The primary motivation of members of the ruling class is the quest for power. Power, which enables people to accomplish other goals, is also a desired end in itself. Those who have the greatest desire for power will self-select into activities that allow them to exercise power over others. Participants in the political marketplace will be most successful if they are open to negotiating any offer from other participants, which implies that principled politicians will be at a disadvantage to those who are less principled. In their quest for power, the ruling class seeks stability to prevent challengers from displacing them. Creative destruction, in markets for goods and services and in the political marketplace, works against the elite, so there is a tendency for the economic and political elite to work together to prevent that creative destruction. Unchecked, this tendency can displace progress with stagnation.

This chapter explores Bloomsbury’s engagements with the United States of America between 1900 and 1960. It analyzes the personal and published writings of various members of the group about American art, politics, and culture. While there is no cohesive “Bloomsbury” position on the USA, it at once fascinated and appalled them, from their university days until late in their lives. From Roger Fry’s tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, until his falling out with J. P. Morgan, through the widespread outrage in Britain at the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and on to J. M. Keynes’ role at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and Clive Bell’s 1950s lecture tours, the USA is a constant presence in their lives. Some welcomed the income that writing for American periodicals provided, while privately disdaining their readers. Others engaged with American politicians on the world stage in the wake of two World Wars. None of those who are associated with “Bloomsbury” held static views about the USA. This chapter explores how they refined and revised their opinions about it throughout the course of their lives.

This chapter explores the ways in which folk music and dance were linked to science and politics in the twentieth century. To understand these relationships, the chapter starts with nineteenth-century collections of folksongs, which determine the canon of Bohemian and Moravian folk music until the present day. The traditional forms of folk music recorded by nineteenth-century collectors nearly disappeared in the twentieth century. This decline coincided with the emergence of a prominent folk revival, marked by the proliferation of both amateur and professional folk ensembles in post-1948 communist Czechoslovakia. Throughout the communist era, which lasted until 1989, these endeavors were officially aligned with the Communist Party’s politics and often carried propagandistic undertones. In the late twentieth century, folk music ensembles and practitioners were both influenced by and influencing classical music, as well as, later, rock and jazz, with institutionalized radio broadcasts playing a significant role in this evolution.

This chapter explores the sacral aspects of Achaemenid Persian kingship. It attempts to precisely illuminate the ruler’s relationship with the divine and to demonstrate that the assumption of priestly prerogatives was an important aspect of his office. To better appreciate the political function of religion, this study provides cultural and historical contexts for the royal appropriation of sacral attributes. It further contributes to the recent field of study regarding a possible soteriological dimension to Achaemenid ideology by assessing and synthesising new and previously cited evidence for the existence of such an element, as well as its possible applications.

For Cicero, effective Republican leadership entailed both morality and agency. Morality meant actions that supported the Republic, while agency was required for such actions to be carried out. It is difficult to subsume any theory of leadership under a single word, but I argue that Cicero’s leadership theory can be signified by consilium. This term encapsulates the best mental and moral aspects of leadership as well as the actions and results of acting on behalf of the Republic. It is inherently tied to the practice of Republican politics, a practice that was fundamentally transactional. Cicero used this idea of consilium to support his acceptance of Octavian as an ally against Antony. According to his theory of consilium, Cicero acted correctly against Antony, but Octavian ultimately exposed the flaws in Cicero’s theory when he refused to participate in traditional Republican transactional politics.

This concluding chapter highlights the important contributions that this volume makes in featuring the diversity of forms of leadership in the ancient world and in illustrating how ancient people were asking questions about leadership that we should be asking more often today. It further argues that future research on ancient leadership should help readers to draw connections among the different forms of leadership in the ancient world, especially those readers who are not expert in ancient studies, and also to draw lessons that can help us better lead and better select our leaders. Ancient leadership studies need to play a vital role in helping us understand contemporary leadership as a moral, creative and collaborative art that we can all learn from one another.

This tri-part chapter reports early and modern women’s roles in language contact, transmission and codification, acknowledging limitations of mediated and absent evidence. In contact, English has been both a colonising and colonised language. Women’s surviving Englishes index privilege or vulnerability, and contextualised social values: Standard English mediating ex-slave narratives symbolised tyranny and humanity simultaneously. In corpus studies, surviving correspondence and other genres hint at literate women’s roles in the transmission and development of English; records and roles are more elusive as status falls. Women’s linguistic innovations in changes ‘from below’ may reflect social subordination. Educated women increasingly lead changes ‘from above’, as education and standardisation spread. Women’s codifying texts initially overrepresented their roles as domestic educators, but their rhetorical responses to social inequities occasionally provoke statutory redefinitions of terms such as person and woman.

