This chapter analyzes the different banking models that were debated and adopted by the elites of the various Latin American nations after midcentury. The examples of the financial and monetary institutions of Europe were influential, but they were not simply replicated. In fact, there was a creative process of adaptation of foreign models of banking organization and regulation that were adjusted to local and regional situations in each country in a prolonged process of trial and error. In Chile and Colombia the advocates of the free banking model tended to gain the upper hand, whereas in Argentina and Brazil the supporters of a single bank of issue tended to dominate. The intense political and financial discussions in each country revealed strong differences between orthodox theorists, in favor of a strict gold standard, and pragmatists, who preferred the flexibility of inconvertibility. These confrontations remained characteristic of many later episodes in Latin American financial history and resonate down to the present day.

This chapter begins with Plato’s account of stasis during the transition to the democratic soul in Republic Book VIII, illustrating the centrality of transvaluations. It then reassesses Thrasymachus’ famous account of justice in Republic I, showing how a sceptical view of language is central to his case. The chapter then addresses the treatments of language and stasis in Plato’s Statesman and Laws, before finishing with his use of paradiastole as a dialogic device in his Philebus. The chapter shows how varied and important Plato’s reflections on language and stasis were, and how deeply they interacted with fifth-century historiography and rhetoric.

In one view, scientific explanation depends on laws, and generalizations in psychiatry let us explain the symptoms of individual patients. These generalizations might themselves be explained by being subsumed under further generalizations. Insofar as individual, idiosyncratic aspects of the patient’s behavior cannot be subsumed under laws, they cannot be scientifically explained. In contrast, though, the psychiatric interview, one of the basic data points for psychiatry, may include the therapist using idiosyncratic details of the patient’s delusions and working through the way in which one stage in the patient’s psychological history generated another. This involves understanding how one thing caused another, but there seems to be no subsumption under laws. Campbell proposes we think of causal explanation in psychiatry as not solely law based but as giving weight to the idea of the patient’s illness over time as a single construct, unfolding in accordance with general patterns. The role of generalizations in psychiatry is to define those constructs that develop over time. Nonetheless, the idiosyncratic detailed causal development of those progressions can be understood at a subjective level by the therapist following the patient’s line of thought and feeling as the disorder develops.

Chapter 3 considers how evolving demands for uniformity fit into the cultural norms of political institutions in late antiquity. It uses reports on (supposed) pagans, heretics, Jews, and Samaritans in service to sketch out the contours of those demands in practice. While these exemplary stories cannot be used to substantiate the presence of these groups in administration, they can help us understand when and why the perceived divergence of a ruler’s subordinates from his version of correct religion mattered. Their continued service is, in part, a reflection of the continued capacity of rulers and their subordinates to put requirements for religious uniformity to one side. This chapter argues that it was also a result of the precise framing of those requirements. Late ancient laws tended to portray orthodox Christian officials as necessary to ensure laws on correct religion were enforced. It is easy to see how those heterodox officials willing to uphold a Christian political dispensation could continue to serve in political institutions. In that sense, the appointments of non-Christians and heretics should be seen, not as a breach of requirements for uniformity, but a product of their specific contours.

Chapter 1 considers the evolving significance of a putative ideal of religious uniformity for the makeup of political institutions in late antiquity. It suggests that we have the chronology of the Christianisation of late ancient bureaucracies back to front. It was only when those elites became predominantly Christian that religious uniformity within the state became a feasible goal for individual regimes. In that sense, for the Christianisation of the Roman state, the conversion of the Roman aristocracy only represents the beginning of the story. This chapter thus pursues the question of religious uniformity further into late antiquity, by considering the developing understanding of what was required to ensure an appropriately (orthodox) Christian state in the fifth and sixth centuries. It argues that requirements for (orthodox) Christian administrators were not simply an axiomatic assumption of late (and post-)Roman regimes, but a product of shifts in institutional norms and wider cultural assumptions across the fourth to sixth centuries.

With the combined experience of an abuse of power by the British monarch and an absence of executive authority under the Articles of Confederation, the Framers faced the challenge of establishing an executive authority of effective, yet limited, powers. It was generally agreed that the role of the executive was limited to the execution of the laws enacted by Congress, but the number of executives, the manner of selection, and length of tenure in office were considered important to restraining factions.

This chapter offers a consideration of Crito’s character, based on other information about him from the Phaedo and the Euthydemus.

