The Inclusion of Minority Interests in Congress and the Presidency

Burke, Christopher M. The Appearance of Equality: Racial Gerrymandering, Redistricting, and the Supreme Court. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Pp. viii, 212. $59.95, hardbound.

Bybee, Keith. Mistaken Identity: The Supreme Court and the Politics of Minority Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. 206. $40.00, hardbound.

Riley, Russell L. The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Nation Keeping from 1831 to 1965. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 373. $22.50, softbound; $49.50, hardbound.     

Relativité et réalité Nottale, Simondon et le réalisme des relations

The exhaustion of the controversy about realism in physics, which is an epistemological consequence of the radical discrepancy between quantum mechanics and relativity, indicates the irrelevance of the traditional opposition between realism and antirealism. Since its purpose is the reunification of microphysics and macrophysics by the means of fractal space-time and scale relativity, Laurent Nottale's theory of Scale Relativity gets over this opposition by postulating the ontological value of the physical relations. The physicist's relational realism hence confirms spontaneously the intuitions of Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of nucleation, which considers the necessary recognition of the ontological value of relations in order to establish the «great synthesis of relativity and quantum physics».     

Economic crises in the ASEAN area: types and responses

Southeast Asia, the world region covering the countries of ASEAN, lies at the crossroads between China and India. Since early times it has been part of the global economy, going through cycles of boom and bust at least from the nineteenth century onwards. This essay compares three successive economic crises during the 1880s, 1930s and late 1990s. It shows how different types of crisis reflected as well as produced changes in the connectivity between production factors and institutional arrangements. Whereas the crisis of the 1880s was ‘local’, that of the 1930s was both ‘national’ and ‘delegated global’ and that of the 1990s ‘regional’ in nature. The types of crisis and the ways in which they were handled reflected structural changes in the institutional architecture of the global economy.