While pointing to poetry’s diminishing role as a public medium and its increasing absence from major addresses by Australian heads of State, this chapter considers how critical discussions of events that have drawn poetry and the State together often focus on the poet’s politics rather than examining the poetry itself. An example of this is Prime Minister John Howard’s invitation to poet Les Murray to assist in drafting a Preamble to the Australian Constitution. Instead, the chapter focuses on the ideology underpinning the relationship between poetry and the State through three examples from different historical periods. It reads Douglas Stewart’s ‘The Silkworms’ as an allegory for the citizens of a modern, industrialised State in the post-war 1950s. It considers Vicki Viidikas’s ‘Weekend in Bombay’ as engaging with progressive liberalism in the 1980s, and Chloe Wilson‘s ‘Ice’ as articulating the spiritual need and helplessness felt by Australians in light of political and environmental crises and perpetual uncertainty.

Chapter 5 begins with a trans-colonial view of the settler empire in the 1870s as a critical decade of consolidating settler sovereignty. At this point of the nineteenth century, the contradictions of imperial liberalism were more clearly evident around the British Empire. British subjecthood was still projected as the glue to imperial citizenship, and the liberal values of freedom and justice still figured as distinctive British virtues. But Britishness itself was increasingly conceived as a racial rather than legal category, especially in the self-governing settler states. Against this backdrop of political shift in the empire, Chapter 5 addresses how Chinese settlers in the Australian colonies practiced everyday citizenship through good neighbourly relations, participation in the public sphere, and interracial domesticity. Some Chinese settlers were British subjects, reflecting the expanding boundaries of British subjecthood in the nineteenth-century empire. However, British subjecthood was not a precondition for everyday citizenship as a practice that was capable of encompassing different peoples and cultures.

Humor functions as a form of civic engagement and social protest in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) and Gertrude Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds (1947), novels that respond to the rise of fascism with complex satire. Despite a common view of Hurston and Stein as either apolitical or conservative, both authors reveal a keen understanding of conversion’s historical legacy in the justification of imperialism. The point both Hurston and Stein make is that humorous incongruity keeps the mind turning and, in the process, forestalls the “settling” of thought into place and “the fixation of belief” associated with totalitarianism. As outsiders for whom conversion—religious or secular—could mean a form of psychic death, they developed distinctive modes of ironic humor involving self-lacerating and self-satirizing critique.

If the press can claim rights different from those guaranteed to every speaker, it must be because we understand the Press Clause to serve constitutional values different from the freedom of speech clause and because these values require distinct forms of rights for their protection. In this short chapter, I explore four distinct constitutional values that at various times have been claimed to be uniquely served by the press: 1) the value of public discourse, 2) the Meiklejohnian value of distributing information, 3) the checking value, and 4) the value of the public sphere. Each of these values yields a different constitutional definition of the “press,” and each might imply a different array of rights that ought to accrue to the press. Although these values are distinct, the press may simultaneously serve one or more of them.

The study of Roman history has always been multilingual, and some of the most important work on the Roman Republic is in German. Today, however, fewer and fewer anglophone students and scholars read German. The result is that major work published in German can go unread and uncited. This new essay by Amy Russell surveys the problem and potential solutions, as well as exploring some of the difficulties of translation from German to English and a glossary of untranslatable terms. It is important that we balance the benefits of multilingual publishing with the need to make Roman history accessible to all. Translation and collaboration are among the methods recommended. Translation from German brings specific problems, as some concepts can be expressed more easily in one language or the other; Russell takes a case study of the term Öffentlichkeit and its similarities to and differences from English phrases such as ‘public space’. Those differences have significantly affected how scholars writing in German and English have conceptualized the public and the political in the Roman Republic. A glossary elucidates a range of other hard-to-translate concepts.

The structure of society is heavily dependent upon its means of producing and distributing information. As its methods of communication change, so does a society. In Europe, for example, the invention of the printing press created what we now call the public sphere. The public sphere, in turn, facilitated the appearance of ‘public opinion’, which made possible wholly new forms of politics and governance, including the democracies we treasure today.

In this chapter, language policies are examined with reference to how they are debated in public discourse. The chapter argues that, like in politics, the space afforded to language policy in conventional media is often narrow, and depends upon how language-related issues invoke broader narratives of identity and ideology, though more significant debating often occurs in new media. The case study examines debates about language policy in Singapore, drawing on examples from traditional media (in the form of letters to the editor) to comments under a Facebook post by a local media outlet.

Throughout the imperial period, but especially in the eighteenth century, the Russian imperial court held a quasi-monopoly on the production, circulation, and conservation of literary artefacts. As the dominant political and economic force in the Russian Empire, it was able to introduce a new type of public sphere by shaping the social mission of literary texts and dictating the norms according to which literature was to be created and judged. This chapter focuses on the reign of Catherine II in order to show how the court promoted social engineering through literature, in particular through the genres of panegyric poetry and neoclassical drama. Celebrated authors in turn benefited from the court’s support. As a result, the imperial palace combined political and aesthetic functions: it introduced a new ceremonial culture and deployed princely patronage to glorify the court’s policies and to impose an absolutist social and aesthetic order.

This chapter shows how Enlightenment theology moved beyond its academic and ecclesiastical contexts to become part of a larger campaign for reform. Advocates of a new system of educating and training clergymen turned to the public sphere and cast their project as a continuation of the Reformation. Intended as a rhetorical strategy to solidify support among a Protestant public that was open to a less stringent and dogmatic Christianity than that of Lutheran Orthodoxy or Pietism, Enlightenment theologians paved the way for a fruitful reinterpretation of the Protestant past. The chapter provides an overview of the theological innovations of Halle theologian Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), which formed the backbone of much of Enlightenment theology (or “Neology” as it is frequently labeled). The chapter shows how public controversies about binding doctrines led to a series of public assertions that had the rhetorical effect of recasting the historical understanding of the Reformation.

