The 1880s marked the beginning of the golden age of matchbox label design, with a proliferation in the production of premium matchbox labels in Sweden. It was also a golden age for design more generally, with these design aesthetics having an impact on the Swedish match industry. This chapter showcases some of the matchbox labels produced during this period, featuring complex compositions and faithful reproductions of original illustrations and photographs.

This paper proposes demoicratic representation as a subtype of representation in international organizational practice. It develops a social ontology of the People and theory of representation which underpins the thesis that the People is represented only by all the different types of representative persons who act within different types of governmental institutions and procedures of the People. A further important tenet of the paper is that democratic Peoples are accountable to each other as Peoples and to each other’s citizens. In a union of Peoples whose representatives act under any decision rule there is a possible second-order consent-deficit about the decision rule. Consequently, in demoi-cratic representation IOs ought to embody all the representative institutions of the People in their organization or be part of a system of mutual accountability and thereby assure demoicratic representation by IOs. Demoicratic representation ought not to be understood as working exclusively under the principle of consent. Rather it is the representational space in which the consent-deficit about the decision rule of inter-People relations is addressed and calibration sought.

This chapter first discusses the main subjects of international law and explains their principal features. It then zooms in on states, the traditional and principal actors in the international legal system. It discusses the criteria for statehood under international law, the role that recognition plays in this respect, and how new states emerge. Finally, this chapter turns to an analysis of the right to self-determination, a notion that plays an important role in the creation of states and is considered to be the most prominent right of one of the subjects of international law: people.

Chapter 1 examines how philosophical arguments and legal frameworks offered important means by which eighteenth-century Britons could understand ownership and possession. It begins by exploring the work of John Locke and the central role it played in shaping conceptions of property in the eighteenth century. The chapter then moves on to explore the changing legal frameworks which sought to define how people (including enslaved people, wives, servants and apprentices), dogs, watches and financial instruments might be understood as possessions and property in this period. It finds that through the course of these changes the law often remained ambiguous as to the nature of property and the protections the legal system might offer. Such ambiguity was significant in opening other spaces which shaped how property and possession were understood.

This chapter discusses certain ways that literature represented ‘the people’, and the idea of national community, during the Thatcher years in Britain. Literature essays a range of strategies to evoke collective life: using specific characters as representative of general trends, depicting groups, or making explicit statements about the state of the nation. Nonetheless, in the literature of the 1980s evocations of ‘the people’ prove difficult to sustain: an observation supported by the social and political analysis offered by Stuart Hall. In reflecting a single ‘people’, writers often register the strain, frame the task with irony, or eschew the attempt altogether, and seek to evoke the collective experiences of particular communities. Writers considered in this chapter include Seamus Heaney, Margaret Drabble, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Jackie Kay, Geoff Dyer, and Martin Amis.

“Socialist Realism, Socialist Expressionism” examines how Expressionist aesthetics metamorphosed from a radical critique of bourgeois liberalism into full-blown fascism. During his period of involvement with National Socialism, Gottfried Benn treated the Volk as an aesthetic object – as a work of art that could be shaped and refined through direct eugenic interventions. Yet Benn’s staunchest critics on the left did not dismiss his aesthetic definition of the Volk outright. Instead, they appropriated the Volk for a leftist politics. Examining the celebrated Expressionism Debate of 1937–1938, I argue that Marxists like Georg Lukács refrained from a vocabulary of class struggle in order to promote a populist aesthetics that associated the Volk with a distinctly anti-modernist literary mode: the realist novel. Hence the chapter grapples with populist cultural politics from both the radical left and right at the moment when the liberal tradition descending from Kant was reaching its nadir.

“Philosophers of the Cabal” inaugurates a line of inquiry devoted to the Volk (people). A powerful critic of Kantian anthropology, Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the “spirit of a people [Volksgeist]” is grounded in a common structure of sensibility or Sinnlichkeit. This shared sensibility derives in part from the notion of the sensus communis theorized by British empiricists in the early eighteenth century. After tracing the influence of British aesthetics on Herder, the chapter moves forward to consider E. B. Tylor, a towering figure of Victorian anthropology known for the evolutionary theories that displaced Herder’s diversitarian model. I show that Tylor actually retained key Herderian premises regarding collective sensation, which modernists like W. B. Yeats then incorporated into a primitivist style. Hence the communalist aesthetics running from Shaftesbury through Herder and Tylor leads ultimately to modernists who came of age during the fin-de-siècle.

“Prometheus Found” moves back to the German sphere in order to contend with the discourse of the neuer Mensch (new human) developed in German Expressionism, a movement that explicitly rejected Impressionism and fin-de-siècle refinement. For Expressionists like Else Lasker-Schüler, dispensing with the bourgeois pieties they attributed to nineteenth-century liberalism required imagining new anthropological entities, new humans, much in the mold of the Nietzschean Übermensch. In the case of Lasker-Schüler, though, the “new human” became a means for modeling a Volk rather than a Mensch, and in particular, the Jewish Volk at a moment when Zionism was at apogee.

