Labor’s gloves are off, and the country is rocked by waves of strikes, all backed by militant battle songs. The Pullman Strike brings to the fore Eugene Debs and other champions of labor and socialism, Coxey’s Army marches on Washington (singing), German immigrants fly the red flag of Anarchism (in song), and Jews fleeing from Russian pogroms swell the streets and sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side, transforming the national soundscape with Yiddish labor anthems and laying the foundations of modern musical theater. The Mexican corrido becomes more prominent amidst white nativist hostility, and in California the Chinese community continues to pit their authentic songs of struggle against the slanders of minstrelsy and the insult of the Chinese Exclusion Act. On the western plains, the Lakota Ghost Dance and its attendant songs drive the US government into a panic born of ignorance, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee. With the frontier officially closed and white settler colonialism entrenched from sea to shining sea, the champions of Manifest Destiny look further westward, to the Pacific islands, where a songwriter named Lili’uokalani, the queen of Hawai’i, awaits her overthrow.

This chapter takes the form of an interview of Chantal Mouffe by Pablo Ouziel. In the course of thirteen questions and answers, it ranges over the main substance and central features of Mouffe’s complex democratic thought. After exploring the complex theoretical grounding of Mouffe’s engagement with and contribution to democratic theory, it explores the implications of her approach for addressing that current conjuncture, which she calls a post-democracy age. She presents her arguments for a left populist response to dominant forms of right-wing populism and neoliberalism in Europe and diagnoses the role of right populism though the example of Brexit.

This chapter shows how the Chinese commercial legal system has improved significantly over the past two decades, to the extent that in most cases it compares favorably in dispute resolutions outcomes with legal systems in most liberal democratic nations. However, it falls short of a "rule of law" system in certain types of cases due to three distortions interfering with decision-making by courts: political interference by local and sometimes central government officials; corruption; and guanxi (personal relationships) involving judges or senior court/government officials. The chapter uses the case of Judge Wang Linqing and the Shaanxi Billion Yuan Mining Rights dispute to demonstrate that these distorting elements have infected legal institutions right up to the Supreme People's Court and involve senior Chinese Communist Part leaders within China's anti-corruption agency and Politburo, making the problems very difficult to stamp out.

Scandinavian immigrants proved nonradical Republicans after the Civil War, exemplified by their continued focus on economic growth and an expanding white man's republic at the expense of nonwhites.

Kant and Schiller each take up one side of Rousseau so as to heal the rift between nature and freedom: Kant stressing our capacity to repress our natural passions, Schiller stressing Rousseau’s Romanticism and the harmony of freedom and sentiment in aesthetic education. Yet the free self and the natural self remained divided within each individual. Hegel healed this division through a synthesis of Kantian moral rigor and Schillerian love of beauty in which the concept of human nature was jettisoned altogether in favor of a totally historicized understanding of human existence. Hegel also resolved the Rousseauan conflict between our lost natural happiness and the alienating qualities of civilization by relocating Rousseau’s Golden Age of the remote past to the final outcome of civilizational progress, redeeming its alienating aspects as necessary for our fulfillment today. Hegel’s dialectic of Spirit includes his understanding of the ancient Greek polis, his critique of the Rousseau-inspired Jacobin Terror, his defense of passionate political ambition against Kantian moral purity, and his claim to have reconciled reason and revelation as the “self-actualization of God” as history. Hegel’s account of historical progress ignited an intense debate among his successors.

Chapter 4 examines the emergence of different internationalist aspirations on both sides of the Atlantic to supersede conflict-prone imperialist power politics and to advance towards a more pacific international order in the decades before the First World War. It compares the pursuits of liberal and both centrist and more radical socialist actors, non-governmental associations and newly important transnational networks like the burgeoning pacifist movement, the Second International and, notably, the new phalanx of those who demanded that power politics should be replaced by arbitration and authoritative covenants of international law – and who paved the way for the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. It reassesses not only the guiding ideas of the vanguards of such aspirations but also the actual influence they had on transatlantic and global politics in this crucial phase, seeking to offer a systematic explanation of why these counterforces failed to civilise international politics and why ultimately they could not prevent the escalatory processes that caused the catastrophe of 1914.

