This chapter introduces the jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin. It outlines the various components of his liberal individualistic theory and how this conceptualises group phenomena including religion. It notes how English law is largely based on this model, highlights its deficiencies as regards the regulation of religion, and traces its declining influence from 2016. It argues that liberal individualism is a suboptimal model on which to base the law of religion because it takes insufficient account of groups and civil society.

The stories about Raúl claimed that it was impossible to know where he came from; that he came “from nowhere.” This chapter shows exactly where he, and so many other Afro-Argentines, came from and how they made their way in a rapidly changing society. But it also illustrates why Afro-Argentines have been so difficult to locate in the historical record. The eve of the abolition of slavery (1853–61) saw the emergence of the racial narratives of Black collective demise and disappearance that would haunt Raúl decades later. “Ancestors” relates the experiences of Raúl’s grandparents’ generation to introduce two intertwined themes that frame the book as a whole: the tendency for Afro-Argentines in the post-abolition period to become at once invisible (through liberals’ removal of racial and caste categories) and punitively hypervisible (when they did not conform to purportedly universal patterns of behavior, politics, and culture that were actually based on White and European models). After briefly situating several generations of Raúl’s ancestors who arrived from Africa and moved from slavery to freedom (thus providing background on colonial and early Republican Buenos Aires), the chapter follows Raúl’s paternal grandparents, Domingo and Cayetana, as they made a life together in the small house they owned, started a family, and built ties of spiritual kinship to the city’s vibrant Black community. Because Domingo was the second-generation leader of a famous candombe (a space for Africans and their descendants to gather, play ritual music, and dance), his social networks allow me to tell a robust and surprising new history of Afro-Argentine music and sociability (continued in subsequent chapters).

This chapter offers a conceptual framework for better understanding the long and often misrepresented history of social rights. It begins by debunking the common notion that social rights are ‘second-generation rights’ – that they are recent additions to ‘core’ civil and political rights that stretch back to the Enlightenment. After historicising this myth, the authors sketch out the long history of social rights presented in this volume, situating their origins across a wide range of sources: religion, liberalism, socialism, decolonisation, biopolitics, among others. Understanding the chronic precariousness of social rights, they argue, requires understanding their entanglements with notions of charity, justice, equality and, above all, ‘duties’ and ‘obligations’. The history of social rights, they insist, is inseparable from the problem of obligation – a problem with philosophical, legal and cultural dimensions. They conclude by linking the history of social rights to broader struggles over inequality, particularly those generated by class, race, gender, colonialism and globalisation.

The political significance of Invisible Man’s literary aesthetics has long been contested. In the dominant narrative, Ellison is a model minority endorsing ‘vital center’ liberalism and anticommunism; revisionary scholarship has insisted on a muted but nonetheless influential relationship to the Left. Regardless, debates have consistently reproduced readings that submit to Cold War ideological imperatives. By tracking this critical genealogy and its limitations from the 1950s to the present, and incorporating recent theorizations of ‘black interiority,’ this chapter recasts the political significance of Ellisonian aesthetics—a project dedicated not to confirming, but rather dissenting from the Cold War’s hegemonic political binary.

The Third Republic is the Liberal Republic (1870-1924) that is created by a constitutional mutation from the Second Republic. This Republic is characterized by the expansion of the right to vote and by a new liberal political atmosphere. During this period of the Liberal Republic the supremacy of the legislative function is imposed even after the 1891 civil war. The new expressions of Chilean constitutional law in the works of Roldan and Letelier is explained. Also the relationship between the social question and liberal constitutional republicanism is explored. The new political actors such as new political parties and the coups d’etat that destroyed the Third Republic is also a part of this section.

This chapter considers the parallel crises that convulsed the British Raj and the Qing Dynasty in the mid-nineteenth century, and that radically reconstituted international orders in both South and East Asia. The chapter proceeds in five sections. The first section presents a comparative overview of the British Raj and the Qing Empire in c. 1820. The second section then outlines the commercial and ideational pressures that propelled an attempted transformation of the EIC’s mode of rule in India, as well as stoking British commercial and military expansion into Qing-dominated East Asia. The third and fourth sections then explore liberalism’s corrosive impact on both the British Raj and the Qing Empire, detailing the crises that nearly destroyed both empires in the mid-nineteeth century. The fifth section concludes with a comparative examination of international orders in South and East Asia after 1860. The mid-century crises of empire that the chapter examines put paid to British attempts to coercively ‘civilize’ Asian polities for a generation, locking in conservative and incorporative diversity regimes that sustained the Raj and the Qing Dynasty down to their destruction in the twentieth century.

