Humanity is currently in the grip of deep institutional denial concerning the adequacy of its institutions for dealing with serious intergenerational challenges, such as global climate change. In response, we should call for a global constitutional convention focused on developing new institutions to protect future generations and further their interests. This chapter presents ten initial guidelines for how to construct such a global constitutional convention. Although each follows as a fairly modest and natural inference (a ‘baby step’) from the purposes of the convention itself, the implications stand in sharp contrast to the status quo and to most conventional discussions of reform. The guidelines are, thus, both modest and radical. As a result, the global constitutional convention is, perhaps, just the kind of realistic utopia that we need.

Chapter 8 moves to the third strand of the Indian linguistic tradition (alongside ‘grammar’ and semantics): phonetic and phonological analysis. This strand of the Indian tradition has particular relevance to the modern Western concept of the ‘phoneme’, which has played a central yet controversial role in phonological analysis over the last century. Several criticisms of the phoneme concept have attributed its popularity in modern linguistics to the centrality of alphabetic writing in Western society, and some have pointed to India as a contrasting situation, where writing was never alphabetic. I show that in contrast to what is often assumed, the ancient Indian tradition of phonetic and phonological analysis depended on a concept essentially equivalent to the modern concept of a phoneme, despite not being influenced by an alphabetic (or indeed, originally by any) writing system.

The chapter locates Pirandello’s characters against the backdrop of modernist culture. Beginning with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche’s reflections on the multiple nature of the “I,” Pirandello’s construction of his characters proves fully in tune with contemporary developments in European thinking. When dealing with such fictional characters as Mattia Pascal and Vitangelo Moscarda, Pirandello goes for an anti-heroic approach to their relationship with history as opposed to nineteenth-century Romantic heroism. Theatre characters, on the other hand, escape definitions and roles to the extent that they become Nobody, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Binet, and Blondel’s reflections on psychology and freedom.

Increasingly, illiberal and authoritarian governments are seizing upon the concept of constitutional identity in order to justify and vindicate their political projects in the face of external criticism. This contribution raises questions about what these invocations tell us about the normative value of constitutional identity. The authors argue that, in the European context of supranational legal integration, constitutional identity should not be seen as an unconditional source of value. Invocations of constitutional identity only deserve recognition to the extent that they serve the ideals of constitutionalism. Where constitutional identity is invoked as a normative argument, the normative expectation of constitutionalism is implied – claims from constitutional identity that stand at odds with the ideals of constitutionalism, in fact, invoke the former ironically and frivolously. Exemplary cases in which constitutional identity is invoked to justify forms of ‘illiberal’ constitutionalism – notably the Polish and Hungarian cases – should be considered abuses of the concept as they do not live up to the normative expectations which they evoke.

Chapter 2 explains the historical setting during the period of colonization and decolonization and develops the theoretical framework of this book. The successful cases of separate independence covered in this book are cases where oil production started at a specific time: after colonization but well before the “window of sovereignty” closed. When this economic activity occurred in protectorates where the colonizers offered protection to the local rulers and ruled through them, the result was separate independence. The central argument of this book, therefore, is that when faced with a project for amalgamation with neighboring areas, (1) oil production during the colonial period and (2) the protectorate system led to separate independence. The two factors enabled some colonial entities to achieve statehood separately by providing them with material and political incentives to pursue separate independence, perceived viability as a sovereign state, which includes both financial self-sufficiency and security, and bargaining power vis-à-vis the colonizers.

In this chapter, I summarise the central theses defended in my monograph and explain how they fit together to provide us with a more complete picture of the nature and normative significance of agnosticism. I conclude that agnosticism is best conceived of as the mental state of questioning both the truth and falsity of some proposition, P – which can, but need not, be preceded by the mental act of refraining from judging P to be true or false – and is rationally appropriate whenever we take our evidence for and against P to be inconclusive.

This chapter offers a reassessment of the life and work of the French professional printmaker Catherine Elisabeth Cousinet (born 1726), also known as Madame Lempereur through her marriage to fellow printmaker Louis Simon Lempereur. Over the course of three decades, Elisabeth Cousinet created a range of impressive, single-sheet engravings after landscape and genre paintings owned by important and well-appointed individuals in Paris, Europe’s cosmopolitan cultural center. Her connections to these collectors integrated her into networks in the French printmaking industry and, by extension, abroad. Despite the dearth of historical evidence, her biography provides a broad outline of, and a few tantalizing glimpses into, what the career of a successful women professional printmaker in eighteenth-century France might have looked like.

