Describes Meade’s and his colleagues’ early efforts to plan for the postwar world.

Sarah Wambaugh was technical advisor to the Peruvian delegation during the 1925-26 Tacna-Arica plebiscite, contested between Chile and Peru. Although the United States was to lead the plebiscite as a neutral arbiter, the fact that the territory was under the control of Chile, which had seized the region several generations earlier, would ultimately lead to the plebiscite being abandoned. Wambaugh would witness first-hand the violence and futility of the attempted plebiscite, made more galling because women were not allowed to vote, all of which fired her with determination to ensure that future plebiscites would not suffer the same results. Consequently, it was in Tacna-Arica that she began to systematically analyse the post-war plebiscites and distil normative conclusions for their future use. These normative prescriptions would be honed by her in the coming years, culminating in a list of eighteen points contained in her important 1933 work on the post-war plebiscites.

Chapter 9 continues to explicate Machiavelli’s theory of the state in the Discorsi, showing how he avails himself of many of the conceptual materials whose place in his earlier thinking has now been observed. It illustrates how Machiavelli continues to conceptualize the state as a body and to understand the work of state formation as an aesthetic process which involves carefully shaping its human material, although he now tracks that process across the course of centuries in a complex account of the phenomenon of corruption within the career of the Roman state. The chapter also underlines how Machiavelli continues to insist that benefits are a powerful way of generating obligations to the state, although he is now noticeably more concerned about the effects of ingratitude upon beneficiaries who are prone to forget or renege upon their debts. And, as the chapter further emphasizes, he continues to maintain that those who hold office within the state should not be mistaken for representative figures in any capacity whatsoever. This point raises a fundamental problem in how to construe his overall theory: is the state a person as well as a body? The chapter culminates in an attempt to resolve this complex question.

Describes the British government’s ‘Meade Mission’ to the island of Mauritius and its subsequent report.

The final decade of Sarah Wambaugh’s life would see her appointed technical advisor to the allied-run mission to observe the sensitive Greek elections of 1946, as well as to the soon abandoned plebiscite in Kashmir several years later. However, in Greece Wambaugh’s expertise now stood in contrast to new scientific sampling techniques, while she would keep silent about the fact that women were not allowed to vote, in a bid to support the anti-communists who won the election. Meanwhile her normative rules for the plebiscite would be dispensed with as not culturally relevant by those planning the vote in Kashmir. The chapter ends with an examination of the first UN plebiscite actually held, in British Togoland in 1956, and with the 1955 referendum on the proposal to turn the Saar into a Europeanised territory. Both operations eschewed many of the heavy normative principles which Wambaugh had developed for the plebiscite.

I met Robert Aumann (*1930) in his office at the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The place has an interesting architecture; it is a square building with a large opening in the middle, so everyone could basically see everyone else’s office, enabling a lot of interaction. The green plants in the building nicely complemented the brown wood, together giving the feeling of comfort. Aumann’s office was located in a central spot in the building. When I entered, he sat behind his desk, surrounded by hundreds of books and papers. Rather small, but with a long white beard and a black suit, he nearly blended in with the shelves. Throughout the whole interview, Aumann remained friendly but at the same time notably affirmative, clearly having strong views – particularly on the status and relevance of game theory not only as a scholarly enterprise but also a basis for political advice and ultimately as a tool to support one’s political views.