This chapter explains how liberal democratic institutions provide a solution to the problem that rulers cannot otherwise credibly commit to forgoing the introduction of regulations that increase state control over church activities. In particular, churches have greater autocratic risk when they have historically invested in activities, such as church schools, that the state has high capacity to regulate. As a result, churches with significant education systems have greater incentive to speak out in support of liberal democratic institutions, although this incentive is mitigated when their schools are fiscally dependent on the government to operate.

This chapter discusses the implications of the book for understanding democracy and democratic activism beyond churches in sub-Saharan Africa. It emphasizes that some churches employ coalitional strategies to advance their interests, and, in such cases, their attitudes toward liberal democracy are contingent on whether doing so will advance or hinder the power of their preferred parties. It also shows that some churches rely on liberal democracy as an institutional guarantee of their interests, suggesting that my argument applies to churches beyond Africa. It concludes by explaining how the theory can be applied to other types of actors in other regions of the world.

This chapter demonstrates that churches have often engaged in activism for liberal democratic institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and yet existing scholarship provides little guidance in explaining why churches sometimes engage in this type of activism while others do not. It sketches out an argument for why some churches have an interest in liberal democratic institutions because they protect them from rulers unilaterally introducing regulations that reduce their control of key church activities. It argues that church schools have particular risk of regulation by rulers, giving churches that run greater number of schools particular incentives to support liberal democratic institutions. It also argues that this risk is mitigated when churches are highly dependent on the state for financing activities.

The last chapter is the Conclusion. After a brief overview of the book’s key themes, topics, and arguments, the chapter places India in a comparative perspective and asks the following questions. How analogous are political and economic trends in India when compared to similar countries? How do India’s achievements and shortcomings discussed in the book stand up against some other comparable countries?

Chapter 2 discusses how India’s rulers have used state power to promote economic development, both growth and its distribution. While India’s growth record is relatively impressive, it is also the case that this growth has not been accompanied by the creation of well-paying jobs, and economic inequality in India has increased sharply.

Chapter 3 focuses on Hegel’s critique of liberalism. It starts by discussing the preface to the Philosophy of Right in order to challenge the widespread assumption that Hegel is averse to robust social criticism. Afterwards, the chapter considers two main causes for the limited recognition of his work’s critical dimension. The first is the tendency to read Hegel’s book as a horizontal progression, fuelled by the accumulation of different aspects or layers of freedom. This kind of approach misrepresents the qualitative transformation that is at stake in the transition from civil society to the state, which only a vertical reading can adequately convey. Second, the Philosophy of Right’s critical import has also been obfuscated by some of Hegel’s own philosophical positions. Despite his intended sublation of the stage of civil society, his account of the state remains wedded, in important ways, to the former’s underlying logic. As the chapter seeks to show, if we accept Hegel’s claim that a rational state must synthesize the particular and the universal dimensions of human freedom, we must reject some of his political options as partly or wholly un-Hegelian.

We model discrete-time dynamical systems using a specific class of lenses between polynomials whose domains are equipped with a bijection between their positions and their directions. We introduce Moore machines and deterministic state automata as key examples, showing how these morphisms describe state transitions and interactions. We also explain how to build new dynamical systems from existing ones using operations like products, parallel composition, and compositions of these maps. This chapter demonstrates how polynomial functors can be used to represent and analyze discrete-time dynamical behavior in a clear, structured way.

Chapter 4 reassesses Hegel’s views on property and its role within a rational state. In the Philosophy of Right’s initial stage, devoted to ‘abstract right’, each person is defined as an independent legal agent, with the right to own and exchange property. From this standpoint, the political sphere is but a prolongation of the legal sphere and the state is reduced to an external authority, charged with regulating existing property relations. As the progression unfolds, however, this legalistic framework is called into question: it turns out that individual rights are not the true foundation of the state, but a part thereof, subordinated to a wider commitment to the common good. Yet while this commitment is clearly affirmed by Hegel, it is at odds with the priority he accords to private property, in the progression’s later stages, over other forms of ownership. Taking a different path, the chapter argues that a Hegelian theory of property entails a critical revision of Hegel’s actual treatment of property rights. If the state is to bring together the citizens’ particular interests and the common good, the ownership of society’s productive resources must be shared by all of its members.

