The epilogue broaches the wrangling over Zola’s posthumous fortune: principally, the shifting attitudes that were brought about by his heroic support of Dreyfus, and the energetic debates attending his Pantheonisation. At Zola’s funeral, Anatole France famously described the writer as ‘an ardent idealist’, his speech emblematising a wider effort to recast Zola’s literary career in the gilded light of his sacrifice. This epilogue tackles, then, a supposition only alluded to in earlier chapters: that the positing of Zola as an idealist goes hand in hand with his emergence as an exemplary object of idealisation. Reflecting on Zola’s evolution as a writer, it explores the irresistible pull of biographical destiny as something of an ultimate horizon for our reading of his fiction. To account for idealism in Zola is inevitably, or perhaps especially, it is argued, to grapple with the question of teleology that the Dreyfus Affair imposes.

Qiu Jun’s Supplement was meant as a handbook for bringing peace and order to “All-under-Heaven” (tianxia), but it was also intended as a guide to delimit the perimeters of the Ming state. The paired chapters 143 and 144, titled “The Boundary between the Chinese within and the Non-Chinese from Beyond,” are the focus of this chapter not only because they offer an excellent illustration of the fundamental tension that has long existed in the practice of Chinese statecraft between the claim of universality, on the one hand, and the reality of demarcating (and defending) one’s domain, on the other, but also because they provide a clear example of how the traditional rhetoric concerning the divide between “Chinese” (hua) and “non-Chinese” (yi) had to be repressed during the subsequent Qing dynasty when China was under Manchu rule.

Political legitimacy is highly important internationally—and probably increasingly so. The question of legitimacy is at the heart of some of the most vital and debated issues of international relations and international law. Think about the centrality of legitimacy with respect to just war theory, issues such as self-determination, the secession of a country and the creation of a new one, state recognition, tensions between the demands of national sovereignty and those of human rights, international humanitarian interventions, and so on. At stake in each of these situations is identifying what is the right course of action and what is legitimate and what is not—and how these situations are handled has an influence on the international system and its legitimacy. In this perspective, Chapter 7 shows that the significance of legitimacy at the international level unfolds in the context of the interactions between the national and international realms and the following distinctions: we/them, inside/outside, particularist/universalist, and system/society.

Chapter 2 provides a history of the recognition of the girl child in the international legal framework, from the universalist to the qualified universalist approach, and finally to the girl child as a distinct rights holder under international law. Chapter 2 thereafter conducts an examination of the definition of girl child in the English language. It critically studies the terminology presently used to define her and explores the etymology of the expression ‘girl’ and its semiotics of inferiority and subordination throughout history. The chapter analyzes the two vectors of identity of the girl child: femalehood and childhood. It examines the conceptions of girlhood and its 1) dimensions, 2) boundaries and 3) divisions. It discusses age-based and competence-based boundaries, and parameters for the end of girlhood in the English language and in the law, including definitions concerning puberty, youth and majority. It also suggests divisions within girlhood, namely young girls and adolescent girls.

Indian Economics’ global development plan in the long run was universal industrialisation and free trade. The widely accepted plan for development in the nineteenth century was broadly based on David Ricardo’s comparative advantage model, which prescribed industrialisation for western Europe and condemned the rest of the world to producing raw materials. This international division of labour, argued Mahadev Govind Ranade, would not, like the model theorised, bring Indians the highest level of progress. Indian Economics envisaged a positive-sum game of global development where an industrialised Asia would not outcompete the already industrialised western Europe. Industrialisation in India would bring higher standards of living and increase global aggregate demand, leading people to buy more goods from Britain and other industrialised countries. Universal industrialisation would, argued the Indian economists, be win–win for the world economy.

Nikki Hessell’s “Romantic Poetry and Constructions of Indigeneity” understands the Romantic racialization of Indigenous peoples as means of denying these groups sovereignty. The trope of the Indian in representative European texts is, by this reading, complicit with the “desire to own, define, and administer everything.” By reading Romantic poetry for its recurring tropes, however, we can also locate the Romantic tradition in the work of those generally excluded from conversations about Romanticism. Thus Hessell reads Romanticism in the works of Indigenous poets Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe) and John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee). This is not merely a matter of expanding the Romantic canon; rather, by centering those whose presence in Romantic literature has generally been restricted to object of interest, Hessell shows that those who have been used as tropes are wielders of Romantic tropes in their own right.

