This chapter develops a theory to explain why counterrevolutions emerge and succeed. This movement-centric theory emphasizes the strategies movement leaders embrace, which, more than anything else, define the capacities and interests of the old and new regimes during the post-revolutionary transition. All revolutionary governments enjoy an initial power advantage over the old regime. Whether a counterrevolution emerges depends on how much capacity these old regime forces have left and how much their interests are threatened by revolutionary rule. And whether their counterrevolutions succeed depends on how effectively revolutionaries can preserve their initial capacity through the tumultuous transition. Specifically, the chapter lays out a post-revolutionary “governance trilemma,” which requires new leaders to simultaneously manage the concerns of lingering old regime forces, elites in their coalition, and popular groups who supported the revolution. The chapter then explains how these dynamics differ following two ideal-typical forms of revolution: radical-violent movements and moderate-unarmed movements. Counterrevolutions are less likely to emerge following extreme versions of both movements – because the former lowers counterrevolutionary capacities and the latter lowers their interests in restoration. However, counterrevolutions are more likely to succeed against moderate-unarmed movements, because they establish governments that lack key tools for effectively navigating the governance trilemma.

This chapter draws on the original cross-national dataset of counterrevolutions to examine global patterns and historical trends in counterrevolutionary emergence and success. It begins with a series of statistical analyses that support core elements of the theory. Counterrevolutions are much less likely to topple radical-violent revolutions than moderate-unarmed ones – a finding that holds across two different measures of these types. Subsequent analyses shed light on the mechanisms behind this relationship: loyal armies and powerful foreign sponsors are key to defeating counterrevolution, whereas robust parties matter less. Next, the chapter shows that counterrevolutions are most likely to emerge following revolutions with medium levels of violence, which leave the old regime with both the capacity and interest to launch a challenge. Further, there is little support for four alternative explanations, particularly when it comes to counterrevolutionary success. Next, the chapter evaluates how key events during the post-revolutionary transition (like land reforms and elections) affect the likelihood of counterrevolution. It concludes with an exploration of the decline in counterrevolution since 1900 (followed by an uptick in the last decade), which it traces to a combination of the changing nature of revolution and shifts in the distribution of global power.

The introduction begins by tracing the historical ascent of comparativism, studying how comparison became a privileged tool of knowledge production in conjunction with imperialism. It examines the minute rhetorical operations and common tropes involved in Iran/Türkiye comparisons through an analysis of modern international scholarship on the Shahnameh, a classic verse epic associated with Iranian national identity.

Chapter 5 shows that German housing programs reached a turning point in the mid-1970s. Initially, these programs reinforced the postwar export-oriented growth regime by alleviating housing shortages and creating low-cost housing that limited wage demands and inflation. However, as housing shortages abated, policymakers started criticizing them for contradicting the growth regime by increasing public debt, diverting capital from manufacturing, and fueling inflation. Unlike American policymakers who expanded housing support in response to post-Keynesian challenges, German policymakers began scaling down housing programs. By the late 1980s, they had gradually reduced large-scale rental housing programs. At the same time, they protected homeownership support, including through Chancellor Helmut Kohl's 1986 tax reform, not as a growth strategy but as policies for family support, wealth creation, and old-age security. However, key actors in the German growth regime critiqued homeownership programs for limiting labor mobility, inflating prices, and shifting capital away from manufacturing. For the time being, German politicians prioritized political factors and ignored macroeconomic critiques.

The epilogue broaches the wrangling over Zola’s posthumous fortune: principally, the shifting attitudes that were brought about by his heroic support of Dreyfus, and the energetic debates attending his Pantheonisation. At Zola’s funeral, Anatole France famously described the writer as ‘an ardent idealist’, his speech emblematising a wider effort to recast Zola’s literary career in the gilded light of his sacrifice. This epilogue tackles, then, a supposition only alluded to in earlier chapters: that the positing of Zola as an idealist goes hand in hand with his emergence as an exemplary object of idealisation. Reflecting on Zola’s evolution as a writer, it explores the irresistible pull of biographical destiny as something of an ultimate horizon for our reading of his fiction. To account for idealism in Zola is inevitably, or perhaps especially, it is argued, to grapple with the question of teleology that the Dreyfus Affair imposes.

