And what to make of the fi nal complete return to sanity? Don Quixote himself presents it as a radical about-face, but the text, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, suggests otherwise; Quixote had been losing faith in his chivalric identity ever since the Cave of Montesinos. There is a sudden reversal here, but it is at the level of form rather than character. Throughout Part II the reader has had to proceed like José Ortega y Gasset's prototypical reader of the novel, ‘by trial and error … work[ing] out as best he can the actual character’ of the fi gures that the author ‘refuses clearly to defi ne’. We have had to ‘shape and assemble’ Don Quixote ‘step by step’; now, a (seemingly) omniscient narrative voice re-emerges and gives us a preassembled, predefi ned protagonist. Not since Cervantes's opening declaration that Don Quixote ‘came to lose his mind’ (I, i, 21) has Quixote's mental state been so unequivocally announced. From that point on, certainty regarding Don Quixote's condition has steadily eroded. The text's increasing ambiguity occurs on two levels: the characters’ growing confusions about Don Quixote's state and the loss of an omniscient narrator guiding the reader to a ‘correct’ interpretation. And then suddenly, at the end, both ambiguities disappear. Don Quixote declares defi nitively that ‘I was mad, and now I am sane; I was Don Quixote of La Mancha, and now I am, as I have said, Alonso Quixano the Good’ (II, lxxiv, 937). His certainty in his own beliefs is nothing new, but for the fi rst time it coincides with the prescribed social narrative. His friends, after an initial suspicion that the conversion might be a ‘new madness’, agree with the priest that ‘Alonso Quixano the Good … has truly recovered his reason’ (II, lxxiv, 936). And after Quixote's death, Cide Hamete Berengeli makes a defi nitive declaration of authorial purpose. His ‘only desire’ in chronicling Quixote's exploits was to ‘have people reject and despise the false and nonsensical histories of the books of chivalry’ (940).

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word ‘culture’ (rather than, say, ‘literature’) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the ‘literary’ is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call ‘culture’. On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identifi cation of the period as ‘the Renaissance’, with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term ‘culture’ in the place of ‘literature’ leads us to expect the words ‘early modern’ in the place of ‘Renaissance’. Why, then, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture’?

The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defi nes its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term ‘early modern’, though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern, that is, of positing ‘the advent of a once-and-for-all modernity’ which is the deictic ‘here and now’ from which we look back. The phrase ‘early modern’, that is to say, forecloses the possibility of other modernities, other futures that might have arisen, narrowing the scope of what we may learn from the past by construing it as a narrative leading inevitably to Western modernity, to ‘us’.

Key concepts

When it comes to discussion of demand for just about any product or service, there is a general misunderstanding both in the media and among the general public of what this concept really is. We often read and hear statements such as “demand for air travel remains strong” or “tourism demand increased by five per cent as compared to the same month last year”. These statements are typically based on some numbers from the data. These numbers, however, do not necessarily represent demand or changes in demand. Rather, what we observe from the data are outcomes of the interplay of forces of demand, supply (the concept of supply is even more misused), competition and regulation – all the forces I will be discussing in more detail in the subsequent chapters. As a matter of fact, an increase in the number of, say, airline passengers, could result from changes in the underlying demand relationship, changes in supply (e.g., new entry on the market, liberalization, or fierce competition), or changes in both demand and supply. The truth is that with so many moving parts in the market system economists themselves are often able to say only with a limited degree of certainty whether the resulting change in quantity and price is the outcome of a change in demand. Yet, pointing to changes in market demand as the underlying reason for whatever is observed in the data is a useful and easy to understand shortcut.

Between 1828 and 1835, the old Tory political order in Britain was destroyed. This was not just because the 1832 Reform Act swept away nomination boroughs and made parliament much more accountable to public opinion. It was because legislation of 1828 and 1829 allowed Protestant Nonconformists and Roman Catholics to sit there. Support for religious pluralism in the constitution, and particularly for “Catholic Emancipation”, was the best signal of “liberalism” as the word was used in the 1820s.

Moreover, in 1835 the corporations that governed most important British towns were made accountable to local ratepayers through regular elections of councillors. The 1835 Municipal Corporations Act brought liberal politics to urban Britain. Unsurprisingly, it also ensured that the Liberal Party would dominate town politics. At local level, the Liberal Party rested overwhelmingly on the support of urban voters, many of whom were Protestant Nonconformists. As towns developed economically during the century, local Liberal associations became socially more diversified, without losing their political effectiveness. Though these reforms strengthened the Liberal Party, they also forced it to behave in particular ways. A lot of power was devolved to local authorities. In principle, Liberals welcomed this. But how were the preferences of Protestant Nonconformity to be accommodated within a historically Anglican political system? And how could the defence of local liberties and the interests of ratepayers be reconciled with central government anxieties about social order and good governance in the towns?