This chapter explores personal religion in some of Plato’s dialogues. First, focusing on the Apology and Euthyphro, it considers Socrates’ daimonic sign and how far Socrates expresses religious attitudes independent from, in line with, or opposed to those foregrounded or sanctioned in Athens. Second, it turns to Plato’s Laws and examines the Stranger’s vision for civic religion in the imagined city of Magnesia and his prohibitions of private worship. Finally, it considers how philosophical inquiry can itself constitute personal religion. Overall, it argues that Plato does not evince a single attitude towards all the phenomena we might classify as personal religion. That the Stranger outlaws some central aspects of personal religion does not mean that he proscribes all others; we should resist the old idea that Socrates would have fallen afoul of Magnesia’s laws. While the Stranger excludes a culture of free speech of which the Socrates of the early dialogues avails himself, Magnesia is not Athens. For Plato, how far expressions of personal religion should be countenanced, regulated, or proscribed by the city turns on the nature of the city in which that question is raised.

It is common to read that the concept of rights did not exist in ancient times. The most influential proponent of this thesis in the past half-century or so may be Alasdair MacIntyre but he is hardly alone. In a more recent discussion, Tom Campbell says this: “Rights (as distinct from the more general ideas of right and wrong) were unknown to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, although the idea developed in the course of medieval theorizing concerning Roman law.” A slightly more nuanced view is put forward by William Sweet: “The history of the ‘discourse’ of human rights is fairly well known. While the existence of ‘natural rights’ is implied in works of antiquity, it is only in the Middle Ages that we begin to see an acknowledgment of rights as distinct from ‘the right.’”

In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands tragedy to be, in essence, an imitation of the finest and noblest life. According to Plato, the only thing that is genuinely good and valuable is wisdom and virtue, and it is this life that tragedy imitates. This definition may seem deeply counterintuitive, lacking core tragic notions of loss, failure and suffering, but Plato would say these depend on prior conceptions of gain, success and flourishing. Ideal tragedy includes adversity, obstacles and limitations to living the best life – it is not an easy life of uninterrupted success – but it foregrounds the goodness and value of the life rather than dwelling on the obstacles. I formulate four constraints on ideal tragedy: the veridical constraint, which holds that only the life that is genuinely the best should be imitated as best; the educative constraint, which holds that tragic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to pursue virtue and wisdom; the emotional constraint, which holds that the tragic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; the political constraint, which holds that no living citizen should be portrayed as living the best life.

In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Philebus, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands comedy to be, in essence, an imitation of laughable people, where the notion of the laughable, or to geloion, is a normative one that picks out what genuinely merits laughter, and not necessarily what people actually laugh at. According to Plato, the only thing that merits laughter is moral vice, in particular the vice of self-ignorance. I formulate four constraints on ideal comedy on Plato’s behalf: the veridical constraint, which holds that only what is genuinely laughable, that is, moral vice, should be imitated as laughable; the educative constraint, which holds that comedic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to reject vice in their own lives; the emotional constraint, which holds that the comedic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; and the political constraint, which holds that only moral and political enemies should be portrayed as laughable.

What does Chinese law have to say about people who are involved in sex work and the places where it occurs? Prostitution control is a universal problem for which states have adopted a variety of policies to address the public order, public health, and commercial challenges that it presents. This chapter describes that range of regulatory possibilities. It then explains the official choices that China has made, through discussions of the policing, health, and taxation rules and institutions that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has adopted to regulate prostitution.

In Chapter 4, I offer a new theory of citizen power. Every adult male citizen would have been free, but this also made him kurios, or empowered, as opposed to ceding his power to a slave master. When substantivized, kurios indicated a male citizen’s institutionalized role as the head of a household. The lens of the household kurios generates an understanding of citizen power that encompasses both private and public domains. Not simply power as domination, kurios also indicated a shared power to act. As a conceptual metaphor, kurios was applied to the political sphere and structured thought across these different domains. Thus, qualities of the term kurios in its original domain, the household, corresponded systemically in the applied domain, the city. The laws and the corporate citizen body, too, were understood as kurioi. While there may be competing claims to power, the identification of the citizen as sharing in power with and through the laws and the dēmos is distinct from the modern conception of the individual versus the state. The negotiation of power in this way has repercussions for debates regarding sovereignty and the rule of law.