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.”

This chapter discusses the variety of modernist theatrical practices grouped under the rubric ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ by Martin Esslin in the 1960s and demonstrates that absurdist theatre was a much more politically attuned and transnational phenomenon than commonly acknowledged. Esslin’s original aim was to understand theatrical practices in France that were related to, but stood outside of, the boundaries and timelines of the symbolist and surrealist movements, in particular the work of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, and Jean Genet. The chapter sets French absurdist drama of the 1950s and 1960s in a wider historical context and calls for the better recognition of a global absurdist canon, tracing the blossoming of a new absurdist drama through playwrights including Virgilio Piñera (Cuba), Halide Edib (Turkey), Issam Mahfouz (Lebanon), Osvaldo Dragún (Argentina), Kobo Abe (Japan), Yusuf Idris and Tawfiq al-Hakim (Egypt), and through the contemporary legacies of Beckett’s absurdist model.

This chapter argues that stand-up comedy events are never apolitical. Politics are expressed and embedded not only in the words that are said but also in the production decisions that shape the context in which they are delivered. The Guilty Feminist podcast is used as an example through which to demonstrate this principle. The podcast presents segments of stand-up comedy within an unconventional format: one that has been designed to serve the political aims and principles of its creators. Key creative decisions are interpreted through the stated political philosophy of the podcast’s co-creator and permanent host, Deborah Frances-White. Her intersectional, feminist politics underpin three important aspects of the podcast’s creative policy: the decision to prioritise women and minority performers, an emphasis on collaboration over competition, and a challenge to conventional wisdoms regarding the nature of comic licence.

The details of the example of the ‘murderer at the door’ – as it is commonly, if inaccurately called – are more complicated than most interpreters assume. This chapter is dedicated to the details of the case, many of which surface only in the light of other eighteenth-century versions of the story. Does the would-be murderer know that the person hiding his intended victim knows about his murderous intentions? Why are the options of the person asked about the victim’s hiding place restricted to yes or no, and how would this restriction work in practice? What are the reasons or motives of someone who intends to lie to a would-be murderer? And what are Constant’s ‘intermediate principles’, which he introduces to defuse the problem case? The chapter also explores Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s discussion of the case in his 1798 System of Ethics. Fichte and Kant agree that lying is not a legitimate option; but Fichte is by far the more radical moralist of the two.

Politics is an inevitable feature of organisational life, particularly in large bureaucratic organisations such as hospitals or government departments. Political activities arise when there is a lack of consensus about how an organisation should be managed. They are typically employed to reconcile these divergent interests, which may be the result of competition for resources within the organisation, the pursuit of personal goals by individuals or a high level of uncertainty within the organisation.

This chapter lays out the book’s central thesis that Supreme Court decisions changing previously prevailing interpretations of a mostly unaltered written Constitution represent the historical norm, not an exception. The chapter begins by discussing the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016 and the changes in constitutional doctrine that Scalia, who had pioneered the interpretive methodologies of originalism and textualism, had helped to bring about. The chapter also highlights changes that Scalia had urged but could not persuade a majority of his colleagues to adopt. It describes the political machinations by a Republican Senate majority in the aftermath of Scalia’s death and the similarly partisan maneuvers that resulted in the swift confirmation of a successor to the iconic liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020. Together, these developments helped produce the Court’s current supermajority of six conservative justices (out of nine), including three appointed by Donald Trump, and inaugurated a new era in constitutional history. After sketching this background, the chapter preliminarily sketches some of the book’s most important themes, including that the Supreme Court is a lawmaking institution but one that is constrained by widely shared understandings of the judicial role in ways that legislative lawmakers are not.

This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.

Little attention has been paid to competitive dynamics from a political perspective, despite numerous instances of political competition across cultures and systems. In liberal democratic societies, political competition is legalized, allowing citizens to elect leaders who represent their ideas. Conversely, in totalitarian societies, citizens lack voting rights, and political authority is not challenged through democratic means. However, political competitions still occur among ruling elites, often through purges to seize power. This chapter explores political competition, particularly in totalitarian regimes, where purges eliminate rivals among ruling elites. The collapse of such regimes has marked an evolution toward freedom and equal opportunities for all individuals, regardless of background, which aligns with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Highlighting the lack of research on political competitions from an evolutionary psychology perspective, this chapter underscores the need for future research on human emotions and competitive behaviors in the political arena.

In the Republic, Socrates sets up rational self-rule, archein hautou, as the ideal state, with what we might call rational other-rule as second best (590d3-5). This paper will focus on the role of dialectic in the process of establishing self-rule from two perspectives: an agent having been raised by an educational program under ideal political conditions, focusing on the Republic; and an agent trying to engage in philosophical self-improvement under non-ideal political conditions, focusing on the Hippias Major. This may be seen as a contrast between a top-down and a bottom-up approach to establishing rational self-rule. My thesis is that, in both cases, an intermediate or provisional form of rational self-rule needs to be established in order to achieve full self-rule, and that, in both approaches, the provisional state of rational self-rule shares some important features of the final state of rational self-rule, what we might call wisdom, but these are different features in the two cases.

Chapter 6 highlights a few implications for political legitimacy and the theory of legitimacy that can be derived from some of the key points that I have touched upon in Chapters 4 and 5. The implications include the following: (1) the character of a theory of political legitimacy is at the same time conservative and progressive, albeit more progressive than conservative; (2) the scope of evaluation and judgment that a theory of political legitimacy entails must avoid two dangerous paths: the first one is thinking that it is not possible to produce valid evaluations and judgments of legitimacy, and the second one is evaluating and judging all political situations from one’s own perspective; (3) evidence—that is, what people think and feel—can be called upon and mobilized for the evaluation and judgment of legitimacy; and (4) contemporary politics is especially relevant to the discussion of legitimacy.