bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
New Garden Edens
Authors: Lehmann Philipp
Published: July 2023

This chapter explores the rise of colonial climate engineers. French colonial engineer François Roudaire's project of transforming the Sahara entered the public debate at a time when European explorers had accomplished their first desert crossings. The Sahara Sea project benefitted from a widespread Western belief in modern technology's ability to overcome all potential environmental and technological obstacles. The chapter mentions Roudaire's extreme technological optimism, which highlights his tendency to take liberties with facts in order to fit them into his theories. It notes Roudaire's plans showcased new scientific ideas about the environment closely bound up in colonial discourses and endeavors.
Luxury, Sociability, and Progress in Literary Projections of Utopia
Authors: Claeys Gregory
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses utopian fiction that has often functioned as a reflection of social conscience over the past five hundred years. It explains how utopian fiction warns the moderns of the dangers of extreme inequality of property, vanity, and greed, and judges societies by the standards of an ideal where these were absent or greatly restrained. Utopia presents itself as a discourse on virtue, sociability, moderation, and restraint. The chapter reviews the exploration of utopian themes in the ever-popular imaginary voyage, which looked backward to classical authors in its discovery of lands inhabited by monstrous beings and still hinted at a paradise in the east. It notes the emergence a radically new approach to the ideal society and the introduction of the term “utopia” into the general vocabulary.
Simplicity and Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Utopianism
Authors: Claeys Gregory
Published: July 2023

This chapter talks about the rapid expansion of industry dominating nineteenth-century Europe, noting that the end of the Napoleonic Wars brought peace but not stability. It mentions that factories intensified and speeded up the labour process and brought more onerous discipline, repetitive, and dangerous work. Nostalgia for pre-industrial life and the softer, slower, and mostly less capricious rhythms of the seasons was one response to the developments of the nineteenth century. The chapter highlights the resistance to luxury that pervaded the socialist and utopian traditions for most of the coming century. It describes that socialists began to explore the prospect that machinery could provide a much higher standard of living for all and decouple luxury from exploitation.
The Great Change
Authors: Claeys Gregory
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses the hope in confronting the reality of the 2020s, emphasizing that the most striking aspects of environmentalist literature produced are outdated. It describes scenarios that make most past utopias outdated and many of the definitions associated with them. It also points out the creeping sense of despair that increasingly defines the current era and the masses have long since lost any belief in a past golden age. The chapter highlights how fear can produce doomism, but at the same time can lead to action. It mentions that hope-mongering fails to offer solutions, which is considered grossly irresponsible and considered mere “hopium.”
Covid-19 and Sociability
Authors: Claeys Gregory
Published: July 2023

This chapter talks about the social distancing and self-isolation demanded by the Covid-19 pandemic that have had an obvious bearing on a number of the central themes. It points out how social interaction rapidly shifted to online contacts, as families and friends attempted to maintain their connections, and businesses, schools, and universities to ensure continuity. Social distancing reduced the sense of touch and feeling of warmth and support from others. The chapter analyzes the incapacity for critical analysis that is extremely widespread and susceptibility to propaganda remains greater than at any time in many decades. It recommends the creation of a legislation to make it mandatory to reveal who funds news program and advertisements, especially where denial of public health risks is expressed.
Introduction
Authors: Eich Stefan
Published: July 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the politics of money, presenting two twin insights. First, money is a foundational institution of democratic self-rule. The chapter explains that the book denotes this democratic aspiration by referring to money's role as “political currency.” To speak of money as “political currency” acts as a reminder of the political possibilities of money and the ways in which political communities not only lay claim to govern the money circulating in them but also rely on money to govern themselves more justly. Second, and closely related, most of the time money does not rise to the level of “political currency.” It all too easily can appear as naturalized or depoliticized. By reconstructing debates about the politics of money, the book not only recovers money as a neglected site of political thought and a potential institution of democratic self-rule but also offers an account of how the politics of money came to be eclipsed in the first place. It traces two parallel movements: the periodic reassertion of a political awareness of money especially at times of crisis; and a historical reconstruction of the thinkers and debates that contributed to the eclipse of the politics of money.
The Political Institution of Currency
Authors: Eich Stefan
Published: July 2023

This chapter begins by discussing the Athenian politics of money, which left a lasting imprint on subsequent monetary and political thought. The spread of coinage throughout the ancient Greek world was linked to a shift in the conception of political authority and how it was wielded; a shift away from divine justice and toward a form of political authority that was more terrestrial, more conventional, and more political. The political centrality of currency in the ancient world was most fully reflected in Aristotle's account of reciprocal justice in the Nicomachean Ethics. His discussion of reciprocal justice pivots around the correct use of currency (nomisma). The chapter then considers how Aristotle's account of currency relates specifically to Athenian democracy. Ultimately, Aristotle's analysis of nomisma as a conventional token of reciprocal justice represented the beginning of the study of money as an institution central to political rule.
Managing Modern Money
Authors: Eich Stefan
Published: July 2023

