Nikki Hessell’s “Romantic Poetry and Constructions of Indigeneity” understands the Romantic racialization of Indigenous peoples as means of denying these groups sovereignty. The trope of the Indian in representative European texts is, by this reading, complicit with the “desire to own, define, and administer everything.” By reading Romantic poetry for its recurring tropes, however, we can also locate the Romantic tradition in the work of those generally excluded from conversations about Romanticism. Thus Hessell reads Romanticism in the works of Indigenous poets Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe) and John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee). This is not merely a matter of expanding the Romantic canon; rather, by centering those whose presence in Romantic literature has generally been restricted to object of interest, Hessell shows that those who have been used as tropes are wielders of Romantic tropes in their own right.

Isaiah was arguably the most influential book of the Hebrew Bible upon the authors of the New Testament. It was the most frequently quoted book, apart from the lengthier book of Psalms, but as David Pao points out in “Isaiah in the New Testament,” it also supplied language and structural models for significant theological themes of early Christianity. He analyzes the role of Isaiah in New Testament themes such as eschatology, Christology, obduracy, and universalism. He also looks at the way in which whole New Testament writings were shaped by Isaianic influence, including all four Gospels, Acts, Romans, and Revelation. All this illustrates why Isaiah has been called “The Fifth Gospel.”

Two forms of Japanese Buddhism, which Barth castigates because they lack the name of Jesus. But they rather seem to be channels of divine grace, though mistaken (from a Christian viewpoint) and perhaps incomplete.

Divine forgiveness is offered to all, but humans must co-operate with divine grace.

Barth speaks of ‘the liberation of all men’ by the union of divine and human natures in Jesus, yet he refuses to be called a ‘Universalist’. This is an aporia, an unresolved perplexity.

Faith, for Barth, is a sharing in the life of the Eternal Word. But is it for all, or only for Christian believers?

Election to membership of ‘the true church’ is unmerited, for Barth. It is hard to see how it can be just, and not arbitrary, if that is so.

Barth’s account of evil as ‘an impossible possibility’ or the threat of Nothingness, seems to lack sense. There is an argument here for some human autonomy and freedom of choice.

Barth’s account seems to imply both that, only ‘the elect’ are to have fellowship with God, and that all humanity will do so. There is no clear account of how the desperately wicked could obtain such fellowship.

The great and unresolved Barthian paradox is that Jesus shows God to be unlimited love, and yet that God abominates all human seeking after God, even the most sincere.

The CRC does not define the beginning of childhood, only its end. Human rights are granted to all humans based on their humanity. The justification for human rights is that every individual is born and has a rational mind. The monist construction of the child-rights identity is unique as a human right since it does not require either mind or body for its realization, as it is based on age and not the body and mind. The CRC is constructed to cover every child and in some cases from conception, which means that the rights of the child cannot meet liberal rights’ ideas of freedom as a foundation since the individual freedom is conditioned on the immaterial rational mind controling the material body, which the unborn child or very young child do not possess.

By analyzing government documents from 1885 to the present, the chapter first argues that the liberal movement’s introduction of parliamentary rule in Norway in 1884 was a critical juncture in the state’s language regime. During the union with Denmark (1380-1814), Danish replaced Norwegian as Norway’s written language. In 1885, parliament adopted official equality for a new written Norwegian language (Nynorsk) along with Dano-Norwegian (Bokmål). From 1885, The Liberal Party implemented language regulations, and was also the power behind welfare regulations that are often described as universal. Consequently, the state tradition of Norway has been labelled welfare state universalism. The chapter’s second objective is to explore how Norway’s language policy is related to the social welfare model, and to discuss whether the language regime can be considered universalist. The Labour Party came into office in 1935, completing welfare and language reforms introduced by The Liberal Party. The universalist regime was not challenged by any government of the last part of the century. However, parliament will probably adopt a general language law, and this has sparked a new debate on language rights. The chapter’s third objective is to discuss whether Norway’s linguistic universalism is currently at a critical juncture.

As a temporal form, irony directs narrative toward self-critique at the scale of both the individual narrator’s personal memory and the nation’s or empire’s cultural heritage. Chapter 4 parses the threefold irony in William Thackeray’s travel writing, which critiques heritage discourse in contemporary British engagements with Greece. It then analyzes Thomas Hardy’s poem “Christmas in the Elgin Room,” which scales up the irony and the critique as it looks back from the early twentieth century to the nineteenth-century acquisition of Lord Elgin’s collection. The result of the universalism that accumulates ancient Greek antiquities in the British Museum, Hardy shows, is not preservation but dislocation and tragedy – a disillusionment that threatens the stability of British heritage discourse.

