Starting with three good ideas – natural equality, government resting on consent, and government limited by the terms of that consent – Hobbes derives distressing conclusions. Reason requires submission to the Sovereign even in matters of conscience. The Sovereign can do subjects no injustice. Mixed government must lead to civil war. This chapter traces and tests Hobbes’s reasoning.

In this chapter, we rely upon two experiments to demonstrate that the public withdraws acceptance of executive actions implemented through contravention – over the objection of a court – but only if that court has a high level of judicial independence. But, if executives contravene a low independence court, it is as if the court had not acted: there is no difference in the public’s level of acceptance. Additionally, we find no evidence in any of our quartet of countries that judicial approval improves the public’s acceptance of an executive’s policy. Contrary to fears that citizens may blindly follow courts and adjust their opinions based on a court’s ruling, we find no evidence that even widely-respected courts are able to increase citizens’ support for an executive action by endorsing it.

Bombay's cotton mills and their relation to the city's emergence over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as India's prime metropolis have been extensively studied from various perspectives, and this is a wide and ever-expanding area of critical scholarship. Within this rich corpus of literature, the development of public education in the city of Bombay and its place in the wider imagination of the emerging industrial city remain a virtually uncharted area. The diverse historical trajectories of state-funded education in the city point to how education discursively constructed the ‘public’ in Bombay in the early part of the twentieth century.

This chapter attempts to trace these developments in the mill district of colonial Bombay (now Mumbai). It provides a descriptive and thematic account of the expansion of education through the implementation of free and compulsory primary education (FCPE) in Girangaon, literally ‘the village of the mills’. The wards that make up the Girangaon area were selectively chosen for the FCPE when it became operational in the city in 1925. Girangaon covers the administrative wards of F and G, as well as parts of E ward, although this was not included in the initial scheme. With the caveat that the archive we have had to work with is largely limited to official records,1 we look at debates on FCPE in the city and attempt to chart the contexts within which policies on primary education in the Girangaon area were being discussed and enacted. The chapter aims to move away from colonial and nationalist narratives of well-known elite educational institutions in Bombay to interrogating the contexts within which children of the working classes were intended to be educated.

Rawls had misgivings about the account of stability he gave in A Theory of Justice. It ignored “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” that is, that the social contract has to attract people who disagree about fundamental values of the kind embraced in “comprehensive” doctrines. The contract doctrine welcomes reasonable comprehensive doctrines but forbids the use of state power to promote a comprehensive liberalism, which he confessed he had assumed. There is also a “fact of oppression,” that no state can stabilize itself by imposing a comprehensive doctrine without resorting to the tactics of Torquemada or Stalin. A “liberal principle of legitimacy” forbids this. One must hope for an “overlapping consensus” of reasonable, comprehensive doctrines to settle upon a “political conception of justice.” Rawls’s concessions may lead even further, amounting to a “fact of justice pluralism,” that is, that there are multiple, incompatible, but equally reasonable political conceptions of justice – including ones that reject political equality as Rawls conceives it. Rawls admitted there was a “family” of such conceptions but insisted that each must satisfy a “criterion of reciprocity.” This chapter ekes out Rawls’s published remarks to construct a “reciprocity” argument for fair value, complementing the “stability” argument of Chapter 15.

While education studies and urban studies have flourished as rich areas of research in South Asia, the interface between education and the urban has received little scholarly attention. It is quite difficult to trace any mention of the processes of acquisition, allocation or demarcation of land for the universities in the archival records on education. Similarly, specific discussions concerning university land seem to be largely absent from land department records in post-independence India. This is perhaps why the literature on the land question in India, in the fields of both agrarian and urban studies, rarely mentions the histories of land acquisition for universities. That the first education commission formed after India's independence was the University Education Commission of 1948 indicates that higher education was meant to have a significant role in the planned development of the new nation state. Many such institutions were built in the 1950s and 1960s, often at the fringes of big cities. The earliest were the higher technical institutes, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the first campus of which was opened in Kharagpur, a little far from the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata). A study of the architectural history of the institute argues that patterned on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, IIT Kharagpur was India's first ‘college town’ (Jain 2020). An Indo-American partnership enabled the establishment of agricultural universities in various states between 1952 and 1973. The ‘land grant university’ model in the United States served as the basis for envisioning these universities (Goldsmith 1990).

Shahjahanabad, a city that the Mughal emperor Shahjahan (1627–1658) named after himself, was a walled city and had seven gates. The Red Fort (Lal Qila) was home to upper-caste Muslims and Hindus, while areas near the walls were inhabited by various craftsmen and workers. The transformation of these caste-and craft-based spaces into communal areas during colonial and postcolonial India has been a long and complex process (Parveen 2021).

Historians describe Shahjahanabad as a place of ‘composite culture’, where both Muslim nobility and upper-caste Hindus shared cultural practices, learned Persian and etiquettes (Gupta 1981). The city was known for its diverse population living in mixed urban spaces, fostering close relationships between Hindus and Muslims across social classes (Chenoy 1998).

