The way in which Proclus’ Elements of Theology exemplifies metaphysical science as understood by Late Antique Platonists and as expressed in Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Parmenides is examined in Chapter 27, which proposes an analysis of the propositions and demonstrations which open the book. I stress the idea that these metaphysical reasonings were regarded as ‘exercises’ of the rational soul, a training leading to a greater proximity to divine first principles.

In 1965, an antiwar movement with disparate constituencies united uneasily in a loose coalition, but remained so amorphous that no single entity could provide either leadership or direction. Local actions built around teach-ins, the international days of protest, or as independent events, dominated antiwar activism that year. Peace liberals and pacifists pursued moderate actions such as lobbying, education and persuasion, legal and peaceful rallies, and picketing, while hoping for change through an international solution or the electoral process. Radicals and leftists connected the war with domestic injustice and questioned some fundamental assumptions about American power. Despite its limitations, organized dissent provided a significant enough challenge that the Johnson administration felt compelled to push back. Government officials mixed efforts to persuade public opinion with denigrating activists as communist-inspired or threatening protesters with military induction. President Johnson aimed his April negotiating proposal and a brief December bombing halt over North Vietnam at impressing his domestic critics as much as his foreign adversaries.

The Vietnam antiwar movement moved along mutually supportive paths; one within the formal political system and one outside. Dissent within the government expanded over time. Distinct elements of the outsider movement exerted greater influence at different points. Liberal reformers dominated until 1967 and after mid-1971, and intermittently during election campaigns and the fall 1969 Moratorium. Leftists were most evident during major coalition events of 1967 through the May Day demonstrations of spring 1971. Massive student protests in both 1968 and 1970 were ideologically ambiguous. Drawing encouragement and political leverage from the “outsider” movement, federal and state legislators and officials in the executive branch played their most significant role in collaboration with the activist core after 1971.

How, given the murder of those demanding a more representative political system at Peterloo in 1819, did more Britons, at home and in the colonies, get to vote by 1885?

The epilogue brings the narrative from the early years of the new century to recent events, just before sending the manuscript to print, in mid 2024. It tells of the changing attitudes in Germany both towards Jews living in that country and towards Israel and its policies of occupation in the Palestinian West Bank. The unique German–Israeli relationship during the last two decades is sketched against the background of the past, and finally, it is attempted to draw a balance between the apparent achievement of a decent Jewish life in Germany, on the one hand, and the new dangers of a rising politically organized right, simultaneously with a growing critique of Israel and the apparent emergence of a new antisemitism, on the other hand.

This concluding chapter looks back at the main findings that emerged from this research and shows how they explain the transformation of long-distance Tunisian politics in the aftermath of the 2011 Revolution. It asks how the anti- and pro-regime struggles evolved following the demise of the central purpose of these struggles and the movements they inspired, and looks at the ways in which boundaries were redefined through different fields of action and the growth of new divisions. The emergence of new actors, the political reconversion of those who had shifted to Tunisian-centred politics, new rules of the game and the various possibilities of return to Tunisia each played a role in redefining the modalities of long-distance Tunisian politics. However, decades of activism had regulated the practice of activists from afar and reinforced the informal rules of the trans-state space of mobilisation. The 2011 Revolution simultaneously represented a decisive rupture and a continuity, reshaping and continuing to reshape the dynamics of the trans-state space of mobilisation.

This chapter charts the evolution of social unrest in the streets of Prague from the war years to the end of 1920, a moment of heightened occupation of public space by crowds. Most of these protests resist clear-cut labels as socialist or nationalist. They must be considered in terms of the protesters’ relationship to the state, in the larger context of the Habsburg Empire’s collapse and the Czechoslovak republic’s difficult stabilization. Food supply deficiencies generated many riots, demonstrations, and strikes. The trajectories of protests, from suburban centers of local power to the city’s main squares, show declining trust in imperial institutions and increasing recourse to violence. Postwar demonstrations signal a shift in conceptions of citizenship and democracy, the streets becoming a forum for legitimate popular political participation. The housing crisis and evictions by crowds constitute a good case study of the willingness to resort to direct action to establish a new form of social justice.

An examination of the practice of petitioning at the grassroots level shows how it stimulated a vibrant popular politics. Revisionist scholarship emphasising the supposed taming or disciplining of political culture has ignored the lively local culture of petitioning. The chapter first outlines the process and practice of petitioning: the drafting, signing, and presentation and reception of petitions. Of all these different stages in the process of petitioning, it was the practice of signing petitions that was most important to nineteenth-century popular politics. Not only did it underpin other forms of political activity, such as public meetings, but opened up new informal spaces for political activity and engendered new forms of political behaviour. The practice of petitioning stimulated a never-ending cycle of claim and counter-claim about the forging of signatures, the undue influence of landlords or employers, and outright misrepresentation. This endless contestation was intrinsic to the practice and process of petitioning and one of the most important ways in which it energised popular politics at the local level.

The Introduction delineates a shared set of concerns animating both artistic practices and scientific discourses at the turn of the nineteenth century, which were deeply invested in the human body’s ability to secure the relationship between reality and illusion, and between seeing and knowing. It first reevaluates historical accounts of the decline of neoclassicism and rise of Romanticism, and particularly the waning pictorial supremacy of the idealized nude body. It then lays out the importance of “popular science” and “Enlightenment empiricism” for the cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Britain and Continental Europe, revealing how the scientific authority of the human body was undergoing intense scrutiny. Recognizing such developments as interlocking rather than parallel enables us to think more critically about how artworks interrogated some of the visual and structural features of popular scientific discourses and, ultimately, the empirical framework that undergirded them.

This chapter describes the duty of States to respect and protect the right to life in the context of assemblies, including demonstrations, marches, and protests. The right to assembly peacefully is a fundamental human right. General Comment 37 on the right of peaceful assembly, adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Committee in July 2020, is an important normative reference.

This chapter explains how we identified and coded protest events over a period of sixteen years in thirty European countries. We present the semi-automated approach that combines natural language processing tools for the identification of relevant news documents and then discuss the manual annotation for a precise coding of protest events from multiple sources that publish news content in English. The semi-automated part allows us to deal with a large number of documents identified through keyword searches, namely 5 million documents. The manual annotation, in turn, guarantees that we are able to distinguish different protest forms, actors, and the issues at play. Our endeavor resulted in a dataset of 30,000 unique protest events that we use in this book to study contentious politics during the Great Recession.