The role of central banks has always evolved in response to political and economic events. In 2015, when the UN Agenda 2030 and the Paris Agreement were signed, awareness of the importance of climate change and other sustainability risks for their mandates began to grow in the central banking community. Physical risks and transition risks can act as powerful channels impacting banks’ businesses and balance sheets and the economy more broadly, affecting both price and financial stability. Laying the analytical groundwork for the following chapters of the book, this chapter embeds their recent concern for sustainability risks and policies in the dynamic role central banks have played historically. It also discusses how central banks have coordinated their policies internationally, such as through the Network for Greening the Financial System and the Financial Stability Board. While climate change and climate-related risks have been dominating these policies, central banks have started shifting their attention also towards other aspects of environmental sustainability, including biodiversity loss. Aspects of social sustainability have received significantly less attention in central banking policy circles. However, the potentially dis-equalizing side effects of extended periods of quantitative easing have fostered central banks’ interest in the inequality dynamics of monetary policy.

This chapter begins with the Phenomenology’s brief critique of Kantian moral theory. Hegel credits Kant with reconciling the objective validity of rational criteria with their status as self-authored, while failing to make good on his own insight. Since, on Hegel’s diagnosis, Kant’s conception of the will is a reified abstraction from social ‘actuality’, he assigns it a spurious self-sufficiency, leading to an unsatisfactory picture of the nature of practical reason. The chapter then turns to Hegel’s strategy for undoing this conception, namely by traveling the two paths Kant opened up but did not take. Taking the first path means appreciating that rational criteria cannot have their basis in features of the individual agent considered in isolation; instead, criteria must be those agents can act upon in institutional actuality while still recognising themselves as their authors. Taking the second entails seeing resistance and alienation as productive phenomena, symptoms not of structural deficits of the human will, but of conflicts between what freedom seems to demand at a given socio-historical juncture and what it really does. Taking both paths, therefore, entails a recognition that what counts as respectively internal and external to free subjectivity is subject to both synchronic and diachronic variation.

The following book is motivated by two primary questions, each of which is familiar – doubtless all-too familiar – and yet somehow enduringly puzzling. The first is the matter of what Hegel does and does not accept of the core of Kant’s practical philosophy, specifically his theory of freedom. On the one hand, Hegel’s teachings about morality, right and ethics are unthinkable without those of his predecessor. To remove any doubts about this, one need only take a look at the opening paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right,1 which clearly show Hegel attempting to appropriate the crux of Kant’s notion of autonomy – while studiously avoiding that term, to be sure – in his own distinctive fashion. In these passages, freedom is presented as the essence of the will, with the consequence, we are supposedly shown, that the will is normatively constrained to will a specific content, namely its own freedom.

More and more supervisors embark on the climate stress testing journey, which is still, even though progress has been made over the last years, new ground for supervisors and financial institutions alike. Good practices and practical guidelines are a crucial element for the industry to further progress and align on climate stress testing practices. This chapter provides an overview of key design considerations for climate stress testing and their differences from traditional stress testing, whereby the focus is on conducting such exercises for supervisory (i.e., microprudential) and institution-specific purposes.

The chapter analyses how the climate change action plan developed by the European Central Bank (ECB) as part of its monetary policy strategy review in 2020-2021 is aligned with the ECB’s mandate set out in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the Treaty on European Union. The Treaties require the ECB to integrate climate change considerations into its monetary policy and to contribute to the EU’s objectives regarding climate change, as established by Regulation (EU) 2021/1119, the European Climate Law. However, there are also legal limits on the action the ECB can take in this field. The chapter examines the key measures proposed as part of the plan from a legal perspective, including measures related to macroeconomic forecasts and models, the collection of statistical information for climate change risk analysis, the enhancement of risk assessment capabilities, asset purchase programmes, and possible changes to the collateral framework. It also considers the questions regarding the ECB’s democratic legitimacy and accountability that arise in this context.

In independent Ireland, civil war threat receded in 1927 when Eamon de Valera led his anti-Treaty party, Fianna Fáil, into the Dáil, the lower, elected house of the Free State’s bicameral parliament. The pro-Treaty parties were Fine Gael and the Labour Party. Various short-lived parties challenged the supremacy of the Big Three over the decades. There was investment in infrastructure (electricity, transport, agriculture, food processing) and native industry flourished from the 1930s to the 1950s behind high tariff walls, but unemployment and emigration persisted. Health care was improved from the mid-1940s. The Catholic Church exercised huge power.

In Northern Ireland unionists’ majority led to systematic discrimination against Catholics (assumed nationalist) in elections, employment and housing. Economically, apart from the Second World War, Northern Ireland experienced decline but it shared in the social benefits of postwar Britain.

