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.

It is widely known that the ancient Greek language distinguished three main kinds of love. With the exception of one sustained discussion that I consider carefully, friendship receives scarcely a handful of references in its own right in Works of Love, for it is usually lumped together with erotic (or romantic) love – “and friendship” is the phrase used to conjoin philia to eros as a kind of afterthought, and this occurs dozens of times in Kierkegaard’s tremendous yet maddening 1847 text. Incessantly, the flaws of philia are declared in Works of Love to be exactly the same as the flaws of eros. For the most part, that leaves no room for a consideration of friendship itself. My chapter seeks to remedy this neglect, turning to Kierkegaard’s example of Jesus’s love for Peter.

But apart from perhaps the national income estimates, he is remembered more for his academic work, especially his role in the 1930/1 ‘Cambridge Circus’ which set John Maynard Keynes on the path to his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), the first Keynesian textbook in economics; his contribution to the enquiries of the Oxford Economists Research Group; and his 1950s work on the theory of international economic policy, which won him a Nobel Prize in 1977, as well as a long series of academic articles and 30 books. This biography tells the story of his involvement in policymaking as well as the development of his more theoretical work in economics.

The Introduction examines the historiography of the idea of the state in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Machiavellian scholarship. It analyses the empirical and methodological problems associated with this specialist literature, before then outlining a new way of reconstructing Machiavelli’s theory of lo stato – and of interpreting it as the very crux of his political philosophy – by laying out a new intellectual basis upon which to reorient our present understanding of the foundations of Machiavelli’s conceptualization of the state from his earliest writings onwards. It draws new attention to the formative role in Renaissance political discourse of a sequence of theories – subsequently discussed in each chapter of Part I of the book – which were drawn from classical Roman political, moral, rhetorical, and aesthetic thought and which came to shape decisively Machiavelli’s own theory. And it forwards the contention, substantiated in detail in Part II, that his theory underwent two redactions, first in The Prince and then in the Discourses. The Introduction closes by broaching the crucial question of whether, in classifying Machiavelli as a singularly pioneering theorist of the state in the early modern period, we should also see him as a theorist of state personality.

This chapter delves into the United States’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, with a specific focus on Indigenous sovereignty and economic rights. It begins by introducing the topic and setting the context for the discussion by providing a history of the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the legal framework, with an emphasis on the series of cases dubbed the Marshall Trilogy. This includes the struggles and advancements in recognizing tribal nation sovereignty and economic rights. It examines the recognition and affirmation of tribal nation sovereignty within the United States, including legal developments and court decisions that have shaped Indigenous self-governance. This chapter analyses the landmark case of McGirt v. Oklahoma, emphasizing its role in addressing past legal injustices, establishing tribal reservation boundaries, and strengthening tribal jurisdiction. It also investigates US tribal sovereignty in the context of international Indigenous trade, showcasing the ways in which Indigenous communities engage in economic activities and exercise their sovereignty on the global stage.

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.

Between 1830 and 1860, new conceptions of moral complicity sparked fierce debates in the United States. Reformers, religious authorities, novelists, market activists, and politicians zealously spelled out how moral liability flowed across legal systems, commercial networks, conspiracies, and political structures. The Introduction begins by illuminating the religious roots of this activist discourse. Then it outlines gendered threads of northern complicity critique, especially the focus on urban sexual vice, and plumbs abolitionism’s preoccupation with thickening social ties and causal webs that connected individuals and institutions to remote and widely distributed evils. Finally, an overview of the book’s chapters introduces key concepts such as moral ensembles, organic sin, tolerance complicity, moral taint, the Black market, and democratic complicity. Throughout, the Introduction highlights how complicity critics adapted old imaginative grammars and developed new ones to capture new forms of moral enmeshment and convey their dynamics and dangers.

The chapter argues that the British gothic is not, as has been assumed, the beginning of the gothic as such, but a response to the local effects of transregional capitalist modernisation. The chapter observes that this history was not only financed by enslavement in the Atlantic world, it was accompanied by a pervasive and fundamentally destructive understanding of racial categories that British gothic writing negotiated. Exploring this entangled material and ideological history, the chapter first analyses late eighteen-century British gothic written at a time when the nation was flush with the spoils of enslavement in the Atlantic world. The chapter then discusses how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), conceived in the wake of slave-led revolution and uprisings in the Caribbean, abolition concerns, increased industrialisation and escalating industrial action, forges a racialised body around which notions of whiteness can take shape. In the final section, the chapter explores fin de siècle imperial gothic texts that testify to a New Imperialism by registering the increasingly anxious construction of racial identity that attended transregional capitalism at the time.

Abraham Lincoln's political writings were the works of a practical politician, not a political philosopher. Yet, his understanding of American politics was deeply informed by wide and penetrating reading in 19th century liberal political economy. This reading convinced him to be a determined opponent of slavery, and a vigorous promoter of henry clay's 'American system.' both of these programs retained their hold on Lincoln, and when, after his election to the presidency of the United States in 1860, the republic was plunged into civil war over slavery, Lincoln guided the nation toward the erasure of legalized slavery and to an economy favourable to commerce and manufacturing. His victory in the civil war, cut short by his assassination in 1865, nevertheless changed the political culture of the nation for the next sixty years, and set the country on the slow but inexorable path of civil equality for the freed slaves.

Anglophone Arthurian films (including television) continually restage the triumphant break from the medieval that serves as the constitutive myth of origin for modernity.  The divinely appointed absolute monarch (Arthur) returns, but only to figure a sovereignty invested in the people.  Medieval Arthurian narratives explore the nature and exercise of political authority, providing ideological legitimacy for political institutions and defining the individual’s obligations within those institutions.  This chapter examines how modern Anglophone film and television remediate Arthurian legends, projecting contemporary notions of sovereignty back onto the Middle Ages.

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.

This chapter will explore, for the first time, the existence, development and characteristics of a Latin American corpus of contemporary Arthurian literature (nineteenth to twenty-first century), written both in Spanish and Portuguese. So far, the collection and study of texts from the Latin-speaking nations of North, Central and South America (Latin America) has remained unexplored. This chapter will show that this area has suffered from unjust neglect; there is, therefore, an urgency to fill this gap in Arthurian studies. Arthur, Merlin and Isolde are found in the tropical lands of Mexico or the great plains of central Brazil, and their stories were added to local motifs; they add new meanings for different communities of readers. Latin American children and younger readers were equally fond of Arthur – as much as young readers elsewhere.

This chapter discusses both motivations and choice mechanisms that underly how people make strategic choices. It lists multiple areas where our understanding could benefit from closer study. About the early work by Tversky and Kahneman on framing (i.e., the dependence of human choice behavior on different presentations of what to rational agents should be irrelevant factors), it concludes that one must make a choice between normative adequacy and descriptive accuracy. Concerning recent work on reciprocity, it argues that players’ reactions to, for instance, kind acts may lead to volatile behavior in settings with noise, whereas reciprocity toward perceived kind types can be more forgiving and result in more stable reciprocal relations.