When Elizabeth Maconchy entered the British compositional scene in 1930 with the premiere of her orchestral suite, The Land, she and her fellow composers had an unsettled relationship with the prevailing musical styles of Europe. Whereas continental composers were highly regarded by British critics as cutting edge, their British contemporaries were faulted as derivative, unoriginal, and too steeped in national traditions to contribute to the ‘new’ music. Constant Lambert argued his rival countrymen (and women) had let their moment to be ‘modern’ pass them by. This chapter examines the scope of modernism on the continent and scholars’ difficulties in pinning down a precise functional definition of the so-called ‘modernist’ style. Practitioners of European modernism sought to be sensational or at the very least individual. British modernism, on the other hand, tended toward the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’, an eclecticism that is not bound to any specific ideology.

Chapter 3 INTELLIGENCE SOCIALISM opposes two radically different views about the relation between skills and intelligence—elitism and socialism. Elitism—pervasive in popular culture as well as in psychometrics—is the view that only a particular class of skill—‘theoretical’, or ‘intellectual’ skills, versus ‘practical’ or ‘embodied’ skills—manifests intelligence. I single out the best case for the stronger socialist claim that no principled difference in intelligence can be found between theoretical, or intellectual, skills, and practical, or embodied skills.

The expansion of the Roman Empire into the Mediterranean in the early second century BCE represented a gradual diminution of the independence and autonomy of the Greek cities. At the same time, processes internal to the poleis were moving them in a more elitist direction, as the “big benefactors,” ultrawealthy men who bestowed ever-greater favors on their cities, moved toward monopolizing participation in civic magistracies. The council and other political bodies became off-limits to citizens who were not among the euergetistic elite. Still, democratic institutions and ideas of the previous period persisted, especially in the popular assembly. Christianity, the centralization of administrative power in the Roman Empire under Constantine, and various crises combined to deprive the cities of the last vestiges of dēmokratia in the fourth century CE, when popular assemblies largely disappear from the poleis.

This chapter details Schopenhauer’s critique of a key modern ideology that grew increasingly strong during his own lifetime: nationalism. First, it notes how Schopenhauer argued that ethnic sameness cannot ground any moral obligations of individuals. Second, it turns to Schopenhauer’s critical dissolution of teleological national history, according to which nations are collective agents with a singular fate. For him, nations were not unified subjects with one shared destiny. Third, it reviews his caustic comments on the increased importance of the vernacular in scholarly communication and the attempt to establish an exclusively German literary canon. To Schopenhauer, nationhood was not even a useful category of cultural appreciation. Through this reconstruction, Schopenhauer emerges as a fierce antinationalist who questioned the importance of the nation as a supposedly cohesive community of mutual care, a unified historical subject, or even a meaningful cultural phenomenon.

In this chapter the “Pashtun Borderland” – a key concept throughout the book – is framed as a distinct physical and geopolitical space. This space, it is argued, is shaped by the complex interplay of imperial aspiration by larger polities claiming their authority over this space and ethnic self-ascriptions arising as a consequence. The heavy ideological baggage both practices pivot on is somewhat disenchanted by significant lines of conflict which traverse the region and its communities: between lowland and upland communities, between local elites and subalterns and between urban and rural communities. It is claimed that the persona of the discontent, or troublemaker, is a systemic result of these complex constellations, heavily fuelled by the agendas of successive imperial actors and the making and un-making of temporary pragmatic alliances typical for this kind of environment, ideal-typically cast here as “Borderland pragmatics”.

The establishment of an objectivist, anti-Romantic tradition in early twentieth-century aesthetics was no purely philosophical breakthrough, nor (as some have argued) a resigned response to the disasters of twentieth-century history, but in significant part an expression of elitism, fascism, and contempt for the masses, one already prominent before 1914. Writers from Schenker to Adorno insisted aggressively on the immanent structural virtues of master-composers’ scores and the irrelevance, or danger, of listeners’ own feelings. The same music-analytical prejudices still vitiate many contemporary attempts within the so-called ‘affective turn’ to theorize emotions and their history in music, not just in musicology but also in psychology. The very end of the book turns toward popular music and cultural studies as more productive embodiments of affective relationality, showing the resonances and continuities these possess with the sentimental-Romantic traditions explored in the book’s chapters.

Chapter 1 presents the debate about republicanism before the French Revolution. Montesquieu played an important part in this debate as he formulated the influential “scale thesis” according to which republicanism could not be adequate for a large country. Montesquieu raised a set of challenges to would-be republicans in France (the “motivation,” “unity,” and “epistemic” challenges). The rest of the chapter presents theoretical resources in different republican traditions (notably Italian, English, American) that informed the French republicans on key issues (conquest, freedom, commerce, institutions). This chapter retraces the context in which the myth of outdated republicanism was born, but also how the elitist and martial dimensions of the republican tradition shaped French republicanism.

