This paper examines what Kant says about the economy in Feyerabend’s notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right. While Feyerabend does not report Kant having a systematic discussion of the economy as a topic in its own right the text is interesting in what it shows about the context and the development of Kant’s thought on issues to do with political economy. I look at the Feyerabend lecture notes in relation to things said about the economy in Achenwall’s Natural Law, Kant’s text book, as well as in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Looking at the three texts in relation to each other illuminates the development of Kant’s thinking and the paper focuses on tracing the relations between ideas to do with the economy in the three texts. I look at Kant’s developing thoughts on the economy in relation to the following ideas: an account of money; an account of value and price; the theorization of labor; taxation; property and the commons.

Italy shared many similarities with Germany: it was a patchwork of different political entities, economically backward, and divided by the Papal State in the middle. Unification was led by Piedmont, a state that was the Italian counterpart to Prussia. Piedmont’s nation builders were anticlerical liberals. In Italy, the confessional cleavage between state and church was of paramount importance after unification. Rapid liberalization and industrialization brought pauperization, and as in Germany, the religious cleavage added to the capital–labor tensions. Despite these similarities, Italy saw the emergence of a welfare state only half a century after Germany.

In this chapter we provide a general overview of trends in PTAs in Latin America (LA), with an emphasis on PTA design and diffusion. We base the chapter around four primary tasks. First, we review extant theoretical accounts underlying the motivations for LA countries’ engagement with PTAs. We classify countries into three groups – the liberal traders, post-liberals and anti-liberals – based on their approach to PTA partner selection and design. Second, we compare Latin America to other world regions. We show that countries in the region sign many PTAs on average, but that design features vary considerably within the region. Third, we show that PTA design in the region is influenced by both economic and political factors. Fourth, we use quantitative text analysis to analyse whether common models or templates can be observed in the region. We find some evidence that agreements involving the US have diffused within the region, but we fail to uncover strong evidence of a single template or templates that LA countries routinely adopt. Overall, our analysis paints a picture of a heterogeneous region where domestic political and economic factors affect how countries engage with the world economy through PTAs.

This chapter considers the double form of nineteenth-century Irish realism through attention to Anna Maria Hall’s The Whiteboy: A Story of Ireland (1845). Focusing on the movement between sympathy and outrage and two mediating figures for Irish social difference – Scottish Highlanders and Indigenous peoples from North America – I demonstrate how the novel exposes the limits of liberal consensus. It works to delimit the proper space of politics and demarcate proper political subjects by teaching Irish people to work toward a shared future rather than agitate in the present. But, in the process, it points toward other political horizons where politics need not be put in its place and justice rather than liberal inclusion – which necessarily depends upon exclusion – prevails.

A long critical history of the realist novel has worked to solidify a set of relations in which realism, liberal ideology, and the construction of a liberal subject all go hand in hand. Such a tight association between text and world and text and ideology tends to predetermine not only what the novel can say but who its subjects can be. What might happen were we to disentangle these generic and political ties, which circumscribe our role as readers of the realist novel, and, most significantly, shrink the worlds of these novels? Via Raymond Williams’s concept of keywords and their ability to pry open meaning rather than solidify it, this chapter argues for a far richer history of realism in alternative accounts of the realist novel that return to classical realism to read it anew or turn to so-called peripheral realisms to expand its purview and its politics beyond the confines of British imperial culture and liberal ideology. It proposes a dialectical approach to reading realism that allows the realist novel to surprise us by how it goes about knowing the world and what it can tell us about the world.

The global imaginary from which cosmopolitanism derives its ideological power has become increasingly dominant. This has set up contradictory responses. Cosmopolitanism is both a core expression and a casualty of our modern/postmodern times. On the one hand, there is a tendency for the intellectually trained to believe that good cosmopolitanism is a necessity in a globalising world. For those people, it does not make sense that positive global exchange between people concerned about fairness and justice should have its nationalist, realist, and provincial critics. On the other hand, there are those who associate cosmopolitanism variously with the abstract emptiness of disembodied globalisation (communitarians), the rapacious consequences of capitalist globalisation (alter-globalism activists), or the assault on certain sections of the national body (right-wing populists). Responding to this tension, this chapter defends a philosophy and ideology that are commonly held while critically and radically reworking its often-assumed precepts, agreeing at least with communitarian and alter-globalist distancing of the easy forms of cosmopolitanism.