This chapter addresses how John Maynard Keynes sought to transform the problem of how to govern modern money from an agonizing dilemma into a daring attempt to find a new internationalism that could ensure genuine monetary autonomy. The British suspension of gold convertibility in September of 1931 illustrated the need for domestic policy to break out of the rigid imperatives of an international monetary standard. Instead of merely embracing the unilateral suspension of gold, Keynes sought to develop a new template for international coordination that would—unlike the gold standard—allow for substantial domestic policy autonomy. These ideas eventually culminated in his proposal for an International Clearing Union during the 1940s. The Bretton Woods monetary agreement that shaped the postwar world is sometimes seen as an embodiment of this vision, but Keynes's international proposals were largely rejected at the Bretton Woods conference and they remain unrealized to this day.
Silent Revolution
Authors: Eich Stefan
Published: July 2023

This chapter explains that while the collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s initially led to a renaissance of monetary thought, it ultimately did not translate into a resurgence of the political theory of money. On the contrary, by the 1980s money appeared once more as merely an economic tool. This reduction of money to a seemingly straightforward economic institution echoed the treatment of money in conventional economics, but it stands in striking contrast to the political debates over the role of money discussed in the previous chapters. One reason for the striking absence of money in much of contemporary political theory after Bretton Woods can be traced back to a more specific and altogether more recent root: the Great Inflation of the 1970s. The Great Inflation of the 1970s was the highest ever experienced outside wartime or postwar conditions in more than two centuries of modern economic history. Only by recognizing how political theory itself has been shaped by the 1970s and 1980s, including the international politics of money after Bretton Woods, can we begin to understand its peculiar blind spot concerning the democratic politics of money.
Epilogue
Authors: Eich Stefan
Published: July 2023

This epilogue reflects on the future of money. Money is today overwhelmingly issued by private banks. It is also, for related reasons, relentlessly global and seemingly beyond the state. And yet modern money continues to be shot through with power and hierarchy. The epilogue suggests that the world is in desperate need of a new global monetary constitution and a monetary system that is more democratic in its governance. Digital-payments systems and cryptocurrencies flaunt in this light the promise of a new global money, indeed a decentralized democratization of entrenched money power. However, the reality is starkly different. Cryptocurrencies promise a future of global money not just beyond the state and beyond banks, but also most fundamentally beyond trust since all information is stored in a decentralized public ledger while cryptography ensures the uniqueness of each entry. The idea of decentralized money beyond trust and power is a dangerous delusion—a counterfeit of democratic money. Even worse, like the deception of depoliticized money, it disguises who actually stands to benefit and who calls the shots.
Introduction
Authors: Atanassow Ewa
Published: July 2023

This chapter provides a background of the reconstruction of Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of three pivotal dimensions of modern politics: popular sovereignty, nationhood, and globalization. It offers a fresh analytical lens through which to view liberal democracy today and understand its travails. It also shows how today’s crisis of liberal democracy, made palpable by the worldwide resurgence of nationalist sentiments and authoritarian movements, is not in itself a novelty. The chapter recovers a broader, nondogmatic liberalism capable of weathering the current political storms by drawing on Tocqueville’s widely celebrated analysis of American democracy and his lesser-known policy writings. Just as liberal democracies should refuse to choose between equality and self-determination, so too they ought to reject the false dichotomies of nationalism and democracy, and of sovereignty and globalization.
(Popular) Sovereignty and Constitutionalism
Authors: Atanassow Ewa
Published: July 2023

This chapter considers Alexis de Tocqueville as among the first to theorize the tension between liberalism and democracy, and his analysis provides a compelling framework for reconsidering their relationship today. According to Tocqueville, modern democracy rests on a synthesis between the universalizing principle of equality that pushes against all limits and borders, and popular sovereignty. It explains how the viability of liberal democracy depends on how the tensions between distinct democratic imaginaries and the dilemmas behind them are understood and navigated. The chapter canvasses Tocqueville’s account of popular sovereignty as the legitimating principle of liberal democracy. It probes the relationship between popular sovereignty and constitutionalism in the American context in order to clarify the meaning of democratic freedom and its preconditions.
Nationalism and Democracy
Authors: Atanassow Ewa
Published: July 2023

