Stalin needed the support of the Allies to secure his victories in Eastern Europe and in Asia. During January 1945, Stalin promised to uphold the Yalta Conference's “Declaration on Liberated Europe,” which guaranteed that open elections would be held in the Eastern European countries under his control. But Stalin quickly broke his promises in Europe, and in Asia too. For example, on 11 January 1943, the United States and Great Britain had completely eliminated all of their remaining extraterritorial rights and special privileges in China. But during the same year, Chiang Kai-shek for the first time confirmed that “the Sino-Soviet Agreement concluded on the basis of equality was not fully carried out.”1 Following the end of World War II, the Soviet government did not renegotiate its unequal treaties with China, but instead worked hand in hand with the Chinese communists to overthrow the Kuomintang. Stalin also consolidated Soviet control over Outer Mongolia.

Historians have previously attributed Chiang Kai-shek's 14 August 1945 decision to hold a plebiscite granting Outer Mongolia full independence from China to the 11 February 1945 Yalta agreement, in which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin decided: “The status quo in Outer-Mongolia (the Mongolian People's Republic) shall be preserved.”2 But when President Roosevelt agreed to support the status quo he never intended to push China into granting Outer Mongolia its independence. In fact, according to international law, the juridical status quo appeared to be based on the 31 May 1924 Sino-Soviet treaty, in which Moscow publicly recognized that Outer Mongolia was an integral part of China: “The Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics recognizes that Outer Mongolia is an integral part of the Republic of China and respects China's sovereignty therein.”

But the true status quo was not what it appeared. China's sovereignty over Outer Mongolia was in fact undermined by a 31 May 1924 secret protocol with the USSR that recognized the 1915 tsarist tripartite treaty signed by Tsarist Russia, China and Outer Mongolia granting Outer Mongolia its autonomy from China. Although the 1924 protocol specified that the 1915 treaty was not to be enforced, Outer Mongolia's de facto autonomy was assured so long as Moscow refused to negotiate new terms. When Roosevelt promised to uphold the status quo at Yalta, therefore, he unwittingly provided Stalin with important leverage during secret Sino-Soviet negotiations that followed the Yalta Conference.

The Emergence of a Multilingual Paradigm

Dorina Michelutti, better known as Dôre Michelut (the Friulian version of her name), is also an Italian-Canadian author. She was born in 1952 in Sella di Rivignano, a town near Udine, in the region of Friuli. Her family migrated to Canada in 1958 and settled in Toronto. After graduating from high school in 1972, she spent five years in Florence, studying Italian at the University of Florence. She returned to Canada in 1981, where she continued to study at the University of Toronto. Meanwhile, she began to write and publish in literary magazines. Her first book of poems, Loyalty to the Hunt, was published in 1986 by Guernica Editions. In 1994, this book also appeared in the French version, entitled Loyale à la chasse. In 1989, she published Coming to Terms with the Mother Tongue. In 1990, in cooperation with five writers, she published Linked Alive and the simultaneous French edition, Liens. In 1990, she also published Ouroborous: The Book That Ate Me, containing poems in English, Italian and Friulian. In 1993, she published A Furlan Harvest, a collection of poems written in Italian, English and Friulian, by women of Friulian descent living in Canada. After 1996, Michelut started travelling and working around the world. In 2005, she received a Master of Arts in Applied Communication from Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC. She died of cancer in Oman in March 2009. She was teaching advanced speech, multimedia and technical communication at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane.

Michelut's works have appeared in many literary publications and have been anthologized both in Canada and Italy. Her literary production constitutes a form of experimental fiction, that is, a form of writing defined by its innovative nature. She continually breaks linguistic, narrative and stylistic norms and conventions, combining different styles and discourses. On the level of content, her poems are thematically obscure, difficult to analyse, and engage the reader with different levels of interpretation. Through this innovative approach to writing, ‘discursive borders are constantly relativized and transgressed, thereby intensifying the work's migratory character’ (Frank 2008, 20). This inventive approach is also evident in her experiments with different poetic forms, such as a series of renga, an Asian form of social poetry.

