This chapter of the handbook tackles a frequently discussed topic in moral psychology: moral dilemmas. The authors offer a normative characterization of moral dilemmas as a situation in which every available course of action involves a difficult moral trade-off and it is morally appropriate for the agent to feel conflicted about the choices available. The authors then explore different empirical accounts of why some moral trade-offs are experienced as difficult or impossible to resolve. Among the most influential of these accounts is dual-process theory, which traces the experience of moral dilemmas to a conflict between a value backed by automatic emotional processes and a value backed by reflection. The authors argue against the dual-process account, and review empirical research bearing on the psychological mechanisms underpinning a person’s experience and resolution of moral dilemmas, as well as the phenomenon of “moral residue.” They argue that further empirical work is needed to understand how people weigh competing values against one another and that such understanding requires expanding the range of moral dilemmas to include cases beyond those targeted in recent research.

The era of enlightened absolutism in the eighteenth century was a moment that decisively shaped Berlin in all senses: topographically and architecturally; socially, both at the time and subsequently; and in the cultural imaginary, in terms of what we think of as ‘Berlin’ today. In the reigns of Frederick William I (1713–40), the ‘Soldier King’, and his son Frederick II (1740–86), ‘Frederick the Great’, Berlin was transformed from a small courtly city into a significant European capital, a garrison town in a powerful European state. The administrative system was developed and reformed, while military exploits abroad led to the growth of the composite state of Brandenburg-Prussia. Under Frederick II Berlin also became a centre of ‘enlightened absolutism’, in which intellectual pursuits, educational institutions, the arts, and culture were fostered. Religious toleration and social diversity were rooted in policies of fostering economic growth through welcoming productive immigrants. By the end of the century, Berlin’s population was growing, and its intellectual life thriving, but its military might was in decline.

Following the argument to its logical conclusion, Chapter 7 finally considers when and how the nation did come to be understood in a political sense. It traces constitutional differences between France and England through the writings of John Fortescue and sketches the rise of the nation-state in France by examining the thoughts of Jean Bodin, Michel de L’Hopital, Francois Hotman, and a number of Huguenot thinkers. The chapter challenges theories of “English exceptionalism,” indicating that France’s nation-state status, in theory and practice, arises at about the same time as England’s. In particular, it calls attention to the different forms of “nation-state” that come into being in England and France. In England, the “nation” becomes synonymous with the populus, the people, as understood broadly in classical and medieval thought, and associated with the Parliament. In France, the “nation” becomes synonymous with and subsumed under the new modern state, represented by the King and his centralized administration. The chapter thus lays the groundwork for understanding the distinct circumstances for conceptual recovery in the present, which are discussed in the Conclusion.

In both France and the United States, the ascendance in the late 1780s and early 1790s of a version of constitutional popular sovereignty oriented around disembodied representation laid the foundation for the abrupt invention of an alternative, absolutist understanding of “the people’s” authority in 1792-1793. Known as democracy, that absolutist conception simultaneously energized and destabilized each polity by demanding embodied, iconic formulations of “the people.” The resultant political muddle in the second half of the 1790s partially obscured institutional innovations critical to the turn-of-the-century reconciliation of disembodied representation and democratic absolutism. With Napoleon’s rise to power and the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, democratic absolutism flourished. The analogous relationship between developments in France and the United States in the 1790s and early nineteenth century stemmed in part from the diffusionary dynamics of the French Revolution. Diffusionary forces would not have registered so powerfully, however, if residents of the United States had not been prepared for them by their prior investment in monarchy. Developments in the early American republic tracked closely to successive French revolutionary phases because absolutist principles, habits, and hopes continued to animate large numbers of people long after the adoption of the Constitution.

The French Revolution began as a dispute between the French monarchy and its traditional elites about where power lay. Its roots became tangled in “enlightened” discussion of the political virtues of the “nation” and the “public,” and put forth thorny branches of bitter social hostility as real state bankruptcy loomed in the later 1780s. By the time the Estates-General met in 1789, wholly new demands for the excision of all privilege from the body politic were poised to bear violent fruit. Aristocratic treachery was the leitmotif of patriotic understanding of everything that happened subsequently, through years in which a new blueprint of society, levelled but also centralized, was painstakingly crafted; and in which that blueprint was hastily redrawn in war and upheaval to become a map of republican virtues. Deep-seated conflict was never pacified, while convictions that unanimity was natural branded all dissent as treason, producing an accelerating spiral into “the Terror” of 1793-94. Although revolutionary upheaval also brought cultural innovation and a genuine new spirit of individual liberty, for the rest of the decade, France wrestled to reconcile a society of survivors and victims. It slid slowly, despite continued military triumphs, towards the suppression of civil society by dictatorship.

