This chapter explores the contributions of social and personality psychologists to the development of Cold War liberal philosophy and social theory. Psychologists helped to define “totalitarianism,” one of the central concepts of Cold War liberalism, as an expression of individual psychopathology – a result of the failure of people in a given society to develop a coherent, healthy sense of self. This state of psychological health, the antidote to totalitarianism, was often referred to as the “productive” character or personality and was defined by an individual’s capacity to express their selfhood in creative work. Cold War liberals identified myriad techniques to promote the productive character and discourage totalitarian psychopathology, including social-democratic policymaking, new childrearing methods, and the practice of both scientific research and spiritual searching. They also sought to develop productive characters in the supposedly psychologically immature societies of the postcolonial world, an elite-driven approach to social and economic development that laid the groundwork for the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the late twentieth century. The productive, anti-totalitarian personality, argued many Cold War liberal development experts and their neoliberal and neoconservative successors, was an entrepreneurial personality, the psychic wellspring of economic growth.

This chapter examines the influence of Cold War liberalism on Mexican public intellectual Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) between the Cuban Revolution and the end of the Cold War. Fuentes’ ideological trajectory from social democracy to neoliberalism mirrored that of many other Latin American intellectuals and was the result of two distinct factors: Cold War liberalism’s late arrival to Latin America and internal divisions within the Latin American left over the Cuban Revolution, the “dirty wars,” and the economic malaise of the long 1970s. In particular, Fuentes’ political writings show how the elitist drive of Cold War liberalism facilitated the ascent of neoliberalism by reframing political debate around the proper limits of state power rather than social transformation.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union shifted from supporting Israel’s creation to viewing Jewish nationalism – and the presumed potential loyalty of Soviet Jews to a foreign state – as a political threat. In Soviet Moldavia, as elsewhere in the USSR, this led to a crackdown on Jewish cultural institutions and individuals, including Yiddish writers and intellectuals seen as fostering nationalist sentiment. Soviet security forces carried out purges, interrogations, and arrests, targeting those deemed politically unreliable or connected to foreign Jewish organizations. This chapter examines the repression of Moldavian Yiddish writers and the persecution of Jews identified as former members of interwar Zionist organizations in Romania. Some were arrested, while others lost their positions as the Soviet state abandoned its earlier support for Yiddish culture. The closure of Jewish institutions and the quiet spread of information about purges –despite official secrecy – deeply unsettled Soviet Jews, eroding even the confidence and loyalty of those most committed to the regime.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the key contributions of game theory to the field of cultural evolution, focusing particularly on interfaces between cultural evolution and economics. Because many readers may not be familiar with the interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution, it begins with a brief orientation to this field as a scientific enterprise and then highlights the important ways that game theory has been deployed in both theoretical and empirical research within the field, noting spillovers and interactions with economics.

Historians of early twentieth-century British and American literary modernism have often portrayed the public sphere as a space that facilitates mass deception. Indeed, the Freudian psychoanalytic model upon which such arguments depend dominates accounts of modernist responses to advertising, propaganda, and mass media. Such representations overlook the significance of William James as a theorizer of a pluralistic public sphere. Based on an understanding of the self as a distributed aggregate of competing “selves” and private and public allegiances, James and an American modernist cohort saw the public sphere as likewise composed of plural, distributed entities. Confronted by a culture of group-think, crowd contagion, and global fascism, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Walter Lippmann, and Katherine Anne Porter deployed a Jamesian variety of civic modernism based upon an ethics of estrangement, in which the internally conflicted “sick soul” is the means of both psychic and civic regeneration.

Chapter 5 addresses these weaknesses by combining STS with sociological systems theory, which provides a persuasive account of law in society, but has been criticised as technology-blind. This does not mean, however, that systems theory lacks the means to conceptualise the interface between the materiality of a distribution medium (e.g. the Internet) and the sociality of communicative systems (e.g. law), since structural coupling provides the means to explain how operatively closed systems can relate to each other, e.g. the sphere of technical materiality (the technosystem) and the sphere of communicative sociality (society and its subsystems). A separation between the material and the social is the prerequisite for adopting a critical or normative position vis-à-vis digital media, enabling us to empirically study the diverse interrelations between the two spheres in online communication. To do so, technologies must be understood as artefacts possessing affordances, that is possibilities and constraints, raising the question of how digital technologies acquire affordances. The final question concerns the concept of normativity in the digital ecosphere, namely whether normative expectations about digital technologies can emerge. Since normative expectations structure the legal system, our answer will explain the nature of the structural coupling between law and technology.

Explains both conceptually and historically the project of the book, which is to integrate Jewish tradition with analytic philosophy. It identifies the various forms that Jewish philosophy has taken, as well as the methods and source materials with which it is pursued in this book.

Commencing with the allegorical adaptations and politicisations of Arthurian settings that arose in the wake of the 1688 Revolution, this chapter examines several discrete modes of literary Arthurianism across the long eighteenth century. As Britain formed around them, eighteenth-century English-language writers adapted the character of Arthur to new aesthetic tastes and modified the Arthurian story to suit emergent modes of story-telling, reshaping the vales of the Arthurian myth according to their own cultural and political concerns. The chapter explores the ways in which Arthur was increasingly embroiled in contested debates about English nationhood and English/British national identity whilst also tracing the evolution of the Arthurian legends into a wider Arthurian ‘mythos’ in which the overarching culture, settings, structures, symbols and themes of the Arthurian world became as significant as the individual figures and narratives featured within them.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.