Through his first four decades, Giovanni Amendola strode energetically down the Italian road to liberalism. From his origins in an uncelebrated part of Campania, from a family clinging to the lowest rungs of the middle class, he moved determinedly up and up. En route, there were numerous staging posts: moderate socialism, religion of great variety (but never Catholicism), marriage to a ‘new woman’ from the Romanov empire, pure philosophy, political philosophy, academic life, political journalism, war service with promotion in his country’s officer corps, and then, in November 1919, election to the Chamber of Deputies for one of the seats in the College of Salerno. That first direct step towards political power was followed speedily by appointment to what was the outer cabinet, but with the crucial post-war task of helping to manage Italy’s finances. Within the framework of Italian liberalism, as set in place by the Risorgimento, other young men also emerged into political prominence. But few ranged quite was widely as young Giovanni Amendola.

The chapter looks at Churchill’s economic ideas as a Liberal and then Conservative and their impact on his actions. Churchill was a free trader and accepted the self-correcting specie-flow mechanism of the Gold Standard. His political economy before 1914 rested on interventions to remove monopoly power and market imperfections that would allow ‘competitive selection’ by free enterprise and encourage individual responsibility. After the war, strains appeared in this coherent set of assumptions. Churchill’s tenure as chancellor was marked by creative accounting for pragmatic political reasons. He remained a devotee of sound finance and balanced budgets, and despite some reservations on the issue of the return of the Gold Standard, he could not go against the advice of Treasury officials and the Bank of England, or his own ‘deeply internalized convictions’ that coincided with their assumptions. After 1929 he took little systematic interest in economics. Churchill’s coherent political economy of free trade and the Gold Standard collapsed and he had nothing in its place.

Part introduction to the frame around 1933, part initial case study, the first chapter introduces Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 2, the symphony-in-progress he carried in his suitcase as he escaped Nazi Berlin for exile in Paris in March 1933. The chapter explores its 1934 premiere in Amsterdam, where critics took issue with both the popular-sounding music and with Weill himself – neither seeming suitable for the symphonic genre – to introduce the book’s central concerns: how, at this uncertain and turbulent political moment, the specific cultural anxieties that emerge around symphonies can generate insights into how people thought about both subjectivity and about political and aesthetic notions of space. If previous scholarship on the genre has largely been wedded to nation-states and grand political narratives, this chapter instead argues for a transnational approach and lays out the symphonic genre’s long history of entanglement with Germanic philosophies of subjectivity and space, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Paul Bekker.

The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.

Questions of the American founding are organized around debates about its republican, liberal, or religious heritage. I locate the founding not in a historical moment but in a mythology reenacted in the cultural imagination. In that narrative, which America shares with Rome, the community is continually reconstituted by ongoing refoundings of Strangers who are dislocated from their own place and past. Where foundings are usually placed in service to securing an identity, the Roman and American foundings unsettle identity.The Introduction provides an argument for how we can understand the tensions that lie in the formation of identity and narratives of belonging, and how we can, in turn, draw on Rome to explore these tensions in American culture and politics.

In Chapter 1, I read the first two acts of Byron’s Swiss lyrical drama, Manfred, as an allegory of the above passage from “ancient” to “modern” liberty, showing how Romantic-period writers could represent the Swiss myth both sympathetically and skeptically in order to maintain a link between classical republicanism and liberalism. Byron’s sympathetic portrait of the chamois hunter, in particular, offers one of the last radical interpretations of Swiss-style republicanism. I then review the historical and ideological origins of the Swiss myth in Switzerland itself, going back to the Renaissance but focusing on eighteenth-century writers whose ideal of a free and happy alpine republic I contrast with the Old Confederacy’s historical realities. While the Swiss myth could express a range of ideological positions before the French Revolution, I show how post-revolutionary authors such as Staël and Karl Ludwig von Haller helped crystallize it as an expression of customary Freiheit rather than of rational liberté.

In place of a conclusion, I provide a Coda on John Ruskin, the last major British writer to devote so much attention to the Swiss myth. The myth’s belated iteration in many of his works is the culmination of a long cultural movement that idealized and ideologized the Alps. But Ruskin’s writings on Switzerland are also a reaction to modern transformations brought upon by organized tourism, industrialized capitalism, and liberalism, which made it Europe’s only modern democratic republic in 1848. Focusing on Ruskin’s earlier texts, I suggest that his reactionary vision of Switzerland marks the end of a century-and-half republican tradition in which the various, sometimes conflicting figurations of the Swiss myth contributed to a modern liberal discourse and helped imagine a republic for the moderns. Yet by showing how Europe’s elites romanticized the country as a simulacrum of happiness and freedom while at the same time ruining its proverbial virtue through tourism, Ruskin also brings to the fore the contradictions between liberalism and free-market capitalism, providing us with the most conservative, but perhaps also the most radical of all Romantic representations of Switzerland.

The introduction argues for a relation between the Swiss myth, Romanticism, and the development of modern liberalism. I notably explain and define the terms used in the book, including negative versus positive liberty, republicanism versus liberalism, and Ancient versus Modern liberty. This brings me to a more detailed discussion of the concepts of liberty, popular sovereignty, and representation in the writings of liberal Swiss intellectuals Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Stäel, and, more briefly, Rousseau. His Letters Written from the Mountain, published half-a-century before Constant’s famous speech, already accepts the passing away of Ancient Liberty, and embraces a modern, representative system in which private virtues supersede public ones and not everyone can participate in the res publica. The Genevan Citizen’s demystification of his own native republic and of Swiss republicanism in general attests to the constructed, ideologically-marked nature of the representations that I explore in the rest of this book. The fact that readers and writers wanted to continue believing in Rousseau’s community of equals in the Alps long after he had stopped doing so speaks to the strength of this Romantic desire, and to the lasting power of the Swiss myth.

