This chapter explores the Histories’ interest in human nature on the battlefield in terms of valour. It reviews instances in which the historical actors – including Pixodarus, Xerxes, and Themistocles – foreground the strategic importance of "surpassing nature." This is a motif that places the speakers in a network of sophistic and later, Platonic, theories on man’s desire to outstrip his own nature. At stake is a philosophy of "superior nature" that is strongly undercut by the complexity of the action on the battlefield.

The content of separation of powers is neither defined in constitutions, which usually do not explicitly guarantee this principle, nor in other legal texts. Its content cannot be circumscribed with precision. Several influential authors have dealt extensively with separation of powers. However, few of them were constitutional and economic thinkers. After careful analysis, but without claiming to be exhaustive, two major names stand out. The connection between reflections by Montesquieu and Hayek on the concentration of state power on one hand, and on economic concentration on the other hand, is illuminating and fascinating, but has never before been established. Aron also deserves a special mention in this regard, as he notably dealt with democracy and totalitarianism as well as competition in the same breath throughout some major parts of his work.

This chapter demonstrates that, in addition to his well-known experiments with paper money, John Law’s System was a project for creating a politically independent central bank. His arguments, and those of his defender Nicolas Dutot, tried to establish a legitimate role for autonomous monetary policy, while his detractors in the 1730s and 1740s like Richard Cantillon and Joseph Pâris-Duverney argued that central banks constituted conspiracies among cosmopolitan elites, not virtuous governance. This neglected episode in the history of economic thought established the data, rhetorical practices, and concepts for later theories over whether the monetary system can or should be within the scope of human agency. Participants in the debate developed the conceptual foundations of self-ordering economic systems, pioneered the use of calculative reasoning in public debate, and tried to theorize the constitutional relationship between government, money, and commerce. These authors were trying to use an emergent episode in their understanding of economic history to uncover the principles of justice, legitimacy, and agency in the newly formed cosmopolitan dominium of commerce and finance.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the main insights of labor regimes scholarship, including its focus on questions of labor control and its use of the neo-Gramscian distinction between consensual and coercive mechanisms of labor control. It then explains the analytic limits of this consent–coercion dichotomy when analyzing labor regime dynamics in peripheral regions of world capitalism. It then develops an ideal-typical framework intended to understand the crisis tendencies of labor regimes that exist in peripheral locations of the world market, distinguishing “hegemonic” and “despotic” labor regimes from regimes marked by “crises of labor control” or “counter-hegemony.” It then draws from insights from world-systems scholarships on the social precarity of fully proletarianized labor systems and on the core–periphery dynamics of global commodity chains to explain how the convergence of processes of peripheralization and proletarianization, or peripheral proletarianization, has a particularly destabilizing impact on local labor regimes. It ends with a discussion of how both processes of proletarianization and peripheralization are impacted by larger structural and institutional dynamics associated with the rise and decline of US world hegemony.

Illiberal governments claim that their regimes are simply constitutional and democratic - period. In their line of offense/defense, they are as democratic and constitutional as any other, only more popular and therefore more genuine. The term illiberal democracy is not an oxymoron. The regimes in Venezuela under Chávez, Hungary after 2010, or Poland from 2015 are indeed democracies, but in the plebiscitarian leader democracy sense, as described by Max Weber (with clear despotic potential). Illiberal democracies are democracies of a troubling sort, enabling the totalitarian potential inherent in mass democracy. Illiberal democracies bring to light the authoritarian elements in liberal constitutions, which are historically unfinished and internally vulnerable. The illiberal (authoritarian) elements (enclaves) that inevitably exist in constitutional systems are unleashed in the constitutional order of the plebiscitarian regimes. The illiberal transformation of constitutionalism is facilitated by the authoritarianism inherent in the constitutional order of established democracies and by the populist mobilization of authoritarian predispositions in the citizenry.

Following a comparative approach, this chapter foregrounds transcultural translation as it examines three different productions of Sa’dallah Wannous’ play Rituals of Signs and Transformations in English, French and Arabic that were staged in Beirut, Chicago, Paris, and Cairo. The chapter argues that Wannous’ play carries a prophetic warning about the chaos that is released when rigid political, religious, and gender structures are undermined in a society deformed by a long experience of despotism.

This chapter considers the intersection of Gothic and Orientalism in the long eighteenth century from the joint perspective of its origins and ideological relevance. Having traced the influence on Gothic of literary materials imported from the East, it examines the terrifying effects of commercial and imperial concerns in works such as William Beckford’s Vathek, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s ‘The Anaconda’, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. The relevance of this commercial and imperial imaginary for figurations of subjectivity, the body and sexuality is then explored with reference to George Colman’s Blue-Beard, Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama, Byron’s ‘Turkish Tales’, Walter Scott’s ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’ and the anonymous novel The Lustful Turk. Through its double focus, the chapter argues that, if the East is a foundational feature in early Gothic, the troubling power of Orientalist Gothic depends on distance and alienness, though also, and more perturbingly, on the proximity and contact promoted by an expanding commercial and territorial imperialism.

In this chapter I seek to show that in On the Citizen Hobbes completes a conceptually coherent defense of despotic sovereignty, in a manner not previously appreciated. I will do so by presenting a novel reading of Hobbes’s treatment of the nature of property. I will suggest that ownership consists in having preeminent power with a natural right to exercise that power. On that basis, I shall argue, Hobbes is entitled to conclude that sovereigns, by virtue of their sovereignty, necessarily and fully own their subjects and all they possess. Sovereigns own their subjects and everything they possess because they rule over them with preeminent power and (at a minimum) a natural right to exercise that power. On the Citizen thus contains a philosophically coherent account of why all sovereignty is necessarily despotic. Perhaps even more importantly, it provides him access to a very powerful, but profoundly illiberal, argument against the existence of property titles of citizens against their sovereign: it is a conceptual truth, on Hobbes’s conception of property, that the sovereign owns everything in the commonwealth that can be owned.

Chapters 8 and 9 of On the Citizen present a theory of sovereignty that Hobbes modeled on the master-slave relationship of dominium. To be a sovereign over a state, according to that theory, is really to be a kind of dominus over slaves. The usual view (based on Leviathan, chapter 20) is that this “despotic” form of sovereignty was limited only to those states described by Hobbes as “natural” or “acquired.” This chapter, however, argues that the despotic model of dominium in alterius personam functioned as a general theory of sovereignty to be found in all sovereign states, even in those states instituted, as Hobbes put it, “by mutual pact.” Indeed, the Hobbesian distinction between “instituted” and “acquired” states was not really a difference in the substance of sovereignty. Rather, it was only a difference in how sovereignty was to be constituted and dissolved. The chapter shows that it was originally intended to map onto the Aristotelian distinction between “correct” and “deviant” constitutions. However a state is constituted, Hobbes’s larger point was that statehood always requires dominium, since it is what ultimately activates the bond of obligation making a state more than just a mere association of duty-free individuals.