bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The emotional value of refugees
Authors: Mavelli Luca
Published: March 2022

This chapter further explores the notion of ‘emotional value’ introduced in the previous chapter. To this end, it builds on the existing literature on ‘humanitarian government’ by showing how the growing intermingling of humanitarianism and security is part of a process of filtering aimed at granting protection only to refugees regarded as valuable. The chapter elaborates on how the notion of ‘ideal refugee’ signals an ultimate commodification of solidarity which subordinates the demand of refugees to their perceived market value. It shows how these neoliberal rationalities of value are mobilized through and overlap with a biopolitical rationality of care of the host population, and thus how neoliberal citizenship crucially rests on the mobilization of biopolitical racism. The exclusion of those lacking in economic and emotional capital becomes mandatory under neoliberal rationalities of value and biopolitical rationalities of care, which therefore become indistinguishable. To illustrate these arguments, the death of Alan Kurdi and several other cases from the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain are discussed.
Sacred market, sacrificial lives (I)
Authors: Mavelli Luca
Published: March 2022

This and the next chapter discuss how the ascendancy of neoliberal biopolitics in the logics and practices of citizenship exceeds mere dynamics of economization, to encompass a fully-fledged process of sacralization of the market. Building on the thought of Giorgio Agamben, Chapter 6 explores a first trajectory of sacralization of the market: a process of totalizing commodification that, by leaving no domain or space beyond itself, turns the market into an overarching and unquestionable framework of meanings and significations. The implications of this sacralization are explored with reference to the neoliberal citizenship regimes advocated by economists Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. Whereas the former praises the illegalization of migration as beneficial for both the migrant and the host community, the latter supports the idea that citizenship should be for sale and the fact that those in need (nominal citizens and non-citizens alike) may sell their organs for cash. These accounts are oblivious to issues of inequality and exploitation. They reduce life and its biological components to commodities and subordinate citizenship to its capacity to contribute to the production of other commodities. Both accounts are shown to be a response to the problem of scarcity, which in turn will emerge as the other side of a problem of overabundance that sees neoliberal capitalism actively engaged in the biopolitical production and elimination of surplus populations.
Conclusion: Neoliberal citizenship in a post-COVID-19 world
Authors: Mavelli Luca
Published: March 2022

This concluding chapter brings the different strands of the argument together and evaluates their implications for a post-pandemic world. In particular, it raises the question of whether the rejection of austerity that to date has characterized the response to the COVID crisis signals the possibility of a post-neoliberal shift. I argue that this is a misleading interpretation that neglects the symbiotic relationship between neoliberalism and biopolitics and how rationalities of care, through the modulation of scarcity, are instrumental in preserving the market order at times of acute crises and thus in preserving its sacred status. Neoliberal citizenship emerges as a fundamental category of the post-COVID-19 order, one in which the nominal status of citizenship is weakened and the borders between self and other are strengthened. This is an order in which we are all migrants, yet walking different routes. Whether ours involves red carpets, corridors, walls, mazes, or graveyards ultimately depends upon our neoliberal value.
Introduction: Reformers and Propagandists
Authors: Huxtable Simon
Published: March 2022

After Stalin’s death, journalists began to rethink the nature of the Soviet newspaper. The press, which had acted as a vehicle for the Stalin cult and as a repository of official information, appeared hidebound and conservative, offering little to the non-activist reader. This introduction briefly sets out the changes that characterised the press after Stalin’s death. It places Komsomol’skaia pravda’s history within the broader trajectory of the post-revolutionary Soviet newspaper, and argues that Thaw journalism is best considered as an aesthetic, a professional code and a practice. As an aesthetic, journalists were committed to a more reader-friendly newspaper that would interest its young readers; as a professional code, journalists committed themselves to the public good; but as a practice, the high ideals and the more mundane day-to-day requirements of propaganda often clashed
Rituals, Routines and Ideology in the Late Stalinist Press
Authors: Huxtable Simon
Published: March 2022

The late Stalinist press both mirrored and moulded the rituals of the Soviet public sphere. Grandiloquent editorials, repetitive stories about record-breaking feats in industry and agriculture, and constant praise for the country’s leader, Iosif Stalin, depicted a world where things were good—and getting better. Behind the scenes, however, journalists began to express dissatisfaction with the ossification of official discourse, recognising that high-flown phrases and official announcements offered little of interest to audiences. This chapter explores the paradoxes of the late Stalinist press, focusing on the press’s role in public ritual and journalists’ attempts to challenge this ritualisation. It shows how journalists lived in fear of making errors and organised their professional routines to eliminate them, but nevertheless struggled to produce the authoritative discourse of Stalinism. Through a detailed study of Komsomol’skaia pravda’s coverage of the 1946 and 1950 Supreme Soviet election, one of the key rituals of Stalinist politics, the chapter shows that, behind the monolithic façade, journalists were constantly dissatisfied by their election coverage and often made errors that stopped the presses. The chapter concludes by showing how the clichés of party propaganda could also be used to argue for reform. By criticising ‘formalism’ in public life and diagnosing a lack of ‘care’ in Soviet schools, journalists drew on Soviet discourse to argue for a more humane society in ways that were both consonant with, but also challenged, Stalinist rituals.
The Institute of Public Opinion and the Birth of Soviet Polling
Authors: Huxtable Simon
Published: March 2022