Having analyzed the satiric, comic, and tragic actions that form the plots of Tristram Shandy, we might adopt the posture of Shakespeare's Polonius, who would only have to decide whether Sterne's work should be labeled tragicomic satire or satiric tragicomedy. Indeed, one might legitimately question the usefulness of the definitions of satire, comedy, and tragedy borrowed here from the work of Alvin Kernan and Northrop Frye, as none of these definitions, by itself, lets us describe the complex action of Tristram Shandy.

Frye himself would have answered this question, I believe, by pointing out that modal complexity represents the hallmark of great literature. The tragic action of Tristram Shandy, as we have seen in Chapter 4, can be partly categorized under Frye's “high mimetic” mode, in which protagonists Yorick and Tristram stand strong in their bold criticisms of grave, reputable dullness. Yet ironically, as Yorick and Tristram come to recognize, their strong moralrhetorical stances leave them weak, vulnerable to the swarms of the dull who come together long enough to slander and destroy.

We have also seen the tragic action of Tristram Shandy blend with comic action as it falls to what Frye would call the “low mimetic” stories of Walter and Toby, stories inseparable from Tristram’s. In telling the stories of his precursors, Tristram illustrates the benevolent “moral character” he would place at the center of a new comic Shandean society, which he would populate with his “hearty, laughing” friends (2: 132; 4: 402). But as we have discovered, within the fictional world created by Sterne, neither Tristram nor his forebearers succeed in drawing friends, in renewing life on the foundation of society's ruins. Tristram, Walter, and Toby may all be fairly counted among the protagonists of “low mimetic” tragedy, for they find themselves excluded from the society they would regenerate (Frye 1957, 39). But this bimodal action, we have found, does not resolve tragically, as Tristram resurrects Yorick regularly and ends his cock-and-bull story with a joke, not with a catastrophe. Neither does the action resolve comically, for despite the joking at the end, we find no harmony, no regeneration, and no shared vision—only Toby's embarrassment, Mrs. Shandy's confusion, and Walter's rhetorical nonsense (9: 803–9).

Introduction

Much ink has been spilled on the problem of sociology's “Eurocentrism” in recent years. Whether understood as a cognitive myopia resultant from the universalization of the particularities of European social and political development, or as a tendency to narrate Western modernity in endogenous terms, shorn of the constitutive histories of colonial-imperialism and Transatlantic slavery, the critique of Eurocentrism has shed light on how the formation of sociology is a power-saturated process with ongoing historical effects that continue to frame the relations between “the West and the rest” (Hall 1992; Steinmetz 2013; Bhambra 2014; Meghji 2021).

In this chapter, I argue that Zygmunt Bauman's project can be read as an intervention into contemporary discussions about Eurocentrism in the discipline of sociology and the imperative to “decolonize” its canon and operative concepts, even if he did not explicitly frame it as such. In making this argument, I re-tread several paths in Bauman's sociological thinking which, to varying degrees, have been elided in commentaries on and critical appraisals of his work. These are his reflections on colonialism and decolonization, the Jewish experience and interpretation of modernity, and the communist project in east-central Europe and its dissolution.

In my book Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociological of Intellectual Exile (Palmer 2023), I track each of these paths across Bauman's thought as it develops from the late 1960s until his death in 2017. I emphasize the essayistic constitution of Bauman's sociology which, when not sufficiently appreciated, has tended to render his overall contribution to the critique of the West not immediately accessible. Bauman's reflections on colonialism and decolonization, for example, crisscross over the long duration of his work and are not contained in neatly-bound, self-contained tracts. His sociology as a whole constitutes a multiplicity of “forking paths,” to borrow the expression from the Jorge Luis Borges (1964) short story which was hugely influential for Bauman.

Roland Barthes once wrote that “in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, not deciphered” (Barthes 1977, 147). The disentanglement that I attempt here isolates the forking paths in discrete phases of their unfolding. Over the course of the first and second sections, I outline Bauman's engagements with themes of colonialism and decolonization as developed in his work “before postmodernity,” taken to stretch from the late 1960s into the 1970s, across the twin poles of his exile: Poland and Britain.

