This Introduction provides historical context for the development of István Hont’s ideas, from his time as a student in Budapest to his arrival in Great Britain. It explores the main themes of his work and seeks to relate these to the work of his primary interlocutors in Cambridge and beyond.

This chapter examines the dual influence of natural law and republicanism on the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This chapter explores the concepts of culture and civilisation, their origin in the natural jurisprudence of Samuel Pufendorf and their connection to the fundamental concerns of political economy.

The substantive discussion begun in Chapter 2, particularly on interpretation, is continued in Chapter 3 through the prism of progress. Collective understandings of state violence, including torture, are understood to have changed over time, with what was historically conceived as permissible coming to be condemned as reprehensible. Changing understandings of pain and punishment, it is argued, are sociopolitically contingent, with legal assessments of torture too beholden to this broader context. On this register, the chapter charts the broader contours of the central shifts in prevailing social and scientific views, values and knowledge, as channelled or challenged through judges and taken to constitute torture’s sociality. This has culminated, it is argued, in a script of ‘progress’ driving the anti-torture field.

Chapter 2 frames the book, drawing on structuration theory and ontological security studies to provide its theoretical underpinnings. This chapter begins by exploring the claims of positive influences of different tools found in the transitional justice project on ensuring non-recurrence of conflict. It proposes that while both scholars and practitioners remain unsure of what ‘works’ for a meaningful ‘Never Again’, they remain faithful that something does and that some transitional justice is better than none. The chapter then delineates some common threads based on these multiple promises of non-recurrence to reflect on the characteristics of transitional justice as a structure. Finally, the chapter theoretically complicates the existing position of non-recurrence in transitional justice scholarship by asking questions about temporality, security, and the purpose of transitional justice as a global project. In doing so, it provides a new outlook on the ontological security/transitional justice nexus and discusses where non-recurrence fits within it.

Chapter 6 concludes the three-partite discussion about what hampers meaningful assurances of ‘Never Again’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and what transitional justice has to do with conflict recurrence anxieties. The chapter first identifies the widespread glorification of war criminals and denial of atrocity crimes as key sources of anxiety about potential renewed conflict in BiH. Next, the chapter analytically links these practices to the global project and discusses how past practices of legal and institutional reform such as vetting led to a legal structure that did not regulate convicted war criminals’ access to power. The chapter then explains these behaviours as responses to the perceived threats to different political communities’ ontological securities. The chapter shows how the resulting widespread practices of glorification and the culture of denialism are framed by the international community as a ‘civilisational issue’ which serves to prolong the relevance and presence of the external actors in Bosnia and Herzegovina and stigmatise actors in international society.

Chapter 5 examines the BJP’s attempt to build centres of elite, traditional intellectuals to legitimise its identity politics. While dismantling advisory committees, quashing dissent, and attacking universities and established research institutions, the BJP has built think tanks to bring together stakeholders in government and civil society and give its political ideology a footprint in already established policy networks. Some scholars have characterised the BJP’s think tanks as institutions of ‘soft Hindutva’ (see Anderson 2015), that is, organisations that avoid overt association with the BJP and Hindu-nationalist linkages but pursue a diffuse Hindutva agenda nevertheless. Through an ethnographic study of the BJP’s two most prominent think tanks, this chapter demonstrates how manifestations of Hindutva can be both explicitly political and anti-political at the same time: advocating for political interventionism while eschewing politics and forging an apolitical route towards cultural transformation.

Chapter 6 has three interrelated aims. First, to identify the relationship between the modern nation-state, international humanitarian law (IHL), and notions of civility; second, through a historical exploration of the relationship between military necessity, proportionality, and discrimination in IHL, to make the argument that the claimed shift from sovereignty to humanitarianism is not as complete as often argued, and that rather, raison d’état continues to be a motivating factor informing constraint during combat; and third, through an exploration of ‘the standard of civilisation’, to identify how this relationship informs discord between the universal underpinnings of contemporary IHL, and ongoing violations of the law. The chapter concludes by proposing that the oft-maligned concept of a ‘standard of civilisation’ remains valuable in exploring continuities of double standards as they relate to protections afforded by the modern laws of war.

This chapter argues that the first two cantos of Childe Harold and the Turkish Tales can be read as a sustained critique and questioning of a teleological history, or a history impelled by the acts of great men and heroes. It suggests that these poems engage with the intellectual crisis precipitated by the Napoleonic wars and a devastated Europe in different ways, representing a broad alienation from the meaningful progress of history both within and beyond European borders. Understanding Byron’s distinctive romanticism as primarily political rather than ontological, the chapter reads this group of poems as being charged with a late-enlightenment scepticism representative of a new freedom of thought in which there are no structural possibilities for history, and through which heroic acts are rendered ever more remote from civilisation’s improvement.

