This chapter starts by observing that public responsibility is still understood in very different ways throughout the world, depending largely on the political, social and cultural background of each State. The Chinese, Middle Eastern, African and Central European examples presented bear witness to this reality, and in particular to the close link between the development of public responsibility and the emancipation of the individual from the State and the collectivity. The great diversity of national and supranational practices on a world-wide scale – in a context marked by global challenges and by the still essential role of the Nation-State framework – makes a comparative legal approach essential, not only to prevent unwarranted standardization, but also to bridge differences and ‘further compatibility’.

This chapter explains how, in the wake of the reforms implemented since the early 1980s and the desire to provide a legal framework for State action, successive statutes have laid the foundations for a system of responsibility of public authorities in the People’s Republic of China. Despite the establishment of mechanisms to enforce State responsibility, the system still suffers from a number of shortcomings. Some are inherent in the reluctance of any State to be held responsible; others are more specific and outline the contours of a regime of responsibility specific to China at a time when the country wishes to assert a government model to compete with liberal democracy. In the background, a regime of political rather than legal responsibility has emerged, which both limits the obstacles to public action (in order to ensure efficiency) and emphasizes the government’s duty to ensure common prosperity. The report examines the Chinese bureaucratic culture, its history and the specificities of the current political system to explain the origin of this specifically Chinese conception of the responsibility of public authorities.

According to Paul Franco, Nietzsche constructed TSZ as a political drama in which the protagonist overcomes his reluctance to rule and accepts his political responsibility. His reluctance to rule springs from his compassion for the suffering that his disciples will have to endure as a result of his teaching. And his political responsibility is to teach eternal recurrence as a cultivating philosophical idea that creates a new ruling class that will help bring about his goal of the Übermensch – a collective goal that will rescue modern Europe from its nihilistic democratic trajectory. In this essay, Franco explains how Nietzsche’s “great” politics presents a radical challenge to our usual assumptions about the need for a common political life and for politics in the mundane and institutional sense.

The international legal and institutional structure around climate change ascertains that the responsibility to react to the phenomena lies predominantly with states. Although states play a vital part in addressing climate change, these structural constrains leaves limited room for alternative actors to take action to react to the problem. This chapter proposes looking at responsibility in world affairs as a political concept; a political concept that reconstitutes norms, practices, and actions in a manner that advances new ways to mitigate climate change. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s conceptualisation of political responsibility, and the activism of non-state and substate within the UNFCCC, we suggest that political responsibility gives agency and space for different actors within the international community to engage in practices that help advance the climate change agenda. This, we further suggest, constructs a common community in which various actors undertake political action in order to influence policymaking.

This chapter distinguishes two eighteenth-century accounts of the English constitution. The first, Montesquieu’s, advocated a balanced constitution. The second, which would become the classical theory of parliamentarism, accepted constitutional imbalance. Authors subscribing to this second approach believed that England was a free state because the House of Commons was the most powerful actor. They thought representative assemblies were best equipped to secure political liberty. And while they recognized that representative assemblies could threaten liberty, they were convinced that two practices had emerged to prevent this from happening, which did not require the Crown and Lords to exercise prerogatives equal to the Commons: first, the involvement of ministers in Parliament, and, second, the sheer presence of a constitutional monarch. Through these two practices, England could enjoy all the benefits of a powerful legislature without any risk of legislative usurpation. While this chapter ranges widely, especial attention will be paid to Jean Louis de Lolme and to the debates over parliamentary corruption and parliamentary opposition that occurred during the ministry of Robert Walpole.

This chapter examines theories of parliament and parliamentarism in Victorian Britain. The first part of the chapter offers a general survey of Victorian constitutional theory. I demonstrate that while Constant’s conception of parliamentarism was defeated in France, it triumphed in Britain, where Victoria was widely viewed as a monarch who reigned but did not govern, and a range of authors argued that ministers must hold power through persuasion rather than patronage. I then consider Walter Bagehot, the most famous Victorian theorist of parliamentarism, who developed the argument that parliamentarism was intrinsically superior to the American constitutional model. Finally, I turn to John Stuart Mill. I demonstrate that Mill shared the widespread Victorian belief in parliamentarism, and I argue that his true project in Considerations on Representative Government was to discover a way to harmonize Victorian parliamentarism and electoral democracy.

This chapter argues that Benjamin Constant’s greatest legacy to liberalism was his theory of parliamentarism, which revolutionized the way that the constitutional model was understood. Unlike previous authors examined in this book, Constant envisioned a constitutional monarch divested of executive powers–who reigned but not govern–and minsters who maintained their position entirely through the process of debate that unfolded within Parliament and the public sphere. Constant believed that this (seemingly) minimal framework of checks was sufficient to prevent Parliament from becoming tyrannical. It could achieve the great promise of the English parliamentary model–a nation being truly governed by a representative assembly–while at the same time overcoming the dilemmas long associated with that model, including the dilemma of corruption. The first part of the chapter examines Constant’s constitutional theory. The second part examines Constant’s involvement in French parliamentary politics during the Restoration when he tried and failed to enact this theory.