This chapter focuses on Komsomol’skaia pravda’s unlikely role in the revival of Soviet sociology after many years of repression under Stalin. In 1960, Boris Grushin, a journalist in Komsomol’skaia pravda’s Department of Propaganda, created the Institute of Public Opinion (IOM), the country’s first ever polling institute. Over eight years, the IOM conducted surveys on a broad range of questions, from the public’s use of free time to their opinions about the Communist Youth League, or ‘Komsomol’. Readers responded enthusiastically to this novel initiative, which for the first time offered the Soviet public a glimpse of the views of their fellow citizens. Journalists were no less effusive, especially because the Institute’s earliest surveys produced results that seemed to prove that the public supported the regime’s policies. However, as the paper’s journalists-turned-sociologists began to probe deeper into the public mood, they uncovered gaps between rhetoric and the public mood. This placed the paper’s editors in an uncomfortable position with officials and seemed to complicate the newspaper’s propaganda tasks. This chapter analyses the IOM’s work, placing it within a longer history of Soviet sociological research, shows how readers responded to the paper’s experiment in polling, and examines the reasons for the IOM’s untimely closure in 1968.
Epilogue: Thaw Journalism after the Thaw
Authors: Huxtable Simon
Published: March 2022

This book’s conclusion offers a brief summary of the book’s arguments before asking when the Thaw came to an end. It offers evidence to support the traditional view, which locates the Thaw’s terminus in Czechoslovakia, and the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. However, it also argues that a certain Thaw ethos pervaded the 1970s press, with journalists indulging in a cat-and-mouse game with censors and officials to ensure that critical materials were published, and continued into the Gorbachev era. The conclusion thus argues that journalists’ hopes for political reform were only extinguished after the fall of communism, as journalists found themselves squeezed between commercial considerations and political pressure from the Kremlin.
The Government Party
Authors: Carty R. Kenneth
Published: March 2022

The Government Party is an exploration of five of the democratic world’s most successful political parties that dominated the politics and governments of Canada, Ireland, India, Japan, and Italy for many decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on an analysis of their structure and organization, the book identifies a distinctive type and form of party – the “Government Party” – whose success is tightly bound up with the political regimes they are created to serve. The analysis reveals the competitive dynamics of the party systems these parties dominate, the very different patterns of leadership that they provide, and the forces that contribute to their long-term persistence or decline. It offers a major interpretation of the distinctive character of electoral democracy when one party becomes a country’s natural party of government.
A Century of Dominance
Authors: Carty R. Kenneth
Published: March 2022

For most of the twentieth century, Canada’s Liberal party has been that country’s “natural government party,” making it one of the most successful parties in the democratic world. After tracing the story of its dominance, the analysis explores the party’s purposes and practice as the primary democratic instrument for articulating and maintaining the political bargain that defines the Canadian state. The Liberals long employed a distinctive decentralized organizational form, linking its parliamentary caucus to its supporters on the ground, which allowed it to successfully respond to the country’s continually changing social and demographic underpinning. Its leadership politics reflected the imperatives of balancing the divergent demands of its several electoral constituencies and produced a strong but fragile leadership that became the focus of intraparty competition. Despite a long, slow, secular decline, the party entered the twenty-first century as the country’s preeminent political organization.
Leadership and Dominant Party Politics
Authors: Carty R. Kenneth
Published: March 2022

Dominant parties may enjoy long periods in office and power but that does not translate into common patterns of government leadership. The tenure and influence of government party prime ministers vary enormously from being among the most powerful in the parliamentary world to being the least. These differences are rooted in the internal organizational forms and operating norms of the parties themselves and reflect both their origins and their consequent place in the constitutional and normative order of the country’s wider political system. Providing acceptable processes, and outcomes, in the inevitable leadership succession contests becomes one of the critical tests of a dominant party and its capacity for long-term survival. Given their different origins and challenges, dominant parties are driven to find different solutions to this problem.
The Ontology of Believing
Authors: Hunter David
Published: March 2022

