In this chapter, we explore how the transfer of power between the monarch and the prime minister occurred, when it happened, how the monarchy survived, the importance it still has in Britain, and how far the prime minister has effectively become the head of state as well as head of executive. The monarchy continued to exercise real authority for the first 200 years of the prime minister’s existence and beyond, up to today. The rebalancing of power was painful, faltering, and contested. Scratch below the surface, and the relationship between head of state and head of government has been far from settled. The continued existence of an independent prime minister was not a given in the eighteenth century. The continued existence of the monarchy until today has not been a given either. It had been abolished in Britain in 1649, as it was in France in 1792 (and 1848 and 1870), Germany in 1918, and Italy in 1946. It would have been vulnerable in Britain had there been military defeat or successful revolution: its continuation into the future is not assured. Monarchies are going out of fashion. Britain’s has held strong.

Chapter 7 says that if scholars will pay more attention to political Stories, they still have to consider how to proceed. The marketplace for ideas is full of Stories, and the epistemological crisis is well funded in every direction. Therefore, Max Weber’s advice is entirely relevant: we must “choose” between Stories (or “causes,” in his term). And we must do that while critics like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Paul Kahn, and Stephen Smith warn us that we should reject old-time Stories only if we can replace them with new ones that are equally effective.

This chapter focuses on Charles Reznikoff’s 1934 version of his long poem Testimony, which consists almost entirely of collaged-together excerpts from nineteenth-century trial transcripts. The chapter proposes that Testimony utilizes these materials to suggest a link between past and present violence and social fragmentation, rejecting narratives of progress associated with the modern American nation and tacitly embracing the “debunking” imperative animating the work of interwar historians such as Caroline Ware. Reznikoff’s text is organized around the spectacle of the body in pain as a galvanizing scene within the modern public sphere, where public affect and social belonging were generated through collective acts of witnessing (and often perpetrating) violence and disaster. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the final subsection of Testimony, titled “Depression,” draws its subject matter from the aftermath of the “Depression” of 1873, as the text proposes this earlier period as a parallel to the crisis of the 1930s. In recalling this earlier period, the chapter claims further, Testimony proposes a negative vision of economic and technological modernity by revealing its human collateral, as well as the cyclical nature of modern social and economic crisis.

Milton's divorce tracts create a political ideology of marriage and husbands which increasingly sees wives as the problem for male citizens. Like Habermas in creating a fantasy of the public sphere that excludes women, and like Charles I in Eikon Basilike, Milton in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Tetrachordon, Colasterion, and Martin Bucer tracts imagines a hapless husband who needs to be freed from both paternal oversight and wifely constraints if he is to be a public authority in England. Inviting Parliament to see divorce itself as not just an analogy for anti-monarchy movements but as itself a key linchpin in the new commonwealth, Milton, in the divorce tracts, creates the perfect male citizen as the man who can repudiate his wife.