National educational goals describe the responsibility of governments, schools and curriculum to ensure learners develop into effective citizens who can participate in society and employment in a globalised economy. This was initially outlined in the vision of the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (Melbourne Declaration) and later in the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration. In promoting values such as social justice, peace, sustainability and democracy, the HASS educational discipline provides the perfect vehicle to achieve this vision. While the rationale and aims are different for each sub-strand within the HASS Australian Curriculum learning area (History, Geography, Civics and Citizenship, and Economics and Business), the overarching theme involves stimulating curiosity, imagination and wonder about the world we live in, ‘and how people can participate as active and informed citizens with high-level skills needed now and in the future’. In reflecting on your own education, were you encouraged to have such curiosity and interest in the world around you?

Italy shared many similarities with Germany: it was a patchwork of different political entities, economically backward, and divided by the Papal State in the middle. Unification was led by Piedmont, a state that was the Italian counterpart to Prussia. Piedmont’s nation builders were anticlerical liberals. In Italy, the confessional cleavage between state and church was of paramount importance after unification. Rapid liberalization and industrialization brought pauperization, and as in Germany, the religious cleavage added to the capital–labor tensions. Despite these similarities, Italy saw the emergence of a welfare state only half a century after Germany.

Religious ideas have been largely absent in the literature on the welfare state. Instead, class-interest based, rational efficiency, and institutional explanations have dominated. The absence of religious ideas is not a peculiarity of welfare state research but is paralleled by a treatment of ideas as ephemeral to politics in general. The introductory chapter reviews the literature on ideas and politics and the literature on the influence of ideas on welfare policy in particular. It shows why ideas could not play a role in the welfare state literature till today and proposes a solution: to integrate ideas into the study of welfare state evolution. The chapter creates an analytical framework for the study of evolving religious ideas and their impact on welfare state formation and reform in Italy and Germany. It engages with the weaknesses and strengths of both welfare state theory and the new ideational turn literature and introduces a theory of ideational competition. The chapter concludes with a short descriptive outline of the book and the following chapters.

Here we will see how a virtuous cycle of ideational competition led to the formation of the world’s first welfare state in late nineteenth-century Germany. In the first part, we will follow nation building and industrialization in nineteenth-century Germany. Industrialization and the confessional cleavage produced a specific political constellation in which the growth of a pauperized working class not only led to a political conflict between capital and labor but also reinforced the existing confessional cleavage between Protestants and Catholics. In the second part, we will see how the cleavages led to a specific cycle of ideational competition between the dominant political forces of the German Empire (Catholicism, conservative Protestantism, liberal Protestantism, and socialism). In the second half of the nineteenth century, they all started to develop modern social security ideas. The development of these ideas paved the way to the formation of the world’s first welfare state. This chapter looks closely at the evolution of German Catholic social thinking, developing from antiquated medieval social ideas to one of the most sophisticated Catholic social security ideologies at the end of the century. The third part of the chapter gives an account of the making of Bismarck’s social security legislation in the 1880s.

The chapter starts with empirical teasers. The reliance on maps during the Congress of Vienna, Sanskrit poetics in premodern South Asia, the coronation in the Middle Ages, and the European Parliament’s staged plenary votes in the absence of formal competencies all find a mention. The chapter then defines representants as those practices, artefacts, and language that stand in for the units of the international system in international interactions. In comparison to existing theories of changes of international orders, a focus on representants carries some advantages. Approaches studying material capabilities omit how highly centralized orders can exist even if capabilities are widely distributed. Constructivists could do more to identify the transmission mechanisms through which abstract ideas affect practical politics. How exactly ideas are materially instantiated leaves its mark on historical events. Theoretically, the book’s aim is to anchor the macro-processes of international order’s stability and change in everyday and extraordinary embodied encounters. The focus is on scaling up (from new materialist and much of practice scholarship) and scaling down (from traditional scholarship on transformations of international order) at the same time. The chapter briefly summarizes the theory of change of international orders, and it provides an outline of the monograph.