Part II centers Greece within British cultural heritage discourse, asking how British narratives about Greece shift after the Greek wars for independence produce a modern nation to vie with Britain’s depiction of itself as cultural (and material) heir to classicism. The temporal forms I identify in this part – inheritance and irony – define Britain in relation to Greece, both historically and geopolitically. Across Part II, I consider Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles, their display in the British Museum, the conspiracy to whiten them on the eve of World War II, and the claims of universal cultural heritage that began in the nineteenth century and still feature in their exhibition. These narratives and their trajectory, I argue, demonstrate how classicism develops in and through cultural and eventually racial supremacy.

This chapter examines the rise and growth of human rights. First, it discusses the historical development of human rights. Second, it outlines how human rights are understood today. Third, it explains how the liberal universalism that lies behind human rights has come up against cultural resistance. Finally, the chapter touches on some challenges that lie ahead in the struggle for human rights.

The Introduction outlines the theoretical framework, starting with a review of the existing literature on musical modernism, global musicology and related theories, including discussions of universalism, methodological nationalism, the centre versus periphery paradigm, multiple modernities, hybridity and postcolonial and decolonising approaches. It further introduces the interdisciplinary concept of ‘entangled histories’, which is illustrated with three short cases studies: the Orchesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (OEIN) from Bolivia, the Bow Project from South Africa and Uwalmassa, a trio creating ‘deconstructed gamelan music’ from Jakarta, Indonesia. What unites these cases is that they are rooted in local traditions, rather than on the adoption or imposition of Western practices, although they undoubtedly respond creatively to Western ideas.

Chapter 3 analyses the normativity of sustainable development in international law and politics as expressed beyond the questions on its present (domestic) manifestations or the endless struggle to place the concept within general legal (normative) registers. It highlights how international law tends to subordinate non-Western experiences in its elevation of sustainable development into a global standard. What emerges from this process is that the more the world pursues sustainable development in its current form, the more we unwittingly contribute to the global dissemination of a particular strand of Eurocentrism. Sustainable development thus reveals itself as an amalgam of power and knowledge while simultaneously establishing itself as a vital component in international legal governance. What emerges in this chapter is that, although the concept of sustainable development is always at the forefront of international public discourse, little is done, in fact, to achieve its presumed objectives. Thus, while sustainable development’s quick ascent to become a universalist concept is central to this book, the concept’s character must be understood as quietly operating to mute global ecological violence that disproportionately affects marginalised peoples in the Global South.

Chapter 5 presents the paradox of national universalism as a theoretical explanation of French republicans’ historical tendency to exclude foreigners and minorities. It retraces the formation of the discourse of “nation” alongside that of “people” as well as the development of nationalism alongside the discourse of universalism. It analyzes the tension caused by the conjunction of two phenomena: the existence (or supposition of) a historical nation, and the declaration of universalism on which the revolution based itself. Finally, the chapter presents education policies and civil religion during the French revolution as two instances of the paradox of national universalism.

The introduction begins with the crisis of republicanism in France today. It asks what republicanism is for the French and why exclusion lies at the center of its crisis. It then presents the characteristics of French republicanism (in particular, its universalism and its emancipatory dimension), its place in the broader republican tradition, and in the neo-republican revival. Finally, it introduces the theoretical paradoxes that led republicans to justify exclusionary practices despite their endorsement of emancipation.

In Chapter 2, I develop and defend an account of human rights as universalist and minimalist. First, I characterize rights as universal, protecting all people universally and absent any qualifying characteristic. Second, I argue that the human right to subsistence is a basic human right. I argue that without enjoying the substance of the human right to subsistence, we will neither be able to enjoy the substance of any other, non-basic right nor pursue any other ends, moral, or non-moral. And third, in response to critics who believe that the universality of human rights entails remaking the world in our image (i.e., maximalism), I develop a minimalist account of human rights. According to minimalism about human rights, human rights should enable us to live minimally decent and autonomous lives. On these terms, human rights aim to protect people from the worst rather than to promote the best.

