Chapter 5 compares Wilhelmine Germany with Edwardian England and arrives at an unconventional conclusion about their relative stability. There is a scholarly tradition of viewing the Second Reich, particularly after the fall of Bismarck and the political ascension of King Wilhelm II, as so ridden with internal contradictions that it was in near-permanent crisis. More recently, scholars have argued that Germany was in fact democratizing, suggesting again that this major historical case of competitive authoritarianism was volatile. I find instead that the balance of evidence indicates that Imperial Germany is a good case of institutionalized competitive authoritarianism, and that it was Edwardian England rather than Wilhelmine Germany where the most serious threat of regime change existed. I contest two widely held misconceptions: (1) that the UK had transitioned to democracy significantly before the outbreak of WWI and (2) that the landed elite acquiesced in this transition. I argue instead that the UK was not only a prototypical competitive oligarchy before WWI but also that it was in a constitutional crisis and close to civil war.

The eighth chapter looks into ‘Concepts of Divinity in the Bhagavad-gītā’; The Gītā is rich with theological descriptions of divinity, whether these refer to the supreme as Kṛṣṇa or the personal God, as Brahman or the impersonal divinity, as the universal person, as the avatāra, as an internalized concept or the witness in the heart and as immanent concepts of divinity revealed through nature. This chapter offers a critique within the realm of philosophy of religion and argues that definitions such as pantheism, deism and theism do not grasp the personalistic themes of the text. A personalistic way of reading the Gītā is suggested, and as such, the concept of ‘the person’ is discussed and an alternative definition of personhood, one that befits the Gītā, is offered. It is also argued that as the Gītā considers itself to be poetry (Gītā means poetry or song), the Gītā’s poetic aspects should also be considered, and not just the philosophical ones. A critique of direct language is offered, and it is pointed out that as opposed to poetry, it is difficult for direct and philosophical langue to grasp personal expressions. The chapter offers a new categorization according to which the concepts of divinity are divided according to the three metaphysical levels underlying the book.

Chapter 1 begins its historical reconstruction of the Convention in the immediate post-war period and focuses on the peculiar connection it establishes between human rights and the concept of Europe. It runs from 1945 to 1954, the moment the Convention became legally binding in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

First, the chapter shows the impact of non-governmental activists, in particular European Federalists, on how two distinct concepts, namely ‘Europe’ and ‘human rights’, became connected in a legal sense, instead of the more current moral or cultural meaning.

Second, it highlights how those involved in linking the concepts drew upon distinct conceptions of ‘Europeanness’. European human rights were distinctively not universal values. Instead, they were inspired by a very peculiar idea of what Europeanness entailed, and restrained by pervasive civilizational, colonial and racial considerations.

Third, the chapter shows how European human rights were drafted into law and how they were perceived by the Dutch government. It sheds light on what the government expected by signing up to the Convention in 1950 and makes clear how the ‘European’ character of these human rights fits with the notion that the Kingdom of the Netherlands was not solely a European country.

The pontificate of Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) was decisive in shaping the Catholic response to modernity. His primary aim was to guide the Church in coming to terms with the modern world by making a clear distinction between unchangeable truths and other teachings that could be legitimately adapted to fit the scientific, democratic, and industrial world. The centerpiece of Leo’s approach was a Thomistic revival that included several elements: (1) Thomas’ view of the universe as an ordered hierarchy of being, governed by law; (2) Thomas’ view of natural law combined with Suarez’s “transfer theory of power” that permits a variety of legitimate regimes; (3) Thomas’ teaching on private property in service to the common good combined with Locke’s natural rights to property; and (4) a notion of the rights of workers as persons that points toward twentieth-century Christian personalism. I conclude by surveying the scholarly debates about Leo’s contribution to modern Thomism and Catholic social teaching.

On August 25, 1914, three weeks after the invasion of Belgium (August 4) and two months after the fateful assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo (June 28), German troops entered the city of Leuven and destroyed its celebrated university library. Some 300,000 books and more than a thousand irreplaceable Medieval manuscripts were burnt along with the torching of 2,000 buildings and the killing of 248 civilians. The devastation was so intense that Dietrich Mahnke, a student of Edmund Husserl’s serving in the 75th Reserve Infantry Regiment, could still observe the city burning on August 27 as his company marched through the village of Korbeek-Lo a few kilometers northwest of Leuven. Outrage among intellectuals, politicians, and the public in Allied nations was swift.