The considerations outlined in earlier parts of the book are recalled in order to emphasize the importance of unconscious processes in the development of religious cognition. In this context, the importance of mythological aspects of religious texts is stressed, since the archetypal resonances of these texts – especially when reflected in liturgical usage or used in contemplative exercises – are of considerable importance in relation to noetic apprehension of the divine reality. In this context, the five theses set out in in Chapter 1 are discussed in more detail. In addition, problems of elitism and its suppression are discussed, as well as the position of those who claim to be spiritual but not religious. It is suggested that these people may, in fact, need one of the ‘doctrinal religions’ that they shun if they are to make progress on the spiritual path on which they find themselves.

This chapter examines the newly expanded and transformed theatre ecology enabled by the post-war rise of central government subsidy to the arts. It explores subsidy’s ambitions, achievements, and benefits, but also its turbulence and the ideological risks embedded in its deeply ambivalent objectives to foster elite arts but also democratise the arts. The chapter begins by giving a history of British theatre subsidy and considers its contribution to the development of theatre as one of Britain’s great cultural assets through its visionary promotion of such things as artists’ independence, the expansion of theatre infrastructure, and a conception of theatre as a civic right. The chapter then considers some of the hazards arising from how theatre subsidy has been practised by the Arts Council of Great Britain (and successor organisations), especially its tendency to reinforce elite privileges of metropolitanism, class, and whiteness. The chapter critiques the elitism of British arts subsidy’s legacy and proposes transformation of its practices to become more accountable, more democratic, and more dispersed, helping to make British theatre and culture more diverse and better informed by a greater variety of imaginations.

Times of crisis call for powerful rhetoric. This section consists of seven speeches that address political, moral, or educational crises of their time. They range from high points of rhetoric to dishonest or ineffective displays of rhetoric. The speakers include Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Allan Bloom.

The final chapter examines Cavell’s theory of democratic perfectionism. Traditional perfectionist political philosophy views the purpose of the polity as the promotion of human flourishing. Contemporary liberals rejected perfectionism on two grounds. John Rawls believed perfectionism was antidemocratic because it was elitist. Isaiah Berlin claimed perfectionism was illiberal because it posited a singular end to life at the expense of all others. Against these claims, Cavell’s later work recovered an inherently egalitarian variety of perfectionism from the American Transcendentalist tradition. While agreeing with Cavell’s defense of perfectionism against liberal critiques, the chapter raises two limits to perfectionism. The first is that it runs the risk of turning into “debased perfectionism,” where striving for an unattained yet attainable self can lead to status anxiety. Second, Cavell pays insufficient attention to the economic conditions necessary for one to lead a perfectionist life. The chapter concludes by reading Thoreau’s writings on economics against Cavell’s reading of Thoreau. It argues that a greater attention to the economic dimension in perfectionism would address some of the concerns that liberal critics raise about perfectionism elitism.

Chapter 6 investigates the debate surrounding Julian’s final – and fundamental, in the eyes of late Roman intellectuals – objection to Christianity: his critique of its universalising rhetoric. Third- and fourth-century bishops legitimised their increasing political prominence through competitive arguments pointing to Christianity as the only philosophy that was accessible to everyone, including the ill-educated. Julian set in opposition to this the Platonist belief that any self-confessed system of knowledge appealing to the many disqualifies its intellectual authority by revealing crowd-pleasing (hence, deceptive) ambitions. The reaction of upper-class Christians, divided between the popular consensus and allegiance to Julian’s elitist sensibilities, demonstrates the criticality of this argument. Yet – as I show in the second section – the Neoplatonic objection to the Christian rhetoric of universalism ultimately displaced non-Christian philosophers from the political scene (Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists). Moreover, the rising popularity of ascetic leaders encouraged even highly authoritative ecclesiastical voices (e.g., John Chrysostom) to question the validity of Greco-Roman education. This, ironically, resulted in a power-driven challenge to the validity of the cultural system whose adaptation had been key to stabilising Christian power.

In chapter 3, I present the concept of “democratic dissonance,” which plays a significant role in the book. By this concept, I refer to the rupture between political practices and our expectations of them, a gap produced by institutions erected on the basis of assumptions about democracy and society that can no longer be sustained. In the chapter I maintain that the conception of democracy upon which the constitutional institutions were built was “restricted” (i.e., distrust towards majority rule and citizens’ participation in politics) and that the societies of those times were politically “contained” (i.e., in terms of restrictions on political rights). In this chapter, I suggest that such institutional legacy tends to create serious political problems when same institutions are directed to govern, in our time, a completely different social base, one marked by the conviction that public policies must be in line with our fundamental political claims and that our public life must be guided by our collective decisions.

In this chapter I show that the judicial branch, as it was designed at the end of the 18th century, jeopardized the democratic nature of the incipient governments. As many contemporary critics of judicial review maintain, I argue that it is “offensive” (“it seems something of an insult”) for a democratic society, and for the equal dignity of its members, that in the face of profound constitutional disagreements, a minority of judges, and not the representatives of the people, pronounce the last word on the matter (Waldron 1999). I explore the “democratic objection” against judicial review through a diversity of cases and debates, including Alexander Hamilton’s early defense of judicial review in Federalist Papers n. 78, and John Marshall’s famous decision in Marbury v. Madison. I conclude this chapter by showing that the “decisive argument” against the dominant, standard position on the justification of judicial review is (what I call) the “interpretive gap” argument.