The chapter articulates a political theory of secularism that can be defended against common, legitimate criticisms of existing forms of secularism. What I call minimal secularism is not vulnerable to the claim that secularism is hostile to religion, marked by an ethnocentric legacy of church-state separation, or committed to a Christian, and specifically Protestant, conception of religion. In addition, it is more structured and precise than liberal philosophies advocating state ‘neutrality’ towards the plurality of conceptions of the good life. Minimal secularism is a thin, yet attractive, transnational ideal for progressive politics.

This introduction assesses a range of popular and scholarly attitudes toward the current state of American democracy, identifying in them a dominant theme of modern democratic theory, namely, an aversion to conflict. Just as John Rawls believed democratic societies to be perennially threatened by a “mortal conflict” between comprehensive doctrines and their “transcendent elements not admitting of compromise,” and so proposed a theory of liberal order aimed at preempting, containing, and resolving these conflicts, so contemporary critics perceive the intractable disagreements and polarizations of American political culture to be only corrosive and destabilizing. They propose strategies for achieving social cohesion grounded in a sense of national unity, shared history, or common identity more fundamental to difference. Many religious persons and traditions exhibit a similar aversion to conflict, believing it to indicate some form of sin, injustice, or moral error. I question this presumption that conflict is inherently vicious, ruinous, or violent, and begin to sketch an alternative view of conflict as basic to human creaturehood and potentially generative for social life.

This fourth chapter assesses how indenture grew from its modest beginnings in British Guiana and Mauritius into a global labor system linking the breadth of Britain’s plantation colonies. With the parliamentary critics of slavery and indenture in abeyance and labor organization established as a keystone of colonial and imperial governance in the colonies where it was employed, the overseer-state was free to expand across the empire. It still faced structural, legal, and moral challenges. The most significant obstacle, for the supporters of indenture, was reconciling a system that was exploitative and inherently unfree with the discourses of Liberalism, “free labor,” moral colonization, and just rule. This, in many respects, was the imperial project in microcosm, and the responses of policy, practice, and public discourse adopted to defend indenture developed in tandem with the broader redefinition of the British Empire as a whole.

Chapter 3 argues that during the crucial transition from slavery to apprenticeship and thence to indenture and “free labor” in the 1830s, the state’s oversight of colonial labor systems became one of the most prominent and powerful aspects of colonial governance. The chapter first assesses the central role of the post-emancipation state in colonial labor management in Jamaica, Britain’s most populous, politically prominent, and wealthy colony in the Americas. It then explores the first attempts to introduce Indian indentured labor in British Guiana and Mauritius, examining the motivations for the adaptation of this centuries-old labor system to a nineteenth-century context. In the Indian Ocean World, the state apparatus of ameliorated slavery was merged with the preexisting models of coerced labor that had been employed in southern India and Ceylon, and with established practices of penal transportation. This initial attempt to expand the indenture system from its modest origins, mired in mismanagement and public scandal, was a failure.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The modern world has as its central characteristic the claim of man’s emancipation from submission to ecclesiastical authority. Born with the Enlightenment, this claim extended from the cultural level to many areas of social life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This process has found significant expressions in movements such as liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, which have marked the history of that period. It is commonly believed that only the Second Vatican Council has produced a turning point: the recognition of the “iusta autonomia” of earthly realities has led the Church from confrontation to dialogue with modernity. The historical judgment must be more nuanced. From the Enlightenment onwards, the papacy has sought to safeguard the submission of men to ecclesiastical authority, but it has also endeavored to adapt Catholicism to the needs of modern men for autonomy in order to be able to better communicate its message of salvation to them.

The chapter returns to what has been called the “central paradox of American history,” the ostensible contradiction between this nation’s declared liberal ideals (“all men” being promised the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and its sanctioning of slavery, the supreme denial of liberty. It focuses on how antebellum debates (literary, political, and theological) over the moral and political legitimacy of slavery were ultimately debates over “personhood” in order to make clear that the conceptual category of the “person” (the center of liberal thought) needs to be understood as a historically contingent – rather than absolute – identity. Noting how deeply modern accounts of slavery remain indebted to the liberal presumption that slavery is wrong precisely to the extent that those enslaved possess a fixed, transhistorical personhood (a personhood that racism, ideology, or self-interest too often obscures), the chapter seeks to leave behind arguments over the conflict between slavery and liberalism and ultimately asks whether it is possible to imagine a liberatory politics that does not require the “person” to be at its center.

The US Constitution committed to equality in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments following the Civil War. Legislators and judges quickly confronted the question of what these new provisions might mean for private actors. The Radical Republicans aimed to bring the commitment to equal protection into private spaces, propagating republican discourses about the practical requirements of equal citizenship and the potential duties of private actors. However, the Supreme Court soon reached its own countervailing conclusion that only state actors, not private actors, gained duties from the Reconstruction Amendments. While this latter understanding remained firm, private actors effectively gained obligations to equality under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later court decisions working around the initial cabining of constitutional equality. Later debates evince a revival of republican-inflected language and arguments for something like horizontal application, even while the country’s jurists viewed such an extension of rights as basically impossible. Several other episodes in constitutional politics, both at the national and state levels, would continue to revisit this question across a range of issue areas.

Citing contemporary issues, this introduction situates horizontal application as one potential response to political-legal questions involving private actors. It makes the case for renewed scholarly attention to horizontal application as an increasingly common practice in constitutional politics. More specifically, examining horizontal application through the lens of republican political theory uncovers new significance in the discourses surrounding this constitutional practice. This theoretical perspective also elucidates how horizontal application is different from traditional constitutional understandings. After introducing the book’s republican framework, Chapter 1 explains the rationale underlying the choice of contexts examined in subsequent chapters. It concludes with an explanation of the stakes, as well as the potential benefits and drawbacks of horizontal application considered in the following chapters. Finally, it previews the concluding chapter’s argument that horizontal application may be further supported with certain political and institutional adjustments to make this practice even more republican.

While the traditional vertical understanding of rights remains rooted in an older liberalism, the horizontal model possesses affinities with republican thought. This chapter makes these connections between constitutional practice and some of the core texts in the history of political thought. In addition to different understandings of the relationship between spheres, or the individual and community, liberal and republican thought generally conceive of liberty differently, a distinction that also maps onto the vertical and horizontal models in important ways. Rights in a horizontal understanding take on a new significance as more than mere rights, but ends as well, that potentially implicate the polity as a whole. Thus, horizontal application gives rise to new calls for parity between public and private spaces, which, in turn, amounts to a new source for understanding the duties of private actors. Such concepts as the common good and duty, integral to republican thought, come to the fore and offer a baseline for conceptualizing the parity and duties to which horizontal application gives rise. The chapter illustrates how these republican concepts occur in the context of actual cases and larger constitutional discourses, drawing examples from Germany, India, and South Africa.

How was the British imperial state transformed from an ancien régime in 1819 to a liberal one that depended upon a new science of government?

Since the early 1930s, a broad acceptance of the need for social planning had been growing in Britain. Neurath naturally became involved in debates on this matter, not only with British and American scholars (C. H. Waddington and James Burnham) but with fellow Central European émigrés in the UK, Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Hayek. Neurath and Mannheim concurred on the possibility of ‘planning for freedom’, whereas Hayek feared that any socialist planning would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Neurath took issue with this, not least in his reading of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which can be reconstructed from Neurath’s copious notes in his own copy. Neurath’s ideas of the 1920s for a socialized ‘economy in kind’ were moderated by his situation in Britain, with its democratic ‘muddle’ of the 1940s. By contextualizing Neurath’s views in relation to other prominent figures of the era, we point out what made him unique among them.