This chapter argues that there are two key errors in the classical natural law tradition: first, that the ultimate end of all human actions is happiness instead of doing justice and loving the intrinsic good for its own sake; second, that our relationship to the good consists above all in desiring it, instead of giving goods an adequate response of will and heart. Grounding natural law on natural inclinations in this way commits the naturalistic fallacy: the moral ought is derived from facts about human desires. Drawing on realist phenomenology, the chapter secures natural law and human rights with an account of intrinsic objective values perceived by human reason. The intrinsic and objective value, or dignity, of human persons grounds a strict ethical obligation (natural law) to respect that dignity, and act with an appropriate value response. The appropriate value response is the object of a person’s fundamental human rights. The scope and hierarchy of human rights proceeds from this ethical obligation to respect human dignity in its various manifestations: ontological dignity, the dignity of conscious and rational persons, acquired dignity and bestowed dignity.

The third force movement, grounded in the principles of existential philosophy, focuses on the individual in quest of identity, values, and authenticity. The nineteenth century writings of such figures as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dilthey formed the background for the view of the person as alone and dehumanized. The twentieth century works of Sartre, Camus, and Jaspers offered further expression to the basic state of anxiety and absurdity. The personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and Karol Wojtyła reintroduced the person within psychology. The methodological writings of Husserl and Heidegger contributed to the development of phenomenology as a means of investigating the holistic character of human experience. The combined existential–phenomenological psychology was an application of a new orientation in clinical settings, by such psychologists as Merleau-Ponty and Binswanger. In America, the humanistic viewpoints of Allport, Bühler, Maslow, May, and Rogers agreed generally with the European movement, and a center of existential-phenomenological psychology emerged at Duquesne University. Although it did not generate a comprehensive alternative to behaviorist formulations, the third force movement has exerted an impact on clinical applications, especially in therapeutic efforts.

Launched as a leftist vehicle for the presidential candidacy of Rafael Correa, the Alianza País (AP) dominated Ecuador’s electoral politics for a decade. Electoral success, however, was never paired with a democratically minded project of party building. Wielding expansive executive powers as president from 2007 to 2017, Correa consolidated his personal control over the AP and set the country on a course of democratic backsliding. Horizontal coordination among elites and operatives inside the party was enforced through a top-down command structure. Decisions about messaging, candidates, and discipline were tightly controlled by Correa and his inner circle of hand-picked loyalists. Eschewing grassroots participation in favor of technocratic governance, Correa systematically undercut independent groups in civil society and used executive-branch resources to subsidize select groups and maintain electoral support. For the most part, the AP was consigned to the sidelines, purposefully diminished by its leader. While mobilizing effectively for elections, the AP failed to develop as a conduit for citizen participation and interest representation. Rather than acting as a democratizing agent of change, the AP evolved into a caudillista-style vehicle reminiscent of personalistic parties in the country’s past.

This chapter reviews how the early post-Kantians perceived the need of reforming Kant’s Critique in order to complete the philosophical revolution it had initiated. In 1785, Jacobi had brought Spinoza to the discussion, claiming that his monism undermined human freedom and personality. He further claimed that this monism was the logical conclusion of all philosophy. The post-Kantians’ task was thus threefold: (1) to demonstrate that personalism is consistent which monism, which they in principle accepted as the necessary standpoint of reason; (2) to show that Kant’s idealism could be the basis for the desired personalism; and (3) to overcome what they took to be the formalism of Kant’s system that stood in the way of it. All this came down to ridding the system of its presumed unknown “thing-in-itself” while finding a principle that would unify it internally, not just by means of external reflection. Fichte had attempted this with his “I.” Even more important, however, was his analysis of feeling, which he considered the concrete counterpart of the “I” and which, as in the feeling of guilt, brought reason and nature together. This was the synthesis that the post-Kantian idealists explored in their different ways.

This chapter offers a brief history of how religious freedom has been conceptualized in international human rights law and politics after 1945, starting with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) Article 18 on the freedom of conscience, religion or belief, and ending with the aborted attempts in the 1960s to craft an international treaty on religious intolerance and discrimination. The chapter highlights how religious freedom over time became linked to a wider human rights discourse centered on combating different forms of structural injustice. It concludes with a set of critical reflections on recent attempts, including by the Donald J. Trump administration in the United States, to return to the “moral landscape” of the 1940s in order to salvage an allegedly natural right to religious freedom from the more comprehensive framework of human rights.