What is Chinese hip-hop? How is its authenticity negotiated and contested in China? Instead of seeing Chinese hip-hop as a given cultural form that follows a singular trajectory, this chapter conceptualizes it as a precarious cultural formation suspended by competing claims to authenticity and overdetermined by divergent forces, such as the hip-hop communities, the state, and commercial forces. The broadcast of The Rap of China in 2017 was a decisive moment in the massification of hip-hop in China, in which the subcultural genre was domesticated, commercialized, and re-infused with hegemonic ideology. Focusing on the televisual remediation of hip-hop in China, this chapter illuminates how battles for authenticity have been fought out among different actors or groups, how tensions between the ethos and the techne of hip-hop unfold, and how censorship and propaganda imperatives delimit the contours of the genre’s representation to the mass audience. It problematizes the line between “the underground” and the mainstream, while foregrounding the process in which different horizons of hip-hip negotiate with one another, co-shaping what is visible, audible, and commendable. The issues discussed in this chapter will likely remain central to the development and dilemma of Chinese hip–hop in the years to come.

In this chapter, we lay out the basic frame for studying innovation management. To do so, we are going to try to understand why innovation is important for society, for companies, and for individuals, and to do that we take our point of departure in the “urtext” of innovation research, namely Schumpeter’s work on Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy and especially the notion of Creative Destruction. To follow that up, we are going to untangle how innovation management fits within a broader context of capitalism as an economic system, within a particular ideology, and within the operations of the modern corporation.

Religious ideas have been largely absent in the literature on the welfare state. Instead, class-interest based, rational efficiency, and institutional explanations have dominated. The absence of religious ideas is not a peculiarity of welfare state research but is paralleled by a treatment of ideas as ephemeral to politics in general. The introductory chapter reviews the literature on ideas and politics and the literature on the influence of ideas on welfare policy in particular. It shows why ideas could not play a role in the welfare state literature till today and proposes a solution: to integrate ideas into the study of welfare state evolution. The chapter creates an analytical framework for the study of evolving religious ideas and their impact on welfare state formation and reform in Italy and Germany. It engages with the weaknesses and strengths of both welfare state theory and the new ideational turn literature and introduces a theory of ideational competition. The chapter concludes with a short descriptive outline of the book and the following chapters.

In the context of the appalling inter-communal violence and killings of Northern Ireland during the 1970s, Seamus Deane felt dismayed by those who found parallels between that situation and O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy. For Deane, O’Casey’s most famous works subject political ideologies to hostile scrutiny, whilst offering a form of sentimental humanism as the norm of the ‘ordinary’ people. This chapter examines how the views that Deane expressed about O’Casey fitted with Deane’s broader thinking about politics and society, and shows how Deane provided a telling critique that proved influential for O’Casey’s reputation, as well as for Irish literary and cultural studies more widely.

This chapter begins with a critical view of what defines a “cult,” highlighting the subjectivity and often pejorative use of that term. It then reviews the history of the term “cult of personality” while defining it broadly as any cult whose members are held in thrall by an identifiable leader and offering a case example of Sherry Shriner and her “alien reptile cult.” Characteristics of leaders of “personality cults” are then reviewed including charisma, personality traits such as narcissism or psychopathy, and the use of “brainwashing,” “mind control,” or “coercive persuasion” while evidence of psychopathology and personality traits such as the “authoritarian personality” is likewise reviewed for followers. Due to the cross-sectional evidence regarding such characteristics, it remains unclear whether they represent premorbid traits or sequelae of cult involvement. Additionally, it is argued that cult affiliation is more about “match” and “fit” between leaders and followers along with the relevant group dynamics and social conditions that bind them together.

This chapter explores the keju system – the imperial examination system, and Confucianism as essential components of imperial governance and societal structure in China, examining their origins, evolution, and impact on the development of China's imperial system. The keju system, which persisted from 124 bce to 1905 ce, served as an institutional gene that fused Confucian ideology with state governance, thereby solidifying the emperor’s absolute ideological dominance. It established a societal hierarchy and unconditional obedience that suppressed individual rights and paved the way for the introduction of totalitarianism. In contrast, the Church in Western Europe, while influential, preserved a clear separation from state functions.