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 analyzes voluntary compliance in tax contexts, focusing on the importance of procedural justice and tax morale. It also explores conditions under which governments can achieve optimal revenue levels.

Constructivism emphasizes the role of ideas, identities, and norms in shaping state behavior and international politics, as well as the intersubjective and relational nature of these ideational factors. Social relations “make or construct people – ourselves – into the kinds of beings that we are. Conversely, we make the world what it is, by doing what we do with each other and saying what we say to each other” (Onuf, 1998, 59). Constructivism therefore highlights the intangible yet relational aspects of our reality: a world in which the meaning of objects and actions is not fixed but socially constructed through our interactions; states are held together by collective belief and actively participate in the social construction of anarchy. Norms play a significant role by defining appropriate behavior and enabling action by providing a framework for actors to understand and interact with the world.

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.

A theoretical intervention into the challenge of thinking through the complexities of life, in Iran or elsewhere. Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault offer us a model of thinking as a practice. Each attempted one project in which they were thinking systematically about ongoing events, and offering that thinking as a contribution to public understanding. Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to observe the Adolf Eichmann trial, and her contemporaneous writing was published in The New Yorker magazine. Foucault traveled to Iran to observe the early stages of the revolution, and his contemporaneous writing was published (mostly) in the Corriere della Sera newspaper. These two projects have commonly been regarded as their author’s most controversial and have often been ignored or used to denigrate the writer’s entire theoretical oeuvre. Yet they offer compelling models of thinking as a practice that critically links the self and the world. Rescuing theory from the confines of academic specialization restores it, and us, to the possibility of thinking as a practice of freedom, and freedom as the daily possibility of beginning anew.

Chapter 6 examines the Sectarians’ portrait of the end-time destruction of its enemies. The depictions of eschatological violence offer insights into how the Sectarians responded to their present overmatched position while simultaneously affirming their special status. Sectarian texts imagine an imminent end of days that would usher in a period in which all of its enemies – both foreigners and other Jews – would be vanquished in the end-time battle.

This chapter provides general concluding thoughts on the book and insights into larger contributions to the scholarly fields in which it interacts.

This chapter discusses the recent scholarly interest in the history of masculinity in Western society, particularly in early modern Europe, and places the evidence from the Selbstzeugnisse in this context. The texts the men left perform a model of masculinity that emphasizes the men’s power over the market, but also draws on other models of masculinity available in this culture, particularly “patriarchal manhood,” which endows men who successfully found and manage a nuclear household with honorable manhood.

The USA as a prison where Black people are confined inside a barbed wire of stereotypes – an idea memorably articulated by Malcolm X in 1963 – is influentially explored in works by Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, a three-man mini-tradition within prison writing. Circumstances leading to Baraka’s experience of solitary confinement (memorably chronicled in his 1979 poem “AM/TRACK”) are the subject of the first third of the chapter. Etheridge Knight, who in prison forged his own poetic path out of tools provided partly by Malcolm and Baraka, is the subject of the next third. The Knight-inspired Reginald Dwayne Betts, a lawyer-poet who was incarcerated as a teenager, is the focus of the rest of the chapter (except for a brief examination of Baraka’s son, Ras, a significant political leader). All four men articulate secrets of survival in the coils of carceral culture and model alternative ways of imagining justice.

Jamila Michener (Cornell Political Science) asks how we might rethink access to justice as a political movement, not a legal one. She focuses on the “Civil Gideon” movement as a case study in how breaking the lawyers’ monopoly will require a political movement that sees access-to-legal service as part of a larger system of change. Michener’s contribution both further illuminates the right-to-counsel movement – including its weaknesses and (Michener argues) limited impact – and recontextualizes it, describing an essential role for counsel within broader organizing efforts.

In this chapter, the focus shifts from literature and philosophy to visual art, in the Near East (Mesopotamia and surrounding area) and Greece in the eighth to the sixth century bce. The approach centres on correlating the ideas of aggregation and antithesis with recurrent visual patterns and with underlying socio-political factors. In Near Eastern art in this period, aggregation predominates, though with some scope for antithesis. This pattern is similar to Homeric epic; however, Near Eastern patterns (by contrast with Homeric ones) reflect the dominance of kingly power, expressed in accumulation or in subordination. Lions are taken as a salient example: the Near Eastern king either overcomes the lion’s violence or exercises lion-like power. The lion-motif is also sometimes adopted in Archaic Greek art but incorporated in structural groups that do not express kingly power; similarly, in Homer, the lion-motif appears without stress on unitary kingly power. In Greek vase-painting of the Eighth-Seventh Century (the Geometric period), exemplified by a series of artefacts, we also find a predominance of aggregation, though with some antithesis. However, neither of these Greek patterns express unitary, kingly power; and the antithetical patterns especially reflect interactions within the family or local group.

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.

Chapter 8 emphasises that the transition to financialised banking was no easy shift and only saw exceptional profits for a limited amount of time for European banks, if compared to US banks. This challenges accounts of financialisation that see the transition to US investment banking as a straightforward shift towards higher profits compelled by securities markets. The chapter documents the problems and contradictions that banks experienced internally and externally, and the resistance of Deutsche Bankers to the practices of liability management (LM) as they experienced losses of their traditional power and autonomy over banking practices. This chapter thus shows how unlikely it was initially for Deutsche to transform so thoroughly towards US finance. It argues that LM is better understood as a necessity to accommodate the higher costs, risks and logics of banking in US money markets. While the financial calamity of 2008 propelled a rethink of Deutsche’s path, financialised banking is not easily reversed, and German banks continue to struggle with the need to raise USD funding. As such, we should worry about banks’ USD funding gap as key source of vulnerability and risk. While a few select US banks have excelled in mastering LM as a powerful technique to flexibly (mis-) match their balance sheets, everyone else suffers from the fallout of the relentless near crisis mode of global finance.