This chapter seeks keywords and concepts that will enable us to grasp the contradictory and conflictive globality of the current moment and sharpen our analysis of equally contradictory and conflictive global pasts. In a plea to move beyond equating the global with openness, connection, and integration, I address the role of closure, boundaries, and limits in global history in a wider sense. For this purpose, I explore in an experimental and deliberately open-ended fashion how thinking about global spherescan be utilised fruitfully for the current practice of history writing. The first part explores the radically inclusive yet claustrophobic vision of the globe as a closed sphere from which there is no escape. Building on earlier closed-world and one-world discourses, this thinking gained prominence after the Second World War in the face of the threat of nuclear destruction and environmental degradation. I then move to think about the globe as composed of many bounded spheres – geopolitical but also social. Here, I take central examples from the realm of communication and language and discusses the public sphere as an exclusionary rather than inclusionary figure of thought.

The flourishing of the essay as a protean literary form in an age marked by growing interest in essaying systematic knowledge reflects a tension within eighteenth-century empiricism. Two divergent subgenres emerged from this tension. The conversational essay, first, drew upon a Montaignian tradition rooted in scepticism, dialogue, and performative rationality; these essays were associated with a form of pragmatic empiricism at ease with the idea of human knowledge as intersubjectively constituted in the public domain. On the other hand, the systematic essays of the Enlightenment, spurred on by John Locke’s attempt to establish ‘order’ in intellectual inquiry, deployed the essay as an instrument for establishing Universal Truth and what Leibniz termed ‘demonstrative knowledge’. In considering the epistemology of the eighteenth-century essay in Britain, this chapter explores not only how this bifurcated empiricism influenced the development of the essay, but also the ways in which the essay reconstituted empiricism itself.

This chapter explores how the essay, with its unlimited subject matter and the flexibility to address diverse audiences and ideas, provides public intellectuals with an invaluable and effective means of educating and challenging readers. It takes George Orwell as the model of the modern British public intellectual, someone whose interactive development as an intellectual and an essayist was fostered through numerous intellectual periodicals and magazines. It shows how four more recent essayists – Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Tariq Ali, and Mary Beard – adapt the Orwellian approach as polemicist and outsider. In distinct ways, public intellectuals extend and enliven the contemporary public sphere, ensuring that the essay remains critical to the collective exchange of opinion.

In the eyes of other nations, Britain was a colonial, maritime, and mercantile country, whose still strong interests in Europe were expressed largely culturally. This perception made the Enlightenment a broadly recognizable movement, carried on over national boundaries and concerned with ideas such as ‘the modern’, of religious toleration, of progress, of the ‘science of man’ so strongly supported by David Hume, and of human (or rather, white and masculine) dignity. It self-consciously located itself geographically in Europe and chronologically in ‘the modern age’, which, after much debate in the early part of the century, it saw as superior to that of the Greeks and Romans, in spite of their immense cultural legacy, which was shared by all Europeans. Yet in the end, this chapter argues, in spite of a shared ancient legacy, Britain remained pulled in two directions, the colonial and imperial on the one hand, and the European on the other.

Chapter 2 examines the capacities of citizens in light of what deliberative democracy seems to require of them. Skeptical survey researchers and psychologists think these capacities are conspicuously lacking and that what we see instead is widespread incapacity to make any sort of reasoned choice. And even when choices are made, they are under the influence of motivated reasoning that seeks evidence only to confirm existing positions that people hold and all kinds of biases that produce polarization. Thus we cannot expect more of democracy than existing electoral processes supply. Extreme skeptics suggest we should not expect even this and so recommend we dispense with democracy instead. We look at the skeptics’ charges and show in a reading of the available evidence why we think they are mistaken. We sketch a deliberative psychology that understands citizen competence and motivations as variables that can be invoked if the circumstances are right and so make essential contributions to countering the diabolical soundscape. We can explore these ideas in the context of deliberative forums, interpersonal networks, and the broader public sphere.

While it is common to speak of the crisis of democracy, we prefer to speak of the multiplicity of diabolical challenges that democracy now confronts. Challenges are diabolical when they have multiple dimensions and are potentially catastrophic, subtle, and interconnected. But crucially, there are clever operators who have figured out how to prosper in this environment. The challenges include a problematic political soundscape, right-wing populism, extremism, denial, and authoritarianism, all of which are the subjects of subsequent chapters. We sketch the beginnings of a deliberative response to these challenges, which puts citizens at the center, while recognizing the importance of attending to elites. A deliberative constraint can restrict what elite operators can do. We set out the essential elements of deliberative democracy and how we understand its practice, especially in deliberative systems and the public sphere.

This chapter introduces a self-development theory of the nonprofit sector, informed by alternative development and basic-needs theory. The theory presented in this chapter suggests that nonprofit law plays a role in creating a legal framework that allows people to participate in the improvement of their own lives and communities through self-development. With a nonprofit-friendly legal environment in place, individuals have greater economic incentive to work within their own communities to create organizations that help individuals, families, and communities to meet their own needs. This paradigm stands in contrast to views of nonprofit organizations as facilitators of rescuing behavior, in which one group of people seeks to uplift another. Based on cases in Nigeria and South Africa, this paper describes the role and importance of nonprofits in facilitating the development of individuals, institutions, and communities from within.