This introductory note provides an overview of the book’s original and timely framework with which to debunk Orientalism in how we read (Turkey’s) political history and present. The main argument is that political contestation is driven by shifting alliances for and against a more pluralistic society, not by forever polarized camps.

This chapter introduces an original and timely theoretical toolkit. The purpose: to challenge misleading readings of (Turkey’s) politics as driven by binary contests between “Islamists” vs. “secularists” or “Kurds vs. Turks.” Instead, it introduces an alternative “key”[1] to politics in and beyond Turkey that reads contestation as driven by shifting coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists. This timely contribution to conversations in political science (e.g., comparative politics; political theory) is supplemented by an original analytical-descriptive framework inspired by complex systems thinking in the natural and management sciences. The approach offers a novel methodological framework for capturing causal complexity, in Turkey and other Muslim-majority settings, but also in any political system that is roiled by contending religious and secular nationalisms as well as actors who seek greater pluralism.

Although Milton’s relationship with Ireland will not be as active after 1653 as it had been in the previous fifteen years, Ireland does not entirely disappear from Milton’s work. Ireland is implied in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” and in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Ireland also appears occasionally in Milton’s The History of Britain. Milton’s personal connections to Ireland grow after the Cromwellian conquest. More importantly, though, Milton has been a persistent presence in Ireland – not only as a literary figure, but also as a republican political theorist: He is cited by Irish Republicans in the eighteenth and twentienth centuries, and by Irish authors including W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, Eimear McBride, and more. At the same time, Milton’s insights into pre-Cromwellian Ireland represent a hidden potential for today’s post-Brexit Ireland.

Proposition 67 of Spinoza’s hyper-rationalistic Ethics proudly proclaims that: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death.” Well, in this book I have thought a great deal about existential death, and a good bit about the “noth-ing of the nothing” that such death discloses. Still, I have probably thought of noth-ing less than of death, so Spinoza might have to count me “free” on a technicality. There are, at any rate, worse things than being freed on a technicality. One can be convicted on a technicality, for example, or even convicted by technicality. Indeed, the later Heidegger suggests that we have all been convicted by technicality, technicity, or technologicity, that is, by “the essence of technology.” According to his view of our late modern age of technological enframing, we have all been thrown by Western history into the prison city-state (or polis) of nihilistic technologicity.

This chapter focuses on three case studies from California that provide a laboratory for investigating value conflicts. One case involves feral goats and endemic plants on San Clemente Island. What initially presents as a textbook conflict between sentientism and biocentrism turns out to engage a host of other values. A second case concerns tule elk and cattle in Point Reyes National Seashore. A variety of values are in play, but the primary conflict is between an endangered species and a population of animals that humans use for food. The third case involves Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep and mountain lions. Both of these species have depleted populations and restricted ranges due to human action, and both are under intensive management. Their interests conflict and humans cannot remove themselves from the conflict.

This chapter returns to some central questions about value and valuing, including questions of intrinsic value and the distinction between values and preferences. It argues for value pluralism and discusses specifically prudential values, cultural values, aesthetic values, and natural values. Prudential values are those that relate to an agent’s own interests; cultural values are those that take artifacts or expressions as their objects; aesthetic values include beauty, but also other features such as the sublime; natural values are those that arise from nature’s autonomy. These and other values can conflict. Resources are available for resolving or reducing some value conflicts, but others are at least in practice unresolvable.

This chapter offers a ‘realist’ interpretation of the All-Affected Principle, as a democratic principle for distributing political inclusion. This interpretation aims to capture the AAP’s democratic appeal as a basis for political legitimacy in the pluralist institutional landscape of global governance practice. First, it is argued that the distinctive democratic value of the AAP derives from its concern with institutionally empowering those valuable dimensions of individuals’ political agency that are expressed through participation in the practical performance of global governance functions, alongside those expressed through deliberative or aggregative social ‘choice’ procedures. Second, it is argued that this interpretation of the normative point of the AAP supports a pluralist, rather than a cosmopolitan, institutional approach to democratic inclusion: the sites, types, and constituencies of inclusion should vary across institutional contexts, depending on their real-world consequences for the empowerment of individuals’ capacities to advance their interests through institutional collaboration with others. Third, the chapter elaborates the broader ‘realist’ conceptions of global democracy and political legitimacy that are implied by this interpretation of the AAP, and highlights some advantages and limitations of the realist account.

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.