This chapter clarifies the possibility of sustaining a shared vision of, and allegiance to, the people is critical for the stability and long-term prospects of liberal democracy. It discusses what form of popular allegiance supports democratic freedom, and how it can be achieved. It also explores Alexis de Tocqueville’s understanding of the people as a concept and its relation to nationhood, clarifying his comparative view of premodern and modern forms of nationhood and his contribution to the vast literature on modern nationalism. The chapter examines the affective foundation of democratic allegiance through the distinction Tocqueville draws between different forms of public spirit. It considers the paradoxes of democratic national identity in order to analyze how these played out in one of the most heated moments in Tocqueville’s political career.
The Art of Conversation
Authors: Pfeifer Helen
Published: July 2023

This chapter demonstrates how gentlemanly gatherings helped to shape social hierarchies by virtue of the pursuit that Ottoman gentlemen valued most: polite conversation. In both Turkish-language circles at the Ottoman center and Arabic assemblies in the provinces, it was expected that participants would be not only paragons of gallantry and social comity, but also wellsprings of learning and masters of improvised verse. However, when Turkish-speaking Ottoman elites entered Arabic-language circles, with little choice but to speak Arabic and to draw from the Arabic literary canon, they did not always perform at levels they were accustomed to in Turkish-language gatherings and that reflected their intellectual stature. The imperfect performances that sometimes resulted would have been easier to brush off were it not for the scholarly and religious cachet Arabic enjoyed in Islamic societies the world over. For the local Arab literati, though, this represented an opportunity; they were able to use their skills to acquire considerable respect and authority.
The Folds of Olympus
Authors: König Jason
Published: July 2023

The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. This book is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those interested in mountains and the environment, the book offers a powerful account of the landscape at the heart of much Greek and Roman culture. The book charts the importance of mountains in religion and pilgrimage, the aesthetic vision of mountains in art and literature, the place of mountains in conquest and warfare, and representations of mountain life. The book shows how mountains were central to the way in which the inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean understood the boundaries between the divine and the human, and the limits of human knowledge and control. It also argues that there is more continuity than normally assumed between ancient descriptions of mountains and modern accounts of the picturesque and the sublime. Offering a unique perspective on the history of classical culture, the book is also a resoundingly original contribution to the literature on mountains.
Summit Altars
Authors: König Jason
Published: July 2023

This chapter introduces tension that runs right through the long history of representing mountains in ancient Greek and Roman literature. It conveys something of the way in which ancient portrayals of mountains confront with powerful images against which to measure relationships around the world. It also considers the mountains of the Mediterranean as both divine and human places. The chapter provides a wider context of ancient religious practice as mountains were dwelling places of the gods within mythical narratives and places associated with divine epiphanies and miracles beyond human understanding. It also discusses the places of human presence where one might gain special access to the gods via sacrifice.
Egeria on Mount Sinai: Mountain Pilgrimage in Early Christian and Late Antique Culture
Authors: König Jason
Published: July 2023

This chapter addresses the question of how the associations between mountains and the divine develop in early Christian and late antique culture. It focuses on the pilgrimage narrative of Egeria, who travelled in the Holy Land in the late fourth century CE and left one of the most extensive travel narratives surviving from the ancient world. Egeria shows more vividly than any other ancient author how the divine could be accessed through human knowledge and through the human routines and rituals associated with certain sacred mountain landscapes. The chapter considers Egeria's vision as typical of late antique responses to mountains and the divine and in some ways quite idiosyncratic. Egeria stands out as an unusual example of female involvement in ways of spending time in the mountains that more often had masculine associations.
Mountain Landmarks in Latin Literature
Authors: König Jason
Published: July 2023

This chapter describes Mount Soracte, which is one of the most famous mountains in ancient literature but is also one of the most briefly described. Mount Soracte stands about 30 miles north of Rome, standing at 691 metres above sea level and not a long walk from the village of Sant-Oreste on its slopes. The chapter cites the Soracte ode by Horace, which was written in the late first century BCE and has been one of the best known and most loved of all Latin poems at least over the last two or three centuries. The chapter mentions Days Near Rome by the Victorian travel writer Augustus Hare and published in 1875, which gives a long account of his visit to Mount Soracte. In Days Near Rome and his other guidebooks, Walks in Rome, Hare quotes at length from different nineteenth-century authors who had previously described the mountain.
Mountains and Bodies in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
Authors: König Jason
Published: July 2023

This chapter reviews Apuleius' Metamorphoses, which is one of the most mountainous texts and the most ‘rocky’ text in the whole of ancient literature. Metamorphoses also includes the most extensive and most bizarre ancient depiction of a stage-set mountain. The chapter discusses two strands of mountain depiction that stand out particularly in Apuleius' account. The first is a series of strikingly rhetorical and in some cases symbolic descriptions of mountains and other kinds of landscape, which have obvious resonances with the examples of visual and figurative representations of mountains. The other strand is a much more bodily way of interacting with landscape.
Ammianus Marcellinus: Mountain Peoples and Imperial Boundaries
Authors: König Jason
Published: July 2023

