In this introductory chapter, Lebow and Norman identify the Weimar Republic and its collapse as the paradigmatic historical example shaping political thinking about fragility and robustness in the postwar world. It spells out the volume’s analytical focus on Weimar lessons in comparative perspective and identifies its theoretical starting points in a broader scholarly field concerned with the role of historical analogies in politics.

The Hippocratic treatise Diseases 4 is well known for explaining corporeal processes through vivid analogies with plants, cupping glasses, bronze vessels, swirling wine sediment, coagulating cheese, and blocked oil flasks. Scholars have often applied a heuristic dichotomy to these arguments, evaluating whether they are “mechanistic” (i.e., rely solely on recognizable physical forces) or “vitalistic” (i.e., attribute special capacities to living tissues and parts). Comparisons to implements tend to line up on the former side, while plant analogies support the latter. Rather than focus on delineating these two types of explanations, this chapter emphasizes that the author draws both sets of comparative objects from the therapies, implements, and techniques that a physician would have either administered to the body or encountered in the more general practice of medicine. Whether comparing the attractive capacity of the four inner “springs” (head, heart, gallbladder, spleen) to medicinal plants drawing up particular nutriment from the soil, or likening these same springs to bronze vessels, Diseases 4 amalgamates medical tools and the bodies that they treat. Its view of corporeality therefore emerges at the physical and conceptual interface between flesh and the therapeutic technologies that affect it, as the body absorbs and enfolds medical tools and substances.

As learners of negotiation, the first step to overcome the blocking of our advance is to become aware of our limited understanding, know-how, and/or thinking. This is not a pleasant experience. Plato linked it to a “torpedo’s shock.” Such a moment of aporia, however, is necessary for us to realize the need to “flip the coin”: i.e. to look at the other, opposite site of what we already know to be true to complete our understanding, know-how, and/or thinking.

This chapter charts courses through a period roughly demarcated by the 1850s, at one end, and the 1930s at the other. It surveys ways in which hearing was treated both as a physiological and as an aesthetic object, and how these approaches converged with and diverged with one another. The chapter shows how nineteenth-century sense-physiology anticipates theories of language advanced early in the twentieth century by Ferdinand de Saussure and its attendant ‘sound-sense dialectic.’ This dialectic forms the crux of competing prospectuses for poetry advanced on either side of the turn of the century by figures as otherwise diverse as Grant Allen, Arthur Symons, T. E. Hulme, R. C. Trevelyan, Robert Graves, T. S. Eliot and James Weldon Johnson. Vernon Lee’s ‘physiological aesthetics’ traces one set of relations between words and recollections; another set features in Henry James’ prefaces to the New York Edition of his works, the pre-eminent statement on fictional aesthetics of their period. Drama is considered via its relation with the voice, as theorised by Yeats and in acting theory. Finally, this voice is considered as it features in the ‘gestural’ theory of language advanced by Richard Paget, and in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Chapter 2 – Sense-making analysis – discusses the study’s theoretical and methodological foundations from the perspective of dialogical communication theory and the literature on sense-making resources. The chapter discusses the roles of narratives, framing, categorization and metaphors in sense-making. The book’s different empirical materials are described: peer reviewed research literature, policy documents, international media texts and focus group interviews.

Chapter 6 – Transformation Narratives – discusses narratives of transformations that recur throughout our data sets. We discuss five major ways of conceptualising transformation: as a journey, a building process, a war, co-creation and recuperation. The chapter argues that it is important to unravel core narratives, as they signal different overarching structures in sense-making, connoting different insights into how to address societal challenges.