challenges the still-influential view of Cary as a Catholic writer, arguing instead for her association with reform-minded men such as Spenserian John Davies and parliamentarians such as her father Lawrence Tanfield, who were defending the liberties of the subject when Cary was producing her drama. Opening up questions about the right to free speech and debate guaranteed by English common law, Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam (1613) allows quasi-legal arguments to multiply on either side until reaching a resolution by juxtaposing characters who scorn the common law with those who articulate its fundamental principles. For Members of Parliament, as for Mariam, freedom to speak one’s conscience was an inalienable right equivalent to owning property (or, in Mariam’s case, owning her body and independent lineage); in Mariam, as in Parliament, those rights are asserted in defiance of the royal prerogative to silence them.

The Introduction to Morality as Legislation: Rules and Consequences explains the difference between a situated perspective where a person asks which act should be performed in a particular instance and a legislative perspective where one asks what rule should apply to a whole class of people in given circumstances. The legislative perspective seems to have advantages in terms of coming to more plausible moral conclusions but does not fit neatly into either consequentialist or Kantian categories as it uses consequentialist considerations to select among possible rules while being unable to explain why the question “which rule?” is the relevant question on purely consequentialist grounds. The Introduction describes four different dimensions along which conceptions of the legislative perspective can vary and two contextual dimensions as to where it is employed: political and nonpolitical contexts and legislative and nonlegislative contexts. The Introduction clarifies the goals of the book and provides summaries of the following chapters.

The best option for defending the use of the legislative perspective is a hybrid approach that includes both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist commitments. Given that the theory in its original theistic form combined nonconsequentialist religious commitments with weak consequentialist reasoning, a successful adaptation of the legislative perspective to appeal to contemporary secular audiences will need to address both types of moral commitments. The type of legislative perspective under consideration is one that is moderate in its strength, realistic, at least weakly consequentialist, and applies to counterfactual cases where one is not literally legislating. The six moral commitments that one must endorse in order to use the legislative perspective in the specified sense are plausible, but they require a hybrid approach that is neither solely consequentialist nor exclusively nonconsequentialist. The nonconsequentialist reasons that justify the shift to the legislative perspective are stronger in cases where people are making decisions in political contexts, even if those contexts are not legislative contexts.

Discussions of form in Irish poetry often equate formalist poetry with conservative politics. A more nuanced understanding of this relationship is that poetic form is a way of turning private experience into a publicly accessible commentary on the challenging times we inhabit. The women poets who came of age at the turn of the twenty-first century, including Sinéad Morrissey, Leontia Flynn, and Caitríona O’Reilly, are sometimes associated with a formalist turn in Irish poetry at the time, but in their embrace of form as in much else besides they are remarkably heterogeneous. All are distinguished by an international perspective, in their influences as much as their subject matter, and an attention to questions of form as embodiment, as well as a focus on the body itself. In their relationships with important precursors including Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath and Medbh McGuckian, they enact generational debates through their dialogues with form, from the ghazal and sestina to the chatty intimacies of the verse letter, vindicating the short lyric as a continuing space of freedom and resistance.

Thailand’s so-called 'judicial crisis' of 1991-92 centred on the controversial figure of Pramarn Chansue, and his tussles with the appointed government of Anand Panyarachun following the 1991 military coup. The then justice minister stood accused of political interference in the appointment of senior judges, in a pivotal episode in the recent history of the Thai judiciary. Pramarn eventually emerged triumphant from the crisis and became a very powerful supreme court president thereafter, but there were numerous sub-plots involved (including a dramatic attempted murder case featuring a famous architect), and the debacle led directly to the separation of the Office of the Judiciary from the Ministry of Justice a few years later. The chapter will use Thai language and interview sources to examine and analyse an episode that was hugely important, but has scarcely been dealt with academically by either Thai or international scholars.

Chapter 2 explores how the economics literature is anything but conclusive on public banking. Reliant on fixed yet polarised tenets of public versus private ownership, its scholars offer contrasting evidence on and contending theories of public banks in economic development. This division within economics occurs along ideological lines. For heterodox ‘development’ views, there is good theory and evidence for public banks. For orthodox ‘political’ ones, the opposite. The aim of this chapter is not to resolve these antinomies but to illustrate them in order to move past them. The economics literature is too preoccupied with fixed notions of public and private ownership and this impedes understanding of how and why public banks evolve. By contrast, I argue for a dynamic political economy view of public banks. In this view, what public banks are depends instead on how social forces in class-divided societies make and remake them over time. That is, contested institutional functions give meaning to the public ownership form.

The global ascendancy of neoliberal economics has deepened inequalities between and within nations and largely undermined efforts toward sustainable development. Based on a belief that the market should be the organizing principle for social, political and economic decisions, policymakers in many countries promoted privatization of state activities and an increased role for the free market, flexibility in labor markets and trade and investment liberalization. The benefits of these policies frequently fail to reach the indigenous peoples of the world, who acutely feel their costs, such as environmental degradation, cultural dispossessions and loss of traditional lands and territories. As vulnerable and often marginalized segments of the world’s population, indigenous peoples are at a heightened risk of experiencing the negative consequences of globalization. Understanding this reality could provide pathways for effective interventions to alleviate, overcome or, at the very least, minimize such effects.