E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, T. E. Hulme, and T. S. Eliot all engaged in their critical and creative works with Edwardian liberalism: with the reformist policies of the Liberal Party in England (which came to power in 1905), with the New Liberal ideas on which these policies were based, but also and more broadly with the much older philosophical and political outlook of liberalism. The works and theories of these early modernists were written in direct response to liberal ideas old and new, with even anti-liberal ‘classical’ modernists such as Hulme and Eliot embracing fundamental liberal values (while of course rejecting many others). A consideration of Forster’s short story ‘The Other Side of the Hedge’ (1904), Ford’s 1912 poem ‘Süssmund’s Address to an Unknown God’, Hulme’s essays in The Commentator (1911–12), and Eliot’s programmatic essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) shows how, much as with many other contradictory facets of literary modernism, the relationship of modernism to liberalism was close, uneasy, and foundational.

Several concerns stand to lead policing away from its mandate to protect the full range of citizens in a pluralist democracy. Among them are special interests, coarse majoritarian rule, and populism. Given that policing involves the discretionary allocation of power and resources in a strategic sense, and that the enforcement of a wide range of laws is subject to police discretion in individual encounters, each of these concerns can turn policing toward illiberal ends when they exert undue influence. In this sense, the discretionary nature of police power is most typically turned toward injustice in the pursuit of sectarian or populist goals that may have a veneer of democratic process, but are insufficient to justify the ensuing disparities of privilege, protection, or access to public space. The duty of the police to resist this impulse and only act upon reasons that treat citizens as substantive equals (i.e., by employing Rawlsian public reason) is a critical way to mitigate this hazard. The chapter closes by recounting the failed but valiant struggle of police to prevent populist rioters from seizing the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 as an example of the duty of the police to safeguard democracy from virulent populist interests.

This chapter argues that policing can be justified at its various levels (e.g., strategic, transactional) utilizing the requirement of Rawlsian public reason, wherein the reasons supplied for coercive government decisions that take up basic matters of justice must be ones that all citizens can access and evaluate from positions of equality. It uses the highly publicized arrest of two Black men for trespassing at a café in Philadelphia to illustrate the concern that procedural justice without public reason can yield troubling outcomes, especially when our intuitions tell us the reasons motivating the procedural transaction do not apply equally to all citizens (e.g., concerns of trespass in a café in a wealthy neighborhood would not apply equally to all citizens based on race, no matter how scrupulously the police employed Tyler’s procedural justice in response to the trespass allegations). While a public reason approach to police justification is a process that would not rule out the subjective judgments police make in complex and evolving situations, it would provide an adequate basis for evaluating overall resource allocations, and more importantly set a high expectation of reason giving grounded in equality as police make lower-level discretionary judgments.

Liberalism’s primary medium is that of values, principles, and laws. One of the ways to de-absolutize liberalism in relation to multiculturalism and the respectful inclusion of minorities is to recognize the sociological and normative significance of other features of social life. I do so by focusing on the significance of identity and by highlighting the normative role of dialogue in a context of cultural and value conflicts. This offers a bottom-up basis for a political theory of multiculturalism, which is not simply about trends in academic liberalism but is about claims on national citizenship and national identity by those seeking inclusion in a new sense of the national. While a focus on identity, both in terms of recognition and in terms of fostering commonality and societal unity is not sufficient, it is a necessary dimension that political theorists who frame things in terms of liberalism miss, and thereby miss both what needs to be addressed and what is needed for liberal – amongst other – values to be secured. (Nor do socialists, human rights champions, cosmopolitans, or localists.)

Many responses to the resurgence of “majority nationalism” assume that that there is nothing normatively significant to the claims of national majorities. They accordingly seek to blunt the force those claims – or simply redescribe them in ways that do not account for majority nationalists’ central commitments or concerns. The very arguments used to ground minority rights in Kymlicka’s works appear to equally justify at least some majority cultural rights. Where a group possesses majority status by reasonably benign means and yet faces threats to its culture through the operation of, for example, globalization, Kymlickean arguments for minority rights grounded in cultural vulnerability equally justify majority cultural rights. In “Nationhood, Multiculturalism, and the Ethics of Membership,” Kymlicka presents justice-based reasons to think that majority rights claims should nonetheless be neutralized. Yet his arguments assume that majority and minority rights claims will only be made within the boundaries of a nation-state and that rights recognition in those circumstances will be a “zero sum” game. This assumption too is unwarranted in a globalized world. The issue of majority rights claims is at least more complicated than what Kymlicka allows.

Today, most societies are grappling with debates over how to create public narratives of belonging that reflect multicultural societies without alienating powerful cultural majorities. Yet the impossibility of neutral national narrative should not lead the state to forego investment in a shared national narrative. Citizens may disagree upon policies or principles, but they need shared values and attachments which can be called upon to mitigate polarizing debates within nation-states. This chapter argues that state-sponsored investment in a shared, inclusive and pluralizing national identity is one of the most important ways of creating the symbolic public good of national belonging.