Comparative law has grown out of its traditional theoretical and methodological boundaries. However, much of comparative law scholarship may still be described as traditional. This chapter discusses the traditional view of comparative law research. What can be characterised as traditional comparative law has concentrated on the private law of major Western legal systems, leaving other areas of law and non-Western systems mostly aside. In substance, while it is not entirely clear what can be labelled as traditional methods, we can separate three essential issues. The first issue concerns the research process and how traditional comparative law scholars have outlined it. Traditional comparative law scholarship typically provides guidance on how research should be conducted. The second issue deals with the specific method of functionalism that has been recommended to be used in the comparative research. At the heart of the functionalist methodology lies the assumption according to which there are legal rules or institutions that serve a certain social function. The third issue concerns the underlying assumption behind functionalism, that is universalism. Universalism maintains that every society faces essentially the same problems, and that societies solve these problems by different means, though often with similar results. The chapter ends with a critical analysis and thoughts about the future of traditional methods.

This chapter starts by framing the larger debate concerning universalism versus contextualism in ethics, largely mirroring the one between positivism and relativism in science. It proposes that pragmatism transcends this dichotomy by considering the role of general (and particular) ethical norms and values in context and by focusing on moral deliberation. The pragmatist approach to ethics is described before discussing the ways in which ethical concerns and forms of reasoning accompany every phase of a research project. The practice of using deception, which is both widespread and controversial in social and psychological research, is reflected upon. Finally, the chapter ends with considerations regarding mixed methods, multi-resolution designs, and their ethical commitments.

This chapter examines a range of 1916 Shakespearean appropriations from the German sphere of influence (the German Reich and Austria-Hungary). Many of them argued that Germany had thoroughly ‘naturalised’ Shakespeare and thus had as much, or more, right to ‘own’ him as Britain. They also used Shakespeare to criticise Britain's alleged iniquities. However, German responses to the Shakespeare Tercentenary did not present an entirely unified, patriotic front. Some of them, like the April 1916 issue of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, exposed significant blind spots in the propagandistic uses of Shakespeare. Chief among them was the uncomfortable contradiction inherent in the claim that Shakespeare was universal and above the hostilities of the war while, at the same time, constituting a uniquely German property. Moreover, it proved possible to use Shakespeare in radical ways which contradicted the official patriotic line, as evidenced in Karl Kraus’s subversive articles published in his magazine Die Fackel.

Chen’s concluding chapter is a full-fledged defense of Brown and Levinson against their critics. In terms of theoretical assumption, Chen argues that rationality, per Brown and Levinson, does not belong to Westerners only, neither is individualism monopolized by them. In terms of utility, Chen demonstrates that Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness is perfectly capable of accounting – and, in fact, was designed to account – for the dynamism of social interaction. The accusations that it cannot stems from an insufficient appreciation of the richness of the theory, particularly the formula for measuring the weightiness of face threat. The second part of the chapter is a critique of the research strand “politeness evaluation.” Chen argues that this strand suffers several weaknesses. It is proposed as a reaction to the norm-based approach in politeness research but ends up being norm-searching. It is meant to capture variation, but what it has offered the field is little more than a list of facts that were expected in the first place. Finally, it is claimed to investigate the “moment of evaluation,” but such a moment – the judgment of politeness at the time of speaking – is practically impossible to capture.

In this book, Rong Chen provides a thorough discussion of Chinese politeness and argues for universality in politeness theorizing. Based on in-depth analyses, the author dichotomizes Chinese face into Face1 and Face2 – the former referring to the person and the latter to the persona of the speaker – and proposes a model of Chinese politeness (MCP), with the notion of harmony at the center. Chinese politeness thusly conceived – the author argues – should be seen as a cultural-specification of a universal theory of politeness dubbed Brown and Levinson Extended (B&L-E), a model that anchors with Brown and Levinson’s theory but with the incorporation of the notions of self-politeness and impoliteness. The author then applies MCP and B&L-E to the analyses of Chinese politeness, both diachronically and synchronically, and to comparisons of politeness between Chinese and other languages. The results demonstrate that B&L-E is capable of accounting for variation as well as consistency across time and space, differences as well as similarity between linguacultures, and fluidity as well as stability in meaning making in authentic interaction. The monograph hence presents a rare challenge to politeness research and pragmatics, which have emphasized particularism at the expense of universalism.