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Tschabalala Self (b. 1990 Harlem, USA) lives and works in Hudson Valley, New York. Tschabalala is an artist and builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the black body. She constructs depictions of predominantly female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self's work seek to expand her critical inquiry into selfhood and human flourishing. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo (2024); Highline, New York (2024) Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024); FLAG Foundation, New York (2024); Barbican, London (2024); CC Strombeek, Grimbergen, Belgium (2023); Desert X, Coachella Valley (2023); Kunstmuseum St Gallen (2023); Le Consortium, Dijon (2022); Performa 2021 Biennial, New York (2021); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2021); ICA, Boston (2020); Studio Museum Artists in Residence, MoMA PS1, New York (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019), amongst many others. Gabriella Kardos : The Fourth Plinth commissions make us look at the world in different ways, addressing issues of importance for British society. They point a mirror to our contemporary world, they embody ideas which need to be expressed in concrete form to remind us of important issues we are facing today. How do you view Lady in Blue within this context?   Tschabalala Self :   Lady in Blue is a sculpture that pays homage to a young, metropolitan woman of colour—a quotidian figure, like many one might encounter in contemporary London. Lady in Blue is not a figure from the historical or political past, but rather a symbol of our shared present and future ambitions. She reflects equity through representation, acknowledgement, and action, where all global citizens are exalted and appreciated for their unique contributions, and a future where the ordinary individual is recognised for their extraordinary capabilities. She expresses resilience and grace through the complications of our ever-evolving modern world.   Inspired by a desire to bring a contemporary woman to Trafalgar Square, Lady in Blue adds a new perspective to the public space. Unlike Henry Havelock, Charles James Napier, or George Washington, this anonymous woman is not a real person but an icon; she represents many individuals rather than the adulation of one. This symbolism allows all who interact with the sculpture to imbue her with their own personal relationship and take meaning from her placement.   This figure would be the first sculpture of mine to depict a walking figure. Movement and walking are associated with agency in my work. The fact that my figures are often ‘on the move’ speaks to their ability to assert their own will and exist within their own reality, rather than existing solely for the edification of the viewer. Similarly, I feel there is great political power in showing a woman walking in the public sphere as opposed to being posed or static: the gesture illuminates the forward moment of all women collectively. Fig 1. Lady in Blue (Tschabalala Self) Model for Fourth Plinth Commission, Trafalgar Square, London 2026 © Tschabalala Self, Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

Both art and science have been cornerstones of western society for millennia, yet their synthesis—artistic research—has yet to achieve widespread acceptance in European […] academies. Samuel Penderbayne[1]   Artistic Research   Artistic research has many faces. [2]  For some it is research ‘about’ art (art as research object : art history [3]  as well as artists’ self-exploration into their own body of work). [4]  For others it is research ‘for’ art (art as research objective : artists utilizing pre-existing scientific research methods as tools and inspiration to create artworks). [5]  For yet others it is research ‘through’ art (art as research method : scientists developing novel research methods through their own artistic practice or partnerships with artists). [6] The Art Side   There have been many prominent artistic research authors from the art side [7]  and many more that conduct artistic research without explicitly writing about it. And while there is a marked increase in research-oriented artistic practices fueled by anthologies,[8] journals,[9] fellowships,[10] and PhD programs, [11]  the same cannot be said for the science side.   The Science Side   There is a general lack of academic scholars who dare explore this route, especially legal scholars, [12]  and especially artistic research understood as more than the one-way-street of simply offering finished research results up for artists to interpret, or the one-way-street of picking famous art disputes to give legal opinions on.   This essay describes my own path of opening up my research to art and outlines ‘Law x Art’ understood as a new subcategory of artistic research and a supplemental ‘academic modus operandi’ [13]  in the legal sciences.   My Decade of Separation   The connection between art and law has, however, not always been apparent to me. For more than a decade my two passions of art and law were stowed away in separate compartments of my brain and life.   Law—Rationality, Formality, Objectivity   One was a highly structured, hierarchical endeavor, infused at times with an almost mathematical dogmatic logic, which I had decided to dedicate my working life to. It required one to analyze, memorize, and regurgitate large quantities of external knowledge, abstract information, paragraphs, and cases. It was result-oriented and classification-based. It offered very little room for coincidence and play. It necessitated a certain self-rigor and self-deprivation to master. It meant following the rules.   Art—Intuition, Informality, Subjectivity   The other represented an escape from those strictness and rules. To record music, to paint, write poetry, or even just to consume other people’s art made me flow. It was full of embodied, sensory, and intuitive spontaneity, a sense of knowing without discursive thinking.[14] The knowledge it created was largely located within myself—even if influenced by external sources. It invited the unsystematic, the illogical, the incomplete. Its outcome was never pre-determined. It allowed me to push boundaries, to provoke, to break rules.   Yet art was something I let myself explore only after a day’s work had been completed successfully, only after I had fulfilled my self-set quorum of productivity, art was something I as a legal scholar relegated—for many years—to the outer margins of my life.   During this time, my ‘decade of separation’, I felt, that—even though I greatly enjoyed diving deep into navigating this strange new world of paragraphs and articles—I left something behind on the surface: an intuitive dimension of myself, cast aside to fit into the preset mold of the rational, straight-thinking, unaffected law student and legal scholar. [15]  It took overcoming the separateness of law and art in my mind, to overcome this separateness of self, and to feel truly at home in my profession. Convergence   Three core experiences triggered this convergence. First, my PhD studies, which turned me from passive consumer and applicator of external legal knowledge into the creator of new legal knowledge and introduced for the first time a creative element into my legal education. Second, my time spent at Yale Law School, known for centering in its curriculum also non-legal sciences like psychology and political economy, solidifying the interdisciplinarity of my research. And third, meeting role models and collaborators ranging from lawyers double-majoring in art history to legal scholars who are practicing artists.[16] My role models were not necessarily older, established individuals but rather young colleagues whose bravery to combine art and law in the face of the conservatism of traditional legal discourse I admired. I needed to see someone   else live the connection between law and art before I could see myself live it. It is through many conversations and collaborations with this group of individuals that my view of Law x Art was shaped.   Today, I no longer consider law and art as opposites. They are complementary for me, bear intrinsic similarities, and I continue to see characteristics of one in the other.   On a high level of abstraction, they both attempt to illustrate aspects of the human condition through exploration, revelation, and representation, and in this sense both art and the legal sciences work toward advancing human understanding. [17]  Law like art is continually evolving and rich with permutations and surprises . Law is not set in stone but contingent on the society that birthed and sustains it. Law like art is a reflection of society.   On a more concrete level, intuition plays a big part in the writing of any text—be it legal or artistic. This includes the intuition of picking a topic to write about, the intuition of how to structure one’s own thoughts for the reader, and the intuition to know when a text is finished. The deep interest a legal scholar feels for a particular topic that compels them to dig deep into it and ‘scratch an intellectual itch’ is also intuition. As is the moment the researcher wakes up from sleep, the answer to a problem they have been unsuccessfully working on for months suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere at the tip of their tongue. This is said to have happened even to the father of the scientific method of rationality and objectivity himself: René Descartes, who stated that the very basis of his scientific method came to him in a dream. [18]   Even the purest forms of scientific research are thus shaped by tacit dimensions such as intuition, creativity, or spontaneous experimental practice. [19]  To allege a wall between science and art with objectivity and rationality on one side and subjectivity and intuition on the other is over-simplistic. [20]  Einstein alluded this to when he proclaimed that ‘the greatest scientists are artists as well.’ [21] Law x Art   Law x Art evades this oversimplification. It aims at centralizing artistic practice’s intuition in the legal sciences to create hybrid forms of knowledge and offer a new academic modus operandi. The goal is not to replace but to supplement traditional approaches in the legal sciences. [22]  Law x Art builds interdisciplinary bridges out of artistic intuition into domains of rational legal thought [23]  by encouraging scientists to develop research projects in tandem with artists, as well as encouraging scientists to develop their own research-based artistic practice. [24]   Creating Zones of Resonance   The intent of Law x Art is not, however, to discipline or rationalize art, and subjugate it to the legal sciences. Art is not just a useful ancillary to scientific research to communicate with the general public more successfully than academic journals and lengthy monographs could; it is not limited to interpreting pre-existing scientific knowledge but may contribute to producing new knowledge. In that sense the artist is not someone who works for  the researcher but someone who works with  them, and law and art are not translations of one another but actors in their own right—neither is subordinate or just a tool for the other.   Law x Art creates zones of resonance and friction for both such actors. While the concept of resonance does not intend to name specific methods to borrow from, rather proposing a set of strategies of suggestion, insinuation, and montage, so as to configure a space ‘where neighboring objects might oscillate in sympathetic vibration’, as artist-anthropologist Rachel Thompson puts it. [25]  Further, the concept of zones of friction particularly welcomes inspiration coming from confusion and chaos, [26]  from having your perspectives and ideas challenged by exposure to other fields and methods. [27]  Strategies of suggestion to create zones of resonance and friction include the following questions:   What are the tacit dimensions of my research? (self-reflection as to the limits of scientific knowledge) How can artistic practice make the tacit dimensions of my research fruitful for knowledge production and communication? (making the invisible visible) How can my research be experienced through art? (creation of experiential knowledge)[28] What metaphors are present in my research? (revealing potentially fruitful connections and novel ways of seeing) [29] What thoughts about my research have I not dared to explore for fear of appearing unprofessional, overstepping the boundaries of my discipline or being laughed at by my colleagues? (this may be where true discovery lies)   Opening a Two-Way Street   Following from the concept of zones of resonance, Law x Art must be understood as a two-way street of mutual productive irritation.   Not just Law →  Art:  What Law x Art is consequently not  about is lawyers taking up artistic practice as a hobby. This produces art more or less inspired by their legal work, but which stands relatively disconnected next to it in the sense of a one-way street: law as subject of art. Examples of such disconnected artistic practices by lawyers may be found in works by Goethe, Kafka, Rosendorfer, Schlink, or von Schirach (so-called poet-lawyers [30] ), as well as in the collection of the ‘Law & Art’ online gallery.[31] These works either do not deal with legal issues at all or are merely about finding artistic representation for pre-existing legal issues. That is not to say that this one-way street may not lead to highly noteworthy works of art—but it’s not Law x Art. Not just Law ←  Art:  Nor is Law x Art about legal scholars giving opinions on cases involving the art world. This, too, constitutes a one-way street: art as subject of law. While there are a number of books with titles such as ‘Law and the Arts’, [32]  ‘Art and Criminal Law’, [33]  or ‘Art Trials’, [34]  none of them constitute artistic research understood as a two-way street. Many merely pick an art law case with which to exemplify and confirm general concepts of legal dogmatics with no true dialogue between art and law occurring. The authors never take off or question their ‘lawyer’s glasses’, they never leave the safety of their discipline’s ivory tower. Further, these works are often concerned explicitly with the ‘direct connectivity’ of art and law, rather than resonance and friction. This approach, too, may produce important works of scholarship, but it is not Law x Art.   It is chiefly for this reason—so as not to be conflated with these already existing perspectives—that I choose not the name of ‘Law and  Art’ for my approach but of ‘Law x  Art’.   X stands for the two-way traffic of mutual productive irritation at a crossroad. The x, too, makes it clear that Law x Art is not about a peaceful coexistence of art and law but resistance and dissent. It demands challenging the expectations of one’s own discipline and one’s own dogmatic conditioning.   x stands for two way-street x stands for resonance x stands for friction x stands for the unknown x stands for inspiration coming from confusion   Fig 1. The author’s offices at the University of Halle.   Examples of My Emerging Practice   Implementing Law x Art in my own work has been an ongoing process. With various projects I have remained within a one-way street (eg advising as legal expert a theatre in Mainz for a play on the Wirecard fraud and embezzlement scandal). Yet the goal is always opening a two-way street between art and law, while at the same time accepting that pushing research to a discipline’s limits naturally courts a high risk of failure and recognizing that the process of such artistic experimentation may be just as important as the results. [35] Fig 2. Wirecard-play ‘Villa Alfons’ at Staatstheater Mainz 2022. IstaCard-CEO Markus Schwartz is seen climbing a giant badger (German: Dachs ), a symbol for the German stock market index DAX (still image © Andreas J Etter).   Beyond Law Salon   At the core of my Law x Art practice stands the Beyond Law Salon  series that I curate and host with collaborators Daria Bayer and Stella Dörenbach in Berlin.[36] The salon is designed to bring together three times a year a diverse group of scientists and artists to discuss, explore, and perform topics of law and art. Inspirations are drawn from the work of the performance collective signa , whose site-specific performances always involve the audience.   Past Salons have been dedicated to AI generated art, violence in art, and burnout in academia. Each evening contains informative as well as interactive elements aimed at disintegrating the strict categories between artist and scientist as well as audience and performers. At one Salon, the AI-based composer collective ktonal  presented a piece of their music, before a legal expert commented on intellectual property protection of the art just witnessed, while guests became AI-artist themselves at the same time, co-creating through apps such as WOMBO Dream .   Every Salon spans multiple rooms, offering different experiences in each of them; one room is usually reserved to be entered in solitude. During a past Salon on violence and consent the Salon hosts—re-enacting Marina Abramović’s performance Rhythm 0—took turns in such secluded room to act as immobile ‘objects’ surrounded by an assortment of, among other things, knifes, scissors, and pins giving guests permission to use them as they pleased on the hosts.   At another evening on the topic of burnout and labor laws, Salonists were refused entry at the agreed upon time but instead sent out individually to bars, busstops, and parks with the task of each collecting a story from a stranger. When reuniting as a group after several hours guests were invited to join the performance of Academics Anonymous (AA), sharing their experience of workaholism and of being gifted an unexpected break in their busy schedules by our initial refusal of entry.   The atmosphere of all Salons is un-institutional in the sense that it rejects knowledge communication through the traditional hierarchical lecture format and instead offers—over candlelight and wine—impulses and suggestions as well as communal, experimental knowledge production. The idea is to take art out of the museum, to take science out of the university, and to infuse ‘the every day’ with them.   Performative Lectures, Art as Evidence, Artist Collaborations   I further implement Law x Art within my research into white-collar crime, reaching from the quasi-lawless space of offshore financial centers to the billion euro Cum-Ex tax evasion scandal. I have, for example, held performative lectures during which water is unpredictably yet constantly dripping onto the audience while I speak, symbolizing the money slipping through legal loopholes into tax havens. Research into the crimes of the rich and powerful is particularly suited for artistic exploration due to the hidden power asymmetries within the law that favor wealthy criminals, and due to art being an innate mechanism to question power. If law is power, law is the establishment—art is the question mark that may make the hidden visible. Art is a means to put normative or normalized behaviors to the test. [37]   Further, art can act as evidence. This was first proposed by the filmmaker Laura Poitras[38]   whose documentary Citizenfour  (2014) on the whistleblower Edward Snowden won an Oscar and sustained attention to the NSA’s global illegal surveillance efforts. The concept of art as evidence, too, has a role in scientific discourse. It can, to use Pointras’ words, be a ‘medium […] we can use to translate evidence or information beyond simply revealing the facts, [and] how people experience that information differently — not just intellectually, but emotionally or conceptually.’ ⁠[39]   Art’s ability in this sense is not limited to the one-way street of science communication, but art itself becomes ‘an entry point to investigate sensitive issues’. Such ‘artistic intrusions’ into ultraspecialized fields of knowledge may be needed either to address topics that have not yet been readily addressed by scientists at all or to generate a public discussions beyond expert circles. [40]  Examples relating to my research include past works on offshore financial centers by artists such as Femke Herregraven  (2011), Paolo Cirio (2013, see fig 3), the Rybn collective  (2017), and the DMSTFCTN  collective (2017).   Fig 3. Loophole for All ( Paolo Cirio 2013, video channels and digital prints ) (Installation at Poetics and Politics of Data, exhibition at House of Electronic Arts, Basel, Switzerland, 2015. © Paolo Cirio).   To explore this further myself, I have been working with the artist Margerita Pevere  and the curator Daniela Silvestrin  as fellows at the Silbersalz Institute  (2022-2023) which pairs scientists and artists for collaboration. In the process I have learned from Pevere’s bio-art concept of ‘leaky bodies’[41] and her ‘poetics of uncontainability’,[42] and transposed them to the uncontainability of bodies of information (secrets) in the offshore space (consider the Panama Papers Leaks ). Pevere, too, has inspired the title of my upcoming monograph Anti-Leviathan .[43] The book uncovers a world in which the traditional Leviathan—the symbol of state power—is challenged by a collective ‘Anti-Leviathan’: a swarm of highly skilled lawyers, bankers, and advisors who help move and conceal vast sums of (criminal) money in the offshore world. The Anti-Leviathan undermines the foundations of tax justice and democratic processes as well as creating a parallel reality, a two-tier criminal justice system in which elites operate untouched by state control.   The scholarly text in my book is accompanied by seven artistic works which I have created in parallel to the three-year academic writing process (see fig 4). They reflect my personal approach to the subject and point to intellectual dead ends not reflected in the text, providing an insight into the genesis of the book.     Fig 4. Artwork from the author’s upcoming book ‘Anti-Leviathan’: Swarm ( Lucia Sommerer 2023, canvas ⌀ 50cm, wire stainless steel ). Wandering: a randomness inviting research methodology   Finally, reflections through Law x Art have helped me recognize as central to my work an approach I have practiced for many years but never named: wandering.   Wandering—on its surface more akin to an artist’s way of relating to the world than a scientist’s—has notably been deployed as a research methodology by US anthropologist Howard Campbell. [44]  It is characterized by random explorations, stumbling onto things, meeting ideas and people in an impromptu way, walking past the boundaries of caution.   While Campbell uses his approach in a literal way—he is actually randomly walking around a location, for example Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, the murder capital of the world—I have long used his approach in a metaphorical sense. It is my mind that wanders around outside my discipline, stumbling, bumping into fragments of foreign ideas. The more disconnected from my research the area I am wandering in, the more promising it seems for unexpectedly encountering a phrase, an image, a sound that will become the core of my legal research later. All my major research topics have come to me that way, discovered not by avid intra-disciplinary discussion and literature study but stumbled upon like a rock on which I hit my toe. By randomly googling, spending too much time on social media, browsing gossip magazines at the hairdressers, or eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations at a party. And oftentimes an academic paper that becomes most important to an argument I am trying to make in my writing is the very one I have encountered only because I misspelled something in the search engine.   Of course, there are moments in every research when loose wandering will pause and pre-structured, minute scientific analysis takes over. [45]  But this is not to negate the role of wandering in formulating the research questions in the first place and in moving the research along by little bursts of chance here and there.   All scientists do ‘wandering’. For me, however, it constitutes an element so central to research, that I consider it necessary to bring it from the unconscious into the conscious, and explicitly credit it. Conscious wandering in this sense is a randomness inviting practice. There is extensive literature on the beneficial role of randomness in complex evolutionary systems like random gene mutations, [46]  in childhood learning, [47]  as well as in imitating human creativity with computers [48] . The same beneficial role of randomness is true for the evolution of academic ideas.    Conscious wandering, while many times likely to end up at strange an impassable dead-ends, is inviting us to think ideas that have not been thought before, and that could not have been thought employing linear thinking. Law x Art is one such way to bring conscious wandering into the legal sciences. Future   Law x Art has the potential to enrich legal debate within the discipline as well as with the public and to provide a creativity-enhancing, supplemental academic modus operandi in the legal sciences.   To normalize Law x Art I invite the reader to, in a first step, utilize hybrid formats of knowledge communication, ranging from research exhibitions to performative lectures and teach-ins at museums (see also the work of Daria Bayer,  who chose to compose her PhD in Law thesis in the form of a theater play). [49]  It is through this novel way of conceiving the communication  of academic knowledge that different perspectives and pathways to creating  academic knowledge will become apparent. Further potential lies in transposing this approach from research into teaching and infusing the classroom with artistic elements.[50] Law—one of the most important resources of power—should not exclusively be communicated in structurally conservative ways. Ultimately, however, to sustain a Law x Art movement and anchor it in legal scholarship in the long term new institutional structures are needed, eg funding for scholar-artist tandems,[51] scholar-artist retreats,[52] and artist in residence programs at law schools.[53]    As cornerstones of western society, science and art have influenced each other for centuries. It is now time to make their connectedness explicit—not just in the legal sciences. Lucia Sommerer   Lucia Sommerer is a Berlin-based artistic researcher  at the intersection of law, technology, and art. She holds an assistant professorship  in criminal law and criminology at the University of Halle (Germany), is a fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project  (USA), and a member of Kollektiv im Fenster  (kiF). Contact: lawxart@mailbox.org . The author thanks colleagues and collaborators Daria Bayer, Stella Dörenbach, Johanna Hahn, and Katrin Höffler for valuable comments on a first draft of this text.   [1]  Samuel Penderbayne, ‘From Artist to Artistic Researcher. Chapter 2.3.1. Epistemology’ ( Hamburg Open Online University,  2022) < https://legacy.hoou.de/projects/from-artist-to-artistic-researcher/pages/2-4-epistemology > accessed 1 July 2024. [2]  See eg Peter Tepe, ‘Über Konzepte der künstlerischen Forschung 5.2. Zu Martin Tröndle/Julia Warmers (Hg.): Kunstforschung als ästhetische Wissenschaft. Beiträge zur transdisziplinären Hybridisierung von Wissenschaft und Kunst ’ ( Mythos-Magazin , January 2023) < https://mythos-magazin.de/erklaerendehermeneutik/pt_kuenstlerische-forschung5-2.pdf > accessed 1 July 2024; Till Bödeker, ‘Zum Wissensbegriff der künstlerischen Forschung’ ( Mythos-Magazin , January 2023) < https://www.mythos-magazin.de/erklaerendehermeneutik/tb_wissensbegriff-kuenstlerische-forschung.pdf > accessed 1 July 2024; Margherita Pevere, ‘Arts of vulnerability. Queering leaks in artistic research and bioart’ (Doctoral thesis, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture 2022) 26 et seq; Julian Klein, ‘What is Artistic Research?’ ( Journal for Artistic Research , 23 April 2017) < https://jar-online.net/en/what-artistic-research > accessed 1 July 2024; Henk Borgdorff, The Debate on Research in the Arts (Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen 2006); Christopher Frayling, ‘Research in art and design’ (1993) 1(1) Royal College of Art Research Papers 1, 5; Claudia Schnugg, Creating ArtScience collaboration: Bringing value to organizations  (Springer 2019). [3]  Till Bödeker and Peter Tepe, ‘Early Connections between Science and (Visual) Art’ (2023) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. [4]  Peter Tepe, ‘Science-Related: Four New Series’ (2022) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal; Samuel Penderbayne, Cross-genre composition  (Wolke 2018) 12. [5]  See eg AEC and others, ‘Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research’ ( Culture Action Europe,  2020) < https://cultureactioneurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Vienna-Declaration-on-AR_corrected-version_24-June-20-1.pdf > accessed 1 July 2024; Suzanne Anker, ‘Vanitas (in a Petri dish) Series’ (2016) < https://www.suzanneanker.com > accessed 1 July 2024;  Lia Halloran, ‘Your body in a space that sees’ (2025) < https://liahalloran.com > accessed 1 July 2024; Dietmut Strebe, ‘The Prayer’ (2020) < https://www.diemutstrebe.com > accessed 1 July 2024. [6]  See eg Neri Oxman, ‘Nature x Humanity’ (2024) < https://oxman.com > accessed 1 July 2024; Peter Tepe, ‘On: Art Inspires Science’ (2020) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. [7]  See above (n 2-6); Jens Badura, ‘Erkenntnis (sinnliche)’ in Jens Badura et al (eds), Künstlerische Forschung: Ein Handbuch  (Diaphanes 2015) 43-8; Anke Haarmann, Artistic research: Eine epistemologische Ästhetik  (transcript 2019); Dieter Mersch, ‘Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens’ in Elke Bippus (ed), Kunst des Forschens: Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens  (Diaphanes 2014) 27-48. [8]  See eg Peter Lynen and Stefan Pischinger (eds), Wissenschaft und Kunst. Verbindung mit Zukunft oder vergebliche Sisyphusarbeit?  (Ferdinand Schöningh 2018); Gerald Bast, Elias G Carayannis, and David FJ Campbell (eds), Arts, Research, Innovation and Cociety  (Springer 2015); Badura et al (n 7); Mick Wilson and Schelte van Ruiten (eds), SHARE: Handbook for Artistic Research Education (ELIA European League of Institutes of the Arts 2013); Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson (eds), The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts  (Routledge 2010). See also Graeme Sullivan, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts (Sage 2010). [9]  See eg ‘w/k–Between Science & Art Journal’ (Peter Tepe and others, since 2019); ‘Journal for Artistic Reserach’ (Society for Artistic Research, since 2011); ‘Art/Research International’ (University of Alberta Libraries, since 2016); ‘Nordic Journal of Art & Research’ (Oslo Metropolitan University, since 2012); ‘Nordic Journal for Artistic Research’ (Stockholm University of the Arts & the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme,   since 2018); ‘Airea—Arts & Interdisciplinary Research’ (Eleni-Ira Panourgia and others, since 2018); ‘Research Catalogue—An International Database for Artistic Resreach’ (Society for Artistic Research, since 2011). [10]  See eg ‘Künstlerische Tatsachen’ < https://www.kuenstlerische-tatsachen.de > accessed 1 July 2024 . [11]  Cf. Thomas Gartmann, ‘Studies in the Arts: An Artistic-Scientific Doctorate’ (2022) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal; Peter Lynen, ‘Die Verleihung des Dr. art. und Dr. mus.—Ein Bärendienst für Kunst und Wissenschaft’ (2011) 11(3) Forschung & Lehre 218. [12]  See however Daria Bayer, Tragödie des Rechts (Duncker & Humblot 2021); ‘A Decentralized Right to Breathe’ ( Logische Phantasie Lab,  2023) < https://www.lo-ph.agency/dertb > accessed 1 July 2024; Gary P Bagnall, Law as Art  (2nd edn, Routledge 2006); Amin Parsa and Eric Snodgrass, ‘Legislative arts: interplays of art and law’ (2022) 14(1) Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 1. [13]  Cf. Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vadén, Artistic research: Theories, Methods and Practices  (Academy of Fine Arts 2005) 9. [14]  Louis Arnaud Reid, ‘Intuition and Art’ (1981) 15(3) Journal of Aesthetic Education 27. [15]  Cf. Duncan Kennedy, ‘Legal education and the reproduction of hierarchy’ (1982) 32(4) J Legal Education 591;   Nicola Lacey, ‘Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy Revisited’ (2014) 5(4) Transnational Legal Theory 596; Duncan Kennedy, ‘The Hermeneutic of Suspicion in Contemporary American Legal Thought’ (2014) 25(2) Law and Critique 91, 128 et seq. [16]  See inter alia authors in (n 12) above. [17]  Cf. Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Art: Arts-based Research Practice  (The Guilford Press 2009) 2. [18]  Robert Withers, ‘Descartes’ Dreams’ (2008) 53(5) Journal of Analytical Psychology 691. [19]  Cf. Badura (n 7) 43 et seq.; Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension  (Routledge 1966); Anon Collective, The Book of Anonymity  (punctum books 2021) 22. [20]   See also Pevere (n 2) 26 et seq;   Bayer (n 12); Tepe (n 2) 10 et seq; Alexander Becker, ‘Art and Science’ (2016) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. [21]  Einstein Archive 33-257. [22]  Cf. Badura (n 7) 43 et seq. [23]  Cf. Samuel Penderbayne, ‘From Artist to Artistic Researcher Chapter 2.3.1.b Intersubjective Resonance and Metacognition’ ( Hamburg Open Online University,  2022) < https://legacy.hoou.de/projects/from-artist-to-artistic-researcher/pages/2-3-1-b-intersubjective-resonance-and-metacognition > accessed 1 July 2024. [24]  Cf. Bödeker and Tepe (n 3) 4. [25]  Rachel Thompson, ‘Labyrinth of Linkages—Cinema, Anthropology, and the Essayistic Impulse’ in Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson (eds), Between Matter and Method  (Routledge 2020) 5; Anon Collective (n 19) 59. [26]  Cf. Katrina Schwartz, ‘On the Edge of Chaos: Where Creativity Flourishes’ ( kqed , 6 May 2014) < https://perma.cc/5KZ7-A99F > accessed 1 July 2024. See also Robert M Bilder and Kendra S Knudsen, ‘Creative cognition and systems biology on the edge of chaos’ (2014) Front. Psychol 5; Krystyna Laycraft, ‘Chaos, complexity, and creativity’ (Proceedings of Bridges 2009: Mathematics, Music, Art, Architecture, Culture) 355 et seq;   Frank Ulrich and Peter Axel Nielsen, ‘Chaos and creativity in dynamic idea evaluation: Theorizing the organization of problem‐based portfolios’ (2020) 29(4) Creativity and Innovation Management 566. [27]  Milena Tsvetkova interviewed in ‘News: Milena Tsvetkova reflects on sabbatical at SFI’ ( Santa Fe Institute , 19 May 2023) < https://perma.cc/W8PM-J72U > accessed 1 July 2024. [28]  Cf. Camilla Groth et al, ‘Conditions for experiential knowledge exchange in collaborative research across the sciences and creative practice’ (2020) 16(4) CoDesign 328. [29]  On the scientific benefits of metaphorical thinking David Gray and Michele Macready, ‘Metaphors: Ladders of Innovation’ in David C Krakauer (ed), Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019  (SFI Press 2019) 129 et seq. [30]  Cf. Yvonne Nilges, Dichterjuristen: Studien zur Poesie des Rechts vom 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert  (Königshausen & Neumann 2014). [31]  See ‘Law & Art’ < https://www.lawand.art/ > accessed 1 July 2024. [32]  Werner Gephart and Jure Leko (eds), Elective Affinities and Relationships of Tension  (Klostermann 2017). See also several contributions on law and art in Lynen and Pischinger (n 8) 167 et seq; Nathalie Mahmoudi and Yasmin Mahmoudi, Kunst-Wissenschaft, Recht-Management: Festschrift für Peter Michael Lynen  (Nomos 2018);   Peter Michael Lynen, Kunst im Recht: Erläuterungen zum Spannungsfeld von Kunst, Recht und Verwaltung  (Der Kleine Verlag 1994); Eduardo CB Bittar, Semiotics, Law & Art: Between Theory of Justice and Theory of Law (Springer 2020). [33]  Dela-Madeleine Halecker et al (eds), Kunst und Strafrecht: Eine Reise durch eine schillernde Welt  (De Gruyter 2022); Uwe Scheffler, Art and Criminal Law Brochure  (2020). [34]  Johann Braun, Kunstprozesse von Menzel bis Beuys: 13 Fälle aus dem Privatrecht  (2nd edn, Beck 2009). [35]  Cf. Anon Collective (n 19) 55. [36]  See ‘Beyond Law Salon’ < https://www.kollektivimfenster.com/beyond-law > accessed 1 July 2024. [37]  Christoph Schenker, ‘Wissensformen der Kunst’ in Badura et al (n 7) 105 et seq. [38]  Tatiana Bazzichelli (ed), Whistle-blowing for Change: Exposing Systems of Power and Injustice  (Transcript 2023) 67 et seq. [39]  ibid. [40]  Anon Collective (n 19) 53, referencing Brian Holmes, ‘Extradisciplinary Investigations: Towards a New Critique of Institutions’ in Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (eds), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice Reinventing Institutional Critique  (MayFly 2009) 53 et seq. [41]  Pevere (n 2) 67 et seq. [42]  ibid. [43]  Lucia Sommerer, Anti-Leviathan: How offshore financial centres promote white-collar crime, create inequality and endanger democracies  (Nomos forthcoming). [44]  Howard Campbell, Downtown Juárez: Underworlds of Violence and Abuse  (University of Texas Press 2021). [45]  Cf. David Bohm, On Creativity  (Psychology Press 2004) 50 et seq. [46]  Andreas Wagner, ‘The role of randomness in Darwinian evolution’ (2012) 79(1) Philosophy of Science 95. [47]  Alison Gopnik, ‘Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions’ (2020) 375(1803) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. [48]  John McCarthy et al, ‘A proposal for the dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence, August 31, 1955’ (2006) 27(4) AI magazine 12; Simone Scardapane and Dianhui Wang, ‘Randomness in neural networks’ (2017) 7(2) Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 1. See also Daniel Kahneman et al, ‘An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence’ (2022) 1(1) Collective Intelligence 1. [49]  See Bayer (n 12). [50]  See eg Peter Tepe, ‘Vorlesungstheater’ (2022) w/k–Between Science & Art Journal; Peter Tepe, ‘25 Jahre Schwerpunkt Mythos, Ideologie und Methoden…und kein Ende’ ( Mythos-Magazin , September 2013) 39 et seq < https://mythos-magazin.de/geschichtedesschwerpunkts/pt_25Jahre.pdf > accessed 1 July 2024. [51] See eg ‘Silbersalz Institute’ ( Documentary Campus ) < https://www.documentary-campus.com/training/silbersalz-institute > accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Künstlerische Tatsachen’ (n 10). [52]  See eg ‘Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann Haus’ < www.vatmh.org > accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Villa Massimo’  < www.villamassimo.de > accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin’ < www.wiko-berlin.de > accessed 1 July 2024. [53]  See eg ‘Artist-in-Residence Program’ ( Columbia Law School ) < www.law.columbia.edu/community-life/strategic-initiatives/artist-residence-program > accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Artist in Residence’ ( Center for Interdisciplinary Research at University of Bielefeld ) < www.uni-bielefeld.de/einrichtungen/zif/funding/art/ >  accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Center of Art, Science & Technology ‘ ( MIT ) < https://arts.mit.edu > accessed 1 July 2024; ‘Arts at CERN’ ( CERN ) < https://arts.cern > accessed 1 July 2024.