The globalization of modern European intellectual history is long overdue. It is also still in its early stages. This chapter distinguishes four paths historians have followed so far. First, there has been the attempt to recover the global contexts and sources of the canon of “European thought.” A second approach has been to recapture the global imaginations of modern European thinkers. A third and more difficult possibility has been to track how European concepts and traditions were received and remade as they traveled the globe and to examine the complex feedback mechanisms that have blurred the line between the European and the extra-European. Finally, a fourth and most controversial mode is to insist that the modern European canon is of prime significance in understanding historical and contemporary global relations – and that part of its value lies in helping undo the exclusions that its own historians have visited on that canon by misrepresenting European thought as a merely European affair.

This chapter draws a distinction between ideas-as-content and ideas-as-form in E. M. Forster’s Howards End, arguing that the novel stages an ongoing tension between liberalism as a set of propositional ideals (content) and liberalism as a procedural approach for investigating ideas (form). Although the novel is invested in liberalism as an ideal, an ethos best encapsulated in the novel’s epigraph to “Only connect,” its commitment towards a liberal methodological treatment of ideas – to balanced debate and discussion that takes conflictual views into account and tries to reconcile them – means that this liberal ideal is also constantly undermined and challenged throughout. This chapter traces the dynamics of this tension and Forster’s attempt to resolve it.

There is a connection between the habits of thinking in science, economics, and diplomacy that are hindering our response to climate change. Western science since the Enlightenment has built its success on reductionism. This has left us less good than we need to be at thinking holistically, and at understanding the potential for systemic change in our environment, economy, and international relations. New ways of thinking can take generations to spread through society and displace their predecessors. In our present crisis, we must accelerate this process deliberately – we cannot afford to wait.

This chapter gives a practical guide to the creative process through step-by-step description of the composition of a short piano miniature, from initial idea to final score.

Péter Lautner’s chapter ‘Concepts in the Neoplatonist Tradition’ expands the scope of the enquiry by discussing Platonist theories of concept formation in Late Antiquity. Generally speaking, the philosophers belonging to the so-called schools of Athens and Alexandria believe that the articulation of our rational capacity and the acquisition of knowledge somehow derives from the senses as well as the intellect, and they mostly agree that some elements of concept formation, notably generalisation, occur on the basis of sense-perception. They disagree, however, as to whether or not such generalisations are full-blown concepts. While all the philosophers under consideration endorse some version of the view that the main source of concepts is our intellect, which essentially contains fully fledged concepts, their accounts vary in respect of the intellect’s ability to project concepts onto the lower cognitive faculties. The problem of how the two kinds of concepts mentioned above are related to each other occupies the Platonists through the entire period under examination and constitutes the focus of Lautner’s analysis.

Engaging directly with the question whether Platonic Forms are concepts, David Sedley’s chapter ’Are Platonic Forms Concepts?’ takes its start from the Parmenides 132b–c, where Socrates and Parmenides briefly examine the hypothesis that Forms are ‘thoughts’ (noēmata). Sedley asks what ‘thoughts’ are in that context, and argues that they are not thought contents, but acts of thinking. The chapter offers an ambitious and comprehensive analysis of the classical theory of Forms as showcased in the Phaedo, Republic, Parmenides, and Timaeus, in terms that clarify why Plato was bound to reject the hypothesis considered in the Parmenides (132b–c), namely that Forms are thoughts.

‘Concepts and Universals in Aristotle’s Metaphysical Thought’ by Christof Rapp starts with the recognition that Aristotle does not have a general term for ‘concept’ and examines which entities in his metaphysical theory might play the role of concepts. According to Rapp, many of Aristotle’s discussions focus on the meaning of general terms and whether they signify something real and existing independently in its own right. Aristotle remains committed to the view that universals as captured by genuine definitions are crucial for human knowledge and understanding. Insofar as Aristotle resists a conception of universals as existing in the way that particular substances do, he can be taken to intimate that universals are ‘merely conceptual’. In the Metaphysics, he distances himself from the view that universals such as genera and species qualify as substances. His main contribution to our thinking about concepts consists in the view that both universals and embodied substantial forms have mental counterparts, by which we grasp and understand the things falling under the conceived form or essential definition.

Through the process of talking to one another, children become creators of their own future as they collaborate and build relationships. Talking Circles are designed to encourage children to ask questions about their lives and how they can make a difference for themselves, each other and their community. This process helps to build the resilience and leadership skills of children. These qualities are important in helping children to consider their world view and day-to-day challenges, which enables them to contribute to their own health and wellbeing.