The Introduction gives a brief account of Bartolus’s life, explains the world of medieval law in which he worked, and then explains the political context of the northern and central Italian city republics for which he worked, and whose problems he sought to analyse. It explains that tyranny was Bartolus’s main preoccupation, even in the two treatises ostensibly concerned with other questions. It then presents the main arguments of his three political treatises and Bartolus’s main political theory in his academic legal commentaries, and describes the later influence of these treatises in European political theory. The Introduction also argues that Bartolus conceived of these three treatises as one composite treatment of tyranny.

Scheuerman engages with the right-wing mobilization of “Weimar lessons” in the context of the contemporary US political landscape. The chapter focuses specifically on how the political thought of German Jewish émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss was used by supporters of the Trump Administration in academic circles, based primarily at the Claremont Institute. The Weimar analogy has often been mobilized to highlight the dangers of antidemocratic political forces. The chapter, however, serves as a reminder that the redeployment of Weimar and stories about its legacy can be instrumentalized to serve authoritarian as well as anti-authoritarian purposes.

This chapter provides an overview of the importance of utopian theorizing in the twenty-first century. It resituates utopianism, through Blochean theory, as larger than a literary genre and more diverse than representations of perfect societies. Rather, it celebrates an ideal of the utopianism of the everyday, of the here-and-now as much as of the future. It argues for a utopianism that is necessarily decolonial as it seeks to undo the damage of racial capitalism and provide imaginative resources for living differently. It concludes with an overview of the chapters collected in this book, showing that they explore both reactionary or nostalgically inflected visions of America’s settler-colonial utopian foundations, as well as centering new strains of utopian thought emerging from the margins of hegemonic American culture.

In book III chapter 4 of the Social Contract, Rousseau takes up the political principle established by Montesquieu in the Spirit of the Laws by correlating the form of a polity’s government to the extent of its territory: it is impossible, in his view, to answer once and for all the question of the best regime, without considering the suitability of regime types for particular situations. Yet democracy could still have a crucial advantage in Rousseau’s system: this kind of government confers most power to the people. A republican state seems to call for a democratic regime. This is why Rousseau’s response may come as a surprise: far from being the best form of government, democracy is the worst – or at least it is not suitable for a people of men, not gods. This essay reassesses Rousseau’s case against democracy. Why does Rousseau declare that democracy causes, so to speak, “a government without government,” and threatens popular sovereignty itself? This paradoxical claim needs to be explained.

Chapter 1 is the first of three chapters that introduce the book. It presents the main concepts used and makes the case for a political economy approach to studying education – one that combines economics of education with political theory. The chapter argues that typical economics of education analyses provide powerful tools to study education, but have analytical shortcomings – they generally assume that markets are competitve, that all economic actors are politically equal, and that, given similar information, they would make similar economic choices, no matter their position in the social structure. The chapter suggests that a political economy approach provides a deeper discussion of market imperfections and economic/political power – including how power relations influence individual choice and condition the identification and treatment of market imperfections – to more fully understand education as an institution and its role in society. The chapter ends by providing three examples of important policy issues in education that such an approach would be likely to address: the relationship between education and economic growth; gender discrimination in labor markets; and teacher shortages.

Chapter 3 makes the case that education systems are almost universally situated in the public sector, and their role is profoundly shaped by economic and social power relations as reflected in the political structures of the nation-State. The chapter argues that the way power relations are reflected in the State provides the framework for a political theory of education The chapter lays out such a State theory and suggests how it helps explain the nature of conflicts over how much to spend on education, who gets the resources, and how they are used in schools. The theory further helps define the structure in which individuals from different social classes, races, ethnicities, and gender make decisions (exercise agency) regarding education. It also helps define the economic opportunities facing different groups and how the State in market economies defines educational norms, standards, and access to education. The chapter’s final sections discuss how economics of education debates – for example, on the efficiency of the public sector in providing education – are influenced by political ideology, and describe the politics of nation-States’ developing social capital to enhance the efficiency of education, often at the cost of individual rights.