This chapter develops an account of the ontology of believing. According to it, to believe something is to be in a certain state and this, in turn, is to have a certain property. There are different sorts of properties, and this matters to the ontology of belief. This chapter argues that belief properties are qualities, not sortals. That is, they are like the properties of being tall or of being rich and unlike those of being a chair or being human. Seeing this helps us avoid hypostasizing believing, treating a belief state as an object in its own right. In developing this ontological view, this chapter draws an analogy between believing and owning. The chapter argues that this view of the ontology of belief is compatible with the idea that belief states are realized by states of the brain, but takes no stand on this idea. It argues that while believing is in certain respects like an action or activity, it is better to think of it as a state. And it offers reasons to resist the standard view that believing is a relation between a believer and an object.
The Objects of Believing
Authors: Hunter David
Published: March 2022

This book argues that believing is not a representational state. In this chapter, it is argued that the objects of belief are possibilities, in the sense that belief properties are individuated by ways things are or could have been. This contrasts with the standard view that takes the objects of belief to be propositions, entities that are by their very nature representational. The chapter considers familiar puzzle cases that many think doom the modal view from the very start. The cases involve characters who are confused or mistaken about what is what or which thing is which or about who, where, or when they are. The chapter argues that these cases are not counterexamples to the modal view, and that the lessons they teach concern the objective and subjective limits to belief. These are discussed in chapters 5 and 6. The chapter then contrasts believing with being certain and considers belief in probabilities. It explains how the modal view can account as well as the propositional view for the fact that people can say what they believe, the sense in which beliefs are about things in the believer’s environment, and connections between belief, knowledge and inquiry. It sketches the history of the modal view and ends by considering Mark Richard’s recent view that beliefs are representational in a thin sense.
Subjectivity and Credal Necessities
Authors: Hunter David
Published: March 2022

This chapter explores the essential subjectivity of belief, what marks a person’s perspective on the world as essentially hers. It argues that this subjectivity concerns, not what a person does believe, but what she alone must believe. It thus concerns the limits to belief. In this way, this chapter challenges the standard view that the subjectivity of belief involves essentially subjective belief contents or propositions. The chapter first defends the claim that to believe something one must believe that one believes it—the so-called BB principle. After clarifying the principle and distinguishing it from several closely related ones, the chapter shows how it grounds the essential subjectivity of believing, and explains why we should accept it. It then considers the so-called transparency of belief and whether the nature of rational action requires more than just these credal necessities. It concludes that the essential subjectivity of belief is not about what a person believes but about what she alone cannot help but believe.
Credal Agency
Authors: Hunter David
Published: March 2022

This chapter argues that in making up her own mind a person becomes responsible for being what she does. It offers an account of inference as a mental action that grounds this responsibility. According to it, the believer is the cause and the act of inferring is a causing of a believing. The chapter sketches metaphysical ideas about action, causation, and agency that underlie this view, extending the account of agency developed in Chapter 1. This view of inference is contrasted with the view that an inference is the onset of a state of believing, and the chapter clarifies the sense in which a person acts on herself when she makes up her mind. It then argues that inferring can be voluntary, at least in cases where the person’s evidence is not conclusive, in the sense that it is up to the believer whether to draw the conclusion. Cases of deductive inference, where the premises entail the conclusion, can make this voluntariness hard to see. The chapter considers why acts of inference cannot be intentional, but offers no conclusive answer. It ends by suggesting that a person can infer unwillingly, even when she does it voluntarily.
Credal Norms
Authors: Hunter David
Published: March 2022

This chapter considers three normative aspects to believing. It argues that while believing is not intrinsically normative, what a person believes can be to her credit or discredit, and there are things that a person ought to believe. According to this chapter, believing is not intrinsically normative because belief properties are not goodness-fixing properties. This means that no case of believing something is a better or worse case than any other. This follows, the chapter argues, from the fact that belief properties are qualities and that no qualities are goodness-fixing properties. While some theorists argue that credal norms flow from a form of intrinsic epistemic goodness, this chapter argues that they flow from the sortals a believer falls under. In particular, they flow from the believer’s goodness-fixing sortals. Whether believing something is to a person’s credit depends on whether her believing it shows her to be good in some respect. Whether she ought to believe it depends on whether she ought to know it, and this in turn on whether knowing it is needed for to be good with respect to her permitted goodness-fixing sortals. This account of epistemic norms rejects the standard evidentialist view that credal norms are an evidential matter. The chapter ends by considering when a person is to blame for not believing something they ought to believe.
State-sponsored Pensions for Private-Sector Workers
Authors: Fullmer Richard K. , Forman Jonathan Barry
Published: March 2022

This chapter explains how state governments could create new low-cost lifetime assurance funds to help provide retirement income security for millions of private-sector workers who currently lack pension coverage. Basically, an assurance fund operates like a mutual fund held within a defined contribution plan, but with the added features of mortality pooling and fully funded lifetime payouts. As we envision them, assurance funds would be offered as annuity-like investment options on the new investment platforms being created by states like Oregon, California, and Maryland that offer their citizens the opportunity to participate in state-sponsored retirement savings plans. Adding an assurance fund could effectively turn these retirement savings plans into lifetime pensions. To ensure their sustainability, assurance funds would operate under a strict budget constraint and be organized as either tontines or pooled annuities.
City and Sanctuary in Plutarch
Authors: Geiger Joseph
Published: March 2022

