The Conclusion draws together the key themes explored in this book. Highlighting the crux norms of comity, collaboration, and conflict management framed by the conditions of reciprocity, reputation, and repeat play, the Conclusion defends a relational and collaborative conception of the separation of powers. Looking to new horizons, the Conclusion gestures at future lines of research opened up by the collaborative idea, including the possibility of imagining international, supra-national, and transnational law in collaborative terms. It concludes by presenting the fundamental norms of the collaborative constitution as vital in the current moment, but also as a form of ’constitutional capital’. On analogy with the influential idea of ’social capital’, it argues that the unwritten norms of the collaborative constitutional system are a precious constitutional resource we should preserve, protect, and enhance in order to create stable and sustainable constitutionalism for the twenty-first century.

Having lived through a global pandemic, or more trivially, having seen online memes “go viral,” we are all intuitively familiar with the spread of things through network ties. Diseases, memes, used books, and cash are ready examples of things passed from one person to another. Somewhat less familiar, perhaps, is that a fundamentally similar mechanism underlies many of our social behaviors. Understanding such processes is therefore related to understanding how anything – information, rumors, diseases, and so on – diffuses through a system. Key questions include: How does a network structure as a whole (its topology) affect the diffusion process? And how does a node’s position in this structure affect the likelihood of transmitting and receiving flows?

The role of social networks in business, and entrepreneurship, in particular, is widely acknowledged. Chapter 2 explores the ways in which business persons relate to networks and how networks impact the circumstances of entrepreneurs. The enabling and constraining properties of networks, their effects on participants, and their subsequent social consequences have all been extensively explored in a large and growing literature. A feature of social network analysis lies in its tendency to deploy structural perspectives in explaining social outcomes. Chapter 2 highlights the ways in which social networks operate as a context in which individual initiative and engagement lead to the making and remaking of network attributes. An empirical examination of business networks in Chinese cities reveals the way in which the formation and maintenance of networks require the conscious contributions of their members, how network norms are produced by the expressed preferences of individual members, and finally how network membership involves management of network participants.

Summary: Policies targeted at disciplining moneylenders was one approach to dealing with the problem of limited supply and high prices; the other was establishing alternative sources of affordable credit. Following rounds of discussion among colonial officials in the late nineteenth century on the type of credit supplier most suited to cater to demand in rural India, the government embarked on an ambitious project to transplant credit cooperatives as designed in Europe to Indian villages in 1904. The chapter explores the phase of transplant and how the cooperative enterprise in India differed from the European model. It examines how cooperatives performed, evaluates profit and loss statements and analyses whether expansion in the number of cooperatives led to inclusive development. The chapter finds negative outcomes in each measure. Prevailing political objectives prioritizing equity over efficiency led to a cooperative structure operating with low savings and weak regulation. The regulatory problem ultimately led to the exclusion of poorer peasants from accessing credit and overleveraged cooperative banks. Injections of public money into rural cooperatives embedded moral hazard in the sector. These problems became more severe in the 1940s and 1950s.

Japan contains one of the largest deposits of geothermal energy in the world, yet has an extraordinarily small number of electrical plants to exploit it. It has few plants because their wells would threaten the hot springs resort industry. Electrical utilities would like to commit to compensating the hot springs hotels for any damages they might cause – but given the difficulty of showing causation in court, cannot do so credibly. The hot springs hotels would like to negotiate in good faith – but given that each hotel potentially has a right to hold up the entire plant, cannot credibly promise that all subsequent hotels will negotiate in good faith. The developers who have succeeded in this industry over the last two decades are disproportionately those with roots in the community itself.

In most modern, wealthy societies, businessmen and women exploit the advantages that the formal legal process can afford. When transacting across the market, they draft contracts that detail contingencies and specify terms that courts will enforce. When cross-market transactions grow too expensive, they integrate vertically. Using the formal legal process, they combine the contracting parties into one unit.

