We are in the early stages of a new “intergenerational turn” in political philosophy. This turn is largely motivated by the threat of global climate change, which makes vivid a serious governance gap surrounding concern for future generations. Unfortunately, there is a lack of fit between most proposed remedies and the nature of the underlying problem. Most notably, many seem to believe that only piecemeal, issue-specific, and predominantly national institutions are needed to fill the intergenerational governance gap. By contrast, I argue that we should adopt a genuinely global approach that treats intergenerational questions as foundational, and advocates for new permanent institutions with ongoing responsibilities to act on intergenerational threats. In this essay, I summarize my diagnosis of the underlying problem—that we face a basic standing threat that I call the “tyranny of the contemporary”—and sketch my proposal for a global constitutional convention aiming at institutions with standing authority and a broad remit. I then develop some of these ideas further through responses to fellow advocates for reform who nevertheless consider my proposals to go too far. In particular, I reject a counterproposal made by Anja Karnein, who argues that reforms should address only threats whose negative impacts would cross a high threshold. I argue that this would leave future generations vulnerable to what I call “squandering generations”. Among other things, these intergenerational squanderers violate appropriate relationships between past, present, and future generations. Yet, in my view, a central task of defensible intergenerational institutions is to protect the future against such abuse.

In this article four photographs of mixed law courts (landraad) in nineteenth-century colonial Indonesia are approached as a window to study the materiality and meaning of cloth in courtrooms. The photos grant access to a careful colonial curation as well as complex Javanese hierarchies that were translated onto and through cloth, and its colors and patterns. Batik sarongs, tablecloths, head scarves, robes and gowns, coats and turbans reveal a courtroom of semiotic richness and plurality where different actors were signaling different messages to multiple audiences. This emphasis on cloth contributes to an emergent and rich discussion on the importance of objects in the study of law and empire, that has primarily focused on the materiality of paper and other objects of lawmaking. In the mixed court of the landraad, it was cloth that spoke louder than words and paper. This article emphasizes that in a mixed court the display of a plural world and jurisdictional layering, complicating the binary between direct and indirect colonial rule, was more important than a monolithic reflection of state law. Cloth was crucial to the display of this plural world and used as a way to impose, maintain, alter, insert oneself in or resist colonial rule.

The individual is still rare in working-class history, and, when we find them, they are often, like Bebel and Lula, exceptional. We are interested in them as leaders of vital mass movements and because they had an important impact on their societies. But another part of the promise of biographies like these is the opportunity to approach the personal dimensions of working-class experience through an individual life. Bringing the two biographies together highlights the diversity of working-class experience. Bebel developed in a racially homogeneous society while Lula was a mixed-race person shaped in race-conscious Brazil. Bebel thrived as a small-shop artisan while Lula thrived as a skilled worker in a mass production factory. I also compare and contrast these two subjects with two American labor radicals, the socialist leader Eugene Debs and William Z. Foster, a key figure in the Communist Party of the US. The importance of individual psychology and the homosocial worlds of these subjects might have played a greater role here, while the ubiquitous learning of both men raises the problem of working-class intellectual history, another subject that has not received enough attention from labor historians.

Extreme impacts from climate change are already being felt around the world. The policy choices that we make now will affect not only how high global temperatures rise but also how well-equipped future economies and infrastructures are to cope with these changes. The interests of future generations must therefore be central to climate policy and practice. This raises the questions: Who should represent the interests of future generations with respect to climate change? And according to which criteria should we judge whether a particular candidate would make an appropriate representative for future generations? In this essay, we argue that potential representatives of future generations should satisfy what we call a “hypothetical acceptance criterion,” which requires that the representative could reasonably be expected to be accepted by future generations. This overarching criterion in turn gives rise to two derivative criteria. These are, first, the representative's epistemic and experiential similarity to future generations, and second, his or her motivation to act on behalf of future generations. We conclude that communities already adversely affected by climate change best satisfy these criteria and are therefore able to command the hypothetical acceptance of future generations.

Abstract: What would constitute just representation for the climate vulnerable? My purpose in this essay is to provide a critique of the default frame for approaching this question, as well as to offer a suggestion for expanding our conception of what an adequate answer should include. The standard frame conceives of representing vulnerable climate interests largely in terms of formal mechanisms of representation in technocratic and bureaucratic institutions. I show the limits of that standard approach and caution against the discussion of climate representation being overly confined to the level of “formal” representation. I go on to detail the importance of thinking about more “informal” modes of representing vulnerable climate interests. In order to pursue both of these aims, I draw on lessons in meaningful representation and inclusion during postconflict peacebuilding.

