The public’s support for the rule of law is a key democratic value and a cornerstone concept in the study of public support for courts. We provide the most systematic analysis to date of its measurement, correlates, and stability. We validate an updated measure of the public’s support for the rule of law, drawing on original survey data. We demonstrate that support for the rule of law is highest among the most politically sophisticated and those with strong support for democratic values. Further, we draw upon thousands of survey responses in the United States and an original six-wave survey panel in Germany to demonstrate the temporal stability of the public’s support for the rule of law at both the aggregate and individual levels. Finally, we illustrate the predictive validity of our measure through the analysis of an original survey experiment.

This concise and interpretative book digs under the surface events of the Wars of the Roses to explore the underlying dynamics of a typical civil war. Beginning with a demonstration of why the well-worn storylines of the Wars are so misleading, it moves on to expose the pressure for reform that animated the conflict and helped to shape its outcomes. It continues by looking at the logics of division and the reasons why the Wars, once started, were so hard to resolve. It concludes by returning to debates long discussed by historians: the role of the economy in the conflict, and the interaction between English affairs and the politics of the British Isles and the near continent. Throughout, a central concern is to emphasise the fluidity and uncertainty of these civil wars: once authority broke down, anything could happen.

Offensiveness is a key issue in contemporary public discourse, especially in relation to media content. Stand-up comedy has provided an important site for discussions of offensiveness, both inside of performances and in the commentary on comedy in other forms of popular media. This chapter provides a brief summary of some well-known examples of stand-up comedy that are embroiled in debates on offensiveness, before engaging in a discussion of what constitutes offensive stand-up comedy. The chapter theorises the discursive work that offensive stand-up comedy does in contemporary contexts through concepts of rhetoric, the performative, and symbolic violence. Comedy and harm are discussed and an explanation of what researchers have described as the impacts of humour and comedy is given. Throughout the chapter, the points made are elaborated with extracts from British stand-up comedian Ricky Gervais’ Netflix special Supernature (2022), especially through an analysis of jokes made by Gervais about transgender people. These and other jokes are examined alongside the disclaimers used in the stand-up comedy performance.

This chapter situates Webern’s early works within the discourses of Stimmungsmusik, a genre of musical composition concerned with the evocation of moods or atmosphere. Through a discussion of selected early songs and the symphonic idyll Im Sommerwind, it argues that for the young Webern the idea of Stimmung was tied to a specific set of compositional choices and expressive strategies geared at conjuring notions of depth. This perspective is corroborated with reference to the aesthetic ideas Webern inherited from Ferdinand Avenarius’s poetry and Richard Wagner’s music dramas. Ultimately, it is suggested that by dissolving the subject–object epistemology in favour of a more ‘phenomenological’ conception of the world, Webern’s early works can be understood as offering a radical critique of ‘Romantic’ landscape aesthetics.

Introduction

The complex and multifaceted links between decarbonization and sustainable development have been the subject of numerous studies and analyses, each focusing on different aspects of the relationship. In the following sections, this chapter will explore some of these approaches to gain a comprehensive understanding of the research areas that employ energy–economy modelling to examine the pathways of development and mitigation. The research areas can be broadly classified into five themes: decarbonization, sustainable development, energy systems, energy policy, and the intricate connections that exist between decarbonization and sustainable development.

Decarbonization

Decarbonization is the process by which countries or other entities aim to achieve a low-carbon economy, or by which individuals aim to reduce their consumption of carbon (IPCC, 2014a).

The decarbonization theme can further be studied under two focus areas: strategies for mitigation and effective deployment of renewables. In the first focus area, which is strategies for mitigation, studies emphasize the importance of much more stringent action for mitigation than the currently proposed actions in order to meet 2oC target (Van Sluisveld et al., 2013). Other studies have suggested that shifting to renewable energy, carbon-negative technologies like carbon capture, and storage and energy efficiency technologies in end-use sectors like households and industries are critical for achieving mitigation (IEA, 2015b; Shukla and Chaturvedi, 2012). Under the second focus area of renewables, it is found that research and development (R&D) in these technologies, along with the transfer of technology from developed to developing countries, plays an important role in promoting the deployment of renewables (Kumar and Madlener, 2016). A recent study says that policies for renewables should be aligned with mitigation targets for cost-effectively achieving decarbonization (Mittal et al., 2016).

While stand-up comedy is conventionally thought of in terms of liveness and live performance, it is also the case that recorded media – such as radio and television – have a long, intertwined relationship with stand-up. Beginning from a historical perspective, this chapter outlines how recorded comedy media drew on live forms from its inception, taking inspiration from music hall and vaudeville. Recorded stand-up remains a fundamental component of contemporary recorded media, via stand-up specials on platforms such as HBO and Netflix. But the grammar of recorded media offers challenges to the pleasures associated with stand-up – especially in terms of liveness – and this chapter therefore explores the particularities of stand-up on radio and television, and its ongoing relationship to the live forms that predated it and continue alongside it.

Unlike the Putney soldiers and Hobbes, Locke held that, although originally God gave the Earth to humankind as a common possession, private property rights arose prior to government and need not be surrendered at the threshold upon entering civil society. This doctrine is widely (but mistakenly) taken as a thesis of “the sanctity of private property.” This chapter traces Locke’s argument, the main thread of which proceeds from self-ownership, to ownership of one’s labor, to ownership of whatever one mixes one’s labor with – with two provisos, a nonspoilation proviso and a enough-and-as-good-left-for-others proviso. With the invention of money, unequal accumulation of wealth without limit was tacitly consented to, and tacit consent is also invoked by Locke to explain why all who inhabit a territory consent to be governed.