Around that time, Rodolphe was very much in love with his cousin Angele even though she couldn't stand him. Meanwhile, Chevalier's thermometer had plunged to twelve below zero.

Mlle Angele was the daughter of M. Monetti, the stove maker we encountered earlier. Mlle. Angele was eighteen years old and had come from the Bourgogne region where she’d spent five years with a female relative who was expected to leave everything to her when she died. The relative was an elderly woman who had never been young or beautiful, but who had always been unpleasant although (or perhaps because) she was very religious. When Angele left to live with her, she’d been a charming child and her adolescence was already bringing her the promise of a charming youth. When she returned after five years she’d become a beauty but also cold, hard and unfeeling. Her life of rural seclusion, her excessive religious observance and an education based on narrow-minded principles had filled her with coarse and ridiculous prejudices, shrunk her imagination and made her heart into an organ that was satisfied with merely carrying out its function like a pendulum. In other words, Angele had holy water running in her veins instead of blood. She welcomed her cousin with icy reserve when she returned and he was wasting his time whenever he tried to play on the tender strings of memory, recalling the time when they were in the early stages of a love like Paul and Virginie, a love that traditionally arises between a male and female cousin.2 Still, Rodolphe was very much in love with this cousin who couldn't stand him and when he learned one day that the young woman was to attend a wedding party for one of her friends, he found the courage to promise Angele a bouquet of violets for the occasion. After asking her father for his permission, Angele accepted her cousin's gallant offer, on the condition that the violets must be white.

Delighted with his cousin's kind acceptance, Rodolphe danced and sang all the way back to Mont Saint Bernard, the place he called home. We will soon see why. As he crossed the Palais-Royal and passed the shop of Mme. Provost, the famous florist, he saw white violets in the shop window.

Introduction

How do we make theory? What are the criteria for judging the power of ideas and concepts in the practice of social theory? The work of theory does not always involve building, or the construction of systems, though this may have been the dominant model in postwar sociology from Talcott Parsons to Anthony Giddens. Sometimes it involves something more modest or experimental, a matter of successive approximations, circling, following hunches and leaving hints (Beilharz 2020a). Sometimes it may be more like tracking a snail trail than attempting to capture every detail of the world in a corresponding concept. Even some of the more ambitious of classical precedents, like Karl Marx's Capital, may be said to contain as much in their hints as in their broad architecture. The section on the fetishism of commodities is elusive at only a few pages; the image of the architect and bee is less than that, but highly suggestive. The last chapter of Capital, on colonization, is indicative of a theory of surplus population and colonization as part thereof. Primitive accumulation is a global process; it represents the modernization part of modernity. Then there is the book's own structural undergirding, indebted to Dante's inferno. In the sprawling text of Marx's Grundrisse, some of the most interesting legacies again are mere fragments: on method, on automation, and on time–space compression. And in Max Weber, the image of the iron cage is a throwaway that has yet become highly generative for critical thinking about modernity, along with various other chilling anticipations as to what the new century would bring.

Karl Marx and iMax Weber come into play here as central sources for Bauman's thinking. In this chapter, I indicate their influences on Bauman, separately and together in the amalgam called “Weberian Marxism.” This junction is one key source for the tradition we call Critical Theory. From Marx to Zygmunt Bauman is a long way—from 1867, for Capital, to 2000, for Liquid Modernity, from the Crystal Place to IM Pei's glass pyramids, from Marx's coat to the costumes of Vivienne Westwood. Liquid Modernity may also be said to be a hint, rather than a theory, though the book by that title is methodical enough: its chapters lead with “Emancipation” and “Individuality,” and follow on to “Time/Space,” “Work,” and “Community” (Bauman 2000).

