Chapter 3 discusses Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “philosophical draft” The Closed Commercial State (1800) and its blueprint for a world system of centrally directed, self-sufficient national economies that abandon commercial and political connections but remain interrelated through state-supervised intellectual exchanges. I argue that although not explicitly labeled as Weltliteratur, this design of cultural cooperation among otherwise insular national states is a paradigmatic configuration of world literature that offers an alternative economy of circulation in the form of planning. After outlining the mechanisms driving intercultural circulation in this model, the chapter examines how its underlying cosmopolitan universalism morphs into patriotic cosmopolitanism (and eventually collapses into a sense of German superiority) in Fichte’s later philosophy. I also argue that this design cast a long shadow in the twentieth century as it prefigured the most potent counter-system of “capitalist world literature”, the command economy of socialist internationalism in the Soviet Republic of Letters.

The Conclusion summarises the arguments of the book and points to the anxieties that male and female family members felt about childbearing and their efforts to impose order on it. Childbearing was habitually represented as women’s work in prescriptive and personal writings. This was because this fitted with an idealised model of gendered domestic labour. However, male family members invested considerable financial, emotional and bodily energy into securing positive procreative outcomes. This was in equal parts motivated by the centrality of childbearing to male status and honour, and by its prominence in larger familial narratives about godliness and fruitfulness. The Conclusion suggests the important implications this has for history of medicine and everyday life in early modern England.

Do Black and non-Black elected officials differ in how much of their rhetorical outreach is centered on high-profile racial issues? We address this question in Chapter 4. We argue that discussions of high-profile racial topics represent a reactive form of outreach. In contrast, elected officials engage in proactive racial rhetorical representation when they discuss issues which are not politically salient. Using a combination of over 500 race-related terms and google trends data, we identify high-profile forms of racial outreach which include racial issues like voting rights and discussions of popular Black public figures like Rep. John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr, and Rosa Parks. We combine this analysis with our previously coded press releases and tweets to explore the percent of racial outreach which contains reference to a high-profile topic. We find that a smaller proportion of racial outreach from Black elected officials in press releases and on Twitter are centered on high-profile topics than racial outreach from White, Latino/a, and Asian American elected officials. We further test our hypothesis that Black elected officials will speak about lower profile topics by exploring whether discussions of police reform are greater during periods where Black Lives Matter is being searched more on google. We find that when Black Lives Matter is a high-profile topic, non-Black elected officials are more likely to speak out about police reform. The salience of Black Lives Matter in the public is a weaker predictor of these same discussions for Black elected officials. Overall, this chapter demonstrates than when Black elected officials speak about race, they are more likely to discuss topics which are not in the public eye.

Germany’s traditionally robust public administration faces escalating challenges as policy portfolios expand, complexities increase, and resource allocations lag behind. This chapter examines how federal, state, and local authorities in the environmental and social sector cope with growing implementation burdens. While Germany’s federal structure can foster high-quality governance, it also enables policymakers to shift blame across levels. Consequently, local offices and agencies with weaker political leverage are especially vulnerable to overload. In the environmental realm, tasks increasingly cascade downward, forcing local authorities — frequently short-staffed — to engage in trade-offs that compromise monitoring and enforcement. By contrast, higher level bodies like state ministries and offices can still manage most obligations, typically deferring only nonmandatory or long-term planning. The German social sector displays a slightly different scenario: The Federal Employment Agency demonstrates strong resilience, leveraging flexible resources and effective crisis management, whereas the Pension Insurance and some regional welfare agencies struggle with increasing task loads. Despite generally moderate instances of policy triage, critical support and preventive planning are often neglected, fueling organizational frustration and jeopardizing long-term governance capacity.

This conversation draws on an online discussion ‘Casa Adentro (Inside the House): Anti-Racist Art Practices’ (21 May 2021) held with the Afro-Colombian dance company Sankofa Danzafro and the Afro-Colombian art collective Colectivo Aguaturbia. The participants explore the concerns and creative processes that reflect on the durability of racialised social orders and the way racism is manifest in various areas of the lives of Afro-descendant men and women in Colombia. The artists reflect on these issues on the basis of their anti-racist artistic practices.