This chapter reviews the work of Ammianus Marcellinus, which offers the most sensationalistic of all ancient portrayals of mountain peoples and mountain warfare. Ammianus' Res Gestae covers the period 353 to 378 CE and is based in part on his involvement in fighting against the Persians and of being besieged in the city of Amida. It covers detailed accounts of campaigning in mountainous country and other kinds of difficult terrain both there and in many other border territories. The chapter considers Ammianus as similar to Strabo and to many other ancient history writers in seeing a strong distinction between the civilised centre of the Roman Empire and the barbarian territories outside it. It describes mountain tribes that threaten the security of the empire and some of the most extreme surviving examples of ancient denigration of mountain populations.
Mountain and City
Authors: König Jason
Published: July 2023

This chapter talks about the Cyclops Polyphemus, which is one of the first mountain people of European literature. In the Odyssey he is a figure far removed from urban civilisation, which anticipates the ethnographic language that if Cyclopes are the first people of the mountains, then Odysseus is ancient literature's first ethnographer. It reviews the association between mountains and uncivilised populations that was very widespread in ancient Greek and Latin literature. The chapter looks beyond the negative images that dominate Greek and Roman literature to recapture something of the highly developed local cultures of those who inhabited the mountains of the ancient Mediterranean. Mountains were often connected both economically and culturally with the cities that lay close to them.
Teachers as State-Builders
Authors: Kalisman Hilary Falb
Published: July 2023

Today, it is hard to imagine a time and place when public school teachers were considered among the elite strata of society. But in the lands controlled by the Ottomans, and then by the British in the early and mid-twentieth century, teachers were key players in government and leading formulators of ideologies. Drawing on archival research and oral histories, this book brings to light educators' outsized role in shaping the politics of the modern Middle East. The book tells the story of the few young Arab men—and fewer young Arab women—who were lucky enough to teach public school in the territories that became Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel. Crossing Ottoman provincial and, later, Mandate and national borders for work and study, these educators were advantageously positioned to assume mid- and even high-level administrative positions in multiple government bureaucracies. All told, over one-third of the prime ministers who served in Iraq from the 1950s through the 1960s, and in Jordan from the 1940s through the early 1970s, were former public school teachers—a trend that changed only when independence, occupation, and mass education degraded the status of teaching. The book reframes our understanding of the profession of teaching, the connections between public education and nationalism, and the fluid politics of the interwar Middle East.
Policies and Practices
Authors: Kalisman Hilary Falb
Published: July 2023

This chapter examines how, during the interwar years, educators and civil servants used their elite status to redefine the parameters of teaching and to shape the authority of their governments overall. Under Britain's Middle Eastern mandates, educators enjoyed and promoted participation in government. They received state paychecks and carried out inspections. Educators also encouraged their students and their societies to try out the ideologies that fluctuated across the Middle East. These concepts ranged from the ends of cosmopolitan Ottoman identities, to dreams of a unified Arab state, to overlapping sentiments of Palestinian, Iraqi, Transjordanian, tribal, religious, and local notions of affiliation. Ultimately, educators' connections to governments tied politics to professionalism in a peculiar way, a relationship forged within a culture of petitions, notions of self-improvement, social mobility through schooling, literature, and local conflicts.
Educators and Governance
Authors: Kalisman Hilary Falb
Published: July 2023

This chapter looks at interwar educators as proponents and practitioners of anti-imperial nationalism, and as a crucial part of the civil service, demonstrating how educated individuals engaged in politics while paving the way for revolutions on the part of other social groups across the region. By comparing Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine across the transition from mandate to independence or occupation and diaspora, the chapter shows how government education can affect regime stability. During the interwar era, the incorporation of educated individuals into government service tempered their nationalisms and curbed their protests. Their place as government-subsidized nationalists, supported by consistent demand for schooling, excluded educators and the educated alike from revolutions, as groups barred from the civil service took up arms. Following the mandates' end, educator-politicians sought to fit themselves into midcentury nation-states, despite these states' differences. They faced a changed world of stronger, more codified, and more exclusive ideologies, squeezed into the new map of the Middle East.
Domination, Liberty, and the Rule of Law
Authors: Sagar Paul
Published: July 2023

