Rousseau has long been understood as a theorist of inequality – though attention to Rousseau has been largely directed to his 1754 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. While scholars are, naturally, right to address this central work, they would do well to consider what can be learned from other works, including The Social Contract (1762). In this text, readers often neglect a passage that Rousseau himself highlights: that “the end of every system of legislation … comes down to the following two principal objects, freedom and equality” (II.11). This chapter explores Rousseau’s understanding of freedom and equality with special attention to the latter as manifested in the problem of economic inequality. In doing so, further, it details how his thinking about freedom and equality were shaped by the ancient sources of Plato and Plutarch – his two favorite ancient thinkers. In both ancient sources, it turns out that economic equality is essential to achieving either political freedom or civil harmony. This essay, thus, not only details the centrality of economic equality to Rousseau’s political thought but also provides a serious account of how he came to this position.

This chapter traces the emergence of a new kind of official masculinity which was not rooted in the household. In the mid-seventeenth century, some lawyers attempted unsuccessfully to exclude women from officeholding entirely by arguing that gender trumped householder status as a qualification for office. Also in the mid-seventeenth century, the new system of indirect excise taxation produced a new kind of officer: young, unmarried, and always male. Excisemen were derided for lacking the independence of traditional householder officers and their wives (if they did marry) were prohibited from taking part in official business. This complete separation of office and household began to be mirrored by London constables and watchmen in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Householders chosen to hold these offices increasingly hired deputies to serve for them, and deputies tended to be poorer than their principals. Many were either younger or older than middle-age and often unmarried. In the course of working and socialising together year after year, these deputies developed a culture of fraternal masculinity based on solidarity, drinking, misogyny, and violence.

Harsh migration enforcement has sparked courageous humanitarian reactions and hundreds of criminal prosecutions. Such prosecutions ostensibly seek to vindicate the power of governments to control nation-state borders. But they seem, ironically, to have achieved the opposite: They have vindicated, reinvigorated – and even inspired new forms of – basic human rights. This chapter examines three cases: Cédric Herrou, a French olive farmer who was criminally tried for assisting unauthorized migrants in France; German “rescue” ship captains, Carola Rackete and Pia Klemp, prosecuted for rescuing distressed migrants at sea and bringing them to Lampedusa, Italy; and Scott Warren, prosecuted after allegedly providing food, water, beds, and clean clothes to undocumented immigrants in Arizona. The verdict in Herrou’s case was overturned because fraternity was recognized as a constitutional value. Captains Klemp and Rackete appealed to the ideal of “solidarity.” Warren’s attorney intoned to the jury, “Being a good Samaritan is not against the law ….” These encounters implicate deep questions of constitutional legitimacy and migrant rights, involving the presence of migrants with definable – if not yet enforceable – rights claims. They illustrate a dynamic process of mediating tensions between “sovereign” power and human rights, an essential revitalizing project for constitutional democracy and human rights law.

The second chapter of Part II treats the first episode in the Narrative of the Transjordanian Tribes. The episode depicts two of Israel’s twelve tribes petitioning Moses to be allowed to occupy territories on the eastern side of the Jordan; their petition incenses Moses, and in responding to his outrage, the tribes affirm the bipartite basis for their affiliation with the nation: kinship and obedience.

This chapter explores the interplay between political brotherhood and ‘natural’ brotherhood in broader public discourses on civil war experience. It brings into the discussion several key fictional and filmic renderings of the Korean War.

Freemasonry emerged in London in the late 1710s as a form of sociability committed to tolerant, cosmopolitan constitutionalism of a characteristically Enlightenment cast. Welcoming to Jews and Catholics, and men of varying social class, the lodges were also frequented by many, quite probably a majority of, male theatre professionals. Among the famous actors, managers and dramatists, the masons counted George Lillo. My contention is that it is no accident that all the most important contributors to domestic tragedy were masons (Hill, Lillo, Moore) but that their generic innovations crafted a genre peculiarly able to represent the shocks of commercial capital and colonial trade on individuals sutured from traditional forms of familial and kinship network and support. The fraternal assistance of the lodge stood as an alternative source of succour in a hostile world, even if it often failed to rescue its fallen brothers. Lillo wrote The Tragedy of George Barnwell in the same year he joined a lodge, and his drama symbolically enacts the challenges and comforts of masonic fraternity.