This essay argues that contemporary Caribbean women exploit the malleability of life writing as a genre in a variety of ways that recognize the precariousness of life-making and self-making in the post-plantation Caribbean. While each of the writers discussed here critically refashions life-narrative for their own distinct purposes, they frequently share an interest in filtering personal life experiences through familiar familial and regional histories to emphasize the imbrication of the personal and political. Narrating life-stories is presented in these texts as inextricably linked to the difficult cultural politics of self-making that is so powerfully evidenced from The History of Mary Prince through to the present. While life-writing remains haunted by the region’s violent history, Caribbean women writers continue to excavate that history in order to record, affirm, rescue, restore, and celebrate self and life-making possibilities, however fragmented, precarious, or itinerant.

Appreciating how government budgeting systems and policies vary is best understood by comparing and analyzing the political cultural, historic, economic, and institutional contexts in which they are formulated, adopted, and executed. This book argues that even similar-appearing institutions and budgetary procedures may very well differ in practice due to the influence of a government’s political cultural and historical experiences.

All governments have budgets. Budgeting is a core state function. Effective budgeting empowers the state to prioritize policies, allocate resources, and discipline the bureaucracy. Proficient budgeting contributes to efficient fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This book offers a comparative framework that identifies eight categores called cultural clusters that help identify the budgetary institutions and policies adopted by different governments.

National convention delegates are chosen through a bewildering array of procedures that vary from state to state. Because states, for the most part, determine not only whether parties hold a primary or caucus, but also which voters are eligible to participate, delegates arrive at the national convention having been selected by very different constituencies that have very different policy ideas and very different levels of commitment to their respective parties.

The result is that neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party is able to express a clear ideological message through its presidential nominations. Presidential candidates seeking to win delegates in different state elections must appeal to the electorate in each state—and the state electorates differ greatly because the state-imposed voter eligibility rules differ greatly from state to state. As a result, candidates who articulate a clear and consistent message will draw different levels of support from the primary electorate in the various states, even when their messages appeal to similar proportions of party members and non-party members in each state.

Justice is a political value that holds across reasonable comprehensive doctrines. I introduce the notion of a frame of human life. For Aristotle, the polis does that job, but nowadays the institutions and practices that do so are embedded into the human web. To call something a “political value” – beyond the generic sense of pertaining to the creation of order – means that it pertains to the design of that frame. Justice is the value of giving each their own within this frame. The political value of distributive justice gives rise to principles of justice, which generate rights and duties. Justice honors the distinctiveness of each within the distinctively human life. That is why the value of distributive justice is the most stringent value. Justice as a value radiates into different domains of practical reasoning in ways that principles, rights, or duties do not. It takes exceptionally strong considerations to offset justice.

Schmitt maintains an uneasy presence because of his involvement with National Socialism. Nonetheless, his views on domestic and international politics are the kind of view against which liberal thought must be defended. Accordingly, confronting Schmitt is a suitable way of ending this book. This epilogue explains some of Schmitt’s views. Schmitt offers a caricature of the political. Nonetheless, his approach proves insightful in certain pockets of that larger domain of the political (which explains to some extent Schmitt’s enduring presence). Accordingly, political liberals too must see themselves as Schmittian friends of sorts. We also investigate the substantial downgrading of justice entailed by Schmitt’s approach, as compared with meaning or love. On the account offered here, the meaning of life and justice are linked. The frame-of-human-life conception has resources to account for all these notions. Finally, we explore Schmitt’s international thought and offer the grounds-of-justice approach as an alternative.

Although political misinformation is not a new phenomenon, the topic has received renewed attention in recent years, in conjunction with sweeping changes in the contemporary media environment. As the Internet and, particularly, social media become an increasingly common source for political information, citizens receive more and more of their news in an uncontrolled and minimally regulated setting where misinformation may easily spread. However, even if the sources of misinformation have fundamentally changed, best practices for correcting misinformation have not. While many of the pieces cited in this chapter do not focus explicitly on the Internet or social media, these works can still inform scholarly understanding of how to correct misinformation on these platforms. The cognitive processes we highlight are likely to translate to the digital realm and are thus crucial to understand when developing prescriptions for social media-based misinformation. Nevertheless, we also spotlight a number of recent studies that examine methods for correcting misinformation in the context of social media.

Having faced multiple traumatic events and severe losses linked to situations of organized violence in their home countries, refugees might experience a loss of connection due to the destruction of important social bonds and a fragmentation of cultural structures. Studies provide growing evidence that cultural belonging and political mobilization may play an important role in reconstructing meaning and connection in the wake of collective violence, loss, and exile. In this chapter, we explore the role of these collective identifications in post-trauma reconstruction through the case of Kurdish refugee families. Thematic analysis of family and parent interviews indicates how the intra-familial transmission of collective identifications may operate as a source of dealing with cultural bereavement and loss, commemorating trauma, and reversing versus reiterating trauma. The findings support an explorative understanding of collective identifications as meaningful resources in refugee families’ post-trauma reconstruction. Our analysis also identifies a paradox between reparative and potentially perilous aspects of collective identifications.