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.

Once again, teachers are being made into political pawns, where K-12 schools are sites of various culture wars. This chapter frames the contemporary politics of teaching as grappling with the pluralism represented in demographically diverse classrooms. Through historicizing this quest in Gunnar Myrdal’s analysis of the “American dilemma” and unifying creed as panacea, it is possible to identify the enduring social, public, and psychodynamic dimensions of an inclusive ideal. Teachers should be prepared to cultivate deep commitment to republican virtues, in principle, while destigmatizing the identity and ontology of the “other.” A credal deep pluralism can ground classroom praxis for the relational and ethical tensions that forms of difference engender in a democracy.

The right to education is one of the most important rights for children, providing the foundation upon which the child’s future is built. The primary responsibility for ensuring that a child receives an education is that of the parents. That responsibility takes on particular significance in circumstances in which the convictions of the parents, or the child, are at variance with those held by the majority in society. The extent to which parents may insist that the child is educated in a way that conforms to parental values remains contentious. The law on the right to education has sought to find a balance between protecting pluralism and upholding the state’s right to run an efficient education system reflecting society’s shared values. The child’s own right to education has often been neglected in these debates. These concerns are considered with particular attention to home education, British values, religious worship and school uniform. A children’s rights approach would ensure that the children whose education is at stake are placed at the centre of a debate which is often dominated by tensions between parental freedoms and state interests.

Wilson articulates a theory of multilayered representation in which nonprofit organizations play an important role. Applying James Madison’s Federalist No. 10 to the nonprofit sector, the author maintains that nonprofits offer additional layers of representation outside of election cycles and party platforms. Nonprofit organizations enable multilayered representation by reflecting the multidimensional needs and aspirations of individuals and the communities to which they belong. This representation lessens the possibility of faction as nonprofits create a wide and varied range of opportunities for identity development at both the individual and community levels.

Chapter 6 moves from combatting capability shortfalls to expanding people’s capability development through capability gains. In addition to promoting people’s basic capabilities for what they can be and do, we can also promote their potential enhanced capabilities when societies are democratic and reduce social inequality. I argue this calls for envisioning the economy as a capability generation process rather than as income generation process (or preference satisfaction process) as the mainstream sees it. I address the relationship between democracy and capabilities, explain democracy in the social contract tradition as a system of public reason, discuss the nature of collective capabilities in terms of the idea of people forming collective intentions, and argue that this all entails seeing democratic societies as “open political systems” that allow for constant innovation and evolution in how diverse kinds of people settle upon and consent to rules that govern the decision-making practices they find functional to living together. Finally, I close by arguing that this is all inconsistent with the mainstream conception of private subjectivity. I return to the idea of a person’s self-narratives as a personal identity capability and suggest understanding it requires we rethink how subjectivity is socially embodied and socially situated – a topic taken up in Part III.

A review of past research picking out common errors and problems and suggesting a fresh approach dealing with all news media sources, not one at a time, and avoiding speculation, plausible or otherwise. It points out how lack of information has resulted in speculation to fill the gap, some of it implausible, contradictory and highly imaginative, and it argues for a close study of how media and audiences interact to produce media effects.

The book’s closing Chapter 9 on change in economics begins with an examination of the methodological problem of explaining what counts as change, and argues change in economics needs to be explained in terms of economics’ relationships to other disciplines. It argues that economics’ core–periphery structure works to insulate its core from other disciplines’ influences upon it, minimizing their influences. This raises the question: Can other disciplines influence economics’ core and potentially produce change in economics? To investigate this question, the chapter develops an open–closed systems model of disciplinary boundary crossings and argues that economics’ core is only incompletely closed and consequently its adopting other disciplines’ contents can change its interpretation. Using the different forms of relationships between disciplines distinguished in Chapter 7, mainstream economics’ relations to other disciplines are argued to currently be interdisciplinarity, but may also be unstable and can break down. When and under what circumstances? Moving from what happens within social science, two sets of external forces influencing change in economics – change in how research is done and historical changes in social values and social expectations regarding what economics is and should be about – are argued likely to increase boundary crossings between economics and other disciplines, undermine the insularity of its core, and move economics toward being a multidisciplinary, more pluralistic discipline. What would then be especially different about economics would be that individuals are seen as socially embedded and an objective economics is seen as a normative, value-entangled science.

