The flourishing of the essay as a protean literary form in an age marked by growing interest in essaying systematic knowledge reflects a tension within eighteenth-century empiricism. Two divergent subgenres emerged from this tension. The conversational essay, first, drew upon a Montaignian tradition rooted in scepticism, dialogue, and performative rationality; these essays were associated with a form of pragmatic empiricism at ease with the idea of human knowledge as intersubjectively constituted in the public domain. On the other hand, the systematic essays of the Enlightenment, spurred on by John Locke’s attempt to establish ‘order’ in intellectual inquiry, deployed the essay as an instrument for establishing Universal Truth and what Leibniz termed ‘demonstrative knowledge’. In considering the epistemology of the eighteenth-century essay in Britain, this chapter explores not only how this bifurcated empiricism influenced the development of the essay, but also the ways in which the essay reconstituted empiricism itself.

This chapter explores how the essay, with its unlimited subject matter and the flexibility to address diverse audiences and ideas, provides public intellectuals with an invaluable and effective means of educating and challenging readers. It takes George Orwell as the model of the modern British public intellectual, someone whose interactive development as an intellectual and an essayist was fostered through numerous intellectual periodicals and magazines. It shows how four more recent essayists – Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Tariq Ali, and Mary Beard – adapt the Orwellian approach as polemicist and outsider. In distinct ways, public intellectuals extend and enliven the contemporary public sphere, ensuring that the essay remains critical to the collective exchange of opinion.

In the eyes of other nations, Britain was a colonial, maritime, and mercantile country, whose still strong interests in Europe were expressed largely culturally. This perception made the Enlightenment a broadly recognizable movement, carried on over national boundaries and concerned with ideas such as ‘the modern’, of religious toleration, of progress, of the ‘science of man’ so strongly supported by David Hume, and of human (or rather, white and masculine) dignity. It self-consciously located itself geographically in Europe and chronologically in ‘the modern age’, which, after much debate in the early part of the century, it saw as superior to that of the Greeks and Romans, in spite of their immense cultural legacy, which was shared by all Europeans. Yet in the end, this chapter argues, in spite of a shared ancient legacy, Britain remained pulled in two directions, the colonial and imperial on the one hand, and the European on the other.

Chapter 2 examines the capacities of citizens in light of what deliberative democracy seems to require of them. Skeptical survey researchers and psychologists think these capacities are conspicuously lacking and that what we see instead is widespread incapacity to make any sort of reasoned choice. And even when choices are made, they are under the influence of motivated reasoning that seeks evidence only to confirm existing positions that people hold and all kinds of biases that produce polarization. Thus we cannot expect more of democracy than existing electoral processes supply. Extreme skeptics suggest we should not expect even this and so recommend we dispense with democracy instead. We look at the skeptics’ charges and show in a reading of the available evidence why we think they are mistaken. We sketch a deliberative psychology that understands citizen competence and motivations as variables that can be invoked if the circumstances are right and so make essential contributions to countering the diabolical soundscape. We can explore these ideas in the context of deliberative forums, interpersonal networks, and the broader public sphere.

While it is common to speak of the crisis of democracy, we prefer to speak of the multiplicity of diabolical challenges that democracy now confronts. Challenges are diabolical when they have multiple dimensions and are potentially catastrophic, subtle, and interconnected. But crucially, there are clever operators who have figured out how to prosper in this environment. The challenges include a problematic political soundscape, right-wing populism, extremism, denial, and authoritarianism, all of which are the subjects of subsequent chapters. We sketch the beginnings of a deliberative response to these challenges, which puts citizens at the center, while recognizing the importance of attending to elites. A deliberative constraint can restrict what elite operators can do. We set out the essential elements of deliberative democracy and how we understand its practice, especially in deliberative systems and the public sphere.

This chapter introduces a self-development theory of the nonprofit sector, informed by alternative development and basic-needs theory. The theory presented in this chapter suggests that nonprofit law plays a role in creating a legal framework that allows people to participate in the improvement of their own lives and communities through self-development. With a nonprofit-friendly legal environment in place, individuals have greater economic incentive to work within their own communities to create organizations that help individuals, families, and communities to meet their own needs. This paradigm stands in contrast to views of nonprofit organizations as facilitators of rescuing behavior, in which one group of people seeks to uplift another. Based on cases in Nigeria and South Africa, this paper describes the role and importance of nonprofits in facilitating the development of individuals, institutions, and communities from within.

When Comparative Politics emerged in the early 1960s, drawing on functionalist theory, the concept of political culture featured prominently in how political development might be best studied. In the prevailing functionalist perspective, political culture was defined as the sum of the views, values, and attitudes people hold towards the political system. Over time, with the decline of functionalism and the rise of positivist theory, political culture was marginalized and reduced to data collected (e.g., in interview surveys). Drawing conclusions about national political cultures using such instruments, however, is problematic. Following influences from hermeneutics, the concept has since been reinvented with a focus on discourse and empowerment. This involves accepting the public sphere as the forum for political discourse, and a recognition of public opinion as a driving force in shaping and changing political culture. This chapter traces the evolution of the study of political culture in mainstream Comparative Politics. It emphasizes the role that political culture has been playing as explanatory variable in the study of both development and democratization. Western countries have viewed themselves as embarked on a mission to disseminate progressive values to the rest of the world, arguing in their approach to political culture in Africa that reforms are needed. Originally conceived as “traditional”, the initial calls were to make it “civic”. The same premise has underpinned more recent research on democratization. In placing research on African political culture in its wider Comparative Politics context, the chapter highlights why approaching it through Western eyes has its limits. More attention needs to be paid not only to the values that underpin political culture in Africa but also to the voice of African political scientists and their interpretation of the success and failure of democratization on the continent.

