Late nineteenth-century African American political thought crystallized around the tensions between survival, accommodation, and activism. Booker T. Washington responded to pervasive racial violence and social exclusion by advocating radical individualism and moderation as tools for Black uplift. Washington emphasized vocational training, economic self-sufficiency, and strategic alliances with white elites. In contrast, W. E. B. Du Bois argued that structural change and political agitation were necessary to contest entrenched inequality. Readers can now compare these two approaches, understanding how Washington sought pragmatic, incremental gains while Du Bois pursued systemic, ideological, and organizational transformations through civic leadership and the NAACP. These contrasting strategies illustrate the spectrum of political thought available to African Americans under Jim Crow. Beyond Washington and Du Bois, thinkers like T. Thomas Fortune, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Lucy Parsons expanded the scope of African American political theory by integrating class, gender, labor, and epistemological concerns in their analysis. Fortune emphasized the material roots of racial inequality and the politics of property and labor, teaching readers to analyze oppression through economic and spatial frameworks. Wells foregrounded truthfulness and the antilynching movement, demonstrating how moral exposure and narrative could confront white supremacist violence. Cooper introduced a standpoint theory that centered Black women’s perspectives, while Parsons advanced anarchist and collective approaches linking joy, labor, and autonomy. Together, these thinkers reveal to readers that resistance requires diverse strategies, extending beyond individual uplift to systemic critique and community solidarity.

The conclusions discuss the significance of the WCC’s evolving agenda, emphasizing above all the distinctly Christian meaning the ecumenical movement sought to imbue human rights with. Against accounts that exaggerate the scope of the WCC’s commitment to human rights in the 1940s, the book shows the organization’s focus on religious freedom. Contrary to narratives that cast the WCC’s articulation of religious freedom as essentially universalizing and cosmopolitan, the book emphasizes how its advocacy was part of wider ideological contests against specific adversaries. The conclusions discuss the ramifications for our understanding of religious freedom today. With regard to the 1970s, the book demonstrates the significance of Protestantism to progressive Christianity and liberation theology. It also illuminates the difficulties liberation theology faced, and has continued to face. Scholars today debate the utility of human rights in the face of material inequality, exacerbated by neoliberalism. The WCC’s attempt to “radicalize” human rights shows the promise as well as the perils inherent in expanding our current understandings of human rights beyond liberal premises.

This introduction to Part I explains how the World Council of Churches (WCC) arrived at its 1948 embrace of human rights, based on its interwar “antisecularism,” the appeal of “personalism,” and the need to resist “totalitarian” state power. Protestant activism on behalf of missionaries and churches predated the turn to human rights, and as did ecumenists’ emphasis on the need to enable Christianity to “leaven” society and international affairs. The emergence of human rights as an foundational principle of the postwar order invited a reframing of these concerns in terms of human rights, even if concern for the corporate rights of churches remained part of the WCC’s approach to religious freedom. Representatives of the ecumenical movement, especially O. Frederick Nolde and Charles Malik, helped to enshrine the ecumenical conception of human rights in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The WCC, the International Missionary Council (IMC), and the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA) advocated for this conception against what they identified as their three main opponents: Islam, “political” Roman-Catholicism, and Communism.

This introduction opens with the World Council’s foundation in 1948 in Amsterdam, where the organization embraced human rights as a pillar of the postwar international order. Its focus, however, was on safeguarding religious freedom, especially that of coreligionists and missionaries. Going beyond ecumenical lobbying at the United Nations as well as a traditional focus on communist countries, the book’s Part I focuses on the global advocacy of the ecumenical movement. Part II traces how, in the 1970s, the WCC self-consciously rejected liberalism, reoriented itself toward the Third World, and articulated a “liberationist” approach to human rights. Rooted in liberation theology and drawing first and foremost on the experience of Latin American Christians, this approach called attention to the political-economic “root causes” of human rights violations, called for the recognition of collective rights claims, and emphasized the agency of the “poor” and the “oppressed.” It also generated blinders with regard to postcolonial and socialist repression, however, which undermined the WCC’s legitimacy as a global voice for human rights.

