Increasing educational standards in the workforce have increased the use of experts throughout the economy, leading to processes that more closely resemble bureaucracies and stakeholder policymaking, with an increasing emphasis on culturally liberal values such as diversity, representation, and social responsibility. The guiding industries and workforces of the scientific and technology sectors have enabled a technocratic ethos in government and industry. Public opposition to technocracy and skepticism of meritocracy is growing among voters, allowing conservatism to brand itself as an opposition movement to the extension of government reach and the associated prevalence of “politically correct” messages and practices across educational institutions and in the workplace. The polarized American brand of politics now pervades internal debates across organizational sectors, enlarging the scope of activist politics beyond campaigns and government, especially where educational and cultural divides are strongest. The distinct styles of the culture war’s two conflicting sides have become more dissimilar at the national, state, and local levels, even in ostensibly apolitical arenas.

The radical Right’s initiatives have not been confined to the realm of ideas. Armed with a specific understanding of the deep cultural and social foundations of the liberal hegemonic order, they have diligently embarked on a Gramscian war of position: a patient counter-hegemonic struggle to change the predominant ‘common sense’ and produce ‘organic intellectuals’ who can critique the existing order and provide alternatives to it. We focus on the Right’s often overlooked efforts to capture the traditional institutions of cultural and political domination via academic publishing, universities, and policy institutes. These initiatives seek to create a new legitimacy and acceptability for radical Right ideas, explicitly re-writing intellectual history from a radical conservative perspective and reclaiming it from the academic mainstream. Through new universities and think tanks, their aim is to replace the liberal, woke, managerial, globalist elite with a Right elite, schooled in the critique of managerialism and critical of the over-reach of international institutions and liberal powers and think tanks.

The Conservative effect is notable in education, with several reforms at the department, beginning with the most (and only) successful Education Secretary Michael Gove and continuing throughout the ten Education Secretaries over the remaining ten years. The rapid churn made for inconsistent policymaking, and a lack of long-term planning. It ends with the Conservatives’ role in guiding the education system through Covid, and the return to ambitious plans under the final PM, Rishi Sunak. The chapter will also scrutinise Conservative higher education and university policy, and whether there was an opportunity wasted with universities.

In 1559/60 the parliaments of England, Ireland and Scotland proscribed the practice of Catholicism in their respective kingdoms and prescribed Reformed religious settlements in its place. By the end of the sixteenth century the English and the Scots had become nations of Protestants, but contemporary estimates of the number of Irish Protestants ranged between 40 and 120 individuals. Protestantism in Ireland was born of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century. Yet the remarkable contrast in the outcomes of the Reformation across the Atlantic archipelago was not predestined. England and Ireland shared the same Tudor monarchs and the Pale around Dublin was, in effect, an appendage of England. Nonetheless, while Elizabeth I’s religious settlement was a ‘runaway success’ in England it failed to win any significant support in Ireland. Indeed, because Irish women were particularly loath to embrace the new religion no self-sustaining community of Irish Protestants was spawned in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Scots created a Reformed Church establishment despite the wishes of their monarch, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. This chapter adopts a comparative approach to help explain the experiences of Reformation in England, Ireland and Scotland before 1603.

The diametrically opposed outcomes of the Reformation in England and France have led historians to presume that there were significant differences in their religious situations before the Reformation that help account for that ultimate divergence. This chapter argues that any such presumption is wide of the mark. Not only were the supposed ‘preconditions’ for the success of the Reformation in England (such as Renaissance humanism, anticlericalism and church-state tension) more evident in France, but the early diffusion of Reformation teachings was swifter and more widespread there as well. Although in the second quarter of the sixteenth century the Reformation received increasing royal support in England but not in France, that early progress was insecure and was briefly reversed. Decisive divergence between the two realms in this regard began only around 1560, and in each of them the outcome might still have been different under other circumstances. The ultimate outcomes reflected the interplay of political contingency with pre-existing differences not in religious experience but in political structures and political culture, which put the English monarchy in a position to impose its will upon the English nation, but left the French monarchy less able not only to impose change but also to suppress it.

