What is the best way to assess the role of religion in nineteenth-century India? Should it be defined by texts? Rituals and religious practice? Reform movements? Distinctive histories of each religious community? Given how multi-faceted religious experience has been and continues to be in India, the question compels no easy answer. Also, given the numerous nationalist uses of nominally religious symbols and references, the importance of defining its historical contours and boundaries has become only more prominent in recent years. Outside simplistic models of nationalism, communalism, or political ideologies that use religion as a rallying cry, how do we begin to understand the role of religion in modern Indian history? If we start with Shashi Tharoor, a prominent public intellectual, one answer would be an affirmative celebration of being Hindu, based on a notion of Hinduism as a transcendental philosophy.1 If one looks elsewhere, such as to the rich world of Dalit and anti-caste activism, what sorts of answers would we find to that question? Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, another public intellectual, would answer that religion in India cannot be imagined outside of caste, hierarchy, and violence.2

These works both generated a fair amount of press in the various public spheres of India and raised questions for any student of religion in India. Is Hinduism, as Tharoor claims, a “tolerant” religion? When viewed from the history of religions, how shall Hinduism be distinguished from the various appropriations of it in the guise of Hindu nationalism?

This chapter discusses health insurance, including its sources (public and private) in the US and the unique quirks introduced by employer-sponsored insurance. Employer purchasing of health insurance on behalf of employees likely induces a decrease in monetary wages, so employees are paying for much of this out of their own pockets. This is due to the federal tax exclusion of fringe benefits, such that it is cheaper for employers to compensate their employees in health insurance than in monetary salary. The chapter also discusses selection, risk pooling, and coverage options in large group health insurance, as individuals will likely choose jobs with health packages that maximize their own utility, which can lead to adverse selection of which managers should be aware. The chapter concludes by addressing Medicaid and Medicare as the other two arms of insurance in the US, with a final word of caution that our private-centric system may be unstable to future political pressures.

This chapter proposes that thought experiments are a cognitive apparatus and situates this view among contemporary accounts of thought experiment. I set forward the project of the book, which is to (1) propose a new account of thought experiments as a method and (2) trace the historical foundations of the term and concept of “thought experiment” from Kant through Ørsted to Kierkegaard. I define “cognition” [Erkenntnis] for Kant as a synthesis of concepts with intuitions and propose that Kierkegaard, like Kant and Ørsted, views thought experiments as useful for achieving cognitions. I introduce the term Tanke-experiment in Kierkegaard and suggest why it has been little emphasized by Kierkegaard scholars and remains widely unacknowledged in contemporary descriptions of the history of thought experiment.

The US corporate tax is over 100 years old, and many academic observers have doubted its value. The standard explanation for why we tax corporations is that it is an indirect tax on shareholders, but that is not a valid reason to have a corporate tax because (a) shareholders can be taxed directly and (b) many shareholders are tax-exempt and should not be taxed at all. However, there is another reason to tax corporations, which was in fact the original rationale why we adopted the corporate tax in 1909: to limit the power of large monopolistic corporations and regulate their activities. If that is the reason for the corporate tax, the US should have a different tax structure than the current 21 percent flat tax. The corporate tax should be set at zero for normal returns and at a sharply progressive rate for supernormal returns (rents).

Chapter 3 examines the history of the clean energy regime complex, which sets the stage to delve into questions of its effectiveness in later chapters. This chapter traces the role played by states, multilateral and bilateral organizations, transnational initiatives, and norm diffusion in driving regime complex emergence over the three periods of analysis (Period 1: 1980–2001, Period 2: 2002–2008, Period 3: 2009–2023). The chapter demonstrates that diverging state interests alone do not explain the regime complex’s emergence, but that organizational expansion, transnational actor agency, normative change, and institutional interplay all contribute to its formation.

This chapter analyzes Stages on Life’s Way as an extended thought experiment. Though it has some similarities with a literary work of art and is sometimes called a novel, I distinguish extended thought experiment narratives like Stages from literary novels. I will show how Stages, like Repetition, embodies and develops Ørsted’s core elements of variation, active constitution, and the pursuit of genuine thought. I will also contrast Stages as a “psychological experiment” with the field of empirical psychology emerging in the 1800s. Against increasing interest in empirical observation, Kierkegaard’s thought experiments direct attention to what is not outwardly observable.

Global value chains (GVCs) are a manifestation of the contemporary global political economy. Viewing them solely as economic constructs, however, obscures the role that law and the wider regulatory environment play in their development and facilitation. The issue of modern slavery within GVCs has been the subject of careful scrutiny from a variety of legal sub-disciplines, including labour, welfare, and immigration law. In this chapter, I examine the role of company law, and particularly the fiduciary duty of directors to act in the interests of the company, in creating conditions under which modern slavery flourishes in GVCs. I suggest that the ideology of shareholder primacy that helps shape board decision-making is flawed both normatively and as a matter of legal doctrine. The central argument advanced is that shareholders’ interests are typically treated as a proxy for a company's interests due to the ambiguity in defining what it means to act in the interests of the company as a legal construct. Yet this focus on prioritizing the interests of shareholders can motivate lead companies’ directors to make decisions that deliver investor returns at the expense of fundamental labour rights and human dignity. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential of incorporating principles of proportionality into board decision-making. It is suggested that this approach can enhance directors’ knowledge and awareness of balancing competing interests, thereby avoiding the most egregious abuses of corporate power in the pursuit of profit.

