It is a rare thing for an historian to have access to sources which chart the entire history of a state, from planned creation to pre-meditated extinction. Nor is every state’s constitutional and political history as varied as that of Czechoslovakia, which was founded on 28 October 1918 and ceased to exist at midnight on 31 December 1992. Czechoslovakia’s experience can be seen as a compressed history of twentieth-century Europe and the many ways the modern state has been imagined. During its relatively brief existence, Czechoslovakia was federalized, centralized, dissolved, reconstituted, re-centralized and re-federalized; it also went from military dictatorship to parliamentary democracy; from authoritarian democracy to Nazi colony; from people’s democracy to Soviet satellite; and from Communist dictatorship and command economy to democracy and the free market. In 2009, Yale University Press brought out a comprehensively revisionist history, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed, the first full account of the state to be written by an outsider. This chapter tells the story of how the book first came to be researched and written by the present author, why its publication in 2009 caused such a furore and why former dissidents insisted, ten years later, in bringing out a Czech-language edition.

Several authors have connected Hegel’s view on action with Elizabeth’s Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge. This chapter first develops the notion of practical knowledge in Kant and Fichte, noting their similarity to Anscombe’s view. Practical knowledge is a knowing of what one is doing in acting. Yet Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit goes beyond this. Practical knowledge yields products or “works” (Werke), which are also products of concepts. Conceptual knowledge of such works, which often stem from institutional histories, is what Hegel calls “absolute knowledge.” It is argued that Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge is qualitative rather than quantitative: it concerns a transparent form of knowing rather than a certain massive extent or even finality of knowing. The constellation between the topics of concepts, artifacts, and social-historical realities present in the Phenomenology becomes a precedent for the more abstract argument for concrete conceptual truth in the Logic.

This chapter traces the formalisation of psychoactive substance use in the early states of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Mesoamerica. It explores how mind-altering plants and compounds were embedded in religious, medical, and elite ritual practices, often regulated by priesthoods and royal authorities. The chapter contrasts medicinal use (e.g., opium, mandrake, soma) with ecstatic religious practices and considers how control over such substances became a form of political power. Art, texts, and material remains are used to reconstruct symbolic associations and ritual contexts. The chapter also examines gendered dimensions of usage and the sociopolitical implications of prohibitions and monopolies. Overall, it portrays ancient civilisations as sites of controlled psychoactive innovation and illustrates the deep roots of contemporary debates about access, morality and consciousness alteration.

William Boyd Dawkins (1837–1929), Professor of Geology at Owens College and Curator of the Manchester Museum, was simultaneously a prominent geological researcher, museum reformer, economic consultant on mining and infrastructure projects, and promoter of the fields of prehistory and palaeontology to public audiences. In a long career and range of works, Dawkins argued for linkages between nature and culture, the entanglement of humanity and geology, and for a view of development defined by ideas of race, social evolution and scales of civilisation. This chapter considers Boyd Dawkins as a linking figure, thinking about Manchester’s place in the history of ideologies around race, ‘progress’, mineral extraction and colonialism, and the role of new scholarly and public debates connecting these fields.

This overview traces the multiple connections between the resurgence of the city of Manchester in the twenty-first century and the new kind of university that was built in the wake of the 2004 merger of the Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST.

Proceedings before the International Criminal Court (ICC) can form integral parts of encompassing transitional justice processes for addressing international crimes. Therefore, the ICC’s principle of complementarity is essential to determine whether justice must be served and by whom – states or the ICC. In April 2024, the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor published its first Policy on Complementarity and Cooperation, which reflects a broader evolution of victims’ roles in international law: from non-recognition to justice actors with numerous rights and an independent voice in proceedings. It emphasises strategic partnership and vigilance as tools for diminishing the impunity gap and bringing justice closer to victims. This chapter examines the policy through the lens of generations of victim participation. It concludes that structural changes at the ICC are necessary to maximise the policy’s potential for continuous meaningful victim participation at all stages of proceedings nationally, regionally, and internationally.

This chapter begins in medias res; it traces and exemplifies Romantic historicism and its enduring potency in the political imagination of the two World Wars. Two specific legacies of Romanticism are identified: the idea that the nation is a transcendent principle deserving our devotion and loyalty; and the paradox that the nation, while inspiring our fervent political allegiance, it is itself not political or contentious but, rather, ‘unpolitical’. This twofold legacy explains the title of this book, Charismatic Nations. That concept is also discussed with reference to the emergence, in the century between Edmund Burke and Max Weber, of the notion of ‘charismatic leadership’; it is suggested that such leaders, as typified by Weber, often derive their charisma from the fact that they are seen to intuit and address the historical needs of the nation as a unified whole.

In the preceding chapters we have presented Basque data related to several syntactic phenomena and constructions, namely the divide between unergatives and unaccusatives, addition of dative arguments, the variation attested in psych predicates, the causative/inchoative alternation, the impersonal construction, and the morphological causative. In this chapter we intend to explain briefly some of the theoretical approaches that can be adopted in order to account for some of the data presented. Specifically, we will offer an introduction to the syntactic derivation that gives rise to the alternations and variation presented so far. In Sections 8.2 and 8.3 we will explore the syntactic building blocks of verbs and the introduction of their arguments. In Section 8.4 the different types of Voice projections will be discussed. In Section 8.5 we will briefly mention implicit arguments and their (possible) semantic and syntactic nature. In Section 8.6 Applicative projections will be considered. In Section 8.7 the Voice-over-Voice configuration will be explored in order to account for the morphological causative construction and, finally, in Section 8.8 the main conclusions will be presented.

This chapter introduces the Hamiltonian operator in the language of second quantization, which is associated with the many-particle system to be considered throughout, including its time-dependent part. An expression is derived for the corresponding time-evolution operator, which depends only on the Hamiltonian and not on the initial preparation of the system before the time-dependent part begins to act. The connection between the Schrödinger and Heisenberg representations is discussed.

Chapter 6 covers research about category management. Said simply, category management means a focus on categories instead of on SKUs, and a division of labour between retailers and manufacturers. In category management various categories are said to belong to one of four roles:profile, routine, convenience, and season. A profiling category stands out as quite unique, a routine category is one that all comparable stores stock, a convenience category is perhaps not part of the core categories but that is carried so that shoppers don't have to go somewhere else to find it; and a seasonal category, which is only stocked when at specific times. Other useful ideas from category management are the concepts of transaction builders, traffic builders, and profit generators. Transaction builders are categories that contribute more to revenues than the average category. A traffic builder is a category of items that end up in many shopping baskets. A profit generator is a category that contributes more to the store’s margin than the average category. A category management project is typically organised so that retailers choose a ‘category captain’ (a manufacturer) to represent all the brands in the category. Together with the retailer, the category captain decides on strategies and planograms. A common outcome of category management projects is that profits increase, but not necessarily revenues .

Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, this chapter shows how women artists navigate the gendered complexities of working in the highly male-dominated occupation of electronic music production and performance. Using a feminist critical management studies lens and positioning the construction of subjectivity as a relational, and power-laden process, the discussion notes six subjectivities enacted by women producing and performing electronic music. (1) The Intersectional Artist (2) The Genderless Artist (3) Visible Woman: Invisible Artist (4) Shrinking Violets and Tough Cookies (5) One of the Boys and (6) Bringers of Divine Feminine Energy. The discussion addresses the impacts these subject positions have on women’s careers and concludes by showing how women’s collectives, despite representing an additional burden on those who organise them, are challenging the status quo by providing public and visible action through the ‘safety and strength in numbers’ of collective activism.