Global history stands out by its intimate relationship to the processuality of history. As they put forms and structures of ‘global integration’ centre stage, global historians have not only made statements about the direction of history the foundation of how they define their area of study; they also ascribe at least partial explanatory power to them. The chapter argues that there is a lot to gain from stronger reflection on how global historians construe historical change over time. It delves into the theory of historical processes to develop more precise questions about directionality and presents responses global histories may offer to the teleological pitfalls of global integration. It also discusses the dialectics involved in processes of global integration and offers the outlines of a global history more attuned to the (unrealised) expectations and ‘futures pasts” among historical actors and to historical uncertainties produced under the impact of global interconnection. While the directionality/teleology problem poses particular challenges for global historians, it also can help think about multiple ‘guiding scripts’ global historians may use, refine and variegate in practice.

This chapter analyzes what makes highly affective collaborations unique and how the complexity of such collaborations can be studied. Drawing on previous research, it explores in-depth innovative methodologies that are designed to capture the key elements of complexity during productive interactions. Components of these methods are then applied to two distinct settings: preschooler free play and early elementary playful learning. The qualitative analysis of free play focuses on how synchrony, intersubjectivity, and shared meaning emerge in a dialectical relationship to each other over the course of interaction and how the coding captures the vicissitudes of complexity. An adaptation of the coding scheme for preschoolers is provided for observational coding of teacher-facilitated early elementary interactions that measures both intersubjectivity and exploratory talk. The preliminary results indicate patterns in the coding of episodes that are consistent with the theoretical premise discussed previously.

This chapter provides an introduction to American pragmatism as an ethical tradition with educational ramifications. The chapter first explains the origins of pragmatism and accounts for the primary features of pragmatist ethics. It then profiles the ethical views and educational bearings of two classical pragmatists: William James and John Dewey, and the most prominent neopragmatist, Richard Rorty. The chapter shows how pragmatism, from its nineteenth-century origins to its contemporary iterations, approaches education as integral to the ethical and political cultivation of a vibrant, pluralistic, democratic culture. Its philosophical orientation – away from the fixed and timeless and toward the contingent and contextualized – conceives of humans as active but fallible agents pursuing knowledge to address the concrete problems of their communities. Despite their differences, James, Dewey, and Rorty recognized the need to foster individual habits and collective sensibilities that center our moral imaginations, sympathetic attachments to others, and our situatedness in concrete social and natural environments.

This chapter discusses the philosopher Richard Rorty’s influential writings on the contingent nature of ironic thinking and expression. Rorty argued that irony does not reveal foundational truths, but is employed to help us “depict the world through multiple points of view.” Irony provides a way of individually recreating the world for ourselves rather than offering a special device to demystify assumptions about reality that somehow exists outside of language. Rorty’s claimed that writers such as Proust, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida are ironists given their questions about the stories and vocabularies we inhabit. Literature is especially useful for creating spaces for irony as sites for creative, nonjudgmental self-examination. But philosophy is also a kind of playful ironic writing that helps us to create useful redescriptions of the world and our roles in it. Colebrook emphasizes that Rorty rejected the idea that irony is just a trope in which one thing is said and another is meant. Irony is “the very opposite of searching for essences,” which is why it is so important for understanding liberalism with its emphasis on the “politics of tolerance, anti-foundationalism, and freedom of speech.”

Since the 1920s, American writers have evinced a fascination with and investment in fictional representations of jazz music and jazz musicians. As this essay demonstrates, part of jazz’s appeal for fiction writers is that it offers the opportunity to explore various kinds of border crossing. This essay surveys several jazz fictions to explicate how these fictions portray jazz as a local event, often focusing on musicians who may not be known beyond their own communities, but who live to play the music. Using Nathaniel Mackey’s concept of artistic othering, this essay investigates how writers portray the jazz musician’s search for a space to belong, where artistic forms of risk-taking are affirmed and the contingencies jazz musicians face, whether it be in the form of substance abuse, underemployment, self-doubt, or social injustice can be managed through instances where self-repair, improvisation, and community constitute the foundations of the musician’s lifeworld. Jazz fiction, in other words, is deeply concerned with the contradictions of American life and how playing jazz music involves the act of containing contradictions.

This chapter explores the Laudian critique of the (allegedly) puritan doctrine of absolute predestination, and particularly absolute reprobation. This critique imputed an absolute, fatal or stoic necessity to questions of salvation and damnation, which, the Laudians claimed, reduced the role of human free will and moral effort to nothing. In so doing it created desperately difficult pastoral dilemmas for ministers trying to rescue members of their flocks from the desperation such doctrines all too often induced. This was particularly the case for absolute reprobation. It was in the course of dealing with puritan error on this subject that the Laudians came to deal with the topic of predestination, and faute de mieux, to adumbrate their own position, asserting that saving grace was offered to all, that Christ died for the sins of the whole world, that God willed the salvation of every sinner, that human effort was required for salvation, that true faith could be totally and finally lost and that no one was simply doomed to damnation; contentions which they defended not as resolutions of the paradoxes at the heart of the debate about predestination, but rather as saving truths central to the nature of Christianity.

