Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

Chapter 2 delves into the primary actors and socio-historical events that have led to producing Hindu nationalism’s multiple political imaginaries and policy imperatives. It chronologically follows how Hindutva and discourses of economic development have interacted in post-Independence political regimes. I show how the BJP has been able to build multiple narratives, using both technocratic organisations and populist mobilisation, to gain several forms of legitimacy, many of which contradict one another. Scholars have written entire books on Hindutva’s ideological basis and its interaction with economic development. My intention is to give people an overview so they can appreciate how my specific research and argument fits into existing conversations and concerns. This chapter introduces how the BJP adopts two distinct forms of persuasion, making claims about the (sometimes magnificent, sometimes repugnant) past and the future to different degrees: (1) returning to an ancient, mythic, and strategically changing cultural unity; and (2) ‘cleaning up’ persisting economic and moral decadence in pursuit of invulnerable national glory.

Consensus-building legitimacy has to do not just with reason but also, of course, emotion – what feels right. We think something is right and good based on what ‘feels’ that way, appealing to normative ideas and sentiments behind rationales (to paraphrase one of my interviewees, in combining the prose of policy with the poetry of politics). Whether this book speaks to students or scholars of populist movements, technocratic managerialism, policy elites, or Indian politics, it contributes to a growing corpus of knowledge on strategies of the powerful. Studying the politicisation of expertise provides invaluable understanding of how the right wing is able to construct effective narratives and be convincing of its multiple, potentially contradictory, formations.

The prologue begins with the illustrative example of a single soldier whose attempts to rationalise the war in letters to his son reflect the broader themes of the book. This man’s child, Bentley Bridgewater, donated a sequence of letters written to him by his father to the National Army Museum. In these, the reader is confronted by a man looking to maintain his relationship with his distant son whilst also crafting a meaningful narrative around his war experiences. In short, it helps to expose the ways in which men sought to create or imagine agency. The preface moves on to explicate the central importance of narrative (and agency) in human cognition and sensemaking, exploring its role in psychology but also in its broader historical context.

Government policies, stories, and institutions lie at the heart of the argument. Widely embodying the term ‘applied science’, they made it visible and real. They have also been sites of interplay between organisational and professional promotion and public discourse about Britain’s prospects. Summarising the book, this chapter reflects on the continuity between the nineteenth-century emphasis on pedagogy and the twentieth-century focus on research. It suggests that because the meaning of applied science is rooted in national debate and experience, it differed from terms growing out of other national experiences, such as the German Technik. Its trajectory in other English-speaking countries should also be studied individually. The imperial experience meant the term may have been transformed as it travelled. In sum, its meaning was not the work of just a few intellectuals. Instead, the character of applied science developed through the complexities of history and widespread public debate.

Remarkably, the classification of science is only now being studied historically. The introduction specifies this book’s question: What made applied science seem such a potent economic, cultural, and political elixir in the United Kingdom for many decades and then saw it superseded? The book explores the meaning of the term that gave it such potency using five tools: institutions, narratives, sociotechnical imaginaries, concepts, and ideologies. The term has epistemic connotations; it has been promoted and blamed for its science policy implications, and cultural reality once weighed heavily. The book explores the relationship between ‘applied science’ and ‘technology’ with their different emphases to describe the space between pure science and the market. The argument has three parts: the nineteenth-century concern with pedagogy, the early twentieth century as attention shifted to research, and the period after World War Two in which the visibility of applied science first rose and then collapsed.

This chapter sets the broader context for the book, which repeats a study on transition to first-time motherhood undertaken 21 years earlier. It asks what a new study on motherhood can tell us about how expectations and experiences are configured in harsher neoliberal conditions and digital landscapes that can empower and individually and experientially, undermine. In this first chapter, the context against which contemporary motherhood is experienced is compared to the earlier study. This chapter will also provide the theoretical and conceptual framework for the book through a focus on definitions and debates around motherhood and narrative construction, gender, and contextual, structural factors. The methodological details of the two qualitative longitudinal studies (which use the same research design) on transition to first-time motherhood are outlined in this chapter, setting the scene for the data presented in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. The chapter asks if it has ever been a more challenging time to be a woman who is also a mother.

