This chapter summarises the diversity in the United States and in Britain. It establishes the number and the nature of the minorities in both countries, and compares the distinct way that race and immigration is thought about in each country. The chapter also provides data on race and migration, and demonstrates a newly definitive picture of working and living conditions.

This chapter turns to historical debates about citizen politics. Throughout the history of civilised society, citizen politics has been the exception rather than the norm. Most societies through the ages have been based not on citizen engagement but on more or less despotic rule. Why, then, should citizens be involved in politics and, indeed, take a direct part in the process of governing? Beginning with the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, the chapter presents a general account of the defence of citizen politics provided by Machiavelli and Marsilius of Padua, Rousseau and Mill, but also an introduction to the elitist critics of democracy, e.g. José Ortega y Gasset and the federalists.

This chapter comprises the readings of Cixous's stories that focus on the relationship between the individual and grace. Cixous's engagement with Lispector's couple signals her interest in a grace that arises in the context of human relationships. This study turns more fully to this question of the possibility of grace, or divinity, as it appears more explicitly in Cixous's own ‘fiction’, The Book of Promethea, which is focused exclusively on an extraordinary love between two women. Here, Cixous develops her understanding of the conditions of a love that emerge in the context of a meeting between feminine subjectivities. In so doing, she returns to the overarching question of this study, that the possibility of an abundant, other-regarding love which is a humanly possible expression of divinity, one that emerges in an encounter with the other, is defined by a refusal to appropriate otherness to oneself.

This chapter examines the nature of naval warfare in ancient Greece. It explains that concerted military action against enemy shipping by Greek communities does not appear to have been undertaken until the seventh century, according to Thucydides. It describes the preparations and outfitting for a major campaign and highlights the role of thalassocracy in providing economic strength and resources and in enabling a state to weather local crop conditions by importing from regions of plenty.

This chapter focuses on the small group of Huguenot exiles who, in alliance with the Real Whigs, played a crucial role in bringing English republican and commonwealth works to the attention of the French-speaking world. The Huguenot connection was one means by which commonwealth ideas came to play an important role in continental European political thought. The Real Whigs, who were themselves deeply concerned about European affairs, were closely associated with a network of Huguenot writers, translators and booksellers. It was via the translations and reviews produced by these French Protestant exiles that the key works of the English republican tradition entered France and became known to a francophone audience.

This chapter considers the role digital technologies might play in the constitution of contemporary identity, when this is understood in narrative terms as a life story and its narration. The life stories at the centre of this inquiry are those of a group of inmates of Ashworth Hospital, a secure institution for the criminally insane. This group participated in the making of Rehearsal of Memory, a piece of speculative software produced in collaboration with the artist Harwood with input from the art collective Mongrel, and others. Rehearsal takes the form of a navigable composite body made up of skin scans taken from the inmates, from Harwood, and from Ashworth staff. This body holds fragments of memory, experiences of life at Ashworth and other places, held as images, texts, and audio spots. Users of the artwork are invited to explore the body and its associated objects, but are only able to do so in ways allowed by the project architecture. This functions to organize the interactions between the body and its users in ways that tend to undermine the conventional relationships operating between the inmates of such institutions and the general public.

This chapter follows Irigaray's investigations of women and of their relation to the concept of otherness, particularly as this term has featured in acts of denial that have deprived women of an identity of their own. It surveys the first and second phases of Irigaray's work—the criticism of the western philosophical and religious tradition and the ways that she recommends for women to challenge it. Irigaray is extremely critical of a Lacanian version of desire that denied women any access to a conscious expression of their own. She wishes to liberate women from such repression but proposes that their new expressions of desire will not engulf the other person. She does not support a literal revival of a goddess religion, but she recommends cultivating the values of tranquillity and harmony that she associates with this benevolent world. She advocates two inconsistent agendas. One is the dismantling, in the name of infinite possibility, of the univocal arrangements that have pervaded western traditions in the name of gender. At the same time, there is the endorsement of definite sex-specific qualities and a structure of relationship that is to be observed.

This chapter analyses the conservative English ‘particular’, an idea which aims to reconcile with civic, liberal and multi-ethnic values, explaining that the first characteristic of conservative patriotism is that the populist version of Englishness has become more prominent that the patrician. It discusses an argument which holds that multiculturalism had imposed a sort of Jacobinian dictatorship of virtue upon a previously free people and suggests that the eagerness of the establishment to abandon British/English customs reveals the extent to which multiculturalism arises less from love of others than from hatred of our own form of life.

This chapter extends the examination of feminism through an exploration of radical nationalist feminist organisations in the 1970s and 1980s and their often frustrated attempts to introduce a feminist agenda into radical nationalism. It argues that the vibrant nationalist feminism of the period 1977–82 was less successful in having its demands recognised by the wider radical nationalist movement than it was in campaigning around broader feminist issues – most notably abortion rights and violence against women. The chapter also analyses the interviewees' mixed memories of feminism and discusses that factors that contributed to the emergence of Basque nationalist feminism.

This chapter examines the considerable legacy of the Nation, Young Ireland and the Irish Confederation. The Fenian Brotherhood, the Home Rule movement, the Land League and the cultural revival of the late nineteenth century all had their roots in the writings or personal involvement of the leaders of the 1848 rising. This extraordinary group of individuals also inspired later generations of male and female radicals and revolutionaries whose prose, poetry, plays and political activities culminated in the Easter Rising. The participants in this rebellion made it clear that they were the latest phase of a revolutionary continuum that had commenced in 1798, resumed in 1848 and 1867, and was completed in 1916. What is apparent when looking at the legacy of the 1848 uprising is that the men and women who played a part in it left an intellectual and ideological legacy that continued to reverberate into the twenty-first century.

This chapter considers theories of electoral choice in an attempt to explain why people vote and what determines their preferences; the chapter considers also the influence of the mass media. What determines the way people vote? Why do some vote for the Tories while others vote for the Labour Party? The answer traditionally has been class. Today the answer is less clear-cut, for class is no longer what it used to be. Another answer is psychological attachment. This chapter also looks at elections and electoral systems, considering various electoral systems, which can be divided into three families: majoritarian, proportional and mixed systems.

This chapter seeks to differentiate postmodern cultural theory in the very widest sense from the forms of modern cultural theory that are focused in this book. In doing so, it focuses on the questions of aesthetics, culture and creativity. The basic and simple point is that, for better or worse, with postmodernism the regulative ideal of an ethics of autonomy has certainly been given up. It is possible to argue that a diffusion of culture represents the generalisation of modernism: the overflowing of modernist principles from the sphere of art into the social body more widely. As a result, it is not just the culture that is everywhere but aesthetic principles: only the aesthetic model is no longer tied to a particular sphere but is generalized to apply to just about everything.