The law of the virtual Roman Empire persisted throughout the Middle Ages, combined with customary law, like Salic law, or Saxon Law. Roman law was rediscovered and studied in the first universities in Western Europa. Legal scholars of the day made comments and thus developed so-called canon law: a mix of roman, medieval and religious law. At the same, as a result of feudal relations, quid pro quo documents, like the magna Charta and Joyous entries, emerged, granting different classes different privileges and rights in turn for assistance, tax and loyalty to a ruler. This marked the beginning of conditional power and the rule of law.

Chapter 1 recovers the history of an Iberian family involved in royal service across Portugal and Spain during the first decades of the Iberian Union (1580–1640). It shows how family memory and political loyalty became professional assets for young, university-trained jurists. By moving back and forth between courtly and university stages across the two monarchies, some of these young letrados came to think of themselves as political polymaths. Ultimately, they found opportunities to reach out and receive support from transnational networks of neo-stoic thinkers and practitioners which was fundamental for articulating the composite social and political life of the Iberian monarchies within and beyond the Iberian Peninsula.

Following his return from Brazil to the Iberian Peninsula and then his journey to Rome, Nogueira continued to experience displacement while always looking for an opportunity to settle down. Upon arrival in Rome, he encountered a global city within which knowledge functioned as a currency to access patronage. In this highly competitive environment, populated by many other mercenaries of knowledge, Nogueira sought support across the city while trying his luck in other places such as the English monarchy. Aware of the difficulty of making a living in Rome, Nogueira followed a new patron to Bologna. There, he familiarized himself with the politics of the papal states in northern Italy, learned from the intense intellectual life around the university, and became involved in political negotiations between papal authorities, the Republic of Venice, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In the midst of these negotiations, he put his historical expertise to work by getting involved in an episode of forged Etruscan archaeology connected to rivalries between the Medici and Barberini families. As a ghostwriter for one of the reports concerning this forgery, he made a case for himself as someone who could serve back in Rome in a multitude of capacities, including legal courts and libraries.

The rising price of literature after the Black Death incentivized the invention of movable-type printing. An example of technological overshooting, the printing press turned an acute shortage of literature, and of human capital, into a sudden abundance. Cheaper literature encouraged wider literacy; new grammar schools and universities further multiplied human capital. That expansion sorely threatened the earlier Latinate elite, both clerical and secular, and led directly to the Reformation. Southern Catholic Europe invoked censorship; northern Protestant Europe censored only lightly. European publishing migrated northward. The divergent responses to printing are explained by: (a) the growth of Atlantic commerce and (b) the rise in Northern Europe of absolutist states. Both commerce and state-building required, and depended on, newly abundant human capital. In northern, Protestant Europe, rapidly multiplying human capital led to prosperity and technical progress; in southern, Catholic Europe, censorship constricted human capital and imposed persistent backwardness.

Chapter 5 gives a detailed account of the trial and execution of Thomas Aikenhead in Edinburgh in 1696–7. The statements that Aikenhead was accused of making are itemised, and their incendiary and openly blasphemous quality is clear. It is also noteworthy that he made such statements in public and seemed reluctant to retract them. This explains the harsh penalty to which he was subjected, which was the subject of much comment at the time. The case also attracted interest in England, not least from John Locke, who preserved various key documents relating to it. Here, Aikenhead’s sources are investigated, including the dangerous books to which he had access in the university library and elsewhere, and his ingenuity in constructing an irreligious ‘system’ from them is asserted.

Late modernism in the US, lasting roughly from 1945 to 1960, is characterized by two simultaneous yet contradictory developments. In one, the techniques and, to a lesser extent, themes of international literary modernism continued to infuse America’s literary bloodstream, diversifying, spreading, and becoming part of the common artistic vocabulary, particularly for underground or countercultural movements. But at the same time, the major institutions of elite culture in the US such as publishers, universities, book-review magazines, and even foundations and the government gradually and then wholeheartedly adopted it in the 1950s and rewrote its history to create a kind of “official” modernism. If late modernism was a set of techniques bereft of a mission, Cold War modernism then voided the modernist project of any urgency or sociopolitical critique, reframing it as the highest expression of the self-satisfied liberal society that avant-garde modernism had always reviled.