On March 21, 1918, the German Army launched “Operation Michael” against British positions around Arras as the first stage of an offensive along the Western Front. Bolstered by reinforcements from the Eastern Front after the October 1917 Revolution and cessation of hostilities with Russia, the Kaiserschlacht, as it was called, represented a final gambit to win the war. A few days after the start of this titanic onslaught, Georg Simmel confided in a letter of March 25 to his friend Hermann Graf von Keyserling: “Now I am in the midst of very difficult ethical and metaphysical investigations […]” (G. Simmel, Briefe 1912–1918. Jugendbriefe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008). It was not only premature aging that conspired against reaping his philosophical harvest: Simmel had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. As he writes to his friend, he finds himself in “very bad health” and severely reduced in “intellectual energy.”

The products of Artefaction are not just made things but making things. Included in this class are tangible things with a capacity for rhetorical performance – for example a statue or a flag – as well as intangible things, of which the preeminent example is the word. Where words combine in sentences and in speech, they can attain monumental status and influence. Contemplating Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke argued that a word like ‘freedom’ is only as good as the use to which it is put, Richard Dawson observes that for Burke, words are ‘evolving cultural artefacts that shape us and are shaped by us as we use them’. This serves as an excellent definition of the Making Sense informing the term ‘Artefaction’ as it is used in this chapter, as does James Boyd White’s idea (as summarized by Dawson) that language is ‘an evolving cultural artefact for making and remaking ourselves and our world – the real world’. In defence of ‘underwater basket weaving’, this chapter turns to material culture to consider the relationship between the weaving of words and such handcrafts as the weaving of baskets.

Vadim Shneyder provides a financial biography of Chekhov as an upwardly mobile freelance literary laborer against the backdrop of Russia’s economic expansion and transition to a money-driven economy. Shneyder traces the rapid development of industrialization in Russia in the 1890s, driven largely by the expansion of the rail network, and examines how this new environment both appears in Chekhov’s works and shaped the conditions of their production.

The goal of the final chapter is to examine the central role of necessities in the epistemological, moral and political theory of An Essay of Human Understanding and of the Two Treatises of Government. A study of the former shows Locke’s preoccupation with classical moral questions such as happiness and the ‘good objects of desires’ and how necessities helped him to strike a balance between tradition and the new science. As a rule of thumb of proper conduct, knowledge of necessities leads to the preservation of life, a human being’s most important duty to God. His doctrine of necessities is what made it possible for Locke to develop the theory of the public good with which, it is argued, he attempted to defeat the egoist theory of self-interest. Examination of his conception of property and money through the lens of human necessities shows a certain ambiguity in Locke’s normative ideals. Nevertheless, my conclusion is that above other considerations underlying the capital-oriented ideals of the period, the last word of Locke’s political theory is the public good represented by preservation and convenience for the commonwealth and, when possible, for the whole of humanity.

Chapter 10 analyses Locke’s early writings on money within the wider context of his corpuscularism and explores what I have termed his ‘doctrine of necessities’. The chapter argues that his theory concerning the ‘necessaries’ and ‘necessities’, rather than ‘rights’, gives systematic coherence not only to his political and economics writings but to his entire philosophical theory. In Locke’s early writings on money, the key issue concerns economic phenomena that belong to an interdependent scientific system. The chapter discusses in detail the literature dealing with moneylending that existed before Locke and demonstrates in this manner his originality.

The author details her team’s research investigating sex differences in serial murder from an evolutionary perspective. Per Trivers’ (1972) Parental Investment Theory, evolved psychological mechanisms serve sex-specific interests to maximize reproductive fitness (genes represented in subsequent generations). As predicted, men – who produce millions of sperm daily and have an increased sex drive – commit serial murder primarily for sexual reasons. Women, who have limited reproductive opportunities compared to men, have evolved to place great importance on resources. As such, women commit serial murder primarily for monetary gain. Moreover, mirroring ancestral agrarian tendencies, male serial killers (MSKs) are hunters (stalkers) of victims, and female serial killers (FSKs) are gatherers of profit and “gather” victims in their immediate environment, including relatives. The author stresses that an evolutionary perspective (ultimate perspective) does not explain the entirety of serial murder. We must consider converging perspectives, including evolutionary, proximate biological, clinical, traumagenic, cultural, historical, social, and gender-role forces that contribute to the development and growth of the human psyche.

