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.

Beginning with the mysterious problem of the so-called “caste system,” this introduction questions the ubiquitous scholarly understanding of the monarchy as a cabal of lawmakers determined to legislate every detail of vassals’ lives. It introduces a very different perspective – namely, that subjects submitting gobierno or administrative-legislative petitions not only prompted the vast majority of the empire’s dizzying thousands of royal decrees – including those concerning novel categories of human difference. It explains how both liberal-era and Habsburg mythologies of Spanish imperial rule envisioned the king as the primary author of these texts, and proposes a labor-oriented, Actor-Network Theory-inspired alternative explanation. It introduces the petition-and-response system, explaining that early modern participants sought intimate lord–ruler dialogue, in which vassals and lords endowed their writings with voluntad or volition, in order to save the consciences of all involved. It also argues that in order for this communication to thrive, a number of legal fictions – including the transfer of voluntad across the globe – was necessary. Also lurking in the distance was violence against the saboteurs of this ruler–ruled dialogue. Lastly, this segment introduces the source material and book structure.

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.

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.

This chapter focuses on how the radical right and strict secularists in France exploited the international context to execute their policy preferences concerning the Muslim minority. The radical right and strict secularists utilized rising Islamophobia in Europe to restrict the public manifestation of Islamic religious symbols. By using anti-Islamic discourse, these domestic actors portrayed Islamic activism and Islamic religious symbols as a threat to French secularism and republicanism, and they built a broad coalition, which included conservatives and socialists, to ban Muslim religious symbols in the public sphere.