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.

A pervasive assumption in game theory is that players’ utilities are concave, or at least quasiconcave, with respect to their own strategies. While mathematically instrumental, enabling the existence of many kinds of equilibria in many kinds of settings, (quasi)concavity of payoffs is too restrictive an assumption. For the same reasons that (quasi)concave utilities can only go so far in capturing single-agent optimization problems, they can only go so far in modeling the considerations of an agent in a strategic interaction. Besides, the study of games with nonconcave utilities is increasingly coming to the fore as deep learning ventures into multiagent learning applications. This chapter studies whcih types of equilibria exist in such games, and whether they are computationally tractable, proposing paths for game theory and multiagent learning in the next 100 years.

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 essay explores William James’s debt to Charles Peirce, arguing that this debt is integral to pragmatism’s historical use-value for studies of race and racism. Scholars of race have historically found pragmatism useful because of its anti-foundationalism. A philosophical stance resistant to abstraction and ossification, pragmatism’s emphasis on continuity through adaptation makes it useful for dismantling racial essentialism while preserving the experience of social and historical continuity necessary for the ongoing recognition of disenfranchised groups. In the late nineteenth century, however, pragmatism failed to reckon with the systematic denial of power and representation to racialized subjects. I argue that this failure is inseparable from pragmatism’s weddedness to the concept of experience and that a deep dive into how pragmatists have relied on this concept to negotiate the relationship between mind and body reveals the racial contours of its genealogy. Transforming what for Peirce was a methodological rule for scientific investigation into a theory of Truth, James imagined a world made entirely of subjects rather than objects. In so doing, he also dismantled the dialectical aspect of Peirce’s principle and the semiotics on which it depends. As this essay argues, James’s pragmatism does have potential for interpreting the history and significance of race. This potential, though, lies less in its anti-foundationalism than in its materialism and a reclamation of Peirce’s more dialectical model of embodied consciousness.

This chapter discusses the sympathetic relationship between the gothic and sublimity regarding their serving similar social and political functions, emphasising their adaptability to the rhetorical interests of those in power in a given place and time. It then goes on to clarify their differences and consider whether they have a more ‘universal’ application than typically understood by taking a broadly historical approach, to examine the xenophobic and gendered origins of the sublime, and the ideological changes that come with the post-Kantian tradition. Rethinking the sublime as the differend identified by Jean-François Lyotard alerts us to imbalanced power relations and the demand for new idioms that give voice to the silenced, thus avoiding the sublime’s traditional claim to transcendence and therefore Western humanism. Similarly, a world-gothic sublime serves to witness the differend, the power imbalance between the ‘normal,’ who sets the terms of any tribunal, and the Other, who is silenced.

This introduction frames Soviet Moldavia as a revealing case for examining the social and political dimensions of postwar Jewish life under late Stalinism. It situates the republic’s Holocaust survivors within the broader Soviet landscape and explains how its dual Romanian?Soviet heritage shaped postwar trajectories. The chapter details the book?s extensive archival base – spanning Moldovan, Russian, and Ukrainian repositories – and its reliance on oral histories to recover individual voices. It also addresses methodological challenges in using Stalinist investigation files and evaluates their evidentiary value alongside survivor testimony. Engaging with current historiography on Soviet Jews and post-Holocaust Europe, the introduction argues for a shift away from center-focused and repression-centered narratives toward a view that highlights Jewish initiative, adaptation, and participation in the reconstruction of Soviet society. By outlining these goals and methodological commitments, the introduction establishes the conceptual and evidentiary foundations for reinterpreting Jewish life in the postwar Soviet borderlands.

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.

This chapter examines the issue of antisemitism in Soviet Moldavia during the late Stalinist era, showing how both state policies and Jewish perceptions of discrimination evolved over time. In the immediate postwar years, Jews found professional opportunities within Soviet structures, but as political suspicion toward them intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s, uncertainty grew about their place in society. While Jews were not formally excluded from key sectors in Soviet Moldavia, the shifting political climate led some of the local decision-makers to question whether restrictions should be imposed. This atmosphere of heightened scrutiny made Jews more attuned to potential discrimination, with many interpreting career obstacles through the lens of rising antisemitism. The chapter explores how Jews navigated these challenges – some seeking protection through party networks, others filing formal complaints, and many attempting to assert their place within the shifting professional landscape.

