In the early days of the twentieth century, missionaries from the United States were in a spiritual battle for the hearts and minds of Brazilians. As a result, in 1901, the Baptists founded “O Jornal Batista.” Four years later, the Catholic Church established its first paper, “A União.” In their pages, these papers reflected the spiritual battle that was being fought. A significant part of the struggle focused on the idea that the United States was either a civilizing agent (“O Jornal Batista”) or an agent of barbarism (“A União”). Social and political topics gripping the northern country, such as lynching, racism, and prohibition law, were regular topics of discussion in both papers. This chapter aims to provide a brief discussion of the significance of these debates and their meaning in the context of North American missions in Brazil, especially in the northeastern part of the country. The sources highlight how locals used religion to understand and articulate changes in local political dynamics as well as the various ways Protestantism changed the parameters of local political debates.

Pablo Neruda’s Nobel lecture “To the Splendid City” was a summary of his poetic practice as well as a consummate presentation of his literary persona to the world stage. Although highly conscious of the political context of his utterance, and hugely laudatory of the recently elected socialist Allende administration, Neruda devoted most of his lecture to evoking the breadth and beauty of the Chilean landscape and the creativity and the imagination of the Chilean people. Evoking the panoramic and eulogistic register of Canto general, Neruda proffered a buoyant and empathetic vision of his homeland, even though some aspects of his approach might seem insufficiently critical to a twenty-first-century literary sensibility. Neruda used the platform of his lecture to give a convincing statement of his identity as a Latin American writer.

This chapter addresses Pablo Neruda’s poetry as world literature. It discusses the prominence that models such as Franco Moretti’s assign to the novel and to Paris or other Western capitals as centers of canonization. It examines the circulation of Neruda’s poetry in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc in the late 1940s and early 1950s to conclude that it is inaccurate to claim that Latin American literature did not enter the international market until the 1960s when the novel received attention in the West. The conclusions argue that a study of the international circulation of literature that is not politically biased or Eurocentric requires an analysis of the translation and publication itineraries of poetry and beyond Europe and the Anglophone market.

Chapter 3 looks at the various ways Muslims in the early Islamic centuries constructed a variety of idealised communities engaging with dialogues between universal ideas and more particularist ones, an endeavour that can be seen in a number of different scholarly fields. The first half of the chapter looks at debates in the fields of theology (specifically prophetology), law and politics (and political theology); the second half considers ideas about attachment to territory and the existence of a united Muslim world, before ending with a brief consideration of the social significance of gradual processes of conversion to Islam. One of the key arguments of this book is that local history-writing was one way for certain elites to deal with the dialogue between universal and more particular concerns as they envisioned and created their communities. Chapter 3 lays the groundwork for this by exploring that dialogue in fields ranging beyond history alone.

Dante’s defense of the life of reason can guide our consideration of the most current concerns.We are more in need that ever of a theoretical basis for openness, for ongoing inquiry, and for a genuinely common good. Dante’s understanding helps us think more clearly about the dogmatisms of our age, which, as ever, envision comprehensive transformations of human life uninformed by the moderating self-knowledge available in the poem.

As our power grows, it becomes more necessary judge its use, to assess the relative weight of the goods we seek when that power is deployed.To do so, we rely on reason as a guide. But reason’s capacity to adjudicate among goods is widely doubted. It requires a defense. This chapter argues that a premodern thinker may best be equipped to meet this need.

It has been a remarkable journey for India from the nation’s independence in 1947 to now. Economic performance has been mixed, with growth remaining sluggish during the first three decades, and picking up only after the mid-1990s. On the political front, with free media, secularism and a vibrant democracy, India was an outlier in the developing world; it resembled some of the most advanced economies in the world. This chapter is a study of this unusual growth path, over the last seventy years, with a focus on how the economy and politics impacted each other. It is argued that, while early political choices may have slowed growth during the early decades, they played a vital role in India rising to be among the world’s fastest-growing nations in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

This chapter argues that reflexivity - an introspective process in which researchers turn their engagement into an object of research - is essential to sustainability transitions research (STR). Reflexivity in STR encompasses not only the non-neutrality of its normative categories, such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘radical’, but also its descriptive categories, including ‘regime’ and ‘system’. This inherent social embeddedness, or ‘engagedness’, positions transition researchers with both an inescapable responsibility and a unique opportunity to shape their engagement reflexively. Reflexivity, which is relevant at every stage of STR, is illustrated in terms of research orientation, role and positionality. It highlights that much of reflexivity lies in the question of how - and with what kind of awareness - you are personally doing what you are doing. As a transition researcher, you are in a comparatively powerful societal position. Your choices matter and make a difference in the world.

