This chapter introduces the central questions that are explored in the book. Not only do legal systems enforce morality but they ought to do so. The legitimacy of legal prohibitions on a host of moral wrongs such as murder, rape and burglary is widely taken for granted and not subject to serious dispute. Since legal systems do and ought to enforce morality, the interesting question is not whether the law should enforce morality. The interesting questions concern what parts of morality the law ought to enforce, the considerations that justify its enforcement, how the law ought to enforce morality, the relationship between the legal and social enforcement of morality and whether there are moral limits that constrain the enforcement of morality, and if so, what are the nature and justifications for these limits. In the course of introducing these questions, the chapter distinguishes different senses of enforcement, as this notion applies to both legal norms and social norms more generally. It distinguishes a broad from a narrow understanding of morality and further distinguishes critical from social conceptions of morality. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the relation between principled limits on the enforcement of morality and pragmatic reasons for imposing such limits.

The velayat-e faqih has steadily come to occupy the apex of the political system in its day-to-day functions, in the process overwhelming and overshadowing elected institutions such as the presidency and the Majles. The Assembly of Experts, which is meant to select and then supervise the velayat-e faqih, has become a shadow of its constitutional self. Especially after Refsanjani was elbowed out of the institution, it has moved to become more of an auxiliary of the leadership. The presidency and the Majles have also come increasingly under the leader’s overpowering influence. The system continues to remain hybrid. But that hybridity is being steadily chipped away at. Khamenei is the most important element of the deep state, the critical connective tissue that binds all the other institutions together. The other elements of the deep state are its praetorians – the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij – its gatekeepers such as the Expediency and the Guardian Councils, and Khamenei representatives and the Friday Prayers Imams, along with the rest of the Qom theological establishment, the Ministry of Intelligence, the Special Court for the Clergy, and the state radio and television broadcaster, the IRIB.

The centrality of the Bretton Woods international conference (1944) in the reshaping of international economic and financial institutions in the post-war world has always seemed obvious. In this story Keynes has been recognised as a key player, given his central role as a key advisor of the British government (despite his now precarious health). The mythology of Bretton Woods has often focussed on a supposed clash between a ‘Keynes Plan’ that sought to introduce the concept of ‘bancor’ as an international currency, and a ‘White Plan’ that was the brainchild of the leading US economist Harry White. But this way of telling the story misses the fact that ‘bancor’, for all its suggestive implications, was never put to the conference as an option. Instead we see Keynes – sadder and wiser than in Paris perhaps – accommodating all along to an American view that ‘a deal’ had to be struck. It was one that crucially involved Britain in paying for the benefit of Lend-Lease by adopting the mantra of ‘non-discrimination’. So here is a revealing example of the priority for expediency over truth in a real-world situation.

It has long been a puzzle to reconcile two well-known facts: first that the Economic Consequences became the received version on the left for a contemptuous view of Lloyd George; second, that Keynes came to cooperate so closely with Lloyd George in seeking to revive the Liberal party in the 1920s. Their own relationship had begun during the First World War, when Keynes was first drawn into advising the Treasury on key policy issues from 1914. It was in these years that Keynes benefited from the sponsorship of Edwin Montagu, a key minister in the Liberal government. This chapter shows how much Lloyd George’s initial hostility to Keynes on economic policy was the product of a cultural clash between them; also how this came to be resolved (at least temporarily) when Keynes picked up economic insights from Lloyd George’s untutored intuitions. And the chapter draws on the memoir ‘Dr Melchior’, composed by Keynes for his Bloomsbury friends, to illustrate the way that – almost against his own prejudices – he became captivated by Lloyd George’s intuitive mastery of the political process.