My narrative has been more focused on the individual person than I had anticipated and more than I have experienced in local governance. Anarchism tends this way. Self-governance, which I take to be its irreducible essence, must entail the possibility of causal agency which cannot be alienated or obscured in complex procedures, thereby forfeiting responsibility of authorship for one's actions and participation in power. Only individual agency can in certain circumstances approximate this demand. The extension of self-governance to all the domains of governance in which the individual person participates complicates the responsibility of agency and embeds authorship in ever more distant and impersonal procedures and structures. But anarchism insists that the will to self-governance never be abdicated. Actions which the person cannot plausibly comprehend in some palpable sense as her own agency on her own responsibility are usurpations of authorship and a diminution of self-governance. From this follows loss of authority and an increase in domination, coercion and submission.

Nevertheless, social order cannot be distilled to this individuality. Social structures, institutions and policies are collective. However much ultimately their impact on people is individually experienced, neither their causes nor their consequences can be adequately comprehended on that level. A person who seeks the power of authorship only where it is obvious and easy excludes herself from public action and compromises her self-governance, settling for trivialities. A challenge of anarchism is to empower us to transcend our ordinary existence into more inclusive realms of causal agency, without losing self-governance, the pursuit of excellence through art or the strength for solitude, contemplation or personal artistry.

There are many means to this end. In this study, I focus on municipal and associational participation which may be explained by its possible contribution to anarchism. Anarchist praxis may precede intentionality and enrich our self-constitution when we better comprehend our situations and consequences. This sequence indeed is frequently asserted by anarchists, that anarchism permeates society more extensively than is recognised as both an urgent need and a possibility (Ward 1982, 135– 44). Intentional praxis is a goal but without allowing doctrine to distort effective participation, which may depend on practical compliance with ruling institutions.

The trade and investment treaty regime has largely closed the opening in the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that allow nations to regulate cross-border capital flows. The lack of policy space for regulating cross-border capital flows conflicts with prevailing economic theory and new policy at the IMF that encourages nation-states to regulate cross-border capital flows in certain circumstances. This essay suggests reforms to the treaty system that could make it more conducive to fostering financial stability.

The Need to Regulate Capital Flows

Cross-border financial investments that are not foreign direct investments— such as bonds, stocks, derivatives and other instruments— can be essential parts of government, banking and corporate finance. Indeed, many developing countries may lack the savings or financial institutions that can help finance business activity. Capital from abroad can fill that gap. Therefore, under normal circumstances, the more capital flowing into a developing country, the more the country benefits. However, cross-border capital flows tend to be procyclical: too much money comes in when times are good, and too much money evaporates during a downturn.

A key characteristic of the global financial instability has been mass swings of capital flows across the globe. Indeed, international investment positions now surpass global output. Developing and emerging markets are no strangers to these flows. When the crisis hit, capital rapidly left the developing world in a flight to the safety of the US market. In an attempt to recover, many industrialized nations, including the United States, resorted to loose monetary policy with characteristically low interest rates. Relatively higher interest rates and a stronger recovery triggered yet another surge in capital flows to the developing world. The result has been an increasing concern over currency appreciation, asset bubbles and even inflation.

The East Asian Financial Crisis is a case in point, where surges of short-term capital flows led to upward pressure on exchange rates in a region where competitiveness was the cornerstone of national export-led growth strategies. When global investors speculated that those countries would no longer be able to maintain their competitive exchange rates, there was a sudden stop that caused the region's currencies to collapse and a major crisis to ensue.

Over the past few years, platform firms such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Uber (and their global counterparts and competitors such as Alibaba and Tencent in China) have emerged at the vanguard of international business. These firms represent revolutionary forms of oligopolistic capital and may hold major implications for industry organization, market structure and perhaps even the future of the corporate organizational form. However, despite their ubiquity, understanding the rise of these firms is anything but straightforward. On the one hand, their rapid growth is predicated on new disruptive technologies that generate market value through machine learning algorithms and big data. Yet, on the other hand, the success of their business models is fundamentally predicated on the now-familiar structural and institutional transformations of the global economy that have occurred during the past few decades of neoliberal globalization. These include changes in trade, investment, and labor laws and policies that have facilitated global capital flows and rendered workers vulnerable in countries around the world.