Art has been part of our being for millions of years—possibly even before the beginning of our genus Homo—without being understood as what we now call art. From the beginning, it was simply another way of knowing, probably our first, of coping with what confronted us in our environment as a necessary way of surviving in it and sharing that knowledge with others. It sprang from an emotional reaction to what existed outside of us and how we translated that feeling to pass it on. Often that shock was significant enough for our ancestors to know instinctively to communicate it wordlessly, since it predates language, and to do so with the limited means at their disposal. They did this by creating sounds, movements, or things to represent those emotions—symbols, through things found or made, to pass on those feelings subconsciously. This is what we have come to call art.   We were not put on earth to master it as many religions and political systems espouse. We are a product of the earth and to continue that existence we must know our environment, the earth in all its dimensions. The ‘purpose’ of life is to know, to learn, and through knowing ensure its survival. To live is to learn, to learn is to live. The need to know our environment in order to survive in it is something we share with all living things. Each manifestation of life, from the simplest to the most complex, has evolved means of interacting with its immediate environment in order to find in it sustenance, protection, and whatever is needed to survive. We, as humans, have one of the most complex such manifestations, which has evolved to provide us with both our instinct and our intellect as ways of interacting with our surroundings and knowing in our own limited way.   Henri Bergson defined the two, instinct—feeling, emotion—and intellect—memory and reason—along with intuition, which he calls the instinct educated by the intellect, meaning that instinct is also something which evolves.[1]   As we did eventually with art, our species continued to split knowing into other categories, whether religion, philosophy, or science. This has been effective to some extent by focusing more deeply on different aspects of human behaviour, but it has also created boundaries to knowing. Because those categories are relatively recent human creations, they provide insights useful to understanding how humans express the different dimensions of their being, how they are communicated, and how that communication becomes expressed socially. That first way of knowing is through feeling, the response most living creatures have to their surroundings. In our case, it was a pre-intellectual reaction to those experiences which collectively evolved into symbolic thought and symbolic representation and eventually manifested as art.   The need to know, to which art is one response, is at the heart of existence, something we share with other species, each of which has its way of knowing and sharing. We started, as all living organisms do, by having an emotional reaction to something, whether positive or negative for our survival, and storing that memory as a mental sign, the root of instinct. As the genus Homo evolved, the accumulation of emotionally provoked memories became our intellect and retained knowledge passed on through generations, which in turn coloured our emotional responses to our environment and allowed us to eventually communicate them through speech.   In a long career in art, I often asked artist friends which came first in their minds, speech or art. They all responded, as if a given, that we had art in the way I have defined it before speech as a way of communicating our feelings to others.   The first ‘good or bad’ response to situations in nature was the primal emotional reaction to external stimuli. Is it something dangerous or useful to my survival? Is it something I can eat or will it eat me? That response and the memory of those responses is what allowed us to survive. It is seeing from another part of ourselves, our instinctive side, internal, founded on experience and memory, in an attempt to understand the world around us, survive in it, and share that knowledge with others. Sentient before intelligent.   That emotion and memory are located in the amygdala and the limbic system, this most primal part of our brains, is significant in understanding how ancient this process must be. We can almost see our ‘lizard’ brain’s head darting back and forth in response to possible pleasure or potential danger. That emotional response, a reaction between the individual and the external stimulus, is recorded in the memory as an image, a sign, a seed of a symbol, what Gilbert Simondon called a symbole-souvenir  or memory-symbol. [2] When one or another of those reactions enter our memory, the grounding of the intellect, we have the very primitive beginning of symbolic thought—one might say instinct. What we understand as art today is rooted in this early beginning; it was always there from the start and evolved in complexity and capacity as everything involving life and humanity did. As we embarked on that Bergsonian two-step, an emotional reaction to a confrontation, positive or negative, to something outside of us, we started building up experiences to guide us further. The fact that the amygdala is involved in memory gave our perception the information accumulated through experience to help decide what was good or bad by recalling reactions to past encounters. One might call this the evolving intellect.   Neuroscience has confirmed that role of the amygdala as proposed by James McGaugh several years ago:   The findings of human brain imaging studies are consistent with those of animal studies in suggesting that activation of the amygdala influences the consolidation of long-term memory; the degree of activation of the amygdala by emotional arousal during encoding of emotionally arousing material (either pleasant or unpleasant) correlates highly with subsequent recall. The activation of neuromodulatory systems affecting the basolateral amygdala and its projections to other brain regions involved in processing different kinds of information plays a key role in enabling emotionally significant experiences to be well remembered.[3]   This beginning of symbolic thought in embryonic form evolved to become art—founded on artists’ emotional reaction to the ‘real’ in their time and space, developed with the action of the intellect, and then communicated to others through their own emotional reactions to it.   When we are confronted with something we don’t know, something not already clearly part of our memories, we make up an answer, inventing something to explain what is in front of us from our limited experiences. This is essential to our being able to move forward. Edwige Armand and I propose that creativity is provoked by a crisis in perception caused when the givens we possess for understanding what we are experiencing are insufficient to explain it. When we don’t understand what we are confronting, we will make up an answer, linking things not necessarily related, but with an internal logic of its own through invented relationships with things already believed. British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist has described this as ‘sensing the lack of fit between perception and cognition, and using this as a stimulus to shift the way we both see and think’. [4]  That stimulus is what we proposed as the crisis-provoked call to creativity in which our intuition dips into what Armand named ‘forgotten memories’ to find or invent a suitable explanation. [5]   The same process is what creates mythologies, the mental shorthand used to transmit an understanding our world: a solution pulled from our unconscious through reinvention that changes forever our perception, how we see, think, and imagine. Perception is what artist Robert Irwin calls the subject of art [6]  and why Marshall McLuhan called artists educators of perception. [7]  That being so, artists generally sense a change in perception before the rest of the population, which is why society takes time to digest and understand their proposals, sometimes as long as a century. It is also why artists have always been interested in what we’ve come to know as science, how we understand the world intellectually, knowledge which feeds our imaginations. If science defines our reality as is the case in our society, it becomes a major subject of art, in both its intellectual proposals—structures—and the technologies it produces—tools.   Bergson’s understanding of perception, its limitations and potential, led him to recognise the special relation between perception and the artist:   For hundreds of years there have been men [and women] whose function has been precisely to see and make us see what we do not naturally perceive. They are the artists. What is the aim of art if not to show us, in nature and in the mind, outside of us and within us, things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness […] The great painters are men [and women] who possess a certain vision of things which has or will become the vision of all […] Art would suffice then to show us that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible.[8]   That communication is triggered by the emotion of the creator connecting through the emotion of the receptor. Art is about emotion and emotion is about the body and the body’s encounter with the exterior. It is the other way of knowing, long before the evolution of our intellect pushed it aside, touting reason as the only way of comprehending, a limiting inheritance from the Enlightenment. Our emotional response to an artwork is our connection to the emotion of the artist who created it. That response literally incorporates it into us and makes it part of our being. Learning in depth must be more than intellectual to become truly part of us.   Art is born out of our curiosity toward our environment and an effort to engage with it and understand it on a first level, knowing it with the whole self. Art is an emotional engagement with our surroundings and calls on an emotional response from the receiver to complete the effort. Those emotions, even though overlapping, are as unique to the artist who created it as they are to each of us, a result of our life experiences, our physical make-up, a product of our embodied minds, as Varela put it. [9] Emotions cannot exist without a physical body to experience them. They can be communicated intellectually but not completely, which is what makes the artistic experience sometimes difficult to explain in words. Each person’s emotional response to someone else’s emotions is coloured by their own. Emotions can be imitated, which we have ritualised and even made into an art form. In theatre, in cinema, the performing arts, we have what we call ‘suspension of disbelief’, a convention by which we accept the imitation as temporarily real and offer our emotional selves to the spectacle to mix with the simulated emotions of the players.   Parenthetically, this seems also to apply to politics, which are never very far from theatre. It is in syncing our emotional experiences with others that a bond is made between humans and is how society functions. Our emotions can fool us and many societies have mistrusted them, often for good reason. When the emotions are faked it can cause confusion and a skewed response. We seem to be up to our eyes and ears in that today, in our contrived and manipulated communication space. If the shared emotions are negative the resulting pact will be negative, if not flat-out evil. We have seen many examples of the evil it can cause throughout human history, particularly in movements appealing heavily to emotion, as the twentieth-century authoritarian regimes— whether Fascist, Nazi, or Communist—did very effectively. In art the Italian Futurists demonstrated how precarious that borderline can be. That danger is present today with emotion gaining over reason in the public domain, as we at the same time add more and more dimensions to our communication space. The resulting social networks are full of fascist tropes of hatred for the other. They grew in an unregulated fashion, creating a media free-for-all focused on the violent and the shocking for financial gain through increasing the number of online users exposed to advertising.   I define communication space as the sum of all means we have of transmitting and receiving information as individuals and collectively. I have a personal communication space. My social group or nation has a collective communication space. It is made up of what we exchange with others, our education in its broadest sense, what we read and learn, and, in our time, mass communications and the media. It is where a society sees itself and where its members learn how to function, where we find our models of comportment.   My emphasis on emotion in art is not to dismiss the importance of the intellect to the artist’s search for solutions to the self-imposed problems—perceptual crises—leading to a work’s final form. That finality is a question of feeling, both an emotional and intellectual satisfaction with the work, and the artist’s first audience is the artist him- or herself. Art is not made in the first instance to communicate but to satisfy the personal need to record that feeling. In much prehistoric cave painting the images are often in obscure and inaccessible parts of the cave, limiting who saw them. Art is a very private thing until the moment when the artist dares to put it before a public. When does one arrive at the satisfaction of work completed, the solution to that self-imposed problem? One of hardest things for an artist is to know when to stop, when the work is finished, simply because there is no predetermined finality in art. Giorgio de Chirico used to sneak into museums to continue working on some of his paintings, which were still evolving in his mind.   In general, we give, consciously or unconsciously, an emotional weight and symbolic significance to what we perceive, another dimension depending on our reaction to it. Some of that might be based on new intellectual givens we have discovered, some uniquely on feelings derived from our culture and the need to fit what we see into our belief system. The new and the old are often in conflict. Some might eventually become superstitions. Many millennia ago, if I killed an albino bear and the next day a volcano erupts, I would never kill an albino bear again. We are always looking for links between things, patterns, and making up why things are related. This we share with every culture which ever existed. It is what we call culture and our first way of knowing together. Later, we try doing this in an objective and logical way, supposedly eliminating the emotional aspect, and we call that science.   Christianity as the dominant European philosophical, psychological, and moral guide throughout the Middle Ages and into the early Renaissance exhausted itself in the Thirty Years’ War of the early seventeenth century. The way was opened to fill that vacuum through the Enlightenment which codified the changed worldview wrought by the Renaissance, proposing a clockwork paradigm, the Mechanical Universe. It gave Western society a new model of how things work based solely on reason. The excess of emotion witnessed during those years of slaughter provoked an understandable mistrust of that side of humanity. What became the governing paradigm was founded uniquely on the material and measurable. The Mechanical Universe was invented as the ultimate explanation of how the world worked and reason the only accepted method for understanding. That gave birth to Positivism and its banning of emotion and total reliance on science. That mistrust exists to this day among ‘serious’ people, but as long as emotion is suppressed it will always find a way out and when it does the results are not usually beneficial. We ignore it at our own risk.   Eliminating emotion in the scientist is an illusion and a distortion of what science is, an unfortunate fallout from Positivism. Cogito ergo sum —I think, therefore I am— was a useful but limited approach to how humanity is defined . René Descartes’ formula helped promote the idea of individual agency, one of the defining elements of modernity, but its focus on reason as the only way of knowing ignored the other half of the human to the detriment of the model of how humans actually function. Sentio ergo sum —I feel, therefore I am—is how most people first react to sensory input. Recognising that aspect of humanity not only allows us to understand the whole human by recognising the other half, but also connects our species with the rest of the living world which reacts principally through feeling. Objectivity is a tool, an important one, but to imagine that scientists manage to eliminate their emotional side is a distortion. The scientists operate as all of us do with their fullest selves—indivisibly—but recognise when emotion colours the scientific search for answers. Peer review is the method developed to guard against just that.   In western history, Positivism, evolving from the debates of the Enlightenment, tried to deny the emotional side by declaring rationality the only approach to true knowledge, such that all else must be rejected. Anything coming from feeling was unreliable, even dangerous, and excluded from a mechanical quantifiable view of how things work. It has created a distorted perception for many human beings, a worldview based on a diminished idea of the human. That may work for understanding material processes but not how human beings function. Reason helps curb emotion’s excesses but emotion modifies reason’s rigidity. The interaction between Sentio…  and Cogito…  defines us and may be the space of Bergson’s élan vital , where life grows. Dualisms are useful only if we understand them as two points of a triangulation leading to a deeper understanding of what they address , the third point. In Bergson’s case his dualism of instinct and intellect defines understanding.   For over 40 years I have promoted the idea that we are living a new renaissance based on the premise that, historically, when art and science fundamentally change the definition of reality and its representation, we are confronted by a profound transformation which demands a reinvention of the institutions by which we interact and govern. Those new structures will eventually replace the older ones which no longer work or function in a degraded and decadent mode, a distortion of their original mandate. The new institutions will be based on a different operational schema, a new paradigm, which for me is the interactive network replacing the mechanical model which has dominated since the Enlightenment. That reinvention brings front and centre the relationship between individual and society and the foundation of the authority to govern—sovereignty, redefining both and their interaction. We are once again confronted by that need today.   The machine model recognised and credited the person, individuals as distinct parts operating together through opposing parts—friction between gears. The network model again recognises the individual as a singularity but as connected, cooperating members—the person and his or her network of others. The distinguishing fundamental definition of the new renaissance is the difference between opposition and cooperation.   A renaissance is always a violent period with the old order stubbornly defended by those that profit from it most and the so-called new often being promoted with equal energy. A renaissance takes time to move from destruction to construction which is the frontier we now inhabit. The new paradigm which replaces the clockwork of the mechanical universe is, I proposed, the interactive network, whereby everything is understood as connected and interdependent. Art and science, because they represent broadly the two principal ways of how human beings interact with their environment in trying to understand it, are our evolved tools for doing so, instinct and intellect. Both have pointed to that new schema for well over 150 years. [10]   In 2001, I organised a conference on art and science with Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry, at the Rockefeller Conference Centre in Bellagio, Italy. [11] We brought together a small group of people from both fields to talk freely over several days about how we understand human creativity, which came up consistently during our five days together. One of the participants, Margaret Boden, a founder of cognitive science and an early explorer of AI and creativity, described creativity in an analysis as profound, complete, and intellectual as science would demand. Mandelbrot objected strenuously, proclaiming that ‘no, no, no, creativity was like a hand coming down from heaven touching you with inspiration’. The dispute between the two scientists was, of course, the core argument which still exists today, the pull between cogito  and sentio  in understanding humanity.   The capacity for symbolic thought, as I have explained above, has always been part of our makeup in its earliest primitive forms since the beginning of our genus and most probably well before. It comes from an instinctive and unintellectual operation of that curiosity which is part of every living being’s functioning as a way of exploring the environment. With our ancestors it often led to finding and keeping objects, stones, fossils, organic or inorganic, which excited that curiosity by whatever made the objects exceptional. When the found object, the first overt manifestation of what we now know as art, was kept and shared with others it acquired a symbolic sense for the group as well as the individual who found it, an unarticulated meaning but something felt to be important. We still have traces of this today when we come home from the beach with a bag of stones and shells which we found fascinating and decided to keep. Our keeping them gave them a personal, thus human, value, intangible but real. With the evolution of our intellectual capacity this process became more elaborate in providing a ‘why’ to that selection giving those objects an explanation of their symbolic value as a means of communicating it and the beginning of what can be seen as a belief system—the root of religion. In the beginning, this was not an intellectual exercise; the choosing came from feeling rather than understanding. It became more intellectually elaborated in time through the need to be communicated, probably diluting the experience of the first person to experience it but making it transferable to others and incorporating other reactions to it.   The found object is one of the first forms of artistic experience, going back some millions of years to when our ancestors were attracted to an object by its unusual appearance or whatever made it stand out for them. That attraction was instinctive, more feeling or emotion, not because it had any obvious utility. Keeping it and sharing it with others made it art.   Fig 1. This pebble was discovered in Makapansgat, South Africa, an Australopithecus site dated to three million years ago. The mineral matches a site several kilometres away where it was found, transported and kept. It is naturally worn and not sculpted. Duchamp resuscitated the objet trouvé  for our times and it has been a major motivation in art ever since. It is not hard to see its role in art using new technologies. They were designed for a specific reason and to accomplish a certain task. The encounter with artists took them somewhere else and changed their role. Again that explains why the public has often reacted negatively to that work as not doing what the technology was designed to do. That has been the history of twentieth-century art, as wave after wave of artistic invention has been met with scandalised reactions, only to become canon a generation or two later. It underlines what McLuhan called the education of perception in action.   The earliest toolmaking was never totally utilitarian; we can often see that artistic manifestation, the extra added to it which makes it art. One of the best ancient examples I know is a biface brought to my attention by paleo-anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, dating from between a quarter- to half a million years ago.[12]   The maker recognised a shell fossil in the stone and shaped it to emphasise it—an aesthetic act. Many of those early tools were never used physically and tool making always went beyond the utilitarian to include the symbolic. We have consistently assigned that kind of meaning to our technologies ever since, seeing them as symbolically representing something prideful about ourselves. Fig 2. Handaxe knapped around a fossil shell, located centrally on one face, identified as the Cretaceous bivalve mollusc Spondylus spinosus. Found in West Tofts, Norfolk. Between 250 to 500 thousand years old. © Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. This is the root of artistic creativity—an individual act of symbolic expression—and its eventual integration into culture, socially communicated. For most of human history, art was the external expression of religion and its means of communication. This process can be seen clearly in the elaborate cave art found world-wide. It was the symbolic representation of a group’s belief system, produced with enormous effort underlining its importance to the group. That role lasted for millennia and became the principal reason for making art.   As another end result of the Enlightenment, art broke from religion to express the symbolic sense of the individual artist rather than the collective belief of the group. Still, during the symbiotic relationship between art and religion there were certainly individuals who created for themselves and even in religious art the expressiveness of the individual artist is present, as more obviously so in the Italian Renaissance.   The symbolic is very much part of us and ignoring it or pretending it is less important or something to be overcome demonstrates a dangerous misunderstanding of how humans function. All of us operate under a mythology of sorts, recognised or not. Myths are shorthand symbolism of how things are, how people expounding them think the world works. We’ve eliminated myth as beneath our human intellect but in this we fool ourselves. Myths can actually unite people in a common emotional understanding of who we are and how we are connected. They are fundamental to any group, a kind of code expressing a shared and necessary value to its members. In the publication cited above, Edwige Armand and I proposed a new myth for society given what we know today, a kind of neo-animism whereby we understand that everything is alive and connected. [13] It was edited out of our chapter by the science publisher.   ***   Art, as mentioned above, is the very ancient way our species interacted with the world. What we understand as art today already lay in our lineage millions of years ago and evolved. It eventually became the symbolic recreation of an emotional response to the exterior before we had the intellectual resources available to explain what we were experiencing. We still act in that way when confronted with something we don’t understand by making up an explanation, by expressing in some way our feelings toward that experience, creating patterns and links which we alone imagine. That eventually became symbolic thought and its expression and, shared, grew in sophistication as our species evolved. The symbolic has always played a major role in our world view and art expresses a good part of it. It is an essential element to our survival in aiding our understanding even when that understanding is misplaced or erroneous. It is the emotional response, feeling, that colours what we know for good or for bad. This makes it a major field for human conflict, your symbol verses mine. It is not an unconscious reaction on our part, but a response coming from somewhere else in us but as important, and sometimes more so, as our intellect. If we ignore it in any human enterprise we witness or undertake we deprive ourselves of a fuller understanding.   Artistic exploration has been a manifestation of that need and produced the actual symbols in our cultures. For that reason, art has for many centuries and in many cultures been subservient to religion, since religion provided that symbolic content which art interpreted and a degree of its emotion impact. This is ironic since the symbolic sense of the world proposed through art predates religion by many millennia. Religion is a derivative of art as that symbolic sense increased in complexity, was codified and communicated to larger numbers, and became institutionalised.   Humanity always seems to search outside itself for some literal deus ex machina solution for guidance, some imagined or proposed superior force to which we bend the knee to a greater or lesser degree depending on our tolerance for superstition. We have seen in the West alone various gods, religions, and related divine-right sovereignties, science with Positivism, the market and its invisible hand, some automatic system into which we must put our full faith as something above us and accepted as infallible, the source of authority. To turn the bible around, our Gods, Golems, and Frankensteins are usually made in a misunderstood or limited image of ourselves. They have also been a convenient way to avoid personal responsibility for our actions and have been used as such often in history.   Artificial Intelligence is the latest saviour to be promoted to that role, as if algorithms came down to us from the mountain as a gift from who knows whom. This attitude is directly traceable to Norbert Wiener’s horror of the Second World War and the Holocaust which ‘proved’ to him that humanity was incapable of governing itself, a parallel to the reaction to the Thirty Years’ War. The pure logic of the machine was to provide a disinterested guide to our actions and we were supposed to accept it as neutral and just. No questions asked of course, about who built it and why, just as in previous ‘infallibilities’. Wiener himself saw the dangers in the blind trust in such mechanical solutions and warned against it. [14]   Art is never neutral. The goal of art doesn’t change over time but the means for making it do. The expression of our emotional reactions to our world is still central to art but the move from religious to the personal expression as its principal source is another product of the Enlightenment and relatively new in history. The tools that artists choose have always evolved and had an impact on artistic practice, whilst the resulting work starts a cycle of the effect of the technology on the artist and the artist on the technology. They help explore the world in a new way, to see new dimensions of it, and tell us much about ourselves who invented them. As the technologies of communication continue to expand at an ever increasing speed, artists will respond. Experimentation with their new possibilities and how they change our perception will continue. They will use them to express something more than an exchange of information, going beyond the ‘objective’ to a personal, emotional, and symbolic response to our changing environment and our place in it. In changing the way we think we see the world, artists open up other ways of imagining, thinking, and seeing.   