Chapter 4 discusses Plutarch’s visits to sanctuaries in Rome, Greece, and Egypt for scholarly investigation, contemplation, and pleasure. It presents snapshots of Plutarch walking in the Delphic sanctuary or looking at the temples of Fortuna and of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome; of Plutarch’s theoria to various festivals such as the Elaphebolia in Phocis, the Daedala in Plataea, the Pythian Games, the Isthmian Games, the Dionysia in Athens. It also highlights the festival of Eros in Thespiae (from which Plutarch and his retinue retreated to the sanctuary of the Muses on Mt. Helicon) where the story of Ismenodora and Bacchon set in the town of Thespiae provides the stimulus for philosophical discussion. The discussion shows Plutarch’s keen interest in urban sanctuaries but brings out his preference for the peace and quiet of the out-of-town sanctuaries as loci for philosophical discussion over the hustle and bustle of life in the city.
Athenian Monumental Architecture, Iconography, and Topography in Plutarch’s De Gloria Atheniensium
Authors: Athanassaki Lucia
Published: March 2022

Chapter 5 explores the significance of the Athenian art and architecture in shaping Plutarch’s subject matter and narrative style in De gloria. Taking as starting point the overt reference to Euphranor’s painting in the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios and the covert references to the Marathon painting in the Stoa Poikile, it traces Plutarch’s steps in the Athenian Agora and argues that Plutarch places himself, mentally at least, at the temple of Ares and in full view of Pindar’s statue in front of the Royal Stoa; this particular localization indicates that the vehement attack on Athenian cultural achievements must be taken with a grain of salt. On this reading De gloria was not a panegyric, but a rhetorical exercise, composed perhaps with the expectation of eliciting a counter-argument. The chapter concludes with Plutarch’s selective visualization and commemoration of the cultural landscape of the Agora and the people and events celebrated in it.
Stereotyping Sparta, Stereotyping Athens
Authors: Pelling Christopher
Published: March 2022

Chapter 6 begins with the impact on Plutarch of some famous Thucydidean and Herodotean characterizations of Athenians and Spartans. Thucydides’ contrast between Athens and Sparta (1.70) is the first in a series of examples of his profound influence on Plutarch’s depictions of Athens in the Lives, despite his other sources, e.g. comedy, Ion of Chios, Stesimbrotus of Thasos, etc. Plutarch’s depiction of Spartan character owes much less to Thucydides, a little to Herodotus, a little to Xenophon, and a lot to Plutarch’s own views: his Sparta is militaristic and not reluctant to take action; his emphasis on education, owed partly to Xenophon’s Lacedaemonion Politeia, shows that Spartan education encouraged philotimia/philonikia. The chapter concludes with the question of how far that philonikia is a characteristic of Greece as a whole, taking us back to Herodotus who had a keener eye than Thucydides for the similarities Spartans shared with other Greeks.
The City and the Self in Plutarch
Authors: Zadorojnyi Alexei V.
Published: March 2022

Chapter 13 investigates Plutarch’s conception of the polis as a somatic, psychological, and moral entity, which recalls and elaborates the city/soul analogy in Plato’s Republic. It is argued that the tropes for the soul in Plutarch are not dominated by contemporary references to the Roman empire, but rather point to a timeless, palpably classical, polis fighting off the enemies from its gates. Such a ‘defensive’ turn of the city/soul analogy does not, however, make it any less valuable to Plutarch as a Platonically bent interpreter of the past and of the imperial present. The city/soul analogy helps to triangulate the three major ideological circuits of the Plutarchan macrotext: his sustained interest in human soul and character, his scrutiny of city-state politics from a perspective which is simultaneously pragmatic and idealistic, and his decision to explore both character and the polis with, and through, Plato.
Plutarch’s Cities
Authors: Athanassaki Lucia
Published: March 2022

The Afterword (Chapter 18) picks out significant points of contact between the seventeen essays and draws attention to aspects of the study of cities that might fruitfully be explored further, namely: (a) the importance of autopsy and the impact of the emotions it catalyses on Plutarchan composition; (b) the political significance of religious and secular rituals; (c) the very wide range of sources Plutarch used for the reconstruction of the history of cities; (d) the role of civic art in the representation of cities and characterization of individuals; and (e) the seeming contradictions that upon scrutiny are best interpreted as different, covert, perspectives resulting from the complexities of civic life and socio-historical dynamics.
And All Shall Be Changed
Authors: Bierson Marshall
Published: March 2022

