This final chapter treats the Snopes trilogy as a clear-sighted affirmation of immanence and interiority that responds in a self-contained way to the whole of Faulkner’s study of complex systems as outlined in this book. In The Hamlet, the symbolism of the submerged woman offers Faulkner’s clearest portrayal of an immanent underlayer to our networked social systems, an underlayer that gives value and dignity to the individual life. Although there may be a chaotic quality to the expression of such individual forms of novelty, this does not mean that the larger networked process is blind. For Faulkner, individual experience serves as both a moral anchorage for the larger expression of the social body and an ever-present wellspring for social change. The Town and The Mansion continue to depict how such individual behavior can challenge vertical paradigms of top-down power, bestowing a mercurial quality to the New South and making it open to the possibilities of change.

The chapter looks at Churchill’s economic ideas as a Liberal and then Conservative and their impact on his actions. Churchill was a free trader and accepted the self-correcting specie-flow mechanism of the Gold Standard. His political economy before 1914 rested on interventions to remove monopoly power and market imperfections that would allow ‘competitive selection’ by free enterprise and encourage individual responsibility. After the war, strains appeared in this coherent set of assumptions. Churchill’s tenure as chancellor was marked by creative accounting for pragmatic political reasons. He remained a devotee of sound finance and balanced budgets, and despite some reservations on the issue of the return of the Gold Standard, he could not go against the advice of Treasury officials and the Bank of England, or his own ‘deeply internalized convictions’ that coincided with their assumptions. After 1929 he took little systematic interest in economics. Churchill’s coherent political economy of free trade and the Gold Standard collapsed and he had nothing in its place.

The final chapter summarizes the major findings of the book along two perspectives.

First, the book shows that the study of civil society under authoritarianism needs to take a bottom-up approach that pays attention to local issues and gives a voice to the people engaged for the public good and for the local community. At its heart, the debate about civil society in Saudi Arabia is about the difference between agency and sovereignty. Saudi Arabia is a country in which the population profoundly lacks popular sovereignty. Yet ordinary men and women in Saudi Arabia – young and old; social activists, philanthropists, and social workers; Saudis and non-Saudis – do have agency.

Second, the analysis shows that where the public social welfare system of the state has failed or systematically excluded specific segments of the population, charity organizations have tried to meet some of the needs of marginalized groups. Sometimes this transgresses the policies set down by the state; sometimes they complement or occasionally work together with the state. The meaning of charity has been subject to debate and scrutiny. Charity is a constantly evolving, contested field, in which numerous actors engage – often highly critical of each other and with competing approaches.

Chapter 18 provides a human rights’ narrative in envisioning the implementation of competition law in the food value chain. The authors argue that competition law, with its inherent focus on market regulation and providing a level playing field to market players, offers a credible conceptual and institutional response for addressing this challenge along transparent, predictable and sustainable lines. They argue that not only does the implementation of the right to food stand to benefit from a market-centred approach but also that competition itself becomes a more “holistic” and meaningful tool for social reform by taking into account values inherent in the progress towards the global right to food by integrating the multi-dimensional reality of the global food supply and retail chain in the assessment of specific commercial practices and/or sectors. The Chapter provides the “grammar” of a more holistic competition policy in this crucial sector for national and global economies and attempts to dissect the actual and potential impact of the right to food rhetoric on competition law enforcement.

In 1924, a wealthy New York philanthropist, Dorothy Straight (née Elmhirst), married a Yorkshire-born agricultural economist, Leonard Elmhirst. The First World War had made both of them question the self-oriented, market-driven doctrine of laissez-faire liberalism that underpinned the Western world. ‘I found that the bottom of life had dropped out,’ Leonard Elmhirst wrote, ‘and that the old beliefs could not stand the test’. Both wanted to dedicate themselves to creating a community apart from mainstream society, where a better mode of holistically integrated, democratic living could be pioneered. In 1925 they bought a run-down estate in South Devon, Dartington Hall, and began a social, cultural and education experiment that they hoped would ‘set the pace’ for Britain and the rest of the world. They devoted the rest of their lives to this project, which became one of the best-known and most influential of the many small-scale interwar utopian experiments.

“Writing the Ghetto, Inventing the Slum” traces the changing definitions, representations, and meanings of the “slum” and the “ghetto” in American literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. The chapter considers writings by Abraham Cahan, Theodore Dreiser, Hutchins Hapgood, Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison, and Claude Brown, reading them alongside turn-of-the-century muckraking, Chicago School sociology, and “culture of poverty” social science discourse. Instead of a single, overarching story, the imaginative literature analyzed in the chapter offers competing and divergent representations of the “slum” and the “ghetto” as places of cultural and linguistic vibrancy and vitality, but also as places of poverty and pathology, as zones of acculturation, but also as zones of inassimilable ethnic and racial difference. These contradictory understandings within and between texts reveal the unsettled status, historically changing nature, and enduring fascination of the “slum” and the “ghetto” in the American imagination.

Kathy Glass’s “Black Reform, Writing, and Resistance” highlights social networks, textual politics, and Black resistance and focuses on African Americans’ sustained literary activism against myriad social evils after the Civil War. The chapter begins to map the politics of uplift, temperance, and social reform, with emphasis on work by Julia C. Collins, Harper, and William Wells Brown. Glass suggests these texts underscore literature’s potential for political work by inspiring readers and encouraging collective resistance against oppression.

Chapter 2 focuses on social investigators and policy reformers who criticized the court-based system of employee injury law and called for compensation laws. The chapter argues that these investigators and reformers had genuine concerns with social justice and understood the personal and dignitary harms inflicted by employee injury. At the same time, they were most concerned with economic harms and their implicit theories of justice were largely centered on distributive concerns like inequality and poverty. As a result, advocates for social justice unwittingly ended up helping create a relatively one-sided picture of employee injury as a problem, a picture that ultimately neglected the non-distributive human costs of injury.