Indeed, a core feature of platform firm strategy has been to leverage the material power of their large size to take advantage of high levels of global liquidity to capture surplus finance and rapidly capitalize much more quickly than conventional multinational corporations in manufacturing and extractive industries. Further, unlike conventional firms, multisided platforms deploy novel techniques of aggregating and deploying labor on demand while leveraging the power of network effects to rapidly grow their consumer base and build scale. This may have allowed these firms to generate technical efficiencies, but it also enabled them to amass significant political power through both large size and pervasive presence across markets. Platforms have also developed mechanisms for co-opting and directly deploying their consumers as resources in aggressive efforts to challenge conventional regulation at the urban, national and global scale. These dynamics challenge simple narratives of innovation-led growth in platform firms in favor of explanations that are informed by the political economy. In other words, the technological and political are deeply intertwined. This essay seeks to critically assess the growth of platform firms and markets in this latest development in global capitalism.

Trade liberalization has proceeded on the assumption that eventual aggregate welfare gains will exceed the losses. While compensatory mechanisms exist in most countries, they tend to be underfunded and ineffective. To begin to address this problem, the direct beneficiaries from trade liberalization need to pay more than they do now. This essay proposes to introduce passporting fees to generate more public revenue. Transnational business actors would be required to obtain a free trade passport to receive the excludable benefits that a free trade agreement provides. This would change the political economy of trade radically and allow for the creation and expansion of compensatory mechanisms necessary to re-embed economic liberalism in systems of social protection.

In his seminal article on “embedded liberalism,” John Ruggie argued that to maximize the combination of free trade and social welfare, nation-states must have the power to buffer their populations from trade shocks. The compensatory mechanisms— whether directly targeted at trade-related effects (“trade adjustment measures” such as transfer payments or retraining efforts directly linked to trade-related dislocations) or in the form of general economic and social policies (such as unemployment insurance) —are funded through nation-state– based systems of tariffs and taxation. Post– World War II trade liberalization through the now almost universal General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which continues to be the bedrock of the World Trade Organization (WTO), has successfully brought down tariff levels significantly. In the past two decades, an everincreasing number of bilateral, regional and, most recently, megaregional free trade agreements (FTAs) has further expanded the freedom under which businesses operate transnationally. However, despite their extended scope and supposedly comprehensive nature, not even the most recent trade agreements address public revenue generation, instead maintaining the traditional separation of trade and tax. This has contributed to an unsustainable “disembedded liberalism” in which transnational business actors enjoy the gains that trade agreements create while successfully avoiding state-based systems of taxation. The lack of funding is one reason the architects of the contemporary global economic order have failed to develop compensatory mechanisms commensurate with increased trade liberalization.

Straight Talk on Trade is an incredible collection and interweaving of many of Professor Dani Rodrik's accessible discussions on globalization and the world economy. While the book addresses issues of financial crises, trade policy and democratization, I will focus my comments on the issues most directly related to trade policy.

One of Rodrik's statements reflects his motivation for the book: “Globalization, at least as presently construed, tilts the balance of political power toward those with the skills and assets to benefit from the global economy, undermining whatever organized influence the losers might have had in the first place.” Implicit in this statement (though less so in his other writings) is the notion that the rules of the world economy are accentuating global inequities. Thus, the rules need fundamental reform to make the world economy work more efficiently and more equitably.

Like some of his other works, this book does not solely take aim at the major powers, and the interest groups that sway those powers, for these global inequities. Rodrik also blames economists.

It's the Economists

Riffing a bit from the book, one could argue that there are two major problems with the way most Western-trained economists engage with trade. First, they fail to acknowledge the content of trade and investment agreements and have consistent quantitative models for only a small part of what constitutes contemporary treaty-making. Second, they overstate— especially in public— the “gains” from their limited modeling exercises and understate the “losses.”

The modeling exercises that dominate trade policymaking take the form of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models that “work” only if good trade is modeled and if there is perfect competition, fixed employment, no externalities, no international investment and no technological change. Once one introduces economies of scale, services and investment, unemployment and so forth, the models will give spurious results, which, while important to study in seminars, should not be used by policymakers to make decisions.

As Rodrik discusses, the gains from trade, according to these modeling exercises, are minuscule relative to the size of the economies. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), one of the largest trade deals, benefited the US economy by 0.08 of 1 percent.

