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Africa throughout its postcolonial history has been plagued by human rights abuses ranging from intolerance of political dissent to heinous crimes such as genocide. Some observers consequently have gone so far as to suggest that human rights are a concept alien to African cultures. The International Criminal Court (ICC)’s focus on Africa in recent years has reinforced the region’s reputation as a hotspot for human rights violations. But despite Africa’s notoriety concerning human rights, Africa and the Shaping of International Human Rights argues that the continent has been pivotal for helping shape contemporary human rights norms and practices. Challenging prevailing Eurocentric interpretations of human rights’ origins and evolution, it demonstrates that from the colonial era to the present Africa’s peoples have drawn attention to and prompted novel ways of thinking about human rights through their encounters with the world at large. Beginning with the depredations of King Leopold II in the Congo Free State in the 1880s and ending with the ICC’s current activities in Africa, it reveals how African events, personalities, groups, and nations have influenced the trajectory of human rights history in intriguing and critical ways, in the end enlarging and universalizing a major discourse of our time.

Ruskin often disparaged attempts to alleviate conditions in the cities, yet he financed the pioneering early housing experiments of Octavia Hill in London, and established a museum for working men in Sheffield. At the same time, he strove to promote the rural ideal and inspired the revival of some rural handicrafts. Both a self-proclaimed ‘violent Tory of the old school’ and a ‘communist’, the paradoxical John Ruskin, the leading Victorian art and social critic, inspired a younger generation with his political ideas and social experiments. A wide range of individuals, consciously indebted to him, engaged in social action designed to ameliorate the worst excesses of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British industrial capitalism. Progressive political thinkers and social activists answered Ruskin's challenge to confront the ugliness and corruption of Victorian society, and to reject the hypocrisy of the utilitarian philosophy which underpinned it. This book is the first study to approach Ruskin's legacy in terms of the institutional and organisational contexts in which his ideas flourished. It recreates the associational culture of a network of influence which was united by a shared enthusiasm inspired by one man. The Guild of St. George embodied his social challenge, and provided a point of focus for his most loyal disciples. Many of the Oxford undergraduates inspired by his lectures, and his practical scheme to rebuild the road at Hinksey, helped to found and guide the university settlements. Ruskin societies emerged in the large cities to promote the study of his work and to effect civic reforms on Ruskinian lines. Many of the pioneers of the nascent Labour movement developed their political consciousnesses whilst reading his work. In the early life and career of John Howard Whitehouse, parliamentarian and educationist, these strands of influence combined, helping him to become Ruskin's truest disciple.

This book explores the knowledge underpinnings of agricultural change and growth in early modern Europe, building on the growing recognition among historians that ‘what people knew and believed’ had a bearing on their economic behaviour. Until recently researchers resisted arguments rooted in non-quantitative explanations of economic change which place the emphasis on cultural agents. The book focuses on the period circa 1750–1840 when an unprecedented amount of agricultural information was put into circulation which facilitated its consumption and incorporation into the practices of cereal and animal husbandry. In Scotland, England, and Denmark this precursor Agricultural Enlightenment triggered a modernization of the rural economy which can be labelled an Agricultural Revolution. Elsewhere the impact of the supply of agricultural knowledge was muted and it is hard to separate out the ingredients of the changes under way by the 1830s and 1840s. Adopting a continental perspective on agricultural growth, the book weighs up the effects of cultural factors by analysing the mechanisms governing knowledge production, diffusion, and adoption by farmers. Issues involving the transfer of knowledge and skill receive particular coverage. But equally the book explores the impact of demographic change, urbanization, and evidence that European agriculture was moving towards market-driven production by the end of the period. Governments were as influenced by the knowledge project of the Enlightenment as landlords and their tenants, and the book examines the proposition that institutional change ‘from above’ was the single most powerful catalyst of agricultural growth before industrialization transformed the European economy.