The 1960s brought more questioning of authority of all kinds, all over the island. In independent Ireland, new-found prosperity removed the safety-valve of emigration and free secondary education improved opportunities. Living standards rose. In the North, Catholic dissatisfaction was expressed in civil rights demonstrations which outraged unionists, and the British army was called in to maintain order.

This chapter begins the work of showing how the Phenomenology effects a transition from Kantian to Hegelian theodicy. It begins with Hegel’s exposition of self-consciousness, since this sets the terms for his subsequent analyses. Indeed, the famous ‘Self-Consciousness’ chapter thematises the very possibility of criteria of goodness by unfolding elementary structures of human autonomy. The chapter then turns to Hegel’s developmental account of Kant’s understanding of freedom as autonomy, which functions simultaneously as a critique: he presents Kant’s practical thought as the result of a progressive, rational development, while also diagnosing it as the product of a series of abstractions and reifications, whereby Kant conflates his insight into the nature of freedom with a certain methodologically individualistic metaphysics of the human being. The chapter focuses on the first of three key phases in the Phenomenology that engage with Kantian theodicy and its underlying view of the will, namely the somewhat satirical presentation of ‘Virtue’, which Hegel classifies as a shape of ‘Reason’. By charting the interrelated views of goodness and the will that produce and are produced by ‘Virtue’, we can uncover a developmental logical that leads to the Kantian idea of freedom as self-authorship.

To make a start on understanding what a ‘Hegelian theodicy’ might be, this chapter begins by examining Hegel’s brief but obscure discussion of the ‘Idea of the good’ towards the culmination of the Science of Logic. By expounding the notion of autonomous volition, this section not only contains an explicit critique of Kantian theodicy and its paradoxical consequences, but contains some of Hegel’s own most theodical language, outlining how overcoming the Kantian standpoint enables a correct understanding of the relation between what is and what ought to be. Claiming that the Kantian paradoxes result from the will’s taking a faulty stance towards itself, he notes that he has already explained how the will undergoes the necessary process of self-correction in the final section of the chapter on ‘Spirit’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In order to be in a position to take up this hint, the chapter then turns to explaining the method of the Phenomenology, understood both as a preparatory theodicy, a propaedeutic to ‘true science’, and as a text that exemplifies ‘Hegelian theodicy’ in its own right.

The discourse and trials revolving around Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) stem from substantial shifts and advancements within the financial landscape of the past decade. Emerging within the broader sphere of Fintech, these technological strides, often linked to disruptive innovations, have been championed by entrepreneurs aiming to drive essential progress towards universal financial inclusion. Notably, initiatives like Libra Coin, once spearheaded by the now-defunct Libra Consortium, were specifically geared towards fostering financial inclusion globally, especially within economies grappling with inefficient payment infrastructures. Amid the surge of CBDC projects in response to private global stablecoins, a critical query arises: do they genuinely enhance financial inclusion compared to traditional fiat currencies reliant on established public-private payment frameworks? This chapter navigates this dilemma by scrutinizing pivotal attributes of CBDCs and the spectrum of design choices accessible to central bankers and governments. It addresses key challenges confronting CBDCs in advancing financial inclusion, analyzes potential alternatives to CBDCs — specifically, instant payment systems — and contextualizes CBDCs within the broader challenge of preserving the centrality of central banks and fostering financial inclusion. This assessment also considers the issues associated with upholding democratic values.

The Irish at the dawn of the twentieth century benefitted from many positive changes over the previous half-century in health care, education and social provision, and were (in general, apart from urban slums) among the healthiest in Europe. The new dynamic trade unionism reached Ireland in the 1890s and formed a combustible force when combined with the non-parliamentary nationalisms and feminism of the early century. These all culminated in the 1916 Rising, which usurped the parliamentary nationalism of the Home Rule Party and rapidly assumed leadership of nationalist Ireland. Unionists continued to oppose national self-determination in all its forms. The state of Northern Ireland was set up by the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which also set up a state in the ‘south’. This was superseded by the War for Independence 1919–1921, which culminated in a Treaty with Britain which gave dominion status to the Irish Free State, comprising twenty-six of the thirty-two counties. A civil war followed 1922–1923, between pro- and anti-Treatyites.

Over 100,000 Irishmen from all over the country served in the Great War, and 40,000 died. The war brought great prosperity to farmers and shopkeepers, industrialists and food processors, though rising food prices took their toll of townspeople.

Chapter 2 examines two specific religious events in remote cultural settings: the Jewish settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron and the Hindu destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, India. The chapter argues that existing theories of religious violence or aggression do not account for both the specificity of each of these events nor form a basis for a proper comparison. Instead, the chapter shows that both the religious Zionists and the Hindu nationalists are responding to a sharp internal dissonance within their own religious systems, and the aggressive actions can be compared as an attempted mitigation of dissonance.