Jeong Dojeon 鄭道傳 (1342–1398) was one of the most important Neo-Confucian scholar-officials during the late Goryeo and early Joseon periods, not only as an architect of Joseon’s Confucian constitutional structure but also a revolutionary Neo-Confucian who spearheaded the founding of a new dynasty. This chapter examines the relationship between Neo-Confucianism and Jeong’s political radicalism by demonstrating how, despite his commitment to Mencian moral economy, Jeong could transform Neo-Confucianism, an otherwise abstract “Learning of Principle,” into a revolutionary political ideology devoted to the Public Way. Central to the chapter’s claim is that by undergoing the so-called Xunzian moment, which involved a painful recognition of the breakdown of moral economy, Jeong developed a renewed attention to righteousness, commonly regarded as a virtue regulating the ruler–ruled relationship, as a public and political virtue and principle by which to rebuild the public world in a way that could serve the people’s well-being effectively.

The Western account of political realism stresses that politics is outside ethics, having its own distinctive principles that are internal to it, thus being irreducible to some foundational moral principles and values. This dominant account of political realism, however, is deeply a-cultural, failing to note that politics is always embedded in a specific culture composed of distinctive moral principles and practices. This chapter explores multiple visions of political realism advanced by Korean Neo-Confucians – hence, varieties of “Confucian realism” – when they wrestled with addressing various kinds of contingencies in their own political circumstances through the use of “the expedient” or taking a “Xunzian turn.” This chapter explores the core ideas of each Korean Neo-Confucian thinker discussed in the book, and shows how they could strike the middle ground between Confucian moral economy and the political reality in which they found themselves, thereby generating a sense of reality from within Confucianism.

This chapter introduces the aim and scope of the book as well as its guiding theoretical framework. Although Confucian political theory has emerged as an important field in political theory, it has been propelled by contemporary Confucian political theory and the classical Confucian theory of Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi, largely sidelining Neo-Confucianism, which profoundly affected East Asian politics and society since the twelfth century. This chapter shows the critical importance of filling this gap by providing an overview of the rise and development of Neo-Confucian politics and political theory in traditional Korea, with a special focus on how Korean Neo-Confucians struggled to maintain the Public Way, predicated on the principle of righteousness, against all sorts of contingencies. This chapter also provides a theoretical framework – composed of “moral economy” and “contingency” – to shed new light on the unfolding of Korean Neo-Confucian politics in both domestic and interstate contexts.

This chapter aims to investigate the nature of the moral-political predicaments caused by King Sejo’s usurpation, which entailed the executions of the king, his own nephew, and his younger brother, and how Korean Neo-Confucians attempted to remedy it. Sejo’s political action involved a series of violations of Confucian moral principles, such as righteousness, loyalty, filial piety, and brotherly love, and it critically undermined Joseon’s Confucian constitutionality, requiring a special response to it consistent with the Neo-Confucian moral ideal. This chapter captures this special response to the problem of “contingency” caused by Sejo in terms of “reverse moral economy.” The framework of reverse moral economy helps us understand how the constitutionality of the Confucian state was understood by the Korean Neo-Confucians in early Joseon, how it was threatened by one of the most powerful political agents in violation of Confucian moral principles, and how it was restored, thereby redeeming the Public Way.

I begin here to articulate Rorty’s alternative understanding of hope. Rorty’s understanding has been ignored both by those scholars interested in hope and by those concerned with his intellectual legacy and political identity. I argue that hope, for Rorty, involves the yearning for a future that is contingent and the commitment to redescribing – and thereby contesting – the identity of a fragile social world and political inheritance in the name of its betterment. I suggest that Rorty’s understanding of hope stems from his reading of Hegel’s account of philosophy in The Philosophy of Right. I then unpack Rorty’s enigmatic claim – advanced in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity – that ‘common hopes’ are necessary for sustaining liberal community, which I suggest is given revealing illustration in his infamous Achieving Our Country. I argue that Achieving Our Country is a much-misunderstood text and suggest that we should not regard it as a kind of prediction, but rather as the articulation of hope for his own community and a contestation of its political future through a narrative of redemption.