Few themes have greater longevity in Britten studies than politics. Conventionally, Britten abandoned his overt political engagement of the 1930s – symbolised by his departure to the United States – finding, through a process of self-discovery, a breadth of human expression that transcended the slogans of politicised art in Peter Grimes. Britten’s pacifism and left-wing politics have formed – with his sexuality – a nexus of othered identity that was, as Pears had it, ‘outside the pale’ in British society of the mid-twentieth century. However, this dichotomy of self and other risks rendering British society an undifferentiated landscape of political and social conservatism. This, in turn, prevents consideration of how Britten’s left-wing pacifism intersected with broader trends and attitudes, and other radical individuals, as well as of the place of politics within his myriad, complex interactions with such conventional institutions as the BBC or the monarchy. It is thus timely to reconsider how communism, socialism, and pacifism intersected with Britten’s musical career, exploring the history of these terms, and how they influenced aesthetics, cultural practice, and individuals.

This chapter explores Engels’s engagement with apocalyptic thought. Some reduce Marxism to a secularized version of Christian eschatology, a claim that functions as a rhetorical weapon against Marxism’s originality. I reject this simplistic view but take seriously the textual evidence showing Engels’s interest in the apocalyptic figure Thomas Müntzer and the book of Revelation. He praises Müntzer, going so far as to argue that the coming kingdom of God preached by Müntzer was actually a Marxist ideal marked by radical equality. Though Engels rejects Christian apocalyptic doctrines, he shares with them the belief that things must worsen and reach a crisis before a utopian future is possible. Whereas Machiavelli rejects apocalyptic hope and Hobbes tempers it, Engels embraces it.

Chapter 4 considers the late nineteenth-century aesthetic press as an embodiment of the collaborative process. Drawing from manuscript culture and William Morris’s lectures, this chapter illuminates two integral processes: individuals coming together to form a liberal community and the mechanization of the Kelmscott Press as a joining of art and writing. By positioning the Press within a larger trajectory of Victorian liberal sentiment, this chapter foregrounds that fraternal communitarian conceptions of liberalism can be understood as the same as Morris’s practical socialism. During the 1880s, liberalism and socialism were closely related. Further, by emphasizing Morris’s belief that the production of art brings relief from the vulgarization of society, this chapter asserts that such reform occurs in the communal endeavor of the press as a business partnership, witnessed in the collaborative productions of Edward Burne-Jones and Robert Catterson-Smith, and William Morris and Charles Gere. Morris’s ideal book, thus, serves as an exemplar of lived sociality in the embodiment of the Kelmscott Press: a site that combines work with social pleasure.

The introduction offers an overview of the Tricontinental worldview and its place in the historiography. Secular, socialist, and militant, Tricontinentalism aimed to empower states in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to mount a revolutionary challenge against the unjust international system and Western imperialism through armed revolts and confrontational diplomacy. More closely aligned with communism, this iteration of Third Worldism broke with Bandung’s self-conscious neutralism by reuniting socialism and the global revolution for national liberation. In recognizing this shift, the introduction offers a revised framework and chronology of Third World internationalism by challenging the idea of a single, evolving movement. Instead, it argues Tricontinentalism was one component of a century-long Anti-Imperial Project that existed in the overlapping goals of diverse movements that ultimately informed the Third World challenge to the Cold War. This project encompassed an array of competing ideologies and alliances that hoped to achieve sufficient unity to advance the interests of the Global South, with Tricontinentalism emerging as the most prominent worldview in the 1960s and 1970s.

