The study of Roman history has always been multilingual, and some of the most important work on the Roman Republic is in German. Today, however, fewer and fewer anglophone students and scholars read German. The result is that major work published in German can go unread and uncited. This new essay by Amy Russell surveys the problem and potential solutions, as well as exploring some of the difficulties of translation from German to English and a glossary of untranslatable terms. It is important that we balance the benefits of multilingual publishing with the need to make Roman history accessible to all. Translation and collaboration are among the methods recommended. Translation from German brings specific problems, as some concepts can be expressed more easily in one language or the other; Russell takes a case study of the term Öffentlichkeit and its similarities to and differences from English phrases such as ‘public space’. Those differences have significantly affected how scholars writing in German and English have conceptualized the public and the political in the Roman Republic. A glossary elucidates a range of other hard-to-translate concepts.

The structure of society is heavily dependent upon its means of producing and distributing information. As its methods of communication change, so does a society. In Europe, for example, the invention of the printing press created what we now call the public sphere. The public sphere, in turn, facilitated the appearance of ‘public opinion’, which made possible wholly new forms of politics and governance, including the democracies we treasure today.

In this chapter, language policies are examined with reference to how they are debated in public discourse. The chapter argues that, like in politics, the space afforded to language policy in conventional media is often narrow, and depends upon how language-related issues invoke broader narratives of identity and ideology, though more significant debating often occurs in new media. The case study examines debates about language policy in Singapore, drawing on examples from traditional media (in the form of letters to the editor) to comments under a Facebook post by a local media outlet.

Throughout the imperial period, but especially in the eighteenth century, the Russian imperial court held a quasi-monopoly on the production, circulation, and conservation of literary artefacts. As the dominant political and economic force in the Russian Empire, it was able to introduce a new type of public sphere by shaping the social mission of literary texts and dictating the norms according to which literature was to be created and judged. This chapter focuses on the reign of Catherine II in order to show how the court promoted social engineering through literature, in particular through the genres of panegyric poetry and neoclassical drama. Celebrated authors in turn benefited from the court’s support. As a result, the imperial palace combined political and aesthetic functions: it introduced a new ceremonial culture and deployed princely patronage to glorify the court’s policies and to impose an absolutist social and aesthetic order.

This chapter shows how Enlightenment theology moved beyond its academic and ecclesiastical contexts to become part of a larger campaign for reform. Advocates of a new system of educating and training clergymen turned to the public sphere and cast their project as a continuation of the Reformation. Intended as a rhetorical strategy to solidify support among a Protestant public that was open to a less stringent and dogmatic Christianity than that of Lutheran Orthodoxy or Pietism, Enlightenment theologians paved the way for a fruitful reinterpretation of the Protestant past. The chapter provides an overview of the theological innovations of Halle theologian Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), which formed the backbone of much of Enlightenment theology (or “Neology” as it is frequently labeled). The chapter shows how public controversies about binding doctrines led to a series of public assertions that had the rhetorical effect of recasting the historical understanding of the Reformation.

This chapter seeks keywords and concepts that will enable us to grasp the contradictory and conflictive globality of the current moment and sharpen our analysis of equally contradictory and conflictive global pasts. In a plea to move beyond equating the global with openness, connection, and integration, I address the role of closure, boundaries, and limits in global history in a wider sense. For this purpose, I explore in an experimental and deliberately open-ended fashion how thinking about global spherescan be utilised fruitfully for the current practice of history writing. The first part explores the radically inclusive yet claustrophobic vision of the globe as a closed sphere from which there is no escape. Building on earlier closed-world and one-world discourses, this thinking gained prominence after the Second World War in the face of the threat of nuclear destruction and environmental degradation. I then move to think about the globe as composed of many bounded spheres – geopolitical but also social. Here, I take central examples from the realm of communication and language and discusses the public sphere as an exclusionary rather than inclusionary figure of thought.

The flourishing of the essay as a protean literary form in an age marked by growing interest in essaying systematic knowledge reflects a tension within eighteenth-century empiricism. Two divergent subgenres emerged from this tension. The conversational essay, first, drew upon a Montaignian tradition rooted in scepticism, dialogue, and performative rationality; these essays were associated with a form of pragmatic empiricism at ease with the idea of human knowledge as intersubjectively constituted in the public domain. On the other hand, the systematic essays of the Enlightenment, spurred on by John Locke’s attempt to establish ‘order’ in intellectual inquiry, deployed the essay as an instrument for establishing Universal Truth and what Leibniz termed ‘demonstrative knowledge’. In considering the epistemology of the eighteenth-century essay in Britain, this chapter explores not only how this bifurcated empiricism influenced the development of the essay, but also the ways in which the essay reconstituted empiricism itself.

This chapter explores how the essay, with its unlimited subject matter and the flexibility to address diverse audiences and ideas, provides public intellectuals with an invaluable and effective means of educating and challenging readers. It takes George Orwell as the model of the modern British public intellectual, someone whose interactive development as an intellectual and an essayist was fostered through numerous intellectual periodicals and magazines. It shows how four more recent essayists – Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Tariq Ali, and Mary Beard – adapt the Orwellian approach as polemicist and outsider. In distinct ways, public intellectuals extend and enliven the contemporary public sphere, ensuring that the essay remains critical to the collective exchange of opinion.