The cardinal role of Anglo-Saxon libraries in the transmission of classical and patristic literature to the later middle ages has long been recognized, for these libraries sustained the researches of those English scholars whose writings determined the curriculum of medieval schools: Aldhelm, Bede, and Alcuin, to name only the best known. This book provides an account of the nature and holdings of Anglo-Saxon libraries from the 6th century to the 11th. The early chapters discuss libraries in antiquity, notably at Alexandria and republican and imperial Rome, and also the Christian libraries of late antiquity which supplied books to Anglo-Saxon England. Because Anglo-Saxon libraries themselves have almost completely vanished, three classes of evidence need to be combined in order to form a detailed impression of their holdings: surviving inventories, surviving manuscripts, and citations of classical and patristic works by Anglo-Saxon authors themselves. After setting out the problems entailed in using such evidence, the book provides appendices containing editions of all surviving Anglo-Saxon inventories, lists of all Anglo-Saxon manuscripts exported to continental libraries during the eighth century and then all manuscripts re-imported into England in the tenth, as well as a catalogue of all citations of classical and patristic literature by Anglo-Saxon authors.

Anticorruption in History is the first major collection of case studies on how past societies and polities, in and beyond Europe, defined legitimate power in terms of fighting corruption and designed specific mechanisms to pursue that agenda. It is a timely book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem, undermining trust in government, financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the “path to Denmark”—a feted blueprint for stable and successful statebuilding. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subjects of corruption and anticorruption have captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the change of anticorruption policies over time and place. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past as well as reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country’s image (of itself or as construed from outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume intends to begin to fill. A wide range of historical contexts are addressed, ranging from the ancient to the modern period, with specific insights for policy makers offered throughout.

The Bhagavadgita has lent itself to several readings to defend or contest various views on life, morality, and metaphysics. It has played an important role in the formation of nationalist discourse in India. The book examines the ways in which the Gita became the central terrain of nationalist contestation, and the diverse ethico-moral mappings of the Indian nation. It also discusses issues such as the relation between the nation and the masses, renunciation and engagement with the world, the ideas of equality, freedom, and common good, in the context of a nationalist discourse. It argues that the commentaries on this timeless text opened up several possible understandings without necessarily eliminating one another. The different applications of the Bhagavadgita in the nationalist discourse can be seen in the works of B.R. Ambedkar, Swami Vivekananda, and Mahatma Gandhi.

Examining the development of a secular, purely material conception of human beings in the early Enlightenment, this book provides a fresh perspective on the intellectual culture of this period, and challenges certain influential interpretations of irreligious thought and the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Beginning with the debate on the soul in England, in which political and religious concerns were intertwined, and ending with the eruption of materialism onto the public stage in mid 18th‐century France, this book looks at attempts to explain how the material brain thinks without the need for an immaterial and immortal soul. It shows how this current of thinking fed into the later 18th‐century ‘Natural History of Man’, the earlier roots of which have generally been ignored. Although much attention has been paid to the atheistic French materialists, their link to the preceding period has been studied only partially, and the current interest in what is called the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ has helped to obscure rather than enlighten this history. By bringing out the importance of both Protestant theological debates and medical thinking in England, and by following the different debates on the soul in Holland and France, this book shows that attempts to find a single coherent strand of radical irreligious thought running through the early Enlightenment, coming to fruition in the second half of the 18th century, ignore the multiple currents which composed Enlightenment thinking.

In 1842, the German poet, Henrich Heine, wrote that the bourgeoisie, ‘obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster’ and ‘an instinctive dread of communism’, were driven against their better instincts into tolerating absolutist government. Theirs was a ‘politics … motivated by fear’. Over the next 150 years, the middle classes were repeatedly accused by radicals of betraying liberty for fear of ‘red revolution’. The failure of the revolutions of 1848, conservative nationalism from the 1860s, fascist victories in the first half of the twentieth‐century, and repression of national liberation movements during the Cold War — these fateful disasters were all explained by the bourgeoisie’s fear of the masses. For their part, conservatives insisted that demagogues and fanatics exploited the desperation of the poor to subvert liberal revolutions, leading to anarchy and tyranny. Only evolutionary reform was enduring. From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of Communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain and NATO became instruments of ‘regime change’, seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free‐market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a ‘watershed event in the global democratic revolution’. This was an extraordinary turn‐around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hubris still invited nemesis.This book examines this remarkable story, and the fierce debates it occasioned. It takes in a span from the seventeenth century to the twenty‐first, covering a wide range of countries and thinkers.

