This review of Tariq Ramadan’s The Arab Awakening: Islam and the new Middle East was published in the Times Literary Supplement, 12 October 2012 – at a time when there were still hopes that the "Arab Awakening" would lead to a new era of progress in the Middle East. It attempts to elucidate Professor Ramadan’s complex intellectual position – where his loyalty to Islamic orthodoxy clashes with the humanities as they are understood in the West – and in particular his relationship to the Muslim Brothers, which is more critical than is often assumed. At the same time it defends Ramadan against unjust criticisms and salutes his personal courage. A prefatory note adds up-to-date information about some of Ramadan’s political interventions since 2012.

In the early twentieth century, the first challenges to publicity developed from new theories of consent at performances. In the 1950s, for the first time since the Ponce decision, the court endowed the consent of witnesses with the power to restrict publicity in sexual scenes enacted in certain public spaces. Publicity would no longer be the essential element but a subsidiary part of the regulation of the distribution of sexuality in space. Rendering sexuality publicly visible does not obey a process of internalization of constraints. Instead, this visibilization is the counterpart to the most extraordinary mechanisms of repression in sexual matters that France has known since the Ancien Régime. In reality, it is through another more sophisticated legal construction that we now accept that we can exhibit unchaste sexuality in front of a consenting audience, in a space not visible from the exterior.

From the final decade of the nineteenth century, a social movement tried to convince society to accept nudity in performances and fought against the traditional interpretation of Article 330 of the Penal Code. The Code understood nudity as a punishable act when committed in a public space. For the first time, the judges of the 9th Division made the distinction between chaste nudes that could be shown without risking punishment provided for by Article 330 of the Penal Code, and obscene nudes that had to remain hidden. The Joan Warner's case resolved the question of bared breasts. The public powers remained impassive in front of performances of live nudity when a minuscule opaque triangle covered just the genital split. The case of the monokini constituted a turning point in this story. No official act legalized the fact of exhibiting one's breasts on the beach, but prosecutions ceased.

This chapter lays out the antecedents that preceded the eventual British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf. In the early nineteenth century, Britain sent military expeditions to the southern coast of the Gulf in order to combat what they called ‘pirates’. Thanks to its subsequent military victory, London coerced the local forces into entering into a series of treaties. The primary aim of these unequal treaties was to establish a peace in the region that was favourable to British commerce and communication, yet the very act of signing these treaties implied that Britain had acknowledged the legal status of its counterparts. Consequently, the territories concerned were given the standing of sovereign states, a dubious status reflected in their British name ‘Protected States’.

The documents in this chapter describe the Viking settlement and their transformation from Vikings to Normans. From the late tenth century, part of the region that was roughly equivalent to the archdiocese of Rouen became known as Normandy. This was as a result of the settlement of Scandinavian people and the grant of authority by the Carolingian king to the viking leader Rollo. The Norman historians Dudo of Saint-Quentin and William of Jumieges say that the pagan viking Rollo came from Dacia and thus they imply a Danish origin.

The new infraction, codified in the reform of 1992, which replaced the old contempt of public decency, is the witness and vehicle for distancing from spatial techniques in the governance of sexuality. The new offense preserved not only the structure of the old infraction but also the content of most of its constituent elements. Sexual exhibition is the only act of sexual coercion that can be either legal or illegal according to the configuration of the space in which it occurs. The infraction of sexual exhibition distinguishes public debauchery, which is tolerated under certain conditions, from perversion, which is condemned, and of which this infraction is supposed to constitute the first stage. In classical theories, the law sought to protect the public from viewing certain scenes to prevent desires or aversions linked to sexuality from being awakened within it.

This introductory essay provides a survey of Polanyi’s early life, during which he wrote the bulk of the texts that are included in this volume, followed by a summary overview of his engagement in émigré politics during his spells in Austria, Britain and North America.