The welfare state is not what it was. Decades of liberalisation have transformed how governments provide social policy and how citizens experience social protection. Services that were once the sole domain of public sector workers are now run by non-profit, even for-profit, firms. Payments that were once straightforward to access and understand are increasingly conditional and stingy, or require expert advice to invest in complex financial products. Even within the public sector, new public management and competition policy have created markets within the state, transforming the public sector into something that looks much more like the private sector.

Yet for all this transformation, predictions of a crisis of the welfare state have proven premature. Across the OECD, and particularly in Australia, the welfare state is on the march. The growth is both quantitative and qualitative. Through the height of neoliberalism social spending grew, and even before Covid-19, had moved closer to the OECD average (OECD 2022c). Areas of social need, such as child, disability and elder care, are supported in ways they were not before. And even though inequality overall has increased, social spending has also become more redistributive, doing more to ease inequalities than in the past (Whiteford 2017).

Much of this change is structural. As populations age there is more need for pensions and healthcare, two of the biggest components of the welfare state. As family structures change and women enter paid work in greater numbers, demands for paid care expand and parenting payments increase. Welfare states redistribute more when our initial market incomes are less equal, as happens when labour and capital markets are deregulated. However, deliberate policy also played a role. New programs have been introduced, and existing spending increased under both Labor and Coalition governments.

This book attempts to understand the varied politics of liberalisation in Australia and understand how to change it. Of course, we can exaggerate difference. Australia never developed a comprehensive welfare state equivalent to those in Europe, or even the UK. We have always had sizeable private sectors in health, education and care and relatively low social benefits. Social policy and the politics of welfare have changed since the 1980s, however less dramatically than many imagine. Liberalisation has not meant the end of the state, but the expansion of markets alongside welfare.

Among the real bohemians of the real bohemia I once knew a young man, Jacques D_____, a sculptor who showed signs of great talent. But poverty denied him the opportunity to realize his potential. He died of exhaustion in the month of March 1844, at Saint-Louis Hospital, in the Saint Victoire room, in bed 14

.I came to know Jacques in the hospital, where I myself was staying during a long illness. Jacques, as I mentioned, was an extremely promising artist but he didn't let it go to his head. During the two months I was near him, even while he felt cradled in the arms of death, I never once heard him complain or give way to those lamentations that make neglected artists seem so ridiculous. He died without any posturing, but with an awful grimace of agony. As I think back on his death, in fact, I’m reminded of one of the worst scenes I’ve ever witnessed in the whole parade of human suffering. Learning what had happened, Jacques's father came to claim his son's body and he haggled with the hospital office for a long time over the thirty-six francs they were charging. He also haggled so aggressively over the cost of the church service that they gave him a six franc discount. As the corpse was being placed into the coffin, the nurse removed the hospital sheet and asked one of Jacques's friends who would be paying for the shroud. The poor fellow didn't have a sou so he turned to the father, who became enraged and demanded to know if they ever going to stop bothering him.

The nurse, a nun who was present for this whole dreadful discussion, looked over at the body, and the words she spoke were tender and innocent: “Oh monsieur! We can't bury him like that. The poor boy! He’ll get so cold. At least give him a shirt so he doesn't arrive stark naked to meet our good Lord.”

The father gave the friend five francs to get a shirt but told him to go to a second-hand shop in Rue Grange-aux-Belles that sold used clothes.

“It’ll be cheaper,” he added.

I came to understand the cruelty of Jacques's father later; he was furious that his son had chosen to become an artist and his anger never subsided, not even as he faced the coffin.

Schaunard and Marcel, having maintained a valiant focus on work all morning, suddenly suspended their labors.

“My God, I’m so hungry!” said Schaunard. And, as an afterthought, he added, “Don't we get to have lunch today?”

Marcel seemed astonished by this highly inopportune question. “Since when do we have lunch two days in row?” he asked. “Yesterday was Thursday.” He finished his answer by waving his maulstick in the air and reciting the church commandment:

On Friday you must take no meat

Nor anything like it may you eat.