The civil war in Spain provoked deeper political thinking and involvement for Hemingway, and his political engagement shaped his writing about that war. Hemingway returned to his journalistic roots in the war reportage he wrote on the conflict, and experimented with dramatic form in his only play, The Fifth Column. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he absorbs, adapts, and rejects a romanticized view of the Spanish Civil War that had been developed and promulgated by European and American writers sympathetic (as Hemingway was) to the Spanish Republican cause, stripping from the realities of internecine conflict any potentially consoling significance of political commitment. The Second World War also drew Hemingway as a war correspondent (initially reluctant, he became an enthusiastic witness to, and even participant in, combat in France and Germany). On the basis of his wartime experience, he explored themes of forgiveness and grace in Across the River and into the Trees, a flawed novel whose purgatorial narrative is nevertheless an interesting experiment in fictional form.

This chapter engages with the philosophy of liberation of the Algerian philosopher and anticolonial thinker Malek Bennabi (1905–1973). It argues that Bennabi’s decolonization theory aims at transforming the structural conditions of the colonized that made colonization even possible. The chapter lays out some of the significant aspects of Bennabi’s theory, focusing on how Bennabi conceived the problem of colonialism/colonizability and what answers he attempted to offer to overcome it. The chapter also examines Bennabi’s theory of society and its elementary aspects before explicating Bennabi’s politics of liberation that aims at transforming (and perfecting) both the means of transformation and the humans as its agents. Bennabi’s philosophy of liberation is not predicated on changing the political system or institutions but on the transformation of their sociopsychological infrastructures in which the behaviors of the individuals can be molded, making their social actions engender a different kind of politics.

In chapter two, Helen O’Connell explores the idea of cultural repression as an unintended consequence of a program of language and cultural renewal. Too often, the early Irish Revival promoted the rewards of cultural renewal without at the same time emphasizing the hard work of education and social improvement that such renewal entailed. Revivalists such as Douglas Hyde and D. P. Moran attempted to reverse social and cultural decline by creating resources out of the cheerless forbearance, that is to say, the suffering of ancestors, all in the name of an Ireland free of any debased and debasing foreign culture. Hyde and Moran were dedicated to the Irish language and the importance of elevating Irish culture and Irish industries and both advocated the rejection of deleterious English influences. But each occupied a different position: one was an Anglo-Protestant and the other a Catholic, one minimized politics and ideology, the other amplified both.

This chapter addresses the challenge of socially "starting from scratch" when moving into a community of approximately 150,000 older adults. It suggests that most residents integrate into overlapping place-, leisure-, and faith-based communities, and experience varying levels of psychological sense of community (PSOC). The chapter also explores the few instances where no PSOC was reported and examines the multiple tensions between different groups based on age, type of residency, and political orientation.

In this chapter, Catherine Morris focuses on the Revival as part of a revolutionary era in Irish history, an era that saw the formation of national identity and national institutions. She shows how revival feminism links the freedom of Ireland to the freedom of women by focusing on the artistic work and social and political thought of neglected or under-studied feminists and activists such as Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, and Helena Molony. Prominent in this group of activist feminists was Alice Milligan. Milligan’s writings offer a rich context for grasping the idea that activist feminists shaped the Revival and provided an intersectional political space for women. She provides a way to reconsider the importance of the Irish Revival and to emphasize forgotten or neglected elements of it. Morris’s research on revival feminism, but especially her work on Milligan, becomes itself part of the revivalist continuum of political engagement.

In this chapter, Ben Levitas investigates forms of distance and temporal indeterminacy legible in the latter-day revivalist drama of Marina Carr and Brian Friel. In their works, strategies of distance, of “paratheatricality,” seek not to avoid representation but to link it to more authentic experiences for the audience. Both playwrights create a theatre of hope, a theatre for and of the future that testifies to a continuance of the Revival’s main themes and concerns (particularly with respect to time), despite their rejection of the idealism of so many early revivalist works. Friel and Carr achieve a transposition of dramatic life from the stage to the audience – that is to say, from the stage to actual life – which is, in its turn, captured in the dramatic work. Theatrical words are forms of political action insofar as strategies of performative distance and alienation find their place in dramatic productions that support a “grammar of change.”