As the social world— the world of people with their psychological and social propensities— enters Peter Kien's mind and life, his illusions and delusions are shattered. One of them is that the intellectual is a fundamentally different human being from other people— he has elevated himself to a condition that makes him qualitatively different from others and immune to the rules and influences that govern their lives— and that his chosen life strategy, the life of the mind, is a viable strategy for survival in the world. This illusion results in the failure to identify the commonalities in the processes in the intellectual's mind and in the minds of other people, as well as the failure to recognize that the social relationships between the intellectual and other people are not immune to the rules and influences that regulate relationships between all people.

The intellectual fails to recognize the fundamental characteristics of human nature in two fundamental domains. The first is the domain of the psychological experience: mental life in both intellectuals and nonintellectuals is similarly regulated by the same selfcentered needs, motivations, goals, and desires, and is prone to the same errors that this self- centered perspective necessarily entails: misreading the self and others in a way that is convenient to the self, illusions that people and events are more controllable than they are, confusing fantasy and reality, and so on. The second is the social domain: social relationships involving intellectuals and nonintellectuals are similarly regulated by desire for control/ power (dominance) or sexual desire. Social dynamics unfold according to consistent processes and result in predictable outcomes. Some individuals survive, others don't; some achieve their goals, others don't; some dominate, others are dominated.

Kien's belief that the intellectual is free from the constraints of human nature encompasses two kinds of deadly illusions. The first is Kien's illusion that he does not need the companionship of other people (other than some services that they provide), that he understands others’ behaviors and their motives, that he can tolerate some limited interactions with selected others when these interactions occur in relation to his books, and that he can control these interactions. He has a primitive understanding of social dynamics between people, for example, the dynamics of power that exist in all relationships between two individuals.

Elias Canetti was born on July 25, 1905, and died in 1994 at the age of 89. Everything Canetti wrote throughout his life, he wrote in German. All of his work has been translated into English (as well as many other languages), and I will mainly refer to the English translations, which were generally published a few years after the German originals. Canetti's extensive autobiography is crucial for understanding his life and his work. The first volume of his autobiography, The Tongue Set Free, covers the years 1905– 21. The second volume, The Torch in My Ear, covers the years 1921– 31. The third volume, The Play of the Eyes, covers the years 1931– 37. These three parts of his autobiography have been published together as a single 834-page volume called The Memoirs of Elias Canetti (first edition, 1999). The first three volumes of Canetti's autobiography are considered an outstanding literary achievement and played a significant role in his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Although they only cover the first 32 years of Canetti's life, they provide an important window into his formative years and shed light on the early influences that shaped his thinking and writing. They are crucial for understanding the genesis of Auto-da-Fé, which was completed in 1931; the novel was the first major literary work written by Canetti as well as the only novel he ever wrote.

Elias Canetti was born in a small town in Bulgaria called, at that time, Ruschuk, now known as Ruse. The Canettis were Sephardic Jews: their ancestors had migrated to Spain after the Diaspora and had been forced to leave the country again at the end of the fifteenth century. Their last name was probably originally Canete, and was later Italianized as Canetti, even though the Canettis had nothing to do with Italy and never lived there. Many Sephardic Jews who left Spain moved to southern European and Middle Eastern countries. This was the case of Elias Canetti's close ancestors, who at some point settled down in Turkey. Elias Canetti's paternal grandfather relocated, along with his family, from Turkey to Bulgaria. Elias Canetti's mother was also a Sephardic Jew, and her family had similar roots as the paternal side of the family.

In seeking to make sense of modernity in the classical tradition of sociology as a field, Robert Bellah's work spans the social sciences and comparative cultural inquiry to embrace the global diversity and coherence of religion as the key to culture across civilizations and epochs within the framework of human evolution. It engages the West, and America in particular, as problematic cases that can only be understood in the broadest comparative perspective on human culture unfolding in history. Seen from this standpoint, the dialectical coherence of civil religion in the moral argument of public life in modern societies runs through the development of its formulation over the course of Bellah's scholarship. This begins in print in 1967 with “Civil Religion in America,” defined in Durkheimian terms as a collection of beliefs, symbols and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity, and then defended as “the subordination of the nation to ethical principles that transcend it and in terms of which it should be judged,” not idolized. Religion forms the womb of all civilization and gives birth to the moral order and community of every society. It does so in symbolic and practical forms that both underlie and overarch the differentiation of religious, political, economic and familial institutions in the evolution of modern societies, enabling their moral judgment as well as their justification.