Kuhn’s notion of normal science seemingly advocated doctrinaire science education. This chapter documents this in Kuhn’s writings, and considers the argument from Popper, Feyerabend, and others that Kuhnian normal science would encourage dogmatism and stifle innovation. The chapter argues that it is possible to ameliorate the dogmatism in science education while respecting the necessities of professional training. Modern science can afford to maintain multiple paradigms within a field, producing the benefits of toleration while maintaining the advantages of Kuhnian normal science within each paradigm. Moreover, it is possible to educate each scientist in a pluralist way, fostering innovative thinking. The chapter argues that such pluralism is already present in physics education to a surprising extent and that it can plausibly be extended further.

When grappling with the extremely uncertain world in which they lived, Byzantine people felt able to choose within a pluralistic mixture of practices and a distinctly diverse set of attitudes, theories, and methodologies. Thinking about ‘drugs’ in Byzantine magic thus involves an exploration of one small part of the fluid spectrum of possible responses that were open to people faced with ill health. Although modern scholars may once have considered these responses under such discrete headings as rational, spiritual, and magical, it is now widely recognised that such distinctions are not applicable. What constituted a drug for the Byzantines, how it was thought to work, and how it might be administered seem to have involved a considerably broader conceptual framework and range of practice than our own. Looking at specific examples of the use of ‘therapeutic substances’ in later Byzantine magic may help us understand this difference.

This essay introduces and explores David Tracy’s notion of ‘analogical imagination’ as something that prevents reason, theology, and social life from collapsing ‘into equivocation or else hopeless stupid conflict’. A capacious reflective reason, after Tracy, depends on imaginative habits and sensibilities that stay faithful to the discordant plurality and ambiguity of things while also acknowledging their analogies or ‘similarities-in-difference’. The essay argues that the continuing integrity and scope of Tracyean analogical imagination depends upon understanding that the negations that belong to apparently contrasting ‘dialectical imaginations’ reach ‘all the way down’ within analogical imagination itself. Aided by classic expressions of culture, furthermore, analogical imaginative possibility shades into contingent vision when organised by ‘focal meanings’ to fashion some global sense of the world. This is then brought into dialogue with Richard Kearney’s comparatively recent notion of ‘anatheism’, to help consideration of how Tracyean analogical imagination might maintain its imagination and ana- at the perilous point that it becomes also a matter of religious believing.

This chapter focuses on eclecticism as a face of political moderation. Starting from the definition of eclecticism given by Michel de Montaigne in his Essays, it shows that eclecticism has important implications for the ways in whicb we conceive of our political attachments. It then considers the justification of eclecticism given by Daniel Bell in his book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) and compares it to the eclecticism at the heart of the fusionist movement initiated by Frank Meyer in the 1960s. Finally, it presents eclecticism as a way to avoid any form of “blueprint thinking.”

The last Fifty years have witnessed the rediscovery of Adam Smith’s moral philosophy and an increasing exploration of his conception of himself as a moral philosopher. Recent scholarship has dwelt on the eclectic nature of this thinking. Scholars have suggested that Smith draws on and combines elements drawn from across the ancient and modern schools of philosophy, and that the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment is characterised by an awareness of and response to the fact of moral pluralism. This leaves open the possibility that different modes of moral thinking can issue in incommensurable conclusions: that in some cases there might be no way to decide what is the ‘right’ thing to do. I explore the implications of these readings for Smith’s understanding of the role of philosophy in moral decision-making and, more particularly, what this means for teaching moral philosophy. Smith saw philosophy as a specific and limited activity that formed but a small part of the moral life of the individual. Moreover, Smith cautioned against over-ambition in philosophical thinking and warned of the intellectual, social, and political dangers of too much philosophy.

Before the Glorious Revolution attitudes towards religion’s position in the state had already helped to define the groupings coming to be known as Tories and Whigs that emerged from pro- and anti-court positions during the 1679–1681 exclusion crisis. Both groups had, however, felt threatened by James VII and II’s circumvention of Parliament and the apparent threat to the Anglican monopoly on power represented by his attempts at religious toleration. The overthrow of the monarch in 1688 made plain the power these elites now wielded through the instrument of Parliament.