Thucydides indicates in a number of ways that the section of his book from its beginning up until the account of the factional strife in Corcyra presents the case for the greatness of Athens over Sparta – of Athens’ regime and its education, and of the understanding of human nature and the human condition on which Athens is based (1.1–3.69). First, as we have seen, in the Archaeology, he presents himself as a partisan of Periclean Athens.1 Second, Thucydides presents a comparison of the two “who had come to be the most illustrious Greeks of their time,” “Pausanias the Spartan and Themistocles the Athenian,” a comparison that highlights the violent, tyrannical, and foolish character of Pausanias but that culminates with Thucydides’ first eulogy of an individual in the book, his eulogy of Themistocles for his outstanding practical wisdom.2 Third, this section of the book presents what is by far Thucydides’ longest eulogy of any individual in the book, of the Athenian statesman Pericles, more than triple the length of Thucydides’ next longest eulogy, that of the Spartan Brasidas.3 Thucydides’ eulogy concludes a discrete, relatively compressed subsection of the book, that is introduced by Thucydides’ praise of Pericles as “a man at that time first of the Athenians, most powerful at both speaking and acting,” a subsection that is 8.1 percent of the book as a whole, and that is entirely dominated by Pericles.4 This subsection contains four unanswered speeches by Pericles – three in direct discourse, and one in indirect discourse – including three of the eight longest speeches in the book and by far the longest speech of all, the Funeral Oration.5 That oration presents Pericles’ eloquent account of the greatness of Athens and specifically its superiority to Sparta in the enjoyment of life and in intelligence.6 Fourth, this section of the book presents the Athenians’ two naval victories over the vastly more numerous Peloponnesian forces, led by Sparta, victories presented by Thucydides as due to the Athenians’ superiority in skill, judgment, and daring.7 Finally, this section presents the Athenians’ thoughtfully compassionate treatment of the rebellious Mytileneans – the greatest act of compassion in this harsh war – in stark contrast with the seemingly thoughtless and cruel treatment by the Spartans of the Plataeans.8 Thucydides in this section of the book portrays Athens as a city with the most sagacious statesmen, the most ingenious and energetic citizenry, and the most thoughtfully humane character.

This chapter explores the semantic and semiotic manifestation of extension – extenuation – to consider how Shakespeare dramatises the merits and demerits of hermeneutic tenuity (plurality, metaphor, poetry, etc.) versus hermetically sealed, unextended signification (the legal sentence, the death penalty, etc.). I will demonstrate how, in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare dramatises both the impracticality and the brutality of any imposition of sanitised or sanctified linguistic precision, of barren semiotic integrity, drawing on period misgivings concerning the performative efficacy of legal utterances.

This chapter explores how emporia could have operated within the political and legal institutions of early medieval Northern Europe. I examine documents and narratives to suggest how prevailing models have misconstrued the norms and institutions of power used to govern these places. The emporia, I argue, were essentially part of a social organization designed for dealing with strangers who came from outside regional social networks and cultural groups, and that existed within a society governed ultimately by common law and popular assemblies. In the absence of the chartered towns, guilds, or individually granted privileges that secured the rights of travellers in the High Middle Ages, emporia were attuned to a simpler framework, in which wider agreements had to be made at group-level and then ratified at legal assemblies. As such, they operated as havens for foreigners who formed a permanent diaspora away from their own country. They were entitled to comply with their own laws within a circumscribed space, and to answer collectively to regional authorities.

In the Introduction, the need for an interdisciplinary approach to human well-being is presented, focusing on law and the social sciences, to elevate the interests of humanity amid rapid scientific and technological change.

In Chapter 10, the book concludes with a review of the numerous means available in the law to support the well-being of humans in an age of rapid scientific and technological development, emphasizing the need to revisit what it is to be human.

This chapter traces the forms of epistemic violence that asylum seekers are exposed to when using data from digital platforms to substantiate their claims for international protection. Drawing on a selection of decisions by the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber in the UK, it challenges accounts of generalised digital surveillance by showing how asylum seekers are forced to engage in more and more data wrangling without resources, time or equipment. In so doing, asylum seekers do not just have to make themselves surveillable but are confronted with a demand to know the contours and limits of surveillance on digital platforms. By introducing the concept of platform power, the chapter shows that asylum seekers face an impossible demand to know the unknowable. Platform power undoes the binaries of privacy/publicity, transparency/opacity, openness/secrecy, and monitoring/indifference. It also obfuscates the attempts to ascertain the likelihood of digital surveillance.