The chapter positions the revolutionary African theorist Amílcar Cabral as part of a Tricontinental generation that believed coordinated, parallel liberation struggles would erase inequalities between Global North and South. A dedicated nationalist, he viewed socialism as a toolkit for evaluating and challenging the international system. His party, the African Party for the Independence of Guiné and Cabo Verde (PAIGC), combined armed revolt and social reconstruction in an attempt to erase the economic inequalities and racism central to Euro-American imperialism. As the PAIGC became enmeshed in diverse solidarity networks that sustained its war, Cabral refined his ideology to better explain his party’s position at the intersection of Third World anti-imperial traditions, international socialism, and Pan-Africanism. Identarian and ideological frictions hampered the movement, but PAIGC philosophy legitimized the creation of an inclusive revolutionary coalition and proved effective at building solidarity in North and South. As a result, Cabral became a leading political theorist of revolution and anti-imperialism, placing him in the foundational canon of the Tricontinental movement.

This chapter opens with a brief vignette on the long struggle to give women a voice in history across different parts of the world. It then examines the agendas and ambitions of gender histories, the discovery of men’s studies, the history of private life, the history of the body. Gender, it argues, did not only develop new fields of historical inquiry, it also impacted massively on traditional fields of historical writing, including political history, the history of empire, the history of science, economic history, nationalism studies and the history of warfare. The fields of women’s and gender history have been closely connected to a feminist politics of historical writing. It sought to recover the full range and depth of women’s experiences and it discussed a range of diverse gender identiteis and multiple ways of constructing the category of ‘woman’ and ‘gender’. It also emphasised the relationality of gender with a range of other master concepts for historical writing, inclucing race, class and religion. By historicising gender identities, it also de-essentialised those identities and pointed to the discursive construction of gender, with more recent historians also rediscovering the embodied experience of gender. Gender history, the chapter concludes, played a crucial role in pluralising our understanding of identity.

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.

Although we are accustomed to think about the role of the state and international regulations in promoting socio-economic rights all over the world, there were alternative ways of thinking among the working-class movements before the twentieth century. The language of rights, justice and emancipation was central in many workers’ claims and struggles from the end of the eighteenth century, but they saw themselves as fighting for autonomy and emancipation rather than demanding state protection or capitalist integration. The debate over the primacy of political and civil rights, on the one hand, and socio-economic rights, on the other, provoked deep divisions among the socialist and anarchist movements up until the First World War. Looking at European and US workers’ debates and experiences during the nineteenth century, this chapter puts the issue of socio-economic rights (how they were conceived, fought for and contested) at the centre of a renewed intellectual and social history of labour movements. It pays close attention to the international dimensions of economic emancipation, as well as to the colonial, racial and gender limits of these socialist theories of rights and duties.

In 1947 and 1948, UNESCO undertook an innovative survey on human rights that was intended to shape the philosophical content of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This short period is interesting for several reasons. First, because the end of the Second World War created liminal conditions in which new institutions, political alignments and moral visions could be forged. Second, because, despite the end of the war, a series of profound conflicts and global challenges remained, including colonialism and global economic inequality. This chapter examines how participants in the UNESCO survey analysed the question of social and economic rights as a response to the challenges of reshaping the post-war world. It focuses on contributions influenced by leftist social and political thought. As will be seen, leftist thinkers were not hostile to the idea of a new declaration of human rights, but the way in which rights were conceptualised in relation to social and economic problems was radically different from the form that socio-economic rights eventually took in the UDHR and in subsequent decades.

This chapter examines the rise of China across the 1989 divide, as a year in both Chinese and global history. It focuses on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership's response to the domestic and international crises of 1989–1992. Using previously unstudied internal Chinese materials, it argues that this period - often overlooked in scholarship of contemporary China -witnessed significant and enduring changes in how the CCP intended to guide China's rise: bifurcating economic liberalization and political liberalization, building up the institution of the leadership "core," strengthening the party, opposing "peaceful evolution," and rewriting the history of the preceding decade to emphasize a battle between "bourgeois liberalization" and Deng Xiaoping's authoritarian Four Cardinal Principles. This chapter shows how the CCP came to see itself as a socialist survivor, uniquely able to exploit the benefits of openness to global capitalism while resisting the perceived dangers. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how these crucial shifts in the period 1989–1992 have profoundly shaped the Chinese system and international images of China to the present day.