In just nine months, the Philippines campaign isolated the Japanese homeland from its conquered empire to the south, made possible an air and sea blockade to prevent the resources of the Netherlands East Indies from reaching Japan, gained a base equivalent to the British Isles in preparation for the invasion of Japan, liberated the Philippines and its people from Japanese occupation, freed Allied prisoners of war and civilian detainees held in camps, destroyed the majority of the remaining Japanese fleet, and destroyed several thousand aircraft. SWPA undertook eighty-seven amphibious landings – more than in any other theater. SWPA logisticians performed legendary feats of improvisation on a shoestring budget. Air support was crucial to the effectiveness of operations in the Philippines. Japanese atrocities convinced MacArthur to charge Yamashita with war crimes on the basis of command responsibility, for which the Japanese general was tried and executed. Civil affairs units and engineers were crucial to rehabilitating the Philippines, which had been devastated by three years of Japanese occupation and nine months of combat operations.

Chapter 7 engages in greater depth with excuse theory to offer a rationale of partial excuse (in the form of a bounded causal theory) that provides a closer reflection of the flexible nature of the defence in practice, and to legitimise the proposal for an expanded partial defence, in the form of the Universal Partial Defence. Echoing the dual strategy of the Real Person Approach, in terms of recognising both retributivism and recognition of vulnerability at a paradigmatic level, the bounded causal theory proposes the reinvigoration of causal theory but in a way that accords with the dominant capacity-based approach to understanding excuses. In doing so, it responds to three major objections to causal theory: the fear of a universal legal excuse, the fact that not all those with a similar circumstance to the defendant commit crime, and the problem of proving the link between circumstance and criminal act.

Circumstances for labor after the pandemic resemble those of the early 1920s: fragmented, labor-unfriendly law has severely curbed the growth of unions under economic conditions and a climate of public opinion remarkably favorable to new organizing. Supreme Court rulings on contracts, employment, unions, and administrative power are restoring many features of law to the conditions before the New Deal. States are the most promising governmental level for protecting organizing and widening its reach in the immediate future; reformers of the 1920s provide a model for an engaged approach to scholarship that can shape state policy. Revisiting the state legal and policy history of the early twentieth century is urgently needed to prepare for foreseeable effects of further Supreme Court reaction, and to explore the era’s remarkable diversity of policy design, which may bring to light both ideas and dormant law useful in addressing labor’s contemporary challenges.

Chapter 6 takes up the best-known bookish metaphor: the book of nature. Tracing the phrase “book of nature” and its attendant metaphors through early modern English writing, this chapter shows how its Christian use did not fully disappear when the metaphor suddenly flipped to work in service of the modern scientific method. The “book of nature” gave people a language for knowledge in a rapidly changing epistemology.

In this chapter we continue to present the theory of Markov chains, specializing in reversible chains, for which the very important relation of detailed balance is shown to hold. This is a basic concept also in continuous processes, and the foundation of the property termed “equilibrium” in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The major application we present is the Monte Carlo method for estimating thermodynamic averages, which maps the average on a statistical ensemble into the dynamics through states of a reversible Markov chain. We introduce the Metropolis algorithm and we apply it to the Ising model for ferromagnetism.

Mao Zedong’s return to the CCP leadership circle after the Zunyi Conference in January 1935 was indeed a pivotal event, after which the CCP changed its course on party-building strategies. Mao would not have been able to rise in CCP leadership rank without the help of contingent events undermining his main political rivals, Zhang Guotao and Wang Ming, who were weakened by a military debacle and the shift in Stalin’s support, respectively. By tracing CCP party-building strategies, I illustrate the CCP’s move away from previous conflictual and discriminatory party-building strategies after Mao consolidated his power and embrace the return of intellectuals and peasants into its mobilization infrastructure. By late 1938 the CCP had completely abandoned its previous discriminatory practice of emphasizing social origins as the primary criteria for the party-building strategies, resulting in a party mobilization infrastructure ripe for intensified fiscal extraction in rural areas starting in 1941.

Fichte takes the promotion of freedom rather than happiness as the legitimate end of political action. He revises the concept of spontaneity, especially in his System der Sittlenlehre, equating it with labour as the transformation of the sense-world under the command of an idea. The political system proposed in his Geschlossener Handelsstaat is a further application of this idea, together with attention to the conditions (epistemic, material, and intersubjective) necessary for the effective transposition of subjective intentions into objective results. Fichte’s political interventionism is fundamentally distinct from Wolff’s because of its commitment to the primacy of freedom, even when his own concrete prescriptions appear to undermine this objective. The political programmes of Fichte and Humboldt are alternative Kantianisms, but both exemplify post-Kantian perfectionist commitments to enhance the capacity for free activity.

With the seizure of Manila and its nearby ports and airfields, Sixth Army had gained control over a vital logistical hub required for SWPA forces to participate in the anticipated invasion of Japan. But MacArthur was not satisfied with this achievement; he would settle for nothing less than the complete liberation of the Philippines from Japanese control. Although there was no military necessity for clearing the rest of Luzon and the few towns still occupied by Japanese forces, it was American territory, and thus leaving it under Japanese control would have been an afront to American (and MacArthur’s) honor. MacArthur also directed the Eighth Army under Lt. Gen. Robert Eichelberger to liberate the Central and Southern Philippines, using several divisions and regimental combat teams allocated for that purpose. Sixth Army would make do with the nine divisions and two separate regimental combat teams left at its disposal. Prolonged combat would steadily erode the combat effectiveness of those forces, even as they strove to clear Luzon, the largest and most important of the islands in the Philippine Archipelago, of Japanese forces.