In Chapter 6, the history of the rule and role of law over time demonstrates a longstanding but eroding dedication to human well-being, particularly in natural law and constitutional principles derived from natural law. A strict adherence to traditional natural law is criticized for its selective support of certain traits as universal.

Liberalism is a foundational school of thought in International Relations with a well-established and rich intellectual heritage dating back to the seventeenth century. It seeks to address core problems in world politics, including the appropriate scope of state authority, the conditions underpinning international cooperation, and the maintenance of international stability. With liberal scholars most notably contributing to debates on the causes and limits of cooperation. Liberal scholars have made their most influential contributions by examining questions such as what enables or constrains cooperation between states, with many claiming that political, economic, and social integration between states leads to more peace and less war. However, liberalism emerged from Western historical and philosophical contexts, and while liberal scholars claim that it is universally applicable, its assumptions can be criticised for not reflecting non-Western experiences. This chapter evaluates liberalism’s applicability to the Middle East by applying liberal theory to the analysis of cosmopolitan law, examining in particular the impact of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) on interstate relations. Thus, it applies liberalism to answer the following questions: do SEZs lead to greater economic integration between states in the Middle East? And is there any observable pacifying effect on political relations between trade partners?

Chapter 6 examines authority and the fragile structures that hold society together. It surveys concepts of justice and order, the roles of kings and councils, and the practice of assemblies, including debates about the ‘seeds’ of democracy. Through episodes of dispute and persuasion, it shows how Homeric communities negotiated power when coercion, charisma, and tradition competed.

This chapter considers the anarchist critique of nineteenth century constitutionalism, the first step in our reconstruction of anarchist constitutional theory. Rejecting the view that anarchism is simply a new form of radical democracy, or via media between liberalism and Marxist-Leninism, we show that nineteenth-century anarchists pressed the republican critique of domination against constitutionalism, honed a critique of social contract theory to reject sovereign law as an instrument for rulemaking and challenged the idea that constitutent power power was or is a check on arbitrary power. The first part of the chapter sets out an anarchist account of constitutionalism’s statist bias. The second examines the arguments about slavery and enslavement. In the third and fourth parts, we consider how these critiques informed anarchist conceptions of sovereign law and constituent power, the lynchpins of the ‘political’ constitution. In the final part, we show how anarchist anticonstitutionalism seeded and promoted the constitutional dissolution of power in the social constitution - the anarchist alternative.

Chapter 3 reads Vladimir Nabokov’s banned, belle-lettristic best-seller Lolita as a complex interrogation of the presiding sexual, legal, and literary critical formalisms of the postwar period. Nabokov’s pathological protagonist, Humbert Humbert, attempts to produce the compliant literary and legal confession of a pedophile. His account requires that he characterize his sexual subjectivity as fixed and antecedent to the forbidden class of objects (children or, in his own rarefied taxonomy, nymphets) for which he has an unnatural desire. But his fine-grained account of his desire for Lolita cannot successfully repress, indeed depends on, a more fluid and relational erotic dynamic: his confession must simultaneously deny and rely on Lolita’s own position as sexual agent in order to illuminate his desire and his deeds. Likewise, the literary loyalty oaths taken by the novel’s formalist defenders (including Nabokov himself) and moralist detractors alike contain kindred contradictions. Ultimately the failure of these legal and literary confessions served to reveal the unsustainability of the oppositions – morality/aesthetics, natural desire/perversion, ordinary subjectivity/monstrosity – on which the concept of the postwar desiring subject was predicated.

In Behemoth, Hobbes says "that what one calls vice, another calls virtue, as their present affections lead them" and that "[t]he virtue of a subject is comprehended wholly in obedience to the laws of the commonwealth." This claim is debunking – nothing more to virtue than obedience to law – and commendatory – understanding that’s one duty is to obey the law is the mark of virtue. Any tension can be resolved by supposing that while virtue does not exist outside of civil society, once civil society is established, virtue becomes possible though the ability of subjects to conform their actions to their sovereign’s law. Yet Hobbes also says that the "Science" of the laws of nature is the "true and onely Moral Philosophy", and thus also the "science of Vertue and Vice," that the laws of nature oblige in the state of nature (in conscience), and suggests in various ways both that it is possible (though dangerous) to be a virtuous or "Just man" in the state of nature and that such men may have an important role to play in establishing civil society. This chapter explores the puzzles raised by Hobbes’s discussion in Leviathan of virtue and duty to obey the law.