This is the first chapter of the synthesis of the various institutional diagnostics undertaken in IDP, including those of South Korea and Taiwan. It compares the main economic development challenges, or advantages faced by the various countries, and the major institutional causes behind them. Development is seen as the structural transformation of the economy through the absorption of traditional low-productivity activities by the modern high-productivity sectors of the economy, rather than merely GDP growth rates. The comparative analysis is conducted with systematic reference to the well-known framework proposed by Arthur Lewis to represent this progressive diminution of ‘dualism’. If South Korea and Taiwan fit this framework rather well, the structural transformation is shown not to rely on growth engines sufficiently strong and labour-intensive to proceed satisfactorily in the IDP countries, except maybe in Bangladesh where the domestic engine is supplemented by massive outmigration of workers. It turns out that the cause for such a situation most often lies in the political economy context of the design, decision, and implementation of the appropriate development strategies.

This chapter deals with a rarity in Romantic literature: the sublime body. While landscapes tended to be seen as sublime, as outpourings of ever-growing philosophical minds, bodies were more often than not belittled and considered as insignificant husks. While eighteenth-century literature introduced the priapistic sublime into erotic novels, thus juxtaposing demure sentimentality with the burlesque gigantism of the homme machine’s genitals, Romantic poets opened “workshop[s] of filthy creation” where philosophical minds seem to unleash bodies that combine the sublime with the monstrous. Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, thus, impregnated by the sexualized voices of his Ingolstadt professors, gives birth to a grotesque abortion, whereas a generation before Matthew Gregory Lewis had shown what happens when an abbot’s mind loses control and – in an unparalleled example of Romantic hagio-porn – transforms a Madonna lactans into a Mephistophelean abettor to the devil. Byron even goes a step further when he imagines man’s existence as a voyage on a gargantuan female body, constantly threatened by the jaws of a vagina dentata.

What accounts for the fact that some physical events occur while others do not? This is a question of physical modality. Three models in contemporary analytic metaphysics have dominated the investigation of physical modality: the Neo-Humean Model, the Universals Model, and the Powers Model. Each model aims to explain, in ontologically conspicuous ways, the unfolding of possibilities in space and time. This chapter explains the Neo-Humean and Universals Models, then shows that while they explicitly deny a place for powers in their fundamental ontologies, they nonetheless implicate powers. That is, they subtly assume the reality of powers. As a result, the Powers Model is the way to go in explaining physical modality. However, there are different ways of conceiving powers. After describing variations of the Powers Model, the chapter returns to the main question posed in the introductory chapter: What is the nature of powers from the inside? Stricter attention to the internality of powers is necessary to better understand the Powers Model and its metaphysical commitments.

Given the centrality of counterfactual difference-making relations to the argument of the book, in Chapter 7 we say a few more things about contrary-to-fact conditionals. We offer a primer on the logic and the semantics of counterfactuals, focusing on the two main schools of thought: the metalinguistic and the possible-worlds approach. We also present and examine James Woodward’s interventionist counterfactuals and the Rubin-Holland model. We argue that the counterfactual approach is more basic than the mechanistic, but information about mechanisms can help sort out some of the methodological problems faced by the counterfactual account.

This chapter provides three regional case studies during 1945–65. Sheffield, selected for being after Hull the least religious city in the nation, shows the relentless power of an alienating evangelical and Nonconformist culture of the middle classes, which bombarded the working classes with middle-class solutions: teetotalism, Sabbatarianism, few pop music venues and contraceptive advice by middle-class volunteers. The result was, according to an influential interpretation by E. R. Wickham, the Anglican industrial missionary, proletarian and artisan alienation from the churches. Glasgow forms a contrast of the most highly religious industrial city in mainland Britain, but with a popular culture under aggressive licensing control, notably its public houses from which ‘civilising’ games, music, television and attractions for women were banned. Sexual culture was made as difficult as possible. Lastly, the Isle of Lewis shows a puritanical anti-alcoholic culture, based on the most orthodox of Calvinist churches, within which, despite overt conformity, there were notable attempts at popular resistance, including organised lawbreaking.

In Chapter 5 I scrutinize the theory of legal obligation put forward by Andrei Marmor. I start out by introducing the basics of Marmor’s legal conventionalism and his view of legal obligation, which I will qualify as a minimalist statement of the reason account. Then, I critically engage with a distinction that I take to be central to Marmor’s study of legal obligation: the distinction between obligations within a practice, or internal obligations, and obligations that are external to it. Marmor claims that legal obligations are obligations of the former type. I will argue that a conception constructing legal obligation as an internal demand cannot account for the characteristically genuine bindingness of the duties arising out of the law. With that done, I will radicalize my critical stance by arguing that, at least on one plausible interpretation, Marmor’s account of legal obligation depicts legal obligation as a perspectivized duty, namely, a demand that is justified exclusively ‘from a certain point of view’. This picture is objectionable, since perspectivized obligations inherently lack genuine binding force.