Referring to significant changes in the sociocultural and political landscape of Delhi over time, Narayani Gupta (1981) points out: ‘Delhi has died so many deaths.’ Poet Altaf Hussain Hali echoes Gupta's feelings in this couplet:

Three major shifts in social relations are clearly visible over time. First, the Britons, after the 1857 revolt, treated communities differently based on their loyalty towards them. They labelled Muslims as ‘traitorous’ and Hindus as ‘loyalists’. This marked the symbols of Muslim presence as ‘contested sites’ for the first time (Parveen 2014). Many older inhabitants, including the tyre biradri (caste brotherhood) and the Punjabis, discussed later in this chapter, shifted to areas outside the city walls and were permitted inside only with passes issued to them.

This notebook contains some of the ideas, ambitions, hopes, anxieties, interrogations, and fears that randomly or expectingly came to punctuate the writing of the previous chapters.

In this chapter, we examine how both variation in levels of judicial independence and in the partisanship of litigants affects citizens’ willingness to punish executives who ignore courts. We again test the partisanship-centered account against our theoretical framework. Leveraging the presence of abstract review in Germany, Poland, and Hungary, we demonstrate that judicial independence continues to be a prerequisite to judicial efficacy, even with the appearance of a discernible influence from partisanship. Our results in this chapter suggest that judicial review holds the promise – at least where courts have high levels of judicial independence – to constrain executives even in contexts where partisanship is heightened.

Locke held that any number of persons might join together to form a government. He imposed no limitation on the knowledge or reasoning that joiners might make use of. It is likely that Locke imagined that governments typically arose by consensus among private landowners, who then by a majority vote chose the procedure by which the legislative power was to operate. It is safe to say that Locke did not favor a wide suffrage or democracy. Locke also did not insist on any strict separation of executive and legislative powers: Of necessity, the executive must have a “prerogative power” to further the common good even if contrary to legislation. The notions of an independent judiciary and judicial review of legislation are nowhere found in Locke. Locke did, however, advocate reform of the composition of Parliament to make it more representative. And he was defensive of the rights of commoners against enclosures – so, logically, he may have favored a wider franchise.

Rawls expounded “a theory of justice that generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the traditional conception of the social contract.” His theory applies to society’s basic structure, a system of productive cooperation over generations. The state of nature was reconfigured as an “original position” which “incorporates certain procedural constraints on arguments.” The “parties” in the original position have general knowledge but no knowledge specific to themselves: their strengths, weaknesses, values, desires, social position, and so on. The “parties” choose principles that will maximize their fund of “primary goods,” or all-purpose means – means useful to all, whatever their particular interests, talents, etc. Two principles would be chosen: a maximum-equal-liberties principle, and a principle governing the distribution of opportunities, wealth, and income. These are in “lexical” order: equal basic liberties, then fair equal opportunity, then the “difference principle,” viz. distribute so to maximize the resources of the least-advantaged class. The chapter describes the “fact of reasonable pluralism” the social contract must accommodate, and the “well-ordered society” the social contract is to stabilize “for the right reasons,” securing the three great achievements of the tradition: toleration, limited government by popular consent, and “the winning of the working classes to democracy.”

Humans seek not happiness but “power after power,” says Hobbes, and so we are perpetually at odds. We are equals in cunning and therefore equally insecure and equally error-prone. Our language contains “words of inconstant signification,” which means we must ever disagree about right and justice. Reason requires us to submit our disagreements to an arbiter – a “Common Power” – lacking whom we must be perpetually at war or on the verge of war with one another over things that matter.

The original-position setup and argument for Rawls’s two principles are the focus of this chapter. Economic inequality is inevitable because the parties accept economic inequalities that benefit all classes. The equal basic liberties can be of unequal worth to persons, under the difference principle. But the political liberties (and they alone) are guaranteed to be of “fair value,” that is, individuals equally motivated and adept are to have roughly equal political influence. Universal adult suffrage is an inadequate measure to prevent money distorting political results. The difference principle in its “general form” could endorse Mill’s plural voting scheme, and would be indifferent to substantive political inequality if, on balance, the least advantaged realized a greater worth of their basket of primary goods. Robert Nozick’s objection to Rawls’s attention to patterns of wealth distribution is taken up, and Rawls’s ambition to render unequal distributions as acceptable as a matter of “pure procedural justice” is explained. John Harsanyi and Kenneth Arrow objected to the difference principle as applied to wealth and income. Rawls’s answer depends on establishing the lexical priority of the equal basic liberties, the argument for which was made toward the end of Rawls’s monumental A Theory of Justice.

Between 1921 and 1924 Edgar was in Baghdad, and Winifred in St Albans. Through Edgar’s eyes, we see Baghdad during the tense early years of the British ‘mandate’ in Iraq. Now a company director, Edgar’s talents were exploited by Baghdad elites, co-opting him as an ‘agent of imperialism’, as Britain dominated the new Iraqi constitutional monarchy, while the Baghdad Anglican church used him to run its new parish. Through Winifred’s eyes, her public profile flowering, we see her expatriate adjustment to middle-class suburban life, with two stepsons and two daughters occasioning stepmothering anxiety. Immersed in the local Anglican church and feminist organisations such as the National Council of Women, alongside the local Conservative association, her conservative politics co-existed with progressive and cosmopolitan social attitudes. The love correspondence is integral to their expatriate identity, with insights into early twentieth-century middle-class marital sexuality, explicit details of a playful sexual relationship underpinned by spirituality, and a description of consensual birth-control practices. Winifred’s sudden departure to join Edgar in Baghdad, placing two young daughters, unhappily, in a small, boarding school, marked the urgency of their passion, but also the strength of a companionate marriage, a product of shared expatriate experience.