The most vital role, though, belongs to Kentucky-born 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, in whose unflinching blue eyes and wide cheekbones we discern a self-command absolutely right for her character.
It also requires radio spectrum to carry signals used for everything from tracking a spacecraft to sending a self-destruct command if something goes wrong.
Translated into the realm of personal saving, this is precisely the quirk in our nature that Messrs Thaler and Benartzi exploit when they ask people to save more not today, but tomorrow.This quirk sets up an "intimate contest for self-command", as Thomas Schelling, a winner of last year's Nobel prize for economics, puts it.
It is a solitary creature in self-command.
On Friday, a self-proclaimed "military command" announced on the radio that it had deposed the prime minister because of what it said was a "secret" agreement between him and military forces from Angola aimed at suppressing Guinea-Bissau's army.
Joseph Hergesheimer wrote in his introduction to the 1925 Knopf edition of the novel that, at its heart, The Red Badge of Courage was a "story of the birth, in a boy, of a knowledge of himself and of self-command".
Too often Washington seems a dull, phlegmatic figure, wooden if worthy, whose self-command stemmed from an essential lack of inner fire.
As McCullough says, Washington was a man of "almost excessive self-command".
Hector-Neri Castañeda [1975], influenced by Sellars [1966] maintained that intentions are a special species of internal self-command, which he calls "practitions".
Part VI of TMS, added in the last edition, presents the virtues of prudence, benevolence and self-command by way of a series of elegant character portraits, and part VII offers a short history of moral philosophy, which stresses the contributions of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.
"Drunkenness is rare," he wrote, "and if so, it rarely manifests itself in a boisterous or belligerent manner, but more frequently takes the shape of song, fun, and a general pleasurable feeling of warmth, energy, and self-command, and hence those horned crimes that sometimes shock us in the United States are rarely heard of here".
