For those who ended up incarcerated, prison life was defined by inequality and social stratification. Imprisonment was an uncomfortable and costly ordeal for most, but one in which wealth could mitigate the harshest conditions. Chapter 3 turns to these day-to-day experiences of imprisonment, exploring living conditions and social structures in prison (including the physical division of master’s and common sides along lines of wealth and status), as well as the place of commerce and trade in prison life. It reveals the crowded and unsanitary conditions in which prisoners lived, not to mention the high costs of doing so. This chapter also considers how prisoners prosecuted their grievances, including strategies of petitioning and their relationship to rioting. Significantly, prisoners regularly appealed to local custom, arguments that could win concessions, but that also risked shoring up dominant carceral ideologies by conflating their interests with those of state authority, defending institutional integrity against supposedly corrupt gaolers.

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.

The connection between Christianity and the development of Western welfare states is long-standing, albeit somewhat neglected by scholarship. Recent work has suggested the formative influence on the formation of different welfare "regimes" through different Christian ideas of work, need, poverty, and the family, as well as differnt ecclesiologies. The chapter outlines these and proceeds to examine the philsophical connection between social welfare and religion, through the work of Raymond Plant. Plant argues that welfare policy invariably draws on inherently "contestable" social concepts, such as ‘need’, ‘want’, ‘right’, ‘justice’, ‘equality’, and ‘community’. To know what kind of good social policy is pursuing, it is essential to clarify what meaning and weight we accord to such concepts. But doing this demands we have a clear idea of the kind of creatures whose goods we are pursuing. In essence, social welfare theory of this kind rests on anthropological commitments. The chapter illustrates this by reference to Richard Titmuss, Margaret Thatcher, and Frank Field, and in so doing, underlines how this entire debate is open to theological perspectives.

Although by no means uncompromising in his hostility to the “welfare” – or as he termed it the “social assistance” – state, Pope John Paul II was more critical of its legitimacy, processes and results than were William Temple, Jacques Maritain (or Rowan Williams). His antagonism was drawn, in part, from his formative experiences in Communist Poland, but it is the anthropological reasons for his more critical appreciation that are foundational. John Paul conceived of the human person as created and oriented to transcendence, as an effective moral agent, and with a clear capacity for reason and truth, as well as being relationally constituted and completed by ‘gift’. The consequence of this for his understanding of the welfare role of the state was a palpable reluctance to countenance social welfare structures that removed agency and responsibility from people. His resulting vision of welfare was not one in which the state had no direct role for welfare provision, but one in which work, family and the natural patterns of associational solidarity were the first and primary basis for welfare.

Energy is the capacity to perform work, but what is “work”? Examining representations of labor, energy, and race, this chapter considers forms of energy that resist, demand, or may be denied representation. It reads W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction with his poem “The Song of the Smoke,” the legend of John Henry, historiographic debates about African American coal miner and union organizer Richard L. Davis, and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s story of labor conflict, “Shaft 11.” Disagreements between labor historians Du Bois and Abram Lincoln Harris reveal conflicts in historiography and fossil culture. Tensions emerge in competing views of “human capital,” but so does an appreciation for elided energies and lives.

Implicitly addressing the French Revolution, most of these Tales advocated avoiding revolution in Britain by changing the culture and composition of the ruling class. Critiquing the mores and rule of the aristocracy, Eliza Parsons, Maria Hunter, Mary Ann Hanway, Mary Charlton and anonymous others advocated admitting capable, genteel, nouveau riche merchants and professionals, or sometimes humane and competent country gentlemen, into the ruling elite. They also intimated that elite culture should consist of the proto-Victorian values championed by their exemplary merchants, professionals and/or country gentlemen and independent working women and by the marriage of “manners and morals” they modeled. Placing their exemplary protagonists in the wealthy mercantile, professional and gentry classes and showing these groups socializing and intermarrying accords with recent scholarly accounts of the conduct of these classes in the provinces, as they began to consolidate into a Victorian upper middle class.

This essay explores the intersection of race and the field of war and society in U.S. history. Centering race as a critical fault line, it examines how racial identities, hierarchies, and constructions have shaped—and been shaped by—U.S. experiences of war, both during and beyond moments of active conflict. While race is the central focus, the essay also considers how gender, ethnicity, and class intersect with it. These interconnected forces help define not only who is recognized within "society" but also how war is waged, experienced, and remembered. By analyzing key historiographic debates, the essay considers how scholarship on race has contributed to a deeper, more complex understanding of the war and society field. It also argues that race-based inquiry challenges conventional definitions of war and society, expanding them beyond state-sanctioned actors and discrete wartime events to include long-term, systemic forms of violence and resistance. In doing so, the essay highlights the co-productive relationship between war and society and how race reshapes our understanding of both.

Using phenomenology to develop Plantinga’s analogy of God and other minds, and in dialogue with Feuerbach’s critique of the God–world difference, this chapter articulates how the order inherent in a work makes manifest the cause of that work even when it remains unknown just how the cause brought about the order. To see the world as created amounts to seeing the world as an ordered work indicating its author amounts to seeing it as created; the world can serve as a kind of protreptic but one that is only understood by those who read it carefully. “That hidden other, whose agency causes the world and me to be, is ‘God’.”

Capability is the informational focus of the theory of justice developed by Sen. This means that, according to this theory, people’s relative advantages and disadvantages should be assessed in terms of their capability. I present and discuss some of the investigational requirements that this entails. A key challenge here is that a capability relates not only to what people actually end up being and doing that is of value to them (achieved functionings) but also to what they are in fact able to do, irrespective of whether they choose to realise such an opportunity. This seems to produce a paradox in Sen’s writings – capability assessment being quite complex on the one hand but surprisingly simple on the other. Drawing on what Sen has to say on the relationship between capability and human rights, I offer a possible explanation for the apparent paradox. Two case studies are given, showing some methods that may be used to assess capability and how the validity and relevance of the resulting evidence can be assessed. I conclude by suggesting that Sen’s capability approach can be considered a realist and non-ideal theory of justice and that specific approaches to capability assessment should be in line with this.