In “Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic” in 1978, Bellah elaborates the critical interplay of civil religion and public theology in the free exercise of religion in America, institutionalized in ways that mediate but never resolve the tension between civic republicanism and constitutional liberalism in its ambiguous political identity. Seen as a cultural dimension of depth, civil religion frames modes of moral discourse and imagination to enable coherent cultural conflict in successive times of trial, which give rise to contrasting public theologies that contest the meaning of civil religion and reshape it in turn. This dialectical logic extends to the model of cultural conversation and argument across multiple moral traditions seen as continuities of conflict in Habits of the Heart in 1985 and Bellah's later work, by contrast to construing civil religion as a unitary moral foundation once fundamentally fixed and then fragmented by culture wars.

I am attempting to hold the municipality of Savonlinna and my own career as councillor and citizen activist to the standards of some anarchist ideals. I am similarly attempting to hold these ideals up to the realities the municipality and I confront. But I have not yet crystallised the ideals in a coherent form. Anarchism has been presented as a set of potentialities and their entailed praxis cohered by several disciplining norms, most prominently self-governance, which themselves remain inadequately formulated. Perhaps this is as it should be. Anarchism is not, or need not be, a doctrine. It can be forced into doctrinal form only at the risk of violating its own strictures against domination, coercion and submission (Wilson 2014, 1– 13). Nevertheless, I envisage anarchist thought as both an origin of purposes for the municipality and a normative framework for assessing its justifiability, as well as indicating alternatives to it when its justifiability fails. My project demands an anarchist doctrine, but only as a conceptually coherent vision whose adequacy can be tested against the realities of the municipality and its civil society. To the extent that it is plausible, it may be a normative criterion for the municipality.

For this purpose, I turn to Murray Bookchin's doctrine of libertarian municipalism, or its less institutionally specific mode of communalism. In spite of its ambiguous relationship to anarchism, at times both affirmed and denied by Bookchin, it provides sufficient conceptual coherence of intrinsically anarchist ideals with sufficient relevance to the realities of the municipality that it may engage realities and the ideals with each other in order to test their ethical validity and practical efficacy. Like many anarchists of my generation, I have had a long and troubled but inspiring relationship with his work. He did not educe me to anarchism. Encounters with doctrinaire leftist authoritarianism on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in the mid-1960s sufficed for that. But when I came to do conceptual work on both anarchism and environmental philosophy, Bookchin loomed large in my perspectives. And when I undertook my political career, his theories of social ecology in general and libertarian municipalism in particular were a constant challenge to my own comprehension of my purposes.

Engagement with the Axial Age bookends Robert Bellah's long and scholarly career. Between the publication of “Religious Evolution” in the American Sociological Review in 1964 and the publication of his magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution, almost 50 years later, he made it his project to understand the cultural forms that grew out of the long process of religious evolution. Bellah agreed with Karl Jaspers, the philosopher who had coined the concept of the Axial Age, and subsequent commentators like Benjamin I. Schwartz, Arnaldo Momigliano and Shmuel Eisenstadt, that the middle centuries of the first millennium BCE were of truly pivotal importance to human history. What set this period apart in the long and complex story of religious evolution was the emergence of what Schwartz had called “transcendence,” Eisenstadt called “transcendental visions” and Bellah in his later work took to calling “theory.” This development, which unfolded through varying pathways and became evident in varying degrees in different civilizations, marks the transition from the archaic to the axial stage. The criterion for this transition is that all presuppositions can be questioned and that alternate social realities can be imagined (Bellah 2011a, 322). Beyond the axial stage, however, Bellah was convinced that the axial breakthrough remained important in modern times as well. Ultimately, Bellah's concern was less with ancient history, and more with the present “crisis of coherence” (Bellah 2011a, xix). While he was unable before his death to complete his planned shorter work on the period from the Axial Age up to modern times, we have some hints in his writings of what Bellah would have seen as the crucial heritage of the Axial Age for our times.

In this chapter, we give an account of Bellah's engagement with the axial breakthrough in three different areas. First, we sketch how Bellah's account of parallel developments in ancient Israel, Greece, China and India exemplifies his evolutionary approach to religious and cultural development. While he rejected the end of the “grand narratives” that had been proclaimed by J.- F. Lyotard ([1979] 1984), he did not simply counter with a single closed and universalizing story. Like the sociologist and medievalist Benjamin Nelson, Bellah was wary of the scholarly tendency toward “uniformitarianism” (Nelson 1974, 140), that is, the post hoc rendering of disparate developments as a systematic whole.