The close analyses now possible of stone bifaces produced a half a million years ago reveal much about our ancestors and how they thought and acted. Sites have indicated that they organised production demonstrating how they interacted and communicated and has even pushed further into the past the development of language.[15] The tools, as in the case of artisans or anyone using tools to achieve their end, become an extension of the body, the technique a reflection of the mental process producing the work.   What was used to create art was what was at hand, from a found object in the beginning to sophisticated computers today and a long list of everything in between. Whatever is needed will be taken or invented to respond to that artistic drive which, because it is emotional and intellectual, is doubly compelling. With our expanded intellect, we eventually named it art to distinguish it from other forms of making and knowing.   Artistic experimentation was and is part of that process as each new technology appeared and expanded our communication space with the usual mix of information or entertainment. But artists were often taking it in a different direction, which is why society had such a difficult time dealing with the new work and the ideas it proposed. The belief that the image mirrored what was seen began to change artistically long before our era and continued to do so with the evolution of communication technologies. Man Ray’s filming in the 1920s with the camera on its side or upside down revealed that this was a tool to be manipulated and not a window on reality; it was rather a new proposed reality invented by art or whoever dominates its production.   There are four artists, two couples, whom I know personally, who exemplify the artistic exploration of new technologies. Steina and Woody Vasulka[16] began with video, analogue and digital, in the late sixties and spent their entire careers experimenting with its artistic potential in both tape and installations. Their work is finally being recognised in the depth it deserves more than two generations later, as more and more of the population lives in the mental space they created with the new tools. Fig 3. ‘The Maiden’, one of the five interactive installations of ‘The Brotherhood’, each containing a bit of artificial intelligence. Woody Vasulka, ICC Tokyo, 1998.   Steina Vasulka playing her midi violin interactively with ‘The Maiden’, one of the many ways of interacting with the five pieces. Another couple, Maria Barthélémy and René Sultra,[17] have been doing the same with newer technologies, especially photogrammetry, creating images, fixed and moving, from multiple photos of a situation from several angles. They create new spaces which challenge the habitual Euclidean space we inhabit and help us see differently. All four have demonstrated how artists in a highly personal and subjective manner open a novel means of expression to new and different levels of understanding. They set a pattern for exploring new potentials in the new tools in a non-objective open-ended way learning and teaching at the same time. This exploration is essential to any new means of expression and very pertinent to AI today. Fig 4. Photo of a woven fibre glass rug, 11 meters long, built by Barthélémy and Sultra as a screen for streaming images. Video of an apartment using photogrammetry, photographed from several points of view, in this case over 400, recreating a Euclidean space acting in a non-Euclidean manner, 2024-5. The idea of total art has been with us for centuries, as different artistic endeavours attempted to unify all forms of creativity into a coherent whole. This was especially so in music and architecture in the nineteenth century, becoming more common in the twentieth. Evolving technologies made experimenting with it possible and, in spite of different ingrained habits and market pressures, it has never stopped. Many gatekeepers of traditional artistic expression try to keep the arts in their habitual spaces, but they tend to leak out naturally. In virtual space, total art is a given, where visual arts approach performance and the performing arts become recorded images in time. It is challenging in many ways, particularly in how we bring the public into the work—a question throughout the history of art. I have always proposed that prehistoric caves were our first multi-media spaces where image, music, and dance were performed together. Artists carry within themselves that total space as they create.   The previous century witnessed an explosion of possibilities that were more than ways of making art, which changed the practice of it fundamentally. First, we had duration added to the image with cinema and all the other image technologies to follow. This brought it closer to performance. Adding time made it easier to involve the spectator and bringing in the spectator’s reactions to the work became an early ambition. New technologies made it possible to reach out to people instead of waiting for them to show up in some designated space. Kupka, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, said in the 1940s that wireless transmission was the future of art anticipating the so-called media arts. [16]  Each new wave (tool) was open for artistic exploration which needs to be increased exponentially as the technologies play an even bigger role in our lives. But support for that is drying up in both public and private domains. We have actually accomplished Plato’s goal of barring artists and poets from the Republic by making them irrelevant and marginal. Plato saw them as people who create imagined ‘realities’ disturbing and dangerous to the dominant world view and therefore necessarily banished. What is lost is the understanding that that is the role of art and often those ‘realities’ reflect coming changes and help us adjust to them, once again a change in perception.   The art world is now dominated by the market; the saleable object is what counts, and this is usually not the experimental. Monetising art, as we have, kills it, making it a carcass, a shadow of itself, devoid of the life it is supposed to reflect. Monetising anything to make it more ‘pertinent’ reflects a society whose dominant value is money. Art no longer informs but simply exists and its importance is determined by marketing. We no longer have gatekeepers, no connoisseurs, for good or for bad, who give their lives to trying to understand what artists are saying. We may agree or not, but at least they were operating from human judgement and not some artificially neutral mechanism, yet another ‘invisible hand’ divorced from human interference. Even art institutions no longer fulfil that role, taking their direction from the market on who is and isn’t an artist. The ‘stars’ are stars because they say so and people buy it. Museums will inevitably defend it as art to justify their purchases, and the game of smoke and mirrors goes on. Art stars like J eff Koons are to art what Donald Trump is to politics, devoid of all sense, spectacle without meaning. In that regard they are, unfortunately, a reflection of contemporary society: as Macbeth lamented, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.   It is time our society understands that art is not the plaything of the rich or the raw material of financial markets and finally acknowledges how absolutely essential it is to us and our survival, which should make its exploration of our social evolution a priority. When governments cut budgets, the first thing to go is the no-longer affordable ‘luxury’, art and culture. Why is it then that when governmental institutions rescue children from traumatic situations, they give them materials to draw, to express the emotions they cannot put in words. Art is our essential emotional educator.   A friend, a Parisian galeriste , opened a branch in New York. In his many meetings with other gallery owners there he would ask questions about meaning and was usually mocked for being philosophical, French, and not business oriented. His response was, ‘You want to make money. I want to make sense’.   Art using AI and the overhyped world its creators propose cannot operate through Sentio —feeling. It can only do so through being understood as the tool it is in the hands of a human where the necessary feeling exists. On its own, it can trigger emotions by appealing to emotional memories, rehashing the past, but it cannot itself create new emotional reactions since a body is needed to do so. That is how we respond to newness, provoked by something never before experienced which calls on our creativity to respond accordingly by pulling an explanation from our subconscious. AI must still be explored by art as a communications tool to better understand it, how it interfaces with us, and if it has the potential for kind of creativity we understand as art. It remains a tool but the tools artist uses affect the artist as much as the artist affects the technology, exposing dimensions of it not anticipated by the developers.   ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is an oxymoron, since intelligence is a living thing and anything artificial an imitation and not the real thing. Intelligence is informed by bodily experiences, the emotional responses to outside stimuli, which is key to how the memories, good or bad, are coloured and stored. A key part of intelligence is the memory of those experiences recalled when needed, usually when a similar emotional reaction is provoked. AI is based on massive past memories, plus pattern recognition drawn from that pool but without the emotional responses which triggered the retention. The bigger the memory, the bigger the base for identifying patterns, but the missing values which memories have for us become a product of programming and cannot evolve in a situation the way humans do. If it does, it is reacting with programmed responses—but whose responses and whose values? Even stocked with thousands and thousands of human emotional responses, they will be responses from the past and not something new.   Emotion demands a body capable of feeling. Would AI be an imitation of the perfect emotional response based on an averaged ideal system of values—statistical emotions? Averaged emotions would belong to everybody and nobody. Even when we know something intellectually it has an emotional dimension to it based on who we are. And when we know emotionally it becomes a little bit more than simply knowing and more a part of our value system which evolves through both reason and emotion.   With humans, pure reasoning usually happens within a set of established parameters and is an attempt to overcome the emotional associations, making it more objective and communicable to a greater number, which we consider rational. Yet rationality is an attempt to overcome subjectivity by removing those emotional dimensions, a nearly impossible task because of the intricate reaction between emotion and values, more a goal than an achievement.   The need to know, what might be popularly referred to as curiosity, is something shared with all living creatures. Every living thing continually pokes, smells, probes into all corners of its surroundings to assure its survival. We need to know our environment in order to survive in it. Human beings share that with all other life forms but with an abundance which has taken us further than most living creatures. The depths of our consciousness, memory, and feelings have allowed us to advance further and we have developed several directions in which to apply them: art, science, religion, and philosophy. All are answers to the need to know and to understand and explain. That abundance is apparent in both art and science as elaborate manifestations of that curiosity in operation, two important ways of trying to probe what is out there, what we understand as real, how we fit into it, and how it can serve us. What we, as a culture, are finally beginning to understand is the ancient wisdom of serving it in exchange.   Art and science each bring to a situation their own methods of looking—or rather seeing—and from each comes something new to understanding. The experiences and practices of each prepare them in different ways to ask questions and propose solutions. A work of art is a proposed solution as much as any scientific proposal, albeit coming from the personal perspective of the individual artist. Science operates from a generally accepted worldview applied to specific examined situations and artists from a personal worldview expressed through specific works. Both change and evolve and that evolution results in change, which affects the world view of us who experience them.   We need both and in situations where both are operative that approach provides better, richer, and more complete answers. They are complementary like two legs for walking or two eyes for depth. They are the two angles of a triangulation, as mentioned, where together they give a more complete understanding of what is being pursued, the third point, our being in the world.   Communicating information is one form of fundamental communication. Another, central to art, is communicating emotion. Art was probably our first effort in trying to pass on an experience, before language, the emotional reaction we had to something, good or bad, which gave it an urgency, the need to be transmitted to others. Today, when our many forms of communication manage to transmit emotion we react to them with a higher degree of attention, recognising something special in itself.   Bergson, as mentioned, called intellect and instinct the two sources of how we know and evaluate our exterior and our place in it.   This fuller way of knowing is by becoming one with what we perceive. It is the opposite of standing outside as a disengaged observer, but means incorporating what is perceived by joining with it for the duration. That demands the fullest participation of the person. This is what the artist does which does not mean that others don’t. But for art it is the metier. Art is perhaps the most misunderstood activity of the human being and, in our highly educated society, that misunderstanding, as profound as it is, is incomprehensible. Art is a way of knowing in order to survive.   We live in a time of necessary experimentation to reinvent ourselves and the institutions which represent us. Art has always been a major way of doing so, particularly in the last 200 years, the sine qua non  of the new renaissance I propose. It evolved from representing the powers that be and became the expression of individuals who made it from their interaction with the world.  The collection of those individual expressions is an important part of that experimentation taking place and fundamental to it.   Art is a proposition coming from the individual and sum of those individualities is what we call culture. The open-ended approach of art is essential now as we rebuild our institutions on a new model of interactivity and without hype, without self-serving salesmanship, without the conviction that we hold the truth but with openness and honesty in building back the trust essential to any social order.   ‘Aux arts citoyens’. Don Foresta Don Foresta, Advisory Editor to CJLPA 4, is a research artist and art theoretician in art and science and new technologies. His 1990 book in French, Mondes Multiples , is considered a landmark on the relation between these subjects. He holds a Sorbonne doctorate in Information Science and is a Chevalier of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. [1] See Henri Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion  (Félix Alcan 1932). [2] Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et Invention, 1965-1966  (Presse universitaire de France 2014) 4. [3]  James L McGaugh,  ‘The amygdala modulates the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing experiences’ (2004) 27 Annual Review of Neuroscience 1-28. [4]  Private correspondence (2015). [5]  Edwige Armand, Don Foresta et al, Sapiens : métamorphose ou extinction?  (Humensciences 2022) 176 [6]  Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin  (University of California Press 1982) 184. The title of the book is an expression of the reverse of the operation, a necessary step to really ‘see’. We must forget the name of something, its intellectual designation, to ‘know’ it in another way. [7]  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media  (Signet 1964) xi. [8]  Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Citadel 1998) 135. Translation has been lightly altered based on original at La perception du changement : conférences faites a l'université d'Oxford les 26 et 27 Mai 1911  (Oxford 1911). [9] Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind  (MIT Press 1993). [10]  Don Foresta, Mondes Multiples  (Edition BàS 1991). [11] See ‘Bellagio Report and Conclusions’ ( Don Foresta , 21 December 2015) < https://donforesta.net/conferences/bellagio/start > accessed 23 September 2025. [12] See image at < https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/art/exhibitions/object/id/3147-535 > accessed 23 September 2025. The biface handaxe was found in West Tofts, England in the 19th century and is in the collection of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of Cambridge University. [13] See Armand, Foresta et al (n 5). [14] Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc  (Boston 1964). [15] Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts, Fairweather Eden (London 1997). [16] See < https://vasulka.org/ > accessed 23 September 2025. [17] See < https://www.sultra-barthelemy.eu/ > accessed 23 September 2025. [18]  Pascal Rousseau,   Le Rêve de Kupka: La vérité nue de la peinture  (Institut national d'histoire de l'art 2022) 21.

After fifteen years spent debating its scientific potential, and despite claims of procedural irregularities and a challenge to the validity of the vote, in March 2024, twelve of the twenty-two members of the international sub-commission on quaternary stratigraphy chose to reject the applicability of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to signal a new geological epoch. For some geologists and Earth System Scientists, the point of such a designation would have been to signal a determinate epochal boundary, a golden spike in terms of residues and remains in the lithosphere, that could signal a chronostratigraphic shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. They wanted, or some of them at least wanted, a clear boundary marker. In this case, the mark in question was set at 1952, located in the mud in Lake Crawford, Canada, and coterminous with what many environmental historians have long considered the proximate origins of the Anthropocene, the period of the Great Acceleration following the Second World War. [1]   If that place and time was rejected as marking a new geological epoch, what difference does it make to the Anthropocene more broadly, which has already long moved beyond the bounds of the geological? Innumerable histories have shown, whether written by climate scientists or not, that human beings have been geological and planetary agents for aeons. [2] Though perhaps it is only more recently, however, that they have become self-conscious of the fact. If so, the point is not to find a singular spike or boundary marker that would tip Holocene climatic stability into the crises that have been part of an increasingly public political discourse about climate for at least seventy years. Instead, the issue is more about intensification and process. [3]  This would still be focused geologically (the Anthropocene as an ongoing, intensifying, planetary ‘event’ rather than epoch). But it can also be focused historically and politically (as an ongoing, intensifying engagement with the path dependencies of modern capitalism, grounded in regimes of extraction and violence, that have shaped the modern world and its climatic catastrophes), or epistemically (as an ongoing, intensifying, understanding of the conceptual shape of a world often dubbed ‘after nature’).   This latter point in particular is crucial to understanding the politics associated with the Anthropocene. Scientists often refer to those intensifications that have transgressed several of the nine ‘boundaries’ within which a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ might be found (viz climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss). [4]  But historians and political theorists just as often refer to the need to break down false oppositions between politics and nature. The latter, in fact, is something that has always been constructed and framed by very real human interests and powers. Jed Purdy’s recent histories, considering the dynamics through which modern politics and law has self-consciously adopted different visions of nature and environmentalism according to different needs, show this clearly. Whether the racialised forms of environmentalism through national parks, underpinned by the political actions of Teddy Roosevelt’s government, or a long lineage of settler-colonial claims about land seen as terra nullius , through to more recent disputes over land and energy in the Appalachian coalfields, for Purdy and others one thing is clear: America has ‘always been Anthropocene’. [5]  If modern America, modern politics, modern history even, has always been ‘after nature’, then it has never really been ‘modern’—in the sense that there never was an objective, human-independent ‘nature’, even though human beings have cleaved to such a conception for centuries to make sense of their politics and their boundaries. [6] If the Anthropocene allows us to see this sort of ideological co-constitution in new ways, that is because it focuses attention on those intensifications of human effects on the environment. Now, the boundary lines and intensifications across what is ‘planetary’ and what is ‘global’, rather than what is political as opposed to what is natural, seem set fair to fix the terms of any future engagement.   For political theorists and historians of political thought, this raises several pointed questions about the relationship between time, history, and politics. And here, Dipesh Chakrabarty has done more than most to suggest how the attempt to construct such an Anthropocene ‘regime of historicity’ might be a productive intellectual challenge for those working in these areas. The term, ‘regime of historicity’, is borrowed from François Hartog, and provides a heuristic to frame a society’s overlapping ways of relating past, present, and future at particular moments. Such regimes might last generations, even centuries, depending upon the dominance of particular understandings of the world. But for Chakrabarty, any Anthropocene-focused regime of historicity has to begin by taking seriously the arguments of Earth Systems Science (ESS). And these, as already noted, typically consider the Anthropocene as a series of planetary processes (tracking changes to the atmosphere and biosphere, as well as to the technosphere, and the climate). Nevertheless, according to Chakrabarty, ‘What we see in the history of ESS’, is ‘not an end to the project of capitalist globalization but the arrival of a point in history where the global discloses to humans the domain of the planetary’. [7] This has upended not only those histories premised upon a distinction between human and nature, but geological agency makes bio-political histories of globalization and capitalist crisis management, on their own, redundant. [8]  Because of this, in turn, the Anthropocene opens up various spaces for rethinking histories, and therefore positing alternative futures, to the fatalistic narratives that underpin most political discussion about climate today, at least in wealthy democracies.   The Anthropocene that is coming into view here pushes for more than the optimistic fatalism of a world where planetary futures are salvaged by human ingenuity, and a ‘good Anthropocene’ might be had through modernist technologies of politics and geoengineering. [9]  It also demands more than the pessimistic fatalism of the ‘eco-miserabilists’ associated with the Dark Mountain Collective  and the manifesto of Uncivilization. On the latter view, human civilization is already lost. The Anthropocene shows us that this, and precisely this idea of civilization is what needs to be reckoned with, mourned, and moved on from. Roy Scranton has suggested that the tools of ancient Stoicism might have some purchase in this regard, in helping us learn how to die in the Anthropocene. In a different fashion, Matthias Thaler salvages something of this eco-miserabilist position from the teeth of critics who see it as nothing more than pessimistic fatalism. Thaler finds in their critique the foundations for radical hope of a new beginning, a new world brought into being by an appropriate mourning of that which is lost. [10] Jonathan Lear is the source for such thinking, first, in writings about the possibility of renewing ethics and meaning by communities compelled to live through cultural devastation, using the example of the Crow Nation and its Chief, Plenty Coups. More recently still, Lear has updated his own rendering of this prospect, by offering a new imagining of what ‘mourning’ entails. Now he presents mourning as a form of practiced imagination, and looks to the many worlds lost to climate change, for a focal point to an argument that takes him back to Freud (another student of ancient Stoicism). There, Lear (and Freud) ask us to think about what it means to actively reject something one has been part of, and benefited from, something destructive precisely because its lustre and its seeming naturalness and permanence was little more than a transient illusion. For Freud, this meant (among other things) rejecting the ideological veneer of a particularist and hierarchical model of European civilization and progress, which had been unmasked and undone by the First World War and numerous war neuroses. As the barbarism underneath the civilizational façade was made clear to Freud, and once the mourning over what was lost has been undertaken, he invested hope (akin to the sort of ‘radical hope’ that Lear had earlier conceptualized), in human capacities for restoration, to build back better, in the current argot, and move past failures. To help them do so, new sorts of histories and exemplars and models need to be found. [11]  Now the question becomes whether a boundary politics of radical hope in the Anthropocene might help avoid the twin poles of an optimistic, or a pessimistic, form of fatalism about the future by rethinking the past. Could such a move avoid binaries and epochal overstatements, leaving space for imaginative possibilities and events?   