This chapter presents a qualitative case study of the UK Conservative Party’s failed 2010 pledge to reduce net migration below 100,000. It probes the mechanisms through which globalization constrains promise fulfillment by focusing on this paradigmatic broken promise. The analysis shows how international legal commitments (especially EU free movement rules), the economic imperative for labor mobility, and political pressures from both market actors and voters made the pledge untenable. Drawing on elite interviews and archival evidence, the chapter traces how economic integration and institutional entanglement restricted the UK government’s policy autonomy despite its electoral mandate. This typical case illustrates how globalization creates cross-cutting pressures that lead governing parties to abandon salient, repeated promises. The case demonstrates how external constraints interact with domestic political incentives to produce broken promises, while contributing to rising public dissatisfaction and support for radical alternatives like Brexit.

Though the tradition is traced at least as far back as to Plato, Berlin claims that ‘the hour of the greatest triumph’ of natural science in the seventeenth century greatly increased the influence of this tradition, and as often happens, also produced a contrary reaction, beginning in the eighteenth century. Against this background, he describes ‘the critical attack upon the total claim of the new scientific method to dominate the entire field of human knowledge’ … which ‘in due course led to the great divorce between the natural sciences and the humanities …’. In the case at hand, the many adherents of the scientific tradition are the first party in the divorce, Berlin choosing Voltaire as their nominal representative. The second party has a more singular representative – Vico. Berlin treats Vico not only as the representative of the second party but as himself providing lengthy grounds for the divorce, as well as mounting a strong attack on the epistemic credentials of the first party. Discussions of each of these will figure in this chapter. What will emerge is that divorce between science and its putative partners is less the real issue than a fundamental disagreement over jurisdiction.

I propose a radical reform agenda consisting of four key principles:

First, a ‘gold standard’ in financial privacy should be re-established so that the financial system can operate efficiently free from the burden of AML/KYC regulations. The whole apparatus of AML/KYC and similar regulation would then be abolished.

Second, central banks should be prohibited from issuing any kind of CBDC, as the US did in January 2025.

Third, the central bank should be required to establish a competitive legal framework for the issuance of payments media, which would require the central bank and financial regulators to establish a level playing field between alternative payments media. Such a framework should be competitive, open to new entrants and, as far as possible, neutral in its impact on competing providers, whether they be providers of deposits, cash, digital dollars, cryptos, stablecoins or gold or silver currency, in whichever allocations the market will bear. Within this monetary universe, people would be free to use whichever monetary instruments they wish.

Fourth, the central bank should not issue any payments media at all and leave the issue of currency entirely to the private sector. Historical experience suggests that the best monetary systems are private ones.

Roman armies entered Iberia at the end of the third century BCE and conquered the Carthaginians. Nonetheless, it required two centuries to bring what they called Hispania into the Roman orbit, due to the difficult terrain and the resistance of many local populations. Once established, the Romans brought considerable benefits to the inhabitants, including roads, bridges, aqueducts, the Latin language, law, and civic and cultural enhancements such as theaters, all of which left lasting traces into the present. They also converted to Christianity. As the Roman Empire faded in power, barbarians including the Visigoths invaded its borders. The Visigoths eventually arrived in Hispania and established their rule at the end of the sixth century, but they were overwhelmed by Muslim invaders from North Africa in the early seventh century. Nonetheless, although they left few traces of their own way of life, they preserved much of the Roman legacy.

This chapter addresses the ethical and legal dimensions of malleable persuasions, focusing on William Godwin’s and William Wordsworth’s responses to the rise of probabilism, specifically the new allowance in English law courts for circumstantial evidence, or narratives that connected causes to effects in plausible ways. As such evidence in the 1790s became subject to abuse, Godwin and Wordsworth came to share a concern with how plausibility might instead serve the cause of justice. In Things as They Are, Godwin draws on Cicero to show how the use of another’s words as evidence can either intensify persuasion or call it into question, thus breaking with his insistence on unvarnished truth and rationality in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Wordsworth in The Borderers explores the ambivalences of plausibility in the thirteenth-century borderland between England and Scotland, where individual judgment carried the weight of legal conviction. Wordsworth’s imagination of a miscarriage of justice comes to share with Godwin’s novel a sense of the value of eschewing rigid convictions when grounds are wanting, even as it attests to their powerful appeal.

Chapter 5 addresses how writers defined racial and national difference according to bodily deportment in the context of Atlantic slaveocracy. Historical theorizations of “wanton cruelty” and involuntary motion are crucial to our understanding of the largest forced migration in human history, in which more than twelve million African people were enslaved. The aesthetics of motion also played a crucial role in how whiteness was constructed in opposition to the paradoxical claim that Black and Brown bodies were too antic and yet too languorous. The Woman of Colour reframes racialized movement in terms of “flexibleness,” which is a way of moving through the world that is hyperactive and yet especially vulnerable to being acted upon. Olivia Fairfield’s deportment challenges racialized aesthetics of motion but nevertheless embraces a form of narcissistic amelioration in which deserving white English gentlemen – and not the biracial heroine – ultimately have the capacity to enact social change.

Chapter 4 engages with China’s ideational power as part of its image-making in Ethiopia, and more broadly in Africa. The chapter directly speaks to the ongoing debates about the export of the China model to the Global South by delving into the content of and perceptions toward China’s official training programs of African elites. Rather than exporting a model, I find that Chinese educators and officials attempt to legitimize China’s governance (both domestic and global) and to show off China. The actual delivery of these trainings carries some consistency, such as the presentation of China as an alternative type of democracy, as well as some arbitrary content diffusion in specific governance domains like journalism. Far from passively buying into the “China model,” Ethiopian participants soften their perceptions of China, but also negotiate and reject some of its persuasion narratives and strategies.

This chapter examines Jane Austen’s interest in the circumstantial character of judgment in the context of courtship. It argues that across the gamut of Austen’s works, we see a marked change in the representation of persuasion and the ideal marriage of minds. Discussion of her teenage writings establishes her familiarity with, and dissent from, the cultural valorization of unwavering conviction. The chapter then considers her ironic portrayals of the triumph of such conviction in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, and her depiction of its shortcomings in Mansfield Park. By contrast, in Pride and Prejudice and Emma, it is argued, Austen makes significant allowances for the value of disagreement among the open-minded, while in Persuasion she engages most directly with the contingent and relative qualities of judgment that make good quarrels a personal and communal imperative, resulting in a wholly new valence for the title term.

Berlin’s essay begins with a standard question: Given the apparent lucidity and precision of Machiavelli’s work, why is there such enduring disagreement about its core meaning and significance? There is, however, nothing conventional about Berlin’s answer. He diverges fundamentally from the conflicting interpretations that have long dominated debate about what makes Machiavelli unique and notorious and argues that the deeper revolutionary character of his thought lies not in divorcing morality from politics but in favouring a politics that has its own ethic, albeit one fundamentally at odds with the prevailing Christian morality of his time. After giving a brief synopsis of Berlin’s account of Machiavelli’s originality, the chapter will delineate and explore how his interpretation operates on three distinct and related levels – historical, philosophical and political. It will then critically examine the questions of whether Berlin’s view of Machiavelli is historically accountable, philosophically coherent and, finally, politically plausible. My aim will be to show that whilst Berlin’s essay is by no means immune to criticism on all three fronts, it holds up remarkably well.

This chapter summarises the principal results of Greenberg’s classic 1963 paper (Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Language, 58–90. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press) and subsequent work in language typology developing Greenberg’s ideas by Lehmann, Vennemann, Hawkins and Dryer, concluding with a section on X’-theory and the Head Parameter.