This chapter begins by exploring the concept of a biosignature in the context of its use in the search for extraterrestrial life. While newer biosignature-based search strategies, such as the “Ladder of Life Detection” strategy, and the recently popular (but misnamed) “agnostic biosignatures” strategy, avoid the problem of presupposing which features of familiar life are fundamental to (aka defining of) life, they nonetheless assume that we know far more than we do about the diverse ways in which biotic and biotic processes may manifest under radically unfamiliar chemical and physical conditions on other worlds. In this light, we propose a new, more promising approach for searching for extraterrestrial life: search for potentially biological anomalies (vs. life per se) using tentative (vs. allegedly universal, let alone defining) criteria. We argue that this strategy has the advantage of increasing our chances of finding forms of life differing from our own in unanticipated ways, whereas the competing approaches are likely to result in such phenomena being summarily dismissed as the product of poorly understood abiotic processes. Indeed, as we discuss, there is reason to believe that astrobiologists have already encountered some intriguing potentially biologically anomalies.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of the larger themes addressed by the book, focusing on the question of contingency and how letters can be considered as literary ‘works’. The chapter argues that chance or happenstance itself governs letters and letter-writing both in material and in affective or conceptual ways. It proposes that the ‘radical contingency’ of letters can be said to set them apart from literary works more specifically conceived, in the sense that the latter do not generally and in principle hold a primary or formative connection with the specific events surrounding their composition. The chapter argues that the question of contingency connects with Keats’s governing ideas about life – with what he repeatedly refers to in his letters as life’s ‘circumstances’, ‘chance’, or ‘accidents’.

Chapter 4 analyzes historical antecedents, crises requiring solutions, and junctures resolving these crises in four case studies. As Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and Romania feature key similarities and differences, these countries are both comparable and representative of the diversity of experiences in Eastern Europe. I begin by showing that neither historical antecedents nor kinds of crises were predictive of the balance of political power during key market reform periods, suggesting that postcommunist junctures potentially constituted real turning points in these countries. I then focus on political configurations during junctures. Although Czechia and Romania differed from one another, crucial neoliberal deepening in both was presided over by the reformist Right while the Left led the opposition – a predictable pattern. And whereas Slovakia and Poland were also dissimilar in many ways, leading reformers here behaved contrary to campaign promises by bait-and-switching. By demonstrating that prior developments did not determine political configurations and by emphasizing the role of political agency amid moments of heightened uncertainty during postcommunist junctures, the chapter supports the book’s central argument about the causal relevance of contingency and lays the basis for comparing subsequent developments in the four countries.

The new science of complex systems explains why Zelinsky’s cube is a good model of culture. It works well with economic markets–and also language in use. We can see the evidence that a complex system has operated in American English by looking at evidence from the Linguistic Atlas Project. Linguistic variants all show the same patterns of distribution, both overall in a population and in subset populations. These frequency profiles provide a challenge to traditional ways of thinking about language with grammars and dictionaries.

This chapter illustrates the importance of ongoing engagement with conceptual analysis when conducting research. It focuses on clientelism, a phenomenon in which politicians provide material benefits to citizens in direct exchange for political support. The chapter presents four typologies that refine the overarching concept of clientelism by revealing underlying dimensions, explicating subtypes, and reducing conceptual ambiguity. More specifically, the typologies clarify four key points: (1) campaign handouts can be used for both persuasion and mobilization; (2) campaign handouts can also shape the composition of the electorate; (3) a key distinction exists between electoral and relational clientelism; and (4) some scholarly usage of the term “vote buying” involves conceptual stretching. More broadly, the chapter suggests that continued engagement with conceptual analysis can yield important insights and analytical leverage. The typologies discussed not only improve conceptual clarity but also prove to be foundational for further formal and empirical research on the topic.