This chapter explores how the ranching-grabbing RDPE is supported by moral economic changes, which in this context is veneration for the cowboy lifestyle and scorn of traditional/Indigenous livelihoods. The cowboy lifestyle is often seen in a positive light, despite the violence that accompanies forest removal. These changes in the moral economy help to explain how locals increasingly welcome ranching-land speculation, even inside multiple-use conservation areas. Another key factor in deforestation processes are the policies and infrastructure investment decisions made at the federal and state level, which render large areas available for appropriation. These problems are also international, as groups expanding deforestation are still often funded by international banks, creating investment lock-in, as investors are more interested in preserving returns on investments than curbing illegalities. Simultaneously, there is a wide variety of activists in local communities who are resisting these extractivist pushes. The chapter examines where and how Indigenous peoples/forest-dwellers successfully resist land grabbing and clearcutting on their lands.

The Finnish pulp sector is the key actor responsible for the preference for a homogenous clearcut forest economy. This chapter examines the historic roots and global connections related to Finland’s post-2015 so-called bioeconomy boom. This boom prompted the construction of large “bioproduct” mills, which in practice produce export-oriented pulp that will be turned into cardboard and tissue. Finland is transforming from being the core of global paper production to being a semi-commodity producer. Fiber mass production and its accompanying energy production are key in delineating how forests are used, what kind of trees are grown, where, for how long, and based on what logic. The reasons why the pulp-driven forestry strategy and clearcutting model have continued against all logic are explored. This chapter uncovers how the pulp sector became dominant and the effects of the new contentious forest politics in the context of the “bioeconomy” and European Union (EU) legislation.

The chapter recounts the history of the concept of risk and of early modern insurance practices as they evolved from communal attempts, mainly in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, to discipline and commodify earlier forms of speculation. The processes eventually involved in risk assessment, pooling, and diversification were neither inevitable nor entirely capricious. They were complicated and indeterminate, and accommodating structures of government developed in tandem. The chapter also provides an orientation to increasingly complicated scholarship focused on the governance of risk and uncertainty as considerations of their consequences migrate over time and geographic space. It notes how leading business firms around the world, not just in the insurance industry, came to base their strategies on sophisticated models that take for granted commonplace, and even simplistic, notions of risk. Those models are dynamic and they now shape larger structures within which firms and people interact. As collective impressions of risk become more complex, shared sources of uncertainty also rise, often because economic and political systems are misaligned.

History for German idealism is the expression of practical reason, the process of gradually bringing about the accord of subject and object. In Hegel’s conception of the history of freedom, different configurations of ethical life embody changing assessments of the self and the world, and contain essential contradictions whose resolution is the key to progress towards new and more complex forms. The dialectic of the will in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is an exposition of the idea of spontaneity, endowing itself with concrete content as it moves through its dimensions of universality, particularity, and singularity. Hegel demonstrates that modern institutions are not mere limitations, but legitimate conditions for the exercise of freedom. The rationality of the real, however, does not preclude a critical engagement. Close examination of current relations and institutions as exemplifying ideas of freedom reveals nodal points where practical interventions are likely to be fruitful in effecting change. An implicit, historicised ‘ought’ in Hegel, arising from his reworking of the logical categories, marks his place within post-Kantian perfectionism.

The term “school adjustment” refers not only to the state or phenomenological description of a student at a given point in time; it also refers to the process that newcomers experience once they start to make the transition from home to early childhood care or kindergarten; from kindergarten to elementary school; from elementary school to secondary or junior high-school; from secondary school to high school; from any one school to another (e.g., due to parental divorce or immigration); and from high school to institutions of higher education. The state of school adjustment refers to students’ exhibition of expected academic outcomes, expected interpersonal outcomes, a general motivation to learn, and personal outcomes (e.g., positive self-esteem, lack of depressive symptoms). The process of school adjustment is the advancing process by which the students’ readiness and even eagerness to meet the aforementioned criteria of a state of school adjustment gradually emerge. As one of the life-course transitional events, adjustment too school can be articulated by the Stress and Adjustment Model (STA; Israelashvili, 2023).

The textbook Immanuel Kant assigned for his course on Naturrecht was Gottfried Achenwall’s Natural Law. In the Feyerabend transcript of his course (1784), Kant not only explains Achenwall’s text but also criticizes him and expounds his own alternative theory. Since it is not always obvious from the lecture notes whether Kant is explaining Achenwall, criticizing him, or presenting his own theory, one must know the basics about Achenwall’s positions when reading Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. In this essay, we introduce Achenwall and his handbook to readers of Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. We start with some background information and then discuss Achenwall’s position on freedom and obligation, natural law and right, and his theory of property and the state. We end by pointing out a few of the main points of disagreement between Kant and Achenwall that emerge from the Feyerabend lectures.