When the dryly assured narrator of Northanger Abbey introduces a new character by summarily denying “the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past adventures and sufferings,” Jane Austen effectively kicks Lady Vane, Leonora, Cynthia, Miss Price, Amri and this book’s chorus of motley tale-tellers out of the novel. Of course, as documented by the previous six chapters, Don Quixote, Henry Fielding, and other characters, authors, critics and common readers had been threatening to do as much for generations, and indeed, from the first. However, as we have now seen, that same propensity of eliciting such critical disfavor had already been a proven if unarticulated feature of the interpolated tales that early novelists continued to wield, disrupting their plots. For the two centuries between Don Quixote and Obi, interpolated tales were all but omnipresent: a pervasive, yet still consistently aggravating feature that co-constituted the novel form and provided critics and readers with an off-center vantage point from which to consider it. But sometime on or about 1800, novel relations changed, internally and formally, in a shift of balance from one prevailing version of heteroglossia to another.

Chapter 4 shows how, as the Wales novel congealed into a stable genre, it began to confront the knotty problem of race. The notorious economic underdevelopment of Wales posed a problem to Scottish Enlightenment-inspired anthropologists who cast climate and religion as the determinants of standardized, stadial socioeconomic progress. Such theories failed to account for the wealth gap between Wales and England, since Wales’s climate was mostly identical to England’s and Wales had come to be understood as the heartland of British Protestantism. As authors struggled to explain Welsh impoverishment, they became increasingly willing to use race to figure the Welsh as different from Anglo-Britons in kind, rather than in degree of social development. Some authors contended that the Welsh were “negroes,” “savages,” and “men of copper,” who deviated from a phenotypically white Britishness, while others insisted they were the progenitors of a pure race destined to rule the world.

At the heart of this chapter lies the following question: how can the fact that lawful behaviour can be enforced be explained against the background of Kant’s moral philosophy? I argue that without grounding Right in morality we cannot even understand coercion as a normative problem. The reason is that for Kant coercion becomes problematic only vis-à-vis persons, because they – being ends in themselves – can legitimately claim not to be coerced (1). This does not mean, however, that coercion is completely inadmissible according to Kant. For by defining equal, relational freedom as a sphere of non-domination, the law also defines a sphere in which coercion is permissible because it is morally unproblematic and requires no justification (2). Tracing back coercion to the limits of autonomy, however, does not only explain why coercive force is ‘deducible’ from moral autonomy (and the Categorical Imperative as its principle). Even more, this requires us to reconsider whether Kant can consistently argue against the external enforceability of internal perfect duties (e.g. the prohibition of suicide) (3).

The twenty-six grievances in the Declaration of Independence targeted two distinct categories of British policies: reforms and punishments. Parliamentary reforms like taxing the colonies to help pay for the 10,000 troops left in America at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 (mostly as a human wall protecting colonists from Native Americans – and vice versa) angered free colonists, but not sufficiently to make them want out of the British Empire. Free Americans did, however, protest Parliament’s reforms, for example, by tarring and feathering Customs officials who cracked down on molasses smugglers, burning stamped paper, and throwing 340 chests of tea – taxed by Parliament and carried to American ports by the East India Company – into Boston Harbor. To punish the colonists for these protests, Parliament revoked Massachusetts’ charter, sent troops to reoccupy Boston, and more. Ultimately royal officials in the colonies even forged informal alliances with black Americans previously enslaved by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founders. It was these British punishments, not Parliament’s original reforms, that pushed free colonists over the edge into independence.

A framing case study describes Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Then the chapter provides an overview of law on the use of force. The chapter begins by describing the historical movement to prohibit the use of force. It then discusses the use of force with UN Security Council authorization. Next, it examines the complex topic of self-defense, including how states can respond to armed attacks, whether they can prevent armed attacks, and how they can protect themselves against non-state actors. Finally, the chapter probes whether the use of force is ever legally justified for other reasons, including: protecting nationals abroad; humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect; and when states consent to intervention.

A framing case study describes the trial of Hissène Habré, the deposed leader of Chad who was prosecuted for multiple international crimes in Senegal. The chapter then discusses international criminal law. The chapter first discusses major principles of international criminal law and its evolution. It next discusses the key elements for establishing criminal guilt, including: the definition of core crimes; modes of responsibility and liability; and possible defences. Finally, the chapter surveys the major institutions that enforce international criminal law by discussing the operations of the International Criminal Court and the assertion of universal jurisdiction by domestic courts.

Chapter 4 charts a biography of Kant’s printed authorial name, ‘I. Kant’, so as to disclose its ethical function in late eighteenth-century Germany. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s and Roger Chartier’s studies of the materialities of authorship, I consider uses of the authorial name at the rhetorical level of Kant’s 1785 essay alongside its textual and typographical displacements, both within and outside the May 1785 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, and during and beyond the author’s lifetime. In so tracing the anthumous and posthumous movements of ‘I. Kant’, I clarify the authorial name’s role in implementing an ethical author-function that Kant understood to be responsive to the demands of enlightenment practice. I contend that Kant not only recognised the importance of printed authorial names to the enactment of authorial responsibility but further so deployed his own authorial name as to hold himself and others accountable for the print publications that contributed to the public discourse in his time. I argue that this ethically and socially concerned author-function in the German Enlightenment discloses the limits of copyright’s proprietary understanding of authorship and its material constitution.

The prologue of Invisible Fatherland examines how Weimar Germany has become a metaphor for democratic failure and is often remembered for its catastrophic collapse and the rise of Adolf Hitler. This narrative overshadows the nuanced and sophisticated efforts by Weimar contemporaries to build an open and forward-looking democracy amid social, political, and economic turmoil. Written from Charlottesville, a city grappling with its own history of democratic challenges, the prologue reflects on the vibrant practices of Weimar democracy by looking at the Republic from its hopeful beginning rather than its tragic end. At the same time, it also acknowledges the challenges Weimar faced, as authoritarian and illiberal ideologies exploited its legal and cultural vulnerabilities. Setting the stage for the book’s broader argument, the prologue asks readers to reconsider the meaning of democratic fragility — not as a weakness, but as a strength that fosters flexibility and adaptation. This reflection is especially urgent as democracies worldwide confront rising authoritarianism and polarization.