Well, one thing that interpreting the Anthropocene as a form of boundary politics does do is offer the possibility of seeing  the world, earth, or globe differently, opening up more possibilities than it closes down. Here, things might take a ‘poetic’ (and agentic or vibrant form), where the Earth is Gaia, pulsating with ‘things’ and ‘actants’. [12] And because the Anthropocene also challenges narratives of ‘global’ history, by forcing them to confront a dissonant relationship with the planetary, it pits human dynamics of sustainability and development against planetary dynamics of habitability. For Chakrabarty, new forms of philosophical anthropology will be needed to interpret human attempts to experience these new-old times of the planetary, and which will allow for a reckoning with the processes of productivist globalization that have thrust awareness of this planetary perspective upon the human species. By so doing, new questions are raised about whether such lineages can really support a move towards a political economy robust enough to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, as opposed to a Green New Deal, for example. [13]   The fact that so much current discourse about climate politics and the Anthropocene is fixed with reference to wartime, and particularly the wartime of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt, now becomes a little more understandable. The mobilizing metaphors and rhetoric are obvious manifestations of a call to action, bearing an implication that governments, agencies, corporations, and citizens are to see themselves as all in it together. Yet when wartime is, and who decides so, and where it matters, are precisely the questions at issue. For some, most obviously anti-liberals like Carl Schmitt, the capacity to decide upon such issues is the foundational building block of the concept of the political itself. Determining friends and enemies, making war and peace, and deciding upon the extremes fixes the political through the actions of sovereignty; events help to determine boundaries and thus to divide epochs. But who, amid the boundary politics and fissiparous sovereignties of climate crises, can, or will, determine the shape of the political within the scale of the planetary? That the effects of climate change already affect unequally those whose histories were already unequally affected by myriad forms of exploitation is glaringly obvious. Such history augurs inauspiciously for a more progressive form of collective politics moving forward, and suggests a likelier prospect of doubling down on conventional politics grounded in old models of sovereignty, dividing the world along the lines of national interests into increasingly uninhabitable futures. [14]   Of course, the temporalities of planetary habitability or the Anthropocene also have their own complex cycles and timeframes, whether understood as units of abstract time (geochronology) or through the material units of chronostratigraphic time, through which different material deposits (radioactive residues, pollutants, polymers) can be measured, like those found in Lake Crawford. Rather than seeking a singular golden spike, such complex temporalities also allow us to reimagine the world and its interwoven global and planetary histories, by tracing ‘slow’ histories of environmental violence visited upon the planet by those who live upon it, as well as the defiant response of the planet to intensified human activity. [15] And they allow us to do so as part of a longer intensification and acceleration of human impact on the planet. Carbon in fact shows the complexity of the problem well. Its overall lifecycle is stabilizing for the planet, while its climate cycle is massively de-stabilizing, particularly for life on the planet, while its explosive potential is part and parcel of the history of modern imperial and democratic politics. [16] The mineral has a complex agency, just as do nuclear isotopes, bacteria, microbes, and fungi, something the recent Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us of. [17]  And the timescape analogy, which sees time more as a landscape than a series of measurements, perhaps in turn offers new ways of seeing the politics involved. [18]   In any case, rejecting the linear chronologies of breaks or epochs or ‘-cenes’, as much as the Anthropos prefix, is a prerequisite. Such a claim connects with critiques of the so-called ‘singular’ Anthropocene narrative (where the Anthropos, rather than the political economic ‘system’ of capitalism erected by human beings, becomes the problem). This is why the question of temporality is so vital—perhaps it is only possible for humans to conceive this in terms of deep time at most, that is to say, the time of human life upon the planet. But whether the timescapes that matter most to the Anthropocene are versions of deep time, or democratic time, or the accelerated time of the nuclear era, is a matter of serious contention. [19]   How  then has the planetary resonated and been incorporated into historically-informed accounts of political theory or the political predicament of the Anthropocene thus far? And how is it possible to see such perspectives as attempting to chart the dissonance of planetary and global, as part of the new boundary condition of the Anthropocene? William Connolly finds in the planetary a challenge to what he calls ‘sociocentrism’. Sociocentrism is the attempt to analyse structures by discerning humanly legible patterns with reference to other humanly legible and constructed patterns. It thus presumes a human exceptionalism. The political challenge of the planetary therefore becomes a question of how to re-connect active human freedom with the impersonal scale of the planetary, in the form of what Connolly calls ‘entangled humanism’. While this suggests that ‘generic responsibility [for climate change amid the Anthropocene] must be replaced by regionally distributed responsibilities and vulnerabilities’, who exactly constitutes the ‘we’ of these entangled assemblages and their ‘temporal force fields’ is never clear. [20]   Equally, we might wonder when  the planetary emerged into political thinking? Not in any obvious way, for sure. One claim concerns a human stumbling towards this new recognition with the planetary as a product of globalization. It exists in an older idiom, particularly for Marxist-inspired writers, for whom the confrontation with the planetary was equally a confrontation with permanent forms of capitalist-inspired catastrophe, given most obvious embodiment in the carnage of the First World War. Then, through such figures as Walter Benjamin, the epic scale of the struggle for human liberation from capitalist globalization suggested that only radical hope, libertarian revolution, or messianic redemption were appropriate to the task. Reverting to the same moment, Latour has suggested that new forms of diplomacy, rather than moralized conceptions of politics, are required to navigate this terrain, though whether this smooths over otherwise intractable political disagreements about the impact of the planetary upon the global, remains a live question. [21] For some critics of ‘planetary politics’, the ‘deep-rooted political-ideological divisions and structures of thought reproduce themselves anew [even] within discourses that declare them redundant’. [22] Nevertheless, pioneering figures in the development of environmental and indeed planetary thinking, like Vladimir Vernadsky, built on these foundations in important ways. His work on the biosphere, central in turn, to the new historical renderings of the atmospheric politics of the Anthropocene era, thought about planetary systems precisely because they related to very real, very worldly, problems. From his first research in 1917 in Russia for the Committee for the Study of Natural Productive Forces , which tried to understand how the state might gain better access to its rich mineralogical resources, Vernadsky moved to Ukraine in 1917, Paris thereafter, to research planetary and earth-systems-science. His work framed a world made already, it seemed, ‘after nature’, in the sense that human beings had evolved, and thus transformed the world, to such an extent that it seemed obtuse to him to think blocs of people on one side, and nature on the other. [23] For Vernadsky, understanding a transition from the biosphere to what he called the ‘noösphere’—analogous to what I have tried to discuss as the Anthropocene here—required a recognition of the long-term effects of human beings and their histories, as well as their physical and conscious development and capacities, which together rendered them into geological agents. Here, Vernadsky could construct a new boundary (the noösphere) where the planetary and global intersected as a space of intensified human agency and consciousness, and where progressive politics, just as much as, say, the ‘war ecology’ underpinning major conflicts such as those in the Ukraine today, could be found. [24]   Where  then do we locate the planetary? Here, one further answer has been that the location of the planetary into the predicament of politics occurs wherever the ‘war’ for what constitutes the earthbound, or ‘geo-’, takes place. More prosaically, this means that the planetary is found in the ‘critical zone’ of earthly habitation. Latour and others have argued that because the prefix geo- has no stable meaning, the battle to control this language is analogous with a war for the planet, or for planetary survival (the two can be separate or interconnected). The power or authority to describe and define here is crucial because multiple, incommensurable worldviews about where the tensions between local and global and planetary reside exist in states of deep conflict. This leads to variously implied (or threatened) trajectories, from deepening processes of globalization to austere conceptions of planetary security; from those that seek some sort of escape from the planet, to a radical new politics for the terrestrials that remain, those whom Latour calls the earthbound. [25] Here, once again, the human politics of globalization has brought the planetary and the Anthropocene into view, forcing a reckoning for politics across scales and imaginations (global and planetary) that are not reconcilable, but which are nonetheless deeply imbricated. This is the climate parallax that Chakrabarty has referred to recently, of a single planet which contains within it many worlds. [26] And as the global and the planetary are continuously misaligned, it is in the boundary spaces of such misalignment that new forms of politics can take place.   What if any human politics, though, can only realistically focus on the global, with the planetary more a background noise than structuring condition? As Julia Nordblad suggests, perhaps ‘the temporal characteristics of the Anthropocene concept renders it unhelpful for thinking critically about how the current environmental crisis can be addressed and for forging political action’. [27] In their accounting, what present generations owe to future ones is the possibility of an open future itself, which means leaving open the space for future self-government without closing down options. Such an open, or optimistic model of the future, configured through climate change, is not only ‘prospective’, but asks a telling empirical question. How much resource are current people willing to leave to future generations? Here, the question of discounting remains crucial, but newly structured around a question of how to value an ‘open’ future itself, as well how to value future goods or future peoples. Seeing the future as a finite resource in this way might make it a new ‘tool’ for galvanizing action over population as much as decarbonisation. [28]   Finally, for Achille Mbembe, the challenge posed by climate crisis and the planetary scales of the Anthropocene is to be found in the need for a more radical rethinking of democracy itself. So, the question of who constitutes the planetary is raised again, in the hope of engendering a planetary consciousness that can be more democratic than not. While infrastructures and technospheres transform, it seems less and less likely that such infrastructures as have contributed to the current predicament will be plausible contenders to act as transmission mechanisms for a more bio-symbiotic future, the sort of thing Haraway talks of as making kin, and which Mbembe pursues with reference to a sort of shared heritage of alternative ways of seeing human and non-human connectivity. [29] This time, the point that unites is a shared capacity for agency, the breath of life, as it were, which animates any kind of motion or even consciousness for living matter. The right to life, as in the right to breathe, takes on many layers of meaning in the midst of climate crisis and histories of racialized violence and oppression, and is itself a form of consciousness raising about the need for anti-racist and anti-imperial forms of politics to align once again under the banner of democratic climate politics.   It is unlikely that there will be any easy reconciliation here, but forms of irreconcilability could demarcate political futures in some important ways that are themselves radically hopeful. In Mbembe’s calculus, if the ‘interfaces of life’ and ‘structures of provisionality have expanded well beyond what we have long been used to’, then certainly democracy as a theory and practice will have to develop, and in ways no longer bounded by their European presumptions. [30] Thinking of the earth as a global commons, for example, might suggest the need to revisit older arguments again about the unjustifiability (at the bar of democracy) of territorial borders, and a recognition of the limits of contemporary thoughts on freedom grounded in extractivist and racialized histories of affluence and abundance for some, at the expense of others. Freedom of movement (for all who have a right to live on the planet) without the fear of a loss of rights that has historically been the corollary of statelessness signals one side of this challenge. Can a brighter democracy be both rights-bearing and not conceptually meaningless, when uncoupled from its conventional mooring within the territorial bounds of a discrete political entity? How, too, to connect with forms of language that humans recognise but don’t fully understand, not just within and between peoples, but between peoples and others forms of life that clearly communicate, from the microbial and viral, to the tubular and fungal, as well as the animal and mineral. These can so often sound like academic questions only, or sometimes a sort of perverse focus on a proliferation of agents and actants designed on the one hand to ‘reconstitute’ the social for the new ‘terrestrials’, but also simultaneously to invalidate any more structural forms of political analysis and agency (particularly Marxist) associated with class or economic exploitation. [31] The work of mourning and hope through the intense and intensifying boundaries of the Anthropocene takes place alongside other forms of intellectual conflicts within and between different forms of political theory—informational, theoretical, historical—concerned with grasping meaning and interpreting trajectories and tracing evidence. Whether this kind of intellectual struggle has any chance of moving the dial on the depressingly more familiar forms of war and war ecology taking place all across the world right now remains very far from obvious. [32] Were we not to try, however, that would surely be the worst of all possible worlds. Duncan Kelly Professor Duncan Kelly teaches in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His latest book is Reconstruction: The First World War and the Making of Modern Politics (Oxford University Press 2025). His previous works include Politics and the Anthropocene  (Polity Press 2019). [1]  John R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945  (Harvard University Press 2016). [2]  Lucas Stephens and Earl Ellis, ‘The Deep Anthropocene’ ( Aeon , 1 October 2020) < https://aeon.co/essays/revolutionary-archaeology-reveals-the-deepest-possible-anthropocene > accessed 31 September 2024. [3]  Phillip Gibbard et al, ‘The Anthropocene as an Event, not an Epoch’ (2022) 37(3) Journal of Quaternary Science 395-9. [4]  Johan Rockström et al, ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’ (2009) 461 Nature 472-5. [5]  Jedediah Purdy, After Nature  (Harvard University Press 2015); Jedediah Purdy, This Land is Our Land  (Princeton University Press 2019); Katrina Forrester, ‘The Anthropocene Truism’ ( The Nation , 12 May 2016) < https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-anthropocene-truism/ > accessed 31 September 2024. [6]  Alison Bashford, ‘The Anthropocene is Modern History: Reflections on Climate and Australian Deep Time’ (2013) 44(3) Australian Historical Studies 341-9; Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Genealogy of Terra Nullius’ (2007) 38(1) Australian Historical Studies 1-15. Cf. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern  (Harvard University Press 1991). [7]  Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Planet—An Emergent Humanist Category’ (2019) 46(1) Critical Inquiry 1-31, esp 17-9; more broadly, J Zalasiewicz et al, ‘The Anthropocene: Comparing its Meaning in Geology (Chronostratigraphy) with Conceptual Approaches Arising in other Disciplines’ (2021) 9 Earth’s Future . [8]  Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories’ (2014) 41(1) Critical Inquiry 1-23. [9]  Jonathan Symons, Ecomodernism: Technology, Politics, and the Climate Crisis  (Oxford University Press 2019). [10]  Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization  (Open Media 2015); Matthias Thaler, ‘Eco-miserabilism and Radical Hope: On the Utopian Vision of Post-Apocalyptic Environmentalism’ (2024) 118(1) American Political Science Review 318-31; cf. Mathias Thaler, No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-Changed World  (Cambridge University Press 2022) ch 5. [11]  Jonathan Lear, Imagining the end: Mourning and Ethical Life  (Harvard University Press 2022), 37ff, 56ff, cf. 110ff; Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation  (Harvard University Press 2008). [12]  Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia (Polity 2019). [13]  Jeremy Green, ‘Greening Keynes: Productivist Lineages of the Green New Deal’ (2022) 9(3) Anthropocene Review 324-43. [14]  See Ajay Singh Chaudhary, ‘We’re Not in this Together’ ( The Baffler , April 2020) < https://thebaffler.com/salvos/were-not-in-this-together-chaudhary > accessed 14 March 2025; now expanded in The Exhausted of the Earth  (Repeater 2024). The various options canvassed by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future  (Verso 2018), continue to look like plausible extrapolations. [15]  Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor  (Harvard University Press 2013); see also Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Polity 2017). [16]  Cf. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil  (Verso 2011); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, ‘Rethinking Time in Response to the Anthropocene—From Timescales to Timescapes’ (2019) 9(2) Anthropocene Review 206, 211, 212, 213-5.  [17]  Adam Tooze, ‘We are living through the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene’ Guardian  (London, 7 May 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/07/we-are-living-through-the-first-economic-crisis-of-the-anthropocene > accessed 31 September 2024. [18]  For a succinct critique of Anthropocene narratives in favour of what has become known as the Capitalocene, see Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind: A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’ (2014) 1(1) The Anthropocene Review 62-9. [19]  Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ (2009) 35(2) Critical Inquiry 197-222; cf. Duncan Kelly, Politics and the Anthropocene  (Polity 2019) ch 1. [20]  William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming  (Duke University Press 2017) 16, 18, 20, 33-4. [21]  Adam Tooze, ‘After Escape: The New Climate Power Politics’ (2020) 114 E-Flux < https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/367062/after-escape-the-new-climate-power-politics/ > accessed 14 March 2025. [22]  Peter Osborne, ‘Planetary Politics?’ (2024) 145 New Left Review 103; cf. Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics  (Polity 2021). [23]  Etienne Benson, Surroundings  (University of Chicago Press 2018) 105ff, 118f, 122f, 132f. [24]  Vladimir Vernadsky, ‘The Transition from the Biosphere to the Noösphere’. Excerpts from Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon (1938). Translated by William Jones’ (2012) 21st Century 18-9 < https://21sci-tech.com/Subscriptions/Spring-Summer-2012_ONLINE/04_Biospere_Noosphere.pdf > accessed 14 March 2025. [25]  Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Critical Zones—The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth  (MIT Press 2020). [26]  Dipesh Chakrabarty, One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax  (Brandeis University Press 2022). [27]  Julia Nordblad, ‘On the Difference between Anthropocene and Climate Change Temporalities’ (2021) 47 Critical Inquiry 330. [28]  ibid 342, 343, 345, 347. [29]  See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene  (Duke University Press 2016); developed in Adele Clark and Donna Haraway (eds), Making Kin, not Population  (Prickly Paradigm Press 2018). [30]  See the interview with Achille Mbembe, ‘How to develop a planetary consciousness’ ( Noma , 11 January 2022) < https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-develop-a-planetary-consciousness/ > accessed 31 September 2024; and his earlier essay ‘Planetary Entanglement’, in Out of the Dark Night  (Columbia University Press 2019) 7-41. [31]  For a helpful recent overview of how Latour combined these positions, often with a Catholic-inspired agenda, see Alyssa Battistoni, ‘Latour’s Metamorphosis’ ( NLR Sidecar , 20 January 2023) < https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/latours-metamorphosis > accessed 31 September 2024; Dominique Routhier, ‘Reactionary Ecology’ ( NLR Sidecar , 26 February 2024) < https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/reactionary-ecology > accessed 31 September 2024. [32]  For a little more detail here, see Duncan Kelly, ‘Wartime for the Planet’ (2022) 20(3) Journal of Modern European History 281-7.

Roshi Rouzbehani, a London-based Iranian illustrator, uses her captivating artwork to champion social causes. Beyond captivating aesthetics, her editorial and portrait illustrations address critical issues like gender equality, women’s rights, and mental health awareness, sparking conversations and advocating for positive change.   CJLPA : Thank you for taking the time to interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art to discuss your work as an illustrator and artist with your pieces having been featured in publications such as The New Yorker , the  Guardian , The Washington Post , and numerous others. Your illustrations and portraits are known for advocating for the rights of Iranian women. Could you share the specific experiences or events that initially drew you to this cause?   Roshi Rouzbehani :   I have always felt a deep connection to the advocacy for the rights of Iranian women, shaped by my upbringing in the oppressive patriarchal regime of Iran. In this societal framework, women often find themselves lowered to second-class citizenship, confronting various challenges and injustices. The struggles faced by political prisoners within my family and circle of friends exposed me to the harsh realities of existence under such a system.   Having resided in Iran until my early twenties, I closely witnessed the profound impact of religious dictatorship on every facet of life. This firsthand experience ignited a determination within me to employ my illustrations and portraits as a powerful tool for highlighting these pervasive issues. Through my art, my objective is not only to encapsulate the strength and resilience of Iranian women, but also to catalyze change and advocate for a society that is more just and equitable, enabling women to fully embrace the rights and freedoms they rightfully deserve. 'Free Tehran' (Roshi Rouzbehani) CJLPA : In light of recent events, such as the cases of Mahsa Amini and Armita Geravand, how do you see your role in raising awareness about human rights issues in Iran, and more specifically, women’s rights?   RR : I feel responsibility to amplify the voices of the oppressed and to challenge the societal norms that maintain gender inequality in Iran. Illustrations have the power to evoke emotions and create a sense of empathy transcending language barriers so that everyone can understand without the need for translation. Through visually portraying the experiences and struggles of Iranian people, I can contribute to raise awareness about their rights. My work serves as a catalyst for social change, aiming to inspire a transformative impact on the collective consciousness.   CJLPA : Can you describe a specific piece of your work that has been particularly impactful in highlighting the challenges Iranian women face in terms of their rights and freedoms?   RR : On the first anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death in custody, I curated a series of ten images titled ‘Mahsa Amini and a Year of Brutality and Courage in Iran’ which was published in the Guardian . One of these images, titled ‘An Eye for Freedom’, pays homage to Niloofar Aghaei, a midwife who lost sight in one eye during last year’s protests. The image portrays the harsh reality of security forces using live bullets, metal pellets, and tear gas to injure several individuals. Niloofar Aghaei, a woman dedicated to bringing new life into the world, bravely took to the streets in the fight for freedom. Her story serves as a powerful reminder of the Woman, Life, and Freedom motto.

Had any of the players who competed for the inaugural tennis grand slam of 2022 in Melbourne been complete (i.e. sovereign, self-governing) individuals, they would have declared the ‘AO’ boycott before the tournament started.[1][2] Not only because of Djokovic, but also because of Renata Voráčová. Not only out of the camaraderie with the two fellow members of the traveling circus which professional tennis (along with all other professional ‘spectator’ sports) has become, courtesy of the ‘contemptible money economy’.[3] Nor because of supporting Djokovic’s undoubtedly hard and inevitably controversial choice not to get vaccinated. Not even because the famed AO had fallen easy prey to inconspicuous electioneering by the incumbent government. The principled individuals would have abandoned the tournament in light of what the cases of Djokovic and Voráčová inadvertently told us about what we have become. The boycott, however, was unthinkable. It could never happen, not in a million years. The inverse vision emphatically unfolded as part of a history adorned with the narratives of the ‘great success’, ‘uplifting finale’ and reignited ‘GOAT’ debates. To borrow the self-righteous assertion of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, echoed by many, ‘the Australian Open was bigger than Djokovic, much bigger’.[4] No doubt they were right, although it is less clear whether any of them thought through the repercussions of their emotional and patriotic endorsement of the AO’s hyperbole. It is no secret that we have long since dispensed with the critical gift of unhurried and prolonged contemplation.[5] As a result, we tend to become too wrapped up in today’s multitude of political whirlwinds, whether big or small, brief or protracted. Nietzsche warned us about the perils of foregoing the ‘ vita contemplativa ’ and living, instead, ‘as if one always ‘might miss out on something’. When this happens, he argued, ‘hours in which honesty is permitted’ become rare, and even when they arrive, we have no energy left to for them.[6] Heeding Nietzsche’s warning, we might stop to ponder ‘why not?’. Why wouldn’t the boycott happen, why couldn’t it, should there have been one and, most importantly, what does the highly publicised scandal around Djokovic tell us about ourselves? Admittedly, it has always been a tall order to expect athletes to act as a barometer of collective conscience. It is, however, not without precedent. Sport often ends up caught in the crossfire of politics, which has in recent decades marred and brutalised the Olympic spirit, still vaguely synonymous with the few remaining pockets of uncommercialised athletic endeavour. Still, past athletes have, on occasion, shone an uncomfortable and uncompromising light on the perils of a situation the majority might passively sanction as ‘normal’. Jesse Owens did just that in 1936. Today, inside the fact that the boycott could never happen, hides a small but important secret. It binds us in a manner we prefer to pass over in silence even though we must speak about it. The secret is that we have firmly forgotten the original meaning of the word ‘idiot’. These days, when we casually throw around the term ‘Cov-idiot’, we refer to someone dangerously (almost offensively) weak in their mental and ethical faculties, unable to recognise the blindingly obvious benefits of getting vaccinated. In so doing, we habitually misuse the term or, to be more precise, we utilise its inverted meaning . An ‘idiot’ (from the Greek ἰδιώτης , or ‘ idiotes ’), however, is not at all a ‘fool’ or mentally incapacitated.[7] Neither Aristotle, nor Dostoyevsky, nor Nietzsche thought so.[8] The root adjective ἴδιος (‘ idios ’) denotes a state of affairs which is ‘not shared’ or an individual who, akin to a branch torn from the tree, is ‘disconnected’ from a larger whole, ie whose communitarian sensibility has been disabled. In other words, an ‘idiot’ is simply a ‘ private person ’.[9] That is, ‘idiot’ is a designation for an individual whose psychic cord—informing and enabling their sense of the ‘communal’ and the ‘collective’—has been irreparably severed, turning such fragmented human beings into ‘ dividuums ’. These dividuums are those who can be re-assembled as the meaningless (in and of themselves) and disposable (Marx would say ‘commoditised’) cogs of new socio-economic wholes—the vast religious, industrial, commercial, and ideological, forms of repressive machinery.[10] Much as in ancient Athens ‘idiot’ denoted a person positioned, by choice or fortune, outside of the polis (i.e. a form of disenfranchisement) and made weaker and more vulnerable on account of such externalisation, today the same term denotes the basis on which we are re-incorporated into society—i.e., as idiots.[11] Put slightly differently, we are incorporated into society as subjects who have internalised our own disenfranchisement from the community and from the communal, and therefore as inevitably of lesser value than individuals. Nietzsche would remind us that two other forms of reactive power, namely religion (meaning Christianity) and slave morality, operate according to exactly the same principle, the ‘reversal of the evaluating glance’, in terms of creating obsequious subjectivity.[12] Don’t get me wrong, today’s ‘private persons’ are invariably clever, educated, sophisticated and endowed with high morals. Yet, having been moulded into ‘idiots’, they have unwittingly become vulnerable and susceptible to being fooled and manipulated, without even realising this.[13] Private persons arranged into a ‘society’ serve as a powerful repellent of the few non-idiots from the new configuration of the polis .[14] The behaviour and the decision-making of idiots is different from that of individuals.[15] Idiots are powered and informed by a fundamentally different algorithm: one of constantly chasing after and maximising (but never fulfilling) the elusive personal marginal utility, in the form of the abstract notion of happiness, a ‘bubble’ that requires continual inflation. So much so, that ‘dividuums’ come to internalise and normalize their idiocy in much the same way, Nietzsche explains, as we have internalised the valuations of slave morality which inhibit individual autonomy and privilege the collective welfare of idiots as the ‘gold standard’ of good citizenship.[16] Tsitsipas, the Greek tennis ace, said that Djokovic made ‘the majority’ look like ‘fools’, and he was absolutely right.[17] ‘Fools’, however, in what sense? Did Tsitsipas inadvertently express the sentiment of the righteous idiotic majority that lacks an authentic collective identity which could extend beyond the mere slogans ‘expanded into a political theory’?[18] Echoing him, Martina Navratilova, a fellow idiot, suggested that Djokovic ‘should have taken one’ (i.e., the vaccine) ‘for the team’.[19] The embattled Australian government, justifying their decision to deport Djokovic after a protracted theatrical performance that all but revitalised the notion of the ‘kangaroo court’ and ended up dramatically invoking the ghosts of ‘civil unrest’, stated with unwavering confidence that they acted in the ‘public interest’.[20] The curious thing is that all of Navratilova, Tsitsipas, and the Australian ministers genuinely believed that they spoke on behalf of a community: the tennis community, the Australian nation, humankind even. Using Covid as the new universal leveller, they believed they spoke on behalf of the ‘greater good’ in the firmly Benthamite/Millean sense. The kind of ‘good’ that extends beyond the notion of mechanical compliance with the rules. The kind of ‘good’ that should appeal to our ethical core notwithstanding that the chief functionality of the latter has long since been replaced with the plight of the idiot, powered by the totalising drive for equalisation intolerant of difference and thirsting for unanimity at any cost. Incidentally, Adam Smith thought that agents acting to further self-interest, without either ‘knowing it’ or ‘intending it’, helped to advance the ‘interest of society’.