The most striking aspect of Berlin’s thinking about political judgement is how he treats moral principle or moral rules as a factor in political judgements. Political judgement, as he defines it, is a capacity that he praises irrespective of its moral character or its consequences. So how did Berlin believe moral considerations did shape political judgement? If he thought of political judgement as a skill, an experience-based ability to size up a concrete situation and evaluate risks and opportunities, in a time-bound context, he thought of moral judgement in exactly the same way. In both political and moral behaviour, he doubted that rules, principles, formalized ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ could be determinative. The situation was everything. An essay on Berlin’s idea of ‘political judgement’ will have to unpack Berlin’s moral psychology, confront the question of whether he praised moral ruthlessness a little too much and ask whether his conception of political judgement ends up sidelining ethics as a crucial factor in political decision-making.

The Army upheld religious observance and conformity. This was as true of the Hindu milieu of the Brigade of Gurkhas as it was of the Christian character of the wider Army. The Army’s ‘Christendom’ culture endured much longer than in civilian society: soldiers were expected to profess a religious affiliation, and mandatory worship did not disappear with the notional abolition of Sunday church parade in 1946. Only from the turn of the twenty-first century, and under the aegis of a New Labour government, did this situation begin to change. While the goal of making the Army more representative of society led to an increasing accent on recruiting from Britain’s ethnic and religious minorities, under the banner of equality, diversity and inclusion, Humanists began to challenge the Army’s Christian ascendancy. However, and although the proportion of soldiers professing ‘no religion’ (in fact, a remarkably varied category) grew in the early years of the twenty-first century, most notably after the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan, the appetite for fundamental religious change remained very limited, with Humanist aspirations being assimilated by the Army’s established culture of religious pluralism.

Now twenty-five years into the twenty-first century, the formidable legacies of Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) come into clear view. She lent her lyrical voice to celebrating the dignity, complexity, and heroism of ordinary people. Her portraits of the residents of Chicago’s South Side, where she lived most of her life, achieve vitality because of her skillful fusion of Black cultural tradition with modernist aesthetics. She saw her poetry chronicling the history of a transforming society in the service of truth and universal humanism. Brooks wanted her poetry “to vivify the universal fact,” and early in her writing career she found that humanism all around her as she looked from the window of her small second-floor apartment at 623 East 63rd Street. This chapter discusses Brooks as the singular inspiration for the inaugural Furious Flower Conference in 1994, her passion for inspiring young people to explore their gifts of writing and reading, her own distinguished career as an award-winning American poet, and her deep devotion to the craft of writing and the inventiveness of language.

This chapter explores the worldview of individuals who reject religion but, rather than placing their faith in science (scientism), put it in humanity, embracing the humanities and culture, and affirming that human beings are persons born free and equal in dignity and rights.

This chapter explores the influence of Confucian culture on the political culture of the CCP, with a particular focus on the latter’s attempt to establish a revolutionary morality. Having analysed different views of Confucius within the Party leadership, it reviews the debate among intellectuals about Confucianism, which reached its peak in the early 1960s. By the Cultural Revolution, Confucian values had come under fierce attack. It explores the CCP’s relation to specific Confucian values, such as loyalty, family relations, filial piety, benevolence, ‘conscience’, hard work, and the pursuit of wealth. It rejects the idea of the CCP as a ‘Confucian Leninist party’, concluding that its appropriation of elements in the Confucian tradition was often unconscious and always fraught with tension.

The brief conclusion summarises the book’s argument about Blake in relation to the critical terms of humanism and posthumanism. It argues that Blake’s nuanced representation of the body, which, in his universe, is simultaneously preformed and self-organised, aligns him with a distinctly Romantic humanism while also allowing him to anticipate the insights of posthumanism. Finally, it suggests that Blake’s works offer the concept of elasticity as an alternative to plasticity – a concept which acknowledges the complexities of embodiment while insisting on the importance of resilience and identity.

Using critiques of ‘the human’ drawn from Black feminism, this chapter examines the aesthetic components of ‘race’ as the concept begins, in the early nineteenth century, to resemble its current form. After a brief introduction featuring Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), the main test cases are early to mid-decade representations of Khoikhoi women and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The chapter ends by looking forward to works like Sanditon by Jane Austen and Ourika (1823) by Claire de Duras. Ultimately, the chapter aims to show that the 1810s were a period where the concept of race became simultaneously more unsettled and more established as a distinct realm of human experience. Further, it argues for the crucial role aesthetic representation played in this contradictory state of affairs and in the development of modern identity categories.

Europe’s recovery and reconfirmation were brought about by a growing and increasingly urbanized population as well as by technological advancements and the “Columbian Exchange” that gave Europe access to American riches. Even as the balance of economic power shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, the humanistic ideology first developed in Italy spread throughout the region and stimulated the emergence of new theatre forms. The theory and practice of commedia erudita (developed from the study of Roman comedy) and commedia dell’arte (Europe’s first fully professional theatre form) were brought together in the spoken theatre that filled new niches for urban commercial theatre in the leading cities of Spain, England, and France. The study of Greek tragedy, meanwhile, prompted the emergence of opera in Italy, even as royal courts in France and England glorified themselves with ballet and court masques, respectively.

