Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010-14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

Chapter 6 is the first to develop the new theory of martyrdom and draws together insights from case studies towards an understanding of martyrdom as a performance of suffering that enacts the truth of a sovereign imaginary. First, I analyze the similarities and differences regarding the practices of self-killing and introduce the concept of performance suffering to explain how martyrdom’s afflictions of the body are used to communicate a truth by a) seeking to directly influence the situation martyrs face, and b) making a symbolic statement about the nature of the crisis, the social collectives involved, and the hopes for an ideal world. I examine the settings wherein martyrs are produced, the scripts guiding their performances, the sacred models they reinscribe, and the audiences to whom martyrdom communicates. In doing so, I argue the present becomes aligned with a sacred past, creating an experience of living again in legendary times requiring legendary feats. As martyrdoms are seen to reiterate the deeds of sacred models, they are marked as possessing the highest character, lending their speech a greater impact through the form of truth-telling known as parrhēsia.

Chapter 13 examines the development of Weimar Classicism, from the impact of Goethe’s own experiences in Italy to his collaboration with Friedrich Schiller. A crucial factor in any classicism, including that of Goethe and Schiller, is the absence of the ancients, and the chapter argues that Weimar Classicism was far from the settled, canonical project for which it is often taken. Rather, it emerged from historical crisis, above all the French Revolution, and it is characterised by internal tensions, between antiquity and modernity, desire and restraint.

Perception, habit, and innate coping mechanisms are important features of military morale. Soldiers during the Great War relied, like anybody, on the information available to them as they made sense of their experiences. Their sensemaking was constrained by what they could see, what they could hear, and what they were told. Subtler influences also informed how they navigated the world, and these were often drawn from their cultural and social context, not to mention their surroundings. In this way, morale was nurtured (and sometimes destroyed) at the confluence of men’s physical world, their social groups, and their psychologies. Some of the components of morale morphed as time passed, but military morale rested, to a great extent, on the ability of individuals to cope with great stresses and unimaginable horrors. The army provided them with many of the tools, resources, and mechanisms that helped them to do so but, significantly, it appears that so long as victorious peace appeared likely (and necessary) men were willing to confront crisis, both acute and chronic. Of course, individuals had their breaking points, but resilience and endurance were the norm. Whilst this narrative hinges on the power of the human spirit, there were features of English infantrymen’s morale that were unique to them: their very specific local identities and patriotism, and their lack of a explicit political identity, which was a key feature of their sensemaking. English infantrymen’s perception of military service was not interwoven with their sense of citizenship. These parochial patriotisms were potentially less vulnerable to change than more pronounced political identities.

Soldiers’ desires to craft a narrative out of the war experience encouraged them to look towards the future. This chapter focuses on another central feature of soldiers’ psychologies: their hope. Infantrymen invested themselves in visions of victorious peace, which supported their morale and encouraged resilience. Nonetheless, their hopes for peace changed over the course of the war. At the end of 1914 and 1916, soldiers remained confident that the next year’s campaigning would bring the war to a successful close. However, their experiences in 1917 left them uncertain that victory was even possible. Censors noted that men began considering the likelihood of a negotiated peace during this period. Nevertheless, the German offensives of 1918 restored men’s faith in victorious peace. Soldiers gleaned immense psychological benefits from their investment in a peaceful future. Hope was a coping mechanism fed by memories, dreams, and fantasies that provided a vision of an alternative world devoid of war: something the men could fight for. Infantrymen developed personal life goals, which instilled their service with a depth of meaning that was itself sustaining. A variety of things fuelled their hope and optimistic reasoning: religion, prisoners, war souvenirs, and rumour all fed hope. Significantly, too, most of these soldiers believed that the German state had to be defeated were there ever to be a lasting peace. More subtle psychological mechanisms were also essential: optimism, certainty, language, acculturation, and the sense of success. So long as men were able to conceive of the war as just, necessary, and winnable they were generally willing to endure the stresses of service.

The preceding chapters reveal that a looming sense of crisis emerged in the BEF during and after the Battle of Passchendaele. Later, these weary men were faced with a major acute crisis – the spring offensives. Infantrymen were practically and psychologically ill-equipped to overcome this challenge. Using the concept of sensemaking, this chapter uses the records of a mix of regular, territorial, and New Army battalions drawn from six regiments to trace why men’s perceptions of battle may have changed and transformed. It charts their experiences during the optimistic days of early 1917, on the saturated battlefields around Ypres, amidst the chaos of Cambrai, in the tiring and demoralising winter of 1917–1918, and whilst facing the German onslaught after 21 March 1918. In early 1917, battle remained the imagined pathway to victorious peace. Yet, by the summer, the weather and Third Ypres left men’s hope of peace – and faith in battle – in tatters. The slow progress, casualties, and trying conditions convinced many that the war had become irreversibly static. These fears were confirmed as the BEF shifted to a defensive strategy. At the same time, esprit de corps was shaken by the BEF’s reorganisation in the new year. The work required to prepare the lines for defence was at the cost of effective training and the BEF retreated in the face of the German attacks. However, whilst the military outcome was sometimes in question, the spring offensives signalled a change in the character of the war in Belgium and France. Heavy casualties were inflicted upon the enemy, the army learnt on the job, and it appeared the conflict had entered a new phase. Somewhat counterintuitively, retreat and withdrawal rekindled soldiers’ faith in battle as the pathway to peace.

