I know then at age 16 that this knowledge would provide the pathway for my entire life.

Although freedom, as we have seen, is as complicated and variegated as it is simple and singular, it is also the case that freedom is essentially inseparable from happiness. One might even go so far as to claim that all happiness is the result of freedom, even though freedom's relationship to happiness is not so one-sided.

In this chapter, we shall attempt to elucidate freedom's relation to happiness, and vice versa, by examining three “artist-philosophers” who had much to say on this very subject. As we have already seen and will have numerous occasions to observe further in Part II of this work, artistic freedom is one of the most important “zones” of positive freedom where participants are able to operate outside the usual constraints of society in order to create a viable alternative to same which is nothing apart from the blissful state of happiness it enjoins upon both artist and audience—even Kant's notion of art is inseparable from pleasure. Examining the ideas about freedom from these three artist-philosophers will provide additional insight into our understanding of the joy of freedom as well as a transition to the other practical aspects of freedom discussed in Part II.

Nietzsche […] Much that has been written on the subject of Nietzsche and freedom falls into the “analytical/continental divide.” Discussion among the Anglo-American analytical school of philosophy is largely taken up by a discussion of Nietzsche's many problematic comments about the age-old shibboleth of “free-will” (updated with recent theories of “compatibilism”) and his notions of “sovereign individuals” who have it and a “herd mentality” which doesn’t. Unfortunately, as a number of those philosophers are forced to admit, this approach usually leads to the dead-end of sovereign individuals who don't really exist and a “herd mentality” which is all too real and, truth be told, impossible to completely overcome. Even Robert Pippin, who is less pessimistic than most about the reality of attaining freedom in Nietzschean terms, is forced to admit:

The transitioning, peri-urban communities of East Java, Indonesia have responded to their challenges of urbanization and societal transformation in innovative ways. Champions of local and informal communities across the Global South have long championed the various acts of resistance and subversion in the face of the encroaching power of national, provincial and municipal states that often combine with the corporate private sector to disempower local and oftentimes politically marginal communities. Stories of such disenfranchisement in the provision of water services is particularly rife in our understanding of urban services. Oliveira and Lewis (2004), in his study of Cochabamba, Bolivia and Bond (2008) in his work on South Africa illustrate the kinds of disenfranchisement that result from state-centric urbanization. Less well documented, however, are the deeply pragmatic grassroots efforts to deal with rapid urbanization and transition.

This chapter details the ways in which local residents in Gresik, Indonesia, have become de facto planners, bankers and engineers. These jacks-of-all-trades coexist alongside rational, expert-based planning professionals in the rapidly urbanizing communities of Gresik, yet they are almost entirely invisible to the formal structures of national and local water governance. Understanding what these grassroots community planners and developers can and cannot achieve sheds new light on some of the policy and governance opportunities inherent to rapid urbanization and development in the Global South.

Indonesia is the world's fourth-largest country with five major islands: Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Papua. As much as 60 percent of the population is concentrated on Java, which makes up only 7 percent of the total land area. From 2000 to 2010, the bulk of Indonesia's population growth was in urban areas as the population grew from 203.5 to 237.6 million and the urban population grew from 85.2 to 118.3 million during that period. The percentage of those living in cities increased from 41.9 to 49.7 percent in the time period from 1970 to 2010, with 68 percent of the population on Java, giving Indonesia the fastest urbanization rate in the Asia-Pacific region at 4.2 percent (Firman, 2012; Ellis, 2012). By 2025, approximately 67.5 percent of the population will be living in urban areas, with the fastest growth taking place in the peri-urban areas outside of Java and Bali (World Bank, 2012).

As has been explained in the opening chapter, our story illustrates a process of cross-cultural engagement and economic transformation from a very local perspective that by the end of the first millennium CE had been widely underway across the broader South for many decades, even centuries. There was no standard process, no local model that can stand alone to illustrate how this engagement played out from place to place. The common feature across the South, however, was the interaction between the array of culturally and ethnically non-Sinitic cultures that had long occupied the land from time immemorial and the intruding Sinitic model that had evolved from the ancient culture of the Central Plain, an engagement that led to a profound change in both.