This chapter covers the notion of modern liberty in correlation with Adam Smith's political thought. According to Smith, liberty is deliverance from the spectre of domination, understood in terms of lack of security over both possessions and physical safety. Unlike thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville, Smith's published moral psychology did not foreground or emphasise a love of domination, nor the need to satisfy desires for positional superiority via efforts at publicly recognised status seeking. On the other hand, Smith's attentiveness to the love of domination is highlighted in his discourse surrounding slavery. The chapter also tackles Smith's alternative model of political theorising that acknowledges the importance of nondomination as a political value.
Smith and Rousseau, after Hume and Mandeville
Authors: Sagar Paul
Published: July 2023

This chapter looks into Adam Smith's political thoughts influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Bernard Mandeville. It mentions Smith's intellectual context in 1750 when reviewing Rousseau's Second Discourse and publishing the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith's paraphrasing of Rousseau's rhetoric featured the roles of utility, vanity, and economic consumption. The chapter clarifies that Smith was neither seriously influenced nor animated by Rousseau's Second Discourse, and engaged it not as a major challenge to his thought but as collateral damage. It considers approaching Smith's works as part of a sustained programme of enquiry rooted in the British intellectual context.
Conclusion
Authors: Sagar Paul
Published: July 2023

This concluding chapter considers why Adam Smith's political thoughts were often misinterpreted and misrepresented. It cites ahistorical conceptualisations of distinct notions of capitalism, economy, and commercial society. Smith's thoughts maintain their real relevance in recent times, especially when it encourages people to think about the choice between commercial society and impossible alternatives. The chapter also clarifies that Smith is not a theorist of capitalism even though his idea of commercial society is now synonymous with capitalism. It explains that Smith's ideas constitute a category error because his understanding of capitalism properly qualifies as a mode of managing a commercial society.
Introduction
Authors: DiIulio John Peter
Published: July 2023

This chapter addresses John Stuart Mill's inconsistency, illogic, and incoherence for his unquestioned brilliance and profound influence. It reconstructs Mill's practical philosophy, which includes his theory of happiness, morality, liberty, and freedom. It also cites Mill's 1861 essay Utilitarianism, which gives the fullest and most renowned statement of his value and moral theory, and his 1859 essay On Liberty provides the fullest and most renowned statement of Mill's social and political theory. The chapter provides a sympathetic account of Mill's uncommon common sense, considering him as an empirical thinker who stretches the evidence of everyday life to dazzling and bracing philosophical heights. Mill's philosophical approach is as much or more about being liberal in mind, heart, and soul as it is about liberalism itself.
Impartial Duties
Authors: DiIulio John Peter
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses John Stuart Mill's moral theory on what people are obliged to do or refrain from doing and what moral meaning and weight should people accord to utility, rules, and justice. It shows how the entirety of Mill's Utilitarianism is devoted to proving that the general happiness is the only morally relevant value, which involves separating Mill's moral standard, the Utility Principle, from the Benthamite directive to maximize the general happiness. It also involves expanding Mill's proof of the Utility Principle beyond the unfairly maligned opening passage of Utilitarianism. The chapter disinters Mill's empirical defense of the Utility Principle and develops his hedonic moral-sense theory. It repurposes the evidence given for what is often called Mill's Sanction Utilitarianism.
Liberal Justice
Authors: DiIulio John Peter
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses John Stuart Mill's liberal theory, confirming what principle ought to govern the relationship between the individual and society and when it is permissible for society to interfere with the individual. It explicates the general value Mill places on what is known as liberty as non-interference and argues that Mill both echoes and exceeds the core Benthamite reasons for valuing liberty. It also addresses the meaning of the so-called Harm Principle, wherein “harm” for Mill is to act “unjustly” and it merges Mill's liberal theory with his moral theory. The chapter reconstructs Mill's absolutist defense of intellectual liberty and pays special attention to Mill's conception of individual originality, including how it deepens and refines his theory of happiness.
Republican Justice
Authors: DiIulio John Peter
Published: July 2023

This chapter talks about John Stuart Mill's republican theory, analyzing what principle ought to direct or frame the relationship between individuals and the sociopolitical institutions that govern them. It distinguishes between the libertarian and republican concepts of freedom, considering that the libertarian concept is liberty as non-interference, while the republican concept is freedom as non-domination. It also gives a theoretical account as to why Mill, based on his empirical teleology, would naturally reject the libertarian view of freedom and endorse the republican theory. The chapter provides a republican reading of Mill's concept of freedom. It taxonomizes Mill's various reasons for valuing freedom as non-domination over and above, and often at the expense of mere liberty as non-interference.
How Sermons to Jews Worked
Authors: Michelson Emily
Published: July 2023

