A 50-year-old man was initially seen by a rheumatologist because he had crooked fingers on the left hand and painful cramps. No rheumatological abnormalities were found. In the next three years, he developed severe atrophy and weakness of the left hand, and could not hold a glass of water. There were no sensory complaints. His GP considered motor neuron disease.

This chapter outlines the challenges that current political polarization presents for constitutional law and judicial authority. Over the past fifty years, US politics have polarized, producing close political competition between two ideologically defined national parties that view each other with fear and distrust. This polarization has encouraged political actors in Congress and the federal executive branch to take legally aggressive positions and prioritize substantive policy achievements over adherence to good-governance norms or even constitutional restraints. At the same time, polarization has generated rival constitutional visions, and aligned slates of judges, that aim to advance partisan goals through constitutional interpretation. This environment poses risks for both judicial authority and constitutional law, because the public may lose trust in courts as neutral arbiters of constitutional disputes if it perceives them as wholly political institutions.

While the institution of private property is a central institution of the liberal state, the role of the state is necessarily, and paradoxically, de-centered in accounts of liberal property law. The rhetorical power of ownership relies on the de-politicization of property rights, positioning the question of entitlements and the protection of the status quo of private property above, or prior to, the law. In periods of relative stability the relationships between private property, political ideologies, state legitimacy and authority are relegated from the “public realm” of political and legal debate to the “private sphere” of interpersonal relations between individuals. Indeed, the resilience of the liberal state is rooted in the taken-for-granted assumption that private property rights (as defined by the dominant narrative) will, and must, be upheld. However, in an age of crisis, “settled” liberal nation states, including the USA and the UK, economic setbacks, social movement protests, and civil unrest, have called into question the relationships between property relations, on the one hand, and the authority and legitimacy of state actions and institutions, on the other. This chapter explains how “Resilient Property” approach and methodology focuses directly on state action in responding to property problems, particularly in moments of crisis.

The introduction presents the key theoretical concepts of cultural exchange and Mercio P. Gomes’s theory of ethnoexocentrism; the historical parameters of 1833–1910; the ten writers on which this study focuses, who arrived in Germany in three successive waves; the varied reasons women travelled to Germany; the relation of this book to studies of cosmopolitanism; and Anna Jameson’s and Vernon Lee’s own theories of cosmopolitanism that demonstrate their understanding of what it meant and its importance. The introduction then briefly outlines chapters to come.

Faiz’s literary pursuits are difficult to disentangle from the wider political trajectory out of which he emerged and impacted. I argue that Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ethical self-fashioning as a political subject was deeply rooted within Perso-Arabic, Indo-Persian, and Urdu literary traditions even as he became increasingly invested in internationalist solidarity. I show that Faiz’s poetry, deeply rooted in Urdu literary and ethical traditions and composed during incarceration and exile, demonstrated his revulsion for the narrow confines of territorial nationalism and the authoritarianism of the postcolonial state.

This chapter contends that Manto’s trials signify a paradoxical sociopolitical context when it came to questions of women and sexuality: middle-class women became more visible in public and more highly educated in the formal sense, but there was also a shift in expressions of sexuality. This chapter argues that a complex and critical reassessment of Manto’s ethical self-fashioning through an examination of official documents, literary materials, and debates within progressive literary circles over representations of sexuality, enhances an understanding of the larger cultural and political developments of a turbulent period when it comes to the politics of sexuality. Finally, moral discourses, particularly around sexuality, were also prevalent within progressive, communist, and socialist intellectual circles as well, giving rise to hegemonic definitions and distinctions about who constituted the ideal literary progressive.

The controversy over Angāre in the early 1930s has always been interpreted as a contest between religious and secular forces given the furor around the publication for being “blasphemous.” Turning to relevant legislation in the period, contextualizing debates around blasphemy in the legal and literary spheres, and analyzing responses to the text, I problematize assumptions behind seeing the controversy as one about religion vs. secularism. I argue that the text and the reception to it is best read as a crisis over ethics within the colonized, Urdu-speaking Muslim upper classes of urban North India, who were beginning to stake their raison d’etre and sense of selfhood on minority political status. This status had enormous consequences a decade later in the demand for Pakistan. This chapter shows how this early controversy was about how a class of Indian Muslims were identifying as an ethical community, not a religious one.

A historiography of South Asian Muslim nationalism and the place of Urdu progressive literature within a broader political context of independence struggles against colonial rule in India and Pakistan.

Chapter 4 sketches how the contribution of ordinary language philosophers like Ryle, Kenny and Vendler to linguistic semantics has added to persistent terminological confusion. Their delivery of the Aristotelian legacy to linguistics consists of a sort of naive physical ontology at the cost of the principle of compositionality. The misleading translation of Greek verb forms occurring in the crucial passus of Metaphysics 1048b into the English Progressive Form will be argued to have been decisive for what natural (language) philosophy handed to linguists: an outdated vision on motion. The chapter also sketches the heavy work of a verb in taking all sorts of different arguments and argues that features are insufficient for the semantics of tense and aspect: they should be used as abbreviatory and for convenience only.

A valid new sense of privacy would need to be founded on the principles of the existential, respectful self-responsibility of all individuals and the promotion of which would need to be complemented by a reimagined State, Market and technological design principles. This will allow the embrace, not the denial, of the value of technological development, especially in neuroscience. In this context, each individual would have an evolving personal technology strategy with progressive/enhancement and conservative/protection elements. From that, respectful self-responsibility would require both sharing information and acquiring it, all typically under the individual’s control, including through data and algorithms that are designed and applied under their direction. The initiatives undertaken by the IEEE and MyData are moves in the right direction, but they remain prey to mythological interpretation. The principles of this new sense of privacy are then tested by application to standard and well-known privacy dilemmas, including on case law.

The purpose of this chapter is to connect ‘human movement’ theory with practice. Thus, the chapter answers the questions: What does human movement theory look like in practice? How can it be optimised for all children? Why is it vital for the advancement of ‘health and wellbeing in childhood’?

Chapter 4 introduces basic differential equations and boundary conditions for gravity waves propagating along a water surface. Assuming low wave amplitudes, equations are linearised. Then a quantitative discussion is given for harmonical (sinusoidal) waves propagating either on deep water, or otherwise on water of constant depth. Phase and group velocities are introduced, and then formulas are derived for the potential energy and the kinetic energy associated with a water wave. A closely related result is an important formula for the wave-power level, which equals the wave’s group velocity multiplied by the wave’s stored – kinetic + potential – energy per unit of sea surface. An additional subject is the wave’s momentum density. A section concerns real sea waves. Further, circular waves are mathematically described. Two sections of the chapter concern mathematical tools to be applied in Chapters 5–8 of the book. A final section considers water waves analysed in the time domain.

Policies that follow from increased awareness of civic friendship are progressive and socially conservative. Each policy—on fair wage, immigration, and national service—fights the current tendency of citizens to “live down” to the low expectations theorists and policymakers have of them. Our theoretical realism fails to account for the role of ideals in our lived experience. Civic friendship helps us avoid the pitfalls of moralizing and reifying market mechanisms, by giving greater attention to the way wages confer honor—as opposed to bodily welfare and comfort. A norm tethering CEOs’ pay to a fixed multiple of the lowest salaried employee helps workers but would also help the wealthy realize their mistake when they seek, through money, honors that can only be won through civic patronage. Patronage as opposed to philanthropy is local, hands-on giving. Patronage often arises within ethnicities and creates social capital out of the ethnocentricity of immigrant groups. The civic capacity of young people could be increased by a compulsory choice between military service and a civilian corps dedicated to public works projects.