Schaunard was at a loss for a reply so he turned back to his painting, an image of an open field on which a red tree and a blue tree could be seen shaking hands with their branches. It was a clear allusion to the pleasures of friendship and was, without a doubt, profoundly philosophical.

Just then the concierge knocked at the door to deliver a letter for Marcel.

“That will be three sous,” he said.

“Are you sure?” the artist replied. “Well that's alright, you can pay us later.”

And he closed the door in the concierge's face. Taking the letter, Marcel broke the seal.

After reading the first few words, he began leaping around the studio like an acrobat and singing the following famous ballad at the top of his lungs, thus demonstrating that he had attained jubilation's summit:

Four young men who lived in the town

With sickness they were all struck down

To hospital they were taken away

Hey hey! Hey hey! Hey hey! Hey hey!

“Yes!” Schaunard said as he joined in:

They were placed side by side in a very large bed

Two at the foot and two at the head.

“We both know it!” said Marcel as he continued:

A Sister of Mercy soon came their way

Hey hey! Hey hey! Hey hey! Hey hey! “

If you don't quiet down,” said Schaunard, who was starting to feel symptoms of madness closing in, “I’ll play the allegro from my symphony The Influence of Blue in the Arts.” And he began to approach the piano.

This threat had the effect of cold water falling on a boiling liquid. Marcel became quite calm almost as though a spell had been cast on him.

“But wait!” he said, handing the letter to his friend. “Look at this.”

In the days following his final breakup with Mlle. Mimi, who, as you will recall, left him for the caresses of Viscount Paul, the poet Rodolphe tried to distract himself by finding another lover.

She was fair and we’ve seen how he dressed up as Romeo for an interlude of pleasure and laughter, but this relationship arose from his unhappiness and her yearning for a good time, and it wasn't made to last long. After all, she was a foolish young woman: she had perfect pitch when it came to singing the songs of manipulation, she was smart enough to recognize the intelligence of others and sometimes use it for her own benefit, and she was barely sensitive enough to feel bad when she’d overeaten. In addition to all that, her pride was unbridled and her vanity was so strong that she’d rather see her lover break a leg than to have one flounce less on her dress or a faded ribbon on her hat. An ordinary creature, her beauty was questionable and she was naturally endowed with every bad instinct, but she had a way of being quite seductive as well when the time was right. It didn't take her long to realize that Rodolphe was only with her to help him get over his lost love, but it wasn't working and instead he missed her even more. Never before had Mimi's hold on his heart been so strong, so compelling.

One day Juliet, the poet's new lover, was chatting about him with a medical student who was courting her and he said, “My dear child, this boy is using you the way we use nitrate to cauterize a wound. He wants to cauterize his heart and you’re making a mistake if you get upset about him or even stay faithful to him.”

“Oh!” the young woman exclaimed as she burst into laughter, “do you really think I’m worried about that?” And that very evening, she provided the student with clear proof that she was not.

Thanks to the indiscretion of a so-called friend who didn't know how to keep a secret if it held back news that might make someone miserable, Rodolphe caught wind of her affair and used it as an excuse to break things off with his interim mistress.

Introduction

The world of sociology is—just as the social world sociologists themselves study— inhabited by many different breeds, forms of life, and creatures. Many years ago, Swedish sociologist Walter Korpi (1990) metaphorically suggested that these different types of sociologists could be captured by the colorful and fairytale-like notions of respectively “pegasuses,” “pegasus-groomers,” “tree-huggers,” “stump-sitters” and “moles”—each with their identifiable features, focus areas and specific modes of working. Korpi defines the first group, the “pegasuses,” as a sort of otherworldly creatures hovering well above the prosaic world, looking down upon it, and describing and analyzing it in comprehensive, theoretically abstract, and almost immortal terms. Like in “phosphorous illumination,” the pegasuses show us “the way things are” by painting the “big picture” and describing the main tenets of the human condition (Korpi 1990, 3). Korpi specifically mentioned the likes of Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Bourdieu as such exemplary pegasuses. However, Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) would indeed also qualify as one of these almost otherworldly “pegasuses” of his discipline, one whose writings will continue to be read, reread, discovered and re-discovered, interpreted, and re-interpreted in many decades to come. The reason for this is first of all that Bauman was a man with what may be regarded as a megalomaniac mission—he wanted to humanize not only the discipline of sociology but also the world he was studying. Bauman's sociology was thus an unmistakable humanistic enterprise if there ever was one. Moreover, Bauman was a general social theorist, not someone concerned with the meticulous empirical exploration of this or that small enclave of society or with piling heaps of detailed statistical material to shed light on a relatively limited section of the world. Instead, his eyes were firmly fixed at “the big picture,” the way the world was organized and how and why it was constantly changing, and with what human consequences.

