A philosophical account of worship will answer at least two questions: the constitutive question of what worship is, and the normative question of what normative standards govern worship. The questions are related because what normative standards govern worship depends on whether worship consists primarily of some attitude or some action. This chapter briefly surveys the theoretical terrain of answers to these questions, with special attention to identifying the minimal conditions under which worship is fitting or supported by reasons.

While Rabindranath Tagore and Taraknath Das did not travel to the US to learn about American racism, Lala Lajpat Rai specifically journeyed there to understand the Black experience. Rai was born in 1865 to a Jain family in the Punjab Province. His father was a teacher of the Urdu language at the Government Higher Secondary School where Rai also studied as a child. In 1880, Rai attended the Government College at Lahore to study law, graduating four years later. During his time at there, Rai began to grow disillusioned with British rule. In 1886, he moved to the village of Hisar in Haryana to practice law and founded the Hisar district branch of the Indian National Congress and the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. Like the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj campaigned against caste discrimination, and they supported widow remarriage and women's education. The organization also had an internationalist outlook and established chapters in British colonies with Indian populations, such as South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, Suriname, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago. Rai was an active participant and campaigner during the early years of the organization's existence. Like the Arya Samaj, Rai had an internationalist philosophy toward advocating for Indian independence as well as social reform. In 1914, he quit practicing law to dedicate himself to the Indian independence movement fully. That same year, Rai planned a six-month trip to the US to collect material for a book on the plight of Black Americans. However, while he was in the US, the British categorized him as a political exile for criticizing British rule and he was not allowed to return to India until the end of 1919.

During his five-year stay in the US, Rai had a considerable impact on Americans. He formed alliances and garnered support for Indian self-rule from Irish nationalists, American civil rights activists, and other American anti-colonialists. In addition to seeking out support for Indian self-determination, the strife of Black Americans was a central part of Rai's advocacy. Rai wanted to understand how the Black American struggle related to the plight of Indians under the British Raj, and he also sought to compare American racism to the Indian caste system.

“Eusynoptos” takes its title from the Aristotelian notion of εὐσύνοπτος: “easily taken in at a glance.” In the Politics, Aristotle maintains that the size of a city is strictly delimited by the number of citizens that can be visually comprehended at a glance. But what if a machine were to augment the sensory capacities of humans? Could a political entity then be expanded beyond its natural limits? Confronting these questions in his film theory, Walter Benjamin modernizes eusynoptos by showing how the movie camera records large masses of individuals in a manner impossible for the naked eye. Informed by Benjamin’s idiosyncratic Marxism, the coda examines the reception of Nazi propaganda films in the United States in order to develop a critical theory of collective spectatorship that promotes a rational politics, thereby pressing back on an irrationalist tradition in aesthetics leading from Schelling and Schopenhauer through Nietzsche to fascism.

Chapter 5 examines how early nineteenth-century accounts of walking in the city traced the nuisances and delights of urban living, helping to articulate a sense of collective experience that in turn shaped a sense of what it meant to be a Londoner. Many of these accounts of London emphasized the modernity of their moment by reimagining earlier eighteenth-century works, presenting them as inadequate to the task of describing the contemporary experience of the city. Trivia’s “art of walking the streets of London” was reworked to propose forms of selfish behaviour in the streets, and Pierce Egan’s Life in London broadly followed the template of spy guides while also showing his characters delighting in, rather than simply observing, all aspects of urban pleasure. Together, these works suggested new ways of thinking about moving through the streets of a city as crowded and busy as London.

This chapter recovers Schopenhauer’s previously neglected account of prudent political action. It points out the connections between the skilled governance of society and the savvy self-control of the individual in Schopenhauer’s works and argues that a full analysis of his conception of politics must include a treatment of prudence in world affairs as well as in interpersonal encounters. In fact, Schopenhauer supplemented his account of the modern state as an instrument of society-wide pacification with an account of prudent self-governance as an obligation for the modern subject. He believed that the state must impose constraints on disruptive egoism from the top, but that individuals should also prudently mask their egoism and in this way soften antagonisms. In Schopenhauer’s view, Hobbes’ theory of statehood could be constructively linked to Baltasar Gracián’s account of prudence; implemented together, they could strengthen the prospects of peace.

In this chapter, Qureshi-Hurst turns towards empirical science, introducing Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and arguing that its most compelling interpretation is committed to the existence of the block universe. The neo-Lorentzian interpretation is analysed and rejected.

“Militant Neoclassicism” argues that W. E. B. Du Bois marshaled post-Kantian aesthetics against the anthropological categories posited by Enlightenment theorists. The chapter departs from the traditional interpretation of Du Bois as a champion of integration, which relies heavily on The Souls of Black Folk at the expense of Du Bois’s later Marxism. This interpretation downplays his controversial advocacy for the self-segregation of African-American communities, which sought to capitalize on intra-group solidarity in order to rectify class conflict. The chapter argues that these collectives, spheres of free action carved out from predominately white social structures, evince the aesthetic autonomy theorized by Friedrich Schiller, whom Du Bois admired and quotes in Souls. Attending to aesthetic autonomy also reveals new connections between Du Bois and cultural anthropology, especially the work of Ruth Benedict, who advanced aesthetic arguments about anthropological communities that distinguished themselves from a dominant social milieu.

As Chapter 4 has already made clear, this chapter is not another caravan-to-car story. Nor is it another case study of threatening mobility vs. governmentality. It is rather a continuation of Chapter 4 on the transformations of economic and political geography that put caravans to the test. Building on Chapter 4 and contrary to developmentalist notions of modernisation, this chapter argues that the end of caravans was a cumulative process, just like its persistence until the interwar period. New kinds of territorialisation (automobility and what I define as the ‘evening of mobility’ were part of it, indeed) fostered gradual disintegration and divergence across the caravan regional market. This would gradually erode the caravans’ raison d’être and deepen their transition to shorter routes while camels and traders would find new employments.

The chapter analyses the judicial application of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the Convention) in South Africa, which is a hybrid legal system with both monist and dualist features. The largely successful judicial application of the Convention has been facilitated by the country’s constitution, which contains a provision on children’s rights and generous provisions regarding the judicial application of international treaties. The chapter shows that courts favour the application of the Convention as an interpretation tool for the children’s rights clause in the Constitution, but they neglect other possibilities of engagement, such as self-execution or statutory interpretation. This has resulted in lost opportunities to give judicial effect to the Convention. Courts also engage in sui generis forms of application, which has diversified the means of its application. The impact of the Convention is sometimes difficult to discern because of its overlap with domestic instruments. Nonetheless, the Convention has demonstrated its value added when gaps were found in the domestic law, although most often the influence of the Convention has been subtle and diffuse.