The loss of community is often seen as one of the reasons for the alienating experience of modernity. Community seems to allow for a civic-minded solidarity that counteracts the legitimation crisis of democracy by returning agency to citizens. Such a demand for a communitarian correction to liberal constitutional democracy is not without dangers, even when this demand is intended to stand in the service of a more democratic life. This chapter traces the fate of this communitarian desire in a broader transatlantic field, highlighting the uncanny connections among the philosophical debate about communitarianism, the antidemocratic and authoritarian drift in American conservative political and legal thought, and central aspects of European neofascism. These connections should make us suspicious about the democratic potential often ascribed to community. The ease with which arguments for a communitarian correction of democracy can be used against democracy suggests that community lacks an intrinsically democratic and emancipatory potential.

Chapter 3 centres on case selection and methodological considerations. The discussion opens up with a brief analysis that details how the MENA is understudied from both a climate and gender representation perspective, before moving on to a discussion of why it is important to study representation and climate change in authoritarian settings, i.e., not only in the MENA, but broadly speaking. The discussion in the first part of the chapter also covers the status of the MENA as a so-called ‘climate change hot-spot’. A considerable section of the case selection rationale in chapter 3 is dedicated to the study of gender and climate change within the MENA, which illustrates how the MENA case aligns with studies elsewhere in the Global South, i.e., focusing on women at the micro level and their vulnerability. The final (second) part of the chapter goes into detail with the methodology after briefly outlining the approaches favoured in the extant academic literature, coving both qualitative and quantitative methods.

The publication of Allen Ginsberg in Context marks a dramatic shift in Ginsberg Studies (and Beat Studies), clearing important new ground for scholarship on the poet. This volume offers a crucial reminder of the need for continued study of Ginsberg’s full body of work and widest range of influences. The case for Ginsberg’s importance has not always been as clear. Ginsberg’s considerable popular readership has not translated often enough into serious attention from scholars. Allen Ginsberg in Context signals to the larger critical community that Ginsberg’s life and work are essential to the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, culture, and political activism. This book starts the necessary conversation as to why Ginsberg’s poetry can still matter. Ginsberg’s body of work might find its big-bang moment in the 1956 publication of “Howl” and the poem’s subsequent triumph against obscenity charges the following year, but his work in its totality can be seen as a primer for how to live and speak freely in a world that increasingly is bent upon state surveillance and restrictions upon movement and expression.

Although oil is not the only potential source of rent from the rest of the world for contemporary states, it is by far the most important. The increase in oil prices post 1970 facilitated the emergence of rentier states, especially, but not exclusively, in the Gulf region, hugely increasing the volume of the rent at their disposal. This allowed consolidation of political regimes which otherwise would probably not have survived, and gave power holders an unprecedented degree of autonomy from their societies. The chapter then explains how the rentier state needs to engage in large-scale public expenditure to circulate the rent domestically, nurture a private sector and promote economic development along a peculiar model of its own. In order to counter the phenomenon known in economics as the ‘Dutch Disease’, the Gulf states have opened their doors to massive temporary immigration of foreign workers, creating a very peculiar labour market structure which has ended up damaging the opportunities for productive employment available to nationals, especially the young. This model must now be overcome, but while some states are in a position to remain rentiers, thanks to large accumulation of financial resources, others face an eroding oil rent and the need to increase domestic taxation to pay for their ever-increasing expenditure. Increasing reliance on taxation of nationals is inevitably coupled with increasing demand for accountability, which will eventually need to be accommodated through political reform.

Recent threats to democracy have induced scholars to sound the alarm by employing dramatic terms more broadly, for instance by associating right-wing populism with fascism. From the pragmatic perspective advocated by David Collier and Robert Adcock in their article “Democracy and Dichotomies: A Pragmatic Approach to Choices about Concepts” (1999), this chapter criticizes this attenuation of qualitative differences and pleads for maintaining and reaffirming strict conceptual boundaries. After all, fascism constitutes a syndrome of interlocking components (“bounded whole”) that is distinct from lesser dangers such as right-wing populism and conservative authoritarianism; hybrids are rare and unviable. Careful, circumspect concept usage is crucial for accurately diagnosing democracy’s current predicament and for designing promising, effective remedies.

When scholars extend their models and hypotheses to encompass additional cases, they may need to adapt their concepts to fit new contexts. Giovanni Sartori’s work on conceptual traveling and conceptual stretching provides helpful guidance in addressing this fundamental task. Sartori’s framework draws on what may be called a classical understanding of conceptual hierarchies. Each successive concept as one moves down the hierarchy is a “kind of” in relation to the one above it – such that it may be called a kind hierarchy. Concepts have clear boundaries and defining properties shared by all cases deemed to fit the concept. This chapter examines the challenge to this framework presented by two nonclassical approaches: Wittgenstein’s family resemblances and Lakoff’s radial structures. According to these alternative perspectives, concepts may not be sharply bounded, and some attributes may not be shared by all cases viewed as corresponding to the concept. Because they only partly correspond to the concept, this may be called a part–whole hierarchy. With such patterns, strict application of a classical framework can lead to abandoning concepts prematurely or modifying them inappropriately. This chapter discusses solutions to these problems, suggesting that these two forms of hierarchy can productively be used together.

This concluding chapter puts land at the heart of the “China model,” linking legal, fiscal, financial, and political features of the system to explain the roots of China’s contemporary economic challenges, including the real estate crisis, land-backed debt, and abortive property tax initiative. It also extends the theory beyond the Chinese case in three ways. First, it revisits the paradigmatic case of post–Glorious Revolution England in light of China’s experience, suggesting that, in the context of technological change, property rights over land were less secure and governance less democratic in the early eighteenth century than presented in some of the development literature. Second, it examines the relationship between the ease or difficulty of using law to reassign land rights and promotion of transformative economic growth in the case of contemporary India. These comparisons point to the significance of regime type—authoritarian vs. democratic. Regime type shapes the ease with which the state can reassign land rights and how the state manages the conflict that results from the redefinition of property rights. Third, the chapter examines the redefinition of property rights over personal data as a driver of growth in the new information economy as well as a new source of conflict.

