The brief coda reflects on how the model developed in this book can be applied to later premodern societies.

The conclusion draws together the findings of the book’s fifteen analytical chapters and is divided into six sections. Each section places several individual chapters in conversation with one another. First, we reflect on how the authors engaged with stability, across the four forms we developed in the introductory chapter, before the second section does the same regarding re/politicization. Third, we engage with the running theme throughout the book that stability and re/politicization are not dichotomous but rather interact, and indeed, one can be pursued to achieve the other. Fourth, we explore manifestations of depoliticization encountered within the book and find that, in practice, many regimes pursuing stability are less depoliticized than often assumed. Fifth, we bring in the importance of temporality to our studies, before finally offering concluding remarks on the book’s arguments and suggesting avenues for future research. Throughout the volume, we have presented the antagonism between stability and re/politicization in a deliberately flexible manner, and we hope others will find it – as well as our four novel forms of each approach – to be useful in their own analyses.

The introductory chapter details what is gained by using the concept of social role when studying power relations in Late Antiquity and how it ties in well with ancient ideas about why people act in the way they do. It shows how Late Antique thought and practice conceptualized social hierarchies in moral terms and argues that precisely the expectation that social and moral hierarchies coincide injects the dynamism in social interactions that this book chronicles. It also underscores that society was conceived of as held together by justice and shows how this was intertwined with hierarchical conceptions of society and the cosmos.

This introductory chapter establishes the two prevalent framings of climate governance and politics, namely an antagonism between the pursuit of stability and of re/politicization. The chapter’s first section, on stability, introduces to the field four novel understandings of stability: as the status quo, as engineering lock-in, as policy lock-in, and as long-term emissions reduction pathways. Next, re/politicization is explored, and we likewise develop four forms of re/politicization: as broader sociopolitical change, as partisan competition, as discourse, and as scholarly praxis. In each of the two sections, we illustrate our four novel forms with examples from the book. Finally, the chapter’s concluding section provides an overview of the five thematic parts that structure the volume, which are Movement Politics, Political Economy, Comparative Politics, Global Politics, and Reflections.

This chapter argues that petitions have hitherto been too narrowly studied as bureaucratic acts defined by Roman law and shifts attention to informal petitions, whereby any superior could be petitioned even when they did not have formal power, and to oral petitions, whereby immediate justice was demanded. Petitions then appear as reflecting a culture of entreaty characteristic for a hierarchical society.

Minoritized groups are often portrayed as “hard to reach” by policymakers yet face myriad obstacles in undertaking – and, in particular, shaping – climate action. For many minoritized communities, the pursuit of climate justice is inherently intertwined with achieving other goals, such as economic, gender, and/or social justice. In this chapter, we examine the experiences of climate actors from Muslim communities in the UK, finding that the politicization of climate action may shape the assumptions of policymakers behind the scenes, generating more effective and inclusive policy outputs. However, this strategy faces complex power inequalities, as Muslims face structural inequalities that hinder, or even threaten, involvement. Muslim communities face a higher probability of arrest when participating in political action, alongside worse conditions following such an arrest. Our interviewees tell us that a wider pursuit of societal justice and alternative forms of politicization beyond protests are integral to achieving more representative and effective climate action for Muslim communities.

The sense of duty is a virtue of caring, not directly about the good, or even about justice, but about doing one’s duty. Insofar as doing what one takes to be one’s duty is in fact to do what is good, the sense of duty functions as a backup for the more direct virtues of caring – generosity, compassion, and truthfulness, as well as justice. Being a virtue of caring, the sense of duty can be expressed in emotions: a feeling of satisfaction in having done one’s duties or feelings of guilt or shame at having neglected them. The sense of duty can vary, emotionally, according to how one conceives the authoritative source of duty, on a spectrum from reverence, through respect, to resentful acceptance. Example of the extremes beyond the spectrum are some Hebrew psalmists’ delight in the law of God and the contempt of the utter moral cynic.

Chapter 9 draws on the evidence outlined earlier in the book to evaluate a range of possible legal interventions. Structured according to the five potential equality objectives outlined earlier, the measures include steps to increase the visibility of people with disfigurements in daily life, methods of motivating employers to become appearance-inclusive and changes to influential institutions outside the employment context. They also include a range of legislative reforms to replace the severe disfigurement provision with a better remedial mechanism, such as the creation of a new protected characteristic of disfigurement or the reformulation of the definition of disability.