John D. French's stimulating article, which explores the scope for comparing working-class leaders across time and space, is considered in this contribution by reference to my biography of August Bebel and with a particular focus on the following topics: a) historical actors as shaped by their own particular time and place; b) the importance of personal relationships and networks in making people who they are; c) the importance of psychological elements and the risk in interpreting them in retrospect – recovering them depends upon the sources available; d) how charisma reflects an interdependence between attribution and individual qualities; e) the importance of political milieux for the flourishing of individual working-class leaders; and f) the relationship between political work to both civil society and existing class relations. Using these approaches allows us to write cross-border and cross-temporal “embodied social biographies”, as suggested by French.

In this paper, I consider John French's biography, Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil (2020). French discusses his methodology, which he characterizes as “a social biographical approach”. I argue that this methodology is already in historians’ toolkit. Historians writing biography seem to start with first premises rather than building on what went before. I thus contextualize the methodology, situating French's biography of Lula within more general shifts in approaches to biography.

This article examines the inflectional system of adjectives in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve, with particular reference to the adjectives ‘high’ and ‘sly’. Since these poets were careful metrists, scansion allows us to determine the syllabic status of adjectives in their verse. While in Chaucer and Gower, the grammatical system for the inflection of monosyllabic adjectives (final -e for weak and plural adjectives) is generally observed, there is good evidence to show that the system was breaking down in the case of ‘high’ and ‘sly’, which frequently appear without inflection in weak position. The article also shows that in Hoccleve's poetry inflectional -e had disappeared altogether in these adjectives, except at line ending. Editorial emendations that depend on this inflection are therefore incorrect. The explanation for the irregular behaviour of ‘high’ and ‘sly’ is probably related to the vulnerability of schwa after front vowels.

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans contested the relationship between the federal government and states. Conflict over federal authority played out in concrete and surprising terms in a controversy that erupted in 1868 surrounding regulation of international telegraphy. The debate, which has remained largely unexamined, centered on whether a state could authorize a foreign company to land a submarine telegraph cable on American shores without Congress’s permission. Scholars have scrutinized consequences of the revision of federalism for individuals’ rights but have devoted less attention to implications for the nation’s international relations and commerce. The regulation of foreign cables, however, proved a key testing ground for the federal government’s efforts to assert sovereignty before both state authorities and other nations during Reconstruction. The episode revealed varied alliances and sources of opposition that emerged amid attempts to project federal power. It also reflected many Americans’ growing expectations of an expanded role for the national government in commerce and the international sphere—a position the federal government realized only haltingly. Intractable problems of federalism contributed to congressional inaction. While undertaking the formidable work of reconstructing the Union, the United States government struggled to delineate the physical boundaries of its authority.

This essay suggests that the accountability trends explored by Stian Øby Johansen and Gisela Hirschmann in their respective monographs should be viewed as indicating the emergence of a right to justification in global governance. Both Johansen and Hirschmann seek to advance the interdisciplinary conversation about the accountability of international organizations—Johansen by developing a normative framework assessing the quality of IO accountability mechanisms, and Hirschmann by seeking to identify the variables that shape the evolution of what she calls pluralist accountability. Building upon their analyses, I put forward a set of hypotheses about the procedural and substantive dimensions of the right to justification as well as the conditions for its consolidation in global governance.

At least since the middle of the eighteenth-century, salus populi (the people’s welfare) and sic utere (use your own without injuring others) have encapsulated alternative conceptions of regulatory power, with the former associated with continental police regimes and the latter with Anglo-American conceptions of limited government. This article finds the origins of this antithesis in the intersection of two landmark cases addressed by Coke in the fall of 1610: Aldred’s Case, sic utere’s foundational text, and the Case of Proclamations, where Coke disputed the legality of building and starch proclamations. The Crown had provided common-good justifications for these proclamations, but their beneficiaries had included the individual neighbors of smelly starch makers and obstructive new buildings who had been left unprotected by previously existing local law. Rather than acquiescing to centralized legislation enacted via proclamation or parliament, Coke hinted in Aldred’s Case towards common law nuisance adjudication based on the sic utere principle as the desired mechanism for overriding local law that had privileged injurious land uses. Like salus populi, sic utere served a centralizing function. But whereas the former invited expansive regulatory agendas, the latter conditioned interventions on a judicial finding of a nuisance. In this, Coke’s invocation of sic utere in Aldred’s Case presaged the maxim’s eventual role as a substantive limit on the police power.

There were times – not so long ago – when it seemed that historical processes could be dissected as though human action did not matter. Those times have changed. Nowadays, scholarly biography is enjoying broad interest, also among social historians, as is shown in this issue of the IRSH, in which John D. French explains how biography can contribute to a better understanding of global labour history. This contribution addresses three issues. Firstly, the relationship between agency (subject) and structure, or the role of the personality in history and society; secondly, the question of charismatic leadership, and finally, the question of how to deal with issues of necessity and coincidence and with the selection of leadership.