This article argues that the regulation of rents in eighteenth-century Turin played a central role in shaping the city’s social fabric. Focusing on the first half of the century, it examines the process of rent formation culminating in a 1749 edict that condemned excessive increases and introduced new procedures for regulation. By analysing both the causes of rising rents and the criteria used to define fair rents, the article shows how rent-setting operated as a site of clash and negotiation among the competing interests of institutions, landlords and tenants. The procedures and solutions adopted reveal a system of values through which access to the city was defined. In this sense, the rental market emerges not merely as an economic mechanism but as a key arena in which the production, appropriation and transformation of urban space were negotiated and redefined.

Contrary to the notion of collective self-rule, in modern democratic states the set of individuals that make the rules and the set of individuals to whom rules apply cannot be one and the same. Recognizing this “non-identity thesis” has important implications for democratic theory. Among them is the need to recognize that any democratic system will involve rule over others and that democratic procedures will not be sufficient for political legitimacy.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, best known for “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland, brings a colloquial Machiavellian deception to women’s political education in her sorely neglected novel, Benigna Machiavelli. Serialized in her magazine, The Forerunner, which itself is one of Gilman’s attempts to generate social change, Benigna Machiavelli gives us the character, Benigna MacAvelly, triply marginalized—female, a child, from a poor family—who becomes a hidden leader. Benigna, following in the footsteps of Ben Franklin and Machiavelli, and advocating associations as a means to preserve liberty, seeks to cultivate women as social, political, and economic actors. Because the man-made world has malformed women, limiting reason’s effectiveness as a means to pursue social change, Benigna turns to deception. This paper examines Benigna’s—and Gilman’s—uses of deception and imagination, respectively, as tools to create a new world, to generate a democratic polity.

In September 1833, eleven students aged between fourteen and twenty-one were imprisoned and brought before judge Manuel Joaquín Valdivieso in Santiago de Chile. They were accused of leading a rebellion that had rocked the country’s foremost educational institution, the Instituto Nacional, earlier that month. When asked who had initiated the revolt or invited them to join, the students refused to name names, insisting instead that theirs had been “a complot of all.” Their statement echoed similar assertions made by protesters across the Spanish Atlantic, from Castilian peasants to Andean Natives. Tracing the confrontation between the Instituto students and Judge Valdivieso, this article examines how appeals to collective agency and unanimous action disrupted the attribution of penal responsibility. I argue that such strategies served not only to deflect blame but to assert the legitimacy of revolts and other dissident political acts. The article explores how students confronted the judge’s interpretation of their movement, from their motivations to the dynamics of the insurrection. To justify their revolt, it shows, the Instituto students had to mobilize their knowledge of the law—not to claim its protection, but to undermine its capacity to render their actions intelligible.

Within nationality studies, the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) is typically presented as the founding father of liberal-nationalism because of his warning that liberal democratic institutions need to be embedded within the framework of a mononational state. However, the leading Mill scholar in the field, Georgios Varouxakis, has long challenged this designation. Indeed, in the absence of any attempt by other scholars to refute his claim that Mill should be interpreted as a cosmopolitan patriot instead, he has raised the question of whether the conventional view is little more than a disciplinary dogma. This article defends the conventional view through two key moves. First, to counter Varouxakis’ principal objections, we show that Mill’s account of the emergence of nationalities, as a historically progressive phenomenon grounded in an expansion of human sympathies, implies that his concerns about nationalistic indifference or hostility to foreigners do not translate into objections to nationality as such. Second, to counter Varouxakis’ presentation of the cosmopolitan patriot interpretation as a viable alternative to the liberal-nationalist one, we argue that Mill’s ethical and political cosmopolitanism is insufficient to support a liberal-postnationalist interpretation and is instead best understood as an integral component of his liberal nationalism.

This article presents conclusions from a study of 1,400 criminal trials in cases involving anti-caste and tribe violence, filed in the trial court of Aurangabad District (Sambhajinagar) in western India. Employing computational analysis upon the metadata and text of decisions filed under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) (POA) Act 1989 during a 20-year period (2002–2023), I offer an exploratory socio-legal analysis of hate-crime adjudication in India. This article sheds light on hitherto unexplored questions about criminal adjudication in India such as: Which cases are most likely to result in acquittals and convictions? What kind of evidence does the court consider and in what manner is evidence read? How frequently are cases dismissed due to witnesses turning hostile? What kinds of punishments do Indian courts hand out? How long do criminal trials typically last? What kind of charges are most commonly brought against the accused in these cases? How easy is it to get bail and what conditions do courts typically impose? How long do POA-accused spend in jail before they get bail?. In doing so, this article offers a first-of-its kind phenomenology of ‘hate-crime’ adjudication and, more broadly, of criminal adjudication in India.

