Political factions at Carthage cannot be identified beyond a simple polarity: supporters and opponents of Hannibal’s family, ‘Barcids’ and ‘anti-Barcids’. At Rome, the richer naming system has encouraged prosopographic studies, conjectures about political alliances based on kinship, marriage ties, and shared local origins. But more than temporary existence of such ‘groups’ is doubtful. It is also disputed whether Republican Rome was any sort of democracy: Polybius controversially claimed that tribunes of the plebs were there to do the people’s will. In the second Punic war, where we rely on Livy, elections do not look very democratic, but there is a special and temporary reason for this: demography. Casualties in the 218−216 disasters produced a top-heavy senate for years to come. The trials of the Scipios (180s) do not support the idea of groups but rather exemplify the ruling class’s concern to prevent ambitious individuals from upsetting a competitive equilibrium.

The victory of Cameron’s Conservatives in 2010 ushered in the idea of a new Conservative Party, repairing both image and electoral prospects. However, this chapter will examine to what extent that change occurred, and how much the Conservatives were united or divided by the same older questions of policy and ideology – particularly on Europe and the economy. The chapter will also analyse the development of the party’s structures, power and personnel, and contemplate what effects any change may have had.

Antioch’s circuses and theaters are well known; however, how they gradually became locus to faction rivalries and hotbeds for civic strife is brought into focus by this chapter.

This chapter focuses on Rousseau’s underappreciated treatment of voting and electoral laws. It argues that these are a worthy and essential part of the Social Contract – a matter of political life and death. First, Rousseau sees universal suffrage as necessary for establishing a political community, for selecting its form of government, and for discerning the general will. Second, electoral reforms are the primary mechanism for reducing the speed of political decline and “death.” The chapter brings together Rousseau’s remarks on the design of electoral districts, the manner of voting (i.e. timing, place, secret vs. open, order of casting ballots, thresholds), and the aggregation of votes, drawing primarily on his examples of flawed but enduring republics such as Rome, Sparta, Venice, and Geneva. Instead of reconstructing Rousseau’s blueprint for the perfectly just republic, the chapter shows how frequent and appropriate electoral reforms allowed these republics to outlive even their less corrupt contemporaries.

This chapter examines the meanings of moderation in the American political tradition, beginning with George Washington’s Farewell Address, continuing with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and ending with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.

Chapter 3 describes how the Constitution created a system for control of factions. But when those factions more and more polarized around the issue of slavery, the Northern and Western national majority was unable to rule and eventually had suppress the Southern minority in the Civil War. In recent decades, much Black migration out of the South and some White migration into the Republican Party have again polarized voter sentiment into red and blue states, or two tribes. This gridlock in the national government has again created a national majority which cannot rule (see the Senate cloture procedure), in which case a new political crisis plagues the country.

The standard explanation for Trump’s 2016 victory is that it was the culmination of a long-term right-wing capture of the Republican Party. However, in 2016, the most consistently right-wing candidate was Ted Cruz. Trump was unusual in that he was the candidate of no faction. Rather, Trump’s low-cost populist strategy, in which he relied on mass rallies and social media, was effective because the factions who backed his opponents could not coalesce to keep him out. Trump won the GOP primary with an historically low share of the vote. This chapter also shows that Trump was not the first to successfully pursue such a strategy. In the wake of the reforms of the early 1970s, a little-known Jimmy Carter was similarly able to capture the Democratic nomination in 1976 on the basis of a low-cost direct-communication strategy. The Democratic Party adapted then to keep future populists out. Whether the Republican Party will do so after Trump remains unclear.

Chapter 6 considers the transformation of competition in the political sphere and the functions of the state. While prefigured in British politics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, like the modern company the modern political party and party systems first emerged in the young US, largely in the same period. Despite early condemnation of parties and factions by political leaders (Washington, Adams, Jefferson), within a few decades the modern party system had taken shape, emerging out of more rough-and-tumble, quasi-militarised factionalism, before spreading to Europe as democracy supplanted aristocracy across the nineteenth century. The chapter also briefly examines the rise of adversarial law, and the replacement of patronage by competitive examinations for government appointment, as two further examples of the state’s institutionalisation of conflict through formalised competition.

This chapter moves beyond individual corporations and corporate types to examine the broader sociopolitical system in China. It focuses on the "fragmented authoritarianism" of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), outlining the main causes of fragmentation, including corruption, factionalism, autonomy of state-owned enterprises, local government self-interest, private firm co-optation of government actors, and internal contradictions within the CCP's own ideology. This fragmentation prevents the CCP from exercising consistent control over corporations and the broader society, leading to a much more complex and diverse corporate-political ecosystem than imagined by many Western commentators.

As reports of mass famine turned from a trickle to a flood in 1960, the leadership slowly realized that the party had made a mistake of historical proportion. According to Ministry of Public Security data, 675 counties and cities had death rates exceeding 2 percent of population in the early 1960s, compared to the normal 1 percent or so. In forty counties, mainly in Anhui, Sichuan, Henan, Guizhou, and Qinghai, the death rates exceeded 10 percent of the population (Yang et al. 2012: 395). Economists and demographers estimate that the Great Leap Forward caused sixteen to thirty million unnatural deaths in the early 1960s (Kung and Lin 2003). The policy of using confiscated grain to finance a rapid buildup of industrial capacity championed by Mao and his colleagues had led to one of the greatest man-made disasters in the twentieth century.

In mid-1975, a sickly Mao had one of the last meetings with the Politburo. During the meeting, Mao shook hands with the entire Politburo, probably for the last time in his life. When he greeted alternate Politburo member and Vice Premier Wu Guixian, Mao confessed, “I don’t know who you are.” An embarrassed Wu said, “Chairman, we met in 1964 during the national day parade.” Mao compounded her embarrassment by responding, “I didn’t know that” (Mao 1975).

Chapter 2 presents a history of popular storytelling in the Kamigata/Kansai region, with discussion of important figures and translations of early stories. As one willl see, Kyoto and Osaka storytellers developed an art with distinct characteristics, and this can be connected to the fact that, for a significant part of its history, the art was performed outdoors. Kamigata storytelling has virtually always been inclusive and open to the public. Countless amateurs took part in Osaka storytelling circles; in fact, participation was regularly solicited. Consequently, storytelling there has always been tied to the masses. It was arguably this special bond that helped a small number of rakugoka steer the art out of some of its darkest hours before, during, and immediately after World War II. Kamigata rakugo still operates at ground level and retains traditional elements. Tokyo rakugoka had a hard time after the war, but, unlike the case in Osaka, yose were quickly rebuilt in the capital. Kamigata rakugoka did not have a permanent ‘home’ until 2006, when the Tenma Tenjin Hanjōtei opened its doors. In spite of this, the art flourishes today.