In Ireland, Liberals faced more acute problems. How were Irish Catholic interests to be reconciled with those of Protestants? And how were Irishmen to be persuaded to accept the Union with Britain?

Institutional infrastructure of international civil aviation

The key international treaty that underlies the institutional architecture of international civil aviation is The Chicago Convention of 1944. Signed towards the end of the Second World War on 7 December (internationally commemorated annually as the International Civil Aviation Day), the Convention currently has 193 state parties. The Chicago Convention has enshrined the basic principles, under which international civil aviation operates, such as the principle of airspace sovereignty, the states’ rights to prohibit foreign operators from using their airspace, basic freedoms of the air, etc. Importantly, the Chicago Convention created the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

As part of the United Nations organizational infrastructure, ICAO is headquartered in Montreal, and operates seven regional offices worldwide. Similar to other specialized UN organizations, ICAO serves as the forum for interstate cooperation and coordination on various issues related to civil aviation. Perhaps the most important function of ICAO is establishing rules and regulations for aviation safety. Those rules, known as Standards and Recommended Practices, or SARPs, are enshrined in 19 annexes to the Chicago Convention. According to ICAO, currently those annexes contain about 12,000 SARPs. Many countries directly implement the SARPs developed by ICAO. The Standards and Recommended Practices are of course regularly revised.

At its most extreme, orthodox (mainstream) economics is an apologia for capitalism. Greed is good; property is sacrosanct; the consumer is sovereign; competition is healthy; unemployment is voluntary; and free markets are efficient. So long as markets are allowed to function, without impediment, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Orthodox economics is a collection of ideas that (at its core) sets out the extraordinary power of markets to deliver economic well-being.

To take on such a powerful and dominant stream of thought, two major thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are called upon. Karl Marx, originally from Prussia (now Germany), was exiled for a large part of his adult life to live in London, where he established his international reputation as a journalist, political activist, economist and philosopher, before his death in 1883. In that same year, John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, England: going on to become a highly respected academic economist, journalist and adviser to the British establishment. They had different politics. Whereas Marx wanted to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a new socialist form of organization, Keynes wanted reform in order to prevent a collapse of civil society. But each was able to identify serious flaws in the capitalist system, each inspiring schools of thought that feature heavily in the fabric of heterodox economics as we know it today.

This first chapter introduces the ideas of Marx and Keynes, set in their different historical contexts, as a foundational starting point for heterodox economics.

I am very grateful to Alison Howson for commissioning this book. It has given me the chance to develop a general argument about British Liberalism that I have wanted to make for some time. Chapters 1–3 draw on several of my research publications on nineteenth-century Liberalism, but all the chapters also rely on the work of many other scholars, not all of whom there is room to mention in the bibliography. Modern British political history is fortunately still a thriving field of study.

This project has also allowed me to reconnect with the twentiethcentury history of the Liberal Party, which was one of my first historical enthusiasms. When I was growing up, the Liberals were my team. My parents were enticed to join the party by the vivacity of Jo Grimond. Not having been to university, they embraced his emphasis on the importance of working out their own intellectual and moral positions and rejecting stale conventional thinking parroted by a complacent political establishment. Liberal raffles and jumble sales played a large part in my childhood in Dover in the late 1960s and 1970s. Local Liberal social life implanted in me the idea that political activity was really a means through which thoughtful, humane and public-spirited people could enjoy each other's company. Adult politics, therefore, has been something of a disappointment.

I have followed the usual convention of capitalising “Liberal” and “Liberalism” when applying these words to the Liberal Party and its political impact, but otherwise using lower case. This is not always an easy distinction to draw.

Liberal concern with the distribution of power has given the party a distinctive interest in several constitutional issues in addition to PR. The most important have been civil liberties, devolution to localities, and British relations with Europe and the wider world.

For decades, Liberal MPs have argued that British politics is “broken”, because the centralized United Kingdom state has excessive control and the two parties that compete for office have a vested interest in maintaining it. At the 1950 general election, Jo Grimond wrote that “it was not strong government we needed, but less government, better government and government nearer home” (Sell 1997–8: 7). In 1988, Alan Beith noted that the Liberals’ one big idea was “that the relationship between the individual and institutional power must be transformed” (Jones 2011: 144). Liberals have suggested that politics needs a reset if it is to respond effectively to the grievances of citizens and provide good government respectful of their liberties. The parallels with the nineteenth-century Reform Acts are obvious.