Introduction

Writing in 2016, the IGLP Law and Global Production Working Group (the IGLP Working Group) observed that residing ‘at the heart of the GVC phenomenon’, law serves as ‘the vehicle through which value is generated, captured, and distributed within and between organizational and jurisdictional domains, and diverse and geographically disparate business operations are coordinated and governed’ (IGLP, 2016: 61). Law and the wider regulatory environment, comprising a complex mix of national, transnational, hard law, and soft law norms, are concerned with GVCs in numerous ways that influence the organization of GVCs. Company law is typically considered to be implicated in GVCs insofar as it shapes the structuring of activities within a chain and the liability (or lack thereof) of investors.

This chapter critically examines how international lawyers have conceptualized the structural relationship between organizations and their members. First, it argues that popular accounts behind the notion that international organizations enjoy a personality that is opposable to non-members rest on problematic, and ultimately unproven, assumption. Next, the chapter explores the idea of volonté distincte. This is the notion that international organizations must exhibit a will of their own before they can be thought of as distinct from their members. The chapter zeroes in on the discipline’s most commonly employed test in this respect, namely checking the capacity of an organization to adopt decisions without the consent of all of its members. It argues that, on closer inspection, this test turns out to be incoherent and cannot serve the purpose it was devised for.

This chapter zeroes in on the relationship between international organizations and customary international law. First, it explains why and to what extent international organizations can contribute with their practice to the formation of customary international law. This chapter argues that the practice of all the organs of an international organization should count towards the formation of new customary norms, with the caveat that this practice should not be weighed separately in terms of its representativeness. Next, this chapter revisits the problem of the extent to which customary international law applies to international organizations. It argues that in principle these institutions are bound to the same extent by custom as states are, with the caveat that they will often derive different rights and obligations from it, given their varied factual circumstances. The chapter then explains how this would apply in practice by looking at human rights and immunities in relation to international organizations.

After underlining the importance and currency of the topic of leadership, the introduction of the volume sets out to explain the content and merits of the present volume. The chapters of the volume make significant contributions to the following topics: (a) the vocabulary of ancient leadership: the authors study terms and concepts related to leadership in several ancient civilisations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran, Israel, China, Greece, Rome, and the Late Roman Empire), providing clarifications as to their different nuances; (b) the diverse forms of leadership: the essays of the volume deal with good and bad leaders, intellectual and political leaders, imperial and local, thus highlighting the complexity of the phenomenon of leadership in antiquity; (c) theoretical reflections on leadership: the analysis proposed enables readers to trace elements of leadership theory in ancient civilisations. The merits of this investigation consist in encouraging a comparative reflection on ancient civilisations and in triggering also a critical reflection on modern leadership issues.

Throughout the eighteenth century, hundreds of borough officers – mayors, aldermen, burgesses – were prosecuted in the Court of King’s Bench by quo warranto. The purpose of the process was political: to remove these officers from the parliamentary electoral register. The Municipal Offices Act 1711 provided a legislative foundation for the remedy, and secured it against the objection that it was interference with the exclusive right of the House of Commons to determine the eligibility of electors. While the 1711 Act provided litigants with a judicial alternative to petitioning the partisan Committee on Elections, there were abuses. Litigation was sometimes secretly funded by the government, borough officers were intimidated into disclaiming their office by fear of unsupportable costs, and officers who, for years, had innocently assumed that their titles were secure, were ejected for concealed historic defects. An effort to rebalance the process in favour of the interests of borough officers was made by Charles James Fox’s Quo Warranto Act 1792.

We define the category of polynomial functors by introducing its morphisms, called dependent lenses or lenses for short, and we show how they model interaction protocols. We introduce several methods for working with these lenses, including visual tools such as corolla forests and polybox pictures. We explain how these lenses represent bidirectional communication between polynomials and describe how they compose. By the end of the chapter, readers will have a comprehensive understanding of how polynomial functors and their morphisms can be used to model complex interactive behaviors.

Progressives who respond to conservative law and economic arguments by rejecting neoclassical economic theory are making a mistake. Neoclassical economics is the only ideology that honors the modern view – associated with the Death of God narrative in Western culture – that there are no longer universal standards of value. To make a case for redistribution of wealth that appeals to the modern view regarding value – a view that progressives themselves hold – progressives must engage with economics. Fortunately, the concept of the gains from trade in neoclassical economics (also known as "surplus" or "economic rent") allows progressives to make a strong case for redistribution of wealth. That is because gains from trade can be redistributed without harming efficiency by varying the prices at which inframarginal units change hands. This insight is called "inframarginalism" to contrast it with the conservative view that the valuations of the marginal buyer and seller pin down price in competitive markets and therefore prevent redistribution of the gains from trade.