This chapter focuses on the 1970s and 1980s during which MacCormick confronted and developed his political philosophy, with a special focus on the essays that were collected in Legal Right and Social Democracy (1982). This includes how MacCormick crafted a middle space between liberalism and socialism, which he called ‘social democracy’. It also includes MacCormick’s work, in this period, on obligations and rights. This chapter discusses the sense in which this conceptual work can be read with character, e.g., how his concepts of obligation and rights relate to his basic commitment to respect for persons (including a concern for the temporally-extended quality of relations between persons). It also places this philosophical work in the context of the politics of the period, e.g., the SNP’s own eventual endorsement of a social democratic platform, and it discusses how MacCormick’s political interventions in this period (e.g., his actions with respect to the’79 Group) can also be understood as expressions and negotiations of his character. Overall, the chapter explores how MacCormick’s character is expressed and negotiated in his role as a jurist, making law as morally intelligible as he could, seeking to limit executive power legally, and also diffusing and decentralising power as much as possible.

This chapter tackles MacCormick’s lifelong engagement with and reflection on nationalism, including both in terms of how he lived it politically and how he philosophised it. It situates MacCormick’s nationalism in the historiography of Scottish nationalism, resisting attempts to frame the field on the basis of either pro- or anti-independence views. MacCormick’s nationalism cannot be shoehorned in this way. Instead, the chapter explores MacCormick’s particular kind of nationalism by reference to its relation to time – e.g., in the form of gradualism – as well as how he reflected on the constitutional importance of the Union of 1707. It also considers how MacCormick conceptualised nationalism – as liberal and civic – and how this was explored both in his philosophical work as well as in his political life, e.g., in his various campaigns as SNP candidate in Westminster elections. The chapter also considers MacCormick’s contributions to the SNP’s Constitutional Policy Committee, and in particular his work on the Draft Constitution for a Future Independent Scotland. In so doing, the chapter examines how MacCormick’s nationalism and constitutionalism can be read as a matter of character.

The conclusion considers theoretical and practical changes needed to begin to extricate liberalism and liberal democracies from their patriarchal roots, strengthen the protection of women’s rights in liberal democracies, and bolster the ability of liberal democracies to fight against right-wing religio-populism. The changes suggested are in the tradition of the radical internal critique of liberalism offered by Susan Okin, whose radical liberal, or humanist, feminism aimed to provide theoretical underpinnings for a liberalism that will focus on both the private and the public spheres, recognize the gendered power differentials, oppression, and prejudices maintained and supported by patriarchal liberalism, and take active steps to change them. Most of the discussion will refer to the theoretical and practical changes needed to protect women’s rights in liberal democracies from the adverse effects of patriarchal religion, including its nationalist and populist iterations. The last part will discuss the connection between the suggested changes and the urgently needed overall struggle of liberal democracies against right-wing populism.

This chapter argues against the common but oversimplified claim that the secularization of the world and the legal separation between religion and the state in liberal states have eliminated the negative effects patriarchal religion can have on women’s rights. The chapter suggests that there are at least five facets of the relationship between religion and the state in contemporary liberal democracies that are crucial to a proper understanding of the ways in which religion–state relations affect women’s rights: (1) institutional differentiation between religion and the state; (2) strong protection of religious liberty; (3) the involvement of religion in politics; (4) the extent of religious involvement in education and social services; and (5) the levels of religious belief of individuals in society. It analyzes each of these facets and shows how their treatment in liberal states allows patriarchal religion to perpetuate and entrench women’s inequality.

This chapter examines the theoretical roots of discrimination against women in liberal states. It starts with a general discussion of feminism and liberalism and the tensions between their main variants, with an emphasis on the public–private distinction. It then introduces a detailed feminist critique of political liberalism, pointing to its flaws, and in particular to the distinction between the public and the private and between the political and nonpolitical on which Rawls’ theory is based. The chapter claims that these flaws have allowed patriarchal religions and other illiberal ideologies to strengthen their power in liberal societies and deepen the oppression of women. This chapter also introduces the role of capitalism in the oppression of Women in western liberal states, its connection to patriarchal religion, and its dependence on the public–private distinction and its corollary distinction between love and justice. The chapter closes with a discussion of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, compares it to the Race Convention, and claims that despite its shortcomings, it is a better model for protecting women’s rights than the liberal model.

