Macron’s political leadership appeared as a successful political construction after his first year in office, one more successful than that of most of his predecessors. There were three main reasons for this. First, in terms of individual attributes, there appeared to be a better fit between Macron and the office of the French presidency than was the case for his two immediate predecessors. Second, during his first year in office, Emmanuel Macron invested the presidency – an established but rather tired political office – with renewed energy and strengthened its central position amongst institutions. Third, during the first year in office, the combination of a dynamic leadership and a strengthened office enhanced the position of President Macron in terms of the macro-level: hence the ability to conceive of European, international and global economic pressures not simply as external constraints, but also as a set of domestic opportunities. The first year in office offered a relatively rare period of leadership coherence. By the end of this period, however, there were some signs of diminishing leadership returns and unresolved tensions.

In the early years of the tenth century several Anglo-Saxon royal women, all daughters of King Edward the Elder of Wessex (899-924) and sisters (or half-sisters) of his son King Athelstan (924-39), were despatched across the Channel as brides for Frankish and Saxon rulers and aristocrats. This chapter addresses the fate of some of these women through an analysis of their political identities. In particular, it is concerned with the ways by which they sought to exercise power in kingdoms where they were outsiders. By directing attention to the outsider status of Athelstan's sisters, the chapter maps out some of the contours of queens' power in tenth-century Francia, identifying differences between them as well as similarities. It explores what it meant for Eadgifu that so many of her sisters were married to the continental big hitters of the day.

Chapters 1 and 2 set out the main message of the book: policy-makers should experiment to find out the most effective way of encouraging better citizen behaviour. This chapter discusses nudge and think in some depth. Reviewing the associated literature, it explores the assumptions underlying the two strategies, and asks what nudge and think can bring to the challenge of stimulating citizen behaviour. It also engages with normative questions about whether the state or other public agencies should nudge citizens or encourage them to think.

This chapter describes the events on polling day, and the statistics relating to voter turnout and to the number of yes votes. The results are examined and an assessment of how the people’s decision was finally implemented into law follows.

In her response to Rainer Forst’s lead essay, Melissa S. Williams interrogates Forst’s account of morality through an empirical and historical analysis of the actions by which human agents establish moral and just relations between themselves. She challenges the idea that all moral practices of reciprocal respect can be reduced to practices of justification. ‘Prefigurative’ practices such as those employed by Gandhi and various Indigenous movements entail a turning away from a politics of justification and critique addressed to the dominating agent, and a turning towards those whose solidarity one seeks in constructing and enacting an alternative ethical form of life based on relationships of egalitarian reciprocity. Such approaches begin from the understanding that practices of reason, and especially social practices of reason-giving and reason-demanding, and of recognising others as rational subjects, are never innocent of power relations. Forst may respond that his theory acknowledges the role of power in constituting the subjects who are capable of recognising one another as equal agents of justification, but this leaves unanswered the question of what agents are doing when they interrupt discursive practices of justification by substituting non-discursive performances of egalitarian respect within cooperative relationship.

A more useful way of approaching success or failure is to view peacemaking and diplomacy as a web of different relationships that contributed to ultimate success or failure. Successful peacemaking in the twelfth century was, in many ways, more about how to make peace than it was about the longevity of the terms of individual agreements. Peacemaking involving the Danish kings further shows that the principles and practice altered slightly over the course of the medieval period. War in the medieval period broke out because participants thought that they had more to gain from war than from keeping the peace. The notion that successful peacemaking in the Viking period rested on a shared concept of peace through Christianity, achieved mainly through sponsorship at baptism or at confirmation, is a well-attested phenomenon in early medieval Europe.

This chapter provides a theoretical framework for defining liberalism and its features, criticizing prevailing attitudes in Western historiography, and reframing Arab liberalism.

Sir Walter Ralegh mentions Mandeville twice: once in The Discoverie of Guiana and again in The History of the World. Like anthropologists later, he considers the 'fables' of The Travels as meaningful narratives that can be explained rationally, and it is no surprise that his reading of the Acephali was current until the nineteenth century. This chapter discusses an example of the Acephali that shows how by resorting to an early source Ralegh manages to distance himself from the iconographical and fabulous tradition. Ralegh's travel narrative is based on epistemological strategies that adumbrate in many ways the Baconian method, even if it is a far cry from the factual objectivity of the Royal Society experimentalists. Critics have often dismisses Ralegh as a mere dabbler in natural history and travel literature, but Ralegh is one of the finest readers and interpreters of his time, capable of mastering very distinct hermeneutic systems.

This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The part considers the ways in which the historical study of the medieval English peasantry has, after its first stirrings, tended to be confined within three broad themes. These main themes have become associated with a more all-encompassing discussion of change in the medieval economy. So, historians have tended to see the economy as driven by one of or a combination of the following 'supermodels': population movement and its determining factors, the demands and constraints of the seigneurial economy and of resistance to the same, and the development of commerce and the market. The part suggests that a population-driven model, associated especially with the writing of M.M. Postan, was highly influential in the third quarter of the twentieth century but lost significant ground to a more 'commercial model' during the 1980s.

Medieval Jewish society saw itself as being under siege in a struggle for survival within a Christian population that abounded with threats and temptations, both economic and intellectual. In sources written by the Jews in the first generation following the attack on the Jewish communities in the year 1096, emphasis was laid on the Jewish woman's readiness to lead religious resistance to the death, together with her unswerving devotion to Jewish values. The change in the status of the woman manifested itself in at least three significant ways; in her economic-legal status, in her status within the family and in her social standing. Starting in the twelfth century, a woman stepping down from her bridal canopy was a woman of a new and different status. The women also succeeded in bypassing an almost impossible obstacle in regard to study and education.