In the eyes of other nations, Britain was a colonial, maritime, and mercantile country, whose still strong interests in Europe were expressed largely culturally. This perception made the Enlightenment a broadly recognizable movement, carried on over national boundaries and concerned with ideas such as ‘the modern’, of religious toleration, of progress, of the ‘science of man’ so strongly supported by David Hume, and of human (or rather, white and masculine) dignity. It self-consciously located itself geographically in Europe and chronologically in ‘the modern age’, which, after much debate in the early part of the century, it saw as superior to that of the Greeks and Romans, in spite of their immense cultural legacy, which was shared by all Europeans. Yet in the end, this chapter argues, in spite of a shared ancient legacy, Britain remained pulled in two directions, the colonial and imperial on the one hand, and the European on the other.

Chapter 2 examines the capacities of citizens in light of what deliberative democracy seems to require of them. Skeptical survey researchers and psychologists think these capacities are conspicuously lacking and that what we see instead is widespread incapacity to make any sort of reasoned choice. And even when choices are made, they are under the influence of motivated reasoning that seeks evidence only to confirm existing positions that people hold and all kinds of biases that produce polarization. Thus we cannot expect more of democracy than existing electoral processes supply. Extreme skeptics suggest we should not expect even this and so recommend we dispense with democracy instead. We look at the skeptics’ charges and show in a reading of the available evidence why we think they are mistaken. We sketch a deliberative psychology that understands citizen competence and motivations as variables that can be invoked if the circumstances are right and so make essential contributions to countering the diabolical soundscape. We can explore these ideas in the context of deliberative forums, interpersonal networks, and the broader public sphere.

While it is common to speak of the crisis of democracy, we prefer to speak of the multiplicity of diabolical challenges that democracy now confronts. Challenges are diabolical when they have multiple dimensions and are potentially catastrophic, subtle, and interconnected. But crucially, there are clever operators who have figured out how to prosper in this environment. The challenges include a problematic political soundscape, right-wing populism, extremism, denial, and authoritarianism, all of which are the subjects of subsequent chapters. We sketch the beginnings of a deliberative response to these challenges, which puts citizens at the center, while recognizing the importance of attending to elites. A deliberative constraint can restrict what elite operators can do. We set out the essential elements of deliberative democracy and how we understand its practice, especially in deliberative systems and the public sphere.

This chapter introduces a self-development theory of the nonprofit sector, informed by alternative development and basic-needs theory. The theory presented in this chapter suggests that nonprofit law plays a role in creating a legal framework that allows people to participate in the improvement of their own lives and communities through self-development. With a nonprofit-friendly legal environment in place, individuals have greater economic incentive to work within their own communities to create organizations that help individuals, families, and communities to meet their own needs. This paradigm stands in contrast to views of nonprofit organizations as facilitators of rescuing behavior, in which one group of people seeks to uplift another. Based on cases in Nigeria and South Africa, this paper describes the role and importance of nonprofits in facilitating the development of individuals, institutions, and communities from within.

When Comparative Politics emerged in the early 1960s, drawing on functionalist theory, the concept of political culture featured prominently in how political development might be best studied. In the prevailing functionalist perspective, political culture was defined as the sum of the views, values, and attitudes people hold towards the political system. Over time, with the decline of functionalism and the rise of positivist theory, political culture was marginalized and reduced to data collected (e.g., in interview surveys). Drawing conclusions about national political cultures using such instruments, however, is problematic. Following influences from hermeneutics, the concept has since been reinvented with a focus on discourse and empowerment. This involves accepting the public sphere as the forum for political discourse, and a recognition of public opinion as a driving force in shaping and changing political culture. This chapter traces the evolution of the study of political culture in mainstream Comparative Politics. It emphasizes the role that political culture has been playing as explanatory variable in the study of both development and democratization. Western countries have viewed themselves as embarked on a mission to disseminate progressive values to the rest of the world, arguing in their approach to political culture in Africa that reforms are needed. Originally conceived as “traditional”, the initial calls were to make it “civic”. The same premise has underpinned more recent research on democratization. In placing research on African political culture in its wider Comparative Politics context, the chapter highlights why approaching it through Western eyes has its limits. More attention needs to be paid not only to the values that underpin political culture in Africa but also to the voice of African political scientists and their interpretation of the success and failure of democratization on the continent.

The Neapolitan string virtuosi who moved to Paris were among the protagonists of the early private and public concert series. The editorial success of Michele Mascitti – nephew and student of Pietro Marchitelli – is paradigmatic of the growing influence of the “public sphere”: revenues from his nine collections of sonatas allowed Mascitti to live for many years as a freelance musician while having a crucial part in the formation of a modern public. Together with Mascitti, Giovanni Antonio Guido, a student of Cailò in Naples, participated to the weekly soirées organized at the residence of the Crozat brothers in Paris. Guido’s presence at these splendid gatherings of the finest intellectuals and artists is attested by his portrait sketched by Antoine Watteau, also a protegé of the Crozat family, during one of these events. The aesthetic approach and performance practice imported in France by the Neapolitan string virtuosi became à la mode in the 1720s. The mixture of the Italian virtuosic approach with the French instrumental tradition that is found in the later sonatas by Mascitti and Guido was typical of the so-called goûts réunis, the “reunited tastes” of French and Italian music that would end up dominating the European scene in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.