The chapter addresses the relation between the Earth system and social systems centring on the concept and phenomenon of growthism. It argues that modern economic growth is the main reason why humans have become such a major force in the Earth system. It stresses the link between natural and social systems, and shows how complex and growing human society has emerged from nature. While the former remains part of the latter, these interdependencies between natural and social systems require the development of conscious and reflexive planetary control systems.

A cherished common law notion is equality before the law. This notion has shaped and defined Australian laws, and is important to law’s capacity to produce justice because it requires that everyone is treated the same before the law. However, equality before the law has not produced effective social justice and equality in Australia: demographic and socio-economic indicators consistently paint a picture of broad social inequality and a growing poverty gap – rather than one of an egalitarian society in which everyone achieves the same justice. This chapter explores how Australian laws work with the idea of equality to help explain why certain groups continue to be disadvantaged in their access to justice and the legal system. It provides a window onto different perspectives and experiences of Australian laws, which we encourage you to reflect upon throughout your legal studies.

This chapter reconstructs uses of indirection to organize street protests against the Pahlavi regime. I focus on a vernacular tradition that gained traction in the 1960s through which leftist and Islamist activists hid their political objectives behind nonpolitical veneers. In 1968, Iranian activists transitioned from using nominally nonpolitical institutions for cover to more fluid, and hence more potent, uses of informal “nonpolitical” practices in public. The transition began with mourning ceremonies for the popular wrestler Gholamreza Takhti. In conflating public expressions of loss with action, activists were able to hide in plain sight, leveraging confusion to facilitate popular assemblies. Their actions planted a seed, a contentious repertoire that blossomed into a cycle of protest a decade later. This chapter describes the terms according to which the transition occurred. It theorizes changing significations of the word senf (guild) from a noun into an adjective, senfi. Thus, practices associated with intermediary bodies (institutions conventionally seen as “premodern” and hence transitional) gave shape to an intermediary ethic central to revolutionary action.

This introduction outlines the focus and scope of the study, explaining its motivation, remit, and overall aim. It offers brief thoughts on relevant interpretive issues, explains the structure of the book, and provides brief summaries of each of the subsequent chapters.

I argue that through his account of the meaning of, and need for, solidarity, Rorty offers a non-juridical vision of liberal community built upon a political ethos of hope. This political ethos of hope is necessary to combat the threat posed by pathological individualism to contemporary liberal democratic societies. This ethos is characterised by attention to the cruelty that we inadvertently cause to others through the exercise of our private freedoms. It involves an explicit commitment to curiosity and an implicit demand for humility in our interactions with our fellows. These values have radical and far-reaching implications for Rorty’s account of political conversation – how we approach our dialogues with others, and the language that we use therein – in his idealised liberal community. I contrast these implications with deliberative democratic norms and put distance between Rorty’s view of political conversation and J. S. Mill’s account of free expression in a liberal society and the accounts of epistemic injustice offered by Fricker and Medina. I attempt a nuanced interpretation of Rorty’s understanding of the relevance of identity to politics.

Commitment to hope has meaningful implications for political philosophy itself: it involves a specific orientation and attitude towards theoretical reflection and its limits. To illustrate Rorty’s invocation of Dewey’s opposition of hope to knowledge, I turn to his reading of Rawls’s political liberalism. I first consider some of the substantive commitments shared by Rorty’s and Rawls’s political liberalism. I explore their complicated understandings of religious expression within liberal society, suggesting that their commitment to hope shapes their account of the legitimacy of expressions of moral faith within politics. I show how we can interpret Rawls’s intellectual project in terms of Rorty’s Hegelian understanding of hope through examination of concepts such as ‘realistic utopia’, ‘public reason’, and ‘the burdens of judgement’. I argue that when we read Rawls’s work with hope in mind, we sharpen our understanding of his philosophy while dissolving many apparent problems raised by its critics, including the view that it fails relevant tests of normative or epistemological justifiability and that it grapples insufficiently with lingering historical injustices.