Bauman—as most of the other aforementioned pegasuses of the discipline of sociology—was a scholar solidly rooted in the great European intellectual tradition from the latter part of the twentieth century. Korpi had claimed that the ratio of “pegasuses” within sociology was much higher in Europe as compared to the United States.

For the past five or six years, Marcel had been working on his great painting, which he claimed was a representation of the biblical passage of the Red Sea. And for five or six years, this colorist masterpiece was stubbornly refused by the Salon's jury. It had been back and forth from the studio to the gallery and from the gallery to the studio so many times that if someone had put wheels under it, the painting could have found its way to the Louvre all on its own. Marcel, who had reworked the canvas ten times from top to bottom, insisted it was personal, that jury members’ hostility toward him had led to the annual ostracism keeping his work out of the exhibition hall. In honor of the Cerberuses of the Academy, in his spare time he compiled a small catalogue of insults complete with remarkably savage illustrations. The collection had become famous. In artists’ studios and the École des Beaux-Arts, it had achieved a level of success equal to the popularity of the immortal complaint of Giovanni Bellini, official painter for the Grand Sultan of Turkey. Every struggling painter in Paris had it committed to memory.

For a long time, Marcel was not discouraged by the harsh rejections he received from each exhibition. He was settled comfortably in the opinion that his painting was, though to a lesser degree, the long-awaited companion piece for Veronese's The Wedding at Cana, that enormous masterpiece whose overpowering brilliance was uncompromised by three centuries of dust neglect. And so every year at the time of the Salon, Marcel sent his painting to the jury for assessment. But in order to throw the jurors off track and thwart the obvious prejudice that led to the annual refusal of The Passage of the Red Sea, Marcel would alter certain details in the painting without altering the overall composition, and he’d give it a new title.

On one occasion it appeared in front of the jury with the title Crossing the Rubicon, but the Pharaoh, poorly disguised in Caesar's cloak, was recognized and turned away along with all the honors he was due.

Introduction

In her book, Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture, Doris Bachmann-Medick (2016) argues that since the 1970s the development of the social sciences and humanities has been marked by a variety of “cultural turns.” These denote transdisciplinary orientations that engage the attention of researchers and determine the direction of their inquiries. In Bachmann-Medick's view, to be described as a “cultural turn,” a new research orientation must become “a tool and medium of knowledge itself” (Bachmann-Medick 2016, 16). This means that the object of inquiry in a given research field must have transformed into a broader analytical category that can be applied to study many unrelated phenomena. In her book, Bachmann-Medick identified and analyzed “the interpretive turn,” “the performative turn,” “the reflexive/literary turn,” “the postcolonial turn,” “the translational turn,” “the spatial turn”, and the “iconic/pictorial turn.” At the same time, she admitted that her list was by no means complete, and that the emergence of new “cultural turns” was a hallmark of the contemporary social sciences and humanities.