Calls to restrict women’s rights are a most effective rallying cry for right-wing populists and religious conservatives in their surprisingly successful attack on the foundations of liberal democracy. Populist leaders across the world use the aggrandizement of patriarchy and the opposition to women’s rights as the engine of a right-wing populist revolution. The success of the populist attack on women’s rights in liberal societies, together with decisions such as the American Dobbs decision, has confirmed feminist warnings regarding the flawed protection of women’s rights in liberal societies, which have hitherto been rejected by most liberals as unfounded and alarmist. The book claims that to understand the success of the religio-populist attack on women’s rights in liberal democracies, and its centrality to the success of right-wing populism, it is necessary to acknowledge and understand the patriarchal nature of liberalism and liberal societies. The introduction defines patriarchy and explains its connections to liberalism, religion, and populism, and the contemporary threat it poses to both women’s rights and liberal democracy. It then sets out the outline of the book.

This chapter argues that the flaws in liberal theory and practice that religious conservatives and right-wing populists use to attack women’s rights are also used to undermine liberal democracy. It claims that due to the embeddedness of patriarchy in liberal theory and practice, liberals have chosen to disregard the feminist critique of the liberal public–private distinction and of the refusal to intervene in the nonpolitical sphere. As a result, prejudices that liberals have allowed to flourish in the private sphere serve as the basis for a successful right-wing religio-populist attack on the liberal state itself. Using the example of the USA, the chapter discusses the capture of the American Supreme Court by the populist and religiously conservative Republican Party led by President Trump. It analyzes two major abortion decisions issued by the captured Supreme Court – Whole Women’s Health and Dobbs – and shows how these decisions thoroughly undermine the liberal rights regime, transfer the control over women’s bodies and their rights to Christian religious hands, and are part of a wholesale Christian nationalist attack on American liberal democracy.

Chapter 4 shows how the Russian hawks’ ideas moved from the fringes to the center of the public sphere in the early 2000s. It investigates the 2001–02 controversy that surrounded the publication of a novel written by one of the most radical conservative ideologues, Aleksandr Prokhanov. It demonstrates that the controversy reconfigured the formerly consensual distinction between legitimate and transgressive public discourse. It explains that the intellectual legitimation of Prokhanov thrived on Russia’s political and intellectual elites’ backlash against the legacy of the 1990s and the standards of Western liberalism. The controversy eventually contributed to normalizing modernist conservatism, which gained a new audience among the younger generation of intellectuals.

The chapter articulates a political theory of secularism that can be defended against common, legitimate criticisms of existing forms of secularism. What I call minimal secularism is not vulnerable to the claim that secularism is hostile to religion, marked by an ethnocentric legacy of church-state separation, or committed to a Christian, and specifically Protestant, conception of religion. In addition, it is more structured and precise than liberal philosophies advocating state ‘neutrality’ towards the plurality of conceptions of the good life. Minimal secularism is a thin, yet attractive, transnational ideal for progressive politics.

This introduction assesses a range of popular and scholarly attitudes toward the current state of American democracy, identifying in them a dominant theme of modern democratic theory, namely, an aversion to conflict. Just as John Rawls believed democratic societies to be perennially threatened by a “mortal conflict” between comprehensive doctrines and their “transcendent elements not admitting of compromise,” and so proposed a theory of liberal order aimed at preempting, containing, and resolving these conflicts, so contemporary critics perceive the intractable disagreements and polarizations of American political culture to be only corrosive and destabilizing. They propose strategies for achieving social cohesion grounded in a sense of national unity, shared history, or common identity more fundamental to difference. Many religious persons and traditions exhibit a similar aversion to conflict, believing it to indicate some form of sin, injustice, or moral error. I question this presumption that conflict is inherently vicious, ruinous, or violent, and begin to sketch an alternative view of conflict as basic to human creaturehood and potentially generative for social life.