Chapter Nine explores Rogers’ humor, which was the common denominator in his wide-ranging endeavors as a public figure . It argues that he was the heir of a homespun, cracker-box tradition of comic commentary dating back to Benjamin Franklin and continuing through Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, Mr. Dooley, and Mark Twain. Rogers presented a comic persona composed of common sense, a puncturing of pretense and pomposity, and a head-shaking, chuckling exposure of the absurdities of modern values and traditional prejudices alike. He did not tell jokes but offered witty reflections on the conundrums of modern life, appearing as a rustic sage cracking wise at the local general store. Moreover, while Rogers took pains to present his humor as spontaneous, it was actually meticulously prepared. Ultimately, by joking about the tensions, incongruities, and dislocations of a rapidly modernizing society, he helped Americans come to terms with enormous changes affecting their lives. Their rapturous reception made Rogers the leading American humorist of early twentieth-century America.

This chapter surveys and critiques the three major viewpoints on the ethics of communication, which I label Civility, Victory, and Open-mindedness. For Civility, activism must be governed by a set of rules for respectful engagement. For Victory, the ends justify the means, and for the sake of one’s political goals, one may need to mislead audiences, dismiss opponents, and use ad hominem attacks. For Open-mindedness, it is violent and immoral to impose one’s views on others. I argue that all three perspectives have serious shortcomings, but that each voice expresses a valuable concern. People want their advocacy to be moral, effective, and nonviolent, but often feel like it is impossible to have all three.

Martin Luther King Jr. argues that means and ends must be commensurable. If one wants to bring about a more equitable society, one must do so by equitable means. This means-ends principle is reiterated in the writings of Gandhi and King, but it has often been treated as something mysterious. A pragmatic case can be made for it if we pay attention to the dynamics of communication. Gandhi and King argue for an approach to social conflict that combines compassion for the needs of their opponents with a resolute opposition to the injustices these opponents perpetrate. Respect and respectability without challenge and protest will not contribute to the development of a more equitable society. But neither will challenge and protest without respect and respectability. By attending to how nonviolent direct actionists combine these two pressures, I develop an alternative to the dominant perspectives in communication ethics, but one that shares their concerns for morality, effectiveness, and nonviolence.

Most people believe there are rules of civility that ought to govern our discourse in moral and political disagreements. These rules operate like the rules of just-war theory: easy to adhere to in theory, but in practice routinely abandoned by all parties for the sake of winning. Drawing on conflict theory and social psychology, I explain how social conflicts make it possible for people to break their own rules of engagement without recognizing that they are doing so. Indeed, the same public figures who speak of the need for civility and unity are often the ones most willing to resort to uncivil and intentionally divisive speech. In any “us versus them” conflict, the perceived necessity for “us” to prevail over “them” tends to outweigh other ethical considerations. The rules of civility, whatever their merits as an ethical theory, are largely ineffective at constraining immoral practices when the chips are down.

In appreciating the institutional perpetuity of war, while simultaneously acknowledging the historically informed, inherent limitations of attempts to bound its conduct by international law, this chapter introduces the three interrelated questions that serve as the organising themes of this volume: first, is there a historical continuity with legal protections in war being informed by notions of ‘civility’ and ‘barbarity’?; second, what is the relationship between the ideals and operational realities in international humanitarian law (IHL)?; and third, what are the limitations of international laws designed to restrain excess in war? Via a brief overview of the divergent evolutions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello law, this introductory chapter further explores the sub-themes present in this volume: universalism and its shortcomings; problems with punishing violations of IHL; and the degree to which modern laws of war legitimate activities that should otherwise be prohibited.

Until quite recently, international relations theory neglected the role of emotions. This chapter surveys the rehabilitation of emotions and moral sentiment in political and international relations theory with a view to examining the cultivation of sympathy as a normative and historical condition of international humanitarian law as a ‘civilising process’. The chapter argues that, as part of a broader ‘civilising process’ to alleviate unnecessary human suffering, moral sentiment has been an indispensable, if ambivalent, factor in the historical pursuit of humanitarian action. The chapter argues that the modern codification of international humanitarian law is predicated on the cultivation of moral sentiments such as sympathy and compassion being extended to those injured or killed on the battlefields.

This chapter turns to the conception of ‘legitimate’ knowledge, first examining constructions of ‘legitimacy’, drawing on political, sociological, and philosophical conceptions. The construction of legitimate knowledge in relation to the conceptions of belief, truth, and justification are considered. In addition, debates pertaining to the recent discourses of the democratisation of knowledge, linked to the notion of ‘expertise’ and ‘stakeholders’, indigenous knowledge and decolonising knowledge are discussed; this entails a critical exploration of various types of factors complicit in the formulation of knowledge, including positionality, with respect to class, political interest, gender, race, and so on; university diversity initiatives; disciplinary quality; methodology and the ‘Canon’; skills, employment, and research assessment initiatives; funding and international partnerships; and global legitimating systems such as global university rankings, publication systems, and citation practices. Furthermore, it is argued that the production of research does not sit outside these positionalities and the politics of knowledge production.

This chapter addresses a fundamental debate in the field – the presumed irreconcilability of the principles of academic freedom on the one hand and diversity and inclusion on the other. It examines contested conceptions of academic freedom through academics’ experiences in Lebanon, the UAE, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In response to polemical and polarised debates, it has been theorised that the principles of justice and inclusion and the principles of academic freedom are complementary rather than contradictory. However, this potential complementarity has not been examined to date in relation to the production of knowledge. This chapter makes the original proposition that this complementarity between inclusion and academic freedom is also a requisite in the production of ‘inclusive knowledge’.