In the final chapter, the general account of the artifactual paradigm at work in Hegel’s thinking is extended to explain the shape of his overall philosophical position. Speaking loosely, Hegel sometimes suggests that everything is conceptual. However, it is here contended that Hegel’s idealism essentially involves an asymmetry in the domains of Geist and nature that is rooted in Hegel’s theory of concepts. Geist is that which is conceptually constituted; nature is that which is not conceptually constituted. This asymmetry between the two domains is the “inversion” of philosophy that Hegel’s concept-centric metaphysics inspires. In this chapter, evidence is assembled from Hegel’s so-called Realphilosophie – specifically his works on political philosophy, natural philosophy, and aesthetics – to show that Hegel’s treatment of these topics indeed demonstrates an inverted conception of philosophy, one that is rightly considered a humanism.

Austen’s Emma is read with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s challenge to imagine a humanistic study that overcomes anthropocentrism and looks at the world from non-human points of view. First a traditional reading of Austen’s vertical framing, based on the idea of the Great Chain of Being, is offered. Then, a practice called “reading horizontally” both opposes that framing and heeds the idea of humans as holobionts. As seen in the elision of insect action, the novel omits vital biological processes and agents in favor of a particular form of androcentrism where humans dominate and are separated from and impervious to the natural world. This construction of the human warrants reexamination in light of the biology of symbiosis, as well as the idea of the holobiont. The chapter proposes integrating new, biologically informed approaches into the reading and teaching of such texts. Much can be learned from considering newer biological definitions of what it means to be human.

This chapter examines how active citizenship or political participation, and representation were understood in Europe from the early sixteenth century to the mid seventeenth century. There are two central arguments which I put forward and seek to defend it what follows. First, there was a noticeable shift from direct participation to representation as the main form of political involvement during this period. Second, and more importantly, whereas in the early part of the period political participation was understood mainly as a duty, by the mid seventeenth century, when representation was conceived as the chief form of participation, it was increasingly comprehended as a right. The chapter begins by discussing Niccolò Machiavelli’s notion of direct participation of the people, before moving to Northern Europe, where the idea of active citizenship was understood in more restrictive terms. Shunning popular political participation, citizenship was reserved for the elite.

This chapter traces the history of Renaissance Italy’s long and passionate love affair with the textual and material remnants of classical antiquity, exploring classical influences within literary and intellectual history, art history, and material culture. The classicizing movement known as humanism is charted here from its origins in the early 1300s to the moment sometimes called the High Renaissance in early sixteenth-century Rome. The chapter argues that past paradigms have often over-emphasized the secular leaning of Renaissance humanism or posited a sharp transition from a medieval, other-worldly to an earthly, human-focused world-view. Countering this, the chapter examines the ways in which a society and culture still deeply invested in Christianity responded to the philosophical challenges posed by pagan antiquity and the strategies it developed to reconcile the two.

This chapter examines the ways in which classical influences intersected in Italian Renaissance culture with modernizing impulses in an era of rapid social and material change. The early sixteenth century in Italy brought a series of devastating wars and a loss of political independence at the same time that Italian culture was absorbing significant novelties, such as the introduction of printing in Europe and the geographical ‘discoveries’ of the period, especially that of the transatlantic New World. The chapter foregrounds the sense of novelty and progress that was a marked feature of the later Renaissance in Italy, balancing humanism’s reverence for classical antiquity. This dialectic is examined through detailed case studies of the histories of geography and cartography, of the theory and practice of anatomy, of art-historical writing and conceptions of artistic progress, and of the social and cultural impact of print.

Like a puppy playing with the long stick which is the risk-uncertainty conundrum, we chew energetically on the risk end, letting the uncertainty end drag in the dust. The stick is shaped, I argue, by Newtonian humanism. It combines the scientific and humanist stances that have co-evolved in modern times, constituting a commonsensical, internally inconsistent, worldview. And that view bends the analysis of the political world toward controllable risk, sidestepping or silencing unruly uncertainty.

This chapter tracks the way the accumulation of capital in the colonial metropole enabled a cross-cultural dialogue among certain poets from the East and the West in London in the 1920s and 1930s, one that gradually diminishes in the postcolonial period. Poetry, in the modernist period, sought to dismantle the binary between authenticity and derivation, a binary which has been given new life in our own moment and has, therefore, blinded us from seeing these poets as participating in a common enterprise, even if it is one beset with many conceptual pitfalls resulting from the colonial relation. Nevertheless, poets as distinct as Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, and Una Marson – and thinkers such as C. L. R. James – wished to construct a universal humanism out of the uneven terrain of imperial modernity, an impulse they shared with such complicated figures as W. B. Yeats and even the violently reactionary Ezra Pound. Ultimately, this unstable humanism gives way to the starker divides of the period of decolonization.