[21] One thing Smith overlooked and Nietzsche problematised was how the nature of collective interest may evolve following the reconfiguration of individuals into idiots and their subsequent re-incorporation into society. Nietzsche was weary that such ‘living for others in egoism’[22] would only ‘conceal knavery and harshness’[23] in the same way that ‘public opinions’ only serve to hide ‘private indolence’,[24] and by so doing aid in weaponizing the vindictive drives of the idiotic multitude.[25] Reinforcement of such ghostly yet militant collective identity, stitched together by exasperation and ressentiment , was on full display in the ‘no holds barred’ approach by the Aussie government in the pre-election fight for their idiots’ hearts and minds. Djokovic, in the wrong place at the wrong time, ended up being precisely the right person, offering a once in a lifetime gift to the politically fraught rhetoric of the ‘democracy of concepts [that] rules in every head—many together are master: a single concept that wanted to be master has crystallised in an ‘‘idee fixe”’.[26] Redolent though it may seem, even Smith would agree that ‘idiot’ does not necessarily designate someone of inferior intelligence.[27] Rather, it denotes someone who is (liable to be) manipulated on account of having been placed into and fully accepted the context (and the consequences) of acting only out of one’s—presumed autonomous and enlightened—self-interest, albeit one that is no longer informed by the authentic sense of the ‘communal’ or the ‘collective’ and, for that reason, unable to find fulfilment. The ‘collective’ now connotes an entirely abstract construct, hollow and lacking substance. It no longer allows for the possibility of ‘1+1 > 2’, where the ‘collective’ or ‘communal’ transcends the individual without trumping them. The present day ‘collective’ is a simple sum of private egoisms, each acting in their own self-interest. Crucially, however, each ‘private person’—a dividuum, or idiot—is a vastly diminished version of the ‘individual’, and the sum of ‘private persons’ invariably represents a far lesser magnitude than the fellowship of individuals. The ‘atomistic chaos’ of modern society lacks the ethos and material necessary for building the ‘new form of community’[28] (‘ Gemeinschaft ’) of truly ‘free individuals’,[29] which would be a ‘fellowship rather than the flock’.[30] As a result, Nietzsche argues, the collection of ‘atomistic individuals’[31] does not add up to a ‘collective individual’.[32] When we become incorporated as private persons, we trade individual autonomy for the collective welfare of idiots . Though we may be adorned with the labels of equality, freedom, and dignity, we effectively surrender the right to make principled choices. The latter, Nietzsche tells us, is not at all a ‘private matter’.[33] The assemblage of private persons is far weaker, more vulnerable, and politically impotent beyond the periodic hysterical outpourings of ressentiment, the ‘signs of the lowest and most absurd culture’.[34] The mass of ‘private persons’ will never win a war. It will never build anything worthwhile, let alone guarantee a stronger future. It will, however, happily submit itself to any coercion, just as long as this subjection is sublime enough and doesn’t hurt too much, allowing private persons to bask in the oblivious trinketry of the present moment.[35] Having undergone this transformative journey ‘at the freezing point of the will’,[36] private persons lackadaisically dwell in the ‘self-created world of opinions’,[37] no longer able to detect ‘the weight of the chains’.[38] Zarathustra forewarned that ‘even a prison’ of slave morality would ‘seem like bliss’ to the ‘restless people’, who can only ‘enjoy their new security’ in its inescapable nets.[39] The trouble is that any form of ‘mass idiocy’, by amplifying collective ‘moral effects’, invariably creates fertile ground for and becomes the conduit for the development of fascism and tyranny, which leverage ‘the power that lies in unity of popular sentiment, in the fact that everyone holds the same opinions’.[40] Nietzsche argues that the ‘private lazinesses’ hidden behind ‘popular sentiment’ come at an extremely high price: they turn the masses into the accomplices of the very crimes they think they help safeguard against.[41] The tyranny of words, idioms, ideas and opinions, once embraced by the multitude of idiots, soon becomes transformed into a real and potent weapon of reactive power: tyranny by the people, of the people and for the people.[42] Except that these people—akin to the Homeric ‘lotus eaters’—have lost, forgotten, or put to sleep their meaning as individuals.[43] They have traded their right to choose as autonomous individuals in exchange for the chimera of private citizenry, for the illusion of a social construct ‘in which everyone enjoys their own social ‘contract’.[44] They have effectively agreed to subordinate themselves to totalising oppressive drives, having squandered their ability and credibility to resist them. These idiots may occasionally develop a faint sense that they are being fooled and yet they are powerless ‘to not be fooled’, thus only exacerbating their predicament.[45] They have become the ‘fooled ones’, and we know well the sort of things the fooled can end up sanctioning and even eagerly participating in, believing all along that they are playing their part in bringing about the greater good.[46] Viewed in this context, Djokovic’s visa cancellation and his subsequent deportation were acts by the government acting ‘in the public interest’ of idiots: ensuring that idiots remain just as they are, and the bliss of idiocy remains unperturbed, for its veneer, concealing myriads of ‘subterranean demons and their knavery’, tends to be thin and fragile.[47] That is where the contradiction lies, inverting reality and distorting valuations. This, Nietzsche—following in Aristotle’s footsteps—suggests, is where we ought to start looking for answers. Many may argue that comparisons between the AO of 2022 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 are misplaced. For the most part, I would agree. But in one important respect, namely that of the perilous complacency which has rendered us mere spectators in face of the pervasive rise of the repressive social control systems, the parallels could hardly be more merited. Make no mistake, ‘Let’s turn the world into one hospital or penitentiary’ (otherwise known as ‘build back better’) is a clever slogan. Unlike many others, it represents a realistic and achievable target.[48] It feeds on the energy we all, mostly unwittingly, lend it whilst we appear to be craving and beckoning it with nothing but the ‘good intentions’ of our hearts and minds. Alas, Nietzsche cautions that when individual sovereignty is made into a private affair ‘an abundance of dragon’s teeth are sown’ at the same time.[49] The more we demand that general security be guaranteed, ‘the more do new shoots of the ancient drives to domination assert themselves’.[50] We are no longer dealing with an isolated case of the ‘lunatics taking over the asylum’. Rather, the rapid and pervasive spread of idiotism resembles a situation in which the entire world, as though consumed by irredeemable guilt, has obsequiously agreed to place itself in the same woke asylum just so no idiot would any longer feel out of place. That is why the news of Djokovic’s deportation has caused many an idiot to experience an uplifting, if fleeting, sense of exaltation. Not being discriminating enough in what we wish for, not daring to be individuals (i.e. un-idiots and anti-idiots), we may sooner or later have our wish granted, if only to prove right either the gloomy prophet Silenus[51] or Plato, who warned that the penalty idiots end up paying is none other than to find themselves ruled by evil.[52] This is important because—and in this we can be certain—the machine will not stop harvesting our freedom in the name of ‘unanimity’, as long as we continue to submit ourselves to it ‘as material for heating’: Mankind mercilessly employs every individual as material for heating its great machines: but what then is the purpose of the machines if all individuals (that is to say mankind) are of no other use than as material for maintaining them? Machines that are an end in themselves - is that the umana commedia ?[53] However, ‘precisely because we are able to visualize this prospect, we are perhaps in a position to prevent it from occurring’.[54] For this reason, we need a Jesse Owens to emerge from the cirque macabre enveloping us. Not as a solution, not as an Übermensch , but as a flicker of light and an instant of ‘counter-reckoning’ informing the sense of our ‘counter-action’—to ‘put a stop to the injury by putting a stop to the machine’.[55] Dmitri Safronov Dmitri Safronov holds a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Cambridge for research on ‘Nietzsche’s Political Economy’ (2020). Dmitri received an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and Honors BA in Philosophy and Politics from Trent University. Prior to matriculating at Cambridge, he spent over 20 years in the City of London, working for the leading global investment banking franchises. Dmitri’s profile and list of recent publications can be found on < https://philpeople.org/profiles/dmitri-safronov >. [1] This article quotes extensively from Nietzsche’s unpublished notes. These are assembled in the Nachlass and accessed from < http://www.nietzschesource.org >. Notes in the Nachlass are organized according to the year, number of the notebook, and number of the notebook entry, e.g. NF-1885(year): 2(notebook) [179] (note). [2] The author is triple vaccinated, lost his beloved aunt to the virus, does not hold anti-vax views, and is not a Djokovic fan. [3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (first published 1873-76, Cambridge University Press 1997) ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ §§4-6. [4] Crystal Wu, ‘Dan Andrews says Australian Open is “much bigger than any one person” as Novak Djokovic faces wait over visa stoush’ ( Sky News Australia , 16 January 2022) < https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/dan-andrews-says-australian-open-is-much-bigger-than-any-one-person-as-novak-djokovic-faces-wait-over-visa-stoush/news-story/c2a4a0388fc026bf6c28dcfcf97d31f6 > accessed 15 February 2022. [5] Cf. Nietzsche’s discussion in Nietzsche (n 3) ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ §4; ‘David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer’ §8. [6] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (first published 1882, Vintage Books 1974) §329. [7] Only in English and only by the late 14th-early 15th century does ‘idiot’ become a designation for the ‘mentally deficient’ (Oxford English Dictionary). [8] Cf. Aristotle, The Politics and The Constitution of Athens (Cambridge University Press 1996) 1253[a]. His two main claims are that man is by nature social (or political) and that ‘the whole must necessarily be prior to the part; since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense…’. Dostoyevsky presents a masterful exploration of this subject in The Idiot (1868-69) . Nietzsche echoes Aristotle’s logic, arguing that community is ‘a body on which no limb is allowed to be sick’ (NF-1888:15[1]) as well as exploring its permutations in modernity with recourse to Dostoyevsky’s psychological insights. Cf. also Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (first published 1878-80, Cambridge University Press 1996) ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §33; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (first published 1888) in The Portable Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann ed, Penguin Classics 2008) §16. [9] Precisely this connotation of ‘idiot’ is used exclusively throughout the article. Should you find the usage of ‘idiot’ distressing, simply replace the offending term with the placating ‘private person’ as you feel necessary. However, it is recommended to take the cue from Nietzsche’s treatment of the similar semiotic challenge to modern sensibility as was posed by the discussion of the highly uncomfortable subject of ‘slavery’. Nietzsche, who was well aware that the modern world anxiously avoided the word ‘slave’ (cf. his 1871 essay ‘The Greek State’), nevertheless challenged our ability and willingness to do anything about the substance of ‘slavery’, when we cannot even handle the sound of the word (cf. NF-1871:10[1]). So, perhaps, see how much ‘offence’ you can take before boiling over with righteous indignation – one way or another, this exercise will tell you something about yourself. [10] Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (first published 1878-80, Cambridge University Press 1996) §57; NF-1885:2[179]; NF-1887:10[17]. Cf. also Richard Mulgan, ‘Aristotle and the Value of Political Participation’ (1990) 18(2) Political Theory 195-215; Julian Young, Individual and Community in Nietzsche’s Philosophy (Cambridge University Press 2015) 5-10; Raymond Geuss, A World Without Why (Princeton University Press 2014) 231. [11] Cf. Nietzsche (n 10) §§472, 481, ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §33. [12] Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (first published 1887, Cambridge University Press 1994) I §10; NF-1881:11[73]; NF-1887:10[135]; NF-1888:14[9]. [13] Cf. NF-1886:5[71]; NF-1888:15[42]. Cf. also the definition of ‘idiot’ in Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (Brockhaus-Efron 1890) < http://www.vehi.net/brokgauz/index.html > accessed 15 February 2022. [14] Cf. NF-1881:11[185]; NF-1888:14[91]. [15] For the purposes of this discussion, we leave out the possibility highlighted by Aristotle that an ‘idiot’ could also be a ‘god’; cf. Aristotle (n 8) 1253a 27–29. Nietzsche, likely echoing Dostoyevsky, strongly disagreed with this Aristotelean possibility when discussing Jesus; cf. NF-1888:14[38]. Dostoyevsky makes this point in The Idiot through the image of Prince Myshkin. [16] Cf. Nietzsche (n 10) §45, ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §276; Nietzsche (n 12) I §§4-5. Nietzsche also suggests that ‘wherever slave morality predominates, language shows a propensity for the words “good” and “stupid” to edge closer together’; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (first published 1886, Cambridge University Press 2001) §260. [17] Harry Latham Coyle, ‘“It makes the majority look like fools” – Stefanos Tsitsipas slams Novak Djokovic for “playing by his own rules”’ ( Eurosport , 13 January 2022) < https://www.eurosport.co.uk/tennis/australian-open/2022/it-makes-the-majority-looks-like-fools-stefanos-tsitsipas-slams-novak-djokovic-for-playing-by-his-ow_sto8707032/story.shtml > accessed 15 February 2022. [18] Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche Contra Wagner (first published 1888) in The Portable Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann ed, Penguin Classics 2008) §7. [19] Tom Parsons, ‘Novak Djokovic told to “take one for the team” as Martina Navratilova weighs in on debacle’ Daily Express (London, 10 January 2022) < https://www.express.co.uk/sport/tennis/1547560/Novak-Djokovic-visa-Martina-Navratilova-Australian-Open-Roger-Federer-Rafael-Nadal > accessed 15 February 2022. [20] Ben Doherty, ‘Novak Djokovic visa: Australian minister Alex Hawke says risk of ‘civil unrest’ behind cancellation’ The Guardian (London, 15 January 2022) < https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jan/15/novak-djokovic-visa-australian-minister-alex-hawke-says-risk-of-civil-unrest-behind-cancellation > accessed 24 June 2022. [21] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (first published 1759, Oxford University Press 1976) 183. [22] Nietzsche (n 10) §1. [23] ibid §443. [24] ibid §482. [25] Cf. ibid ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §33; NF-1887:10[113]. [26] ibid ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §230. [27] Cf. Smith (n 20) Ch. 3, Section 3, ‘Of Self-Command’. [28] NF-1883:16[50]. [29] NF-1880:8[61]. [30] NF-1882:4[48]. Cf. the excellent discussion on this point by Vanessa Lemm, Homo Natura (Edinburgh University Press 2020) 176-177. [31] NF-1882:4[83]. [32] Nietzsche (n 10) §94. [33] Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (first published 1881, Cambridge University Press 1997) §9; Nietzsche (n 3) ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ §§1-2. [34] NF-1888:14[38]. [35] Cf. Nietzsche’s discussion in Nietzsche (n 3) ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ §4; Nietzsche (n 10) ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §286; Nietzsche (n 12) ‘Preface’ §6; Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (first published 1888) in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann ed, Modern Library 2000) ‘Why I Am a Destiny’ §5. [36] Nietzsche (n 10) §349. [37] NF-1887:11[341]. [38] Nietzsche (n 10) ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §10. [39] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (first published 1883-5, Random House 1954) IV ‘The Shadow’. [40] Nietzsche (n 10) §472. [41] ibid §482. [42] Cf. Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (first published 1947, Bloomsbury Academic 2013) 43-5. Cf. also Plato’s discussion on the creation of ‘the fiercest extremes of servitude’ from ‘the height of liberty’; Plato, The Republic (Penguin Books 1905) 563[a]-564[a]. [43] The image of the ‘Lotus eaters’ is used by Plato in his discussion of the ‘democratic man’ – i.e. private person lacking in willpower and judgement – in Plato (n 41) 561[e]-562[d]. Plato’s reference is to Book IX of Homer’s Odyssey . [44] NF-1888:14[197]. [45] NF-1886:5[71]. [46] Cf. Adam Smith on the ‘invisible hand’ – a euphemism for the magic wand that transforms individuals into idiots; Smith (n 20) 183. Nietzsche’s assertion that it is always ‘the invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst’ (Z: I, Tree ) appears imminently more accurate; Nietzsche (n 38) I ‘The Tree on the Hill’. [47] Nietzsche (n 10) §111; NF-1887:10[113]. [48] Cf. the discussion in Nietzsche (n 6) §329; NF-1886:4[7]; NF-1888:14[182]. [49] Nietzsche (n 10) §472. [50] Nietzsche (n 10) ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §30. [51] Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (first published 1872, Vintage Books 1967) §§3-4. Leonard writes beautifully about this ‘frightening wisdom’ of Silenus in Miriam Leonard, Tragic Modernities (Harvard University Press 2015). [52] Plato (n 41) 347c. [53] Nietzsche (n 10) §585. Consider the latest cynical attempt to shame Djokovic into vaccination by the UK’s Health Secretary, Mr. Sajid David, who suggested that it is only the millions of vaccinated spectators who make it possible for Djokovic to ‘get back to play the sport in front of them and earn millions again, it’s ok for him to have them take the vaccine, but the vaccine is not OK for him ’ (author’s emphasis); Jennifer Meierhans, ‘Novak Djokovic is urged by the UK health secretary to reflect on his Covid jab refusal’ ( BBC News , 15 February 2022) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60391876 > accessed 21 February 2022. [54] Nietzsche (n 10) §247. [55] ibid ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ §33.

The following short essay was written as a supplement to an essay published in 2018 [1] which provided an analytic description of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s political philosophy and vindicated Heidegger’s view of this philosophy as fundamentally technological in nature, representing the final stage of Western metaphysics. As Heidegger put it, ‘in the thought of will to power, Nietzsche anticipates the metaphysical ground of the consummation of the modern age’, making him the ‘ last metaphysician  of the West’. [2]   Heidegger classified Nietzsche’s politics under the headings of Machiavelli and Roman Culture (Caesar), technique  and imperium . These terms illustrate how the overman ( Übermensch ), who represents subjectivism at its peak, challenges the subjectivism of the ‘last man’, who also   seeks dominion over the earth. Heidegger claims that by the time Nietzsche wrote Twilight of the Idols , he ‘had clear knowledge of the fact that the metaphysics of the will to power conforms only to Roman culture and Machiavelli’s The Prince ’. [3] For Nietzsche, Roman culture signified Caesar, political genius and organization, autocracy, and imperium , while Machiavelli signified political realism, the political subjectivity of the Renaissance ( virtù ), and technique  ( technē )—the manipulation of appearance for political ends, the the state as a work of art, or manufactured politics.   Heidegger argues that a Machiavellian cloud hangs over the end of metaphysics since ‘there belongs to it the ubiquitous, continual […] investigation of means, grounds, hindrances, the […] plotting of goals, deceptiveness and maneuvers, the inquisitorial, as a consequence of which the will to will is distrustful and devious toward itself, and thinks of nothing else than the guaranteeing of itself as power itself’. [4] Heidegger’s situation of Nietzsche’s politics within the metaphysical purview of Machiavelli’s Prince  indicates that he views modern politics as fundamentally subjective (self-legislating), technical, or manufactured, an expression of a technological will to power which deploys itself as machination viewing the human being instrumentally, as calculable and manipulable.   The only difference between the configuration of domination of the last man, who ‘set[s] up a glittering deception which is then agreed upon as true and valid’, [5] and that of the overman is that the latter, who has declared war on the democratic masses, knows, or should know, that what he has constructed is merely semblance or simulation.   Thus a ll modern ideologies (including Nietzschean ideology), to the extent that they are determined by the development of modern metaphysics, must inevitably share certain salient characteristics and thus must be considered formally the same . In the age of technology, the final stage of metaphysics, there is produced a ‘power - based’ truth replaced by aggressive justification , propaganda—or the ‘production of semblance for the preservation and enhancement of power’—and a guiltless brutality which ‘posits what is to be considered right and wrong from the viewpoint of its own power’. Heidegger illustrates this modern power - based truth with the following example: ‘when the British recently blew to smithereens the French fleet docked at Oran it was from their  point of view “justified”; for “justified” merely means what serves the enhancement of power’. [6] A power-based truth represents the destruction of the critical distinction between truth and falsehood, where truth and untruth both constantly prove to be useful; [7] where the distinction between the ‘real world’ and the ‘apparent world’ is abolished and there are only interpretations. [8]   Heidegger recognizes that Nietzsche, given the context in which he found himself, was forced to elevate his language to a higher intensity—which he did, populating it with symbols, images, and emblems. Nietzsche treats language, including images and symbols, as an instrument, simultaneously justifying the right   to lie , to simulate and dissimulate, that all power structures since Plato have consistently claimed. [9] This trait is an essential aspect of Nietzsche’s description of the artist - philosopher who, like the actor, takes a pronounced ‘delight in simulation […] the inner craving for a role and a mask, for appearance ’. [10]   In this essay, I continue to outline Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s political ontology—which may be defined as a description of the properties common to the being of the political—with a preliminary focus on the Nietzschean notions of animality, cruelty, guilt, and the morality of pity. It should be said for the sake of clarity that Nietzsche’s political thought includes a political ontology (eg of the will to power) but one which is meaningful only in an oppositional framework. Heidegger, by contrast, takes up fundamental elements of Nietzsche’s political thought and political psychology and formulates them into a descriptive political ontology of the technological age, without the oppositional demarcations codified by Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian ideology and its chain of equivalences. The implications of this investigation transcend the Nietzschean corpus and apply to our current place in history.   1. The Nietzschean Credo   Nietzsche’s political thought, in its both antithetically negative and tragically affirmative expression, in its opposition to ‘notions of justice that derive from Christian, humanistic, Enlightenment […] and socialist moralities’, [11] which we can properly call its ideology, in its Dionysian and radically aristocratic projection, constitutes the political ontology of the contemporary technological age, forming one unified system, internally conflicted. This system may be defined by a metaphysical orientation towards subjectivism , or the supposed necessity of Caesarism and charismatic leadership, strength of will , that must prescribe; [12] values ,   agonistically divided into those that are ascending  and those that are in decline , and whereby each   ‘subjects the opposing activity to the standard of a universal […] morality’, [13] in Nietzsche’s case appealing to health or to the instinct of life ; [14]   ‘man’, self - designated ‘as the creature that measures values’; [15] force  and will to power , whereby power becomes the ultimate explanatory, determinative principle—‘on every side there is the struggle for power’ [16] — claiming the ‘essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form - giving forces that give new interpretations and directions’; [17] a power-based truth , characterized by aggressive, polemical justification , propaganda, [18] and guiltless brutality , [19] with the ensuing critical destruction of the distinction between truth and falsehood; a ‘ mission ’ assigned by ‘fate’, or ‘destiny’, and invented for the purpose of self - legitimation); [20] and  globalism , the closure of the distinction between ‘national’ and ‘international’ [21] , with a struggle for the dominion of the earth, for world government or imperium . [22] This is the general framework of Nietzsche’s political thought which, in the Heideggerian reading, sheds its superficial ideological aspect and is converted into the political ontology of the technological age.   Another salient feature of Nietzsche’s political thought and the political ontology of the technological age, as critically engaged by Heidegger, is the extent to which psychology dominates this era. [23] Nietzsche takes deep - rooted psychological structures as his object, primarily instincts and the animal —sometimes referred to as the ‘blond beast’ or, more frequently, as the ‘beast of prey’. As Nietzsche portrays it,   one cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness. [24]   This is the regenerative imperative which comes to reveal itself in a technoscientific context with a premodern revaluating  orientation, favouring the ancient, aristocratic  Greek and Roman cultures [25] which produced ‘noble and autocratic men, in whom the animal  in man felt deified and did not lacerate itself’. [26] Nietzsche recounts that during these flourishing ancient times, ‘in the days when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful’, [27] but laments that the inherently aristocratic character of these cultures was eventually extinguished by both the moralism of Platonic philosophy, which converted all values into moral values, and the Christian slave rebellion. The result of the former transformation was the ‘superfetation of the logical’, [28] and the pitting of rationality against the instincts and the unconscious, an idealistic philosophical imperative which Nietzsche prosopopoeically animates in Twilight of the Idols : ‘One must be prudent, clear, bright at any cost: every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards ’. [29] The latter momentous, ressentiment - driven transformation led in turn to the ‘morbid softening and moralization through which the animal “man” finally learn[ed] to be ashamed of all of his instincts’, [30] his natural  instincts, the body, sexuality, the passions. [31] But, as Nietzsche insists, in effect defining the dogma of his own philosophical countermovement, to ‘ have to combat one’s instincts—that is the formula for décadence : as long as life is ascending , happiness and instinct are one’. [32]   This is the credo of a naturalistic morality which considers it imperative to establish the means to channel and cultivate the animal in the human being in ways that are neither self - destructive nor socially destructive (at least to the extent that a social structure remains). How Nietzsche intends to accomplish this for the radically aristocratic order he envisions, in his ‘attempt to raise humanity higher’, [33] is not comprehensively clear. Yet every society must ultimately confront this potentially dangerous problem. Christianity confronted it by loathing, obstructing, and repressing the animal  in the human being—‘the ancient animal self’ [34] —leading to a culturally venerated self - lacerating guilt and self - denial, and a final ‘forcible sundering from his [man’s] animal past’. [35]   An animal, Nietzsche says, ‘loses its instincts […] when it prefers what is harmful to it’. [36] But it may be asked: what is lost exactly when an animal ‘loses its instincts’? The answer is the ability to maximize, enhance, overcome, or even preserve itself. This is because   Every animal […] instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power; every animal abhors […] instinctively and with a subtlety of discernment that is ‘higher than all reason’ every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or could obstruct this path to the optimum. [37]   To make this maximization possible, at least this much is clear: the sense of guilt, the guilty conscience, and the morality of pity must be diminished. As Nietzsche writes: ‘the overcoming of pity I count among the noble virtues’. [38] This assertion might appear rather anaemic if Nietzsche also did not elevate the instinct of cruelty to the degree that he does, as overcoming pity and increasing cruelty are one and the same. There can be no reluctance in acknowledging that the aggressive  instinct of cruelty possesses a philosophical status higher than all of the other healthy  and natural instincts Nietzsche identifies, insofar as it constitutes, as the ultimate ‘form-giving’ force that imparts ‘new interpretations and directions’, [39] the condition for their activation (in forming a culture or in simply overcoming the ‘anarchy among the instincts’), such as the ‘instinct for self - preservation’ or ‘ self-defense ’ or ‘those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future  grows’, which the ‘entire West has lost’—the instincts (or drives) for authority, organization, or durability. [40]   The argument that the instinct of cruelty possesses for Nietzsche an elevated philosophical status is fivefold. First, Nietzsche associates the ‘masters’ with ‘beasts of prey’ who are, without question, cruel, as they forcibly shape reality. [41] Second, via reference to ‘men of prey’ and ‘barbarians in every terrible sense of the word’, Nietzsche suggests that cruelty lies at the ‘origins of an aristocratic society’ where human beings could be found ‘whose nature was still natural’. [42] Third, in Ecce Homo , commenting on the second essay in On the Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche points to the originality of his conclusion stating that it is in this essay that cruelty is ‘exposed for the first time as one of the most ancient and basic substratum of culture that simply cannot be imagined away’. [43] Fourth, in what may be read as a development of the previous notion, Nietzsche declares that ‘higher culture is based on the spiritualization [or sublimation] of cruelty ’. [44] Fifth and finally, in the Genealogy , Nietzsche expresses the general rule that all ‘instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward ’, [45] while specifying that it was cruelty that was repressed in the ‘animal - man’ after it could no longer discharge itself externally when ‘the more natural  vent for this desire to hurt had been blocked’. [46] Once this occurs and the ‘bad conscience’ is formed the ‘animal - man’ only hurts himself.   