Law is seen to be a vehicle for royal jurisdiction and royal propaganda as well as providing the catalyst and underlying reason for civil disobedience and popular complaint. This chapter shows the necessity of examining the workings of the mind and the psychological elements of law as a means of identifying the dynamic role of legal consciousness in the prevailing political culture. By emphasising the contexts in which law operated and the ways in which it was represented and understood, it is possible to gain an insight into how law had the capacity to form, affect and direct political attitudes during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The complexity of the medieval experience of law should be seen as a key component in the growth of legal consciousness. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.

The emerging supranational union of nation-states in Europe is one of the most important and theoretically stimulating political innovations of the twentieth century. The book argues that shared memories of war and suffering have been crucial to the development of the Union. The introduction outlines how the passage of time has undermined these cognitive, motivational, and justificatory foundations, as the generations that can directly remember Europe’s bloody history have passed from public life. It also introduces the Frankfurt School of critical theory as an engaged form of social research that proceeds in two operational stages: a crisis diagnosis followed by reflections on paths for future emancipation. Individual memories play a key role in this process by providing the theorist with the distance and the resources needed to diagnose problems in the present and envisage possible solutions.

In the search for Sir John Mandeville that occupies Giles Milton's The Riddle and the Knight (1996), Milton identifies a range of connections and differences between the 'religions of the book' (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) with the intention of indicating Christian legitimacy in opposition to misguided Islam and demonised Judaism. Regardless of the nature of Mandeville's reflections, there is no doubt that his presentation of Islam was hugely influential. Milton chooses not to refer to Mandeville's depiction of the Prophet Muhammad; this is the focus of this chapter. The chapter considers the source for a small part of The Travels. It is concerned with the uneven character of Mandeville's conception of Islam and Muhammad. The portrayal of Islam in Mandeville's Travels appears ambivalent - the emphasis upon religious common ground between Islam and Christianity does not demonise with the same polemic found in many contemporary texts.

This chapter discusses the pivotal figure of Herbert Read. He wrote extensively and influentially on anarchism as a politics and a cultural direction. He saw one of his most famous books, Education Through Art (1943) as an anarchist manifesto. Read’s role in establishing the ICA is clear, which he saw as ‘a microcosm of a modern, anarchistic society’. He was aware of and developed ideas coming from a number of polymathic thinkers in politics, philosophy and the natural sciences, such as Kropotkin, Bergson and D’Arcy Thompson. Building on them, and extending his role far beyond art historical study alone, he articulated thoughtfully the aspirations of a new kind of anarchism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of more recent anarchist theory, particularly that of Antliff, which has, or could in the future, play a role within the discipline of art history.

The 2017 presidential election campaign was tightly fought, and there was genuine uncertainty about the outcome. In 2017, Macron was the repository of the electorate’s general distrust in the mainstream parties, as the candidate determined to clean up politics who could appeal to mainstream former Socialist and centre-right voters. With Macron’s election, the old world of left–right partisan politics appeared to be crumbling at the edges. The extraordinary feature of the 2017 campaign, however, lay not so much in Macron’s relative success as in the heavy underlying forces that swept aside the main parties in the presidential contest: the public’s reaction against the ‘scandals’ involving the other candidates (Fillon and Le Pen in particular); the extraordinary climate of anti-politics, which produced a side-lining of the discussion of major issues of policy; and the apparently straightforward choice available to electors between Macron and Le Pen as representatives, respectively, of an open and liberal and a closed protectionist France.

This chapter explores the appropriateness of distinguishing sharply between lay (or secular and temporal) and clerical (or ecclesiastical) as it attempts to comprehend the ideas and activities of the people of medieval and early modern Europe. With historians of sixteenth-century France and Victorian England emphasising the dangers of drawing neat distinctions between lay and ecclesiastical and between the sacred and the secular, it considers the possibility that historians of the Middle Ages should also eschew such divisions. In examining this issue the chapter first considers Susan Reynolds's own approach to lay activity and ideas, and turns to Joseph R. Strayer's hypotheses concerning the laicisation of society and government in the Middle Ages. It also offers the author's own appraisal of the relationship between lay and ecclesiastical, church and state, and secular and sacred, focusing on the reign of Philip the Fair.

