The War of 1812’s end heralded a new era for the courts, and for the nation. Political leaders emboldened by having fought Great Britain to a standstill were eager to lay the groundwork for a new American empire. But adventurous Americans had their own priorities, and privateering on behalf of South American revolutionary governments offered new opportunities for wartime profit. Like the British in the 1790s, Spanish and Portuguese officials demanded that the federal government suppress such freelancing. To preserve relations, the Madison and Monroe administrations dusted off a tool for suppressing maritime violence that previous administrations had largely eschewed – criminal prosecutions for piracy. But a patchwork statutory regime and popular support for South American rebels made convictions difficult to secure. At a deeper level, privateering cases raised thorny questions about the sovereign status of former colonies seeking autonomy. As Congress and the executive branch struggled to adapt to the rapidly shifting political context in the Americas, federal judges expressed renewed doubts about extending their authority onto the high seas. The renaissance of privateering threatened to derail the American imperial project just as it was getting started.

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.

The introductory chapter explains and legitimates the approach of the book: why does it make sense to write the long-term (pre)history of democracy as a history of two distinct phenomena – pluralistic participation and individual equality – and of their convergence? Why can it be argued that this convergence was not unavoidable and is not irreversible?

The development of institutionalised political participation is shown for nine of the most important early modern European states – or else those, such as Switzerland, that figure prominently in the history of democracy. The focus is on not only the ‘long’ seventeenth century and the ruptures it created but also the general continuities in essentially all early modern states: they all featured some mode of institutionalised central political participation, but it was always geared towards the participation of the top social elites only.

This chapter asks: how did institutionalised political participation, individual equality and, in particular, their fusion survive into and develop during the nineteenth century, and what can we learn from the historical genesis of democracy as a composite of two different elements, as sketched in this book, for the predicament of democracy today?

The chapter deals with the history of the Hussite revolution in the first half of the fifteenth century in Bohemia. It focuses on the discourse of heresy, which underwent significant differentiation in the late Middle Ages as political conditions became increasingly complex.

From 1926, O’Casey became well known as a critic of Irish nationalism. Some commentators felt that the playwright presented a grotesque distortion of historical events, and a slander on those men who had died for Ireland, including Patrick Pearse. This chapter examines O’Casey’s 1926 play The Plough and the Stars, O’Casey’s relationship with Pearse, and the dramatist’s prose history The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919). We see how Irish nationalism changed during the first half of O’Casey’s life, and the way in which his attitude to nationalism also altered, with this chapter making the case that the relation between O’Casey and Irish nationalism was far more shifting and nuanced than has often been perceived.

This chapter sets O’Casey’s political activism within its contemporary contexts. The chapter focuses on the years before the Easter Rising, which were formative for O’Casey’s political development, and shows how the would-be writer developed a political and cultural appreciation through membership of organisations such as the Gaelic League. Readers will discover how O’Casey’s activism in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and in the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) shaped the perspective that informed his iconoclastic views on the revolutionary events of 1916-23.

Proletarian realism’s aspiration to depict the social totality stresses the causal connections among antagonistically opposed classes in capitalist society, a critical examination of the ideological standpoints accompanying this antagonism, and the working-class struggle for liberation from the yoke of capital. The sense of dialectical possibility informing many works of US proletarian realism – which were largely produced during the Great Depression – reflects the abiding influence of the Bolshevik Revolution. While guided by a sense of the social world as a process in motion, thus “drawing their poetry from the future,” as Marx wrote, works in this genre frequently stress the fetters – material but above all ideological –preventing the proletariat from grasping the social totality in which it is inserted. Proletarian novels deploy a range of techniques, both realist and modernist, to bring to the awareness of the reader historical forces often beyond the ken of individual characters. Realism is thus a matter not just of style and structure but also of epistemology – the text’s aspiration to grasp the social totality is an aspiration toward the truth that will liberate the proletariat from its chains.

This chapter examines the political culture of the fragile Weimar Republic, focusing in particular on its tumultuous beginning and its calamitous end. Rather than narrating a story of unavoidable doom or one that focuses exclusively on Weimar’s cultural achievements, it stresses the complexity and the multifaceted crises that marked this era of German history. This essay considers the particularly German elements of the Weimar period but also the ways in which Germany’s post-First World War experience can be situated within a broader regional context.

Rudolf Virchow is regularly celebrated as one of the fathers of social medicine. This chapter explores the context in which Virchow wrote and published his famous statement that: “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale.” I discuss Virchow’s epidemiological fact-finding mission to Upper Silesia and his involvement in the revolutionary events of 1848 and 1849. I also look at the ways in which Virchow’s achievements were framed during his lifetime and in the early twentieth century, when medicine in Germany was perceived, by many, to be undergoing a crisis, caused by materialism, specialization, and a growing dominance of laboratory medicine –developments then seen as in-line with Virchow’s aims. I argue that what we think of as social medicine is an American tradition which emerged at a particular point of time in the mid twentieth century and that the image of Virchow as the father of social medicine was created then, by scholars and activists such as George Rosen and Henry Sigerist, to provide this new tradition with a longer pedigree.

This chapter examines the coup d’état carried out by General Juan Velasco Alvarado in 1968, a coup that radically differed from the series of military takeovers in the Southern Cone of South America during the height of the Cold War. It seeks to analyze the causes that led to the coup, its principal objectives, and how the United States, in particular the Nixon administration, responded to Peru’s challenge to relations with the US. It further addresses a series of questions such as who the coup makers were, what their social backgrounds were, and what kind of resistance the new regime faced in what became, over the next several years, a radical effort to transform one of the most tradition-bound countries in Latin America in order to modernize it and bring it into the twentieth century.

Far from representing the abandonment of civilian government by conservative, pro-military forces in Washington, DC, Bolivia’s 1964 coup d’état occurred over strident objections from the United States. In describing this surprising story of local Cold War golpismo (coup waging) in Latin America, this chapter analyzes the overlapping trajectory of three key groups of actors: the deterioration of the ancien régime of middle-class nationalists (los golpeados), the widespread involvement of liberal developmentalist US officials (los gringos), and the multivalent ideologies and strategies of civilian and military plotters (los golpistas) who brought down twentieth-century Bolivia’s most powerful leader. The case study reveals a superpower’s inability to micromanage political development on the periphery, and it highlights the underappreciated intimacy between civil society and military officers in the social phenomenon known as Latin American golpismo.

Over the past two decades, there has been a resurgence of authoritarianism around the globe. The recent wave of autocratization – the declining quality of institutions for clean elections, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly – stalled the global spread of democratic ideas and principles. A related global trend is the unprecedented frequency, scope, and size of anti-government protests. Women play a vital role in pro-democracy movements and revolutions. Yet, women’s engagement in contentious politics often appears to be invisible in the public discourse. This chapter presents a typology of women’s participation in a revolution. In addition, this chapter provides background information about the Revolution of Dignity and its participants, identifies the main trends in gender inequality in Ukrainian society, and describes data sources.