This chapter highlights that sermons to Jews were tightly woven into both elite and popular Roman society, identifying the many sorts of patrons and supporters that kept them afloat. For one conversionary sermon to take place at all, a few weighty Catholic organizations had to contribute. The chapter discusses that the weekly enforcement of the sermons over centuries required the deep investment from confraternities to print offices to treasuries. It examines conversionary preaching that looked to Jews like a sure success story, noting a self-congratulatory initiative to be proud of. The status of conversionary preachers came to lend prestige and authority to many other initiatives in early modern Rome that touched groups and people ostensibly far removed from the Saturday sermon.
Saints, Turks, and Heretics
Authors: Michelson Emily
Published: July 2023

This chapter focuses on conversionary preaching that reflected and promoted early modern Catholicism's innovations and triumphalism. It highlights unusual departures that are best revealed in an untapped cache of over 750 manuscript sermons by Gregorio Boncompagni Corcos. Corcos, a respected conversionary preacher of the late seventeenth century, held his position for nearly forty years and delivered handwritten sermons that introduced unprecedented topics discussing Catholicism's triumphs. The chapter recounts how Corcos formulated influential arguments for the continued importance of sermons to Jews in the Roman devotional landscape, revealing his own personal doubts and insecurities. Corcos's preaching confirms that Judaism directly helped a resurgent early modern Catholicism to define itself, providing a context for the new “others” and new devotional priorities of the early modern period.
Voicing Politics
Authors: Pérez Efrén , Tavits Margit
Published: July 2023

This book brings together the latest findings from psychology and political science to reveal how the linguistic peculiarities of different languages can have meaningful consequences for political attitudes and beliefs around the world. The book demonstrate that different languages can make mental content more or less accessible and thereby shift political opinions and preferences in predictable directions. The book rigorously tests this hypothesis using carefully crafted experiments and rich cross-national survey data, showing how language shapes mass opinion in domains such as gender equality, LGBTQ rights, environmental conservation, ethnic relations, and candidate evaluations. The book traces how these patterns emerge in polities spanning the globe, shedding essential light on how simple linguistic quirks can affect our political views. It calls on scholars of political behavior to take linguistic nuances more seriously and charts new directions for researchers across diverse fields. The book explains how a stronger grasp of linguistic effects on political cognition can help us better understand how people form political attitudes and why political outcomes vary across nations and regions.
Conclusion
Authors: Pérez Efrén , Tavits Margit
Published: July 2023

This chapter reflects on the implications of languages when studying political attitudes. The language–opinion connection helps deepen the understanding of political decision-making in mass publics, especially democratic ones. Moreover, greater sensitivity to the language–opinion connection is good scientific practice and good normative sense in line with the complexities involved in measuring, diagnosing, and interpreting mass opinion in linguistically diverse polities throughout the world. The chapter then considers language's role in political information processing in an environment inundated with data, facts, and figures about public affairs. It explains how the languages people speak can affect what they think and how they think about the political world around them.
State Strengthening in the Tang Dynasty
Authors: Wang Yuhua
Published: July 2023

This chapter focuses on the State Strengthening during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). It briefly discusses the two earlier dynasties that influenced Tang politics and society—the Qin and Han. The chapter then presents a general introduction of Tang politics, with a focus on the medieval aristocracy and Tang fiscal and military institutions. It also investigates the mid-Tang crisis, especially the An Lushan Rebellion, and how it weakened state control. The chapter discusses one of the most important fiscal reforms in historical China—the Two-Tax Reform—which influenced the structure of taxation over the next millennium. It also outlines the social network analysis of 141 major politicians from the mid-Tang era (779–805), and demonstrates that the elites during this period formed a star-type network with a coherent center and ties reaching out to the periphery. This centralized elite network helps explain both the success of the fiscal reform and the short duration of Tang emperors.
The Turning Point: Tang-Song Transition
Authors: Wang Yuhua
Published: July 2023

This chapter explores the transition from the first to the second eras by focusing on the elite transformation from the Tang to the Song dynasties (960–1279). It systematically studies what took place in the Tang–Song transition as well as when and why it occurred. Using an original biographical dataset of over three thousand major politicians from throughout the Tang and Song eras, the chapter reveals that elite social networks became increasingly local and fragmented. The chapter characterizes the transition as a transformation of the elite social terrain from a star network to a bowtie network. This elite transformation helps explain the change in ruler survival: Chinese emperors since the Song era became more secure and less threatened by the elites. The chapter highlights how the transformation also marked the beginning of a new era in Chinese political development in which the state partnered with society to govern, creating a durable equilibrium in the next millennium.
State Failure in the Qing Dynasty
Authors: Wang Yuhua
Published: July 2023