If cruelty is the ‘most ancient and basic substratum of culture’, in a sense it is what is most real , [47] likely ‘the basic text of homo natura [that]   must again be recognized’. [48] If ‘higher culture is based on the spiritualization of cruelty ’, then cruelty must be discharged externally before being ‘spiritualized’ (or sublimated), for pure and endless spiritualization would be nihilism. The problem for Nietzsche is to press this basic instinct into service, just as it was the essential psychological problem for the ascetic priest, who ‘pressed into his service […] the whole  pack of savage hounds in man […] under cover of a religious interpretation’. [49] This problem was also later solved in Wilhelmine Germany, as Gustave Le Bon comments: ‘Germany did a really remarkable thing when she harmonized the evangelical ideal of charity, mildness and protection of the oppressed—stigmatized as slave morality by Nietzsche—with an ideal of force, brutality, and conquest so utterly foreign to Christian teachings’. [50] During World War II, the Wehrmacht found their solution in the drug Pervitin.   Nietzsche’s solution should be similar. It will mean the recovery of realist culture , the world of Thucydides and Machiavelli, of the spirit expressed in the ‘Funeral Oration’ of Pericles, where it is written: ‘our boldness has gained access to every land and sea, everywhere raising imperishable monuments to its goodness and wickedness ’, with scorn for ‘security [and] comfort’, [51] since the ‘diminution and leveling of European man constitutes our greatest danger’. [52] However Nietzsche’s solution is explained, the sense of guilt and the morality of pity will have to be diminished, mutatis mutandis , corresponding to a calibrated increase in cruelty and its complement, suffering (which makes noble). As such, the Nietzschean revaluation of all values will be initiated through desublimation  but will not lack a spiritualizing aspect. With it we will witness a real rupturing of social constraints and the breaking of contracts our naturalization permitting us more than, merely, the ‘ bestiality of   thought ’. [53] The explanation must also, necessarily, dwell reflectively on the meaning of Napoleon Bonaparte, since he represents the ‘synthesis of the inhuman  and superhuman ’, the political limit Nietzsche does not exceed, warfare spiritualized, and conquest made more artistic. [54] Nietzsche’s writing is replete with tension and obstructed paths, and cruelty empowered is the key to release.   2. The Heideggerian Conversion   The above description, with its intimations regarding the limits of Nietzsche’s political philosophy and political ontology—defining the final stage of metaphysics and the technological age—vindicates Heidegger’s assertion regarding Nietzsche’s figure of the ‘overman’: that the ‘overman’ is ‘extreme rationalitas  in the empowering of animalitas ’, ‘the animal rationale  that is fulfilled in brutalitas ’ (cruelty and guiltless brutality), [55] indicating that in the final stage of metaphysics ‘[s]ubhumanity and superhumanity are the same thing. They belong together, just as the “below” of animality and the “above” of the ratio  are indissolubly coupled in correspondence in the metaphysical animal rationale ’. [56] In other words, as Heidegger clarifies this statement, the ‘complete release of subhumanity corresponds to the conditionless empowering of superhumanity. The drive of animality and the ratio  of humanity become identical’. [57]   One factor in reading Nietzsche that had previously obscured the close link between rationality  and animality  in his work was, according to Heidegger, the ‘artistic aura’ imposed on Nietzsche’s philosophy by the ‘Wagnerian cult’, who made a ‘literary phenomenon out of it’, privileging its ecstatic Dionysian dimension. Heidegger explains that this was made possible   [b]ecause no one realized how, according to Nietzsche’s doctrine, the representational - calculative […] guarantee of stability [or preservation] is just as essential for ‘life’ [as will to power] as ‘increase’ [or enhancement] and escalation. Escalation [was] taken only in the aspect of the intoxicating, but not in the decisive aspect of at the same time giving to the guarantee of stability […] the justification for escalation. Hence it is the unconditional rule of calculating reason which belongs to the will to power, and not the fog and confusion of an opaque chaos of life. [58]   Securing permanence and providing the guarantee of stability is achieved through desublimation ( brutalitas ) and sublimation (the set of justifications  for enhancement and overcoming)—through technology [59] capable of producing the ‘radiant dream - creation of Olympus’. [60]   The indissoluble link, or even equivalence, that Heidegger sees between ratio  and animality (or the ‘complete release of subhumanity’) in Nietzsche’s philosophy is justified on the grounds that Nietzsche describes ‘instinct’ as a higher form of intelligence: ‘instinct’, Nietzsche writes, ‘is of all the kinds of intelligence that have been discovered so far—the most intelligent’. [61] When Nietzsche exhibits his ‘sensitivity’ in Ecce Homo  he is alluding to an instinctual capability, one that makes it possible for him to discern ‘all signs of healthy instincts’. [62] It constitutes a kind of artistry or active, constructivist, shaping power at work in his project of the reversal or revaluation of all values. To instinctive activity, Nietzsche typically suggests, belongs ‘a subtlety of discernment that is ‘higher than all reason’ [63] —‘higher than all reason’ yet a kind of reason nonetheless.   According to Heidegger, when Nietzsche utilizes the term ‘instinct’ he is referring to an intellectual ability ‘which transcends the limited understanding’, superescalating  the term to coincide with ‘superhumanity’ (the Übermensch ). [64] Two immediate implications follow from this ‘superescalation’. The first is that the legitimation of the course of action (the necessity of the revaluation of all values, the technique to reverse perspectives) is entirely based on the ‘assured instincts’ of the philosopher legislators’. [65] The second is that, since animality or subhumanity is an intrinsic property of superhumanity, it may be concluded that superhumanity, as Nietzsche conceives of this type, is master of what is ‘elemental’—‘in such a way that precisely the animal element is […] subjugated in each of its forms to calculation and planning (health plans, breeding) […] [with] man [as] the most important raw material’ or resource. [66] The mastery of what is elemental is first and foremost a psychological (technoscientific) mastery of the—especially aggressive—instincts and emotions. This must rely on linguistic encoding as well as ‘protective measures’ and ‘hygienic regulations’. Nietzsche takes his exemplary model of breeding and social control from Hindu morality, which reveals such intensive applications in its calculating attempt to achieve an ‘automatism of instinct’ between all of the castes, [67] as well as from his study of the array of techniques employed by the ascetic priest, described most notably in the Genealogy . [68]   Nietzsche’s political ontology of the will to power is technological in character because of the ordered use of human beings it proposes and justifies, so as to bring about a stability that makes possible further escalations. When Heidegger states that ‘[t]heir use is employed for the utility of armaments’ [69] or war (in an age where physics and technology are militarised), it is entirely in accord with Nietzsche’s supreme example of the channeled fusion of subhumanity (cruelty, animality) and superhumanity. This fusion is made flesh in Napoleon, who represents the limit of Nietzsche’s political thinking, and whose life and history is a significant source of Nietzsche’s political ontology, which, in Heidegger’s words, as the ‘ground for the planetary manner of thinking, gives the scaffolding for an order of the earth which will supposedly last for a long time’. [70]   To read Heidegger on Nietzsche opens a portal to what is rarely, if at all, discussed in contemporary Nietzsche studies, and permits entry into a new range of studies explored by Nietzsche in the area of control and manipulation: the technological subjugation of human beings (their reduction to resources). It is this refusal to read, in the interests of privileging style or imposing upon Nietzsche’s thought a democratic politics, that makes it impossible for contemporary readers of Nietzsche to decode passages such as the following:   From now on there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of domination. […] The possibility has been established for […] a new tremendous aristocracy […] in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist tyrants will be made to endure for millennia […] who [will] employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon ‘man’ himself. [71]   It may be argued that Nietzsche was, in addition to that of the Wagnerian cult, obscured by another sort of artistic aura in the Deleuzian reading, which neglected the energy of preservation in the will to power, as if Nietzsche had no interest in Apollo, no interest in stability and rational planning. Such a reading cannot dismantle the scaffold we mount simply because it does not associate Nietzsche, as Heidegger does, with technique, let alone with a power-based truth or guiltless brutality. Yet Nietzsche has a technological approach to symbolic systems and the reversal of values, as he indicates in Ecce Homo : ‘Now I know how, have the know-how, to reverse perspectives ’. [72]   In the final stage of metaphysics, subjectivity necessarily develops as the brutalitas  of bestialitas, fulfilled by violence and warfare in an age of highly sophisticated lethal weaponry and military equipment. For Nietzsche considered war as possessing a ‘curative power’, [73] and in Heidegger’s treatment of Nietzsche this idea attains an ontological status, while providing a more exacting set of terms to analyse our contemporary locus with respect to both the war industry and information systems. Don Dombowsky Don Dombowsky is a Professor of Political Studies and Philosophy at Bishop’s University in Canada. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics  (2004) and Nietzsche and Napoleon: The Dionysian Conspiracy (2014), and co-editor of Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche : An Edited Anthology (2008). [1]  Don Dombowsky, ‘“The Last Metaphysician”: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s Politics’ (2018) 23(5-6) The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 628-42. [2] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche , Volume III : The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics  (Harper & Row 1987) 8. [3]  Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche , Volume IV : Nihilism  (Harper & Row 1982) 165. [4] Martin Heidegger, ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’ in The End of Philosophy  (The University of Chicago Press 2003) 100 - 1. [5] Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking (Harper Perennial 1976) 74. [6] Heidegger (n 3) 144. [7] See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Vintage Books 1974) §344 [8] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols : or How to Philosophize with a Hammer  (Penguin 1968) ‘Real World’ §6. [9] See ibid ‘Improvers’ §5. [10] Nietzsche (n 7) §361. [11] Heidegger (n 2) 243 - 4. [12]  Nietzsche argues for the necessity of leadership during a period of decadence: ‘We have a different faith; to us the democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value […] at some time new types of philosophers and commanders [must appear] […] It is the image [and necessity] of such leaders that we  envisage’, ‘ commanders and legislators [who] reach for the future’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future  (Vintage Books 1966) §§203, 211. Heidegger, likely with Nietzsche’s philosophical legislators in mind, refers to ‘the leaders [who] had presumed everything of their own accord in the blind rage of a selfish egotism and arranged everything in accordance with their own will’. Heidegger (n 4) 105. [13] Heidegger (n 3) 145. The ‘greatest of all value - antitheses’ being ‘ Christian values— noble  values’. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ  (Penguin 1968) §37. [14]  These self - legitimating terms occur, for example, here: ‘all healthy  morality, is dominated by an instinct of life’. Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Morality’ §4. And, in another permutation, here: ‘A legal order thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power complexes but as a means of preventing  all struggle in general […] would be a principle hostile to life  […] an attempt to assassinate the future of man’. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals  (Vintage Books 1969) II §11. [15]  Nietzsche (n 14) II §9. This is taken as a self - evident function with an implicit difference between the Christian  and noble modes of experiencing value - legislation: ‘The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values […] it is value-creating ’. Nietzsche (n 12) §260. Conversely, the priestly type ‘used morality to raise itself mendaciously to the position of determining human values—finding in Christian morality the means to come to power ’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is  (Vintage Books 1969) ‘Destiny’ §7. [16]  Heidegger (n 4) 102. [17]  Nietzsche (n 14) II §12. To this effect, Nietzsche writes: ‘life itself is essentially  appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation […] exploitation’. Then, more metaphysically condensed: ‘The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else’. Nietzsche (n 12) §§259, 36. [18]  As Nietzsche from his own epochal context realizes, in an age of propaganda  ‘it is in itself a matter of absolute indifference whether a thing be true, but a matter of the highest importance to what extent  it is believed to be true’. Nietzsche (n 13) §23. [19]  Or, as Heidegger writes in ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’: ‘What is in acordance with its will is correct and in order, because the will to will itself is the only order’. Heidegger (n 4) 100. [20]  Heidegger (n 4) 102. [21] ibid 107. [22] Heidegger (n 2) 191. [23]  Nietzsche writes that ‘psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems’. Nietzsche (n 12) §23. Heidegger rightly observes that Nietzsche’s philosophy was ‘grounded in the predominance of ‘psychology’ in the concept of power and force’. Heidegger (n 4) 93. [24] Nietzsche (n 14) I §2. [25]  Nietzsche links ‘the salvation and future of the human race with them unconditional dominance of aristocratic values, Roman values’. ibid I §16. [26] ibid II §23. [27] ibid I §17. [28] Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Socrates’ §4. [29]  ibid ‘Socrates’ §10. [30] Nietzsche (n 14) I §7. [31]  See Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Morality’ §1: ‘to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life ’. [32] ibid ‘Socrates’ §11. [33] Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Birth of Tragedy’ §4 [34]  Nietzsche (n 14) II §18. [35]  ibid II §16. Nietzsche says it succinctly: ‘Christianity desires to dominate beast of prey ’. Nietzsche (n 13) §22. [36]  Nietzsche (n 13) §6. [37]  Nietzsche (n 14) III §7. [38]  Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Wise’ §4. [39]  Nietzsche (n 14) II §12. [40]  Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Expeditions’ §39. [41]  Nietzsche (n 14) III §18. [42]  Nietzsche (n 12) §257. The ‘beasts of prey’ who lie at the origin of the the state which was ‘carried to its conclusion by nothing but acts of violence’ are described by Nietzsche as ‘the most unconscious artists there are […] They do not know what guilt, responsibility, or consideration are, these born organizers; they exemplify that terrible artists’ egoism that has the look of bronze and knows itself justified to all eternity’. Nietzsche (n 14) §II 17. A superlative historical ‘beast of prey’ is the Renaissance figure, Cesare Borgia. Nietzsche situates him among the ‘healthiest of all tropical monsters’. Nietzsche (n 12) §197. [43]  Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Genealogy of Morals’. [44]  Nietzsche (n 12) §229. [45]  Nietzsche (n 14) II §16. [46] ibid II §22. [47]  As Heidegger recognizes: ‘We should not forget that Nietzsche gives the name beast of prey to the highest form of man’. Heidegger (n 2) 39. And Nietzsche reminds us that the ‘Superhuman type […] conceives reality as it is  […] is not estranged or removed from reality but is reality itself’. Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Destiny’ §5. [48] Nietzsche (n 12) §230. [49] Nietzsche (n 14) III §20. [50]  See Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of the Great War  (T. Fisher Unwin 1916) 116. [51] Nietzsche (n 14) I §11. [52] ibid I §12. [53] ibid II §22. [54] Ibid I §16. [55]  Heidegger (n 2) 177. [56]  Heidegger (n 4) 103. [57] ibid 106. [58]  ibid 94. Or it may be said: ‘ Forming horizons belongs to the inner essence of living beings themselves ’; ‘Securing permanence […] is a condition of life’. Heidegger (n 2) 86, 101. In this respect, also, a goal is crucial: ‘Formula of my happiness: A yes, a No, a straight line, a goal ’. Nietzsche (n 8) ‘Maxims’ §44. [59] See Heidegger (n 4) 99. [60]  Heidegger maintains that ‘Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power is prefigured in the sentence [from The Birth of Tragedy ]: “the Greek knew and sensed the terrors and horrors of existence: In order to be able to live at all, he had to set up the radiant dream - creation of Olympus above them”’. He elaborates: ‘The opposition of […] the “barbaric” […] is put here on one side , and beautiful, sublime appearance on the other  […] the idea is prefigured here that the “will” needs at the same time the guarantee of stability and escalation’. This means that technology encompasses both desublimation and sublimation, since the will to will employs both energies at the same time. ibid 95. [61]  Nietzsche (n 12) §218. [62]  Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Clever’ §10. [63]  Nietzsche (n 14) III §7. [64]  Heidegger (n 4) 105 - 6. [65] ibid 107. [66]  ibid 106. A crucial question for Nietzsche concerned the ‘type of human being one ought to breed , ought to will , as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future’. Nietzsche (n 13) §3. [67] Nietzsche (n 13) §57. [68] An experiential reflection that situates Nietzsche within the school of mass psychologists following Hippolyte Taine and Guy de Maupassant and preceding Scipio Sighele, Gustave Le Bon, and Gabriel Tarde. [69] Heidegger (n 4) 103. [70] ibid 95. [71] From Nietzsche’s notes of 1885-86, note 2[57] at < http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1885,2[57] >. [72]  Nietzsche (n 15) ‘Wise’ §1. [73]  Nietzsche (n 8) Foreword.

Introduction   Recent scholarship on early photography examines the photograph as primary source material in order to identify and explore ‘veins of influence’ that operate on, through, and from it. The ‘veins of influence’ analysis developed in that research brings us, whether as professional creatives, academics, or other participants, into dialogue with the photograph. Through such engagement, we become active participants in and agents of influence, shaping how these early images continue to exert influence in both the contemporary and future contexts.[1]   As creative professionals, we bear a responsibility to the image, and primarily to the persons, communities, and cultures represented within the frame. How should we define that responsibility? What are the elements that we should consider in order to create ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation, and thus better ensure a ‘fair and responsible’ influence of such images in the contemporary context, given what we know now? This responsibility necessarily extends to how we curate, exhibit, publish, digitise, catalogue, and otherwise present these images or maintain them for engagement.   This updated approach and revised discourse are especially important when the subjects involved are long gone, belong to shrinking communities, or otherwise lack a voice to contribute to the conversation and advocate for themselves. An optimal outcome of the fair and responsible treatment of these early photographs would be a re-evaluation of how, for example, Sri Lanka’s Vedda community is represented, to now improve engagement, fulfil unmet promises, and build meaningful dialogue that includes them in processes of community building and self-determination. The same images that once cast damaging shadows over this community, relegating them to positions of unimportance and primitiveness, have arguably contributed to their ongoing marginalisation. The way these images portrayed them in the past denied them the chance for progress. A retelling of that past, along with a re-assessment of the photographic documentation to present a more balanced narrative, would serve to celebrate Vedda identity in a respectful and empowering manner.   Through a case study of an extensive collection of early twentieth-century photographs of Sri Lanka’s Vedda community, taken by noted anthropologists Charles and Brenda Seligman, we will explore possible frameworks for what constitutes ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation of these images today, in the many platforms which may potentially showcase them, including the physical gallery, digital feature, documentary review and record, and the archives. Respecting the principles espoused herein, this article will show photographs already in the public domain through the Seligmans’ own publication.   The Seligman Collection, comprising some 400 glass negatives and prints and now part of the British Museum’s collection, documents the Seligmans’ field research on the Veddas in 1908.[2] This body of work has not been examined in this manner before and remains largely unnamed and unnumbered.[3] The Seligmans published their findings in the seminal publication The Veddas , which includes 72 photographs from the Collection as illustrations.[4]   To provide a proper historical context for this Collection, we will begin with a brief review of British colonial presence in Ceylon and the role that early photography played there. We will examine period perspectives on the Veddas as reflected in writings by colonials and others. This review will shed light on the cultural context in which the Seligmans were operating, which likely influenced both their research approach and the visualizations, through the photographs they took and selected for their publication. We will then briefly analyse the Seligmans’ study itself, noting key aspects of their methodology, relevant findings, and the photographs. The photographic process that the Seligmans followed over a century ago differs significantly from contemporary visual anthropology practices. By comparing these approaches—albeit in broad strokes—we can understand how the field has developed and how these developments reflect on the subject matter. Such comparisons highlight the ethical and legal developments related to human rights and the preservation of cultural dignity, particularly in research. In this way, we can better inform our understanding of the processes needed to develop a framework for what might be considered a ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation of the Collection images in a contemporary context.   Colonial Presence and Photographic Discourse   To understand the cultural context in which the Seligmans were operating, we need to consider the nature of British presence in Ceylon (since 1972 Sri Lanka), the colonial use of photography, and the prevailing perspectives on the Vedda community. Ceylon under the British contributed to the empire’s prime purposes of profit, power, and prestige. Propaganda about the colonial mission of civilising was an integral part of the colonial narrative, but the facts of the matter were somewhat different. As in India, so in Ceylon, there was a gap between the realities of imperial rule and the justifications of it which aimed to ward off criticism at home and among the colonial subjects. The administration’s approach to the Vedda community provides a clear example of this dissonance, with repeated efforts to ‘civilize’ and tame the community, which ultimately worked against Vedda interests and threatened their cultural existence.   Ceylon has a long history of occupation by conquerors and colonisers. From the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, Ceylon was colonized in part, first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch and finally by the British from 1802 until 1948, when the country gained its independence. [5]   The advent of photography conveniently coincided with the growth and consolidation of Britain’s empire, providing an impetus to the medium. Indeed,   [t]hrough means often complex and subtle, […] [photography] engaged viewers to look at the colonized through a pictorial dynamic of realist exoticism with varied results. Colonial photographs nonetheless often engender ambiguous and fluctuating relationships between the photographer or observer and the subject peoples and terrains.[6]    Frederick Fiebig’s 1850s salt print calotypes, now housed in the British Library, form the earliest known collection of ‘original’ (ie, not prints of originals) photographs of Ceylon. Other key commercial photographers operating in Ceylon in the mid-nineteenth century, either as travellers or through a more permanent presence on the island, included Samuel Bourne (Bourne & Shepherd), John Thompson, Joseph Lawton, Henry Cave, Colombo Apothecaries, AW Andree, Cyrus Koch, Henry Martin, Lawton & Co (Swaminathan Kandiah Lawton), Plate & Co, Scowen & Co, and Skeen & Co. Local photography studios tended to adopt standard classifications of photographic categories that included portraiture and ethnographical studies, often labelled as ‘native types’ or ‘racial studies’.[7] Gathering photographs under these broad headings helped to create ‘enduring markers’ of social status, religion, custom, ritual, ethnicity, and where various cultures stood in the indigenous hierarchies of high to low.[8]   Photographers found a ready market for portraits of the Veddas, indigenous people who wore few clothes. A notable example is the official album for the Royal Ophir Tour of the Duke and Dutchess of York in 1901, later King George V and Queen Mary, during which the couple visited Ceylon for a few days. That album features two images of Vedda men posed to show action with bows and arrows, and another of a cooking show. [9]     Early Writings on the Veddas   The earliest and much-referenced English-language account of the Veddas comes from Robert Knox’s 1680 publication, An Historical Relation of Ceylon . For centuries after, this work served as an important source of knowledge about Ceylon, including the Vedda community, and became a colonial classic, providing British leaders with new information about the island. Knox’s insights were based on nearly 20 years of captivity in Ceylon, during which he was in and out of ‘open’ jail, meaning he was allowed to roam the island freely. While his observations were undoubtedly shaped by his own prejudices, Knox was seen as providing an honest portrayal because he was perceived as a straightforward man who did not ‘dress the thought’. [10] Ironically, Knox’s account of the Vedda community became an authoritative reference, despite the fact that it was based purely on hearsay—Knox himself admitted to never having seen one of the ‘wild men’ he described. [11]  His depiction of a Vedda man, described by later commentator John Bailey as a ‘fancy portrait and decidedly flattering’, is evidence of his unfamiliarity with the community. [12]  Yet Knox’s account, though inaccurate, provided a detailed description of Vedda character, customs, property rights, diet, rituals, and clothing, and remains highly influential. Even the Seligmans credited him as the first to accurately describe the Veddas. [13]   By the mid- to late nineteenth century, further commentary on the Veddas emerged, mostly by colonial administrators who assumed the role of scholars due to their authority and access. One such administrator was John Bailey, who, based on his personal and repeated investigations, offered early ‘ground-truths’ about the Veddas. Bailey, who oversaw the Badulla region, home to the ‘most barbarous Vedda tribes’, took an interest in their habits and customs. [14]  He argued that the Veddas represented the ‘original’ and ‘pure’ indigenous man, focusing on the jungle-dwelling tribes because they maintained isolation from other races, thus preserving their supposed unique ‘peculiarities’. [15]  Like others of his time, Bailey also recorded the Veddas as intellectually inferior, stating that their frequent ‘perplexed’ manner was common among ‘people of weak intellect’. [16]   Around the same period, the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland (founded in 1845) published a few articles on the Veddas. [17] These articles often repeated the ideas of previous writers like Knox and Bailey, with little grounding in field research. The earliest article, published in 1851 by Reverend J Gillings, already noted the perceived corruption of the ‘pure’ Vedda identity through intermarriage with the majority ethnic group, the Sinhalese, reflecting a concern among scholars that such assimilation would erase an opportunity to study this ‘rare and treasured human specimen’. [18]  Colonial efforts to civilize the Veddas were evident in their attempts to settle them in smallholder lots with houses, efforts that were largely unsuccessful. The Veddas, resisting domestication, returned to the forests, continuing their traditional hunting practices and eschewing formal education, remaining ‘totally destitute’. [19] Furthermore, Gillings expressed disappointment in their resistance to Christianity, despite some success with coastal groups. [20] His writing reflects the missionary zeal common among colonials, who saw the Veddas as untamed and in need of saving.   