This chapter treats three comedies dating from between 1596 (roughly) and 1604 as experiments in tragicomedy, broadly understood here as an uneasy juxtaposition of comic patterns fulfilled with an affirmation of tragic potential as encoded in the human condition and left suspended at the conclusions. The comic patterns are mainly of Italian origin, but certain tragically tending elements emerge more clearly through hitherto neglected French intertexts. One bearing especially on both Merchant and Measure is a Protestant allegorical morality by Henri de Barran, L’Homme justifié par Foy (1554), which dramatises the Reformation reading of Mankind as doomed by sinfulness according to the Old (Mosaic) Law and redeemable only by the New Law of Mercy. Mankind’s struggle is staged in terms especially evocative of the confrontation between Antonio and Shylock, but light is also shed on the fall, suffering and forgiveness of Angelo. The potentially tragic fate of the latter is also illuminated by the tragedy of Philanire, by Claude Roillet, whose French version presents particular intersections with Measure. Finally, it is argued that the tragicomic associations of Malvolio in Twelfth Night may have been enriched for audiences by knowledge of the contemporary life and writings of Pierre Victor Palma Cayet.

Janet nelson was born in 1942 and grew up in Blackpool, Lancashire. After graduation she proceeded directly to postgraduate research under Professor Walter Ullmann, completing a PhD in 1967. Her thesis title was 'Rituals of Royal Inauguration in Early Medieval Europe. The research gave her an understanding of the political resonance of the liturgy in the early Middle Ages and a thorough grounding in that intellectually rigorous scholarship which is the hallmark of her work. Janet Nelson's concern with how ideology, ritual and political thought might be combined in practical action, and with how individuals made choices according to needs and opportunities, led her to work on the reign of Charles the Bald, a figure rather in need of historical rehabilitation. The result was a model of political history that set the pace for a series of studies that rethought the history of the later Carolingians.

Rainer Forst begins his lead essay by discussing the concept of toleration. He asserts that toleration involves three components – objection, acceptance and rejection – and that its task is to bring these components into the correct normative order. He then identifies two different conceptions of toleration that have been advanced in the past: the permission conception, an authoritarian attitude which grants minorities the permission to live according to their faith, and the respect conception, an attitude of citizens who know that they do not agree with each other, but who accept that institutions must be based on norms which can be shared by all. While it is tempting to believe that today we follow the respect conception, in reality the permission conception is still regularly employed. Negotiating these different conceptions requires a normative principle beyond toleration; Forst proposes that this principle should be justice. The central connection between justice and toleration, he argues, consists in the following question: Does my objection to a practice rest on reasons that do not merely reflect my ethical or religious position that others do not share, but on reasons that are sufficient to proceed to rejection? Forst concludes by arguing that if we want to talk about genuine progress in toleration, the central question is how to develop a secular moral language in which those affected can present and discuss their claims – and in which there is a willingness also to treat minorities as equals.

Written specially for the second edition, this epilogue reviews the field since the book first came out in 2011 and assesses the future of nudge and think in light of subsequent developments in public policy. There has been a fast-moving agenda for nudge, which has gone from being the newcomer to an established policy tool. But it has also been an important time for think, which has matured as a form of governance. This chapter asks whether recent developments have followed the first edition’s recommendation for nudge and think to work more closely together. It also proposes a modified version of nudge, ‘nudge plus’, which incorporates elements of think and takes forward the vision of a decentralized, citizen-active form of nudging argued for in the first edition.

This chapter examines sections from Emile Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method (1895). Durkheim argues here that it is the purpose of science to disturb established ideas. One such idea is that things (in society as elsewhere) exist for the purpose of fulfilling the function that they happen to be fulfilling. Against this he hammers home the need to distinguish between the cause of something and the function it has assumed (or has been subsumed to). Most of all, Durkheim’s insistence that society is not something that merely happens in our minds but that it actually is something thing-ly, out there, for real, acknowledges the fact of alienation that also others like Marx reflect on.