In the course of its three versions (October 1926 – February 1927 and November 1927 – January 1928), Lady Chatterley’s Lover gradually morphed into a more mythic casting of the state of the world and its future. The third version is bathed in the afterglow of Lawrence’s Etruscan essays of mid-1927, Sketches of Etruscan Places, and partly conditioned by his short stories and essays of 1927. For Lawrence, it was a matter of developing his imaginative vectors – the obdurate industrial and social circumstances of the Midlands on the one hand, which a visit home in 1926 had tempted him to come to grips with, and a future of tenderness on the other – and then deploying them to see what they might yield in the performative writing event. Realism, a response to the working-class settings, slowly gave way to celebration of the ‘eternity of the naïve moment’, coming from before Plato and available in the present if only love-idealism and sentiment could be overthrown.

Chapter 4 examines local concepts of right(s), dissecting the ways in which brokering and begging were viewed as charitable compensations for the lack of government protection for disabled people, but claimed by the recipients as forms of work. Aspiring to have their activities recognised as rights, they spoke a local language of entitlement that conflated the value of independent work with the ethical and political right to care, asserting obligatory rights or taxes, against the donors’ perception of gifts. The language of ‘rights’ is a space of mutual evaluation, a rich and powerful language for discussing issues of inequality, membership, personhood, welfare, and power in Kinshasa today. It is perhaps most significant as a claim for distribution than as a legal premise of entitlements. Here, the question of a rightful share becomes pertinent, as givers and receivers evoked differing views on the same transaction that expressed contradictory aspirations and values. In the absence of formal institutions to enforce informal disability privileges, people had to recognise the right to be beggars or brokers on an interpersonal level, requiring constant value tests on whether claims to assistance were legitimate. The chapter thus disrupts the classic Maussian focus on giving and production to consider the moral and political controversies associated with asking and distribution.

Chapter 3 considers another prominent economic activity, the particular form of begging known as ‘doing documents’. Examining the performances and invocations of this practice, the chapter considers how the documents produced by these beggars attempted to legitimate the act of begging through formalisation and bureaucracy. This reflected an ideal of a valuable form of dependency, but conflicted with a moral logic of the dignity of independence and honest work. As such, the sentiment of conviviality and official regularity conveyed by the document was frequently at odds with the practice of exchange itself: donors frequently viewed disabled people as suspect and aggressive. This chapter examines the debates that ‘doing documents’ provokes on who is ‘deserving’, what kind of work is ‘honest’, and whether or not begging is truly work. Desiring shallow relationships with many donors, the beggars aimed to build ‘contractual dependencies’ with them, deploying the symbolism of the bureaucratic (social) contract both to enforce and limit the relationship.

This chapter and Chapter 9 offer a detailed reading of central arguments in The Human Condition. A striking fact about this study of the “active life” is the absence of any discussion of morality, apart from minimum obligations to keep promises and forgive unintended consequences of action. The chapter sets out the problem, and then offers a conjecture about what moved Arendt to neglect morality: her fear that moral constraints would handcuff human action, which in her view makes life meaningful. The following chapter analyzes that conjecture in depth. The remainder of this chapter sets the stage by examining central themes and vocabulary in The Human Condition. It explains what Arendt means by “human condition”, unpacks her concepts of labor, work, and action and the risks of confusing them, and explains why the human condition of natality (“unto us a child is born”) matters so crucially.

I begin by narrowing down the realm of human ‘production’, the requirements it places on our faculties and why humans are essentially productive animals. I then move on to three philosophical accounts of human productivity: those of Aristotle, Marx and Gwen Bradford respectively. Aristotle’s account is marred by class prejudice, Marx’s by a hyper-focus on the conditions rather than the results of ‘labour’, and Bradford’s by an over-formal analysis of production that has too little to say about products. By contrast, I propose a comprehensive account that has substantive things to say about producers, processes of production and products. My account distinguishes two productive ‘poles’, namely: (1) those powers engaged in the producer (productive ‘inputs’); and (2) those powers engaged in the consumer (productive ‘outputs’). Production is good overall to the degree it protects and promotes the perfection of both producers’ and consumers’ powers. I round off Chapter 9 by tackling the ‘anti-work’ critique, arguing that it fails to show work as such is a bad. Indeed, production remains perfective of humans in virtue of their productive nature.

The conclusion discusses valuation, the activity of giving value to things and people, to stress residents’ economic and political choices.

In this chapter, the first law of thermodynamics is developed using a series of experimental setups. In doing so, some new terminology and concepts are introduced. The idea of specific heat is revisited, and it is discovered that there are two forms of specific heat: a specific heat at constant volume and a specific heat at constant pressure. The important concepts of pressure work and thermodynamic cycles are also introduced.

We are living in a time when many teachers say they are feeling burnt out, and many others have left the profession altogether. Even new teachers who might start out feeling enthusiastic are likely to leave the profession after a few years. Teachers say the pressures they feel don’t match their view of what teaching is supposed to be all about – caring for, and teaching, children and young people. So, what do teachers do? What does the public (and, for that matter, Hollywood movie producers) think teachers do? This chapter argues that we have a bit of a mismatch between what people outside the profession think, and the experiences of teachers themselves. It also argues that broader changes in education, such as the use of data to govern teachers’ work has created extra pressure on teachers.