This chapter asks how voters react to political messaging and, crucially, sometimes change their minds. It begins by reviewing experimental psychology, neuroimaging, and artificial intelligence research showing that the brain reasons in two distinct ways: Recognizing patterns (fast or Type 1 thought) and constructing logical arguments (slow or type 2 thought). It then argues that the first mode almost always dominates political thought. The paradox is that humans have evolved to feel pleasure both in confirming old patterns and in being surprised by new ones. This means that while political messaging is often repetive, humans are also susceptible to messages that feature large departures from current orthodoxies. Because of majority rule, politicians will normally prefer messages that appeal to large numbers of voters. This explains how even highly-polarized electorates can sometimes realign around new issues to restore a more centrist politics.

This chapter reviews and reconciles two theories of voting. Rational man models treat voters as actors seeking to maximize their material self-interest. Because their policy knowledge is limited, they often rely on ideology, trusted figures, and information picked up in the course of everyday activities to reach a decision. By comparison, survey evidence has shown that many voters are social, i.e. routinely adopt the opinions of those around them. The chapter concludes by describing various theoretical frameworks which unify these models. The combined models typically predict new behaviors in which initially small majorities are typically amplified; established opinions resist change for long periods; and very dramatic, once-in-a-generation events can abruptly reshuffle voters beliefs.

The chapter gives a detailed account of Chinese cybersecurity policy as an example of a state-oriented model of internet governance. After describing China’s early attitudes towards cyberspace, it analyses in detail its cybersecurity policy under the Xi Jinping administration, and how its concept of ‘cyber sovereignty’ differs from Western countries’ approaches to cyberspace. It also examines China’s efforts to export the Chinese model of cyber laws and regulations based on the concept of cyber sovereignty to non-liberal countries. It also analyses how the country is actively involved in the formation of international rules for cybersecurity in order to spread this concept.

This chapter examines Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner’s first novels to depict the racial ideology of the South as unstable and incoherent. Whereas the author initially attempted to understand how information continuously flows through a networked system as culture, these novels depict entropic states capable of undermining and destroying the social order. In Absalom, Absalom! especially, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. These emergent entropic states, though perilous to the wellbeing of many, are not simply to be feared. As ideological surfaces waver in their ability to disseminate cultural directives, there emerges the potential for reorganization and renewal, trajectories of novelty and behavior that gesture beyond the seemingly intractable bounds of social space and the self-reflexive epistemology of textual space that reinforces them.

The conclusion makes the case for Faulkner as an anti-ideological thinker, an artist engaged in attempting to disentangle image-making from propaganda as a key ingredient of his larger Yoknapatawpha project. I interpret Faulkner’s Stockholm Nobel address in this context, as a humanistic counter to modern disenchantment, an affirmation of human interiority in the face of scaling social systems in the process of becoming all-encompassing.

This chapter synthesizes the history of the monarchy in Brazil from the Portuguese court’s 1807 exile to Rio de Janeiro to the end of the Regency in 1840. It addresses the European threats to the Portuguese monarchy, its successes in Brazil, and its adaptation to the Atlantic revolutionary era. It focuses on the actions of two monarchs, João VI and Pedro, João’s heir in both the old Portuguese kingdom and the new Brazilian one, which Pedro made independent and transformed into the Empire of Brazil, in 1822. It goes on to discuss Pedro I’s struggle (1822-1831) for domination against the Brazilian elite, and the results, through the Regency (1831-1840) following Pedro I’s abdication. Of particular significance in all of this are international and social issues bound up with the continued expansion of African slavery and its Atlantic trade. In both the diplomacy between João VI and his crucial English allies, the abolition of that trade loomed large. It was central, too, in the struggles between Pedro I and his parliamentary opposition. Indeed, slavery’s maintenance as foundational to the economy, the society, and those who dominated both, as well as the state, is made clear in analyzing the monarchy’s politics during 1822-1840. Slavery affected the monarchy’s survival, transformation, and the nature of party formation and ideology in the constitutional monarchy that emerged by 1840.