The erosion of democracy has shown itself to be a necessary political precondition for the implementation of neoliberalism. Utopian culture quickly attuned itself to this crisis of democracy, and while there certainly are not many works of utopian culture that uncritically embrace the dominant post-1989 narrative that hails democracy as the universal cure for whatever ailment may exist in the world, we begin to see the emergence of works that foreground the profound danger inherent in the waning of democracy precisely in times of its instrumentalization by Western capitalist nations and the forces of economic globalization. Authors reveal neoliberal utopias as antidemocratic dystopias against which democracy must be defended. Moreover, we also see the emergence of novels that address a second pressing question: how can democracy survive when populations decide to democratically abolish it?

Comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) has been one of the cornerstones of geriatric medicine since its introduction by Marjory Warren in 1936. This kind of assessment is defined as a multidimensional and multidisciplinary process related to identifying medical, social, and functional needs and developing an integrated care plan designed to meet the patien’st needs.The practice and applications of CGA have been used to various degrees in mainstream care for older people in the UK and internationally.

Some limitations still exist around the wider implementation of CGA, as its practice relies on members of the multidisciplinary team (MDT) and on an effective communication between them, the patients, and their families. This kind of assessment has been criticised for not adequately acknowledging frailty and for not using patient-reported outcome measures to test its efficacy.

Randomised controlled studies, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses provided considerable evidence for the clinical and financial effectiveness of CGA in various hospital specialties. However, there are still concerns about the generalisability of CGA in community settings. Further research to identify target populations for CGA-led interventions and a consensus on outcome measures are required to realise CGA benefits.

In this chapter we describe required skills and practical tips to deliver CGA across a variety of settings.

Older people are one of the biggest populations requiring hospital care, and the demand is expected to rise. There is a compelling need to transform hospital environments to meet older-people physical, psychological, and emotional needs. In the UK, certain hospital circumstances such as ward configuration, mealtimes, noise levels, and visiting hours can be detrimental to patients admitted with delirium and to those living with dementia. In rehabilitation settings, lack of meaningful activities, isolation, and boredom are additional key challenges.

Models of good hospital practice catering for old people exist, both in the UK and internationally, and there is strong evidence for their clinical effectiveness. Environmental strategies to maintain orientation and enhance safety in hospital are crucial for a positive experience. Arts-based programmes in acute care settinsg can improve the experience of a hospital admission.

A cultural shift is warranted to champion the delivery an elderly-friendly service. Creating the right environment requires a hospital-wide system, a ward-based service, and a specially trained clinical team. In this chapter we will present examples of essential ingredients for hospitals and wards, and desirable qualities in clinicians who work in collaboration to deliver the best outcomes for an older population.

Chapter 5 presents the paradox of national universalism as a theoretical explanation of French republicans’ historical tendency to exclude foreigners and minorities. It retraces the formation of the discourse of “nation” alongside that of “people” as well as the development of nationalism alongside the discourse of universalism. It analyzes the tension caused by the conjunction of two phenomena: the existence (or supposition of) a historical nation, and the declaration of universalism on which the revolution based itself. Finally, the chapter presents education policies and civil religion during the French revolution as two instances of the paradox of national universalism.

This conversation will address the crisis in the concept of constitutional identity, a concept which has been subtly articulated by Gary J Jacobsohn. Conceiving ‘crisis’ as ‘disharmonies’, he speaks of constitutional ‘identity’ in a dialectical relation as a culturally embedded core of varied practices of identification. The preliminary issue is whether, and how, the national and constitutional identity coincide. Second, we consider the matter of identity entrepreneurs and, third, examine the thesis of ‘abuse of constitutional identity’ and the dialectics of robustness and fragility of/in the identity of constitution. Finally, we attend briefly to some questions of related concerns raised by the distinction between ‘We, the people’ and ‘We, the nations’, in relation to the notions of identity.

In this chapter, we examine the almost uniquely powerful position the British prime minister is in compared to heads of government abroad, and the long list of the PM’s powers and resources. With so much in their favour, why is their performance often so underwhelming? Premierships can go by in a blur of frenzied activity. Prime ministers typically only reflect fully on the powers and resources they possessed after their period in office is over, when they are writing their memoirs, ruefully reflecting on what might have been. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t precise powers, some formal, others informal, accumulated over the years, and it is these that we consider in this chapter. The most successful prime ministers, like Thatcher or Attlee, knew, by study or osmosis, how to use them.

I go to the swimming pool and everybody’s body is on show, including my own. I don’t have rippling pecs, and I am in my 60s, an age when you think I wouldn’t care about my body anymore, but I do. Another swimmer, in her 30s, is just getting out of the water. She is ‘a big girl’, and gets looks, of the wrong kind, even though I have watched her plough the lanes and work hard, keeping enough stamina back to sprint her final lap. If I am self-conscious of my body, how self-conscious is she? Every look is a dagger to her self-esteem. I try to put myself in her place, chanting to myself, ‘Don’t put me down, don’t put me down.’ People who say, ‘You’ve got yourself to blame’ have got it wrong. Even though the evidence is that body stigma only contributes to obesity, people stigmatize large body size – especially in the Global North among poorer people, females, and Black and Indigenous peoples. I discuss how obesity stigma comes from the type of moralizing thought that is embedded in present-day Western societies. I go on to consider how obesity stigma is used to develop and maintain social hierarchies in times of food-plenty.