Today, the catalog of “cultural turns” can certainly be expanded to include the “nostalgic turn” (see, e.g., Bonnett 2010, 2016; Cross 2015; Jacobsen 2020a, 2022a; Lizardi 2015, 2019; Niemeyer 2014; Salmose 2019). In 2001, Svetlana Boym observed in her now-classic book The Future of Nostalgia: “The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia” (Boym 2001, xiv). Since then, the importance of “nostalgia” as a concept for describing and analyzing contemporary reality has been constantly increasing. This notion is used today to investigate diverse phenomena, such as the soaring popularity of populist parties (Bauman 2017b, 2017c; Gandini 2020), the vogue in music, film, and literature to draw on styles and genres of the past (Leggatt 2021; Reynolds 2010; Rudaitè 2018), the trend to use retro fashion in order to increase sales of services and products (Cervellon and Brown 2018; Cross 2015), and a range of other developments. Multidimensional, as it is, the “nostalgic turn” is analyzed by researchers from a variety of disciplines. Michael Hviid Jacobsen addressed this issue in his 2020 book: “Sociology, psychology, anthropology, historical science, political science, literary studies, business studies and so on have now discovered nostalgia as a potent and inexhaustible source of knowledge about individual behavior as well as about ongoing cultural changes” ( Jacobsen 2020b, 2).

This is the story of how chance, which skeptics consider God's business manager, one day brought together the individuals whose fraternal affiliation would later transform them into members of a bohemian society, part of the bohemia this book's author hopes to introduce to the public.

One morning, it was the 8th of April, Alexandre Schaunard, who studied painting and music, two of the liberal arts, was rudely awakened by notes ringing out to him from a neighbor's rooster, which served as his alarm clock.

“Oh my God,” Schaunard exclaimed. “My feathered clock must be running fast. It can't possibly be today already.”

As he spoke these words, he propelled himself out of a piece of furniture he’d built himself, an ingenious invention that served as his bed by night (though it must be said that it served very badly) and served as all the rest of his furniture by day, since everything else had been burned as firewood during the bitterly cold weather the previous winter. Only this all-purpose piece remained.

To protect himself against the morning's bitingly cold drafts, Schaunard quickly slipped on the pink satin petticoat with sequins that sparkled like the stars, an item he used as his dressing gown. This fine garment had been forgotten at the artist's home one night after a masked ball by a reveler who’d been foolish enough to fall for Schaunard's empty promises. He’d been disguised as the Marquis de Mondor2 and she’d heard the sounds of a dozen silver coins clinking seductively in his pocket, though in fact these were counterfeit, theater props cut from a metal plate with a punch and borrowed by Schaunard.

Once he was dressed for the day, the artist went to open his window and shutters. A beam of sunshine, like an arrow of light, suddenly penetrated into the room and his eyes, still veiled with the mists of sleep, were forced open into a wide-eyed stare. At precisely that moment, nearby bells pealed five o’clock.

“It is Dawn herself,” he murmured. “It's amazing, but,” he continued while consulting the calendar hanging on the wall, “it's an error all the same. Scientific research clearly affirms that the sun cannot rise until five thirty at this time of year, yet it's only five and here it is up already.

For the past five or six years, Marcel had been working on his great painting, which he claimed was a representation of the biblical passage of the Red Sea. And for five or six years, this colorist masterpiece was stubbornly refused by the Salon's jury. It had been back and forth from the studio to the gallery and from the gallery to the studio so many times that if someone had put wheels under it, the painting could have found its way to the Louvre all on its own. Marcel, who had reworked the canvas ten times from top to bottom, insisted it was personal, that jury members’ hostility toward him had led to the annual ostracism keeping his work out of the exhibition hall. In honor of the Cerberuses of the Academy, in his spare time he compiled a small catalogue of insults complete with remarkably savage illustrations. The collection had become famous. In artists’ studios and the École des Beaux-Arts, it had achieved a level of success equal to the popularity of the immortal complaint of Giovanni Bellini, official painter for the Grand Sultan of Turkey. Every struggling painter in Paris had it committed to memory.

For a long time, Marcel was not discouraged by the harsh rejections he received from each exhibition. He was settled comfortably in the opinion that his painting was, though to a lesser degree, the long-awaited companion piece for Veronese's The Wedding at Cana, that enormous masterpiece whose overpowering brilliance was uncompromised by three centuries of dust neglect. And so every year at the time of the Salon, Marcel sent his painting to the jury for assessment. But in order to throw the jurors off track and thwart the obvious prejudice that led to the annual refusal of The Passage of the Red Sea, Marcel would alter certain details in the painting without altering the overall composition, and he’d give it a new title.