Mortality seems important in explaining the value of virtues. It seems that courage is valuable because we face dangers of death and pain, just as it seems temperance is valuable because we can harm our health by overindulgence. This poses a serious problem for Christian ethics. If the virtues are valuable because they ameliorate harms stemming from limitations like mortality, then the virtues will lose much of their value in the new creation, where those limitations are no more. This chapter argues that the threat is serious, and requires the rethinking of the fundamental value of the virtues. The virtues are not, first and foremost, the dispositions that allow us to improve the broken world we live in, but precisely those dispositions necessary for enjoying ideal or perfect conditions.
Being Good and Loving God
Authors: Byerly T. Ryan
Published: March 2022

Can trying to be morally good make a determinative difference for whether a person cognitively commits themself to God’s existence? If so, would the resulting commitment be epistemically justified—or at least not epistemically unjustified? This chapter defends a positive answer to both questions. It explains, first, how aiming to be the kind of person who tends to err on the side of giving others praise, thanks, or apology might lead someone to adopt positive cognitive commitments to God’s existence despite having ambiguous evidence for God’s existence. It then explains how several different views about epistemic justification would allow the resulting cognitive commitments to be either epistemically justified or not epistemically unjustified.
Defining Religion
Authors: Lebens Samuel
Published: March 2022

When philosophers and sociologists have sought to define ‘religion’, their definitions have invariably stumbled in the face of counter-examples. Some definitions have been too exclusive—failing to include non-theistic religions. Some have been too inclusive—failing to exclude non-religious ideologies (such as Marxism). This chapter takes religiosity to be conceptually prior to religion. Accordingly, a definition of religiosity is first proposed, which in turn allows for a definition of religion that seems immune to any obvious counter-example. Religiosity, it is argued, demands community, faith, and imagination. Religions are systems of ideas and/or practices that call for religiosity in a way that non-religions do not.
Time and the Nature of the Atonement
Authors: Seymour Amy
Published: March 2022

Standard practice in philosophy of religion is to evaluate certain theological positions with respect to how well they comport with desirable philosophical positions and vice versa. The ontological status of the atonement has not received much of this treatment, in no small part due to disagreement regarding what constitutes a proper account and the abundance of metaphor. The metaphysical nature of the atonement depends on questions about existence, properties, and time. Examining atonement via theories of time thus helps make clear these disagreements and offers solutions. The ontological specifics of the atonement will vary depending on whether one is a presentist or eternalist.
Divine Self-Manifestation
Authors: Johnston Mark
Published: March 2022

The author’s account of creation as a free and contingent act of Divine self-manifestation has been criticized by Timothy O’Connor and Kenneth Pearce. O’Connor suggests that the account restricts the scope of contingency as it is ordinarily understood, and that God might have created out of generosity; Pearce avers that it does not touch the familiar problem of evil in the form of the observation that that this is not the best of all possible creations. In response to O’Connor, it is argued that the scope of contingency may be restricted, but in a way that should be unsurprising; and an alternative view of God’s conditional generosity is proposed. In response to Pearce, an account of creation as God’s indefective self-manifestation is developed—one which makes the whole problem of evil look very different.
To What Extent Must Creatures Return to the One?
Authors: Cohoe Caleb
Published: March 2022

This chapter begins by highlighting the role of necessary emanation in allowing for goodness to be diffused without involving anything contingent or external. It then argues that, while Timothy O’Connor’s position avoids modal collapse, it may imply divine coercion. O’Connor suggests that God, in order to properly manifest God’s goodness, must create creatures capable of divine union and give them everything required to make their enjoyment as perfect and infinite as it can be. This view is in danger of making God’s salvific acts required, rather than gratuitous. The difficulty is not unique to O’Connor. Any position on which created things are capable of sharing in infinite goodness faces this tension. Such views can imply both that God must create a universe containing creatures capable of infinite enjoyment and that, within such a universe, the return of all things to God must be as complete, infinite, and encompassing as possible.
Ineffability and Creation
Authors: Pruss Alexander R.
Published: March 2022

The doctrine of divine ineffability is a part of the major Western monotheistic traditions. But it is a difficult doctrine to make sense of without self-defeat, undercutting theistic devotion, or technical problems. Whereas previous attempts have had a semantic focus, this one offers a pragmatic account of ineffability which avoids the problems of earlier accounts. Moreover, it suggests a solution to the seemingly unrelated puzzle of why a divine being might choose not to create.
Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement
Authors: French David
Published: March 2022