By integrating the fragmented research on emergency services, armed forces, and humanitarian organizations, this book identifies the components of a new theory on frontline crisis response. To begin with, the work of responders is characterized by persistent operational dilemmas. Since there are no universal solutions, they need to adapt their approaches and decisions to the situational contingencies of a crisis. These adaptations continue throughout the crisis response process as the situation evolves. Responders usually pragmatically act their way through operational dilemmas in the crisis response process. These experiences nevertheless have an existential effect on their identities and lives. Thus, the new theory comprises operational dilemmas, situational contingencies, response processes, pragmatic principles, and existentialist ideas. This theory offers a basis for crisis response improvements and contributes to the literature on strategic crisis management, frontline work in organizations, reliable organizing in risky contexts, and post-crisis operations. The chapter ends with a research agenda and a call for more academic engagement with frontline crisis response.

With Kant’s conception of organisms as “natural ends” nature and freedom are represented as harmoniously cohering with each other thereby giving us a special reassurance of reason’s causal efficacy in nature. For Kant, in order to make organic formations intelligible, we must represent the rule of their organization as reciprocal causality. I contend that this rule of reciprocal causality serves as a schema-analogue of reason’s Idea of absolute freedom. Moreover, I proceed to show that the antinomial conflict of teleological judgment is a conflict between two perspectives on nature: theoretical (scientific) in the thesis and practical in the antithesis. Therefore, the solution to the antinomy does not merely offer a justification for the explanatory compatibility of mechanical and teleological explanation in our representation of a single organic formation but also leads to a view of the world according to which the theoretical and the practical representations of nature “must cohere.”

Chapter 2 focuses on the migration stories of two generations of Kenyans, situating them within wider family and social histories. Although only one person in a family typically moved, I argue that their migration is better understood as family migration, rather than economic migration. While economic gain and social possibilities are related, they are not the same. Rather, these migration projects marked the convergence of individual and familial aspirations, thereby re-centring kinship as a means of realising the futures of both those who moved and those who stayed. The imaginings of migrant and non-migrant kin are important to this discussion and reveal how the United Kingdom was a largely imagined place at the time of migration, though not an arbitrary migration destination. Alongside this focus on place and space, the chapter begins to explore the role of time and temporality in the self- and life-making projects of migrants and their families.

Waseem Yaqoob examines how four prominent German political philosophers responded to the ‘crisis of historicism’ by re-thinking the relation between ethics, politics and history. The trigger for the crisis was Germany’s defeat in World War I, when the presumed convergence of the monarchical nation state with ethical fulfilment and historical destiny dissolved in defeat and political upheaval. Among the first to respond was Friedrich Meinecke, whose earlier confidence in that convergence was replaced by an awareness of historical contingency, and of the difficulty of aligning ethics with reason of state. Notoriously harder line was Carl Schmitt, for whom an appreciation of contingency in a ‘world of enemies’ entailed the assertion of sovereignty at the expense of ethics. With the collapse of Nazism and advent of the Cold War, Reinhart Koselleck renewed Schmitt’s critique of moralising historical philosophy (identified with the Enlightenment), before turning to ‘conceptual history’ to suggest that the state would best adapt to the accelerating temporality of modernity by avoiding all normative choices. By contrast, Hannah Arendt would seek in the contingency of history the space to make such choices, and the opportunity to revive the ancient ideal of active citizenship. In conclusion, Yaqoob sets German post-Historicist thinking off against the anti-historical tendency of Anglo-American political philosophy associated with John Rawls, suggesting that the former may offer a more sophisticated historical ‘realism’ than that current among Rawls’ critics.

The introduction establishes a framework for the volume as a whole. It explains why questions of temporality are at the heart of political thinking, and points to the several ways in which many (but not all) political thinkers have invoked history. It asks what historians of political thought can learn from the wider ‘temporal turn’ in historical studies inspired by Reinhart Koselleck, while also arguing that the understanding of political thought in terms of plural ‘languages’ of politics, advocated by John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, already offers powerful resources for addressing the issues associated with time and history. Six such linguistic contexts for thinking about politics in time and history are identified – the legal, the sacred, the contingent, the social, the revolutionary and the global – and the individual chapters of the volume are then introduced in relation to these contexts. Particular attention is given to recent developments in global intellectual history. Approaching political thought in these contexts will show that the roles of time and history have amounted to much more than the cliché that ‘a week is a long time in politics’.

In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.

Hegel intends to prove two different claims about purposive connections in his Logic: (1) that teleology is the truth of mechanism and (2) that inner purposiveness is the truth of the external reference-to-an-end. I devote this chapter to the analysis of the first of these arguments. To this end, I introduce Hegel’s concept of ‘mechanism’, whose main ingredient is the idea that mechanisms are determined as causes merely from without. This feature disqualifies mechanisms as self-sufficient explainers. I compare Hegel’s understanding of this shortcoming with Hume’s and Kant’s misgivings about the cognition of causal relations. For Hegel, mechanical causes are in themselves apparent and the relations they maintain with other causes are in themselves contingent. It is this essential contingency of the ‘necessary’ that makes Hegel judge mechanical relations to be untrue. Mechanical objects with indeterminate causal powers appear essentially as means and, hence, hypothetically subordinated to self-determining causes.