The chapter-length Introduction establishes the historical and philosophical contexts for the Romantic reimagining of persuasion. A section on David Hume’s skeptical views on “perswasion” and the influential response to them by the Scottish rhetorician and minister George Campbell draws important terminological distinctions and delineates key features of the inquiries and reimaginings addressed in the chapters that follow. The main features of the concept of malleable persuasion are described and differentiated from adjacent concepts in works by Lord Byron, Edmund Burke, and Mary Shelley, among others. The book is situated in relation to major lines of scholarship on Romantic cultures of controversy, secular casuistry, and the histories of belief and skepticism. The chapter ends by addressing the distinctly literary dimensions of persuasion, including the role of reading in its representation and elicitation, and the formal resources involved across genres.

I show that group mind phenomena are measureable using such instruments as collective intelligence assessments/quotients, group personality instruments, organizational identity and culture assessments, and so on. Scholars have also measured what is arguably the content of the group mind, that is, that information that exists only in the collective mind rather than in any of the individuals by themselves. Scholars have used game-theoretic measures such as Shapley values and regressions, Tononi’s Phi measure of integrated information, Luppi’s measure of synergistic information derived from partial decomposition analytic techniques, and so on. In development are other methods such as “theory of group mind” assessments that measure people’s ability to read the minds of groups, anticipate actions of groups, and so on. I review the key findings with respect to group personality, collective intelligence, group identity effects, collective action effects, group decision-making processes, transactive memory, and group emotions.

This chapter concludes the book by reflecting on the implications of the findings for democratic representation in a globalized world. It argues that globalization has introduced structural constraints that alter the relationship between voters and elected representatives, compelling mainstream parties to adapt their electoral strategies in ways that threaten democratic accountability. The chapter ties together insights from the cross-national analyses, survey experiments, and in-depth case studies to show how parties recalibrate their promises, adopt ambiguous or populist rhetoric, and shift responsibility for broken pledges to external actors. It emphasizes that although these strategies may be electorally rational, they can erode the clarity of democratic choice and the mechanisms through which voters hold politicians accountable. The chapter closes by discussing the normative and institutional implications for democratic resilience and responsiveness in an era of enduring international interdependence.

Chapter 6 examines the evidence accumulated from CBDCs attempted to date.

The first was the Avant smart card introduced in Finland in 1993, well before modern CBDCs were conceived, and discontinued in 2006. The second was the dinero electrónico (DE) introduced in Ecuador in 2014 but demand was negligible and the DE was withdrawn.

Turning to schemes still in operation, there was the Sand Dollar in the Bahamas, DCash in the countries of the ECCU, and the Jam-Dex in Jamaica, all of which had trivially low adoption rates. The Chinese e-yuan, introduced in 2020, was designed to complement the Chinese Social Credit System and is explicitly intended as a tool of social control. The Nigerian eNaira was launched in 2021; after a slow initial uptake, the Nigerian central bank resorted to a ‘war on cash’ that backfired badly, producing a major cash crisis followed by a subsequent policy reversal and the ousting of the central bank governor.

In all cases, the CBDC was very unpopular and adoption rates by the public were extremely low. It is clear that the public do not want CBDCs.

After making a few opening remarks about Berlin, the introduction will cover five topics, which are aimed especially at the general reader who may be unfamiliar with Berlin and his ideas. The first will provide a brief, descriptive account of Berlin’s life and times; the second will focus on (again briefly) his move from a rather narrowly focused Oxford academic philosopher to a wide-ranging historian of ideas and public intellectual (or, alternatively put, a far more capacious and historically inflected philosopher) keen to reach a readership beyond the academic groves; the third will discuss Berlin’s vision of philosophy as a fundamentally humanistic discipline; the fourth will explore his original and cogent pluralist defence of liberalism; and the fifth will consider some of the main criticisms that Berlin’s ideas have received both during and after his lifetime. The introduction will end with a brief rumination on his main legacy as a thinker.

I compare and contrast properties of group minds that are not supernatural agents (SAs) and group minds that might be considered SAs. Religious group minds tend to be characterized as persons, while non-religious group minds tend to represent institutions and organizations. I also suggest that when we consider reality to be filled with group minds (collective minds all the way down and up) we adopt a new scientifically informed world outlook that amounts to a new type of animism, and that this new animism could profitably be included in a new religious consciousness appropriate for the times we are living through.

Chapter 1 delineates the overlapping new paradigms of persuasion elaborated by Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt in response to George Campbell and David Hume, and considers their implications for the genre of the periodical essay. Against Campbell’s definition of persuasion as an emotional supplement to rational conviction, De Quincey and Hazlitt, in their essays of the 1820s and 1830s, formulate the alternative of a self-consciously partial and flexible way of holding and forming beliefs. De Quincey’s performance of such persuasion in “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” makes apparent the problem of anything-goes judgment that leads him, in his “Rhetoric” and “Style” essays, to restrict persuasion to “subjective” domains like rhetoric and poetry. Hazlitt, by contrast, in his late-career essays on belief, opinion, and controversy, endorses malleable persuasion in all domains of dispute and theorizes its unique affinity with imaginative literature.