The first part of the chapter examines how the loss of the Christian colony became a prism through which it was possible to reflect on the two globalising European projects of the nineteenth century: colonialism and Christian mission. The ‘lost colony’ in Greenland came to function as a mirror for contemporary anxieties about the danger of settling far from European metropoles. Analysis of available sources shows that this fear was fed by anecdotal evidence that the European Greenlanders had lost their Christian faith and descended into savagery. The second part of the chapter explores a series of significant themes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary representations of the Christian mission in Greenland. As the old colonists had been Christian and new missions were now making progress, a ‘fall-and-restoration’ structure became embedded in several texts. The most notable example is the British poet James Montgomery’s Greenland (1819), a text neglected in modern criticism despite the fact that it enjoyed significant popularity in the Romantic period.

In her chapter, Silvia Sebastiani treats Scottish Enlightenment thinking about the history of society as the product of a dialogue with natural history as well as moral philosophy. The key reference points were Buffon’s Natural History and Rousseau’s Discourse on inequality: from these the Scots derived two rival accounts of how natural man became historical. One conceived of history as the ‘progress of society’ through successive ‘stages’ of development, culminating in the attainment of ‘civilisation’. With contributions from David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, this account was premised on the idea of a uniform human nature, but did not exclude the possibility of hierarchies between humans, and attached lesser value to forms of social organisation preceding civilisation. The alternative, explored at length by Lord Monboddo, a practising judge, took Rousseau’s assertion of the ‘perfectibility’ of man as an invitation to appreciate the variety of ways (physical as well as moral) in which humans might develop, and to accept that quite different outcomes were possible, corruption and decline as much as progress. There was no single Scottish conception of the ‘progress of society’, and the normative implications of stadial history were less uniformly positive than its later admirers have supposed.

Most contemporary students and proponents of cosmopolitanism would identify it as a philosophy of peace, based on mutual tolerance, recognition, dialogue and commitment to global justice. This chapter argues that, though true, this account of cosmopolitanism is historically incomplete and conceptually truncated. It shows how such a pacific conception of cosmopolitanism had to be positively argued for in the Enlightenment against currents of cosmopolitanism reaching back to the Stoics that presented it as conflictual and conflicted. In particular, it argues that there has been a long and complex relationship between conceptions of cosmopolitanism and ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to our own age of “Global Civil War.” It presents the darker side of cosmopolitanism as a philosophy of conflict as well as compromise, of war as well as peace and of civil war as well as of civilisation and civility.

Chapter 8 proposes a three-tier system for eliminating food insecurity, avoiding famine, and reducing conflict in the twenty-first century.

This chapter uses notions of language and civilisation to understand how disabled people were understood in the context of the British empire.The chapter begins with a discussion of the long-standing association in western European thought between language and humanity. Debates about whether animals had access to language, which gained renewed importance during the Enlightenment and again with evolutionism, identified language acquisition as the ‘true marker’ of what it meant to be human. This left those with aphasia, intellectual disabilities that affected speech or deaf muteness in a highly vulnerable position. Whilst the development of deaf education helped mitigate fears around disability, during the nineteenth century, it became deeply contested and the question as to whether deaf children should be educated using sign language or spoken English became of surprisingly wide importance. Drawing on the work of Douglas Baynton, who argues that in nineteenth-century America sign language was increasingly linked with an early stage of evolution and ‘foreignness’, I resituate these trends, found also in Britain, in the context of colonialism and imperialism. I argue that the intolerance of sign language was linked to a wider intolerance of difference, both the difference of disability and the difference of ‘race’.

Chapter 2 illuminates the transformation of the European and global international system in the first decades of the “long” 20th century (1860–1914). It analyses how the turn towards ever more uncompromising power politics, the emergence of modern states and the intensification of ever more unlimited imperialist competition between older and aspiring world powers – essentially, the European great powers, the United States and Japan – came to recast Europe and the world. It throws into relief how this competition and the rise of dominant imperialist, militarist and “civilisational Darwinist” doctrines and assumptions not only led to the creation of a new global hierarchy characterised by unprecedented inequalities between imperial world states, smaller states and those who were subjected to different forms of informal imperialist domination and formal colonisation. And it offers new perspectives on how the confluence of European balance-of-power practices and escalating global rivalries successively corroded international peace.