In 1881, prominent scientist Dr Rudolf Virchow published a study on the Veddas’ origins in the same journal, in which he claimed that the Veddas had biological links to other South Asian indigenous groups, [21]  with conclusions based solely on skull measurements sent to him in Germany. [22]  He never set foot in Ceylon. Virchow theorised that the Veddas were related to Dravidian or pre-Dravidian tribes of Hindustan, bore little resemblance to Tamils, and that the Sinhalese showed evidence of Vedda genetic influence, likely through intermarriage. Despite never observing a living Vedda, Virchow offered extensive commentary on their social behaviour, echoing earlier authors like Knox and Bailey. His assertions about their intellectual inferiority, based on the size of their skulls, reflected the pseudo-scientific racism prevalent in the era. Virchow concluded that their inability to count or plan beyond the present day, along with failed educational efforts, proved the ‘inferiority of the race’. [23]   In 1902, American explorers HM Hiller and WH Furness documented their two-week visit with the Veddas, similarly describing them as primitive and noting their ‘unwashed, uncombed and all but unclad appearance’. Though their work has since been criticized as subjective and insubstantial, it reflected the prevailing colonial attitudes of the time. The explorers’ documentation included a few photographs, capturing these negative perceptions visually. [24]   Virchow’s ideas on physiological distinctions and origins were later echoed by Swiss naturalists Fritz and Paul Sarasin, who conducted five scientific expeditions to Ceylon between 1883 and 1907. Initially focused on zoology, the Sarasins’ later expeditions shifted to anthropological research on the island’s indigenous peoples, the Veddas, likely inspired by Virchow’s studies. [25]  Unlike Virchow, the Sarasins conducted fieldwork in Ceylon, collecting over 400 artefacts, skeletal remains of over 90 individuals, and more than 500 photographs. In their collection of portraits, we find early studies of the Veddas, very much following the period anthropological oeuvre of ‘mug shots’, rather than sociological studies. The Sarasins, in their 1907 visit, just before the Seligman visit, also ‘established the existence of a stone age upon the island […] [and objects] most reasonably attributed to the Veddas’. [26]   Their anthropological work included studies of Vedda skulls, following the period’s trend of racial anthropology, focusing on physical features over social or cultural contexts. They concluded that the Vedda phenotype was distinct from other Sri Lankan groups, but this assertion has been challenged by recent research. For example, Samanti Kulatilake’s study of the Sarasins’ collection found no significant cranial morphological differences between the Vedda and other Sri Lankan groups, suggesting that the long-held notion of Vedda distinctiveness may have been influenced by outdated or biased scientific approaches. [27]   The recurring themes in these various writings—primitive, unintelligent, hopeless—reflect the colonial mindset that reduced the Veddas to a subhuman species, albeit one deemed worthy of study. The Seligmans operated within this cultural context, informed by both scientific and popular ideas that framed the Veddas as objects of curiosity, backwardness, and inferiority.   The Seligman Study, 1908   Dr Charles Seligman and his wife Brenda conducted a significant anthropological study of the Vedda community during their expedition to Ceylon in 1908. Their research, officially commissioned and supported by figures including Cambridge anthropologist Dr AC Haddon and colonial administrators Sir Henry Blake and Henry McCallum, was driven by the belief that the Veddas were one of the most ‘primitive’ surviving races, potentially on the verge of extinction, thus their remit was to explore the Veddas’ ‘social life and religious ideas […] as thoroughly as possible’.[28] As such, the Seligmans’ work was heavily publicized and people eagerly awaited the results, viewing the study as crucial to understanding both the past and future of Ceylon. Newspaper coverage of the time echoed these sentiments, reporting that:   Ceylon has perhaps more than any contemporary ‘modernised’ country—for she is not yet wholly and completely civilised […] [The] few surviving primitive Ceylonese, the fast disappearing Veddas, stand as one of the few remaining proofs of a branch of the great theory of evolution propounded by Darwin and since applied by such thinkers as Haeckel, Thomas, Henry Huxley, and Buckle.[29]    The expectation was that the research would be ‘exhaustive in nearly all the details worthy of investigation’ regarding this ‘primitive’ and ancient group, though in fact the Seligmans only encountered and studied four families.[30]   In 1911, the Seligmans published the illustrated volume  The Veddas , which remains the ‘standard work’ on this ‘very primitive and interesting people’, as the Royal Anthropological Institute website informs us today.[31] The publication gained  iconic status that endures as  a ‘pioneering ethnology’ and a ‘standard reference work of the social structure and material culture of the Veddas’. Even now, some Sri Lankan academics accept the Seligman ethnographic research methodologies without challenge.[32]    While the study provided detailed accounts and extensive data, what should be kept in mind is that the photographic process may have been less that ‘fair and responsible’. At the time of the study, there were no photographing protocols. Some of their approaches appear questionable from today’s perspective. Nonetheless, the Collection remains extremely important for historical data, perspectives, and of course the images that were published. Photography was a key feature of the study and the Seligmans ‘devoted the whole of [their] attention to obtaining a reasonably complete series of photographs’. [33] The methodology was new, there were no protocols, and the results were iconic.   The study recorded what were new findings for the time, particularly because Brenda Seligman gained access to Vedda women and children. This allowed her to photograph and study more intimate instances of their family life, including making phonograph recordings of lullabies. She gained access to activities which men were not allowed to witness. Of the nearly 400 photographic glass negatives that are now part of the British Museum collection, some 71 photographs appear as illustrations in the Veddas  publication. Some of these Seligman admitted to touching up, in particular those documenting the dances at Sitala Wanniya and Bandaraduwa, to minimise the blurring from the movement. [34] Some photographs cover the Vedda dances of Kirikorana, Bambara Yaka, and Pata Yaka. We know now that the Kirikorana has sacred features, as likely do the other dances. In the absence of protest and clarification from the living Vedda community, what is the best practise for the sharing of these dance and ritual photographs now? How should they be handled in the Seligmans’ publication now that we know what we do? If Brenda Seligman gained access to photograph the Vedda women and their children in situations where men were not allowed, how can we rationalise breaching that privacy by showing these photographs to the public eye?   Another aspect of the Seligmans’ published photography that has come under scrutiny is the potential staging of Vedda subjects. Seligman himself observed that the Veddas were often ‘fetched’ to meet travellers at rest houses, where they would appear dressed in traditional Vedda attire, despite normally dressing like neighbouring peasants when not on display.[35] This suggests that even during the Seligmans’ study, there may have been a performative element in the Veddas’ presentation to outsiders, raising doubts about the authenticity of some of the photographs and observations. Nishanka Wijemanna has justly criticised the way the Veddas were presented in these images, arguing that they were dressed up as ‘showpieces’ for the benefit of foreign observers, thus reinforcing the stereotype of them as uncivilized and barbaric.[36]   The Seligmans’ study also raises ethical questions in view of its scientific evaluations and suggestion that ‘the few unsophisticated Veddas of the present day do in fact represent the aboriginal   inhabitants of Ceylon’. In support of this thesis, they referred to the work the Sarasins, using this and their own observations to separate the Veddas from the Sinhalese on the grounds that there were ‘obvious external characters in which the Veddas differ from the Sinhalese […] [at] a single glance’.[37] They compared certain measurements of the Vedda male being some three inches shorter than the Kandyan (Sinhalese) as further proof of such genetic distinction, not considering (as others before also failed to do) that such shorter height could have been due to nutrition.     The anthropologist James Brow, who undertook extensive field research on the Veddas in the 1980s, draws our attention to the problem that ‘the search of racial and cultural purity became an increasingly dominant theme in their [European’s] inquiries, and that their ability to discover it was greatly enhanced by the division of the Veddas into two kinds. Even the Seligmans, whose ethnography ushers in the period of modern anthropology as applied to the Veddas, were still under the spell of these concerns’.[38] Indeed, the Seligmans repeatedly note that the ‘Veddas have been regarded as one of the most primitive of existing races’.[39] Their aim was to ‘isolate the customs of the ‘pure blooded’ Veddas from those of the ‘half-breed’ combination of Sinhalese and Vedda strain, so that the ‘authentic’, ‘original’, and ‘ancestral’ customs of the Veddas can be discovered’.[40]   Nonetheless, we should also be aware of the potentially harmful biases that the photographs cast. Today, the Collection remains extremely important There is thus a need to establish a more effective approach to managing and disseminating the Collection through appropriate contextualisation.     Ethical Extrapolations   At the time of the Seligmans’ anthropological work in the early twentieth century, there were no formalised research ethics or institutional guidelines. Credibility relied heavily on the reputation of the researcher and photography, while used, was not yet recognised as a rigorous anthropological tool. This began to shift in the 1930s with the pioneering work of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, whose fieldwork in Bali (1937-9) contributed to the foundation of visual anthropology. Mead and Bateson aimed to document cultural behaviour as it unfolded naturally, stating that their goal was ‘to shoot what happened normally and spontaneously, rather than to decide upon the norms and then get [the subjects] to go through these behaviours’.[41] Their methodological approach, centred on a ‘disciplined subjectivity’, treated the camera as a neutral recording instrument rather than an illustrative device, thereby setting a precedent for ethical engagement through visual media.[42]   The aftermath of the Second World War catalysed a global movement toward codifying human rights and dignity, influencing how research, representation, and consent were subsequently framed. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasised the ‘inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’, while Articles 26 and 27 underscored the right to education and cultural participation.[43] The 1945 founding Constitution of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) likewise spoke to the importance of accurate cultural representation, stressing that member governments are ‘agreed and determined to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives’.[44] Later frameworks, such as the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, affirmed that Indigenous communities ‘have the right to the dignity and diversity of their cultures, traditions, histories, and aspirations [to be] appropriately reflected in education and public information’.[45] Although these instruments do not address photographic representation directly, they provide a foundational basis for ethical reflection on the use of such media in research, publication and exhibition contexts.   Today, a growing number of academic and research institutions, along with the communities they engage, have developed comprehensive ethical frameworks to guide responsible scholarship, particularly in cross-cultural and historically asymmetrical settings. Guidelines such as the ‘Code of Ethics for Research in the Social and Behavioural Sciences involving Human Participants’ (Netherlands)[46] and the ‘Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings’ articulate frameworks premised on concepts of fairness, respect, care, and honesty. The latter’s Article 8 (Respect) advises researchers to explore potential cultural sensitivities to avoid violating customary practices, while Article 12 stresses the importance of tailoring informed consent procedures to local contexts for meaningful understanding.[47] The ‘National Inuit Strategy on Research’, co-developed with Inuit leadership, frames research as a tool for achieving social equity and calls for ‘respectful relationships’.[48] Similar concerns are addressed in the ‘Protocols for Native American Archival Materials’, which guide institutions in handling sensitive heritage content.[49] Notably, the Warburg Institute’s decision to remove select early photographs of the Pueblo community from public access, citing cultural sensitivity, demonstrates the growing institutional recognition of ethical responsibility in archival and visual practices, as does that Institute’s development of a protocol for those materials. These evolving norms form a crucial backdrop against which we can ethically reconsider the Seligmans’ visual anthropological work.   These policies and conventions reflect ethical values that touch people’s lives, operating not only to grow community conscience but also to inform personal micro ethics, including those that assist in evaluating and rationalizing ‘ethically important moments in research practice’.[50] Guillemin and Gillam, in their astute coverage of ethical values, ask us to be ‘reflexive in an ethical sense [which] means acknowledging and being sensitized to the micro-ethical dimensions of […] practice and, in doing so, being alert to and prepared for ways of dealing with the ethical tensions that arise’.[51]   Though the Seligmans did not benefit from these policies to guide their photographic protocols and research, we now have the advantage of them and of hindsight. Given the iconic and pioneering stature of their study, it becomes imperative to properly frame the Collection images, not only to qualify their authority in light of recent learnings but to develop different approaches. A sad truth that underscores the importance of obtaining better narratives is that these past biases, including those depicted through visual media, may have contributed to the colonial and later Sri Lankan government’s poor treatment of the Veddas. The Veddas were forced out of their natural habitats starting with colonial development because they were considered ‘primitive’ and ‘totally destitute’, imagery that stayed in the wider community consciousness. These actions of neglect continue today with forced displacement and attempts to erase the identity of the group. In recent times, the Sri Lankan census even removed the classification of ‘Vedi’ in 1963.[52]   Recent publications surveying the plight of the Vedda community conclude that ‘these communities are faced with insurmountable challenges that rob their dignity and self-esteem when identifying themselves as the people of this land’.[53] The migration and / or forced displacement of the Vedda communities into areas where the government promised them land—promises that have not been met to this day—remains an ongoing issue.[54]   Engagement with the Collection and its ‘Re-Presentation’   Knowing what we do now, the central issue is how we should approach this collection to present it in the various platforms on which these images could feature, in such a way as to be ‘fair and responsible’ including, essentially, in ways that dignify the Vedda community. How can we display these photographs in a manner that avoids reinforcing outdated and harmful stereotypes—such as portraying the Vedda as primitive, unintelligent, or unworthy of recognition—that have historically caused them so much harm? In this context, re-evaluating the Seligman Collection and reframing the narrative may offer an opportunity to challenge existing biases against the Veddas and provide an alternative perspective that highlights their history and lifestyle, thereby elevating their recognition and status.   While a comprehensive review of the entire collection is beyond the scope of this study, several key points emerge that guide and contribute to the principles of ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation, that include the following:   1. Preface the Collection with Historical and Ethical Context:  The archival presentation should include a preface contextualizing the Collection’s development within its historical period, noting the absence of ethical frameworks that might have influenced the Seligmans’ methodology. It is likely that Charles and Brenda Seligman may have unconsciously perpetuated the cultural biases and stereotypes prevalent at the time regarding the Vedda community. Acknowledgment of this potential bias should precede the Collection.   2. Engage the Vedda Community and Local Scholars:  Such local involvement, along with connecting to points of origin, can inform and culturally sensitise curation. Collaboration with contemporary Vedda community leaders and local scholars to notate and comment on the collection and individual images, would further inform the archival depth of these images by including community perspectives, memories, and contemporary treatment of the images. Their insights should inform the contextualization of the images using culturally relevant knowledge. Representatives from the Sri Lankan Ministry of Culture, responsible for safeguarding Vedda heritage, could be involved in this process. Each photograph should be individually reviewed and annotated by Vedda community members to incorporate their perspectives on content and optimal display practices. These annotations should form part of the Collection’s archival documentation, ensuring that the presentation is guided by Vedda community authority in both public and archival contexts.   3. Protect Private and Sacred Content:  Images that infringe on personal privacy or depict sacred rituals should remain restricted and reserved solely for scholarly research, governed by institutional protocols. Public access should only be granted with explicit consent from the Vedda community, and such permissions must be formally documented. In particular, photographs depicting female activities, rituals, and sacred dances should not be publicly exhibited until the Vedda community authorizes their display or provides interpretive guidance to enable a nuanced understanding.   4. Establish Institutional Guidelines:  Institutions should develop and publicly share guidelines that reflect best practices for re-evaluating early photographic collections. The current lack of transparency in these efforts limits broader learning and collaboration. Public dissemination of these protocols would benefit institutional teams and stakeholders by incorporating the perspectives of those directly impacted by the presentation, promoting equitable and informed representation of colonial-era photographic archives.   Conclusion   Early authorities on the Veddas became experts primarily by extolling new knowledge and through repeated, often unchecked validation. By contrast, the Seligmans’ study was more rigorous, with focused attention on gathering findings for publication, further supported by funding. This study was not only pioneering but also credible, gathering important observational data that, while possibly distorted through a colonial lens, can nonetheless be reviewed in a contemporary context. Furthermore, the Seligmans’ objective appears to have been honourable, demonstrating a commitment to gaining ground truths and showing an appreciation for firsthand contact to enhance research credibility. Photography was a critical component of this endeavour, introducing a novel methodology that illuminated and supported his findings.   The criteria for evaluating whether there is ‘fair and responsible’ re-presentation in these early images should consider the methodologies of picture-taking acceptable at the time, acknowledging that no formal guidelines existed, as well as to consider the objectives of the researchers. Those early studies and imaging exercises operated under different guidelines than those known and recommended today. While it can be argued that the Seligmans acted in good faith, this does not imply that they adhered to the standards of respect expected by contemporary human rights norms. Prefacing the context of the photographs encourages us to reflect, learn, and engage, utilising valuable historical endeavours to reshape narratives. My hope is that this review raises critical questions that we must address to gain new knowledge and consciously build upon the ‘fair and reasonable’ re-presentation of early photographs of peoples, generally, and in doing so also strengthen our individual and community consciences when we interact and intersect with these early images. Shalini Ganendra Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research integrates nearly three decades of programming experience with a foundation in legal training. She actively investigates theoretical frameworks through the lens of creative practices and cultural histories, particularly in under-researched regions such as Sri Lanka. Her work foregrounds the complex interplay between tradition and contemporary dynamics, offering alternative modes of engagement that are deeply attuned to diverse cultural contexts.   Shalini has received numerous accolades for her contributions to cultural development and community impact, including the Knighthood of St Gregory the Great (DSG) from the Holy See and the Chevening Fellowship from the United Kingdom. She has held visiting academic appointments at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, serving also as an Associate Academic in Oxford’s Department of the History of Art. Shalini read law at the University of Cambridge, earned an LL.M. from Columbia University Law School, and qualified as both a Barrister (UK) and an Attorney in New York. [1] Shalini Amerasinghe Ganendra, Veins of Influence: Colonial Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in Early Photographs and Collections (Neptune Publishing Pvt Ltd 2023). [2] CG Seligman and Brenda Z Seligman, Collection of Seligman Glass Slides (396) and Prints from Those Slides: Photographs of Vedda Community, Ceylon  (1908). [3] James Hamill, ‘Charles Seligman Glass Slides and Photos, British Museum, Nature of Current Cataloguing’ (11 September 2024). [4] CG Seligman and Brenda Z Seligman, The Veddas  (Cambridge University Press 1911). [5] GC Mendis, Ceylon Under the British  (first published 1952, Gyan Press 2020) 12. [6] Eleanor M Hight and Gary D Sampson, Colonialist Photography, Imag(in)Ing Race and Place  (Routledge 2002) 15. [7] Other categories included plantation views, railways, archaeological sites (and buried cities), British royal visits, botanical gardens (and tropical plants), urban landscape, and elephant captures. [8] Benita Stambler, ‘Context and Content: Colonial Photographs from Kandy, Ceylon’ in H Hazel Hahn (ed), Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary: Global Encounters via Southeast Asia  (NUS Press 2019) 233. [9] George JA Skeen, The Royal visit to Ceylon, April 1901  (Government printer 1901) image numbers 28-30. See < https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PH-QM-00002/ > accessed 9 November 2025. By contrast, the private album of Queen Mary covering that tour has no images of the Veddas, indicating a lack of personal interest in them. See Royal Tour Ophir, 1901. ‘Queen Mary’s Photograph Album Volume 7’  (1901). [10] Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon  (Tisara Prakasakayo Ltd 1981) 48. [11] John Bailey, ‘An Account of the Wild Tribes of the Veddahs of Ceylon: Their Habits, Customs, and Superstitions’ (1863) 2 Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 278. [12] ibid 284. [13] Seligmann and Seligmann (n 4) 6. [14] Bailey (n 11) 279. [15] ibid 278. [16] ibid 284. [17] The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (RAS) has a long and illustrious history as an influential organisation, starting with its grant of royal status in 1823 by King George IV . The RAS’s elite colonial membership, commitment to scholarship, and subsequent, inclusion of elite local members in its various branches reinforced this enduring legacy. The Royal Asiatic Society of Ceylon was the society’s first branch, established in 1845. [18] Rev J Gillings, ‘On the Veddahs of Bintenne’ (1853) 2(2) The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 83. [19] ibid 88. [20] ibid 85. [21] Rudolf Virchow, ‘The Veddás of Ceylon, and Their Relation to the Neighbouring Tribes’ (1886) 9 The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 349. [22] Richard L Spittel, Vanished Trails. The Last of the Veddas  (Geoffrey Cumberlege, OUP 1950) xii. [23] Virchow (n 21) 371. [24] Richard Boyle, ‘Visiting the Veddahs, 1899’ The Sunday Times  (Sri Lanka, 12 June 2016) < http://www.sundaytimes.lk/160612/plus/visiting-the-veddahs-1899-196988.html > accessed 10 August 2024. [25] Samanti Kulatilake, ‘The Sarasins’ Collection of Historical Sri Lankan Crania’ (2020) 128 Anthropological Science 119, 120. [26] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) 18.  [27] Kulatilake (n 25) 122. [28] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) vii. [29] ‘Seligman’s Lecture to the Asiatic Society - A Link with Old Ceylon’ Ceylon Observer, Supplement  (Ceylon, 26 May 1908). [30] ‘The Sociology of the Ceylon Veddas: Final Investigation by Dr. and Mrs. Seligman’ Ceylon Observer  (Ceylon, 26 May 1908). [31] ‘Charles Gabriel Seligman’ ( Royal Anthropological Institute ) < https://www.therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/obituaries/charles-gabriel-seligman > accessed 10 September 2024. [32] Alex Perera, ‘Centenary of a Classical Study’ The Sunday Times  (London, 2 October 2011) < https://archives.dailynews.lk/2001/pix/PrintPage.asp?REF=/2010/12/22/art32.asp > accessed 30 October 2023. [33] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) 4. [34] ibid 235 fig 2.  [35] ibid vii. [36] Nishanka Wijemanna, ‘Myths and Reality about the Veddas’ (2023) 3 Voice of Citizens 15 < http://citizenslanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Issue-03-English-Final-2.pdf > accessed 5 July 2025. [37] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) 415. [38] James Brow, Vedda Villages of Anuradhapura, A Historical Anthropology of a Community in Sri Lanka , vol 33 (University of Washington Press 1978) 15. [39] Seligman and Seligman (n 4) vii. [40] Brow (n 38) 15. [41] Ira Jacknis, ‘Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film’ (1988) 3(2) Cultural Anthropology 166. [42] ibid 161. [43] United Nations, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (1948) < https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights > accessed 28 October 2023. [44] ‘Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (1945) Preamble < https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%204/volume-4-I-52-English.pdf > accessed 9 November 2025. [45] United Nations, ‘United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ (13 September 2007) < https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-%20the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html > accessed 3 September 2024. [46] ‘Code of Ethics for Research in the Social and Behavioural Sciences Involving Human Participants’ (2016) < https://www.eur.nl/eshcc/media/67289 > accessed 12 July 2025. [47] ‘Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings’ < https://www.globalcodeofconduct.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Global-Code-of-Conduct-Brochure.pdf > accessed 12 July 2025. [48] ‘National Inuit Strategy on Research’ (2018) < https://www.itk.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ITK_NISR-Report_English_low_res.pdf > 23. [49] ‘Protocols for Native American Archival Materials’ < https://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/ > accessed 10 September 2024. [50] M Guillemin and L Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research’ (2004) 10 Qualitative Inquiry 261, 278. [51] Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, ‘Ethics, Reflexivity, and “Ethically Important Moments” in Research’ (2004) 10(2) Qualitative Inquiry 278. [52] Lionel Guruge, ‘Editor’s Note’ (2023) 3 Voice of Citizens 4-5 < http://citizenslanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Issue-03-English-Final-2.pdf > accessed 5 July 2025. [53] ibid. [54] Ahinsaka Perera, ‘Issues Facing the Eastern Indigenous Community’ (2023) 3 Voice of Citizens 9 < http://citizenslanka.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Issue-03-English-Final-2.pdf > accessed 5 July 2025.

