Jacques Maritain brought to bear a well-developed concept of theocentric humanism on his understanding of the proper function of the state. Maritain conceived persons as individuals but as individuals that were made persons by means of freedom, communication, and gift. He deployed this theological anthropology in particular to delegitimise those conceptions of the state that were dominant in the 1930s and 40, namely liberal, capitalist, nationalist, and socialist/ communist ones. In their place, and in light of his theological anthropology, he advocated a state that was mandated to serve the "temporal common good". In practice, this oriented him, albeit tentatively, towards a particular understanding of the state’s responsibility for the provision of welfare, namely a ‘personalistic pluralism’ in which the state stood simultaneously as broker and regulator of a socialised economy and civil society, and as guarantor of personal, civil and social rights.

William Temple was a foundational figure in the establishment of the welfare state in Britain, having helped popularise the term pre-war and written at length about the duty of a Christian state to provide for the welfare of its citizens. His most popular intervention, the war-time book Christianity and Social Order, and the post-war tradition that assumed his name, usually position Temple as an unequivocal supporter of extensive and direct state-based welfare provision. However, Temple changed his views subtly on this issue, and in partiuclar during his ‘middle period’, from the mid-1920s to the mid-late 30s, he expressed the view that the state was better placed to broker welfare services, rather than to provide them directly. This chapter looks at Temple’s shifting position on this, and roots his political theology in his underlying theological anthropology. Specifically, it was Temple’s incipient "personalism" (though the term is slightly anachronistic), and his understanding of the person as free, self-determining, meant for relationship, self-giving, but susceptible to sin that informed his approach to the state in its "provision" of welfare services.

This conlcuding chapter harvests insights from the theological anthropology of William Temple, Jacques Maritain, John Paul II, and Rowan Williams, and the way in which these thinkers shaped their political theology of the welfare state. It draws out a "multidimensional" conception of the human person that is (1) created, (2) material, (3) vulnerable, (4) agential, (5) sinful, (6) relational, (7) transcendent, (8) creative, and (9) oriented to, and fulfilled by gift. It then uses this conception to return to the work of Alan Deacon (to underline the centrality of anthropology in welfare state theory), Raymond Plant (to help fill in the content of contestable social concepts) and Gøsta Esping-Andersen (to affirm but underline the limitations of the idea of welfare regimes). It concludes by outlining what a welfare state (or regime) might actually look it in the light of this, by focusing on the foundation, the funding, the structure, and the ethos of welfare.

Luther insists that salvation is a gift and brings one into a mystical union with Christ, which is the true meaning of Christianity. Passive righteousness, Christ’s favor and gift, becomes one’s own, and in faith gains knowledge of God, transformation, and holiness in conformity with Christ.

The political failure of community is the background against which a range of post-Marxist European philosophers have sought to rethink what community could be. This chapter focuses in particular on Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, who have made substantial contributions to what we might call a new philosophy of community. Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben ask how community, not least because of its promise of solidarity, can continue to serve a political purpose, despite the violence of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, which appears to be the logical endpoint of any conception of community. But Nancy, Esposito, and Agamben also respond to the failure of community’s presumed revolutionary potential to become a site of resistance against both capitalism and the modern state. Should community be conceived in the plural (Nancy), as a gift economy (Esposito), or as a coming community of stateless refugees (Agamben)? Such attempts to save community come at a considerable cost, both philosophically and politically, since they make community irrelevant for a normative theory of democracy.

The ‘logic’ of charity in modern Britain has been understood as ‘complex’ and ‘varied’: ‘a loose and baggy monster’. Charity after Empire takes this complexity as the basis for a new interpretation. First, the indeterminacy of the role and function of charity lay behind its popularity and growth. With no fixed notions of what they should be or what they should do, charities and NGOs have expanded because they have been many things to many people. Second, the messy practices of aid meant success could always be claimed amidst uncertain objectives and outcomes, triggering further expansion. Third, just as charity was welcomed as a solution to poverty overseas, its scope and potential were contained by powerful political actors who restricted its campaigning and advocacy work. Fourth, racial injustice, especially apartheid, shaped not only humanitarianism overseas but also the domestic governance of charity in Britain. It all resulted not only in the massive expansion of charity but also limitations placed on its role and remit.

In the deliberation entitled, “Love Does Not Seek Its Own,” Kierkegaard develops his notion of distinctiveness [Ejendommelighed] vis-à-vis neighbor love. He introduces a dialectical tension between the duty to seek one’s own as a human task implicated by the divine gift of distinctiveness and the imperative to seek only the neighbor’s own. This chapter unpacks Kierkegaard’s notion of Eiendommelighed, its relationship to courage, Frimodighed [bold confidence], the love commands, and self-sacrifice. Despite his strongly self-sacrificial rhetoric, love demands the cultivation of one’s own distinctiveness, which itself must be understood dialectically as both being one’s own and not one’s own. A dialectical approach affords a more nuanced reading of Works of Love that better reflects the existential complexity of navigating the tension of self-development and self-sacrifice on the ground. To fulfill the duty to develop distinctiveness in both self and other, love must both seek and not seek its own.