I argue that moral intuitions are guided by social heuristics, which are not distinctive from other heuristics in the adaptive toolbox. One and the same heuristic can solve problems that we call moral and those we do not. That perspective helps explain the processes underlying moral intuition rather than taking it as an unexplained primitive. While moral psychologists debate over whether our moral sense is reflective and rational, as in Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory, or intuitive and nonrational, as in Jonathan Haidt’s theory, I believe that any assumed opposition and ranking is a misleading start. Both intuition and deliberation are involved in moral behavior, as they are in decision-making in general. The result of deliberation may become automized over a lifetime or generations, or intuitive judgments may be justified post hoc. If Darwin is right that the function of morality is to create and maintain the coherence of groups, then social heuristics are the tools towards that goal. This adaptive view explains apparent systematic inconsistencies in moral behavior and takes the phenomenon of moral luck seriously. Virtue is found not only in people, but also in environments.

Why do successive education reforms within a country resonate with familiar assumptions about educational goals, society, class, and state, even at moments of radical change? Repeating cultural narratives sustain continuities within institutional change processes, by influencing how new ideas are interpreted, how interest groups express preferences, and how institutional norms shape political processes. Repeating narratives make it more likely for some types of reforms to be implemented and sustained than others. This chapter develops a theoretical model suggesting how cultural narratives are transmitted across time and an empirical method for assessing cross-national differences in cultural narratives. Each country has a distinctive “cultural constraint,” or a set of cultural symbols and narratives, that appears in a nation’s literary corpus. Writers collectively contribute to this body of cultural tropes; despite individual fluctuations, they largely reproduce the master narratives of their countries. Computational linguistic processes allow us to observe empirical differences between British and Danish cultural depictions of education in 1,084 works of fiction from 1700 to 1920. Cultural narratives do not determine specific outcomes, as tropes must be activated in political struggles. Yet we can show how significant cross-national differences in literary images of education resonate with British and Danish educational trajectories.

In “Francis and Dominic: Persons, Patterns, and the Trinity,” Eleonore Stump introduces the term “Franciscan knowledge” for a type of nonpropositional knowledge that includes certain sorts of self-knowledge; knowing music (without being able to identify it); knowledge of other persons through second-person experience and narratives; and, perhaps most importantly, knowledge of God (2000). In Wandering in Darkness (2010), Stump appeals to Franciscan knowledge in her response to the problem of evil, and a number of other philosophers (e.g., Benton, Duncan, and Efird, and Worsley) interact with Stump’s account in their accounts of nonpropositional knowledge, interpersonal knowledge, and knowledge of God. This chapter explains the notion of Franciscan knowledge and discusses some of the ways it has influenced recent work in the philosophy of religion. Since the claim that there is irreducibly nonpropositional knowledge is controversial, the chapter also defends the very existence of Franciscan knowledge.

This chapter examines narrative management as a core function of the police in Vietnam, tracing how this function evolved as an intimate expression of the regime’s politics and ideologies. Narrative management here refers to efforts by policing institutions to guide public opinion in accordance with the vision set forth by the party-state—a practice with a long tradition in socialist regimes. While much has been written about the hard measures of coercion, crackdowns, and punishment that are prevalent in authoritarian policing (and, arguably, in all policing), less is known about the soft public relations campaigns that play a sizable role in the work of Vietnamese policing institutions. The close relationship between the party-state, police, and civil society, down to the household and individual levels, is multifaceted. As analyzed herein, while police work on ideological education is deeply rooted in a desire to control civil society, the Vietnamese police’s grassroots service throughout the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that a close state–society relationship can also be used for a productive end when the state acts with legitimacy and transparency.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the role of social incentives, specifically how changes in the social environment such as esteem, identity, cultural social norms, and social reference points affect individuals' behaviours. We will look into the role of envy and guilt as behavioural motivators, as well as the role of social norms as external signals and constraints on people's behaviours. Human interaction produces norms and social divisions, which create disutility or utility (oppositional or transgressive norms). Social norms are informal rules that govern behaviour in society and include shared social values, beliefs, attitudes, and/or behaviours. Social incentives are defined as "extraneous non-monetary stimuli" that influence an individual's perceived marginal benefit or cost of effort. Social incentives operate through social norms, social image, herd or social multiplier effects, narratives and can be strengthened through praise, attention, esteem, sense of belonging, feelings of meaning and loyalty. Stigma and status both are part of what we can define more widely as ‘esteem’, and can be both a positive or negative, and influence behaviour very much like a price in a market.