This introduction begins by explaining the volume’s starting point: Traditional assumptions concerning Beethoven as an “enlightened” composer rest on an overly simplistic conception of the Enlightenment emphasizing secular humanism and political liberalism. This conception has been called into question in much historical scholarship on the Enlightenment over the past few decades, which has created a more pluriform view of the Enlightenment as encompassing different outlooks on issues such as politics and religion that were often in tension with one another. The goal of the volume is thus to invite a diverse group of scholars to consider the implications of new perspectives on the Enlightenment for our understanding of Beethoven’s life and music. The introduction briefly summarizes the various contributions in each of the volume’s three sections. The first section concerns Enlightenment historiography and its impact on established narratives in Beethoven reception. The other two sections focus on Beethoven’s life in Bonn and Vienna respectively. A number of common themes connect several different chapters with each other: religion, politics, social life, and material culture. The introduction concludes by clarifying that the volume does not seek to overthrow entirely the received wisdom concerning Beethoven and the Enlightenment, but to introduce more nuance and complexity in the way this issue is treated.

Hobbes is sharply criticizing the phenomenon of dueling. He is famous for the claim that the fear of death is the strongest passion and that the security provided by the state is the decisive source of its legitimacy. He is, therefore, often regarded as the founder of liberalism with a new, security-oriented, or bourgeois mentality and made responsible for a decline of honor in early modernity. The chapter aims to critically discuss and enrich this decline-of-honor hypothesis. Hobbes’s redefinition and devaluation of honor is important – but it is only one part of the story. The other part is a subliminal morality of natural honor that is in tension with the security-oriented morality. The chapter discusses different explanations for this tension and offers a complimentary one: The subliminal morality of natural honor might be a part of Hobbes’s goal to get the power-seekers on board, to pacify them, and to turn them to the economic realm. The chapter thus contributes to the differentiation of the decline-of-honor hypothesis, sheds light on the complex and puzzling role of honor in Hobbes’s political philosophy, and offers a starting point to reflect on the role of honor in contemporary liberal democracies.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the New Journalism staged a revolt against two prevailing kinds of expertise: journalistic and literary. Centering reporting on an embodied, situated, individual perspective, and defying the canons of objectivity, the New Journalists helped shift American literary culture from a modernist veneration of impersonal poetry and fiction to an identity-focused era of creative nonfiction. It broke decisively with the powerful norms of Cold War liberalism. The twenty-first century has an afterlife in both the institutions of creative writing and the norms of an increasingly illiberal media sphere.

This Introduction sets out the book’s central aim, and it also provides an overview of the main arguments with summaries of subsequent chapters. The starting point for this book is that there is a need to test a common assumption about the widespread use of techniques and procedures used to prevent the birth of a disabled child: that in a modern liberal state this practice is mainly or solely a matter of individual choice, and that the state itself is neutral. Further, it might be assumed that this neutral stance would allow the modern liberal state to maintain its stated commitment to equality, and that it provides a shield against any charge of eugenics. The Introduction begins to explain how this common assumption will be tested, by reference to interpretations of a neutral state intention. It also emphasises the book’s original contribution: while there is already extensive literature on the ethics of selecting against disability, this book is distinctively centred on an analysis of the state’s position.

This chapter addresses a number of foundational issues in relation to the position of the modern liberal state and the use of techniques and procedures that can prevent the birth of a disabled child. It begins by explaining why the traditional approach to the ethics of selective reproduction is insufficient as it usually sidelines or minimises the role of the state, following on from a common assumption that the state is neutral. It then considers the meaning of a liberal commitment to neutrality, so that we can analyse and question this common assumption. Among other things, the chapter claims that the relevance of the role of the state is not limited to the use of coercive measures, and that we should focus on state intention. Although neutrality can be a matter of degree, and while there are different interpretations of a neutral state intention, the chapter suggests that the position of the state can be assessed by reference to certain central liberal commitments. In particular, the chapter examines the importance of individual choice as an essential commitment of the modern liberal state, and considers what choice should be available to prospective parents.