Chapter 5, ‘New Epoch, Old Stones?’, is the conclusion of the book. It first synthesizes the findings of the examination of practice conducted throughout Chapters 3 and 4, setting out a statement of the scope and content of the emerging rule in (European) international law. Then, by reference to the persistent limitations to participation, it raises questions about what and who the proliferation of mechanisms for Indigenous participation – and the emergence of a legal standard in custom – serves. The chapter engages with the work of Indigenous political theorists to question whether current mechanisms for Indigenous participation in global governance may in part function to legitimize and protect (neo)colonial global economic and political structures. This does not invalidate the conclusion that the right is part of customary international law, nor is it to say that the project of Indigenous peoples’ participation in international governance is not necessarily worth pursuing. Rather, it serves to highlight the limitations of the right, the contingencies of its application, and ultimately to gesture at a space to develop alternative possibilities for Indigenous internationalism and sovereignty.

Rising literacy, urbanization, and leisure time in early modern Japan led to increasing popular interaction with politics. This chapter, after confirming the basic political apparatus of the Tokugawa state, demonstrates how the governance carried out within that apparatus interacted with increasingly vibrant expressions of political opinion from outside the state. From erudite Confucian analysis to popular riot and lewd graffiti, this chapter argues that public political opinion and action both influenced and at times was courted by the shogunal government. Political discussions in salon and popular culture outside the state introduced key new political ideas which transformed the ideal of governance in Japan from a minimalist concept of military domination and agricultural facilitation to a much more comprehensive vision of general welfare and development.

Using a new visualisation technique for word embedding data, this chapter explores the formation of complex, compound concepts in the late eighteenth century, focusing specifically on ‘political revolution’. Word embedding models offer an alternative method of understanding relationships between terms, both as a function of proximity (as in collocation) and of shared contexts (as in synonyms). By measuring the direct distance within the embedding space between two words over time in a series of aligned models, we can witness two parts of a compound idea bind together and observe which terms provide the binding force between them. Using this method, I explore the way that ‘revolution’ travels across the eighteenth century in relation to the ‘political’. Although loosely linked in the wake of the Glorious Revolution at the outset of the century, revolution becomes heavily tied to Newtonian mechanics, before being pulled back into political usage during the French Revolution. The method I introduce here reveals the hidden connections to ‘science’ in both political and revolution that undergirds their eventual merger into the idea of ‘political revolution’ that we have inherited today.

This Introduction surveys the long, inextricable relationship between American politics and the American novel in the twentieth century. After defining twentieth-century “politics” broadly as the theoretical intersection between power, freedom, and justice within the framework of American liberalism, it explains why the American novel is a unique aperture through which to view political conflict and change, arguing that the novel form illuminates how official power relations overlap with personal power relations. While surveying previous scholarship on American politics and the novel, it explains why the volume does not restrict itself to the narrow subgenre of “political fiction.” The Introduction then addresses the rationale for each major section: “Ideologies and Movements,” “The Politics of Genre and Form,” and “Case Studies.” It concludes by considering how a robust engagement with the politics of the twentieth-century American novel can help us make sense of our political present.

The main questions concerning English governance addressed by medieval theorists were: (a) the division of authority between the Church, headed by the Pope, and the king; (b) the extent to which the king was bound by law and custom; (c) whether he was bound to act with the counsel and consent of his magnates; and (d) whether he could legitimately be resisted or even deposed for violating moral, religious, customary or legal constraints.

The fact of religious pluralism is one of the most challenging questions for contemporary liberal democracies. Political theorists variously argue that religious belief and practice can be a support for prosocial morality, can cause social division, may prevent citizens from adopting important civic norms, or should simply be an area of civic competence. All of these positions carry significant consequences for democratic education. This chapter surveys a range of positions present in political theory and democratic education literature, drawing on historical and contemporary examples from Western democracies, particularly the American context. The chapter concludes by exploring the possibility that modern liberal democratic regimes are properly considered religious themselves, and by considering the implications of this notion for debates regarding democratic education.