This chapter investigates the transition from the second era to the third—State Weakening under Warlordism. It discusses the state decline and failure in China's last dynasty—the Qing (1644–1911). The chapter begins with a brief introduction to the High Qing period, examining the origins of the Qing Dynasty and the Manchus, its military institutions, such as the Eight Banners and the Green Standards, and its fiscal institutions. It then pays attention to three centralizing institutions from this period: the Grand Council, the palace memorial, and the Imperial Household Department. The chapter analyzes the decline and fall of the Qing state. Using genealogy records as a proxy for local elite collective action, it unravels that county that experienced more battles during the rebellion experienced a highly significant increase in post-Taiping elite collective action. The chapter concludes by presenting an empirical analysis using an original dataset on elite collective action during and after the Taiping Rebellion and its relationship to the Qing's fall.
The Myth of Nehru the Architect of Independent India
Authors: Sherman Taylor C.
Published: July 2023

This chapter highlights several reasons for the persistence of Jawaharlal Nehru's image as the architect of independent India. Nehru was not only India's first prime minister; he served for seventeen years, longer than any other leader to follow him. However, there are also important dispositional and methodological forces behind the rise of the Nehru myth. Many scholars, publishers, readers and podcast producers continue to prefer to understand the past through the lives of exemplary individuals. Moreover, for over thirty years, the clearest, most coherent source of material on postcolonial India has been the Second Series of the Selected Works of Nehru, published by the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund. The chapter considers how the myth of Nehru's indisputable and indispensable leadership in India was propagated by Congress, at least in part, to keep an exhausted prime minister in his job. It looks at the proliferation of Nehru iconography after his death and describes the Nehruvian consensus.
The Myth of Hegemonic Secularism
Authors: Sherman Taylor C.
Published: July 2023

This chapter examines the myth of India's secularism, which owes a great deal to Jawaharlal Nehru. In the aftermath of the violence of partition and the integration of the princely states, Nehru pleaded that ‘we should forget old matters’, no matter how painful. His aim was ‘to unite the hearts of the people’ and move forward in the common endeavour of building the nation. For decades, scholars, taking for granted the notion of Nehru's dominance over the period, cast his wish for India as one of the hegemonic organising ideas of the state. This belief that Nehru's conception of secularism was spread through the sinews of administration more broadly seemed only to have been reinforced by the events of the last decades of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s, Hindu nationalism has emerged as a major force in Indian politics, prompting what has been widely understood as a crisis of Indian secularism. A Hindu nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has risen to prominence. The chapter explores the gulf between the monumental and the mundane in the treatment of the two most prominent groups with a stake in secularism: Muslims and Dalits.
The Myth of Socialism
Authors: Sherman Taylor C.
Published: July 2023

This chapter investigates the myth of India's socialism, which is entwined with the myth of Jawaharlal Nehru as the architect of postcolonial India. To understand the nature of Indian socialism, the chapter begins with an overview of planning and its ambitions. It then turns to the role of private enterprise in Indian socialism, presenting the township of Faridabad as a case study. It outlines the limited extent of nationalisation, and then the expectations and hopes India's leaders had for its business sector. It also looks at socialism in the countryside, considering two practical manifestations of the slogan ‘land to the tiller’: land reform and the Bhoodan (land-gifts) movement. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which Community Development programmes were part of India's self-help socialism.
The Myth of the Strong State
Authors: Sherman Taylor C.
Published: July 2023

This chapter evaluates the myth that India had a strong state. As shown in the previous chapters, the notion of India's strong state is closely linked with the myth of Jawaharlal Nehru as the architect of independent India, for he is said to have been committed to ‘statist’ change. While tied to the other myths, the legend of the strong state has its own origins in the successful myth-making of both the imperial government and the national movement about the character of the colonial state. The chapter begins by demonstrating that Indians were not impressed by the administrative apparatus that they had inherited from the British. It explores socialist programmes, including social welfare and state-run enterprises. The chapter then explores the disciplinary aims of postcolonial leaders as well as the function of emergency powers in postcolonial India. In contrast with their socialist programme, the disciplinary projects of postcolonial leaders required that the existing police and bureaucracy be deployed, no matter how flawed. Building on the inadequacies of the British period, however, the postcolonial disciplinary state was anything but united, coherent, or effective.
The Myth of the Successful Democracy
Authors: Sherman Taylor C.
Published: July 2023

This chapter assesses the myth of the success of India's democracy, which begins with the introduction of universal adult franchise. It explores the dynamic relationship between elections and democracy more broadly, with elections as the focal point. Although India successfully held elections, the conduct of those elections brought increasing disquiet among those who hoped democracy would transform Indians, rather than the other way around. First, while democracy was supposed to create bonds that transcended caste, it in fact revitalised caste during the first three elections. Second, the insidious influence of money spread from fighting elections to the working of government. Finally, India failed in one of the first major tests of whether democracy could be sustained through a transfer of government from one political party to another, in Kerala. By the time of the third election, therefore, Indians were engaged in a series of conversations about how to broaden, deepen, and clean up their democracy.
Beyond Pessimism
Authors: Lamb Michael
Published: July 2023