On one occasion it appeared in front of the jury with the title Crossing the Rubicon, but the Pharaoh, poorly disguised in Caesar's cloak, was recognized and turned away along with all the honors he was due.

We’ve told the story of how Marcel, the painter, came to know Mlle. Musette. They were brought together one morning by the intervention of chance, who is the mayor of the thirteenth arrondissement and, as so often happens there, they believed this marriage would let their hearts remain independent. One evening after an angry quarrel they decided to break up right then and there but as they shook hands to say goodbye, they noticed that their hands were unwilling to separate. Almost without realizing it, their affair had turned into love. Laughing quietly, they admitted it to each other.

“This is really serious,” Marcel said. “How in God's name did we let it happen?”

“Oh,” answered Musette, “We’re such idiots! We didn't take enough precautions.”

“What's going on?” asked Rodolphe as he came in. He’d recently become Marcel's neighbor.

“I’ll tell you what's going on,” Marcel said gesturing toward Musette. “This lady and I have made a happy discovery. We’re in love! It must have happened while we were asleep.”

“Oh right! Asleep,” Rodolphe replied. “I don't believe you. And what proof have you got that it's love? Maybe you’re exaggerating the danger.”

“Damn it!” Marcel said, “we can't stand each other.”

“And now we can't leave each other either,” Musette added.

“Ah, my children, the situation is clear! You thought you were just playing a game, but you both lost. It was the same story with me and Mimi. Soon we’ll have gone through two calendar years arguing day and night. It's the system for making marriages last forever. Put a ‘yes’ together with a ‘no’ and you have the household of Philemon and Baucis. Your home life will become like mine. Schaunard and Phémie are threatening to come here and live with us too and if they move in our three households will make a very agreeable community.”

At that moment, Colline walked in, and he was told about the accident that had happened to Musette and Marcel.

“So,” they said, “you’re a philosopher. What do you think about all this?”

Colline scratched the fur hat that served as a roof over his head and muttered, “I knew it all along. Love is a game of chance. If you look for trouble, you’ll find it. It isn't good for a man to be alone.”

How has liberalisation changed Australia's model of social protection and the politics of equality? Much of the change has simply echoed changes internationally. As markets and money partly displaced states and law in organising economic life, competition and productivity became key watch words for policymakers, even in discussions of social policy. Still, the Australian experience appears distinct. For some it is an exemplar of how liberalisation should be done. Australia moved swiftly from a relatively tightly regulated economy to an increasingly free market model. It broke records for sustained economic growth and won awards for its ‘economic management’. It is also distinctive because liberalisation came largely through bipartisan changes led by a Labor government in an explicit alliance with organised labour. That has led to divided views within Australia, but also positioned Australia as a crucial example of the uneven development of neoliberalism, suggesting social democrats not only accommodated but entrenched neoliberalism (Humphrys 2018). This chapter aims to connect an analysis of liberalisation to Australia's institutions and history.

The different accounts of Australian liberalisation reflect unusual combinations and alliances. Rapid reductions in tariffs and privatisations were matched by rising social spending. Labor reformers embraced competition but explicitly rejected the free market think tanks often claimed to be the real driving force of change. Economic success came as much from avoiding crisis as improving productivity, echoing Keynesian efforts at demand management. Of course, Australian novelty can be overplayed. Liberalisation was different everywhere, as it responded to existing institutions, and ‘mutated’ as reforms moved from place to place. However, the configuration of unusual combinations makes Australia's story a useful one. Australia encountered liberalisation with a history of egalitarianism and labour solidarity that had not yet translated into traditional welfare state structures, with a progressive government chased by the fiscal record of the previous Labor government and strong movements stunned by the seemingly extraconstitutional means for removing it. Those circumstances produced an unusual politics, where the welfare state was reworked in new ways to conceal either its scale or its distributional impact.