This chapter argues that contemporary openings to utopian thinking are confronted by an array of different temporal frameworks that afford radically different possibilities for human agency and cohere with radically different political and ethical demands. These include, on the one hand, the geologic time scale of the Anthropocene, the long historical time informing social activism and social justice movements (e.g., the perspectives afforded by the histories of slavery, genocide, and colonialism), and the utopian perspective of hope or what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. These must confront, on the other hand, the cyclical time of economic growth and recession, the exigent time of electoral cycles, and the frozen time of “capitalist realism.” This chapter explores conceptual and fictional responses to this matrix of possibilities, especially in narratives by Cormac McCarthy, Donna Haraway, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Chapter 3 takes a more biographical approach, seeing an example of moral human perfection in the, little known, but dedicated, life and work of Dr Henry Holland, a medical missionary in North India, compared favourably with the well-known, but flawed, medical missionary work of his more famous exact contemporary Albert Schweitzer. Together with the two earlier chapters, it is suggested that human perfection – understood in the contextual sense of it being difficult to see how something similar could at the time have been done better – is dynamic rather than absolute, just as John Wesley, Calvin, Aquinas and Gregory claimed, is highly focused and requires very considerable effort and hard work -- striving to get something as near to perfect as humanly possible. It concludes with a discussion of the recent work of the late Catholic medical anthropologist Paul Farmer.

This chapter provides a basic introduction to Cambridge Platonism and its four central figures: Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), John Smith (c. 1618–52) and Henry More (c. 1614–87). Beginning with brief biographies of the Cambridge Platonists and an outline of the Civil War background to their intellectual development, the chapter then moves to a consideration of the contested nature of Cambridge Platonism in contemporary scholarship. Were Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith aligned enough biographically and intellectually to warrant grouping them together as architects of a shared philosophical school of thought? After reviewing several recent arguments to the contrary, the main argument of the book is laid out: Anthony Tuckney’s 1651 correspondence with Whichcote contains important evidence that Whichcote, Cudworth, Smith and More were known to their Cambridge contemporaries as proponents of a distinctive set of philosophical positions clearly inspired by Platonism.

Chapter 7 is the conclusion and consolidates ideas and findings. This chapter calls for and reflects on the possibility of a more transparent and fair anti-dumping system for all WTO members achieved by promoting procedural justice. It also considers the significance of the findings of the book for international trade law discourse more generally by relating them to contemporary trade issues such as the US–China trade war, Brexit, the WTO crisis and mega free trade agreements.

This chapter considers whether and in what way Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith can be called ‘Platonists’. Was Platonism a part of the story they told about themselves, or that their contemporaries told about them, or is it simply an anachronistic label invented by modern scholarship? I argue that ‘Platonism’ was a live intellectual category in the Cambridge Platonists’ seventeenth-century philosophical and theological context and denoted a particular set of doctrinal positions which were associated with ancient Platonism, such as the primacy of God’s goodness over his will. The chapter also investigates evidence of a surge of interest in ancient and Renaissance Platonism at Cambridge in the latter half of the 1630s, centred at Emmanuel College, which included John Sadler, Peter Sterry and Laurence Sarson and also coincides with Henry More’s discovery of Platonism, and Cudworth’s early Platonic letters to John Stoughton. It is argued that these developments provide important context for the origins of Cambridge Platonism, and illuminate the ways in which Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith’s intellectual development was shaped by engagement with Platonic texts and ideas.

Our knowledge of Japanese sexuality from the tenth to the twelfth centuries is limited chiefly to the imperial court. Sexuality was constructed textually through key concepts from Chinese culture and the globally unprecedented rise of writing by women in Japanese. Emperors, princes, and high-ranking aristocratic men were often polygynous and marriage was not controlled by either law or religion. Virginity was rarely valued and there was no primogeniture. ‘Divorce’ and ‘remarriage’ were frequent. Incest taboos were limited, applying to full siblings and parents and their biological offspring. While most aristocratic women were to be seen only by their fathers, husbands, or sons among men, women and men serving at court might have multiple sexual partners and social hierarchy played a dominant role in men’s access to women’s bodies; legal prosecutions for rape were nil. There is evidence of pederasty both at court and in temple complexes by the late tenth and the early eleventh centuries, respectively. Non-pederastic homosexuality seems to have had a sudden efflorescence at the end of the period. Definitive evidence for female homosexuality does not appear until the thirteenth century, but probably existed earlier.

Many of the unofficial advocates for states-in-waiting were individuals affiliated or identified with the international peace movement. These transnational advocates often found themselves championing independence struggles in states-in-waiting that were situated within newly decolonized postcolonial nation-states. While some within these postcolonial state governments may themselves have relied on these advocates during their own independence struggles, they opposed such advocacy after they won their independence, since it had the potential to undermine their own state sovereignty. The 1963 Friendship March – launched by the World Peace Brigade, a transnational civil society organization set up to find peaceful solutions to global decolonization, exemplified this contradiction. The Friendship March started in New Delhi, India, and intended to cross the Chinese border in the immediate aftermath of the 1962 Sino-Indian War.