Tradition stands as an unexplored and misunderstood segment of humanity’s memory, a moment of déjà vu for the collective unconscious that the twenty-first century strains to escape or resolve. The modern world knows neither whether tradition is necessary for thought to exist, nor whether it is a barrier to true rationalism. Further, struggling over tradition and whether it has a place in our collective consciousness has frequently divided modern Western culture into warring camps. In an attempt to make a contribution to the present situation, the present study examines John Calvin’s engagement with tradition. His day, not unlike ours, was turbulently violent, and the epistemic foundations of truth claims were one of the regularly visited battlegrounds. Calvin lived in a time when the medieval foundations of claims to religious truth were being questioned openly. I argue that this makes him the perfect study to provide a mirror to the present age. For Calvin struggled with tradition – arguing that he did not use it, while turning to it frequently. In so doing, he created a religious tradition in which many modern Christians still stand, that does not know what to do with the orthodox tradition.

Schools, hospitals, prisons, and other institutions shape physical experiences and act as organizational entities for many material endeavors. This chapter examines how institutions shape how we interact with material worlds.

The House of Commons is the repository for elected legitimacy in the UK’s national system of governance. Over the course of the twentieth century, this political fact relegated the House of Lords to the status of a subordinate chamber. This chapter examines the reason why the House of Commons came to dominate the UK Parliament by considering the problems with the composition of the House of Lords (it is a largely appointed House which still retains some hereditary membership) and the process by which the Commons came to strip the Lords of its equal role in the UK’s law-making process (replacing the Lords’ veto over legislation with a mere delaying power). This chapter also considers the role that this subordinate chamber continues to play in the legislative process. Today, the work of the House of Lords is dominated by scrutinising and, where necessary, revising legislation produced by the Commons. The unelected nature of the UK’s second chamber remains a contentious constitutional issue, one which has not been solved despite frequent reform proposals in the last two decades.

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century UK policy makers and constitutional lawyers grappled with how to incorporate human rights concerns into a constitution based upon the theoretically unlimited legislative power of Parliament. This chapter charts progress towards this goal, examining first the inadequacies of the protection of ‘civil liberties’ in the UK under common law and statute. We then consider how other countries have attempted to reconcile majoritarian democratic politics with legal protections for individual rights, and how these efforts influenced the UK in the development of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). The remainder of the chapter examines the scheme of the HRA 1998, considering what rights were incorporated under the Act and the powers that the courts gained over legislation and over the activities of public bodies.

In the heyday of temperance reform, temperance – like women’s suffrage and abolitionism – stood in the foreground of the progressive reform agenda, and temperance reformers believed themselves to be basing their actions on the latest scientific research and on up-to-date sound philosophical arguments, specifically the prominent philosophy of Scottish common-sense realism. Their biblical and scientific arguments took place in a larger philosophical and cultural context which sheds light not only on temperance, but on other nineteenth-century reforms.

The English Care Act recognizes the possibility that carers may be both unpaid carers and paid workers. It also recognizes both care and support users and carers as potential rights-holders on the basis of their needs and/or responsibilities and partly contemplates that people may be in both roles at the same time. While its gaps and limitations mean many people cannot access rights-based support, these policy features do offer a scaffolding for developing a policy that aligns with the six principles proposed in this book. This chapter sketches the reforms that would be necessary to overcome the limitations of the policy in terms of its inadequate support for unpaid care and paid work, lack of recognition of the gender division of labor and inadequate responses to the claims of carers and people with disabilities. These include removing the ‘hard’ eligibility threshold and introducing greater flexibility and user control in assessment and eligibility determinations; ensuring that budgets are sufficient to ensure decent pay and conditions for paid workers; and revising the definition of ‘well-being’ to ensure that the policy captures human rights considerations and all of the matters care and support users and carers consider to be important.

This chapter introduces the second case study analysis, which explores the manifestation of the two care policy tensions, and the potential application of the care and support rights principles, in a different context. It is focused on England’s Care Act, which introduced fundamental changes to the form and purpose of care and support policy, also referred to as ‘adult social care’. The Care Act makes provision for some people with disabilities – and other adults with care and support needs – as well as some carers to access personal budgets for the purchase of services to meet their needs and promote their ‘well-being’. It contemplates recipients’ participation in a range of activities (including unpaid care and paid work) and applies to multiple constituencies and thus appears – at least on the surface – to be more closely aligned with the care and support rights principles than the Australian policy discussed in earlier chapters. This chapter outlines the history and key features of care and support policy in England and sets out the eligibility criteria that care and support users and carers must meet in order to qualify for support.

This chapter introduces the first of two case study analyses presented in the book. The case studies explore how the care policy tensions manifest in different policy contexts and demonstrate how the principles might be used to amend specific policies. This chapter describes the history and key features of an Australian care and support policy that prioritizes one activity (unpaid care) over another (paid work) and one constituency (carers) over another (children with disabilities). Carers’ income support has been available to some citizens and permanent residents since the 1980s. Since 1998, Carer Payment (child) – a pension payment administered by Australia’s federal government – has been available to people whose constant care for a child with a severe disability or medical condition prevents them from supporting themselves through paid work. The most recent major reforms to the policy in 2009 introduced a new eligibility test that focused on the ‘care load’ that a child’s medical needs produce for the carer. This extended access to a greater number and wider range of people, although the payment is still only available to those providing constant care and have no, or limited, involvement in paid work.