When this process began, as early as the Han dynasty if not even in the latter stages of the Zhou era, the diverse cultures and politics of the Yangtze River basin and the coastline south of the Shandong Peninsula were very different from those of the Central Plain. Over the course of the first millennium CE this changed as the disparate cultures of North and South engaged and cross-influenced each other. Our story comes rather late in the broader process. For a variety of reasons: mountain barriers, indifferent soils and indigenous hostility toward immigrants, among many, the more narrowly defined littoral regions south of the Hangzhou Bay and east of the Pearl River estuary, including both the coast and the interior highlands, attracted only a small number of the early Sinitic migrants. They primarily followed the interior river basins, which bypassed the area known to early scholars as Min. It was not until the mid-centuries of the first millennium CE that the Sinitic presence began to have a noticeable impact, and it was not truly until the turmoil and migration associated with the mid-eighth-century rebellion of An Lushan that has been referenced several times in earlier chapters when that presence became defining.

A reader might well ask, in light of this, what makes this particular story, a very local story that does not even include all of Min, worthy of focus? For one thing, I have long found it an interesting story that speaks in many ways to the lives of people in a remote past.

With a 1945 birthdate, it became apparent when I was in law school, or before, that I would likely have to perform military service. This was not something that I had given a great deal of thought to beforehand as military service had not loomed large in my family since my forebears came to the country from Russia and Russian Poland in the late nineteenth century. It is fascinating (to me, at least) to see how things unfolded.

It is a complicated story. On the one hand, my great-grandfather, Aaron Greenberg served in the Tsar's army. Oral tradition among my cousins has it that he was an Army barber. On other sides of the family tree, my paternal great-grandfather was said to have served in the brief Russo-Turkish War of 1878–79, while my maternal grandfather elected in the 1890s not to answer the Tsar's call. One of the few pieces of family memorabilia I possess is his draft notice. He fled, made it to New York, learned English in a hurry, and within a few years of immigrating graduated high enough in his class at the former Brooklyn College of Pharmacy to win a microscope as a prize. It's in my closet. Nicholas II also figures in my stepfamily; one of my stepsisters’ proudest possessions is a photo of their dashing young grandfather in his Russian Army white tunic.

My father was born in 1909 and served briefly in the New York National Guard, including marching in Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt's inaugural parade. Regrettably, he never gave me any other details, and I imagine he was too old to be drafted in World War II. My maternal uncle, who trained as a dentist, served briefly in the Army in the 1940s, but again, details are few. He never discussed it. I never had the opportunity to meet my wife's father, but he was an Army doctor.

In my own generation, military service became a reality thanks to the draft. This was simply a fact of life for young men of my generation. Nevertheless, it was a new experience when my brother, also a lawyer, was commissioned in the Coast Guard, going on to serve for six years, that is, beyond his obligated service.

Stage look

Stage look (banxiang 扮相) refers to how an actor appears onstage in costume and with makeup or face patterns. In one scholar's summary of Mei Lanfang's [Appendix H] account, stage look “conveys a spiritual likeness of nature, life, and emotion, which stimulates the viewer's imagination, not just a formal, or physical, resemblance to them” and is analogous to the image in a painting (Min Tian 1999, 256). The relative independence of xiqu roles from an actor's age and gender is due in part to the fact that stage look is regarded as quite separate from offstage looks. This goes some way to explaining the relative longevity of xiqu careers, since stage youth is not closely tied to performer age.

Body and movement

As numerous performers note in these lectures, movement is often accounted as one of the genre's defining features, partly because kunqu performers are seldom immobile while singing. Student actors first execute movements for years under the supervision of their teachers. Even for mature actors, correct execution relies on sound foundations established in their years of apprenticeship. Basic physical training ( jiben gong 基本功) denotes techniques obtained in early education and training. At a slightly later stage in education, these movements become clearly differentiated by role type.