This chapter explores the relationship between Hans Kelsen’s philosophical relativism and his theory of democratic leadership. First, it argues that Kelsen’s theory of democratic leadership cannot be fully understood unless placed within his broader political thought, which includes a commitment to philosophical relativism. Second, it suggests that Kelsen provided an original answer to the puzzle of democratic leadership that is significant in its own right. Writing during the rise of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet communism, Kelsen made a crucial distinction between autocratic and democratic forms of leadership: while autocratic leaders are seen as possessing absolute knowledge and, therefore, hold unlimited power, democratic leaders are thought to carry only relative truths, and their power is consequently limited. Kelsen demonstrated that if we believe moral absolutes exist, it is logical to have an absolute leader with unfettered power. In contrast, if we hold that moral absolutes are inaccessible to human knowledge and only relative truths exist, it follows that leaders should have limited power and be subject to constant scrutiny and control. Contrary to the common characterisation of Kelsen as an abstract and idealist thinker, this chapter shows that his approach to political leadership was normative yet realist. Rather than eliminating leadership, Kelsen associated democracy with multiple, temporary leaders who have limited and relative political power.

This chapter examines how and why the idea of “liberal democracy” was invented by French liberals in the 1860s. I argue that liberal democracy was conceived as an essentially polemical concept, defined in reaction to what French liberals identified as a defective form of democracy – namely, Napoleon III’s “Caesarist democracy.” I also show that, initially, one of the key meanings of liberal democracy was the idea of rule by public opinion. The first theorists of liberal democracy criticized Caesarism as a dangerous combination of plebiscitary sovereignty and silencing of public opinion. Meanwhile, they argued that the exercise of popular sovereignty should be confined to legislative elections, and that a free and independent public opinion should influence both elections and representatives. This perspective was articulated by figures such as Eugène Pelletan, Auguste Nefftzer, Charles Dollfus, Édouard Laboulaye, Anatole Prévost-Paradol and Émile Ollivier. The chapter further explores how the invention of the term “liberal democracy” overlapped with efforts to create a liberal tradition, as well as with a defense of settler colonialism in Algeria.

I revisit how my practice of adda instituted a counter-hierarchical, shared practice of knowledge making which helped to show the diverse locations and experiences that produce a field of Indian feminist jurisprudence. I recount how my performances of adda helped to carve out specific conversations—in authors’ texts and lives—to show how these are conscious experiences of law that account for the diverse organisations of mutual law–life relations in an Indian post-colonial context. I draw this book to a close by reaffirming that the field of Indian feminist jurisprudence is a diverse body of knowledge that is produced out of the disparate lived practices of varied groups of people who live different lives and relate with law differently; and that the performances of emplaced conversations help us attend to, and recognise, such differences in law-life relations.

Chapter 9 demonstrates that there was a negative homestead effect on the development of homesteaded lands compared to lands that were sold. In other words, even after 100 years of the date of the initial homestead patent being issued, those lands were less likely developed. This finding is very robust and does not depend on any measure of land quality or particular measure of later development. The effect, however, is driven by the earliest homesteading, and our evidence shows that it stemmed from homesteaders “being in the way” of early commercial development.

Drawing on critical realist ontology and critical realist discourse analysis, the chapter analyses how the concept of resilience can be and has been applied to Black, Asian, and minority ethnic families and communities in ways that are biased, stigmatising, and pathologising. It argues that current definitions of resilience need to be redefined and reconceptualised, particularly in settings dominated by White middle-class voices that define what ‘positive emotions’, ‘successful traits’, and ‘coping mechanisms’ entail. Here, through racism and flawed perceptions and interpretations of resilience and ‘Othering’, members from ethnic minority communities are defined as in need of resilience support, whilst at the same time their experience of structural racism is being erased. Reframing resilience thus means taking account of multifaceted and interactive effects of personal, material, institutional, and political factors that impact on behaviour, well-being and resilience, as well as acknowledging that the way in which ‘behaviour’ is received is by default flawed, if this is largely informed by an oppressive White middle-class viewpoint.