The equilibrium notion of Nash has been the primary tool for predicting strategies and outcomes of games with rational players. But the Nash equilibrium is a weak criterion for games with dynamic interactions and/or private information among the players. Stronger criteria called equilibrium refinements are intended to remedy deficiencies that stem from these features. This chapter summarizes motives for refinements, the main refinements themselves, and reports progress on characterizing the strongest refinement, called stability, via axioms that express basic properties of rational behavior.

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.

Chapter 3 focuses on liberty and servitude, and the way in which these conditions – defined in Roman law in terms of the status of individual persons – are predicated of collective bodies described as civitates and populi in Roman political philosophy. Machiavelli’s relationship to this particular conception of liberty has been at the centre of much recent literature on classical, early modern, and contemporary republicanism, but his theory of freedom requires closer scrutiny, not least because of its relationship to a line of thinking about popular self-government which had been used by humanists to articulate a theory of popular sovereignty from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century in Renaissance Florence. This chapter shows how the key concepts of this thesis come from Cicero’s philosophy, which conveys to the humanists an influential account of how to constitute the entity which he calls the populus as the ultimate bearer of public authority. Cicero’s view of ‘the people’ as the master of its own affairs informs his definition of the res publica as res populi – literally, a ‘thing of the people’ – and this chapter shows how it informs the very basis of the classical republican tradition which Machiavelli inherits and reworks.

The individual experiences of the post-war European plebiscites varied; however, in all cases the commissions organising them faced challenges in ensuring fair votes with limited resources and entrenched local administrations, something exacerbated by the American rejection of the peace settlement and consequent termination of involvement in its plebiscites. The traumatic plebiscite in Upper Silesia left the deepest impression, and during the Lausanne Conference of 1922–1923, the plebiscite was rejected by the British statesmen leading the negotiations with the new Turkish republic, with compulsory population transfer advocated instead. For her part, Sarah Wambaugh observed what she saw as a better way to conduct international relations when she briefly worked in the secretariat of the League of Nations. Following this Wambaugh would visit all of the plebiscite zones soon after they were held and conclude that future plebiscites needed to be conducted along more rigorous scientific lines.

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 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.

Chapter 2 opens the study of free speech in a globally networked digital environment by clarifying the meaning of the term ‘constitution’. Under the heading of transnational constitutionalism, intense discussions have taken place in recent years about constitutional thinking that seeks to break free from statehood and formalism. The question of the constitutional subject is of great importance here. In the twenty-first century, nation-states are still the primary constitutional actors, as they have been since the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contemporary era has also witnessed the emergence of transnational corporations, which have developed into powerful players within a globalised economy. As telecom service providers, equipment manufacturers, or platform operators, they have a particularly significant influence on the conditions governing freedom of expression. According to Gunther Teubner, transnational corporations should be conceived of as constitutional subjects. But what does this mean on the theoretical and practical levels? How can factual developments on the Internet be related to processes of producing constitutional norms? How should the relationship between state-centred and societal constitutional legitimacy be conceptualised? These questions are addressed within the framework of transnational legal theory.

Analytic philosophy of religion is a vibrant area of inquiry, but it has generally focused on generic forms of theism or on Christianity. David Shatz here offers a new and fresh approach to the field in a wide-ranging and engaging introduction to the analytic philosophy of religion from the perspective of Judaism. Exploring classical Jewish texts about philosophical topics in light of the concepts and arguments at the heart of analytic philosophy, he demonstrates how each tradition illuminates the other, yielding a deeper understanding of both Jewish sources and general philosophical issues. Shatz also advances growing efforts to imagine Jewish philosophy not only as an engrossing, invaluable part of Jewish intellectual history but also as a creative, constructive enterprise that mines the methods and literature of contemporary philosophy. His book offers new pathways to think deeply about God, evil, morality, freedom, ethics, and religious diversity, among other topics.

United by their realistic approach to the study of democratic politics, Hans Kelsen and Joseph Schumpeter similarly sought to de-ideologise ‘classical’ accounts of popular sovereignty. Both developed an analytical framework to explain how modern democracy, based on parties and the electoral selection of representatives, functions and realises its ideals. Both emphasised that democracy lasts only if it successfully generates a ‘compromise’ between the contingent majority and the temporary minority (in the terminology for Kelsen) or if current majorities exercise ‘self-control’ (in the language of Schumpeter). However, neither explained the mechanisms that induce democratically elected majorities to limit themselves in the practice of governmental power. The chapter first charts the innovations introduced by Kelsen and Schumpeter into our understanding of democracy; then, it teases out their views on how majorities abstain from aggrandising their power beyond some limits. For both, such limits must be self-enforcing and observing them must constitute an equilibrium. Yet, a proper understanding of how this equilibrium emerges remains one of the greatest challenges for contemporary scholars of democracy. ‘Compromise’ or ‘self-restraint’ is almost definitionally a requisite of democratic politics, but it cannot be imposed from outside, and it cannot just follow from agreements about certain rules, unless those rules are self-enforcing. As the chapter explains, it must be in the best interest of the democratic rulers to stop monopolising power given the potential reactions of the opposition, and it must be in the best interest of the opposition to participate peacefully given that the incumbent stops. Despite the significant progress in the normative and empirical study of democracy over the past several decades, the greatest challenge faced by Kelsen and Schumpeter has not been completely resolved.

The Coda foregrounds the literary implications of the book’s argument by reflecting on the idea of the Indian Ocean as a comparative literary space. Through an example from Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), it illustrates a comparative practice wherein the historical, the geopolitical, and the literary come together. The mutual imbrication of the geopolitical and the literary in contemporary Afro-Asian fiction generates the Indian Ocean as a space of comparison where historical relationalities become legible within the exigencies of the present.