Dante traces the question of happiness to our nature, knowledge of which is available.His decision to persist in rational inquiry is not arbitrary as rests on such knowledge. At the heart of Paradiso Dante speaks with his ancestor Cacciaguida about Florentine politics and nobility because the needed self-knowledge is gained through reflection on political life. From the contemplative unity characteristic of the previous Heaven to the political conflict in Mars is an ascent.

The key discussion concerns how candidly Dante’s poem should express the truth. The literary question points to the political problem of posed by the enduring tensions among human goods, and these tensions disclose the conflicts inherent in an embodied mind. Among beings that desire and reason, that are “mortal” and aware of their mortality, there is decisive inequality, inequality regarding the willingness and ability to discern truth.The scope of this difference defies the possibility that good can be understood by deduction from a principle or law, making it a matter for inquiry. The life devoted to this inquiry, as indicated in these central Cantos, is available here and now and grounds every genuinely common good. Dante calls his epic of self-reflection a “comedy.”

Chapter 2 examines three problems in Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato: the impasse of dialogue and dialectic, Heidegger’s disastrous and putatively Platonic politics, and the reductive approach to Plato’s metaphysics. First, I question his critique of Platonic dialectic by showing that it is already built into the matter as well as the way of writing in Plato’s texts. Second, I show that Heidegger’s ontologizing of political themes in Plato’s writings leads him to a catastrophic “ontological politics” wherein ethics and politics in their concrete sense are completely eclipsed by or absorbed into ontology. Third, I show that the interpretations that Heidegger offers to show that Plato allegedly occluded the original sense of truth and distorted the question of Being. A closer look at the relevant passages as well as other passages that Heidegger overlooked reveals a much more dynamic ontology than what Heidegger sees in Platonism understood as metaphysics. The concluding remarks of the chapter sketch the post-Heideggerian directions leading from these three problems to the Platonism of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.

The introduction sets out the book’s main arguments and interventions, methodology, and structure. It details how the book applies the concept of ‘active reading’ to classical translation while challenging the idea that translators had a unified political agenda that reflected that of their patrons. It also outlines how the book reinforces the centrality of the concept of counsel and the agency of translators in producing diverse interpretations and applications of ancient Greek and Roman texts. It draws on the concept of the public sphere to conceptualize the shared political import of classical translations. The book’s innovative methodology combines literary-textual, book historical, and historical-contextual approaches and expands the canon to bring out the full range of applications and interventions of early modern translations of the classics while connecting them to larger developments. It ends by explaining the organization of the book according to the main genres of ancient Greek and Roman prose in translation between 1530 and 1580: moral philosophy, history and biography, military manuals, and oratory.

Chapter 6 turns to the relation between philosophy and politics in Plato’s Republic. The question here is how to understand Socrates’ proposal of philosophical rulership in Kallipolis. For all three post-Heideggerian Platonists, this is not to be read literally (pace Heidegger’s 1933 disastrous appropriation of the proposal), but ironically. For Strauss, Socrates’ argument ironically points to the opposite claim: philosophical rulership is impossible, and this is a symptom of the irreconcilable tension between philosophy and the city. For Krüger and Gadamer, the irony points to an “in-between” position: while philosophers cannot rule directly as kings and queens, they can rule indirectly. For Gadamer, this indirect rulership takes the form of the philosophically educated citizen’s participation in the political life of the community, and, most importantly, the task of civic education. For Krüger, it takes the form of a philosophical critique of existing political institutions. Despite their differences, all three ironic readings of the tension between philosophy and politics in the Republic converge toward what I call the “political finitude” of philosophy.