This book presents a compelling and original survey of British grand strategy in the inter-war period. Whereas most existing accounts privilege either diplomacy and foreign affairs, intelligence, or military affairs more narrowly, this book underlines the inexorable relationships between foreign policy, grand strategy, military force, intelligence, finance, and not least, domestic politics and public opinion. Britain was the world’s only global power in the inter-war period and it confronted problems on a global scale. Policy-makers sought two goals: peace with security. They did so successfully in the 1920s, partly due to favourable circumstances that made their task relatively easy, and partly because they understood the strengths and limitations of British power and knew how to wield them. The situation deteriorated rapidly in the 1930s, however, as the international system became increasingly unfavourable to Britain. Policy-makers then proved less adept than their predecessors at meeting these new challenges, partly because those challenges were more formidable, but also because they lacked the self-confidence of their predecessors, who had held high office during the most difficult years of the First World War, and they lacked their predecessors’ understanding of how to wield the levers of international power. The book ends by providing a new and more sophisticated account of how and why Neville Chamberlain appeased the fascist powers in the late 1930s, and why Winston Churchill opposed him and eventually supplanted him in May 1940.
Introduction
Authors: French David
Published: March 2022

This chapter explores the historiography of grand strategy and explains how its meaning changed in the early twentieth century. It then examines the contested history of appeasement, and suggests that British grand strategy between the world wars cannot be explained simply by the pursuit of appeasement. Until the second half of the 1930s British policy-makers were more likely to try to deter or coerce their rivals than to appease them. The failures of policy-makers in the 1930s can best be understood by analysing the reasons for their predecessor’s successes in the 1920s.
Who Made British Policy and Grand Strategy
Authors: French David
Published: March 2022

The British policy-making elite consisted of a small, socially cohesive group of politicians, civil servants, and senior officers of the armed forces. They shared a common aim: the creation and maintenance of a world in which the British Empire could enjoy peace with security. Policy and strategy were made by these men working within a structure of Cabinets, committees and ministries. Policy-makers had to take cognizance not only of Britain’s own strengths and weaknesses. They also had to understand the ambitions, strengths, and weaknesses of their rivals, and what British public opinion would, or would not, allow them to do.
Creating the New World Order, 1919–21
Authors: French David
Published: March 2022

By l921 British policy-makers had met with very mixed success in their efforts to create a new world order that would ensure the peace and security of their empire. Germany’s power was diminished, but it remained capable of revival and bent on revising the Versailles settlement, something the French would not countenance, and something that the League of Nations was unlikely to be able to deliver. The Middle Eastern settlement was also imperfect. Two other powers who had been excluded from meaningful participation in peace-making, Turkey and the Soviet Union, also rejected the legitimacy of the terms that the victors had imposed on them. The British were more successful in overcoming challenges from within their empire, partly because they were relatively much stronger than those groups who were challenging their paramountcy and partly because after they had failed to maintain their position by force, they opted to do so through negotiations.
Reconstructing the New World Order, 1921–6
Authors: French David
Published: March 2022

This chapter explains how British policy-makers re-shaped the immediate post-war settlement in ways that gave them peace combined with security. At the Washington conference the British contained the American threat to their global naval supremacy, and the Japanese threat to their regional security in the Far East. The British public wanted arms limitation agreements, and British policy-makers gave it to them, and they did so in a way that enhanced the security of their empire. They also succeed in blunting the threat to the peace and security of Europe and the Middle East. By 1922 the combination of the Russo-Turkish treaty and the Russo-German treaty signed at Rapallo meant that the three major revisionist powers, the USSR, Germany, and Turkey, had come together in a potentially dangerous grouping intent on overturning the post-war settlement. Over the next four years the British broke up that alliance. The Treaty of Lausanne, the Dawes Plan, the Locarno pact, and the settlement of the Mosul dispute created, at least temporarily, the kind of stable settlement they needed to safeguard their imperial security. By 1926 Britain was the world’s only global power. The Americans might have had the economic and financial wherewithal to challenge them, but they lacked the sustained political will to do so.
‘And I sincerely believe that we have at last opened the way to that general appeasement which alone can save the world from chaos’
Authors: French David
Published: March 2022

When Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement in September 1938, he signalled Britain’s disinterest in the fate of the states of Central and Eastern Europe. This chapter explains why just a year later he announced that Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany. It shows that in the winter and spring of 1938–9 there was a seismic shift in British policy. Most policy-makers, even those who had supported Chamberlain’s efforts to secure a negotiated settlement of the Czechoslovak crisis, came to recognize that appeasement had failed and that the right policy was to do what Eden had suggested in November 1937, to accelerate rearmament and work with other powers to try to contain Hitler’s ambitions. It also demonstrates that Chamberlain did not accept this consensus and worked behind the backs of his own ministers to continue to try to appease Hitler.
‘…there was no hurry as time was on our side’Chamberlain’s War
Authors: French David
Published: March 2022