This introductory chapter tackles the pessimism often found in Augustine of Hippo's works and political theory. It references that Confessions read like a personal indictment of sin and that the City of God laments the misery of life. Thus, the portrait of pessimism dominates Augustine's reception in contemporary political theory. Meanwhile, many of Augustine's defenders appropriate his pessimism to chasten political hope and emphasize the limits of politics. On the other hand, communitarians summon Augustine to advance an even more radical critique of contemporary politics. The chapter considers various lenses to look into Augustine's works, including disciplinary specialization, historical context, and Lutheran reading, before offering an alternative interpretation that focuses on Augustine's conception of hope.
A Conceptual Grammar
Authors: Lamb Michael
Published: July 2023

This chapter discusses Augustine of Hippo's grammar of hope while considering its correlation to faith and love. In The Enchiridion, Augustine offers his most systematic and influential account of hope, explaining the relations among faith, hope, and love and devoting a section to the proper objects of hope. Most of Augustine's discussions of hope are deposited throughout theological treatises, sermons, and letters often overlooked in political theory. The chapter explains hope supplements faith with motivation and provides love with the resolve needed to endure time's difficulties and delays. Additionally, the relations between faith, hope, and love allow a tentative specification of hope's structure and function.
Between Presumption and Despair
Authors: Lamb Michael
Published: July 2023

This chapter looks into the distinctions in Augustine of Hippo's order of love in an effort to reconstruct his implicit order of hope. According to Augustine, hope depends fundamentally on the movement of love. Moreover, Augustine allows a robust hope for temporal goods as long as it is rightly ordered and avoids opposing forms of disorder, such as vices of presumption and despair. The chapter elaborates on the moral, spiritual, and social practices that Augustine deems necessary to cultivate the virtue of hope and resist its corresponding vices. It cites how understanding the virtue of hope also considers the examination of Augustine's account of faith.
Into Hell and Out Again
Authors: Lamb Michael
Published: July 2023

This chapter covers Augustine of Hippo's pedagogy presented in his political work, City of God. It argues that Augustine's vivid description of earthly evils in Book 22.22–23 should not be taken as a literal expression of pessimism. The selection functions as a moral and spiritual exercise of hope that helps readers find a way between presumption and despair. The chapter notes how political theorists, who fixate on Augustine's pessimism, often neglect his structure of encouragement, which reflects the simple binary between optimism and pessimism among Augustinian studies and political theory. It also considers the ancient perspective of philosophy as a way of life.
Hope for the Commonwealth
Authors: Lamb Michael
Published: July 2023

This chapter considers how political goods can be proper objects of Augustinian hope. It also cites that common objects of hope offer resources for political deliberation in the face of disagreement. In the City of God, Augustine of Hippo traces the history of two cities to encourage readers to become pilgrims and distinguish the cities by their hopes. The distinguishing concept of two cities by their hopes fed suspicion that Augustine's political thought is simultaneously otherworldly and antipolitical. The chapter clarifies Augustine's view of “last things” to address the notion of futurist eschatology precluding political hope. Moreover, Augustine's distinctive vision of the saeculum (secular age) encourages more openness toward plurality than many interpreters recognize and implies the vision of commonwealth.
Hope among the Civic Virtues
Authors: Lamb Michael
Published: July 2023

This chapter looks into the contested debates of pagan virtue found in Augustine of Hippo's works. The critique of “pagan virtue” presents a special challenge for the Augustinian account of political hope. The chapter considers an alternative Augustinian account that recognizes non-Christians as capable of virtue, even the virtue of hope. Acknowledging interconnected virtues highlights how piety and humility can help both Christians and non-Christians develop the virtue of hope and resist the vices of presumptions and despair. The chapter cites that the alternative Augustinian account challenges democratic critics who believe that political Augustinianism entails a totalizing rejection of diversity, difference, or pluralism.
Augustine and the Politics of Hope
Authors: Lamb Michael
Published: July 2023

This concluding chapter reflects on Augustine of Hippo's politics of hope. It argues that Augustine commends hope instead of pessimism and the false hope that assumes politics as the ultimate happiness. Since Augustine encourages citizens to seek common goods in the saeculum with those who do not share his Christian commitments, he offers a common hope for concord that resists the politics of despair. The chapter also highlights that the Augustinian account encourages diverse citizens to share a common hope for the commonwealth. Although he resists theocracy and recognizes the value of diverse citizens uniting around common goods, he does not endorse a strict separation of church and state.