The relationship between democracy and sustainability is a contentious one. Yet diverse groups of citizens need to be engaged in the design and implementation of policies and actions across all scales and sectors for them to succeed and be socially acceptable. But how? From protest and mobilisation to participation in policy and the creation of new spaces of citizen engagement through citizens’ assemblies and the like, governments, businesses, cities and civil society actors are all grappling with the challenge of how best to engage citizens in addressing a series of threats to global sustainability but with uneven capacity to do so. In terms of transforming the democratic state, the chapter engages with the literature on ecological democracy and explores the idea that deepening democracy would extend to democratic control over the economy for the common good. In practice, this might imply expanded spaces and scope for deliberation over plural pathways to sustainability and the use of deliberative and inclusive policymaking processes such as standing panels of citizens, regular polling, multi-criteria mapping and citizens’ assemblies and juries. To really deepen democracy and open the state up would mean including issues of core state interest that are currently off limits for debate and not just what are dismissively termed ‘low-political’ issues.

This chapter resolves the problem posed in the previous chapter, namely, the Scotist objection to the instrument doctrine. It argues that of five different strategies, only one solves the problem of coherence, and it is a solution found not only in some of Aquinas’s mature statements on instrumental causality but also in the theology of Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835-1888), who knew the intricate debates about the doctrine after Aquinas’s time and had developed a unique response to the Scotist objection. The chapter defends Scheeben’s view, known as ’extrinsic elevation’, as the way to preserve the coherence of the two claims that God alone is the cause of grace and that Christ’s humanity is an instrumental efficient cause of grace.

This chapter poses the most difficult objection for the instrument doctrine, in particular as Aquinas conceives of it. For Aquinas, a created cause, Christ’s humanity, produces divine effects as an instrumental cause. But the tradition has affirmed that God alone is the cause of grace in the soul, and no created cause can produce grace. John Duns Scotus puts this objection to Aquinas’s account of instrumental causality, and this chapter argues that the criticism appears to succeed. If a created cause participates in the production of grace, as Aquinas argues, then Scotus argues that Aquinas fails to maintain the distinction of natures and powers in Christ basic to Chalcedonian Christology. For Christ’s humanity is taken up into God’s power and brings about the deification of the human person immediately, something only divine power can do. The ground is prepared for a response to this objection in the following chapter.

This chapter is the heart of the book’s analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on Christ’s humanity as the instrument of the divinity. It explores the various details of Aquinas’s account, outlining it in five synthetic propositions. These propositions, taken together, form the instrument doctrine as St. Thomas conceives of it. Various ambiguities in Aquinas’s account are presented for consideration, and the chapter makes some judgments about how best to understand Aquinas in his mature works. The chapter concludes with a section on the relationship of language to reality in Christology and why reduplicative propositions, used in a standard mode of theological analysis in the thirteenth century, can clarify how to understand the instrument doctrine.

The introductory chapter explains and legitimates the approach of the book: why does it make sense to write the long-term (pre)history of democracy as a history of two distinct phenomena – pluralistic participation and individual equality – and of their convergence? Why can it be argued that this convergence was not unavoidable and is not irreversible?

In this chapter the medieval history of political participation is summarised both in more general terms (such as the emergence of the concept of ‘representation’) and in the form of some of the most important individual examples, from Spain, Sicily and Hungary to Scandinavia and England.

The development of institutionalised political participation is shown for nine of the most important early modern European states – or else those, such as Switzerland, that figure prominently in the history of democracy. The focus is on not only the ‘long’ seventeenth century and the ruptures it created but also the general continuities in essentially all early modern states: they all featured some mode of institutionalised central political participation, but it was always geared towards the participation of the top social elites only.

This chapter asks: how did institutionalised political participation, individual equality and, in particular, their fusion survive into and develop during the nineteenth century, and what can we learn from the historical genesis of democracy as a composite of two different elements, as sketched in this book, for the predicament of democracy today?

The book’s conclusion assesses the extent of legalism in Korea and Japan, including other issue areas. It underscores the importance of studying the role of activists and lawyers in catalyzing sociolegal and institutional change. Legalism may take diverse forms, as demonstrated in the comparisons of Korea and Japan. The tobacco liability cases show that legalism is not emerging everywhere. The cases suggest legalistic governance is more likely when support structures for advocacy and legal mobilization exist, opposition is diffuse or weak, and activists sustain all five mechanisms. The conclusion considers what the expanding role of law and courts means for democracy in both countries. It ends on a cautiously optimistic note: the potential for rights realization and participatory channels has grown, especially in Korea. Although challenges in legal mobilization persist, and reform implementation faces human, resource, and attitudinal barriers, activists and lawyers are creatively engaging with legal frameworks in ways that strengthen legalistic regulatory styles.

Chapter 2 outlines the book’s conceptual and theoretical frameworks. It bridges studies of regulatory styles with scholarship on legal and political opportunity structures to detail indicators of legalistic governance, which serve as a guide for the subsequent paired case studies. It also theorizes five causal mechanisms that elucidate how activism contributes to more legalistic governance. Finally, it discusses, in probabilistic terms, the conditions under which activism is more likely to contribute to legalistic modes of governance.

Worldwide, more than 125 countries have enacted legal provisions against disability-based discrimination; such legislation was also a core demand of Japanese and Korean disability rights activism. Despite the rapid diffusion of non discrimination norms, we know less about why their forms vary and how they have affected rights-claiming options. Through a paired comparison of activism surrounding statutes enacted in Korea and Japan in 2007 and 2013, respectively, Chapter 5 shows how advocacy for such legislation and related litigation transformed governance and created legal opportunities. To a greater extent in Korea than in Japan, people with disabilities gained non discrimination rights, mechanisms for redressing discrimination, support from NGOs and state agencies, and the legal tools with which to solidify and expand anti discrimination protections in court and through statutory revisions.

International law is a system of rules, institutions and practices that govern the relations of States with one another. It is designed to distribute resources and solve problems that States identify as relevant for creating order in the world. In a world without a centralised government States use international law and its institutions to generate solutions for emerging and complex issues and problems, such as climate change and terrorism. The effectiveness of international law is often called into question when it fails to stop certain kinds of activities that appear abhorrent to most people from around the world. However, it also manages to resolve and address issues and challenges that would otherwise get ignored without international cooperation. A lot of international law is designed to meaningfully contribute to establishing order. States also use it to legitimise disruptions to global relations.