The political failure of community is the background against which a range of post-Marxist European philosophers have sought to rethink what community could be. This chapter focuses in particular on Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, who have made substantial contributions to what we might call a new philosophy of community. Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben ask how community, not least because of its promise of solidarity, can continue to serve a political purpose, despite the violence of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, which appears to be the logical endpoint of any conception of community. But Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben also respond to the failure of community’s presumed revolutionary potential to become a site of resistance against both capitalism and the modern state. Should community be conceived in the plural (Nancy), as a gift economy (Esposito), or as a coming community of stateless refugees (Agamben)? Such attempts to save community come at a considerable cost, both philosophically and politically, since they make community irrelevant for a normative theory of democracy.

This Introduction provides an overview of the main themes of the book and questions the democratic potential we often attach to “community” and to “the common.” Community might be what we desire from political life, and it is tempting to hope that a return to community can correct much of the current disillusionment with liberal constitutional democracy and the state of civil society. Instead, I argue that, as models for the normative organization of political life as a whole, neither community nor the common are compatible with the normative demands of democracy. The communitarian desire of much political thought often stands in sharp contrast to the pluralism of democracy.

This chapter follows Tocqueville in arguing that civic culture must support formal learning in schools and colleges, by providing a social spirit of reflective patriotism. A particular challenge given America’s civic fracture of angry polarization, but also widespread apathy, is to motivate citizens to care about America, citizenship education, and a discursive patriotism; thus, civics now should emphasize stories of American hope and achievement, forging an e pluribus unum out of our pluralism. It then develops the sections: (a) E Pluribus Unum and Civic Hope: Jazz, Constitutionalism, Religious Liberty – with subsections on (i) American Story and Song, Especially Jazz – featuring the Ray Charles version of American the Beautiful, Justice O’Connor and Wynton Marsalis in conversation, and jazz pioneers such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, (ii) The Declaration and Constitution as Achievements of Harmony, and (iii) Religious Liberty and Pluralism as American Harmony, featuring George Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

This chapter is about the concept of religion in International Relations (IR) scholarship, the pitfalls of multiculturalist approaches, and the potential of alternative approaches centring genealogical care. It illustrates this through close conceptual readings of central figures such as Daniel Philpott, Jürgen Habermas, William Connolly, and Iza Hussin. It argues that such conceptual analysis is necessary in order to understand the endemic ideological and cognitive bias built into the dominant multiculturalist framework on religion in IR, as well as the importance for alternatives to it. This is significant because these biases continue to structure both scholarship and political practice of religious freedom, the regulation and governance of religious minorities, the identification and evaluation of ‘religious’ conflict and conflict parties, as well as the initiatives for reworking the relationship between religion and politics within international practices and theory.

I open Chapter 1 by outlining ‘agathic pluralism’, namely the view that (ultimate intrinsic) goodness is univocally definable yet also irreducibly plural at the metaphysical level. This is my view, but I do not embark immediately on its defence. Rather, Chapter 1 clears the way for such a view by showing how none of the ‘big three’ ethical theories – namely consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics – manages to capture goodness as I understand it. Consequentialism tries, yet fails, to reduce goodness to a single property; deontology tries to sideline or do without goodness altogether; and virtue ethics substantially mislocates goodness, finding it in our moral dispositions. In order to argue for this, I tackle (first) consequentialism’s failed proxies for goodness, namely pleasure and desire- or preference-satisfaction; and I canvas J. J. Thomson’s a priori semantic argument for the incoherence of consequentialism. Second, I look at deontologists’ paradigm examples of promising, lying and retributive punishment. And third, I look at the Stoics’ and Michael Slote’s strong over-estimation of virtue as the only, or at least primary, good.

Beginning in the 1970s, corporatism became a key concept for analyzing state–society relations in Latin America, particularly in the context of authoritarian regimes. It offered an alternative to pluralist models, providing a lens to examine state control over interest group politics. This chapter traces the conceptual development of corporatism in the Latin American literature, highlighting two early features: (1) convergence around core definitions, and (2) a shared view of corporatism as a subtype of the broader category of interest intermediation. As scholarship progressed, conceptual innovations emerged. These included (3) revising the overarching concept to incorporate overlapping or conflicting meanings, and (4) differentiating between classical subtypes, where corporatism is present along with added traits, and radial subtypes, where a core attribute is missing. This refined conceptualization contrasts with a broader tradition that equated corporatism with an Iberic-Latin legacy of hierarchical state authority. That tradition has drawn criticism for lumping diverse cases into one category and for advancing overly broad claims. Nonetheless, the chapter urges caution in dismissing this broader usage, suggesting that while flawed, it may still hold analytical value. In all, the chapter underscores the value of conceptual precision and innovation in the comparative study of group politics.