This chapter explores the pronounced divide in England’s environmental and social policy implementation, painting a highly diverse picture of policy triage across organizations. The Environment Agency, initially envisaged as an integrated “one-stop shop,” now exemplifies frequent and severe triage. Chronic underfunding, staff attrition, and politically induced blame-shifting in combination with ever-increasing workloads undermine its monitoring, enforcement, and crisis-preparedness functions. In contrast, most local authorities sustain only moderate triage levels, where increasing implementations tasks are mitigated by a broader range of financing avenues and political networks. In the social sector, the Department for Work and Pensions displays striking levels of triage despite minimal formal policy growth, as unrelenting welfare reforms, departmental downsizing, and inadequate cross-agency collaboration spur severe and frequent trade-offs. Meanwhile, The Pensions Regulator remains a near-anomaly, effectively managing regulatory expansion. The English case study thus underscores how variation in blame-shifting, opportunities for resource mobilization, and organizational overload compensation can yield a highly diverse triage scenario — even within a country.

This chapter distinguishes solidarity as a legal concept (LS) from solidarity as a social practice (SP). It matters for our understanding of the law to reflect on how, when and why law is able to interact with solidaristic practices. Section 1.1 explores the distinction. Section 1.2 stresses the ubiquity of solidarity in the law, from the traditional private law understanding of obligatio in solidum, to solidarity as a cohesive social force, to solidarity as a source of state duties. Section 1.3 shows that, despite its omnipresence, solidarity is an underinvestigated legal concept. Section 1.4 offers a typology of interactions between SP and the law, to show the many ways in which legal scholars may relate to SP. I list several types of interaction, and object to one. I argue that law cannot command us to act solidaristically since solidarity presupposes an intimate form of identification with others. But law may disrupt solidarities, sometimes in morally justified ways; it may compensate for the failing solidarity, recognizing and integrating it; and it may foster solidarity by its status-generative function, albeit merely in an indirect and not often controllable way.

The emergence of British punk in the mid-1970s led to a reimagining of the fanzine, home-made magazines self-published and self-distributed to fellow ‘fans’ within a particular cultural milieu. Where fanzines had previously been carefully collated and geared towards disseminating information, punk’s fanzines were produced speedily and irreverently. In line with the cultural critique inherent to punk, fanzines such as Sniffin’ Glue and London’s Outrage began to develop literary and visual discourses locating ‘the new wave’ within a wider socio-cultural and political context. Expositions on punk’s meaning and the media-generated moral panic that ensued following the Sex Pistols’ infamously foul-mouthed television appearance in December 1976 soon led to formative political analyses on everything from racism and commodification to anarchy and gender relations. By the early 1980s, anarchist punkzines engaged with a variety of political causes (e.g. CND) and recognisably feminist and socialist analyses found space between record and gig reviews. This chapter examines a selection of punk-related fanzines to argue that the medium provided space for young people (overwhelmingly teenagers) to test and cultivate political ideas and, in the process, develop a distinct genre of writing informed by punk’s impulse to simultaneously destroy and create.

This chapter expands our understanding of how continuous policy growth affects public agencies’ ability to implement policies. It introduces the concept of policy triage, wherein organizations must choose which tasks to prioritize and which to neglect when facing resource constraints and expanding policy portfolios. Triage reflects a trade-off that intrinsically undermines overall implementation effectiveness: Agencies systematically channel attention to some policy areas at the cost of others. The chapter develops a theoretical framework accounting for variation of triage levels across implementers. Three factors are central: whether politicians can shift blame for inadequate implementation (reducing their incentives to fund administrative capacity), the ability of implementers to mobilize additional resources, and the extent to which these organizations strive to compensate internally through a strong organizational culture and policy ownership. By highlighting both, top-down and bottom-up influences on policy implementation, this chapter emphasizes that an agency’s level of policy triage is determined by the configuration of these factors. The framework thus provides a robust lens for analyzing varied implementation outcomes among agencies operating under ever-expanding policy stocks.

Chapter 2 takes up Goethe’s distinction between a higher and a lower layer of world literature (discussed in the previous chapter) and argues that in complementing the transnational distribution of cultural mediocrity through markets, Goethe envisioned a more elevated sphere organized along a decidedly non-market form of exchange, that is, gifting. I examine Goethe’s correspondence with his translator Thomas Carlyle as a circuitry of world-literary gifting marked by the to-and-fro movement of tangible (books, journals, manuscripts, jewelry, drawings, interior decoration, etc.) and intangible gifts (tribute, reward, cooperation, guidance). Their nexus, I argue, was emblematic of the transition from the ethos of generous sharing in the republic of letters to world literature as a forum interconnecting outstanding representatives of various national literatures. Contributing to the material diffusion of texts and channelling symbolic economies of prestige, their acts of gift-giving prefigured Carlyle’s conception of hero-worship, and the “significant geography” circumscribed by the movement of gifts between Weimar and Scotland morphed into an imperialistic vision of a Teutonic (British-German) world literature.