Shundai addresses the transition from feudal agrarianism to an urbanized commercial economy in early modern Japan. He accepted the inevitabile growth of commerce, but sought to counteract its disruption of traditional hierarchies through a series of institutional reforms to solidify state power, including policies to shift control of commerce from the ascendant merchant class to the ruling samurai class. Shundai draws on the views of Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), who defined the Confucian Way as a set of techniques for rulership derived from the sage kings of ancient China, as opposed to the metaphysical theories and focus on personal moral cultivation promoted by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and his Japanese followers. Shundai’s samurai authoritarianism owes much to Sorai, but he is innovative for his pragmatism and flexibility, as reflected in his willingness to employ non-Confucian methods of governing and to adapt Confucian ideals to contemporary reality. After Shundai, writers on political economy in early modern and modern Japan developed increasingly ambitious visions of state-managed economic growth, presenting such policies not merely as a pragmatic compromise, but as an unalloyed good.

Chapter 2 continues to dig into the Roman rhetorical tradition in order to clarify some aspects of the intellectual history of a pair of terms, forma and materia, which recur throughout Machiavelli’s political philosophy, allowing him to talk about the shape or form – as well as the stuff, or material – of the entities he is analysing. One prevalent assumption to be found in various parts of the relevant scholarship is that Machiavelli’s use of forma and materia indicates his reliance upon Aristotle. By way of contrast, this chapter argues that we have to turn to consider the historical fortunes of an entirely different set of classical resources. Classical Roman thought deployed the pair of Latin terms materia and forma in rhetorical, literary, architectural, and moral theory within a theoretical landscape far removed from any Aristotelian commitments. This chapter brings a greater measure of historical depth and conceptual precision to the pre-Machiavellian career of these ideas in classical and Renaissance political thought in order to illuminate what Machiavelli is doing with them, and to show why they should be identified as the theoretical foundation of ‘l’arte dello stato’.

This chapter seeks to trace the history of On the Parts of Animals (hereafter PA) and the impact it had up to the Byzantine era and Michael of Ephesus, the first systematic commentator of Aristotle’s biological works. The first section examines a variety of works and passages until Galen’s time, delving deeper into the case of the ps.-Aristotelian On Breath. The second section focuses on Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts: Despite the fact that Galen argues that this treatise is part of the tradition of the PA, it emerges that Aristotelian zoology is discussed in late antiquity and the Middle Ages based on the study of other zoological treatises (or their epitomes) and not of the PA. The third section examines Michael’s commentary and especially his comments on the marrow and the brain. It is shown that Michael’s scholiastic activity contributes genuinely and substantially to the circulation of Aristotle’s thought in philosophical circles of the time.

Describes first year in wartime government service.

Live Aid was the singular event that made humanitarianism fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s. In the United Kingdom, it was Comic Relief that sustained and institutionalised this new form of mass giving on a regular basis. In 1988, the comedian Lenny Henry hosted the Red Nose Day telethon which became a regular event and raised £1 billion over the next thirty years. Comic Relief symbolised a new era of humanitarian giving in a televisual age. It shifted attitudes to poverty overseas which then constrained prior government intentions to reduce aid and development spending. And it also helped change public attitudes to charity more generally. Surveys of public opinion evidenced continued high levels of support for overseas aid, and the scepticism towards charity observed at the expansion of the post-war welfare state dissipated. Respondents expressed their views no longer in terms of charity versus the state but in terms of the importance of both public and voluntary provision in the relief of poverty, at home and overseas. The popularity of humanitarianism had increased the acceptability of charity as a solution to poverty more generally.

According to Dazai Shundai, the provision of food and goods to all the people is an essential element of good government. Wealth as measured in food and goods will then lead to a strong military. Some have considered the ideal of “enriching the country and strengthening the military” to be contrary to Confucian teachings, but this is mistaken. Currency should be seen as secondary to food and goods and does not in itself represent true wealth, a fact that many have lost sight of in Edo and other urban centers of Tokugawa Japan. In farming, it is crucial to extract the full productive potential of the land, which requires an understanding of the different types of land and the uses that each of these serves; an ignorance of these different uses has led to harmful policies that try to convert all land into paddies. The stabilization of prices is another important role for government and helps prevent merchants from exploiting price fluctuations for private gain. A system of government-managed granaries can be used to stabilize rice prices, provide relief in times of famine, and provide low-interest loans to samurai in times of need.

This chapter formulates the research question and clarifies the critical methodological issues pertaining to the analysis. This is important because the book aims to bring together science and technology studies, sociological systems theory and jurisprudence The topic of the book is then introduced by giving an overview of all the chapters, making clear that a common thread runs throughout the book and that the argument addresses all of the theoretical, empirical and practical aspects of the research question posed at the beginning.

According to Dazai Shundai, establishing institutions to handle various affairs is the foremost task of government. These should be fixed in place for a long period of time and be strictly upheld. In earlier times, Japan had proper institutions based on models learned from China, but with the advent of government by warriors, such institutions fell into disuse and have been replaced by provisional measures. Tokugawa Japan lacks proper institutions for a wide range of matters, a key example of which is the absence of institutions to regulate kinship relations.

The vast Prose Brut tradition, derived as it is from Galfridian pseudo-history, but with the continuations found in the Anglo-Norman, Latin and then Middle English chronicles, benefits from the integration of Arthurian pseudo-history and some elements of romance into the history of the ‘English nation’. It becomes the bestselling English history in the Middle Ages, attesting to the enormous popularity of Arthur’s reign not just among those interested in the chivalric ethos and courtly love, but in how the land was governed through the centuries. The Prose Brut was copied anonymously for the vast majority of the extant corpus across the three languages of medieval England, but even more importantly, was owned and read by a cross-section in society, enjoyed among the middle classes, and clearly produced, at least in part, commercially. It was one of the first texts printed by William Caxton and went through seventeen editions in the first few decades of the printing press in England.

Chapter 7 systematically re-examines Machiavelli’s beliefs about lo stato as they emerge in his early political writings and culminate in the first full statement of his theory in Il Principe. The architecture of that theory is clarified: it is an account of both free and unfree states, and it is shown to be articulated according to a theory of rhetorical definition which was instantly recognizable to his humanist contemporaries. The place of Machiavelli’s thinking about liberty and its absence in the princely state is then investigated, as is his account of state formation, which is demonstrably conducted in equally rhetorical terms, recurring not only to the concepts of form and material to describe how political bodies are artfully assembled and shaped, but also to rhetorical ideas about invention and disposition in Machiavelli’s view of the creative work involved in founding new states. The chapter identifies the evolving role of a theory of political obligation within Machiavelli’s account of the state, before culminating in an analysis of his understanding of Fortuna’s role in state matters and his rejection of the Senecan wisdom which elsewhere informed Renaissance thinking about the remedies for good and bad luck in human affairs.

Describes academic and other activities, 1933–36.

The first of two chapters describing Meade’s life and work at LSE, including the work which earned him a Nobel Prize.