The British began the war committed to a Fabian grand strategy. They believed that the allies’ superior economic staying power meant they had a three-year-long window of opportunity extending into 1942 in which to defeat Germany. Chamberlain’s priority was to mobilize Britain’s own resources in such a way as to ensure that it would be able to stay the course. Simultaneously it would try to erode Germany’s staying power by imposing an economic blockade, and only when it was apparent that it had been significantly weakened would the allies themselves go over to the offensive. It was a strategy that promised to deliver victory at minimal cost. However, by the end of 1939 their faith in this strategy was beginning to fade. German staying power might be greater than they had suspected, Britain’s own staying power might not suffice to fight a long war, and ministers were under growing criticism at home for the apparent lack of vigour with which they were waging the war. They needed a short-cut to victory and believed that they had found it in Scandinavia. Their decisions proved to be so hopelessly misconceived that in May 1940, on the eve of a German offensive in the west that saw France collapse within six weeks, they brought about Chamberlain’s fall and his replacement by Churchill.
Why Neoclassicism?
Authors: Fitzgerald William
Published: March 2022

This introductory chapter describes the history and nature of the form of neoclassicism inaugurated by the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, distinguishing between a core neoclassical period (c.1750-1830) and other manifestations exhibiting the same aesthetic qualities. It discusses critiques of the neoclassical idealisation of antiquity since its heyday, and the changing reactions to neoclassical works of art. It considers the role of neoclassical works and ideals in maintaining the presence of antiquity in our minds, sensibilities and environments, and reflects on the ambivalent feelings that neoclassicism evokes in those with a commitment to the ancient world. The chapter introduces key aesthetic values of neoclassicism, notable simplicity, and the markers of its aesthetic, especially whiteness. The chapter concludes with a synopsis of the whole book.
Saviour Gods and Soteria in Ancient Greece
Authors: Jim Theodora Suk Fong
Published: March 2022

From the Archaic to the Roman imperial period, an impressive number of gods and goddesses are attested in the Greek world under the titles of Soter and Soteira (‘Saviour’). Overseeing the protection of individuals and cities, these gods had the power to grant and withdraw an essential blessing―soteria (‘deliverance’, ‘preservation’, ‘safety’). This book investigates what it meant to be ‘saved’ and the underlying concept of soteria in ancient Greece. It challenges the prevailing assumption that soteria was a predominantly Christian concern, and demonstrates instead its centrality and significance in the relationship between the Greeks and their gods. This book focuses on the power of ‘saviour’ gods in the life of the Greeks, how worshippers searched for soteria as they confronted the unknown and unknowable, and what this can reveal about the religious beliefs, hopes, and anxieties of the Greeks. It goes beyond religious vocabulary and cult epithets to investigate worshippers’ thought world and lived experience, the different choices individuals made among the plurality of gods in the Greek pantheon, the multiple levels on which divine ‘saviours’ operated, and the values attached to the Greek notion of soteria. Building on existing paradigms in the study of Greek polytheism, and combining close analysis of epigraphic, literary, and material evidence, this book argues that soteria for the ancient Greeks entailed a very different experience from the Christian, eschatological notion of ‘salvation’, and that what was offered was ‘salvation’ on earth.
Introduction
Authors: Jim Theodora Suk Fong
Published: March 2022

What were ‘saviour’ gods? What did it mean to invoke a god under the title Soter? This chapter discusses the cult epithets, perceived power, and divine nature of gods and goddesses called ‘saviours’ in the Greek world. It explores the possible reasons why soteria and ‘saviour’ gods have been understudied by ancient historians, the significance and centrality of the concept in antiquity, and the existing state of scholarship on this subject in Classical and Biblical Studies. Drawing on recent paradigms in the study of Greek religion in the last half century, not least the ‘structuralist’ approach advanced by Vernant and Detienne and the post-structural analyses of Parker, Versnel, and Pirenne-Delforge, this chapter situates the phenomenon of ‘saviour’ gods in existing approaches to the study of Greek polytheism. It gives a semantic analysis of the Greek words sozein, soteria, and Soter/Soteira, and an overview of the different kinds of source materials, ranging from epigraphic to literary and archaeological, to be encountered in the rest of this study.
Soteria
Authors: Jim Theodora Suk Fong
Published: March 2022

When is the idea of soteria first attested in ancient Greece, and in what contexts did it become particularly relevant in the consciousness of the Greeks? To what extent was there one unified concept of soteria in early uses of this word? Focusing on literary evidence from Homer down to c.400 BC, this chapter traces the early history of soteria, the values attached to it, and the development of its meanings over time. It demonstrates that, although frequently translated as ‘salvation’ and ‘deliverance’ in English, soteria is a multivalent term with multiple layers of meanings and no perfect equivalent in English. It is the fluidity and flexibility of the concept which gave it such widespread currency.
Conclusion
Authors: Jim Theodora Suk Fong
Published: March 2022

