Chandran Kukathas, in his response to the volume’s lead essay, focuses on Forst’s use of Bayle. He argues that Forst underestimates the power of Bayle’s challenge and the radical nature of its implications for our understanding of political order. Kukathas begins with an account of Bayle’s theory of toleration, drawing attention to its distinctiveness and reviewing the main objections that have been raised against it. He then turns to Forst’s account, showing how Forst has sought to incorporate Bayle’s thought into a deeper understanding of toleration. In the next section, he considers Forst’s theory of toleration more critically, arguing that he has not embraced Bayle to the extent necessary for the incorporation to be of any great consequence. The root of the problem lies with the subordination of toleration to justice; here Kukathas offers reasons for thinking that toleration is not a virtue of justice but supplies the foundations for justice. He then suggests that this requires thinking about justice in a very different way, one which gives it a much more modest place in our thinking about political order generally. Kukathas concludes with some wider reflections on where this leaves Rainer Forst’s conception of justice as the right to justification.

Between 1389 and 1413, the powers and composition of the commissions of the peace underwent a series of changes. This chapter examines the strength of these reservations against the evidence available for the membership and activity of the commissions of the peace in the three Ridings of Yorkshire during the majority rule of Richard II and the reign of Henry IV. It discusses the personnel of each of these categories and defines the part each played in the work of the Yorkshire justices of the peace. Among the general observations, the first concerns the respective attitudes of the rulers towards the self-regarding local sentiment embodied in the parliamentary Commons' aspirations to control the county bench. A second general observation concerns the opposition between central government and local autonomy, royal authority and gentry independence.

This chapter explores writings on Stalin’s life, time and personality. It shows how biographies of the dictator often served as vehicles for social and cultural, political and economic histories of Stalinism. It traces the development of a canon of works on Stalin, mutual influences between scholars and their works, and processes of learning and forgetting between the 1930s and the 2010s.

Until challenged by evolution, Christians believed on excellent biblical authority that the ‘nations of men’ were God’s creation and that there were no fundamental divisions between them. From this it followed that all the extraordinary cultural diversity exhibited by the peoples of the world as revealed by European explorers disguised an essential unity; despite appearances to the contrary, they were ‘one blood’. This chapter considers the efforts made by missionary linguists to bolster biblical narratives by demonstrating that the languages of the world could be traced to the descendants of the three sons of Noah (Genesis 10). In particular, it examines the work of the Scottish-born schoolmaster Dr John Fraser (1834–1904), who sought to prove the Hamitic origins of the Australian Aborigines and their affinity to the Dravidian peoples of southern India. Fraser’s views were published as part of his 1892 edition of the works of the missionary linguist Lancelot Threlkeld (1788–1859), though modern commentators have found his biblical genealogy for the Australian Aborigines to be distracting, if not bizarre. This chapter demonstrates that Fraser’s worldview fits him firmly within a well-defined intellectual tradition that used language to demonstrate the Judaeo-Christian foundations of the whole world.

This chapter defines the three core concepts on which the subsequent analysis of the book rests: nationalism, Euroscepticism and the Anglosphere. Written in the shadow of Brexit, it shows how these three political ideas are inter-related and mutually reinforcing. A defence of British sovereignty has historically conditioned English nationalism. This inflects it with wider categories of belonging than the English nation itself, notably those English-speaking countries of the Anglosphere, whilst aligning it closely with Euroscepticism. The chapter goes on to outline the argument that understandings of English nationalism have been conceptually underdeveloped in their application to the outcome of the Brexit referendum in 2016 and the subsequent politics of withdrawal.

The Conclusion discusses the failure of what Carter had envisioned as a virtuous circle between the human rights campaign and bipolar détente. It argues that the rationale for such a failure was threefold. First, the White House underestimated Soviet resistance to the human rights campaign. Second, the domestic consensus for a human rights-based foreign policy was illusory, precarious and short-lived. Finally, Carter’s strategy was based on a negotiation process with partners – the Soviet Union and American opponents of détente – who had no interest in negotiating on their counterparts’ terms.

The chapter focuses on 1978, when the Carter administration’ decided to discuss Soviet violations of human rights through quiet diplomacy and private channels. The chapter explains this shift through a twofold rationale. First, it argues that the administration was satisfied with the early achievements of its campaign. Moving human rights from open to quiet diplomacy would strengthen both what the White House identified as positive trends in the Soviet record on human rights and the conclusion of SALT II negotiations. Second, the Carter administration tried to confine human rights to backchannels to address growing protests within the United States. To many liberals within the United States, the human rights campaign was becoming a new anti-Soviet crusade. This shift, however, occurred at a time when the Soviets condemned many prominent dissidents and the White House left its flank exposed to conservative critics, who accused the White House of being too soft on Soviet violations of human rights.

This chapter explores the ways in which historians have engaged with the peasantry chiefly as tenants, and especially in terms of the relationship between lord and peasant-tenants. This concentration on lord-tenant relations has sometimes narrowed the historical focus to dwell upon sub-sets of the peasantry. An original intention of historical discussion of rent was to chart the development of serfdom, with a view to exploring the origins of servility in medieval England. Rodney Hilton suggests that evidence for class-consciousness amongst the medieval peasantry can be detected in their resistance and their claims against their lords. Hilton in particular, and Robert Brenner as a later contributor, were both engaged in what has been referred to as the 'transition debate', a longstanding discussion of the processes that explain change in the European economy and which sought to identify a primacy of causes for that change.

This chapter is probably more empirical than Susan Reynolds would like, but the author hopes that its attempt to search for the less visible members of urban society will meet with her approval. Her belief in the essential reasonableness of medieval men and women, and in their ability to act in their own best interests, has been a constant corrective and inspiration. It is in the nature of the surviving records to reveal most about those who were most conspicuous: in the case of London those who became aldermen or held other civic office. Such men were almost always wealthy and it is their views and priorities which may be most easily discerned in the surviving records. The wards of medieval London may have been both political and affective units within the complex jigsaw of civic government.

The earlier Middle Ages are generally thought of as a period when there was no such thing as equality. Nevertheless, parity, however circumscribed by particularity, is attested in enough contexts, and in sufficiently many terms, to demand serious attention as an aspect of social relations and political thinking in the earlier Middle Ages. This chapter focuses on the period before 900, though it is gazed occasionally. In Philippe Buc's L'Ambiguïté du livre, there is a striking insistence both on the role of the Bible as a source of legitimacy in the Middle Ages, and on the possibility of egalitarian readings of Holy Writ. Not that Buc means 'egalitarian' in the universalistic sense of the Enlightenment. But he notes that for some twelfth-century Bible commentators, ecclesiastical authority was legitimately and normally wielded by local clergy rather than the pope.

This chapter recounts the life, times, works and influence of Sheila Fitzpatrick, a major historian of Stalinism. It describes her formation as a scholar in a unique Australian milieu, her secondary socialization in 1960s Moscow, and her career in the UK, the United States and Australia. One of the great innovators in her field, Fitzpatrick not only made a major contribution to the professionalization of Soviet history, she also trained one of the largest cohorts of younger historians of Stalinism.