We review here the scant evidence pertaining to the early arrival of people in Southeast Mesoamerica and what is presently known about the timing and nature of the first efforts to domesticate plants in the area. Most of the chapter summarizes the different forms that sociopolitical complexity took in the Southeast during 1600–400 BCE. It was during this period that the first monumental platforms were raised in the area, suggesting the emergence of leaders who could plan these projects and command the labor to complete them. While such constructions speak to a modicum of political centralization, they did not necessarily signify the existence of hierarchies. People in different areas thus used similar things, such as large buildings, to craft different, locally specific power relations. Such variety sets the stage for the different political histories that will take shape in the coming centuries.

In Constitutional Identity, Gary Jacobsohn highlights the tension both within constitutional systems and between constitutions and societal norms (culture). In this essay, we explore the first tension and glance at the second. One objective of the essay is to enumerate a set of “disharmonies” that appear with some frequency within constitutions and, employing historical data, identify the constitutional systems that contain them. Appealing to formal logic, we develop a taxonomy that helps us understand the kinds of disharmonies on display; a taxonomy that points to their sources. The essay thus generalizes Jacobsohn’s notion of disharmony and extends his insights from a small set of cases that begin with the letter “I” to a larger set.

The chapter considers Pirandello’s unsuccessful attempts to establish a national theatre in Italy. Influenced by examples of national theatres in other countries such as the Comédie Française in France and disappointed with the lack of financial resources to sustain his own very successful Teatro d’Arte, Pirandello tried to use Mussolini’s influence and the rise of Fascism to create a national theatre run by himself with full state sponsorship. He developed elaborate plans for a national theatre that would operate in three major cities and house ensemble casts, some of whose members would travel between the cities to facilitate touring productions. The plans would have involved considerable expenditure, including the costs of establishing the technical infrastructure for the three theatres as well as of maintaining three ensembles of actors. Despite initial encouragement and support from Mussolini, Pirandello encountered competition from other entrepreneurs and artists and political opposition, and eventually failed to achieve his goal.

The term “identity” often generates questions about the “essence” of the entity being “identified.” Ascriptions of “identity” become controversial inasmuch as given behaviors or traits are viewed as favorable or unfavorable. Within the United States, the rhetorical trope “this is not who we are” has become almost pervasive upon the occurrence of a regrettable, even heinous, act. President Obama had a particular affinity for the phrase. He suggested, for example, that the vicious racism revealed in the 2015 massacre of African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina was aberrant, revealing nothing essential about American culture. The current debate within the United States about the “1619 Project” is all about constitutional and cultural identity. Its adherents argue that American identity is rooted in the white supremacy instantiated in the practice of slavery, dating back to 1619. Opponents emphasize the 1776 Declaration of Independence, with its proclamation that “all men are created equal” and “endowed” with equal “inalienable rights,” as the key marker of American identity. Slavery, which is conceded to have existed, was simply epiphenomenal; “who we are” is defined by the Declaration. Much is thought to ride on ascribing a particular identity to any given country or, more particularly, its constitution.

Although Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is often taken as an exercise in “metatheatre,” the play in fact imagines theatre defined as a specific technological apparatus: a fully electrified house, actors expected to play “in character,” and an audience spatially and conceptually separated from the artistic performance. That is, Pirandello’s skeptical critique of theatre and theatricality is undertaken through a specific instrument, the apparatus of the modern, darkened proscenium house. This chapter explores Pirandello’s work in the context of a specific kind of technological apparatus, one in which the thematics of critique are specifically managed by the ideological disposition of modern theatre design and signaled most effectively by its tools, notably by the rhetorical assertion of the proscenium as a “fourth wall” and by the ways lighting articulates its function in the making of dramatic performance.

The preface highlights the extent to which Luigi Pirandello, most famous for his play Six Characters in Search of an Author, was a multifaceted writer successful in various genres. In addition to introducing the main themes of the volume, it places some of the key questions in Pirandellian studies – philosophical relativism, metatheatre, the author’s purported cerebralism, and his relationship with the Fascist regime – in the context of the period’s theatre history, literary developments, and Pirandello’s life and career experiences. It finally shows why Pirandello’s influence was so transversal in his century and continues to be into our own and discusses recent advances in Pirandello studies.