The Neapolitan string virtuosi who moved to Paris were among the protagonists of the early private and public concert series. The editorial success of Michele Mascitti – nephew and student of Pietro Marchitelli – is paradigmatic of the growing influence of the “public sphere”: revenues from his nine collections of sonatas allowed Mascitti to live for many years as a freelance musician while having a crucial part in the formation of a modern public. Together with Mascitti, Giovanni Antonio Guido, a student of Cailò in Naples, participated to the weekly soirées organized at the residence of the Crozat brothers in Paris. Guido’s presence at these splendid gatherings of the finest intellectuals and artists is attested by his portrait sketched by Antoine Watteau, also a protegé of the Crozat family, during one of these events. The aesthetic approach and performance practice imported in France by the Neapolitan string virtuosi became à la mode in the 1720s. The mixture of the Italian virtuosic approach with the French instrumental tradition that is found in the later sonatas by Mascitti and Guido was typical of the so-called goûts réunis, the “reunited tastes” of French and Italian music that would end up dominating the European scene in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

In the century of nationalism, the House of Habsburg ruled over a vast territory in East Central Europe. Second only to Russia in size on the European continent, the Habsburg lands stretched from the Alps to the foothills of the eastern Carpathians and from the shores of the Adriatic to the Sudetes mountain range on the border with Saxony. The core of this territory in the Alps, corresponding roughly to what is today Austria and Slovenia, had been ruled by the Habsburgs from the High Middle Ages. In 1526, the Habsburgs made a decisive step to become East Central Europe’s leading power by acquiring the Bohemian and the Hungarian crowns. After one and a half centuries of warfare against the Ottoman Empire, the long eighteenth century witnessed the Habsburgs’ decisive eastern expansion. First, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they reconquered central Hungary and Transylvania from the Ottomans.

This chapter offers a critical analysis of how scholars have interpreted the relationship between eighteenth-century cultural practice and revolutionary politics, circa 1760 to 1825. The chapter first surveys and classifies eighteenth century cultural practice, identifying three main types: the social arts, practices of everyday life, and fine arts. The bulk of the essay then reflects on three major paradigms for interpreting how these forms of culture interacted with revolutionary politics. The dominant approach, exemplified by literature on the “bourgeois public sphere,” argues that eighteenth-century culture prefigured or lay the groundwork for revolutionary politics. Other scholars, particularly those working on the fine arts in the revolutionary era, have emphasized how cultural practices were transformed by revolutionary politics. A third, newer approach emphasizes the autonomy of cultural practice. Scholars working within this paradigm argue that cultural change was itself a form of revolution and that culture acted as an independent container for new political practices during the revolutionary era. This paradigm points the way to a broader, more inclusive account of revolution in this period. The essay covers the historiographies of eighteenth-century culture and revolutionary politics in North America, Europe (especially France and the Netherlands), and Latin America (especially Peru).

The Introduction begins by outlining the generative tension of the early modern public sphere: debate and defamation, free speech and false news, went hand in hand. Libels were often vicious and violent. Yet they were also essential to England’s emerging media ecosystem. Drawing from public sphere theory, the first main section conceptualizes the viral circulation of libels across speech, manuscript, print, and performance; and it makes the case that theater – urban and provincial, amateur and professional alike – was central to their multimedia careers. The next section follows the intertwined semantic, cultural, and legal histories of libel from the 1550s to the early 1600s. In the process, it identifies a clear and enduring paradigm of libel: as anonymous, extralegal accusation. The third section returns to theater history, tracing the same logic to the core of efforts to regulate the stage. After surveying the relevant scholarship on dramatic censorship, it pins the theater’s proximity to libeling on the vexed question of audience interpretation. The Introduction finally locates the late Elizabethan scenes of libel in the context of the anxious years of the long 1590s (1588–1603).

The epilogue situates the foregoing chapters in a longer theater history, tracing two early Stuart scenes of libel – in the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (c.1605) and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) – to their late Elizabethan roots. In Nobody and Somebody, the titular characters reenact in a comic vein Heywood’s story of Jane Shore and Richard III from Edward IV. At once a folk hero and a figure for libel, Nobody plays on his constitutive anonymity to affiliate himself with the same seditious, defamatory talk of which he is falsely accused. The Roman Actor likewise revises the paradigm of libel formulated by its dramatic predecessor, in this case Jonson’s Poetaster. In the play’s metatheatrical opening scenes, the actor Paris rehearses Jonsonian arguments to vindicate himself from accusations of libel leveled by the corrupt tribune and spy, Aretinus. Yet the rest of Massinger’s play belies Paris’s defense of playing, laying bare the unresolved ironies at the heart of Jonson’s satirical project. Finally, the epilogue returns in closing to the constitutive tensions – between protest and threat, free speech and false news – that animated the early modern public sphere.

The foundations of the separation of powers principle and those of antitrust present an actual and renewed interest, as we are currently witnessing a resurgence of non-economic concerns in the antitrust literature. This observation especially relates to the United States, but many issues raised in this country are also relevant in other jurisdictions. Several key provisions of antitrust national laws or European treaties are rather vague, leaving broad room for interpretation, and have remained unchanged in substance for decades, which may open a connection between the political content of antitrust viewed historically and prospectively; to a certain extent, the ball is now in the court of agencies and courts. The concentration of power in the digital era constitutes the starting point of the analysis, which continues with the observation that some digital platforms have significant political power and ends with the idea that such platforms have become important or even fundamental parts of the digital infrastructure of democracy.

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.