Solidarity is generally emphasized as a social good, particularly by international lawyers keen to stress its integrative function for the international community. This chapter will explore the possibility that solidarity might, on the contrary, occasionally be unwelcome, understood as both objectively and subjectively undesirable. Solidarity constructs certain social bonds through “imaginaries of solidarity” (who one imagines oneself to be in solidarity with) in ways that may be problematic. The chapter will examine different sites of international solidarity, including the inter-state and the transnational. It will distinguish between solidarity that is unwelcome on account of its effects (when solidarity actually makes things worse), on account of who it is offered by (the “intuitu personae” of solidarity), and on account of the burden of gratitude it creates (as part of an economy of gift and counter-gift). Overall, the chapter will refocus attention away from obligations to provide solidarity in favor of a more nuanced appreciation that not all solidarity is equally opportune. It also hopes to be a contribution to understanding what might be welcome solidarity based on a renewed understanding of its non-welcome variant.

Through investigating how exactly bribery take place, this chapter examines why guanxi is a necessary conduit of corruption in China. I argue that guanxi-practice embodies an alternative contracting mechanism of corruption with three functions. First, it allows corruption practitioners to communicate their intent to exchange without explicitly expressing it. Second, it minimizes the otherwise prohibitively high transactional costs and reduces the moral and cognitive barriers of corruption. Third, it contains a self-enforcing mechanism that allows the terms of corruption to be negotiated and enforced. Performed with tactics and etiquettes, guanxi-practice seamlessly grafts a corrupt and immoral agreement upon a social setting, in which venality is neutralized and rationalized. In this redefined social reality of corruption, an instrumental relationship is perceived or at least presentable as a reciprocal relationship based on social commitment. Lastly, I draw attention to the emergence of professional guanxi-brokers that has marketized guanxi and extended the otherwise highly restricted opportunity to engage in parochial corruption to a much-broadened user base.

Speech act theorists take a gift to be among the range of things we can do with words. They also disagree regarding the extent of the participation of the giftee in the act. Can a gift be made unbeknownst to its recipient? If not, is the latter required to accept the gift, in addition to hearing and understanding the utterance through which it is made? Because they give their insights about gifts in passing, speech act theorists also leave important aspects of the act in the dark. They hint at the power of gifts to modify the deontic status of its two parties, but leave to one’s guess the details of the related changes. The aim of the chapter is to reflect further on these quandaries and neglected sides of gifts in light of Reinach’s theory of social acts. The main result of the present Reinachian inquiry is that the puzzles raised by the illocutionary act of making gifts dissolve once attention is redirected from the thing that is gifted to the ownership over that thing.

In 2020, two retired NFL players sued the league for “explicitly and deliberately” discriminating against Black players who filed claims for damages in the league’s billion-dollar concussion settlement. The league had, their suit revealed, directed clinicians to implement a practice known as race norming, which built into the evaluation process an assumption that Black retired players had lower preexposure cognitive functioning than their white peers – and increased the likelihood that their claims would be denied. The epilogue contextualizes the scandal in relation to the career of one of the plaintiffs, the former defensive lineman Kevin Henry, to reveal how norming – of race, gender, compensation – had pervaded his athletic life long before the NFL denied his claim.

In the summer of 2010, LeBron James announced that he would be leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers and, as he put it during an ESPN special, taking his talents to the Miami Heat. Cavs fans burned their LeBron jerseys in the street, and team owner Dan Gilbert, the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans, wrote an open letter to Clevelanders condemning the two-time NBA MVP. “You simply don’t deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal,” he wrote. “You have given so much and deserve so much more.” What had fans given LeBron? And what did he owe them? The introduction outlines a theory of the relation between athletic talent and social debt, observing how the assignment of giftedness has reflected and created racial ideas about advantage and deservedness since the civil rights era. It is a theory not of elite athletes but of how the way we imagine elite athletes affects the rest of us. From Bernard Malamud’s classic baseball novel The Natural to the career of the fastest woman of all time to Gilbert’s open letter, the image of the gifted athlete has changed while the assumed debt has grown and resurfaced in other domains of American life.

This chapter examines the eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword fabricated in La Rochelle and given as a gift to Cabindas Mfuka Andris Pukuta following the conflict of 1775. The chapter argues that the object stands for a rich example of the complex interactions between French trades and Cabinda’s local authorities. The chapter explores the work and trajectory of the silversmith, who likely created the sword, and its connections to the shipowner Daniel Garesché and ship captain Jean Amable Lessenne. Like a large cutlass, the sword follows the format of a kimpaba, a Woyo insignia. The chapter explores the uses and meanings of this kimpaba, and its connections to other existing similar West Central African swords. The chapter argues that the sword symbolizes the increasing power acquired by coastal Woyo agents in detriment of the Ngoyo’s ruler whose powers were decreasing with the intensification of the slave trade.