In light of the many shortcomings of Carer Payment (child) policy described in Chapter 7, this chapter explores the potential of the six care and support rights principles to place the interests and claims of carers and children with disabilities on an even footing and realize their citizenship rights to care and support. Many current restrictions on access to this payment would need to be amended to achieve this, including removing the limitation of eligibility to sole carers with intense, constant care loads, reconsidering the income tests and paid work requirements that limit carers’ paid work options, and expanding the ‘care load’ test’s focus beyond individual, medical needs to incorporate the rights and dignity of children and their carers. Other necessary measures would include ensuring that a variety of care and support services are available for all parties and increasing the availability and appeal of flexible working for men and women. Such changes would constitute a major departure from prevailing policy settings and require reform across multiple areas of policy including social assistance, care and support and employment, but the potential benefits of such changes for a range of people with care and support needs and/or responsibilities are clear.

This chapter discusses the contributions and limits of the approach described in this book and summarizes the book’s main themes. These themes include the necessity and value for multiple constituencies of a more coordinated, rights-based approach to the design of care and support policy and the challenges of pursuing rights-based reform in Australia, England and the other liberal welfare states, especially in light of the ongoing processes of neoliberal marketization, individualization of responsibility, prioritization of ‘active’ citizenship and, in much of the world, the now entrenched resource constraints associated with austerity. Ultimately, I argue that the principles can make a practical contribution to efforts to build solidarity between care and support constituencies, challenge prevailing norms of citizenship that prioritize independence and paid work participation and establish care and support as accepted and valued activities of citizenship.

It is often said that in the Republic Plato proposes to ban art and poetry from his ideal society. The truth is that poetry – the right sort of poetry – will be a pervasive presence in the life of the warrior class whose upbringing and education are discussed in Books 2 and 3 of the Republic. What Plato develops here is a systematic anti-democratic programme for reforming music, i.e. musical poetry, incorporating dance as well as song. There are four stages in the programme: first, purging poetic content; second, placing severe restrictions on the manner of performance and on those permitted to engage in it, and particularly on the extent of mimesis or impersonation deemed allowable in performance, on account of its influence on character; third, placing similarly severe restrictions on musical technique, particular on the musical modes composers are allowed to employ in constructing melodies; and fourth, ensuring that the material and social settings in which musical poetry is performed are also designed with a gracefulness and beauty that will work their appropriate effect on the performers, providing the ideal conditions for them to fall in love, homoerotically conceived.

Notwithstanding his reputation in the contemporary United States as a sort of political conservative, Tocqueville in his own lifetime was very much a figure of the centrist-left. In the French politics of his day, Tocqueville was closely associated with various causes of reform, most notably the abolition of slavery. In this chapter, Robert T. Gannett, Jr. reminds us that Tocqueville’s calls for decisive action and concerns with social reform were appreciated by many figures on the political Left in the twentieth century. These Left interpreters of Tocqueville range from postwar intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Albert Salomon to latter-day communitarian thinkers such as Robert Putnam and William Galston to community organizers such as Saul Alinsky and Gene Sharp. Gannett reveals how Tocqueville plays a major role in the writings of Alinsky and Sharp and thus indirectly shaped the theory and practice of community organizing as it has come to be known in the United States and throughout the world.

In the late Roman Empire, complexity and uncertainty created demand for responsa from the apostolic see. After the eleventh-century papal turn, new legislation and a different society generated new complexities and uncertainties. Decretals were not the only way to resolve them, but given the prominence of the tradition launched by Siricius and Innocent I, they were an obvious way. An unbroken chain of communication links the first and second decretal ages. Late Antiquity and the central Middle Ages need not be kept in separate compartments.

How should IP be reformed to incorporate a negligence liability rule? This chapter considers the various implementation options. It argues that, rather than return to a nineteenth-century reliance on formal rules, IP law should change infringement doctrine to incorporate a reasonable person standard. It then applies this proposed regime to a range of contemporary problems in IP law (i.e. orphan works, independent invention, strategic behaviour, IP triangles).

This chapter explores the introduction and rolling out of the separate system in England and Ireland, contextualising this in terms of earlier and rival systems of discipline, notably the silent system. It examines critiques of separate confinement, with vocal opponents often highly critical of the impact of the system on prisoner’s minds, and the extensive debates among prison administrators, governors, chaplains, and medical officers, as to whether separate confinement might provoke cases of mental disorder. Modifications were introduced to the purest form of separate confinement, yet, as we explain, the separate system continued to dominate penal policy and practice, despite persistent concerns about the damage it inflicted on prisoners’ minds. Drawing on examples from individual prisons, including Pentonville and Mountjoy, the chapter examines the management of mental illness among prisoners, and the ways in which power shifted from the chaplains, key advocates of separate confinement from the 1830s, to the medical officers in the 1850s, as the prison medical service became more coherent and regulated.

Chapter 6 outlines the growing momentum of prison reform, enacted by a broad range of prison reformers and within the prison administration itself, towards producing reforms of punitive penal regimes, including separate confinement. Critiques of late nineteenth-century prison regimes noted the continuing high incidence of mental breakdown in prisons and the detrimental effect of severe prison regimes. The chapter highlights how individual campaigners and campaign groups lobbied for the end of the separate system and for rehabilitative penal policies. However, while the Gladstone Committee inquiry of 1895 was hailed as a turning point, and the severity of prison discipline was eased earlier in Irish prisons, in practice change was ‘glacial’. The residue of the nineteenth-century prison system arguably remains with us today, in the physical structures of prison estates, in prison disciplines that still emphasise order and uniformity, in the retention of large numbers of mentally ill people and the imposition of solitary confinement, no longer a philosophy and method of reform, but a means of dealing with disruptive behaviour among prisoners and shortages of prison staff and resources.