Over the past decade, ethnographers have increasingly paid attention to the ways in which practices and principles of financial speculation have been adopted in the governance of public and private resources. Those interested in matters of tax and taxation have typically associated speculation with tax evasion and fraud, paying less attention to other ways in which speculative thinking has entered the relationship between the taxpayer and the state. In this chapter, I examine the design and public reception of the Slovak National Receipt Lottery, one example of the way speculative logic has become part of governing the fiscal subject. I show how the Lottery both reflected and challenged established ideas of fiscal citizenship and redistributive justice, triggering novel anxieties about fraud, disclosure, and privacy amongst citizens and policymakers alike. It revealed a profound disconnect between the way policymakers imagined taxpayer behaviour and motivation, and citizens’ own perception of themselves as morally and socially embedded subjects. Finally, I suggest that the National Receipt Lottery is an example of speculative governance: a particular way of administering public life which combines elements of audit culture, behavioural policy, and gamification to generate social goods and shape citizen subjectivities.

The general introduction sets out how the book differs from standard studies of the titular subjects, its objectives, methods and structure. It sets out three main ways in which the concept of religion is defined: normative political religion, descriptive sociological religion and evaluative legal religion. It notes that English law tends to be blind to the forms that religion, and especially Islam, takes and this can cause problems both for the faithful and for wider society. It identifies the theoretical models that shape the book – liberal individualism, multiculturalism and classical pluralism – and how these will be deployed and to what end. It identifies the institutions that will be discussed in relation to British Islam – banks, charities, schools, elections, clans – and sets out the hopes of the book as a whole.