Chapter 6 adopts a cross-national perspective to reassess the overall strength of the first wave of democratization outside of Britain and France. It argues that four states that scholars have long considered examples of vanguard democracies or “settled cases of democracy” in northern Europe (Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden) do not really fit this description. Belgium and the Netherlands were clearly competitive oligarchies on the eve of WWI. Denmark was indeed one of the most democratic states in Europe by WWI, but its path there had been marked by periods of militarism and rollbacks of suffrage. Sweden was not a democracy by any measure until after WWI. In each of these cases, elites ran clean elections that, because of counter-majoritarian institutions and suffrage restrictions, fell significantly short (outside of Denmark from 1901 to 1914) from the principle of one man, one vote.

Written in February 2025, well after the completion of the monograph, the epilogue reflects on the fall of the Assad regime as a historic rupture while acknowledging the uncertainty of Syria’s post-revolutionary trajectory. While revolutionary ideals have been reaffirmed in historical narratives, their translation into governance, justice, and political inclusion remains unresolved. New actors now compete to define Syria’s future, shaping its ideological and institutional landscape. The chapter highlights how discursive battles over key political concepts – such as democracy, secularism, and governance – mirror a broader crisis of democracy, where increasingly questioned. It argues that the post-Assad moment has not ended Syria’s struggle for meaning but has transformed it into a contest over the principles that will shape the new order. The epilogue concludes that while something undeniably good has happened – the fall of a brutal dictatorship – the revolution’s aspirations remain incomplete. The task ahead is not to declare its success but to create the conditions in which its meaning continues to unfold.

In this chapter, we explore the scholarly literatures on the effects of liberal democratic governance on the likelihood of terrorist violence, and on the threat posed by terrorist campaigns to liberal democracy.  Most disagreements in these literatures stem from the fact that the reciprocal relationship between democracy and terrorism is highly complex and largely contingent upon structural elements and other characteristics of states and terrorist organizations.  In regard to general institutional structure, we maintain that in offering checks against the majoritarian impulse towards authoritarianism, in subjecting policymaking to institutional competition, and in allowing for the responsible and effective exercise of executive prerogative, presidential democracy offers greater resistance to autocratization in the face of terrorism than parliamentary democracy.  We find empirical support for this proposition in analysis of cross-national time-series data on democratic structural integrity and the maintenance of civil rights and liberties for the period 1970-2012.

The opening chapter recasts a central puzzle in European political development during the so-called first wave of democratization. The puzzle is not that democracy was so successful over this period, but that the transition to some form of mass politics in the birthplace of both the Enlightenment and industrial revolutions produced so few democratic successes. If there was indeed a democratic first wave, it was an extraordinarily small one. And if this is true, then it is not the democratic achievements of the first wave, but rather the successful blocking strategies of the old regime that deserve our attention today.

In this introduction to Pragmatism Revisited, Robert Lane summarizes the book’s fifteen chapters. Those chapters apply classical and newer pragmatist ideas to a wide range of issues, including the imagination, conceptual change, ignorance, religious fundamentalism, truth in political discourse, authoritarian populism, academic freedom, criminal punishment and mass incarceration, environmental philosophy, bioethics, artificial intelligence, the Black intellectual tradition, feminism, gender, and social construction; the final chapter examines the future of pragmatism itself.

This chapter reflects on what international human rights litigation has achieved for labor movements in an era of growing repression and backlash against international courts. Focusing on the experiences of Turkish public sector unions and blacklisted workers in the UK, it addresses a central question: Can international courts meaningfully support workers’ rights in the face of neoliberal restructuring and authoritarian resurgence? The chapter argues that while human rights law is no substitute for rank-and-file mobilization, it has provided activists with tools to contest repression, demand accountability, and carve out political space in hostile environments. Legal victories have not reversed the long-term weakening of organized labor, but they have enabled fragile gains – moments of visibility, legitimacy, and mobilization – that matter both symbolically and materially. Labor’s engagement with human rights remains pragmatic, and hence potentially tenuous; but the resources, aspirations, and alliances this engagement leaves behind can seed future movements. Drawing out both the limits and possibilities of international legal mobilization, the chapter closes by emphasizing the enduring struggles and adaptive strategies of labor in hard times.

This final chapter opens with the universal adoption of the principle of the nation’s right to self-determination, which, applied in the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919, was meant to stabilize international relations and which turned the central tenet of nationalism into a cornerstone of international law. In a European continent purportedly divided into ethnoculturally defined nation-states, the culture of nationalism continued to be operative. Many post-1918 nation-states slid (partly because of an unresolved ambiguity between civic and ethnic definitions of the nation) from parliamentary and constitutional governance towards authoritarianism and dictatorships. Meanwhile, a new cultural medium emerged: cinema. This medium is surveyed to explain the remarkable survival of nationalism across the totalitarian dictatorships and devastating wars of the mid-century, and across the internationalist and anti-totalitarian recoil that dominated the post-1945 decades. It is suggested that this survival, and the renewed contemporary dominance of nationalism as an ideology, is due in large part to its ability to shift back and forth between anodyne and virulent states, latent and salient. The alternation between those states served to proclaim the nation’s charisma both as a merely cultural (unpolitical) feel-good factor and as a political imperative, a commanding, inspiring validator for belligerent heroism.