By opening the ‘black box’ of what is said and done in the trial hearings of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the chapter shows that the syllogistic reasoning found in the ICC’s case law and judicial decisions is not a straightforward application of ‘rules’ to ‘facts’, but a contingent discursive achievement that reflects a particular socio-political environment. The discussion of court transcripts from the cases of a Ugandan rebel commander and a Malian jihadist combines a long tradition of sociolinguistic and linguistic-anthropological work on text trajectories and the ‘instability’ of travelling texts with Koskenniemi’s anti-foundationalist re-specification of legal discourse as a ‘language game’. The chapter shows that, first, the recontextualisation of the everyday lives of perpetrators and victims of international crimes with the abstract legal framework of the Rome Statute relies heavily on commonsense understandings of the relevant legal concepts, and, second, that such judicial ‘fact-finding’ and its attendant discursive transformations in turn inscribe international criminal proceedings in a range of broader (geo)political contexts.

Chapter 6 is Senecan in theme. While it includes some discussion of various classical concepts – casus and occasio in particular – which are picked up by Machiavelli to talk about the effects of chance and contingency in the world of states which he wishes to analyse, the chapter is mainly devoted to staking out the philosophical opposition which Machiavelli’s contentions about fortuna in his theory of the state are designed to overturn; and that opposition is deeply Senecan. The chapter lays out an account of the role of fortuna in Seneca’s moral philosophy. It illuminates the providentialism and determinism underpinning all his thinking about the concept, and draws particular attention to Seneca’s persistent tendency to personify Fortuna as a mistress of slaves and to pictorialize a tyrannical realm under her arbitrary government. The chapter then shows how this Senecan treatment becomes central to humanist thinking about Fortuna from Petrarch onwards and explains why Machiavelli is profoundly bothered by its currency in his own day. Machiavelli takes it as a form of delusion emanating from beliefs about a providentialist world emptied of all the contingencies which must be countered by any truly virtuoso agent in charge of governing the state.

This chapter begins with Ben Golder’s reflection on the meaning and stakes of genealogical histories that have prevailed in some quarters of the historiography of the twentieth century. Golder observes that the field of inquiry has generally moved on from “vindicatory” accounts of human rights politics to ones that demystify and problematize the evolution of those politics in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But Golder insists that there is no one way of problematizing dominant stories, and genealogy opens up a project of locating other perspectives from around the world and other voices in the making of human rights norms and politics.

The world came closest to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We find that there existed two paths by which nuclear war might have occurred. The first path involves unrestrained hard-liners. Nuclear weapons did not deter some actors from proposing escalatory actions, including the use of nuclear weapons. Luckily, both Kennedy and Khrushchev reined in their respective hard-liners. Along the second path, situations – not known at the time – could have led to an initial use of nuclear weapons, after which events might have spiraled out of control. The US, for example, did not know that the Soviets had placed tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba. If the US had tried to invade Cuba to topple Castro – as some people advocated – then the Soviets might have used the weapons. Ultimately, Kennedy successfully used a quarantine and threatened force to compel the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from Cuba. The threat of nuclear war lingered behind these actions. In the end, however, the crisis ended not because of nuclear deterrence but rather because both sides reached a mutually acceptable bargain. Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba and to remove US missiles from Turkey; Khrushchev, meanwhile, agreed to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba.

This chapter summarizes the main lessons for diplomacy that we derive from our study. These eight lessons are: 1. A major factor separates the crises that escalate to war from those that do not; in the latter, a strong leader reins in any hard-liners who advocate going to war. 2. Individuals make a difference. 3. Contingency plays a more important role than system structure in determining whether or not a crisis escalates to war. 4. Someone must stand for peace. 5. The secret to preventing war structurally is to find a functional equivalent to war. 6. Norms and rules are important for avoiding war – and, therefore, maintaining peace. 7. War can be avoided; it is not inevitable. 8. The realist concepts of the national interest and balance of power do not always accurately describe the behavior of states.

Metaphysics, Suárez teaches in Metaphysical Disputation I, is the science of being insofar as it is real being. Later he clarifies that this ‘being’ encompasses real natures, whether they actually exist or not. It seems therefore that for Suárez metaphysics engages not only with the most general features of actual things, but also with those of possible things. But to what extent are there possible things for Suárez in the first place? What does it mean for a thing or nature to be possible? And how do possible things relate to actual things? By answering these questions, the chapter reconstructs Suárez’s metaphysics of modality in general and illuminates his widely debated theory of necessary and eternal truths in particular.