Utilizing data from the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Italy, I examine to what extent positive and negative partisanship promote attitudes that are antithetical to a healthy democratic society, including the support for a ban of political parties as well as the desire to see politicians physically harmed.

This chapter provides a narrative account of my time as Chancellor of UC Berkeley, beginning with issues around the governance of public universities and the place of student protest. It covers issues of personal security, debates over tuition and funding, the crisis caused by major budget shortfalls, the struggle between Governor Jerry Brown and President (of the UC System) Janet Napolitano (former Secretary of Homeland Security and Governor of Arizona), football teams and academic performance, sexual assault among students, data science and the curriculum, the global strategy of the university, the plan for a Berkeley Global Campus, the legacy of the Free Speech Movement of 1964, controversy about the role of civility on college campus, budget cuts, institutional restructuring and change, resistance to change among faculty, sexual harassment, and ultimately the tension between administrative leadership and faculty life. It also covers controversies over the visits to campus of Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, and Ben Shapiro and a fullscale riot on campus. It concludes with accounts of progress in data science, biomedical research, and recovery from budget woes.

Chapter 4 reads Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (1968) in the light of the historical crisis from which it arose. Mapping the film against selected material from earlier versions of the script, director’s notes, letters, and interviews, I interpret Stolen Kisses against the grain of its conventional reception as a romantic comedy. I show how, while sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, the film occupied a bystander position in relation to the political parties involved in the conflict. Against ideologies of fusional collectivity, Truffaut experiments with new forms of individuality, freedom, and communication. In striking resemblance to Plessner’s theory of tact, he shows how tactful behaviour can facilitate ways to come close to one another without meeting, and drift apart again without damaging one another through indifference. Counter to the widespread expectation that when relations are close, they are warm, and when they are warm, they are beneficial to all individuals involved, intimacies do not necessarily bring us closer together. On the contrary, inasmuch as they may infringe upon the singularity and dignity of the individual, they can have a deeply alienating effect.

The Conclusion draws together the key themes explored in this book. Highlighting the crux norms of comity, collaboration, and conflict management framed by the conditions of reciprocity, reputation, and repeat play, the Conclusion defends a relational and collaborative conception of the separation of powers. Looking to new horizons, the Conclusion gestures at future lines of research opened up by the collaborative idea, including the possibility of imagining international, supra-national, and transnational law in collaborative terms. It concludes by presenting the fundamental norms of the collaborative constitution as vital in the current moment, but also as a form of ’constitutional capital’. On analogy with the influential idea of ’social capital’, it argues that the unwritten norms of the collaborative constitutional system are a precious constitutional resource we should preserve, protect, and enhance in order to create stable and sustainable constitutionalism for the twenty-first century.

This chaptercomments on the relationship between moderation and civility and argues that the latter can work as an effective antidote to a festering climate of fear, rage, and intimidation.

During its short publishing life, the Iris Américaine proposed a complement to the enlightened White male American citizen promoted by Saint-Domingue’s other two periodicals, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue. After summarizing the contributions of the Affiches and the Journal to the island’s cultural life and discussing the importance of “taste” in French cultural life, the chapter documents how the Iris honored the age-old dictum “to instruct and delight” by publishing a mix of diverting poetry, short stories, and nonfiction essays. Yet its content, however light, had the serious intent of tutoring White women in good taste—both for their own good and to civilize their men by transforming unruly passions into refined pleasures. While these objectives were framed in a metropolitan terms, they assumed special urgency in a society infamous for racial brutality and “disordered” sexuality. Thus, the Iris spoke to deep social anxieties and threatening realities: the failure to establish a stable, White population; the ubiquitous concubinage of enslaved Black women and free women of color; the consequent increase in the number of mixed-race people; and the fact that White colonists were vastly outnumbered by enslaved Black people.

The success of a democratic society depends, Rawls thought, on members having a shared sense of justice, a common basis for reasoning about what is right. Otherwise, disagreements born from conflicts of interest and identity – and associated “distrust and resentment” – will have corrosive effects on social cooperation. But can we reasonably hope for a broadly shared sense of justice? Religious and philosophical pluralism arguably leave hope for an overlapping consensus on a conception of justice sufficient to cabin those corrosive effects. But what about the pluralism of conceptions of justice themselves? I argue that, even on favorable assumptions about people and social cooperation, we should expect serious disagreement about conceptions of justice and the forms of democracy they recommend, as well as conflicts between and among the interests and identities of citizens who endorse those competing conceptions. Even on these favorable assumptions, then, we have reason to worry – as I think Rawls always did – about the fragility of democracy.

Drawing on sources such as jestbooks, compilations of apophthegms, and treatises of wit, this chapter explores the interaction between memory and the affect of pleasure in the context of the early modern culture of jesting. The genre of the Renaissance jestbook, which owes its emergence to the humanist appetite for jokes, taps into the cultural memory of classical wit and medieval exempla as well as the collective memory of pre-Reformation festive culture. In England jestbooks proliferated as commodities on the print marketplace and were avidly consumed by social aspirants, keen to acquire wit and urbanity. Jestbooks were frequently marketed as vehicles of nostalgia for a "Merry England," a fabricated age of universal amity and concord. The jests themselves, however, often harness the legacy of agonistic wit to celebrate a form of civility in which conflict is transmuted into a contest of wit, evoking the shared pleasure of competitive play.