I argue that all extant philosophical accounts of gaslighting overgenerate or undergenerate cases, either because they fail to include the internal felt experience of the gaslit or because they include this internal experience in the wrong way. I contend that some act A counts as gaslighting iff: (1) the gaslighter’s act A expresses disagreement with the gaslit without adequately expressing respect for the gaslit, and this makes it the case that (2) the gaslit in fact comes to believe that there is no hope for their fundamental rational competence, either universally or within some specific domain.

Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind is a memoir of bipolar disorder written by a clinical psychologist, professor of psychiatry and mood-disorders researcher. In this text, Jamison publicly described her own experience of mania, depression, psychosis, suicidality and lithium. We believe that this book remains a useful training text in psychiatry for three core reasons: what it reveals about treatment refusal, about professional stigma attached to psychiatric illness within medicine, and about the things that syndromic diagnosis can miss. Read critically, An Unquiet Mind remains helpful for thinking about ambivalence, clinician stigma, shared decision-making, and the limits of diagnosis without abandoning clinical precision.

This article focuses on the Punjab-Baluch borderland region during the last decade of the nineteenth century. It shows how this region was a conflict zone, not only between local communities across borders but also between the two colonial frontier governments of Punjab and Baluchistan. The article explores the nature of these conflicts by examining a cross-border dispute involving women. It analyses how different competing legal systems—Shariat, customs, and colonial law—operated on the ground and were used by the disputants to resolve the conflict. Additionally, it discusses how, during this process, the colonial state documented women’s presence and used their voices and actions to serve the objectives of state-making. Through this case study, the article demonstrates that in local feuds involving women, colonial authorities emerged chiefly as disputants rather than just arbitrators. By claiming to be the legitimate custodians of the ‘abducted’ women, the two frontier governments competed against each other to fulfil the aspirations of the tribal communities they represented. This intra-tribal and intra-colonial dispute reveals deep fissures in colonial understanding of questions of state intervention, sovereignty, and colonial subjecthood—rendering the imperial project inconsistent, fragile, and contradictory in the Punjab-Baluch borderlands.

This study uses latent class analysis to map the structure of tax-burden perceptions across income strata and to test whether combined income–asset status gives rise to coalition patterns. Based on Korean panel data, respondents are classified into upper, middle and lower groups by joint income–asset deciles. Five latent classes emerge, and multinomial logistic models show that membership probabilities differ systematically between those above and below the middle-income/middle-asset reference group, reflecting distinct coalition alignments. Notably, support for welfare-financing tax increases is driven more strongly by membership in progressive perception classes than by income or assets alone; moreover, this multilevel coalition structure – spanning different income-asset combinations – reveals that asset holdings, particularly illiquid assets, play a crucial role in shaping tax fairness judgements beyond income considerations. These findings underscore the necessity of tax policies tailored to both income and asset dimensions.

On May 20, 2025, the Swedish parliament passed a new law that criminalizes the purchase of sexual acts taking place “at a distance,” that is, via digital platforms and without physical contact. It prohibits the act of promoting or financially exploiting an individual to perform a sexual act remotely for compensation and specifically bans clients from impacting the content of online sexual acts (Government Bill 2025; SVT Nyheter 2025). By targeting platforms such as OnlyFans, it aims to capture the sex industry’s digitalization and thereby decrease the vulnerability of specific groups and prevent new entries into prostitution.

Contemporary work in bioethics presupposes a monistic view of race and a structuralist or polysemous view of racism. We aim to show that these received views are mistaken if the aim is to solve the racial health disparities problem. We argue that the theories that best enable us to solve the racial health disparities problem are a pluralist race theory and a virtue-theoretic account of racism because these theories are the best in terms of providing relevant accuracy and scope, causal explanatory power, nonsuperfluous ontological complexity, and practical utility for the task at hand.

In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant raises the ‘casuistical’ question of whether sexual intercourse is ethically permissible only if it serves the purpose of procreation, or whether it is also permissible when procreation is not possible, e.g. during pregnancy. It might seem that Kant is assuming a special permissive law that allows ‘unpurposive’ sexual intercourse to prevent greater vices. However, as I shall argue, Kant merely recites an argument that was widespread in the eighteenth century. As a closer analysis of Kant’s argument shows, he in fact regards sexual intercourse incapable of reproduction as ethically impermissible.

This article examines the role of showcase festivals and music export organisations (MEOs) in shaping international music careers amid the digital era’s paradox of access and visibility. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Europe, it explores how these institutions have become central, interdependent actors within a global music export ecosystem that promises opportunity yet often reproduces existing hierarchies. While MEOs provide support through funding, training, and networking, and showcase festivals offer exposure through curated programming, access remains uneven and shaped by structural inequalities. Despite these challenges, the ecosystem offers a relevant, if imperfect, framework for enabling mobility, professional development, and artistic circulation. Its value lies not in guaranteeing outcomes, but in offering a visible and adaptive platform through which careers can be imagined and pursued. By reassessing institutional norms and broadening support mechanisms, this evolving infrastructure holds the potential to promote more inclusive and sustainable pathways for international music development.