This chapter examines West German efforts to admit refugees from Chile. It argues that the rhetoric of antifascism mobilized by the Chile solidarity movement was influential during the government of Willy Brandt (1973–1974), because the key pillars of the Social Democratic Party (youth organizations, trade unions, and regional party structures) endorsed the admittance of refugees as antifascist fighters, and members of the Free Democratic Party also sanctioned the admittance of refugees from Chile. However, following Helmut Schmidt’ accession to the chancellorship in 1974, securing political asylum for refugees from Chile became far more challenging and nearly impossible for political refugees from Argentina. This is because Schmidt and fellow government officials opposed left-wing solidarity during a time in which the focus shifted towards stabilizing the economy and combating left-wing terrorism. The government’s stance forced the solidarity movement to emphasize their humanitarian motivations. As the case of Helmut Frenz’s engagement demonstrates, the politics of emergency coexisted with a market-critical understanding of the violence perpetrated by the Chilean military regime.

This chapter examines efforts by government officials to blunt the impact of social movements on their human rights policymaking. Grassroots solidarity advocates tried to save the victims of the Argentine military regime – including West German citizens ensnared in the Dirty War – broaden the refugee admission program to Argentinean political refugees, and end abuses in the Colonia Dignidad in Chile. Government officials and mid-level Social Democratic politicians did not welcome these demands because they saw activists demands as unwelcome intruders in the making of foreign policy. Yet the Social-Liberal coalition’s attempt to shove aside popular advocacy for human rights in Latin America failed in the face of solidarity advocates’ refusal to give up. State officials and mid-level Social Democrats responded with a technocratic human rights policy that prioritized expert knowledge over the demands of social movements.

Contrary to Central America, the politics of emergency remained an essential framework for solidarity activists with the Southern Cone. However, these activists mobilized an explicitly market-critical interpretation of the human rights problems in Chile and Argentina. Grassroots human rights advocates criticized the lack of thoroughgoing judicial accountability, and the continuation of the economic policies imposed by the outgoing military regimes. Government officials, conservative politicians, and market-friendly NGOs such as the IGFM rebuffed these demands. They endorsed market-friendly democratization, the cornerstones of which were a negotiated ending to military rule, continuation of the neoliberal reforms initiated by the military regimes, and the non-prosecution of most perpetrators of human rights abuses. Pro-Pinochet activists favored a protracted process of democratization in Chile to ensure the continuation of his economic policies. This clashed with the efforts of Christian Democrats Heiner Geißler and Norbert Blüm, who wished to speed up the end of Pinochet’s rule and endorsed the acceptance of left-wing political asylum seekers to the FRG on humanitarian grounds.

This chapter focuses on the 1970s and 1980s during which MacCormick confronted and developed his political philosophy, with a special focus on the essays that were collected in Legal Right and Social Democracy (1982). This includes how MacCormick crafted a middle space between liberalism and socialism, which he called ‘social democracy’. It also includes MacCormick’s work, in this period, on obligations and rights. This chapter discusses the sense in which this conceptual work can be read with character, e.g., how his concepts of obligation and rights relate to his basic commitment to respect for persons (including a concern for the temporally-extended quality of relations between persons). It also places this philosophical work in the context of the politics of the period, e.g., the SNP’s own eventual endorsement of a social democratic platform, and it discusses how MacCormick’s political interventions in this period (e.g., his actions with respect to the’79 Group) can also be understood as expressions and negotiations of his character. Overall, the chapter explores how MacCormick’s character is expressed and negotiated in his role as a jurist, making law as morally intelligible as he could, seeking to limit executive power legally, and also diffusing and decentralising power as much as possible.