These movements can be conceived as a series, commonly translated as conventions (chengshi 程式) that “prescribe ways of standing, walking, pointing, looking, as well as a whole battery of physical and facial gestures, combinations and encoded signals” (Hunter Gordon 2016a, 16). Body conventions can be expressed in fixed movements (shenduan 身段), a term that covers “what and how performers act and dance on stage” and is rendered by one scholar as “acting-dancing,” an indication of the absence of any hard line between acting and dancing in the genre ( Joseph Lam 2017, 86). Such conventions serve to accompany, illustrate, or interpret the words being sung. Movements large and small are often summed up as the four skills (chang nian zuo da 唱念做打)—singing, stage speech [Appendix C], gesture, acrobatics—and the five channels (shou yan shen fa bu 手眼身法步)—movements and execution ( fa 法) of hands (shou 手), eyes ( yan 眼), body or torso (shen 身), and gait (bu 步).

Our personal accounts describe the range of experiences that our military service provided. We eight were not a “band of brothers” who shared military experiences in a single command at the same time. Rather, we were a group of civilian friends either before or after active military service. In recent years, we have shared our thoughts on that service and its relevance to the present day American armed forces.

We served in the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines and Air Force. Our services were in the United States and overseas, combat and non-combat. Yet, they provided experiences that we shared and that we agree on half a century after our service ended. We identify a dozen of those common features.

• 1. Pride in our military service: Whether our service was in front line combat or stateside desk duty, we look back on our years in uniform respectfully, even if not always fondly. Our service gave us a strong sense of what it meant to be an American.

• 2. Service as a maturing experience: Unlike most first civilian jobs, our military service was often far from home and parents, mentors, classmates and friends. Often it involved doing initially unfamiliar work. It did not allow the abandonment of that work without criminal consequences.

• 3. The lifelong value of physical conditioning and/or competitive athletics: Regular exercise or competitive sports remained, for most of us, an attractive part of our life in our post-service careers.

• 4. Early opportunities for leadership: Military service, particularly at the officer level, typically required service in leadership positions. This often involved working with multi-million dollar equipment under challenging conditions. We did this work in our early twenties often far sooner than we would have in our first post-graduation civilian employment.

• 5. An unease with the way military service is praised today: We performed our military service during the latter part of the Vietnam War and Cold War eras when a substantial portion of privileged young men avoided military service of any kind. A significant and visible minority of them sharply criticized the military. Often the criticism was directed at the uniformed military members themselves rather than at their civilian leadership. Those of us who did serve found much to admire about military leadership, but also things that did not impress us.

Peter Singer may be the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century in terms of cultural impact beyond the academy. His book Animal Liberation combined philosophical argumentation with muckraking reporting that launched the animal rights movement. Changes in commercial and scientific testing, the mainstreaming of vegetarianism, and reductions in factory farm ing cruelty coupled with the rise of free-range farming are all direct results of his philosophical work over four decades.

Singer is Australian, but his family was originally Austrian.

As the grandchild of victims of the Shoah, Singer became deeply concerned with the wellbeing of the vulnerable. As one of the most well-known ethicists of the twentieth century, he has been thoroughly committed to utilitarianism, a moral system that contends that moral rightness and wrongness is a result of the sum total of good and bad consequences, of pain and pleasure, generated by deliberate human actions. Every time we act, we change the world. Our actions have effects. Some of the effects are good and some are bad. Morality, through the principle of utility, demands that we choose our actions to create the best possible world when we democratically consider the wellbeing of everyone equally. No one is less than. Everyone's interests are considered equally.

This approach to ethics comes to us from late Enlightenment figures like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. They argued that morality is not a matter of sentiment, but of reason. In this way, Singer follows his own grand father who perished in the camps.

There is a terrible, tragic irony in the fact that my grandfather (a classical scholar and a member of Freud's inner circle) spent his whole life trying to understand his fellow human beings, yet seems to have failed to take sufficiently seriously the threat that overwhelmed Vienna's Jewish community and ultimately led to the loss of his own life.