This chapter describes the many-sided aspects of Jewish life in Imperial Germany, in parallel to its general history up to 1914. Following an economic crisis 1873 and a decline of liberal faith, a wave of anti-Jewish sentiments spread – seemingly from Berlin – across the entire country. It brought about the establishment of new political parties with antisemitic programs, just when legal emancipation had been completed. This tension would become characteristic of Jewish life in the following era. It brought about extreme achievements in all spheres of life, but also daily confrontation with antisemitism. The latter deeply disappointed many Jews, but on the whole did not stop their integration and acculturation. Their fight against discrimination, moreover, strengthened their Jewish identity, despite further acculturation. The chapter describes Jewish cultural achievements as part of the period’s academic and artistic blooming, and the life of the Jewish bourgeoisie leading some of its members to disregard the dangers inherent in their situation.

This chapter asks what processes erased applied science from public view from the late 1960s. It explores the public talk of a second industrial revolution in the 1950s, and the increasing popularity of ‘technology’, gaining the support of the Labour Party, which founded the Ministry of Technology in 1964. Meanwhile, funds for scientific research became tighter, and the public popularity of science waned. Increasingly, as economists became interested in ‘innovation’, analysts questioned the efficacy of the applied science route to wealth. By the end of the 1960s, science-push was giving way to demand-pull as a government-favoured model of innovation. Scientific research was seen as just one of several important inputs into successful development. As a result, the use of the term ‘applied science’ fell precipitously. However, in the twenty-first century, the new concept of ‘translational research’ emerged in the ever-more prominent biosciences to fill the gap between bench and bedside.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the United States was a fledgling power, weaker than many European countries in both economic and military terms. The central government had effective control over only a small area of the continent, and disputes between it and the states were already well entrenched. The country had continental aspirations, but only gradually would it begin moving its border westward. The power imbalance between the United States and Latin America was therefore not yet great, but it would rapidly swing in favour of the U.S. in the first decades of the century. This chapter analyzes the challenges in establishing and maintaining relations between governments in the United States and Latin America and concludes with the post–Civil War period, at which time U.S. economic and military power markedly increased.

Chapter 4 introduces the readers to the specific political parties within each case study and considers the extent to which the fourteen items of “good citizenship” are already partisan, that is, before introducing democratic threats. We observe consistent patterns of partisan citizenship, even when controlling for demographic factors that might explain citizenship preferences. That is, supporters of left parties value protesting and solidarity-oriented beliefs like helping others; supporters of right parties strongly support allegiant items of belonging, from obeying laws to items of national belonging. In majoritarian systems (the US and UK), these patterns are strong and systematic. However, a crucial observation underlies these differences: there are sufficient overlaps between the left and right when it comes to liberal democratic beliefs and behavioral items of good citizenship. This “holding of the center” is critical. It suggests a strong base of agreement for preserving national unity and sufficient overlaps for establishing common goals despite polarization in everyday politics.

This chapter considers people (primarily conservatives) who have criticized the Nordic Model and suggested a counter, dystopian version. This approach stretches from Eisenhower in the 1950s to Trump. Sweden and its alleged problems with crime and immigration are a particular theme of this argument.

This is the main theory chapter. It develops a new typology of public service reforms: vertical dimension of centralization and horizontal dimension of public versus mixed governance. The chapter analyzes the preferences of different political parties and the Church, and it sets out the methodology and chapter structure.

Long-time readers of my work will note a shift in my political orientation in earlier essays in this volume, from libertarian to classical liberal. The differences are not huge, but neither are they trivial, especially when it comes to fiscal issues. As I’ve gown older, and especially since the Great Recession of 2008/2009, it has become abundantly clear to me that human nature is darker than I previously realized. As well, there is the issue of what moral obligation we have to help those who cannot help themselves, most notably as it relates to social spending. I’ve come to realize just how unfortunate life can be for a sufficiently large number of people that I no longer think that private charity alone can do the job of shoring up a social safety net for the unlucky. The deeper I looked into the matter of how lives turn out, the more I realized how much is out of our control. This essay, an expansion of that Scientific American column that was originally published in Quillette January, 2019, is a result of my continued research on the subject of, as the above title notes, how lives turn out.