Long before the rise of Christianity, soteria was already widely sought from the gods in ancient Greece; it was central and fundamental in the relationship between the Greeks and their gods. The impressive number of ‘saving’ divinities and their ubiquity all over the Greek world reflect the risks and dangers which permeated all aspects of life in antiquity, and the fears and uncertainties associated with them in the minds of the Greeks. By contrast to the Christian, eschatological notion of ‘salvation’, soteria to the Greeks was strikingly this-worldly in nature. ‘Saviour’ gods and soteria in ancient Greece were almost without exception always concerned with immediate help, protection, deliverance, and well-being in this life rather than the next. The appeal of the Greek ‘saviour’ gods lies in their ability to provide ‘salvation’ on earth. To most ordinary Greeks, this pragmatic and down-to-earth nature of soteria in the here-and-now must have been much more important than some remote promise for the future.
Introduction
Authors: Canuel Mark
Published: March 2022

Many critics and theorists have claimed that literature of the Romantic period resists the logic of enlightened progress; this introduction proposes an alternative view. Using William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience as an opening example, this introduction shows how writers of the Romantic age imbibed but radically altered criteria for political progress. Whereas earlier writers likened improvements in political institutions to the progress of the sciences or refinement of manners, the novelists, poets, and political theorists examined in this book reimagined politically progressive thinking. While embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement—increasing freedom, equality, and protection from injury—they also cultivated increasingly visible and volatile energies of religious and political dissent.
Hope, Politics, and The Prelude
Authors: Canuel Mark
Published: March 2022

This chapter analyzes William Wordsworth’s Prelude, a poem which both affirms and qualifies the fundamental logic of progressive political philosophies of the eighteenth century. Wordsworth often appears to be entirely congenial to notions of political progress that encourage increasing equality and a respect for “individual worth.” But even while making his political views explicit, The Prelude insists that political change—through either revolution or reform—can only be the focus of the poet’s “hope,” rather than an occasion for direct political agency in order to bring about a new state of affairs. Whereas hope lends a voice to dissent without its determining political ends, the problem with French Revolutionaries and royalists alike is that they are too “busy with one work.” Wordsworth’s commitment to a progressive politics without direct action produces surprising effects, I further argue, in the author’s account of ideal educational and ecclesiastical institutions in book 3. There, the attempt to “body forth” or envision future institutions procuring a “solid good,” either in a university or in a church, coincides with a consistent effort to curtail institutional completion. Envisioning a future while avoiding any exclusive claim upon the future’s shape makes schools and churches resemble “stately groves” with “ruminating creatures” rather than organized infrastructure.
How Shelley Moves
Authors: Canuel Mark
Published: March 2022

This chapter demonstrates how Percy Bysshe Shelley’s writing embodies a spirit of perfectionism and realized political hope. I explore The Revolt of Islam’s forthright commitment to an enlightened “moral and political science,” which the poem reinforces with cosmic imagery allegorizing planetary and stellar movement as political movement. But the poem’s characters, and even its narrator, offer conflicting accounts of that movement: the moon, for instance, is described as “still” or “moving” at alternate points. The final scene of the poem thrives upon this tension without resolving it: Laon, Cythna, and Cythna’s child approach the “Temple of the Spirit”—seemingly a kind of paradise—but they are also strangely suspended in time and space. After exploring how this reading guides us to new accounts of other poems by Shelley such as Prometheus Unbound, this chapter ultimately claims that the tensions between directed and undirected movement are not merely aesthetic evasions of politics but instead central to Shelley’s understanding of political reform itself. A Philosophical View of Reform, for example, insists on recognizably utilitarian reforms that include the abolition of church privileges and a standing army. However, the same text also calls for a far less directed practice of “censuring and judging one another,” animated by a “diversity of convictions,” concerning the poet’s own clearly articulated criteria for progressive reform.
The Romantic Novel and the Progress of Civilizations
Authors: Canuel Mark
Published: March 2022

The genre of the novel may seem to provide the most obvious instance of literary progressivism. But I expose revelatory complications beneath this apparently paradigmatic instance. Critical tradition routinely coordinates the rise of the novel with a series of other progressive narratives: the rise of empiricism, realism, and capitalism (to name just a few). But I show how the Romantic novel, as presented in the work of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Jane Austen, tests the explanatory limits of such alignments. Whereas Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest only provisionally equates an ideal political community with refined taste, Smith’s The Banished Man rejects this political tutelage, envisioning a far looser and picaresque form of interpersonal association. Adventitious connections among ill-assorted “strangers” and “wanderers” in this novel model a political community of nonconformists. Austen’s Emma finds an uneasy place between the alternatives found in Radcliffe and Smith: her novel repeatedly gestures toward the possibility of a community defined by a maximized “happiness,” but happiness requires little sense of agreement. The mutually beneficial romantic attachments solidified by the novel’s end also paradoxically demand a “forbearance” and “patience” toward those—like Mrs. Elton, Miss Bates, or Mr. Woodhouse—who appear to contradict, detract from, or otherwise challenge a carefully calculated felicity.