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a moment when scholars and thinkers across Europe reflected on how they saw their relationship with the past, especially classical antiquity. Many readers in the Renaissance had appreciated the writings of ancient Latin and Greek authors not just for their literary value, but also as important sources of information that could be usefully applied in their own age. By the late seventeenth century, however, it was felt that the authority of the ancients was no longer needed and that their knowledge had become outdated thanks to scientific discoveries as well as the new paradigms of rationalism and empiricism. Those working on the ancient past and its literature debated new ways of defending their relevance for society. The different approaches to classical literature defended in these debates explain how the writings of ancient Greece and Rome could become a vital part of eighteenth-century culture and political thinking. Through its analysis of the debates on the value of the classics for the eighteenth century, this book also makes a more general point on the Enlightenment. Although often seen as an age of reason and modernity, the Enlightenment in Europe continuously looked back for inspiration from preceding traditions and ages such as Renaissance humanism and classical antiquity. Finally, the pressure on scholars in the eighteenth century to popularize their work and be seen as contributing to society is a parallel for our own time in which the value of the humanities is a continuous topic of debate.

This study offers a major reinterpretation of medieval political thought by examining one of its most fundamental ideas. If it was axiomatic that the goal of human society should be the common good, then this notion presented at least two conceptual alternatives. Did it embody the highest moral ideals of happiness and the life of virtue, or did it represent the more pragmatic benefits of peace and material security? Political thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham answered this question in various contexts. In theoretical terms, they were reacting to the rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics and Ethics, an event often seen as pivotal in the history of political thought. On a practical level, they were faced with pressing concerns over the exercise of both temporal and ecclesiastical authority — resistance to royal taxation and opposition to the jurisdiction of the pope. In establishing the connections between these different contexts, this book questions the identification of Aristotle as the primary catalyst for the emergence of ‘the individual’ and a ‘secular’ theory of the state. Through a detailed exposition of scholastic political theology, it argues that the roots of any such developments should be traced, instead, to Augustine and the Bible.

In the early 15th century, the general council assembled at Constance and, representing the universal Church, put an end to the scandalous schism which for almost forty years had divided the Latin Church between rival lines of claimants to the papal office. It did so by claiming and exercising an authority superior to that of the pope, an authority by virtue of which it could impose constitutional limits on the exercise of his prerogatives, stand in judgement over him, and if need be, depose him for wrongdoing. In so acting, the council gave historic expression to a tradition of conciliarist constitutionalism that long competed for the allegiance of Catholics worldwide with the high papalist monarchical vision that was destined to triumph in 1870 at Vatican I and to become identified with Roman Catholic orthodoxy itself. This book sets out to reconstruct the half-millennial history of that vanquished rival tradition.

On the morning of September 29, 1920, a young poet died in Santiago’s asylum, where he had recently been moved after nearly two months in police custody. Why and how did José Domingo Gómez Rojas end up in a prison, an asylum, and a cemetery? This book is an effort to answer that question. It is not a biography of José Domingo Gómez Rojas, although he figures prominently in its pages. It is, rather, a book about the context within which his arrest, imprisonment, and death unfolded and about the experiences of a number of the men he counted as friends and comrades. Covering a four-month period of 1920 in Santiago, it is a book about anarchists and aristocrats, students and teachers, poets and prosecutors, and cops and Wobblies. While narrative in form, the book has a number of analytical threads. It pays close attention to university students and the radicalization and “disidentification” they experienced over the course of the 1910s as well as the close relationships they forged with working people at the time. The book also stresses the importance of anarcho-communism in Chile in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The narrative is structured around the lives and labors of agitators and organizers who spent most, if not all, of their lives in Santiago and thus emphasizes the importance of place to radical politics. This is, in sum, a story of individuals and the collective struggles they waged, futures they imagined, and worlds they occupied.