This chapter discusses known motives of female serial killers (FSKs). FSKs’ most common motive for murder was financial gain. An evolutionary psychology model of serial murder is presented. The author discusses how killing children, the antithesis of genesmanship, may be understood from an evolutionary angle. The author reminds the reader that evolved psychology is not an absolute determinant of behavior and that multiple perspectives (e.g., clinical, neural, traumagenic) should be considered to understand a given behavior or mental process. This chapter also presents the outcome (disposition) of serial murder cases in that about 80% were sent to prison, with some receiving the death penalty. This chapter further presents a composite of the “typical” female serial killer (FSK) as described in Harrison et al. (2015) in The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology. The author revisits the case of Kristen Gilbert, a FSK whose motives did not neatly fall into a lone typology category. The cases of Judy Buenoano, Rhonda Belle Martin, Lydia Sherman, and Kimberly Clark Saenz illustrate chapter concepts.

A shop encounter is normatively closed when payment is made. This paper analyzes the ways in which the physical presence of money (whether as cash, or bank card) shapes the payment phase of the interaction at kiosks in Finland. This study demonstrates that customers orient to payment from the very beginning of the interaction and work to prepare their money and to make it observable to the seller from early on. Moreover, if the customer has made their money observable prior to the price announcement by the seller, the payment phase moves quickly and smoothly to completion. If, on the other hand, the money has not been made observable early in the interaction, payment can be delayed. Conversely, customers can put their money on the seller’s side of the counter before payment has been made relevant; in such cases, the seller adjusts his or her actions to speed up the interaction so that the payment phase arrives earlier than is typical. Thus, through money, especially displays of it early in the interaction, customers show their orientation to progressivity.

This chapter argues that while we all have a pretty good idea what is meant by the term ‘social class’, it is far from being a straightforward matter. After all, there is only tenuous agreement about exactly what it is, how prevalent it is, how it organises the life opportunities of our citizens and how best to study it. To make it more difficult still, this is a subject that many feel uncomfortable discussing, let alone applying to themselves or anyone else.

In attempting to better understand the relationship between social class and education in Australia, this chapter will ask questions about just how equal Australian society actually is, how schooling success might be more likely for some than others and why money isn’t everything. In doing so, it will trace important changes in the way the social sciences have tried to explain this phenomenon. Most notably, these changes involve a shift away from a focus on economic and structural aspects of social class to a greater emphasis on issues of cultural practice.

Chapter 13 proposes a monetary system to enable human survival on planet Earth.

The estate at Yasnaya Polyana was both a blessing and a curse to Tolstoy and his wife Sofia. It became the beloved familial, historical stage where the Tolstoys proudly lived and raised their ten children, and Tolstoy wrote his work. It had belonged to his mother, whose great-grandfather Major General Prince Sergei Volkonsky had purchased it in 1763. Tolstoy inherited the property of 330 serfs in 1847, and in 1860, inherited another 300 serfs when his eldest brother died. He had sold half his land and the main house to pay gambling debts by the time he married in 1862. In the next two decades, he managed to re-establish the Tolstoy fortune, investing money earned from the novels in land nearby and in Samara province. By 1880, Tolstoy believed that property ownership was evil. His self-censure reflected his ambitions to acquire property. He had quintupled the value of his holdings to 500,000 rubles by 1891, when the land was divided among his wife and children. After his death, they gave much of Yasnaya Polyana to the peasants, as Tolstoy requested, using the sale of his works to buy out their shares. Tolstoy’s family, literature, and property were everywhere intertwined.