Chapter 6 focuses on relationships in Congress, examining why some members are more likely to work together than others. As collaboration is an inherently relational activity that requires agreement between two or more actors, social network analysis is used to account for the interdependence of members. This chapter demonstrates that the relationships among members of Congress are a function of strategic considerations, personal relationships, and shared policy goals. Most notably, almost half of the relationships in the collaborative Congress are bipartisan, as members expect that working across the aisle will broaden the appeal of a policy and significantly increase the likelihood it will be successful. Even in a polarized environment, members are clearly motivated to try and find common ground with members of the opposite party. Members are also more likely to collaborate when they have mutual friends, are from the same state, or sit on the same committee, reflecting how the existing interpersonal and institutional relationships in Congress can lower the costs of collaboration.

Performative inquiry – studies of doing and its consequences for being – is a prominent feature of research projects in exploring gender and sexuality, especially when gender and sexuality are closely tied to linguistic practices. Moreover, because performativity of doing unfolds in specific social and temporal contexts, performative inquiry shows how gender and sexuality become inflected variously in relation to intersectionalities and inequalities, and how language use connected to gender and sexuality becomes inflected in similar terms, as well. Performative inquiry is also concerned with assumptions about normative (or ideological) assumptions that regulate “commonsense” distinctions between valued and not-so-valued practices of doing and being. This chapter’s case studies and discussion show how gender and sexuality are shaped by performative practices and how language use is entailed within these gendered and sexual performative formations.

This chapter presents moderation as an alternative to ideology and relies on the definition of politics given by Michael Oakeshott, according to which politics is and must remain a limited activity providing the general rules of conduct. It makes a distinction between ideological and political thinking and comments on the overlap and differences between moderation and conservatism.

The introduction explores what is at stake in Fantasy culture. It opens with a passage from a 1951 letter by J. R. R. Tolkien that expresses his aspirations and doubts, before exploring how Tolkien’s success served to catalyse a series of formations inspired in part by him but not bounded or limited by his conceptions. Through discussing Michael Moorcock’s essay ‘Epic Pooh’, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, societies and awards in the 1970s, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it models Fantasy as a generative, ongoing conversation. The introduction then engages directly with questions of definition, considering the centrality of impossibility to a consensus about what Fantasy means, discussing important work by Brian Attebery and Farah Mendlesohn, and asserting that Fantasy is best understood as a complex assemblage of creators, audiences, languages, forms, conventions, tropes, communities, institutions, histories and traditions. It closes by arguing that dismissing Fantasy as an escapist form is both quixotic and myopic. People often have very good reasons to want to get outside dominant frameworks for a while, and they return from Fantasy worlds refreshed and with valuable new perspectives.

This chapter considers how Fantasy is rooted in language’s ability to describe things that do not exist, arguing that this same ability is crucial for constructing the value systems that allow human cultures to operate. In intervening in conversations about meaningfulness and identity, Fantasy plays with heady stuff, but by explicitly parading its impossibility, it creates productive and revealing abstractions that can both playfully and critically interrogate received norms and languages of power. Fantasies ask whether the world we have made through language is the one we want, holding open imaginative spaces for alternatives that are by turns utopian, dystopian, revealingly similar and radically different. Key works discussed in this chapter include Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, Plato’s Republic, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Books, Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

The ‘noble lie’ is crucial within the political philosophy of the Republic, as the ideology of the charter myth needed to motivate the citizens of the Republic’s good city in general, and the rulers in particular, to care above all for its well-being. I look first at the way lying figured in the Greeks’ imaginary and their political discourse, particularly that of the Athenian democracy; then at ethical dimensions of Socrates’ notion of ‘useful lie’, and his distinction between deception by speech and deception in the soul. What makes the ‘noble lie’ useful is its ability (if believed) to instil in citizens love for their community (not merely calculation that promotion of its well-being is in their own self-interest), through representation of their human identity as membership of a single family, with their core affections and obligations directed to their mother country. It is that sense of basic identity and commensurate obligation, not dialectically based grasp of eternal truth, which will persuade philosophers to take their part in ruling the city. Finally, I tackle the issue – its difficulty highlighted by Socrates himself – of how belief in the narrative is to be secured.