George Grote developed aspects of Bentham’s and James Mill’s philosophy into an endorsement of German Historismus, the fruits of which can be seen in his landmark History of Greece (1846–1856). While his historiography is associated more with James Mill than Bentham, Barrell argues that his conception of philosophical history more closely resembled Bentham’s science historique than James’s scale of civilisations, and that his attraction to German Historismus can be explained, at least partly, by his Benthamite logic; like Bentham, he stressed the past’s particularity and distinctness, in pursuit of which he embraced the hermeneutic, philological, and critical strands of Historismus. Greece’s ‘peculiarity’ provided opportunities for reflection without resorting to a vacuous presentism. His examination in the history of ‘democratical sentiment’ and ‘constitutional morality’ illustrated modern society’s comparative selfishness and the difficulty of reproducing those sentiments ex nihilo. The chapter ends by considering the ways in which J. S. Mill drew on these arguments to reconcile modern individuality with extensive civic duties.

According to a standard account liberalism is committed to the rejection of legal paternalism. But the fact is that paternalistic policies are common currency in most liberal democracies, and liberal governments claim or at least assume that those policies are not inimical to liberal principles. My argument in this chapter is, first, that paternalistic interventions do infringe the right to direct one’s life, and that, therefore, the scope of this right cannot be redefined to conceal the conflict. However, the fact that there is an unavoidable conflict between individual sovereignty and paternalism does not mean that paternalism is necessarily unjustifiable. Second, since the right to direct one’s life is not absolute, it can be outweighed by considerations related to an individual’s positive freedom. I will argue that the protection of an agent’s positive freedom is a permissible moral goal, and, sometimes, this goal can offset the right to direct one’s life. I acknowledge that paternalistic actions set back individuals’ autonomous choices, but I nonetheless claim that such interferences are justified because, on some occasions, positive freedom considerations outweigh the right to sovereign individual choice.

Public reason approaches to political legitimacy typically claim that members of society are free and equal when they live under institutions that are publically justified. Institutions are publically justified when they can be justified in the right way to the reasoning of each member. However, the requirements of publically justified institutions are also backed by political coercion or other social practices through which individuals are held accountable to those requirements, though the result is supposedly citizens being free in a positive sense. Throughout this development, public reason theorists have seemed to presume that legitimate institutions are sufficient for securing the freedom of its members, even the members that do not think those institutions are best. This change from best to merely legitimate, however, raises serious difficulties for the account of freedom within public reason theories, particularly when we consider the level of divergence that may exist between the institutions favored by one’s own reason and the merely legitimate institutions one may live under. This chapter elaborates the difficulties that public reason views face regarding liberty in a merely legitimate regime, and considers the main strategies available to such accounts for understanding the liberty of members of legitimate societies.

Over the last century, many philosophers have argued in favour of a liberal-egalitarian accommodation of capitalism, in which the liberty of the market is to be combined with an egalitarian distribution of property. Theorists of positive freedom, amongst others, have been prominent in arguing for the liberal-egalitarian accommodation. They have argued that an egalitarian distribution of private property is necessary to give every citizen equal positive freedom. To lead an autonomous life, every citizen needs control over some private property. The liberal-egalitarian accommodation to capitalism has come under threat in the last decades, as documented by a renewed widening of inequalities in wealth and income. In this essay, I will argue that this predicament requires us to look at one important precondition of the positive freedom argument. This precondition I call the de-politization of private property. Private property is conceived of as a purely private phenomenon, which has no effects on the exercise of political power. However, whether this precondition is met is a contingent matter; and so defenders of the positive freedom argument therefore need to turn their attention to the problem posed by the relation between private property and political power.

A novelist by trade whose intellectual capaciousness brought him directly into the field of politics, Mailer is somewhat adrift in the general categories of political analysis we are accustomed to in the United States. For him, the Left was either too blindly ideological or too unfocused; the Right only crafted national sensibility by force; and the liberals in the middle had so far created a world without mountains and valleys, a land hard-pressed to accept the existential longings of the modern individual. Instead of situating himself within these categories, Mailer firmly and repeatedly called himself a “Left Conservative.” He even ran for mayor of New York City in 1969 as an advocate of a “Left Conservative” platform. This chapter will work to define Mailer’s position, situating it amongst other political conversations in mid-century America.

