The common cause principle says that every correlation is either due to a direct causal effect linking the correlated entities or is brought about by a third factor, a so-called common cause. The principle is of central importance in the philosophy of science, especially in causal explanation, causal modeling and in the foundations of quantum physics. Written for philosophers of science, physicists and statisticians, this book contributes to the debate over the validity of the common cause principle, by proving results that bring to the surface the nature of explanation by common causes. It provides a technical and mathematically rigorous examination of the notion of common cause, providing an analysis not only in terms of classical probability measure spaces, which is typical in the available literature, but in quantum probability theory as well. The authors provide numerous open problems to further the debate and encourage future research in this field.

When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast stories of British agents inciting African Americans and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion. Using rhetoric like "domestic insurrectionists" and "merciless savages," the founding fathers rallied the people around a common enemy and made racial prejudice a cornerstone of the new Republic. In a fresh reading of the founding moment, Parkinson demonstrates the dual projection of the "common cause." Patriots through both an ideological appeal to popular rights and a wartime movement against a host of British-recruited slaves and Indians forged a racialized, exclusionary model of American citizenship.

A lost literary relic of the First World War, Common Cause tells the story of Jeremy Robson, a crusading newspaper editor in the fictional midwestern town of Fenchester. The Guardian’s muckraking has led special interests to withhold advertising in order to drive Robson out of business. But he and local plutocrats put their differences aside when war is declared in 1917 in order to attack the German-American community for its supposed fealty to their Fatherland. Common Cause provides a vivid picture of the America-first fear and hate that gripped the midwestern United States during the Great War.

Using German and previously closed or underutilized Soviet archives, this work brings to date the historiography of one of the most important aspects of twentieth-century international relations: the steps by which Germany and Soviet Russia would find common ground and establish a relationship whose impact would be felt throughout World War II.

It considers the many contributions of both women to the most significant political movements of their times: anti-slavery; women's rights; and industrial reform. It also traces their defining influence on the ideas and writings of Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and the American suffragists.

Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism—an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But, she also illuminates an ethic of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual discipline. Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and offers it to us as a key to democracy’s future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common.

I want to talk to you about democracy. The real one. The one that does not exist, and the one we really need today. My research method is that of Hippocrates, who said, look for the cause of causes. In other words, to cure a disease, to solve a problem, it is useless to attack the consequences, it is useless to attack the different causes. There is always a determining cause (the one that determines all the others)—and that is our common cause. The first decisive battle is to push the important words "right side up": First. I am not a "citizen" (a citizen is autonomous; he votes himself his laws). I am only a "voter;" that is to say, a political child—because I am subject to the law voted into existence by someone other than me. Second. My "parents" in politics, the elected officials, do not want me to emancipate myself from them—they do not allow me to vote for or against the laws to which I have to submit myself. We are "the incompetents." They treat us like children. But it is our fault, because children also believe in "Santa Claus," and so voters believe in "universal suffrage," which we accept to call "democracy" (demos kratos, power belongs to the people). The so-called modern "democracy": • appoints masters, • from among people who have not been chosen; • and without any means to resist the betrayal in between two elections; • with, of course, the right of expression, true enough, but without any enforceable power. The real name of this undemocratic regime is "representative government." Sieyès (one of the most influential thinkers of the French Revolution), said in 1789: "The citizens who appoint representatives renounce and should renounce making the law themselves. They have no particular will to enforce. If they enforced their will, France would no longer be this representative state; it would be a democratic state. The people, I repeat, in a country that is not a democracy (and France could not be one), the people can only speak, can only act through their representatives" (Speech of September 7, 1789). Voltaire added: "A well-organized society is one in which the few make the many work, are fed by them, and govern them." History has shown, for two hundred years, the sham and the never-ending ruses of "representative government." All the thinkers of the world before 1789, from Plato, Aristotle to Montesquieu and Rousseau, knew that election is by nature aristocratic, therefore oligarchic, and that the only procedure that is democratic is the drawing of lots. Aristotle: "Elections are aristocratic and undemocratic: they introduce an element of deliberate choice, of selection of the best citizens, the aristoi, instead of government by the entire people." Montesquieu: "Suffrage by lot is democracy by its very nature; suffrage by choice is of that of aristocracy." To reinforce this idea, we have two historical experiments, of long duration. On the one hand, democracy and thus the drawing of lots (Athens for two hundred years); and on the other hand, representative government and thus election, also for two hundred years, in 1789. Let us examine the results: For two hundred years, the drawing of lots has always given power to the poorest citizens, "the 99%" (This was democracy in Athens 2500 years ago). Whereas, for two hundred years, election has always given power to the richest citizens, "the 1%" (look at the two centuries of representative government in the world—there is no exception). So, my central question is this. How much longer will the poor (the 99%) prefer the election from the lottery of the 1% (against their most obvious interests)? Etienne Chouard is a professor of economics and law in Marseille. Using popular education, he has created and led popular constituent workshops, so that child voters can turn into adult citizens.

This book on bilingual education policy represents a multidimensional and longitudinal study of “policy processes” as they play out on the ground (a single school in Los Angeles), and over time (both within the same school, and also within the state of Georgia). In order to reconstruct this complex policy process, Anderson impressively marshals a great variety of forms of “discourse.” Most of this discourse, of course, comes from overheard discussions and spontaneous interviews conducted at a particular school—the voices of teachers and administrators. Such discourse forms the heart of her ethnographic findings. Yet Anderson also brings an ethnographer’s eye to national and regional debates as they are conducted and represented in different forms of media, especially newspapers and magazines. She then uses the key theoretical concept of “articulation” to conceptually link these media representations with local school discourse. The result is an illuminating account of how everyday debates at a particular school and media debates occurring more broadly mutually inform one another.

Proceedings of the Ispra Course held at the Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, November 16-19, 1987