Throughout the twentieth century, many Europeans agreed that individual freedom had to be defended against an oppressive state. Dissidents strove to do so at the risk of imprisonment and physical violence. Political radicals and neoliberals accused even democratic states of undermining the very possibility of living freely. But for others the relationship was far more equivocal. Social democrats promised to foster working-class people’s freedom by expanding the welfare state, thus rendering them independent of capitalism and the family. Even major dictatorships, out of an interest in mobilization or acquiescence, did not present themselves solely as collectivistic projects. Whether or not the power of the state promoted or stifled freedom thus remained a matter of controversy. This chapter explores three aspects of this relationship: how inmates of concentration and work camps in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, and Franco’s Spain were deprived of their freedom but desperately attempted to safeguard some vestiges of it; how the Third Reich, various Eastern Bloc regimes, and the late Francoist dictatorship tried to accommodate individualistic desires and demands within their repressive structures; and, finally, how the project of social democratic liberty took shape and was challenged from both the left and the right.

How did social democracy seed new forms of politics that came of age in the global revolts of 1968, exposing its contradictions and compromised foundations, and hastening its demise after 1976?

What were the chief characteristics of the new social democratic system of government that developed in Britain between 1931 and 1976?

This chapter describes the many-sided aspects of Jewish life in Imperial Germany, in parallel to its general history up to 1914. Following an economic crisis 1873 and a decline of liberal faith, a wave of anti-Jewish sentiments spread – seemingly from Berlin – across the entire country. It brought about the establishment of new political parties with antisemitic programs, just when legal emancipation had been completed. This tension would become characteristic of Jewish life in the following era. It brought about extreme achievements in all spheres of life, but also daily confrontation with antisemitism. The latter deeply disappointed many Jews, but on the whole did not stop their integration and acculturation. Their fight against discrimination, moreover, strengthened their Jewish identity, despite further acculturation. The chapter describes Jewish cultural achievements as part of the period’s academic and artistic blooming, and the life of the Jewish bourgeoisie leading some of its members to disregard the dangers inherent in their situation.

Norman analyzes Swedish social democratic thinking in the 1930s and the form that Weimar lessons took there. Focusing on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both enormously influential intellectual figures for social democracy during this period, it traces how the re-evaluation of democratic politics informed by Weimar’s collapse that occurred elsewhere shaped Swedish social democracy. From the analysis of social democratic thought in Sweden emerges a more general point regarding analogical reasoning and lesson-drawing in politics. The Swedish self-image as an avant-garde in rational social reform provided a degree of blindness that reduced the scope for critical self-reflection. Its unique position in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s allowed social democracy to play out unbounded in its self-perceived rationality in what could be achieved through state intervention, allowing for both highly progressive reforms and more troubling and intrusive aspects of social programs.

Shifting conceptions of social justice were intricately entangled with changing conceptions of the market in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Understanding this interwoven history requires an analysis of the anthropological, moral, social, and political implications constructions of a market order. This observation is the starting point for a sketch of three distinctive periods in Western European history of entanglements between conceptions of social justice and understandings of the market. In the first period, defined by the social question, a notion of property as entitlements to social security created the social basis for the recognition of political agency and the empowerment of precarious workers. In a second period, notions of social justice centred on the creation and maintenance of a productive workforce, with sufficient spending power to contribute to the efficiency of markets and the growth of national wealth. The third period was characterised by an understanding of social justice as a disturbance of the price mechanism resulting from the capture of the state by self-interested professionals and interest groups. Social justice is not an alternative to a market morality; they together contribute to shifting entanglements of ‘socially’ informed markets and ‘market’ informed constellations of social justice.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

Critics of Rawls’s principles of justice complain that they ignore considerations of merit or desert. As meritocracy is the chief justification for the extremely wide inequalities between workers at the top and bottom today, we need to examine this complaint. I argue that ideas of desert or merit are inherently unsuited to informing principles of justice for the basic structure of society. Moreover, attempts to raise the principle of desert to the systemic level have historically formed the ideological grounds for irresolvable class warfare. Rawls’s principles of justice supply a normative perspective that wisely aims to transcend class warfare. Rawls’s conception of property-owning democracy, culturally shaped by public affirmation of the difference principle, offers a plausible vision of how society may achieve such transcendence.