The USA has among the highest levels of mental illness of all countries, together with the most treatment. We seek happiness through mechanisms that produce pleasure, most of which are not effective. Those lower down in the hierarchy use more destructive means to gain gratification, thereby becoming worse off. Americans may suffer more pain than people in other rich nations, especially social pain in response to chronic stressors present here. We consume 80% of the world’s opioids Smartphone use, especially among youth, may be harmful for mental health. Evolutionary pressures make us live to reproduce and nurture the progeny until they can have children. Various mental illnesses that don’t impact propagation can manifest, especially in later life, such as anxiety to cope with danger. Mental health is political, like other aspects of health

How should scholars and policymakers think about legal pluralism? In this Conclusion, I reflect on that topic, insisting that analysts should move beyond the question of whether laws, themselves, are or are not compatible. Instead, they should look at the practices of legal pluralism that make such compatibility seem natural or permissible, exceptional or impossible. I argue that inter-legal harmony is not a technical feat, but a social, political, and emotional achievement – one that is often precarious. Legal pluralism, therefore, implicates more than just the ‘stuff’ of law, but involves the shifting and recursive processes that help us to assemble normative worlds, reckon with diverse obligations, and find meaningful pathways forward through a changing and complex life.

This chapter outlines distinctions between national and nationalist uses of folk music as a frame for discussing its slipperiness as a concept and the political and identitarian implications of its performance, its collection and publication, its use in education and in religion, and its adoption into works of art music. Consideration of folk practices in Britain, France, Spain, and the USA from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries is combined with special attention to expressions of Celtic otherness within nation states. The chapter also addresses the manner in which sub-national musical nationalisms (or ethnic nationalisms), operate as positive symbols of subaltern resistance and celebration when folk or folk-like material is imported into the art music of late nineteenth-century concert halls. At the same time, the chapter addresses the ‘primitivism’ of folk music and the connections nineteenth-century thinkers made between national folk musics and the precepts of social Darwinism.

Sri Lanka is the only Buddhist-majority country in the world without an official state-recognised monastic legal system. This is in spite of the fact that an entire section of the county’s constitution is dedicated to such a venture. How can one explain this? And why does Sri Lanka remain in this impasse? This chapter answers these questions by tracking a significant (and ongoing) series of attempts made by Sri Lanka’s leading intellectuals, educators, politicians, monks and legislators to ‘legalise’ monastic law (S: nītīgata kirīma) by creating some form of statute, tribunal or legal body that could blend monastic and state legal authority. Drawing on an un- and under-studied body of political and legal documents, it explains how a particular approach to legal pluralism – one motivated by a ‘purist’ approach to law – both motivated and sabotaged successive efforts to formally recognise monastic courts and constitutions in state law.

This chapter discusses the sympathetic relationship between the gothic and sublimity regarding their serving similar social and political functions, emphasising their adaptability to the rhetorical interests of those in power in a given place and time. It then goes on to clarify their differences and consider whether they have a more ‘universal’ application than typically understood by taking a broadly historical approach, to examine the xenophobic and gendered origins of the sublime, and the ideological changes that come with the post-Kantian tradition. Rethinking the sublime as the differend identified by Jean-François Lyotard alerts us to imbalanced power relations and the demand for new idioms that give voice to the silenced, thus avoiding the sublime’s traditional claim to transcendence and therefore Western humanism. Similarly, a world-gothic sublime serves to witness the differend, the power imbalance between the ‘normal,’ who sets the terms of any tribunal, and the Other, who is silenced.

Why do similar conditions of legal pluralism lead to conflict in one setting and compromise in another? This chapter addresses this question by approaching legal pluralism not as an empirical condition – a multiplicity of legal orders that individuals navigate – but as a set of practices that bring order, structure and meaning to the obligations, codes and norms that one confronts. Drawing on three relatively recent case studies, this chapter demonstrates how the same set of normative artefacts – the same texts, norms, institutions, and authorities – can be assembled, interpreted, and mobilised in profoundly divergent and even agonistic ways. The first case study involves a monk’s attempt to gain a driving license. The second involves the issuing of identity cards for Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs). The third relates to a parliamentary bill designed to recognise monastic constitutions (katikāvatas) in law.