The traditional narratives of Austrian constitutional law are evolving. Long decried by scholars and practitioners to be ‘in ruins’, the Austrian Constitution has recently been lauded as ‘elegant and beautiful’ by Austria’s President, thus attempting a paradigm shift in the Austrian public’s perception of its constitution. While some textbooks claim it (still) is a merely formal, ‘value neutral constitution of game rules’ much in the spirit of Hans Kelsen, the Austrian Constitution and its interpretation show more and more signs of converging into a principled, value-oriented and purposive approach common in many other countries. The multinational legal legacy of the Habsburg Empire and its potential for understanding the European integration have been recognized as an asset, just as the ensuing creation of the world’s first constitutional court is of pride and the Austrian Constitution’s leading export.

How did colonialism affect the content and practice of Buddhist monastic law? This chapter answers this question from the perspective of colonial legal sources, considering the ‘practices of legal pluralism’ employed by British officials starting in the early 1800s. Drawing on colonial correspondence, court decisions, draft laws, government transcripts, and newspaper reports, I explain how and why the British concretised legal concepts, such as ‘ecclesiastical succession’, ‘Buddhist temporalities’ and ‘temple lands’, while also generating new bodies of law: a body of civil-court case law governing monks called Buddhist Ecclesiastical Law; and an influential ordinance regulating the use and administration of ‘Buddhist properties’, called the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance. I show how colonial jurists mapped Buddhism onto particular spaces, issues and communities, such that Buddhism acquired, in law, English-style qualities of jurisdiction across three dimensions: territorial jurisdiction, subject-matter jurisdiction, and personal jurisdiction.

This chapter examines the ideological origins and political impact of the American concept of the “free world.” From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, “free world leadership” served as the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. Although American officials imagined the “free world” as the self-evident expression of international liberalism, they defined it negatively as equivalent to the entire “non-communist world.” Cold War liberals’ persistent failure to fill the “free world” with positive content forced them to maintain a series of inflexible and ultimately counterproductive positions, including an intolerance of nonalignment, a commitment to global containment, and an axiomatic insistence on the enduring and existential nature of the Soviet threat. Although the “free world” mostly fell out of circulation after the 1960s, the logic of the concept has continued to underpin an American project of global “leadership” that derives its purpose and extent from the prior identification of a single extraordinary threat.

After the experiences of the Terror and the Directory, there was widespread disenchantment with popular power. For Bonaparte and his collaborators, popular sovereignty and public opinion needed to be rethought to align with France’s aspirations for order, stability and strong leadership. In their view, direct popular sovereignty had to be restored in the form of plebiscites, while public opinion should be controlled and shaped by the government. The resulting political system was, in the words of a supporter of the Brumaire coup, “democracy purged of all its drawbacks.” This chapter unfolds chronologically, exploring Bonaparte and Pierre-Louis Roederer’s shifting conceptions of the people’s two powers from 1799 to the advent of the Empire in 1804. Special attention is given to how they revisited Rousseau’s accounts of public opinion and popular sovereignty to further their own agenda.

This chapter explores the cultural obsession with entropy in the London-based magazine, New Worlds. Associated with the 1960s New Wave, New Worlds was instrumental in bringing an experimental literary sensibility to the genre of science fiction. Writing against the grain of prevailing academic criticism, the chapter unearths a latent utopian impulse within the metaphor of entropy. Artists, writers, and critics associated with New Worlds considered the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, to be a fitting image for the dystopian mood of post-war British literature and culture. The chapter argues that their obsession with the disintegration of society at a time of post-imperial decline reveals, rather, hope among the ruins. It offers a close reading of British-based artist and writer Pamela Zoline’s short story “Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), in which the boredom of a Californian housewife stretches into a Dadaist utopian daydream about the heat death of the universe, the theoretical endpoint of entropy. By situating fictions published in New Worlds within the wider political contexts of anti-colonial resistance, the New Left, Second Wave Feminism, and Gay Liberation, the chapter uncovers a persistent strain of utopian possibility through Britain’s cultural obsession with entropy in the 1960s.

That the Declaration of Independence could be considered from the perspective of rhetoric might seem rather obvious, if not downright self-evident. Even so, appreciating how Jefferson thought about language not as an abstract concept but as a lived and material practice can help us appreciate the text of the Declaration from different perspectives. The text is shot through with the histories of race, nation, empire, and belonging that characterized the ideology of American revolutionary republicanism, and with Jefferson’s thinking about these forces and his own anxious place in them. In fact, despite and perhaps even in part because of his own difficulties with public speaking, Jefferson thought about the ability to access and marshal rhetorical exemplars and put them to use in legal and political argument as an elemental part of what it meant to be an effective citizen. His thinking about material rhetoric, about the absorption of what one read through notes, commentary, and commonplace books, turns out to be a critical component of how he thought about the legitimacy of the American project and of how he framed that project in successive drafts of the Declaration itself.

This chapter studies the controversy that led to the founding of East India Company College as a training institute for future administrators of British India. Governor-General Richard Wellesley’s unilateral decision in 1798 to establish a mandatory training college at Fort William, Calcutta, for all new recruits of the East India Company precipitated a conflict that embroiled the Court of Directors of the Company and the parliamentary Board of Control. I show that the language of corruption in this imperial context was transformed from accusations of personal enrichment to questions regarding procedural propriety, institutional overreach, and cultural difference. The Court of Directors could not refute Wellesley’s claim that Company civil servants were poorly trained. Nor did they wish to lose control over their prerogative of hiring personnel or determining the ideal qualities of an effective imperial administrator. They resolved instead to found East India College at Haileybury, formalizing a new imperial bureaucracy.

When authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote about what it meant to have rights, they discussed a great diversity of ways in which that concept could be understood, but they almost always concurred on one point. It was vital, they argued, that right should never be conflated with power. As Hugo Grotius put it, we must never agree with the claim that might is right. The twenty-six essays in this volume show that the idea of rights was widely used in the early modern period to resist and limit power. Accordingly, modern liberals have portrayed the period in terms of a struggle for rights against arbitrary power. However, the authors in this volume question that the story of rights as resistance was the dominant narrative of rights. If there was a dominant discourse of rights in the early modern period at all, it was one in which rights were coextensive with power.

The rights of peoples in Spain and its empire formed part of wider pan-European discussions, which were informed by both secular and religious normativities. According to those, the universe was the aggregate of constant and multiple exchanges. Though these exchanges were not necessarily equal nor simultaneous, they nonetheless formed the basic skeleton of all social, political, and legal interactions. Jurists and theologians who set out to explain how this system operated suggested that a pre-set order that was stable, prescriptive, and indisputable oversaw these exchanges. This order indicated the appropriate place for all peoples and things and gave each a particular function. It resulted in a constellation, which was not arbitrary, but instead corresponded to an objective situation, a ‘state of stability’ or an ‘unaltered condition.’

A detailed commentary which covers matters of literary and historical interest in book VII in the context of Herodotos’ History as a whole. Issues treated include style, dialect, language, text (where necessary), political, religious and social history, both Greek and Persian, prosopography, ethnicity and geography.