This essay began as a blog post on Skeptic.com that I wrote after a series of debates I did with John Lott, who has emerged as one of the strongest opponents of gun-control measures and a regular guest on Fox News. The original blog included my PowerPoint slides and accompanying commentary that I used in my debates; here I primarily focus on my experiences debating Lott, drawing on some of the more poignant data slides I used to counter his thesis that more guns equals less crime. This is followed by a discussion of a more recent debate I did with a radical gun advocate named Michael Huemer, who made the argument for guns as a necessary bulwark against governmental tyranny, which I debunked in the previous essay. I did not fully understand where Lott and Huemer (or gun-rights advocates of any kind) were coming from until I read George Lakoff’s book Moral Politics, which lifted the scales from my eyes and enabled me to understand what both conservatives and liberals really want, and not just in the realm of gun control, but in all dominions of life. The final part of this essay addresses those insights.

Shifting the analytical lens beyond Iran, Chapter 7 “Africa (1985–2013)” traces the history and evolution of the IRI’s foreign policy and RJ’s developmental activities in sub-Saharan Africa between the 1980s and the 2000s. Contrary to common assumptions, the de-radicalization of the IRI’s foreign policy in Africa began not under the pragmatists in the early 1990s, but under the rightists or conservatives in the mid-1980s. This period marked the first time that the IRI instrumentalized development to advance its strategic interests in Africa – a policy that has continued despite the factionalization of the IRI’s political elite. The chapter is the first to investigate the history and activities of RJ in Africa. It posits that development has enabled the IRI to make significant inroads into the continent due to its sizeable agrarian economies, widespread rural poverty, and formidable developmental challenges.

This chapter examines how domestic actors exploited the international context to execute their policy agendas in the Turkish context. It demonstrates how conservatives, who were heavily dominated and controlled by the secular elite, used Turkey’s European Union membership bid as an opportunity to constrain bureaucratic authoritarian institutions, including the military, and liberalized the Turkish political system. The chapter also shows how conservatives built a broad social coalition with liberals, social democrats, and minorities by using Europeanization as an instrument. This coalition, which included the Christian minority, facilitated the passing of reforms in favor of religious minorities.

In early May, as the deputies from all three Estates came to Versailles for the scheduled opening of the Estates General they carried with them cahiers enjoining them to reform the constitution in broadly similar ways. One major matter that divided them was the question of how the deputies would meet and vote. Deputies from the Third Estate came determined to pursue common meetings of the three orders with matters decided by a vote by head. Noble and Clerical deputies were split on the issue, but a majority in both orders carried cahiers encouraging or requiring them to seek separate meetings and a vote by order. The electoral regulations sent out by the king in January had not settled which form would prevail. From the very first meeting of the Estates General, the orders entered into a prolonged stalemate as the Third Estate refused to conduct business without first verifying all deputy credentials in common in the main meeting hall and the Nobles insisted that credentials be verified separately by each order.

27 June had marked a triumph for those who supported a union of the orders. The stalemate finally broken, it was time to write a constitution and help the king repair his finances. Then, on 30 June, at the first full meeting of the united orders, scores of deputies protested against the activities of the National Assembly. To a man these deputies, all from the privileged orders, claimed that instructions from their constituents prohibited them meeting in common with the other orders or accepting a vote by head. They based their protests on the mandates they had received from their electors. Almost all of the deputies of 1789 had sworn an oath upon receiving the cahier of his electoral district to faithfully present the grievances contained within. In most cases, they had sworn an oath to obey certain commands their electors made on pain of being, at least in theory, disowned as a representative. This was the “binding” or “imperative” mandate.

The decree putting the goods of the Church at the disposal of the nation was a major act with far-reaching implications. As Barère announced in his newspaper, Le Point du jour, on 2 November the Assembly had definitively established itself as a tribunal before which all the institutions of society would be judged.1 It had become a truly constituent body, one that could rid France of useless or pernicious institutions and establish those necessary for the public good. The political struggles of summer 1789 had determined who would lead the effort to reform France. The first phase had been a struggle between the Third Estate and conservatives in the Noble and Clerical orders over who would lead the Estates General. The second phase was the struggle between the king and the National Assembly to see who would establish the new constitutional order. Louis XVI had failed to see through essential reforms under his leadership.

One of the most remarkable features of the early Revolution was the absence of direct communication between the Third Estate and Louis XVI. The king had given no instructions about how to regulate communication between himself and the orders. The matter devolved to the Keeper of the Seals, Charles Louis François de Paule de Barentin, who took it upon himself to act as the supervisor for everything related to the Estates General. He became the conduit through which communication between the orders and Louis passed. But Barentin was deeply hostile to the pretensions of the Third Estate, going back at least as far as the time of the Result of the King’s Council of State of 1788. Until mid July, Barentin managed communications to the benefit of the Noble order, generally refusing to find times for members of the Third Estate to meet with the king. During the stalemate, the deputies of the Third Estate had only been given one meeting with Louis and it was at the worst time possible, coming two days after the death of the king’s oldest son.