For most of the twentieth century, Liberal ambitions for constitutional reform focused on PR and devolution, but in successive election manifestoes between 1979 and 1987 they widened into something more systematic. This culminated in the Great Reform Charter unveiled in 1987 in an explicit nod to the nineteenth-century Reform tradition. Its ten pledges included PR for the British and European parliaments, a Freedom of Information Bill, the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into a British Bill of Rights, the outlawing of all discrimination on grounds of race, sex, creed, class, disability or sexual orientation, the introduction of fixed-term parliaments, the creation of a Scottish Assembly, Welsh Senedd and English regional bodies, and procedural reform to the Commons and Lords.

Key concepts: applied economics of costs

The concept of costs in the airline industry is most often mentioned in the press in light of the distinction between “low-cost” and “non-low-cost” or “full service” carriers (LCCs versus FSCs). What is often implied in these discussions is that low-cost carriers tend to offer cheaper tickets as compared to the full service airlines (a contention I will revisit in this chapter), while offering fewer amenities to their passengers. Indeed, if we look at conventional cost metrics, such as cost per available seat mile (CASM), which is calculated by simply dividing the airline's total cost of operation over a certain period by available seat miles or the product of number of seats offered and the number of miles flown, we will see that there appears to be a gap between carriers referred to as LCCs and those known as FSCs. For instance, in 2024 a leading LCC on the US market, Southwest Airlines, boasted CASM of 15.32 cents; the same measure for American Airlines was 19.88 cents, while for Delta Air Lines it was equal to 20.36 cents (see Table 2.1 for further figures). However, can we draw a line in this measure to say that all airlines with CASM below a certain threshold are low-cost carriers, whereas carriers with higher values are FSCs? Or, do airlines’ costs depend at least in part on the carriers’ business strategies and may therefore not always be directly comparable? Moreover, given the cost differences across the airlines, with airlines that have traditionally been considered LCCs no longer exhibiting the lowest CASM values, should we adopt a different classification of airlines by their costs?

How do firms compete?

Competition is not a very straightforward concept to define. One can think about markets being competitive if market players actively work to attract consumers via low prices, and periodically launch price wars. However, price, or rather airfare in our case, is just the beginning of the story. Firstly, as already noted, the full price of travel includes not only the monetary expenses, but also expected schedule delay. So, an airline offering five flights per day may end up offering an average passenger a “cheaper” product as compared to a carrier who only flies once per day, even if the latter airline's airfare is lower. A business traveller taking a late afternoon flight with the former airline instead of waiting until the following day to return home with the carrier offering less frequent service may be more than happy to pay higher airfare for a more convenient schedule.

Economists think about any product or service on a market as possessing three key characteristics relevant to analysis of competition: price, location and quality. The latter two terms are broader than just physical location or things we usually associate with quality (such as how luxurious, safe or durable a product is). While location can indeed represent a physical place (e.g., a supermarket's address), it can also signify other product characteristics (such as cocoa content in chocolate, or colour of a car). Product quality can indeed include durability, safety, refund conditions, customer service, or even such intangible things as brand reputation.

Key points and issues

Air navigation services (ANS) is a safety-critical aviation infrastructure industry. Like most such industries, it has properties of a natural monopoly, making it a good candidate for economic regulation. However, there are additional factors that make air navigation a more complicated and less efficient industry than it can be. Some institutional changes aimed at bringing in market discipline and hopefully to increase the industry's efficiency are slowly taking place. Also, ANS is perhaps an aviation sector with significant potential for the commercial introduction of a radically new technology, which can substantially increase effective capacity of the aviation system. However, introduction of new technologies and institutional changes to the air navigation service providers (ANSPs) often clash with interests of unionized labour in the industry. This problem is especially acute in some European countries. For example, in 2016 alone French air traffic controllers went on strike at least 14 times.

We can delineate three distinct segments in the ANS industry, which correspond to different stages of the flight. These are “en route control”, “approach control” and “terminal” (also known as “aerodrome control”) services. These services are provided by air traffic centres, approach control centres, and control towers, respectively (at the majority of airports, both approach and terminal control services are provided from the control towers). While all segments of this industry have characteristics of natural monopolies, some limited competition for the right to operate these services has been introduced in a few countries in the terminal control segment (tower services).