Revolutions sprang from a variety of causes rather than simply from Enlightenment. Iberia and Ibero-America absorbed whatever Enlightened ideas or practices responded to political, economic and social necessities. The Spanish and Portuguese governments sought thereby to tighten imperial control. Individual reformers, often independently of government, regarded the new ideas as instruments of amelioration. International conflicts and revolutionary movements in the United States and France, as well as internal tensions, introduced new factors and pressures. These accompanied the strains on both the Spanish and Portuguese governments during the war years between 1793 and 1808. The Portuguese government escaped the political collapse and crisis of legitimacy which befell Spain and its empire, and managed to reconstitute itself in Brazil. The Enlightenment had contributed greatly to the critique of Royal absolutism in both empires and of metropolitan dominance. A range of influential Enlightened figures emerged in each of the component territories of both monarchies. The roots of Iberian Liberalism may be traced to their ideas and actions. A counter-critique attacked Enlightened ideas along with Liberal constitutional forms. The ensuing polemic and its political manifestation, especially after 1814-15, blamed revolutionary activity on the influence of the Enlightenment.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth century encompassed rapid political, social, and economic changes in the Atlantic world. The French Revolution and French expansionism under Napoleon Bonaparte accelerated the restructuring of the Hispanic world. Unfortunately, Spain had to navigate the challenging international period without the great enlightened monarch Carlos III (1759–1788), who had presided over a major intellectual transformation in the Spanish world. Ironically, for much of the period Spain and France cooperated to thwart British naval power in the Atlantic and its territorial ambitions in the Americas. The alliance devastated the Spanish economy and led to the defeat of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar.2 These disasters provoked public discontent, allowing anti-French factions in Spain to force the abdication of Carlos IV in March 1808. When Fernando VII became king, French troops were already on Spanish soil since his father had given Napoleon permission to cross Spain and occupy Portugal.

The essay explores how loyalty to Spain evolved from the beginning of the Spanish monarchical crisis until the end of the independence wars in Spanish America by looking at dynamics in two inter-related scales: the trans-regional and Atlantic. It analyzes royalism in connection to legal and military processes and shows how royalism both shaped and was shaped by changes during the revolutionary era.

The rising price of literature after the Black Death incentivized the invention of movable-type printing. An example of technological overshooting, the printing press turned an acute shortage of literature, and of human capital, into a sudden abundance. Cheaper literature encouraged wider literacy; new grammar schools and universities further multiplied human capital. That expansion sorely threatened the earlier Latinate elite, both clerical and secular, and led directly to the Reformation. Southern Catholic Europe invoked censorship; northern Protestant Europe censored only lightly. European publishing migrated northward. The divergent responses to printing are explained by: (a) the growth of Atlantic commerce and (b) the rise in Northern Europe of absolutist states. Both commerce and state-building required, and depended on, newly abundant human capital. In northern, Protestant Europe, rapidly multiplying human capital led to prosperity and technical progress; in southern, Catholic Europe, censorship constricted human capital and imposed persistent backwardness.

Chapter 4 focuses on how ownership of immovables and movables are transferred (that is, whether registration is not needed, necessary, or creating opposability to third parties), whether registration creates absolutism (public faith principle), whether a real agreement is conceptually separate from a sale contract, and whether an invalid sale contract always leads to the invalidity of a real agreement (non-causa principle), and whether delivery or certain intentions are required to transfer ownership of personal properties or the sale contract itself is sufficient. This is where the traditional idea of legal families is conspicuous. Transfer doctrines involve how notice is given. The choice of registration system demonstrates how states, given path dependence, trade off transaction costs and third-party information costs. Which type of conveyance doctrine regarding immovables is efficient is contingent on factors outside of the law. It is easier to reform conveyance doctrine regarding movables, and lawmakers should provide alternative default rules (“menus”) more frequently and establish clear opt-out procedures (“altering rules”).

