The game metatheorem was recently developed by the author to simplify various constructions in computable structure theory that involve zero-to-the-alpha priority arguments for transfinite alpha. It is a powerful tool, that allows the user to produce proves without worrying about the inctricate combinatorics of approximations to Sigma-alpha sets.

Most of the material in this chapter is from basic analysis and probability courses. Key concepts and results are recalled here, including convexity, norms and inner products, random variables and random vectors, union bound, conditioning, basic inequalities (Jensen, Minkowski, Cauchy–Schwarz, Hölder, Markov, and Chebyshev), the integrated tail formula, the law of large numbers, the central limit theorem, normal and Poisson distributions, and handy bounds on the factorial.

A large share of individuals deviates from self-interested behavior in many paradigmatic games, but in many other strategic situations almost all individuals behave in a self-interested manner. Models with heterogeneous social preferences provide a unifying understanding for these seemingly contradictory facts by focusing on the interaction between agents with other-regarding and selfish preferences. This focus explains why and when selfish agents behave as if they were other-regarding, as well as to why and when other-regarding agents behave as if they were selfish. This focus also helps understand (1) the importance of seemingly irrelevant institutional details, (2) the role of contractual incompleteness for the behavioral relevance of social preferences, (3) the role of social preferences for the prevalence of contractual incompleteness, and (4) why social preferences are an important component in explaining key characteristics of the employment relation. More recent evidence suggests that the empirical distribution of social preferences can be parsimoniously characterized by a small number of preference types which also have out-of-sample predictive power for important behaviors such as the demand for politically enforced redistribution.

Even with emancipation firmly in view as a goal of ending the civil war, Lincoln had to struggle against unsuccessful and even uncooperative generals and officers, and against public opinion which was inflamed by the sensational arrests of prominent anti-war democratic dissidents. Through 1863, his public utterances and writings were aimed at explaining the overall object of the war and justifying actions he had taken to pursue that object. Nevertheless, he was willing to listen to peace overtures, and even to meet with commissioners from the confederacy. But there were moments of discouragement, particularly when it seemed that he might not gain re-election to the presidency. Those fears were largely dispelled by the military successes of Ulysses s. Grant, and Lincoln was able to proceed to a triumphant conclusion of the military campaigns in 1865.

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.

In the 1990s, the humanitarian charities finalised their entry into the development mainstream. They became partners in a humanitarian-development complex associated with military intervention, liberal governance and permanent emergency. As they followed in the wake of more powerful agencies, they also adopted the rhetoric and discourses of official aid. Following the collapse of both communism and apartheid, human rights were confirmed as the guiding principle of international governance. Charity regulation had previously prevented the advocacy of human rights. But after the Declaration on the Right to Development in 1993, the charities all signed up to a ‘rights-based approach’. This was a human rights framework more individualised, more focused on basic rights and less targeted at the inequalities arising out of structural injustice. Rights allowed the humanitarians to depoliticise their work and for charity to be accepted as a part of the common sense solution to poverty at home and abroad. This was a type of charitable humanitarianism that emerged ‘after empire’ and which was palatable to both governments and mass donating publics.

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.

Contemporary constitutional theorists typically assume that a system of constitutional adjudication inevitably stands in tension with a majoritarian understanding of democracy. Kelsen’s influential defence of constitutional review, by contrast, goes along with an affirmation of a procedural and majoritarian understanding of democracy. Did Kelsen fail to spot the supposed conflict between constitutional review and democracy? Or did he identify a solution to the counter-majoritarian difficulty? Michel Troper has vigorously argued that Kelsen’s defence of constitutional review is confused and fails to cohere with his conception of democracy. This chapter defends Kelsen’s argument for constitutional review against Troper’s charges. It argues both that Kelsen’s case for constitutional review is fundamentally sound and that it carries the potential to make an important contribution to contemporary debates on the legitimacy of judicial control of constitutionality. Kelsen’s argument for constitutional review offers a compelling case for constitutional review that focuses on the conditions of the proper functioning of electoral democracy rather than on the protection of liberal rights.

Multi-party, representative democracy is, according to Kelsen, an intrinsically fragile achievment – one that never can nor should be taken for granted. The fragility of multi-party democracies, based on party pluralism and free, competitive elections is the topic he explores in a lesser-know work published in the mid 1930s: La Dictature du Parti (1935). It focuses upon the underlying weaknesses of European interwar democracies which make possible their transformation into party dictatorships. The chapter explores Kelsen’s broader theoretical framework and contribution through a comparative analysis with those in the contemporaneous, early work of Franz Neumann, The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System in Modern Society (1936), which, through a critique of Kelsen’s legal positivism, developed a distinctive, sociological approach to the relationship between law and state. The comparison of the two works reveals the significant engagement of Continental political theory and jurisprudence, throughout the 1930s, with the question of the underlying fragility of European interwar democracies. It, thereby, adds depth and breadth to the study of the genesis of Kelsen’s theory of democracy allowing one to capture more vividly the argument at the core of his La Dictature du Parti: the transformation of democracy into autocracy rests not on the dissolution of the rule of law and the rise of a state without law (as for Neumann), but on the transformation of the very content of the legal system.

This chapter examines the ideological origins and political impact of the American concept of the “free world.” From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, “free world leadership” served as the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. Although American officials imagined the “free world” as the self-evident expression of international liberalism, they defined it negatively as equivalent to the entire “non-communist world.” Cold War liberals’ persistent failure to fill the “free world” with positive content forced them to maintain a series of inflexible and ultimately counterproductive positions, including an intolerance of nonalignment, a commitment to global containment, and an axiomatic insistence on the enduring and existential nature of the Soviet threat. Although the “free world” mostly fell out of circulation after the 1960s, the logic of the concept has continued to underpin an American project of global “leadership” that derives its purpose and extent from the prior identification of a single extraordinary threat.

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.