Leibniz defends teleology or purposive activity against the overly mechanical worldview of Thomas Hobbes, and develops an idea of spontaneity as self-originating action irreducible to mere mechanistic reaction. He links free activity with justice as the enabling conditions for the exercise of freedom, and with the progressive deployment of individual and collective powers. He thus sets the agenda for subsequent idealism, which reconfigures the idea of spontaneity and reflects on the harmonisation of diverse individual efforts as a problem of ongoing juridical reform

Educators within contemporary Australian educational settings are increasingly being called on to enact their pedagogy in multicultural classrooms, yet pedagogies remain oriented towards a narrow learner cohort. Meaningful inclusion of culturally and religiously diverse learners not only focuses on what is being taught or what knowledge is privileged, but is concerned with how it is taught and from whose perspective. Importantly, it prioritises what learners bring to educational settings – their diverse knowledge(s), languages, values and beliefs; all of which are embedded in their ways of knowing, being and doing informed by their cultural and religious traditions. This chapter aims to support educators in enacting culturally responsive pedagogy, including consideration of learners’ world views, knowledge(s) and ways of knowing, as well as respect for identities and backgrounds as meaningful sources for optimal learning, while simultaneously holding high expectations of them all. Educators will be challenged to examine epistemological and pedagogical diversity in HASS teaching and learning, to further develop learners’ knowledge, values and beliefs towards engaged and informed citizenship.

In acts that are properly acts of justice (rather than, say, compassion or generosity), what is good for people is sought under the mediating description what is due them. The virtue of justice is the generalized concern that people get what is due them. Objective justice is the property of states of affairs, actions, institutions, and personal relationships in which people tend to get what is due them. So the virtue of justice is the concern that such objects have that property. When is some good or evil due a person? It is due on at least eight kinds of basis: desert, status, need, current possession, agreement, legality, parity, and freedom. We appeal to these conditions in justifying justice claims. The person who has the virtue of justice is one who is consistently and intelligently concerned that states of affairs, actions, institutions, and personal relationships be objectively just.

Forgivingness is virtue, a specification of generosity, a disposition to give offenders, especially against oneself, more of good and less of evil than they deserve. It is an interconnected set of sensitivities to features of situations marked by wrongdoing. The forgiving person is responsive to these features in ways that tend to mitigate, eliminate, or forestall anger in the interest of wishing the wrongdoer well and/or of enjoying a positive and harmonious relationship with him or her. The chief considerations favoring forgiveness are (1) the offender’s repentance, (2) excuses for the offender, (3) the offender’s suffering, (4) moral commonality with the offender, and (5) relationship to the offender.

This chapter explores the priestly theology of space within the tabernacle and how this expands to the holy land where Israel will dwell. The tabernacle and God’s abiding presence are the center of all holiness for the priestly authors. Only ordained priests may approach his holiness. The consecration of the altar is a high point in the theology of Leviticus and has an impact on its theology of the land and the Jubilee.

This chapter excavates a conception of autonomy from Olympiodorus’ (495–570) commentary on Plato’s Gorgias. For Olympiodorus, the subject of the dialogue is the ethical principles that lead to constitutional happiness, i.e., the well-being of one who exhibits a proper interior ‘constitution’, psychic arrangement or order. Such a person knows himself insofar as he identifies himself with the rational soul and rules himself accordingly. The principal interlocutors in the dialogue falter and stumble primarily because they do not know themselves, and this self-ignorance renders them heteronomic. The present essay therefore detects in Olympiodorus’ commentary an insistence on self-knowledge as the archaeological ground upon which an autonomous human life is based. By reading the pages of the Gorgias, Olympiodorus aspires to draw forth for his students a notion of freedom that is truly human. This chapter attends to Olympiodorus’ commentary with the hope of accomplishing a similar outcome.

This chapter addresses the question of how to understand Socrates’ willingness to obey the law and accept the death penalty in the Crito, seemingly in contrast to his rebellious attitude towards legal authority in the Apology. Its aim is to show that in submitting to the laws of Athens, Socrates does not betray his own ideal of self-government, in the sense of personal autonomy and freedom, which he explains and defends in several dialogues. However, it argues that Socrates conceives of self-government as the freedom to subject oneself to what used to be an external authority, but in such a way that this authority now becomes an integral part of one’s own moral stance. In order to throw further light on this issue, it also draws upon the discussion of the rule of law in the Statesman, where the notion of self-government similarly plays an important role.

This chapter explores how international law and its legitimacy could be improved and made more aligned with the demands of justice. It focuses on two types of requirements. First, there are the principles and accompanying procedures on the basis of which actors ask their agency (and their rights) to be recognized by international law and its culture of legitimacy. These principles are consent, justification, accountability, consistency, representation and participation, and non-abuse of power. Second, there are the topics around which this quest for the recognition of agency (and rights) takes place. They are better universality of international law, human rights as a benchmark of the legitimacy of sovereignty, compliance/enforcement/accountability, and human rights supported by public goods. These two kinds of requirements have been at the center of the efforts to make international law more inclusive as well as more legitimate, and they need to be taken more seriously in the future.

In this book, I have tried to make sense of legitimacy at the international level, especially in relation to international law. I have paid a lot of attention to international law, in particular aligned with the demands of legitimacy and justice. But international law is only one aspect of the forces and the ecosystem that shape international order. Therefore, alone it cannot engineer the change that the international system requires today. This change has to be part of a more comprehensive approach. Here is not the place to offer a full account of the areas on which research could concentrate in the future to further encourage justice and legitimacy at the international level. However, it is worthwhile to present a general overview of these areas. In particular, three domains offer a possible road map for facilitating a constructive path forward: globalization, emotions and passions in social life, and the geopolitics of tomorrow.