The diversity of cultures, religions, and moral values and the ways in which liberalism deals with this plurality is the topic at the centre of this book. The author illustrates, in a critical and original way, the recent international debate on liberalism and diversity. In doing that, he discusses some controversial issues such as multiculturalism and minority rights, immigration, religious pluralism, children education, and the place of religion in society as well. After an analysis of some recent liberal theories, the book works out a solution to the problem of ensuring a peaceful and stable coexistence of different groups within the same institutional setting. It is a solution that is liberal in its general orientation, since it has a liberal allegiance to equality and individual rights. However, the proposed solution tries to recognize the due space to community loyalties, religious belongings, and cultural traditions. In addition to this, the author proposes a new theory of political obligation, namely of how a plural society can persist, notwithstanding deep cultural and religious pluralism. In this book, the analytical rigour typical of the philosophical tradition, is not separated from attention to social reality and its problems. In fact, particularly interesting is the way in which the book tests its theoretical achievements with the issue of religious pluralism in India. The outcome is that peaceful coexistence and respect for religious freedoms is possible even in a fragmented society such as India.

Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s first minister and the architect of French absolutism, is often celebrated for his role in reviving the arts and letters in the crucial period in the formation of French classicism. This book looks less at him than at the writers and intellectuals themselves in the creation of a new culture distinguished by the rise of the French language over Latin and the emergence of a literary field. The author argues that even the French Academy, founded by Richelieu in 1635, was more the result of an already established literary and linguistic movement that he merely managed to co-opt. Dignified Retreat examines the work and activities of over one hundred writers and intellectuals, focusing especially on their place in the urban context of a revived Paris after several generations of religious warfare in the sixteenth century. The theme of “retreat”—a withdrawal from public engagement and certain modes of public expression—runs throughout the book as a leitmotif that captures the ambivalent position of these men (and a few women) of letters as they tried to establish the legitimacy of their calling outside the established institutions of the Church, the law, and the university. Building on the work of such French literary scholars and historians as Marc Fumaroli, Alain Viala, Hélène-Merlin Kajman, Christian Jouhaud, and others, Schneider offers a novel approach to this important period in French cultural history.

Disruption is about radical change—why it happens and how. Drawing on case studies ranging from the fourth century AD through the twentieth century, we look at how long-established systems of government and thought are challenged, how new institutions are created, and new ideas become powerful. While paying attention to the underlying political, intellectual, economic, and environmental sources of social disruption, we will see that no matter what similarities there might be between forces that shake different societies, these underlying factors do not dictate specific outcomes. The human actors are ultimately the most important; their decisions drive the conclusions that we see over time. Through our case studies, we can explore successful and unsuccessful decision making, and the emergence of the ideas that conditioned human actions. We’ll explore the development of Islam and of Christian doctrine, of constitutional thought, of socialism, and social Darwinism. We’ll look at how these ideas, all of them emerging on the fringes of society, became central. We’ll also have our eyes set on whether the sorts of disruptive forces we’ve seen in the past are present at this time. We’ll look at the issues confronting the liberal democracies that have been the dominant political/economic forces on our planet in the last half century and see how they have come under stress in the last few decades. And we will look at the possibility that we’re facing a new period of disruption and at what we can learn from the past about how change can be constructive rather than destructive.

Dystopia: A Natural History is the first monograph devoted to the concept of dystopia. Taking the term to encompass both a literary tradition of satirical works, mostly on totalitarianism, as well as real despotisms and societies in a state of disastrous collapse, this book redefines the central concepts and the chronology of the genre and offers a paradigm-shifting understanding of the subject. Part I assesses the theory and prehistory of ‘dystopia’. Utopia and dystopia are portrayed not as opposites, but as extremes on a spectrum of sociability, defined by a heightened form of group identity. The prehistory of the process whereby ‘enemies’ are demonized is explored from early conceptions of monstrosity through Christian conceptions of the devil and witchcraft, and the persecution of heresy. Part II surveys the major dystopian moments in twentieth-century despotisms, focusing in particular upon Nazi Germany, Stalinism, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Cambodia under Pol Pot. The concentration here is upon the political religion hypothesis as a key explanation for the chief excesses of communism in particular. Part III examines literary dystopias. It commences well before the usual starting point in the secondary literature, in anti-Jacobin writings of the 1790s. Two chapters address the main twentieth-century texts usually studied as representative of the genre, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The remainder of the section examines the evolution of the genre in the second half of the twentieth century to the present.