This essay first argues that popular sovereignty or self-rule depends on self-understanding and then points to a set of practices and activities that make this kind of popular self-understanding more likely, even or especially in a populace as vast, complex, and divided as that of the United States of America in 2020. Brief analyses of works by Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Walt Whitman, and Danielle Allen set the theoretical context for an overview of face-to-face conversation programs and an argument about the necessity of programs such as these to complement legal and institutional efforts to strengthen democracy.

This chapter takes a fresh look at the marionette image introduced by Plato in a famous passage of Book 1 of the Laws, as he undertakes to explain the bearing of self-rule upon virtue (644b–645e). I argue that the reader of the passage is first offered a cognitive model of a unitary self, presided over by reasoning – which prompts bafflement in the Athenian Visitor’s interlocutors. The marionette image then in effect undermines that model, by portraying humans as passive subjects of contrary controlling impulses determining their behaviour. Finally the image is complicated and in the end transcended by reintroduction of reasoning as a special kind of divinely inspired impulse, with which one must actively cooperate if animal impulses are to be mastered. I examine the way Plato’s reference at this point to law (where there is a key translation problem) should be understood to bear upon the nature of the reasoning in question. In conclusion, I comment on what light is thrown by the marionette passage on self-rule, as we have been promised.

This chapter considers the historical development of how Greenlanders acquired political participation in their own affairs. As of 2021, most political parties in Greenland see independence as the ultimate goal. The Self-Government Act of 2009 grants the inhabitants of Greenland the right to this independence.1 My argument here is that a historical view reveals that independence can be seen as the logical next step from the current self-government. This has been attained through continual negotiations between Greenlanders and Danes since the middle of the nineteenth century, and through decolonization and independence processes as seen elsewhere in the world.

Chapter 1 offers historical context and an overview of the intellectual and political history of Classical Liberalism during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the region. The focus of the chapter is on how classical liberals approached questions of despotism, civil freedoms, rights and democracy, and on how they have conceived of political change. These questions have been ignored within most of the academic literature, which has tended to focus on these intellectuals and politicians’ pan-Arabist and nationalist agendas instead of on their liberal and democratic outlooks. Overall, the chapter provides an essential historical and analytical background about the region’s earliest liberal intellectual and political history; it shows that liberal concepts were not “foreign concepts” imposed suddenly on an unsuspecting public. The chapter informs the rest of the study and sets the boundaries of the movement.

The proposal to create a transitional regime of autonomy for the Arab population of the West Bank was initiated by Israel Prime Minister Begin. Through US mediation, the idea of autonomy was adopted by Egypt and Israel at Camp David as a program of full autonomy to the Arab inhabitants. The Camp David Accords proposed withdrawing the Israel military administration from the West Bank and Gaza and replacing it, for a transitional period of five years, with an elected council. The issue of the final status, after the termination of the five-year period, was left open to negotiation. The Accords referred to “the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements.” This phrase could be understood as referring to a right of self-determination but it was not stated explicitly. Egypt and Israel failed to agree on the implementation of the autonomy plan. The issues that prevented agreement were participation of East Jerusalem Arabs in the elections for the Council and the powers and responsibilities that were to be transferred to the elected council. The main elements of the Camp David Accords were, later, adopted by the Israel-PLO “Oslo” agreements.

This chapter sheds some light on the fusion of Islam and nationalism in modern Kurdish history. It selectively discusses the views and activities of some influential late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Kurdish religio-political figures. It is an attempt to demonstrate that Kurdish religiosity, like that of other Muslim communities, accommodated their nationalism. Major Kurdish religious figures were open to, supported and often worked for some forms of Kurdish self-rule: they imagined Kurds as a distinct nation and therefore defended and declared the legitimacy of Kurdish political demands and rights. The latter point defines nationalism since the right to self-rule is principally based on self-referentiality. Hence, this chapter argues that the defining point of religious nationalism is that the modern religious agent creates/imagines the boundaries of her collective self within those of the national.

The developing idea of a social identity based in the Odia language became politicized during the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1903 an organization called the Utkal Sammillani was created to lobby for the amalgamation of all Odia-speaking areas under a single provincial administration. The Sammillani quickly came to serve as the most prominent pan-Odia site for presenting Odia interests to the colonial authorities. In Chapter 3, I show that debates within and about the Sammillani frequently turned to discussions about the meaning of politics, citizenship, and the status of the Odia constituency in relation to the colonial state. I describe the ways in which the demand for an Odia province reconfigured nineteenth-century Odia cultural activism into a clearly articulated argument for the political representation of the Odia people as a unified constituency. By including a brief discussion of emergence of colonial franchise and the changing attitudes of the Indian National Congress towards linguistic politics during this period, I show that the politicization of the Odia public into a liberal representative category is part of a larger narrative of the politicization of the Indian masses.