Writers during the age of the Enlightenment and revolutions did such a good job “declaring” rights that many historians and politicians later believed that they invented them. But as we show in this volume (the fourth in a chronological series), this assumption is flawed. What’s more, many of the earlier characteristics of rights – in particular, their connection to religion – remained present through the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rights became a means of liberation for religious minorities, the economic downtrodden, women, slaves, and others. But rights also became a means of control, especially in the European colonies around the world, as well as in liberal economic regimes that protected property rights. Overall, the transformations of rights during this period were so great that it can make earlier expressions of rights seem unrelated. But, as this volume shows, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are better understood as a crucial time of transformation, repackaging rights for a modern world

Isaiah was arguably the most influential book of the Hebrew Bible upon the authors of the New Testament. It was the most frequently quoted book, apart from the lengthier book of Psalms, but as David Pao points out in “Isaiah in the New Testament,” it also supplied language and structural models for significant theological themes of early Christianity. He analyzes the role of Isaiah in New Testament themes such as eschatology, Christology, obduracy, and universalism. He also looks at the way in which whole New Testament writings were shaped by Isaianic influence, including all four Gospels, Acts, Romans, and Revelation. All this illustrates why Isaiah has been called “The Fifth Gospel.”

Latin American international lawyers are prolific historians. However, while having profusely written histories of international law, Latin Americans have shied away from historiographic controversy. Latin Americans have not disagreed much about how to conceive and write history, but they have had sound disagreements about the international law that is constructed by history, they have disagreed over different ways of using history as law. This chapter offers a history of these disagreements. Some Latin-Americans have used universal histories, echoing the familiar Eurocentric history from the Latin-American periphery to the core, in order to gain doctrinal authority to speak and change international law. With a similar goal in mind, other Latin-Americans have used particularistic histories, foregrounding the region’s doctrinal divergences and contributions to universal international law. Universalist and particularistic histories were dominant between the first half of the nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century, between independence and the Cold War. Towards the end of the Cold War, these two types of history merged into one, presenting the region’s historical trajectory as in harmony with universal international law. This represents a break. If in the nineteenth century an international legal tradition emerged in Latin-America, during the twentieth century it radicalised, diverging from international law as conceived from the West. From the Cold War merger an endemic history emerged, which depoliticised and deradicalised the Latin American tradition. Exploring this history of history-writing in the region may help rearticulating a more ambitious Latin American international law.

Two forms of Japanese Buddhism, which Barth castigates because they lack the name of Jesus. But they rather seem to be channels of divine grace, though mistaken (from a Christian viewpoint) and perhaps incomplete.

Divine forgiveness is offered to all, but humans must co-operate with divine grace.

Barth speaks of ‘the liberation of all men’ by the union of divine and human natures in Jesus, yet he refuses to be called a ‘Universalist’. This is an aporia, an unresolved perplexity.

Faith, for Barth, is a sharing in the life of the Eternal Word. But is it for all, or only for Christian believers?

Election to membership of ‘the true church’ is unmerited, for Barth. It is hard to see how it can be just, and not arbitrary, if that is so.

Barth’s account of evil as ‘an impossible possibility’ or the threat of Nothingness, seems to lack sense. There is an argument here for some human autonomy and freedom of choice.

Barth’s account seems to imply both that, only ‘the elect’ are to have fellowship with God, and that all humanity will do so. There is no clear account of how the desperately wicked could obtain such fellowship.

The great and unresolved Barthian paradox is that Jesus shows God to be unlimited love, and yet that God abominates all human seeking after God, even the most sincere.

The CRC does not define the beginning of childhood, only its end. Human rights are granted to all humans based on their humanity. The justification for human rights is that every individual is born and has a rational mind. The monist construction of the child-rights identity is unique as a human right since it does not require either mind or body for its realization, as it is based on age and not the body and mind. The CRC is constructed to cover every child and in some cases from conception, which means that the rights of the child cannot meet liberal rights’ ideas of freedom as a foundation since the individual freedom is conditioned on the immaterial rational mind controling the material body, which the unborn child or very young child do not possess.

By analyzing government documents from 1885 to the present, the chapter first argues that the liberal movement’s introduction of parliamentary rule in Norway in 1884 was a critical juncture in the state’s language regime. During the union with Denmark (1380-1814), Danish replaced Norwegian as Norway’s written language. In 1885, parliament adopted official equality for a new written Norwegian language (Nynorsk) along with Dano-Norwegian (Bokmål). From 1885, The Liberal Party implemented language regulations, and was also the power behind welfare regulations that are often described as universal. Consequently, the state tradition of Norway has been labelled welfare state universalism. The chapter’s second objective is to explore how Norway’s language policy is related to the social welfare model, and to discuss whether the language regime can be considered universalist. The Labour Party came into office in 1935, completing welfare and language reforms introduced by The Liberal Party. The universalist regime was not challenged by any government of the last part of the century. However, parliament will probably adopt a general language law, and this has sparked a new debate on language rights. The chapter’s third objective is to discuss whether Norway’s linguistic universalism is currently at a critical juncture.