This chapter considers the wider implications of The Satanic Verses affair and the fatwa. It engages with Rushdie’s considerations of Islam, secularism, and the complexities of geopolitical leadership of the Muslim world. The chapter also explores the wider questions and implications of freedom of expression that have been raised in Europe especially at the time and structured Britain’s relationship with Iran between 1989 and 1998. The chapter examines Rushdie’s own responses to the fatwa, collected in the final sections in his essay collection Imaginary Homelands as well as considering responses from Muslim literary critics and writers, some of whom supported Rushdie, others who spoke out against him, to illuminate the wider public debates around freedom of expression, secularism, and faith, which have proved central to a consideration of Rushdie’s work.

Beginning with the mysterious problem of the so-called “caste system,” this introduction questions the ubiquitous scholarly understanding of the monarchy as a cabal of lawmakers determined to legislate every detail of vassals’ lives. It introduces a very different perspective – namely, that subjects submitting gobierno or administrative-legislative petitions not only prompted the vast majority of the empire’s dizzying thousands of royal decrees – including those concerning novel categories of human difference. It explains how both liberal-era and Habsburg mythologies of Spanish imperial rule envisioned the king as the primary author of these texts, and proposes a labor-oriented, Actor-Network Theory-inspired alternative explanation. It introduces the petition-and-response system, explaining that early modern participants sought intimate lord–ruler dialogue, in which vassals and lords endowed their writings with voluntad or volition, in order to save the consciences of all involved. It also argues that in order for this communication to thrive, a number of legal fictions – including the transfer of voluntad across the globe – was necessary. Also lurking in the distance was violence against the saboteurs of this ruler–ruled dialogue. Lastly, this segment introduces the source material and book structure.

Working through an official system of academies, as well as through a more informal institution known as the Little Academy (Petite Académie), Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert controlled a wide-ranging propaganda of absolutism or, in the language of the time, a memorialising of the monarch’s gloire. This chapter investigates the strategy and mechanisms by which Colbert and his collaborators deployed the arts as an instrument of the state. It explores the ways in which Molière’s comedies and comedy-ballets developed out of an established system of courtly propaganda in the court ballet of the 1650s and 1660s, and examines changes instituted by Colbert in the 1660s. Finally, it examines Molière’s ambivalent response to the absolutist enterprise as expressed through these changes.

The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are often viewed as the “age of absolutism,” but customary privileges, legal variations, and the enormous expenses of nearly constant warfare imposed limits on absolute monarchs. Wars included regional wars, civil wars, dynastic wars, revolts, and Europe-wide conflicts, all fought with larger and more deadly standing armies and navies. Warfare shaped the internal political history of each state, which followed somewhat distinct patterns but also exhibited certain common themes: an expansion of centralized authority; the continued development of government bureaucracy; and the pursuit of territorial power and colonial wealth. France, Spain, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian Habsburgs, Brandenburg–Prussia, Sweden, Poland, and Russia all saw struggles between the nobles and the ruler, and warfare with one another. In the British Isles, disputes led to civil war and a temporary overthrow of the monarchy, while the Dutch Republic became amazingly prosperous through trade and toleration. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, rulers in many of these states, who saw themselves as “enlightened,” began programs of reforms designed to enhance their own power and military might, but also to improve the lives of their subjects.

One particular twentieth-century scholar stands out in how influential he was in ensuring Gentili’s position as a key protagonist in the history of international law: Carl Schmitt. This chapter argues that Schmitt’s influential emphasis on Gentili is not simply an inheritance of nineteenth-century narratives. Rather, Schmitt places Gentili at the heart of his history of the development of international law and the evolution of the concept of war in a move that should be understood as part of his broader attempt to defend authoritarian rule. In particular, I argue that placing so much emphasis on Gentili provided Schmitt with a way to make absolutist forms of rule seem normatively desirable. Schmitt came to associate absolutism with the humanization and the rationalization of warfare, not through an analysis of historical facts (which would have made the endeavor difficult) but through a partial interpretation of the works of some “great” thinkers, most importantly Gentili’s treatise on war.

The purpose of this chapter is to clarify some of the disagreements that have arisen regarding Gentili’s ideas by closely examining Gentili’s use of sources in De iure belli (DIB). More specifically, through this focus on sources, the chapter seeks to resituate Gentili’s DIB beyond the immediate legal debates that have conventionally framed its analysis, and to place the text within the broader political thought of the period. Gentili’s text, the chapter claims, is particularly noteworthy in its attempt to straddle the legal and political debates of its epoch, looking beyond legal sources and turning to various contemporary political writers in what was quite a remarkable move at the time.