Japanese Buddhist temples had traditionally relied on the high levels of social capital within the local village to enforce the giving they needed to stay solvent. When men and women began to leave the villages for the anomic cities, the temples found themselves without the necessary funds. In response, they turned from what had been an effective village retainer contract to an individual fee-for-service model of finance. Unfortunately for the temples, they market their priceable services (primarily ceremonies connected to deaths) within competitive markets. Unable to sell above marginal cost, they have been unable to cross-subsidize their other – less priceable – services.

Among the requirements of a liberal order is the ability to pursue collective goals through enduring private organizations. Such organizations contribute to political checks and balances, which sustain individual freedoms. In the Islamic Middle East, a possible starting point for autonomous nonstate organizations was the Islamic waqf, a trust that an individual formed under Islamic law to provide designated social services in perpetuity. Waqfs came to control vast resources. They might have used their enormous wealth to constrain the state and advance the freedoms of their constituents. The resulting decentralization of power could have placed the Middle East on the road to liberalization and perhaps also democratization. However, despite their immense wealth, waqfs remained politically powerless. A key reason is that they were governed according to their deeds, not the preferences of their caretakers or beneficiaries. In these respects, Islamic waqfs differed from European corporations, which were self-governing organizations enjoying legal personhood. In the Middle East, waqfs supplied services that the corporation provided in Western Europe. For instance, whereas churches and universities operated as corporations, mosques and madrasas (Islamic colleges) were financed by waqfs. This institutional difference contributed to the interregional divergence in political patterns.

There is limited research examining community and neighborhood influences on prosociality in children and youth. In this chapter we outline three relevant theories that address how neighborhood and community processes influence prosocial behavior and review the empirical literature on the topic. Our review suggests that measures of neighborhood socioeconomic status, demography, and disorder have little direct association with prosociality in children and youth but that adolescent prosocial behavior is linked to social capital and collective efficacy. The community intervention evidence shows that providing increased opportunities for prosocial involvement may support greater prosocial behavior of adolescents, possibly by boosting community social capital. Further development of more specific theoretical models and further empirical research is required to better understand the complex neighborhood and community mechanisms across neighborhoods, cities, nations, and cultures.

Chapter 13 analyses how profound socio-demographic changes in America have contributed to a shift from the faith-driven culture wars of the twentieth century to a more secular identity politics between liberal cosmopolitans and populist communitarians in the twenty-first century. This trend appears closely linked to the rapid decline of American Christianity, which along with globalisation, individualisation and rapid ethnic change has led to an identity crisis in parts of the white working class. Given the relative unresponsiveness of the traditional party system to this development, Donald Trump succeeded in capitalising on this crisis of identity through a ‘hostile takeover’ of the GOP by the alt-right, and a gradual ‘Europeanisation’ of the American right, which shifted from a faith-based social conservativism to a more identitarian and populist white identity politics.

In Part IV (Chapters 12–15) the final case study of this book explores the relationship between right-wing populism and religion in the USA. It begins in Chapter 12 by discussing the historical background of the First Amendment, American civil religion, and the country’s history of white Christian nationalism and religious culture wars. Specifically, Chapter 12 shows how America’s civil religious tradition had historically been able to act as an important source of integration and prophetic criticism in American politics in spite of repeated challenges from white Christian nationalism on the one hand and secularist tendencies on the other. However, this chapter also explores how this integrative potential has been profoundly challenged by the rise of a new secular identity cleavage that increasingly superseded America’s old religious culture wars and prepared the grounds for the right-wing populist and identitarian politics of Donald Trump.

Chapter 2 describes four types of relational features: social support, social integration, social capital, and social norms, collectively referred to as the “four socials.” The ways in which each of these relational factors impact health can be understood as operating through psychological, behavioral, and biological pathways. This chapter presents the definitional distinctions between the four socials and describes the scientific evidence for their pathways.

Ths chapter looks at the economic and political dimensions of the downside of the knowledge economy. The knowledge economy both drives knowledge clusters and creaters hinterlands where those left behind by the changes in the economy dwell. Significant evidence shows the extent of grievance on the part of the left-behind, which manifests itself in nationalist populism and hostility to international law. Populists depict international law as a series of corrupt power grabs by an élite that is indifferent to the left-behind. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the possibility of Chinese hegemony substituting for international law as a way of organizing international cooperation.