The Epilogue takes the story into the late 2000s, as another major economic crisis hit hard. It considers the cultural memory of how the 1930s touched Britain and other parts of the world. By the early twenty-first century, memories of the inter-war past had largely evaporated from popular party politics, but they retained a force in cementing both the self-identity and the entitlements of those people born in the first half of the twentieth century.

The introduction begins with the crisis of republicanism in France today. It asks what republicanism is for the French and why exclusion lies at the center of its crisis. It then presents the characteristics of French republicanism (in particular, its universalism and its emancipatory dimension), its place in the broader republican tradition, and in the neo-republican revival. Finally, it introduces the theoretical paradoxes that led republicans to justify exclusionary practices despite their endorsement of emancipation.

This chapter offers a broad account of two key governmental themes in post-war British theatre: policy and censorship. The chapter’s discussion of these themes is informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which embraces both the activities of the state and the broader discursive regimes that constitute groups and individuals, including self-governing. The chapter examines a range of values that have featured in post-war cultural discourse in terms of continuities, ruptures, and changes between the post-war period and earlier moments in capitalist modernity, and within the period itself. The chapter surveys the expansionist arts policies implemented in the decades following the war, before turning to the effects of neoliberal governmental politics from the 1970s onward, which saw the value of the arts become subject to increasing scrutiny and justification. Next, the chapter addresses censorship and the contours of its post-war cultural politics. It notes overlapping shifts in focus from sexuality and gender to racial and religious identities – shifts which speak to the governmental ‘management of populations’. Finally, it analyses David Hare’s I’m Not Running (National Theatre: Lyttelton, 2018) – a work that responded to contemporaneous governmental crisis.

This chapter focuses on the development of Iberian Christian societies from 1000 to 1500. It deals with the evolution of output, its composition and how it spread across space. Therefore, the study sets out the main chronological and territorial milestones in the Christian economy: (a) the period of growth and expansion of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and that of the crisis and recovery of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries; and (b) the areas in which economic activities were carried out, taking into account landscape features and different forms of resource used by agricultural, manufacturing and commercial activities. Throughout the text, it is possible to see that the economic model of Iberia in the Middle Ages coincided with some of the European patterns, although it presented original aspects linked, for example, to the Christian war against al-Andalus, to the demands of military supplies and to the role of the spoils of war in the construction of individual and collective fortunes. On the whole, however, the results of economic development were remarkable and do not support the undoubtedly hasty images of Iberia as a peripheral region, located in the extreme south-west of the European continent.

Like all revolutionary processes, those that led to Latin American independence were highly volatile and experimental in nature. Often accompanied by extreme violence, even open warfare, the formation of the new Latin American states in the early nineteenth century required imagining new states, institutions, and laws. The need, often urgency, to transform colonial domains into various independent units frequently coincided with the desire to end (or at least modernize) the Ancien régime. Yet the wish to supersede the past did not guarantee rupture. Instead, it initiated a period of questioning more often than answering, of experimenting more often than finding solutions. After describing the context in which the independence took place, this chapter surveys some of the questions that had to be answered, mostly by identifying debates that required settling and the difficulties entailed in achieving this goal. It examines who had the power to declare independence, how to identify the territories that would become new polities, how the national territory and citizenship were defined, how new republican structures should be formed, and elections conducted, and the legal changes all these developments entailed.

Existing research on the rise of precarious forms of employment has paid little attention to gender and diversity challenges. Yet precarious work has damaging effects for vulnerable demographics, with women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities more considerably affected. This volume unpacks this research and offers insights into the role of organisations in fostering inclusive change.

This chapter puts Donald Trump’s populism in comparative perspective by applying the theory developed in chapter 2 and substantiated in chapters 3 to 5 to the US case. My analysis highlights the great institutional strength of US democracy and the unlikelihood of acute and severe crises and of huge windfalls, given the complexity and prosperity of US economy and society. As a result, populism is exceedingly unlikely to suffocate US democracy -- contrary to recent observers’ fears. The chapter substantiates these arguments through an in-depth examination of the Trump experience, which establishes intense partisan and affective polarization as another obstacle to the American populist’s ability to boost his mass support. Trump’s haphazard agency and very mixed governing performance created further limiations. Therefore, despite Trump’s relentless challenges to liberal norms and long-established institutions, US democracy held firm, even during the unprecedented post-electoral crisis of 2020/21. Indeed, the US’s vibrant civil society spearheaded a pro-democratic backlash that brought the electoral defeat of a populist leader who never managed to garner majority support in a highly polarized polity.

This chapter summarizes my theory about the restrictive “necessary conditions” for the populist destruction of democracy; conversely, democracy proves resilient when these conditions are absent. More broadly, this book reaffirms the crucial importance of democracies’ institutional frameworks and corroborates the analytical value of my political-strategic definition of populism. While my theory emphasizes the main domestic factors that condition populism’s regime impact, I also discuss the role of cross-country diffusion, which can exacerbate populist pressures on liberal democracy. Moreover, inside countries with weak party systems, there can be a succession of populist leaders over time; but their limited political clout prevents them from doing grave damage to democracy. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of prominent Asian cases of populism demonstrates the broader applicability of my theory, but also uncovers some specific country and regional characteristics that affect populism’s effect on democracy in some cases. The book concludes with a restatement of the main argument, namely that populism’s threat to democracy -- while substantial -- is not as grave as many recent observers have feared.