We were on opposite sides of the Brexit divide, perhaps the most divisive issue since 1945. Steve publicly campaigned hard to end the jurisdiction of EU law and institutions in the UK. Paul voted Remain but was much less concerned about the issues. Steve is sometimes lauded, but still widely hated for his efforts. Many of Paul’s colleagues were shocked that he didn’t care very much about an issue they saw as existential. We met on Zoom during Covid, when we shared similar concerns about the harms of lockdowns. The libertarian MP and the leftie academic didn’t expect the call to last very long. But we agreed on much more than we expected to – and we liked one another. We wrote against ‘vaccine passports’ in The Times. Paul was astonished by comments on the article, which were overwhelmingly about Steve’s work on Brexit, which had nothing to do with vaccine passports. Paul was attacked by several colleagues not only for disagreeing with lockdowns, but also for collaborating with a horrible Brexiteer.

Chapter 2 shows how officers and enlisted men related to one another. Both groups were white, but where many officers were middle class, enlisted men were often poor immigrants with unstable access to white men’s privileges in the Jacksonian Era. Officers had to hold the army together to fight a war, and they could not do it by punishment alone. Much as officers sought to tame the Florida wilderness and the Seminole people, they sought to gentle their soldiers. As the regulars fought their enemies and struggled with each other, a shared culture emerged, premised on the common ideal that regulars should protect women. Hierarchical white male unity – based on the concept of the army family in which all military men protected and subordinated all women – helped the army function. This framework appealed to paternalistic officers because it allowed for intense distinctions (of rank) between white men. In this climate, although rhetoric rooted in the need to protect women could bolster army cohesion, it could also serve as a weapon. Soldiers used such language to rebut officers’ claims of superiority.

In this chapter, we discuss a range of perspectives that fall under the umbrella term ‘corporate theory’. These theories address three questions:

1. 1. What is the corporation, and from where does it gain its political and social legitimacy?

2. 2. What is the purpose of the corporation, and whose interests should it serve?

3. 3. How, if at all, should the exercise of power by – and within – corporations be regulated, and by whom?

To subscribe to a particular theory of the corporation often reflects a particular political attitude about corporate activity and correspondingly implies that corporations should be treated in a certain way.

This chapter surveys the main examples of corporate theory. While each author of this book has their own theoretical preference, we try o put our views on hold and invite the reader to consider their own position.

This chapter explores how the ancient literary and philosophical dialogue form maintained its relevance as a tool of cultural and religious identity formation and competition. It addresses the ongoing scholarly discussion regarding the scope for dialogue in the face of rising authoritarianism and dogmatism in late antiquity.

This chapter surveys and critiques the three major viewpoints on the ethics of communication, which I label Civility, Victory, and Open-mindedness. For Civility, activism must be governed by a set of rules for respectful engagement. For Victory, the ends justify the means, and for the sake of one’s political goals, one may need to mislead audiences, dismiss opponents, and use ad hominem attacks. For Open-mindedness, it is violent and immoral to impose one’s views on others. I argue that all three perspectives have serious shortcomings, but that each voice expresses a valuable concern. People want their advocacy to be moral, effective, and nonviolent, but often feel like it is impossible to have all three.

This section consists of excerpts from Aristotles Rhetoric in which he discusses his division of rhetoric into deliberative, epideictic, and judicial or forensic rhetoric and a selection of speeches that illustrate each of these modes of rhetoric. There are two examples of deliberative rhetoric, eight of epideictic rhetoric, and seven of judicial rhetoric. The speeches range from the fifth century BC to the late twentieth century of our era.

Debate and deliberation are two commonly promoted strategies for democratic education. Both strategies are designed to unearth different points of view and then engage in reason-giving and argumentation; in other words, they help students to recognize pluralism. When done well, both also model inquiry and deepen understanding about the issues being investigated. In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical justification for each and show how the adversarial aspect of debate engages a different set of democratic skills than the more collaborative approach of deliberation. These differences require teachers to make judgments about how best to use these strategies in the classroom. We conclude by addressing some critiques of these strategies and discuss how alternative discussion designs might overcome some of the limitations of deliberation and debate.

This chapter looks at how and why Churchill has become such a divisive figure. It opens with a description of recent debates in the public discourse and on social media. It then briefly discuses Churchill’s reputation during his lifetime before recounting the role that he played in shaping his own legacy through his words, written and spoken, and through the creation of his archive and official biography. The authors then examine the long and complex historiography of Churchill, highlighting some of the most significant challenges to the dominant Churchillian narrative. Particular attention is paid to the more recent politicising of Churchill as a result of debates over Brexit, empire and race.

In the early years of the 2010s, new television and radio stations in a postcolonial Islamic Republic of Mauritania struggled to fill airtime with something other than the nightly news, recorded music performances, and images of Mauritania’s countryside set to traditional music. Talk shows, commercials, and sketch comedies were some of the new productions broadcast on private television and radio programs. Short situational or sketch comedy television programs sometimes used l’ḥjāb as a narrative hook for an episode relying on specific gendered tropes and stereotypes about its experts to elicit laughs from viewers. This chapter examines such television programs as well as the ways Islamist preachers also began using social media to their advantage to reflect on contemporary social issues in this period to examine how a larger Mauritanian public understands, criticizes, makes use of, and ignores l’ḥjāb, its experts, and its detractors. While the representations of l’ḥjāb in the media in the late 2010s show Mauritanians challenging the legitimacy of its bases, its experts and its efficacy, these images nonetheless provide evidence of its persistent relevance to the challenges of daily life and its capacity to adapt and respond to questions of modernity.

“Liberators and Friends,” recounts the dramatic events of D-Day – the airborne transit from England to Normandy, the jump, and the shock of landing in a place that was not on the maps of the paratroopers. The flooded areas, the marais, further compounded the problems the paratroopers encountered. The commanding officer, Major Charles Johnston, overruled subordinates, like Captain David Brummitt, and decided to stay and defend Graignes. That the paratroopers found themselves able to wage their own private war can only be explained by the astonishing commitment of the people of Graignes. Led by Mayor Alphonse Voydie and café owner Germaine Boursier, the village organized itself to support and feed the paratroopers.

Discusses the different (philosphical and non-philosophical) ways in which the content, dynamic, and influence of the Davos debate has hitherto been interpreted. The common thread throughout these various interpretations is that no profound philosophical discussion took place between Cassirer and Heidegger. In contrast to this, I suggest that the Davos debate, as well as the larger 'Cassirer‒Heidegger dispute' centres on three key philosophical topics that stand in a coherent, hierarchic relation to each other.

Offers a thorough reading of all texts in which Cassirer and Heidegger explicitly engaged with each other’s thought. I first sketch the philosophical context of the Davos debate, which constitutes only one moment of a dispute that started in 1923 and continued until the publication of Cassirer’s The Myth of the State in 1946 (1.1). Second, I argue that the public debate in Davos hinges on three interrelated topics: the proper interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, the human condition, and the task of philosophy. Concretely, I show that Cassirer and Heidegger’s diverging readings of Kant are motivated by their different views on the human condition, and that these views are in turn motivated by different conceptions of the task of philosophy, which I consider to be the fundamental breaking point between these two thinkers (1.2). Third, I explain that the same issues of contention also structure, in the same order and with the same increasing intensity, the entire, 23-year-long Cassirer‒Heidegger dispute (1.3).