This chapter introduces the supposed problem of ethnicity: that it undermines national cohesion, or is a colonial hangover with no appropriate place in political life. In contrast, I argue that ethnicity is neither inherently desirable nor undesirable; its political effects depend on how it is known and used, and our understanding of how it is known remains underdeveloped. I establish that there is no definitive list of Kenya’s ethnic groups, and we must stop taking for granted what we think we know about ethnicity. I offer the concept of cultivated vagueness – a widespread aversion to resolving the ambiguity of lists of Kenya’s ethnic groups – to understand how ethnic knowledge works and to contrast it with legibility and governmentality. Cultivated vagueness is the response from bureaucrats, civil society, citizens and the state to the conundrum that ethnic knowledge is both common sense and impossible to settle. It also explains how ethnic classifications serve both projects of division and of pluralism. I suggest that attention to the benefits of cultivated vagueness may facilitate the advancement of the latter over the former. The chapter outlines the book’s methodology and chapters.

The final chapter opens with a hypothetical debate between cosmopolitan and particularist positions, which is then mapped onto contemporary political philosophy. It concludes with Joseph Raz’s pluralist and perfectionist liberal requirement that states should support culture.

The conclusion reviews the evolution of transregional Arabic literature from its emergence during the Algerian War of Independence to its transformations in the twenty-first century. Decolonization catalyzed a new literary practice that sought to express Arab nationalist solidarities and critique emergent forms of oppressive power – including those exercised in the name of Arab collectives. The conclusion touches on the ways authors grappled with the faltering of revolutionary hopes and rise of new cultural hegemonies in the present century, notably the establishment of the Gulf as a major new hub for Arabic literature. The author notes the ironic reception of the decolonization generation and its concerns in the contemporary Arabic novel and the queering of Arabness in diasporic literature. Revisiting a key theme of the book, the conclusion highlights literature’s evolving work to imagine, engage, and contest shared political experiences across the Maghreb and Mashreq. The chapter concludes by affirming the ongoing political vitality of calls for linguistic and cultural pluralism in Algeria, as exemplified by the Hirak protest movement.

Chapter 6 emphasizes the Court’s practice pertaining to freedom of expression Article 10) and freedom of assembly and reunion (Article 11). It underlines ‘deliberative pluralism’ as the core principle relevant to tackle the populist erosion of democracy. However, while the Court puts emphasis on deliberative pluralism in its proportionality analysis, the Court only adduces minimal infrastructural guarantees that may be perverted by populist governments, such as ‘procedural guarantees’, while the scrutiny of media bodies and the larger media landscape remains largely cosmetic. This is reflected most prominently in a limited and parsimonious proportionality analysis.

How should people who regard theirs as a (or the) true religion view other religions: their truth, the salvific consequences of believing in them, their role in the world, their eschatology and more? The chapter explores Jewish sources on these questions and devotes much space to an intriguing feature of Judaism: namely, that, in Jewish tradition, seeking converts is discouraged.

This chapter explores how Richard Hofstadter’s scholarly work on populism in American history – and his broader theory of populism as a “paranoid style” – was received by his historical contemporaries and how it continues to shape popular and academic perceptions of populism and the American radical right. Hofstadter argued that disparate movements in American history, from the nineteenth-century Populist Party to McCarthyism during the 1950s, were driven by “status anxiety” and a conspiratorial mindset characteristic of populism. In so doing, Hofstadter introduced concepts such as “status anxiety,” “paranoid style,” and “populism” into the popular lexicon, popularizing a Cold War liberal critique of radical political movements as irrational and misguided. While contemporaries such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset supported his views, historians such as C. Vann Woodward and Lawrence Goodwyn criticized Hofstadter’s account of U.S. populism. By the late 1960s, Hofstadter himself moderated his stance, acknowledging the limitations of his psychosocial theory of populism. The chapter concludes by arguing that Hofstadter’s work, while offering valuable insights, has led to analytical blind spots in understanding the structural and ideological dynamics of the American radical right.