This chapter explores distributive justice and beneficence. Justice involves giving individuals what they are due. Distributive justice governs the distribution of valuable resources and of burdens, and the granting of certain legal rights. Beneficence concerns agents’ duties to benefit other individuals. The chapter highlights distinctions (1) between the ideal and the nonideal and (2) between how institutions should be arranged and how individuals should act. We understand nonideal theory to address what particular actors – both states and persons – should do in the actual world today. Regarding institutions, domestically, we defend a liberal egalitarian view about distributive justice: unchosen differences in individual advantage within a society are prima facie unjust. Globally, we endorse cosmopolitanism: similar principles of justice apply internationally as apply domestically. Regarding individuals’ obligations, we defend moderately extensive duties of beneficence. We argue that national governments should ensure that all their residents have access to affordable health care and that the international community ought to amend the global intellectual property regime that governs pharmaceutical patents.

Chapter 6, ‘Imagining a Community’, brings together, and builds on, the findings made throughout the book about the nature of the international community imagined within the archive. This shows that whilst the tribunal functioned as a site of liberal international governance, that underneath this liberal vision sat a distinctly illiberal understanding of community. In particular this shows that the archive divided the international community into the international, as a site of peace and order, and the local, as a site of barbarity; protected a space wherein violence was a legitimate aspect of international relations; and projected a patriarchal and colonial vision of community as the voice of the subaltern was denied.

This chapter explores a range of possible intersections between music, politics, and Romanticism in France and German lands in the first half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with a discussion of early German Romantic theories of political organisation and how they influenced Romantic conceptions of art, I subsequently unpick the complicated relationship between the French Revolution and Romanticism in music, and between the politically revolutionary and the artistically revolutionary. I show the extreme adaptability of the Romantic aesthetic when it came to its political interpretation, not only through the contrast between German and French Romanticism, but also through the surprising twists and turns in the political associations of Romanticism in France over three decades. In the second section, I look at the political mobilisation of Romantic symbols in Prussian musical life to nationalist and dynastic ends, before ending with a brief consideration of politicised anti-Romanticism amongst music critics in 1848.

The suburbs, which now contain the majority of the US population, have also become increasingly diverse, with more immigrants and people in poverty living there than in cities. Against this backdrop, the privileged, all-white enclaves conjured by New Yorker writers such as Cheever and Updike are outdated. This chapter focuses instead on New Yorker suburban fiction written by women contributors to demonstrate the magazine’s ongoing role in shaping the class consciousness and political sensibilities of its white female readers, who by 1954 accounted for 55 percent of its subscribers. Postwar, it became a symbol of its women readers’ education and refinement. Further, the liberal ideals advanced in the magazine’s essays consistently offered means for enhancing readers’ standing in their communities by championing social causes that would conveniently not raise taxes, lower property values, or compromise their children’s education. The female-authored New Yorker fiction discussed here offers a composite portrait and subtle critique of the white suburban woman voter whose current clout at the polls could be redirected to serve a larger purpose than self-aggrandizement.

This chapter explains the concept of reasonable multiculturalism. Building on the Rawlsian notion of reasonableness, and on Kymlicka’s formulation of multiculturalism, the mechanisms for reconciliation between liberalism and multiculturalism are outlined. What are the boundaries of multiculturalism within the framework of liberal democracy? What are the boundaries of state interference in the business of minority cultures whose norms and practices are at odd with liberal democracy? Reasonability assumes acceptance of the underpinning shared principles. Cultures that do not adhere to these principles are perceived as less reasonable. The extent of reasonability varies. But lacking reasonability does not immediately entail that the liberal majority should intervene in the business of the subcultures. Interference is warranted to restore justice. The chapter discusses the concept of mutual respect, distinguishing between two forms of cultural pluralism – ‘multination’ and ‘polyethnic’ states – and between two kinds of rights that a group might claim: the first involves the right of a group against its own members, the second involves the right of a group against the larger society. Furthermore, the nature of liberal tolerance and the mechanisms of deliberative democracy are explained, the latter instrumental for resolving disputes in a liberal democracy in a civil, non-violent way.