Sarah Dunant is a novelist, broadcaster, and cultural critic whose work blurs the line between historical inquiry and literary imagination. Best known for her fiction set in Renaissance Italy, she gives voice to women whose lives have been obscured by time, deftly merging narrative and historicism. Rendering the past not as backdrop but as pulse, Dunant allows history to unfold with the texture of lived experience. Her acclaimed novels, The Birth of Venus , In the Company of the Courtesan , and Sacred Hearts , have been translated into over thirty languages.   A long-time contributor to BBC Radio 4 and a thoughtful commentator on the intersections of gender, art, and power, Dunant returns with The Marchesa , a novel centred on Isabella d’Este. The Marchesa  offers a vivid reimagining of Isabella d’Este: art collector, political strategist, fashion icon, and one of the most influential women of the Italian Renaissance. Her court is long vanished, her treasures scattered, but thousands of preserved letters remain, housed in the deconsecrated church that now holds Mantua’s state archive.   From this paper trail, Sarah Dunant conjures Isabella’s voice, bold, curious, and unyielding, tracing her life from precocious daughter and reluctant bride to formidable consort and cultural force. Blending fiction with biography and art history, The Marchesa is both an intimate portrait and dialogue with Isabella, and a reflection on how we read the past through the lens of the present.   CJLPA : In your talk, ‘Being lost and being afraid is a part of writing’, you mentioned that before you began writing Sacred Hearts , you knew it would open in a cloistered convent, with the silence broken by the scream of a young girl. That striking image stayed with you throughout the research process.   In The Marchesa , you begin with a very different kind of sensory register: scent. ‘I have always had the most sensitive nose’ is the novel’s opening line, a sharp contrast to the auditory jolt of Sacred Hearts .   Why did you choose to open with Isabella’s sense of smell—her perception of bodies, decay, and perfume—evoking a rich fusion of Renaissance luxury and the physical erosion of her afterlife? Was this sensory focus present throughout your research process?   Sarah Dunant : It’s a good question, actually. The gleam of the idea for this novel came when I was in the archives in Mantua, and I got to step behind the door to take a look at where all the actual documents are stored. It’s an extraordinary building, once a deconsecrated church and an old Jesuit convent, with a mind-blowing amount of history pulsing out at you from stacks and stacks of disintegrating folders. And it struck me, because I already knew then how many letters Isabella had written and how many were written to her, that in some sense Isabella herself was in that archive. She was there in the letters. She saturated the ink of them.   I had this image that when I opened those folders she would somehow be there, hovering above, looking down at me or indeed whichever scholar was studying her. In fact, when I finally sat in the actual reading room, the setting was a huge disappointment; municipal, boring, and bare, so it was harder to hold that image. But at the same time I felt there was also a smell coming off all those disintegrating letters—a slight scent of decay, if you like. Now I already knew that Isabella had a relationship with scent, she produced her own perfumes. And that smell was important to many women at that time because of the relationship of bodies and sweat and dirt.   I’ve always felt that within historical novels, indeed within history, we spend a lot of time with the words but much less time with the senses. So I thought it would be fitting to begin not just with Isabella’s presence, but also her sense of smell.   That idea coalesced the more research I did, the more I understood syphilis, for instance, and what it meant to live with someone who had it, as her husband did. That understanding started to shift how I thought about smell: how it might carry disease, how perfume was also used to ward off the plague as well as mask unpleasant odours.   So I suppose what I’m saying is that that single image of her being present in the archive became a kind of magnet. As my research went on, other ideas fused onto it. There’s a passage later in the book where Isabella actually says the problem with history is that it’s all words, you can’t enter the senses, and she tries to take the scholar back into the court, to taste and smell the food, feel the cloth, hear the sounds. Because that is vital as a way to bring the past alive.   But it isn’t until you remind me, of course, that Sacred Hearts  began with a scream, another version of the senses, something hitting you from history, that I realise this has always been something the historian in me has been drawn to. Indeed, historians are now working on things like soundscapes for particular periods. And so we try to project people back atmospherically and sensuously, as well as through the rather dry, desiccated notion of the word on the page.   CJLPA : The nature of your book involves the interweaving of narrative and history, and you include italicised fragments from Isabella’s real-life letters, which are often verbatim. You then expand on them into a narrative with emotional depth. Rather than inventing a character entirely, it seems you’re really building on what the text gives you, adding interiority while staying grounded in the history and context. How did you approach that layering process, and what guided you in developing a voice and perspective around these documents?   SD : Actually, I think that Isabella is the greatest gift a writer could possibly have, because although she is, in many cases, a piece of work, a definite manipulator—she’s got charm and she’s also politically savvy. She uses letters as part of her diplomatic armoury, both to get what she wants in art and to control political situations when she’s having to rule the state. You start to see how letters contained absolutely everything during that period.   While we now tend to think of letters as something intimate, in that period they served as a kind of armour, especially for a woman with status and influence. For Isabella, they were a tool for everything from managing family relationships to controlling foreign policy or acquiring a work of art.   If you read enough of her words, you begin to watch the chameleon-like shifts in her tone depending on whom she’s addressing. She’s imperious when crossed: when the artist Giovanni Bellini in Venice fails to deliver a painting, she takes him to court to reclaim her money. That’s one kind of Isabella. Then there’s the charming Isabella, as when it’s clear they backed the wrong horse in one of the Italian wars, and she has to be as friendly to France as she was to Spain. You watch her craft letters full of flattery, things like ‘Oh, we’re all wearing the fleur-de-lis here because it’s so wonderful that you won’. Through these letters, you begin to appreciate both her intelligence and her guile. This also highlights how women wielded power at the time: they couldn’t show their hand openly. Both the art market and the diplomatic world, where most decisions were made, were run entirely by men.   How, then, did women make their mark without seeming too pushy? Once I found her voice, I saw she had self-awareness, she knew when to be tough and when to be charming. There’s a moment in the book when her husband is in prison, and she must write a pleading letter to the Queen of France, asking her to intercede. I imagined her sitting, crafting the very flowery prose: ‘Oh, I die a thousand times when I think of my poor husband’. Of course a thousand is too much, and she knows it, but it’s deliberately over the top as a way to get to the Queen. Moments like this gave me the richness of her personality. It’s also a historical observation because it shows how women mixed emotion and diplomacy through letters.   At one level, I think all my historical novels are a political, feminist reclamation of a past usually dominated by men. Ask people to name figures from the Italian Renaissance and very few will come up with a woman’s name. But I wanted to write books that are also a gripping read, so you keep turning pages to find out what happens. Having worked for the BBC over many years, I recall its founder Lord Reith’s idea that good broadcasting should ‘inform, educate, and entertain’. Over time, that word education has come to be seen as rather elitist or threatening in culture. So I have inverted that: if you entertain, you can inform, and maybe even educate, slipping it in under the guise of entertainment.   CJLPA : Going on from this, Isabella is so wonderfully sharp, reflective, but also can be envious, jealous, and performative. In this moment for example, where you write ‘My hand reveals a tremor, deliberate, of course, as I write the words’. Here she’s calculated, and she seems self-conscious of her effect on history.   Did you find moments in her real letters where that kind of theatrical self-awareness emerged? Was there a particular piece of correspondence that revealed the contrast between the woman and the icon, between the strategist and the self-doubting daughter?   SD : What I will say is that sometimes the letters challenge us across time. One in particular stands out: after giving birth to a second daughter, she writes a short, painful letter to her husband saying, ‘the chill that has come over me because I have given birth to another daughter’. For the modern reader, it can be jarring. Too often, we look to the past, expecting people to wear prettier dresses and feel exactly as we do. But if you do the real work of a historian, you begin to understand that their thoughts grew from a different cultural soil.   This letter is a striking example of that. At the time, marriages often faltered if a woman couldn’t produce a male heir. Isabella needs to produce a boy, and six years into her marriage, she hasn’t. And within that letter, I think something else is being revealed about her. The novelist in me thought: I don’t think this woman enjoys sex, actually. I think what she enjoys is the work she’s doing as a collector of art. She takes pleasure in being smart, confident, and politically capable. She doesn’t strike me as one of those women who coasted by on their looks and male attention.   CJLPA : Do you think this was an area where her sister Beatrice thrived in a way Isabella didn’t?   SD : Yes, I think so. And in that case, I wonder if it all felt quite daunting for her, the idea that, as she tells the scholar, ‘I know it is challenging for you to read that word “chill”, but you don’t know what it was like to be me’ .  In that moment, she had failed, again, to deliver a male heir. And that meant they had to keep trying until she did produce those three sons. We don’t often think about that now. We rarely consider that most women at the time would go on to have seven, eight, even nine children, that reality feels so distant from contemporary female experience. But it’s worth remembering: your gender was, in many ways, writing your history for you. And if you wanted to push back against that, you had to be clever, strategic. You had to know when to be sharp, when to be sweet. You had to learn how to survive it.   She’s a gorgeous character for both the novelist and the historian to get their teeth into. Because for the novelist, you can make her life narratively exciting. And for the historian, you can suggest that there are things she’s going to do that you may not necessarily like, coming from your own moment in history. But it seems to me that the imaginative journey of history is to take you back into the past and ask you to soak yourself in difference. And she is a perfect character to do that with, because sometimes she seems very modern, while at other points, she feels absolutely grown from her own moment, in ways that throw a gauntlet down to us.   CJLPA : To touch back on your previous point about Isabella and her sexual relations. There are recurring moments where Isabella complies dutifully with her husband Francesco   II Gonzaga’s sexual advances but registers disgust, such as when ‘he pushes his tongue between my lips […] I get a smell off him […] breath or saliva? […] I feel bile rising in my throat’. This physical revulsion is echoed in her memory of the unsettling, pseudo-sexual relationship between Beatrice and her grandfather, and again later, when Francesco, on his deathbed, acknowledges that Isabella never found pleasure in the bedchamber. How do you see sex and sexual performance functioning in Isabella’s life, and more broadly, in the lives of women of that period?   SD : Well, it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? Because I have to be aware of myself, that I’m also leading a kind of schizophrenic life. There’s both the novelist and the historian in me. And interestingly enough, that’s exactly what I’m talking about in one of my Radio 4 talks: the historian in me cannot prove how Isabella feels about sex, because there’s no evidence of it. But the novelist can ask questions based on the material that’s being uncovered, and that might lead you to feel a certain way.   There’s an extraordinary letter she writes after all the marriage ceremonies have ended and everyone has left. She writes to her sister — and I’m paraphrasing now — ‘My lord could not be nicer to me, but, oh God, I miss you’. And it’s absolutely clear that, yes, she’s young, yes, she’s homesick, but you feel this is a young girl who’s been through some kind of shock. She’s 16, and she’s been in the marriage bed with someone far more experienced than she is, because that’s how it worked in that period.   When we write historical fiction, there’s always a temptation to include sex, it’s part of the romantic cliché, especially with female characters. But we’re doing that from the perspective of decades of openness, of sex being sold back to us, discussed, deconstructed. In reality, many women in the past may not have liked sex or had the chance to explore it. They couldn’t reflect on it the way we can now, the strange contradictions, the mismatches between love and desire. So I wanted to challenge myself: can I write a good historical novel that doesn’t highlight sex? Because often, in novels or period dramas, it’s all about conflict, love, sex, maybe a bit of torture, the usual hooks. But I was more interested in being honest to the period, imagining a woman whose energy isn’t in the bedroom but in power, collecting, and patronage. That felt truer, and just as compelling.   CJLPA : You’ve said that you couldn’t have written these books 25 years ago because the research simply wasn’t there, and that it’s largely thanks to female historians asking new questions that women like Isabella have become more visible. There’s a moment in the novel where Isabella reflects on this shift herself: ‘Slowly, archives, throughout history founded by men for men, were being invaded by women […] my stubbornness, even my bad behaviour, were now to be celebrated’.   It’s a powerful merging of past and present. How do you see this historical reclamation continuing to evolve, both within scholarship and fiction? And what role do you think novelists can play in pushing it forward?   SD : Well, what I could say is that when I studied history at Cambridge, a long time ago, I don’t think I wrote a woman’s name in an essay, possibly a royal name, but that’s it. The history of women was still something we hadn’t really thought about at all. And because my own journey through life coincides, if you like, with the arrival of feminism, I then watched as women, and some men too, started to ask questions of the past that we hadn’t asked before, which in turn also became about challenging whiteness and attitudes to race.   I think if I have an image of history now, it’s history as a kind of pointillist painting. The past is made up of dots. The artist puts a lot of dots on the canvas, and gradually, if you stand back, you get the form and structure of the painting through these dots. Well, what the last 30 or 40 years has done is add hundreds of thousands of dots, dots that for me certainly highlight the other gender in the world, which is women.   Take the Renaissance. In 1976, the historian Joan Kelly wrote the article ‘ Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ That’s how little we knew about women in the Renaissance at that time. Partly, of course, because the Renaissance becomes very fashionable again at the end of the nineteenth century, when history starts to be ‘invented’ by people like Jacob Burckhardt, and they’re not interested in the women. And partly because the only man who writes art history is Giorgio Vasari, and there’s maybe one woman in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists . There was an orthodoxy up until the 1960s: this is what the past was.   But we have run a truck through that now. Indeed, for me one of most fantastic things about feminism is that it hasn’t just changed the present, it’s changed the past.   Now in doing so, novelists have taken broadly two main routes when resurrecting women in history. One was to concentrate on those who broke the mould and should have been more noticed, and the other to give voice to unknown women who were treated badly. So you had this kind of binary approach: famous but hidden, or invisible victims.   What’s fascinating about a character like Isabella is that she’s a real flawed, but hugely interesting woman. I don’t have to make her a victim; she was never anybody’s victim. I don’t have to make her likable. I don’t have to make her sexually attractive. She can stand on her own two feet and be who she was in history: a complex, powerful human being. That, I think, is the last part of feminism’s journey, that we don’t have to excuse these women, or champion them, or feel sorry for them. They’re just included as part of this rich painting, which, when we stand back, now looks measurably different. And I think that’s so important.   It feels to me that that should be the role of historians: to show that history is more complex than we thought, and it’s always more complex than our own moral judgments forged in our moment in time. Our job is to leave our own morality behind and go back and immerse ourselves in the ‘then’. And that’s what makes Isabella such a wonderful subject, because you are  immersed, because she’s actually talking to you. And in the end, I can’t tell when I’m talking or she’s talking, because the two merge.   CJLPA : You’ve spoken about her determination as a collector and how she had to fight to be taken seriously in a male-dominated art market. But her influence extended beyond collecting, into politics, fashion, taste, and the arts across Europe. Her studiolo  is often a focal point for historians. How do you see her use of aesthetics and patronage as part of her self-fashioning and assertion of power?   SD : She’s a little bit like a very, very early Virginia Woolf with A Room of One’s Own . It’s interesting because we know about places like Urbino and Gubbio, where the Duke of Urbino had small rooms for men to consider the classics, appreciate art, and define themselves as cultural beings. Women didn’t have that space.   Right from the start, Isabella goes for it. She had some training in this, born at the right moment, in the 1470s in Ferrara. The main Renaissance focus is usually Florence, Venice, Milan, and Naples, but places like Ferrara and Mantua had great artists and their own early Renaissance schools.   Isabella grew up in a city saturated with art and with parents who greatly appreciated art. On her mother’s wall was a Rogier van der Weyden Deposition , for example. So Isabella understood art from a young age and was well educated. She was perfectly positioned to build her own collection with clear taste.   This was a time when all the big names were sought after. And I think the wonderful thing about that studiolo  is that right from the start, it has marked out on its walls places where the art is going to go. In the case of her first studiolo , we know what her view was, looking out over the lakes. We know where the paintings would have gone; how, when commissioning works, she would specify details like light direction, even the size and number of the figures to be painted. She was at times—and there is no other word for it—a control freak.   Some artists, Bellini for instance, resisted, wanting more freedom. But she’s also lucky because she inherits one of the great mid to late fifteenth-century painters : Andrea Mantegna . Now, he was old by the time she arrives in Mantua and he’s not a particularly loving character. He clearly takes offence of being bossed around by a 17 year old girl.  They clash, but he still delivers art to her, and this gave her confidence to seek—indeed pester—other artists, including Leonardo da Vinci.   Her hunger for art, her confidence, and upbringing surrounded by art meant she wasn’t nervous about her own taste, which is vital for a collector. But as a woman, this was tricky. The dilemma was how much she charmed versus how much she ordered to get what she wanted.   What I really think about Isabella is that she was very lucky. She was a girl child, much loved by her father, and given a fabulous education. It was a moment when women were beginning to be educated in humanist culture, but it wasn’t intended that they would then use it in the way she did. Because she was smart, the firstborn, and adored, she exuded a kind of confidence from a very early age and clearly quite enjoyed showing off. That’s another reason why she is both adorable and deplorable at the same time.   CJLPA : Are there any pieces in her collection that you were particularly fond of or that stuck out to you?   SD : The piece I love, because the story really shows her bad behaviour, is the little Michelangelo statue, which no longer exists. It’s an amazing story. We know that when Michelangelo was a student in the Medici sculpture workshop in Florence, he copied a trope from Greek and Roman mythology: Cupid lying on a bed of stone, sculpted in marble or bronze. It showed the sculptor’s incredible talent to be able to do this with soft, childish flesh.   Michelangelo made one, and then he and a dealer dirtied it up, sent it to Rome, buried it in the ground, and ‘rediscovered’ it before selling it to a cardinal—this was before Michelangelo had become famous. When the cardinal found out it was a fake, he sold it on. But by the time Isabella goes after it, it’s already a famous fake, because Michelangelo’s name is now well known.   She gets it by going behind the backs of her in-laws, whose state has been invaded by Cesare Borgia. They’re actually staying with her at the time, seeking refuge. And she’s clearly always coveted this piece from the Duke of Urbino’s collection. So she writes to her brother, who’s a cardinal, asking if he can intercede with the Pope, who is Cesare’s father, to get her that little statue. And she does get it.   Of course, it’s bad behaviour, right? But as I have her say, and what she more or less says herself in the letters, is that that’s what you do when you’re a collector. And if men behaved like this, it would be seen as them really knowing what they wanted and getting it—strategic intelligence. So don’t blame me. And I love that about her. I know her brother-in-law was very annoyed about it. I know he made it clear when he won back his state that he’d like things back that had been taken. She writes this incredibly artful letter going, ‘Oh, but I spoke to your wife. She said if she knew that I’d liked it, she would have given it to me. So it’s really just between us families, isn’t it?’   She spins this tale and you think, ‘How could you say this?’ But of course, she wanted the Cupid, she got the Cupid, and she kept the Cupid. So at the same time as you’re enormously impressed, you’re quite shocked.   CJLPA : Returning to another shocking moment, the syphilis outbreak had a significant impact on Isabella and her relationship with Francesco. He was surprisingly brash about the illness, writing in 1508 to his agent at the court of Louis XII of France: ‘Please tell the king that my illness is probably caused by love!’—to explain why he may not be able to fight in battle. At the time, it seems the illness was almost celebrated like a battle wound.   Later, Isabella received a letter stating: ‘His Lordship showed me how the marks of his affliction have healed […] he would like to consummate marriage with you again […] a fresh young girl’. In retrospect, the letter reads as deeply unsettling, especially when viewed through a modern lens, with the knowledge we now have about the long-term ramifications of syphilis.   What impact did Francesco’s contraction of syphilis have on Isabella, both personally and publicly? And is there any evidence that they ceased physical relations after his diagnosis?   SD : It’s a question that I asked myself so many times. She must have known. For instance, after 1509, when she is only 34 and clearly still fertile, there are no more children, so in some shape or form she’s managing to avoid the marriage bed. And yet, there is nothing directly in the letters to back that up. Now, obviously, I haven’t read every letter, but I know the scholars who’ve done all the work on her, and I went to them and said, ‘Have you discovered anything about her talking about her husband’s syphilis?’ I mean, she knows syphilis exists — she mentions it in other letters, but there is or was nothing about him.   There’s this great quote by Thomas Aquinas, which still holds true for Isabella’s moment in history: ‘Prostitution is like the sewer in a great palace’. In other words — it is something men need. Sexual politics in this period is all about pure noble women and virile men; the double standard is ferociously powerful.   By 1509, Francesco had likely been suffering from syphilis for some years, though this wouldn’t have been obvious, since initially the symptoms disappeared, giving the illusion of a cure. The disease was still new and poorly understood. (It comes, we think now, from the new world.) It would return in cycles, and a man could remain sexually contagious for three or four years even without visible signs. But again there is no documentation of how noblewomen responded. It’s almost as if they weren’t supposed to know.   So I needed to ask the question, how will the reader find out how she knew? It was when reading Francesco’s letters that I discovered the comment you mentioned to the French king. And then I found that fabulous letter from her secretary when Francesco tells him how his ‘marks of affliction’ have healed, saying outright that he wants his wife home to get into bed with him again.   I love that letter, because we also know the couple had a row around this time. We know, for instance, that she writes back to him furiously. She never mentions his ‘invitation’ or indeed makes any reference to that letter at all. But she basically says, ‘Don’t give me a hard time. You have nothing to condemn me for’. Now, normally, she’s sweet as pie in the letters she writes to him. Whatever she’s personally feeling, it’s ‘Oh, I miss you, I love you’. She plays along with the narrative of the good wife. But in that one, she really goes for him. That, if you like, is the moment when the novelist and the historian go hand in hand again. Because I am sure she knew about the syphilis, and I’m sure it was therefore deliberate that she doesn’t sleep with him.   CJLPA : Giulio Romano created the Room of the Giants  at the Palazzo Te in Mantua, completing it between 1532 and 1535. The fresco portrays the dramatic story of the giants’ rebellion against the gods, drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, specifically Ovid’s Metamorphoses . The Room of the Giants  was commissioned not by Isabella d’Este, but by her son, Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that  whilst Isabella might have resisted the grotesque elements of the Room of the Giants, she was likely captivated by the sheer imagination behind it.   How do you think Isabella’s personal tastes and ambitions influenced her collaboration with Giulio Romano, and what does that reveal about her as a patron and a woman navigating artistic power?   SD : The thing about Isabella is that she was quite traditional in her views on art, particularly when it came to what she felt was morally or aesthetically right. And art was taking a real turn in the 1520s. We were moving away from the height of the Renaissance. Partly, that shift was due to the Sack of Rome, but also because the Renaissance itself was leaving Rome behind. This marked the beginning of the Mannerist period: artists had mastered human anatomy and perspective, and the style began to evolve, becoming more grotesque, more extravagant.   Before long, the Counter-Reformation would sweep in and strip art of its sensuality, responding to anxieties about the Reformation. But I don’t think Isabella was particularly fond of the more fleshy, erotic elements emerging at that time. Take Giulio Romano, for example, an extraordinarily talented painter who trained with Raphael and who in the Palazzo Te created what we now recognise as the first true mannerist palace. He experimented with architecture in ways that Michelangelo would later echo, but Giulio did it first. He was also a master of erotic art. Even today, at the Palazzo Te you’ll see priapic gods cavorting with willing females, or Apollo in a ceiling lunette driving the chariot of the sun across the sky wearing nothing under his billowing tunic. it’s extravagant, overtly sensual, and likely not to Isabella’s taste. She had a certain prudishness.   Nevertheless, I think she appreciated greatness when she saw it. I imagine Isabella sitting in those rooms, recognising how extraordinary it all was. I led a tour to Mantua and Ferrara in the autumn and even today, when people walk into the Room of the Giants, they are stunned. They’ve never seen anything like it. Romano reshaped the room itself, so it no longer feels like a room, but a cave. The original floor was made of pebbles that rose to meet the walls. As one scholar put it, it’s like ‘grotesque Disney’. Completely immersive. You weren’t just looking at art; you were in it. More like stepping onto a film set than viewing a painting.   CJLPA : As we reach the end of The Marchesa , the ending folds in on itself, the scholar becomes the author, the archive becomes the novel. It’s a quietly profound moment about authorship, legacy, and the act of writing history. What does that cyclical structure mean to you? Is it a comment on how we carry the past forward, or how women, across time, help write and rediscover one another into being?   SD : I didn’t know how The Marchesa  would end when I began writing. I knew Isabella’s personality would take the lead, the more I learned about her, the more her voice asserted itself. I always knew I wanted her to be in a kind of silent conversation with the scholar. And looking back, I think the book is partly about how one writes historical fiction, if one is serious about the history.   I’ve now written six of these novels and spent 25 years in the Renaissance, which ironically wasn’t a period I studied when I trained as a historian. So I came to it as an outsider, just as all this rich new research was unfolding. My approach is always split: the historian in me is constantly checking facts, making sure I’ve got the context right. The novelist, though, is waiting for that moment when I can turn knowledge into narrative, when I feel grounded enough in the truth to imagine beyond it.   That shift is almost osmotic. I sit with the research for so long that eventually I stop analysing it and start inhabiting it. I cease to be the historian and become the novelist. So that moment at the end of the book, when Isabella stops being the historical figure and becomes instead a character in a novel, is, in a way, what I believe historical fiction should  do.   It was fascinating being in the company of someone so strong, so smart, so flawed, who could only do what she did by being absolutely determined. You have to show her behaving badly and still forgive her. That’s why I liked the device of her talking to the future, and the future talking back through the scholar. The scholar’s journey is about saying: I leave my present behind and enter your past.   And I have to say, Lily-Rose, it’s really important to me that you have seen so much in it, because I’m now an older white woman. I’m trying to have a conversation about the present in the past. And I would like to have that conversation with people exactly at your moment in life. Because there are so many things to be talked about. The battles certainly haven’t been won. We still need spaces where these intergenerational dialogues can happen. So the fact that you got so much from The Marchesa,  and enjoyed  it—well, that’s everything.   Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin is a Cambridge University graduate, the External Arts Officer at CJLPA , and Managing Editor at The COLD Magazine . Currently working at DMG Media, she will soon begin a Magazine Journalism MA at City, St George, and she is the recipient of the Stationers’ Award. As a journalist and editor, she explores art and culture through film, theatre, literature, fashion, and visual art, with a focus on social issues, cultural context, and representation.

Abstract   In popular discourse, the idea of ‘renaissance’ is rarely associated with Ancient Egypt, but one has to wonder why. Throughout its long history, the land of the Pharaohs underwent a series of transformations, with centralised kingdoms repeatedly disintegrating into a patchwork of regional polities and then being ‘reborn’ several centuries later under unified rule. The reasons for these transformations, and subsequent revivals, were much the same as those we face now: climate change, war, and mass migration. To survive for as long as it did, the Egyptian state frequently had to reinvent itself—and this required an ideology to underpin the reinvention.   With this in mind, Ancient Egyptian culture developed a sophisticated concept of rebirth at the level of both the state and the individual. With the accession of every new Pharaoh, a renewed incarnation of the god of kingship, Horus, was seen as taking the throne. On the individual level, each mortal was guaranteed a renaissance of their own in the afterlife if certain conditions were met, which people were encouraged to work hard to meet. Existence was thus seen as both a progression of events going forward and a cycle of perpetual renewal. Indeed, the vocabulary of the Egyptian language itself has distinct words for linear and cyclical time: it acknowledges that all things grew older, but also that all things recycle themselves, as epitomised by the daily spectacle of sunrise and sunset. As we confront the challenges of renewal and transformation in our own societies, this article hopes to add perspective by tapping into the wisdom of a people who were already theorising these same topics four millennia ago—and drawing conclusions which may prove surprisingly useful today.   Introduction—Why does renaissance matter to Egyptology?   Renaissance and Egyptology seem at first sight to be unlikely bedfellows—in fact, in the popular imagination one might be more inclined to construe them as close to polar opposites. The term ‘renaissance’ carries in its very name connotations of the new and the renewed, whereas Ancient Egypt, at least as far as modern audiences are concerned, does not. This prevalent view is summed up perhaps most effectively by Daniel J Boorstin, an eminent American historian and former Librarian of Congress: describing the Ancient Egyptians, he claimed that ‘for three thousand years their sculpture showed less change than modern European sculpture in a decade’, characterising their culture as a ‘changeless rhythm of daily life’ entirely dominated by Pharaoh, the ‘unchanging god’.[1] The archetypal symbol of Ancient Egypt in popular culture, the pyramid, has long been seen as eternal and static, encapsulated by the medieval Arab proverb ‘Man fears Time, but Time fears the Pyramids’. Professional Egyptologists too have been eager to stress the significance of the pyramids’ enduring appeal—and that of Egyptian material culture more broadly—for the development of their discipline and sustained public interest in it.[2] And yet, a contrasting trend is also present: that of analysing Ancient Egypt as a dynamic system undergoing repeated cycles of change, in line with how the Egyptians themselves perceived their culture.   The historical case for ‘renaissance’ in Ancient Egypt   At the most basic level, ‘renaissance’ is an appropriate word to deploy in studies of Ancient Egyptian history because the Egyptians themselves used it. The term wehem mesut —literally ‘repeating of births’ was an established feature of the Egyptian language denoting a return to what was perceived as good social and political order after a period of chaos.[3] This reflected a key trend in Ancient Egyptian history throughout the Pharaonic period, which was marked by repeated cycles of political centralisation and fragmentation.[4] The first such cycle began with the formation of the very first unitary Egyptian state in the Early Dynastic Period (c.   3000-2686BCE), which gradually evolved into the highly centralised Old Kingdom (2686-2160BCE). This time, best known today for grandiose and extremely expensive royal construction projects such as the Giza Pyramids, ultimately proved both politically and economically unsustainable. A series of weak rulers failed to exercise effective control over the country’s regional centres, while these centres came to realise the potential economic benefits of seceding from the unitary state. The situation was exacerbated by climate change leading to low Nile floods and greater aridification of the surrounding Nile valley.[5] As a result, the Old Kingdom crumbled, ushering in a period with no universally recognised Pharaoh: the First Intermediate Period (2160-2055BCE).   The second cycle then began, centralisation being restored once more with the advent of the Middle Kingdom (2055-1650BCE). Among the first Pharaohs of this newly reunified polity was Amenemhat I (r. 1985-1956BCE), in whose reign the concept of ‘repeating of births’ was explicitly included in the royal titulary as one of the King’s names.[6] This reign saw the consolidation of state administration around a single royal court once again, with this ‘renaissance’ cemented by the return of the capital to the city of Memphis, the traditional seat of Pharaonic government in the Old Kingdom. The Middle Kingdom would go on become what is widely accepted as the classical age of Egyptian literature and also saw Egypt develop imperial ambitions in Nubia and the Levant on a hitherto unprecedented scale. However, it too eventually succumbed to forces of decentralisation, driven on this occasion by vast population movements from the Levant into northern Egypt.[7] These immigrant communities, collectively known today as the Hyksos, were eventually able to set up their own state in the Nile Delta that was independent of indigenous Egyptian government in the south, leading to another period of fragmentation: the Second Intermediate Period (1650-1550BCE).   The third cycle, marking another ‘renaissance’ of the unitary Egyptian state, emerged out of the warfare between the Hyksos and indigenous Egyptian populations that characterised the Second Intermediate Period. It gave rise to the New Kingdom (1550-1069BCE), arguably the most famous historical period of Egyptian history among today’s public. With the Hyksos driven out or subsumed into indigenous communities, Egypt once more coalesced around a single Pharaoh. This was the age of Tutankhamun (r. 1336-1327BCE) and the Valley of the Kings, the epoch of Ramesses II (r. 1279-1213BCE) and the apogee of Egyptian imperialism, far outstripping even the heights of the earlier Middle Kingdom.[8] However, cracks within the system eventually emerged, with court factionalism, incursions from the west and south by Libyan and Nubian forces, and food shortages all contributing to a growing sense that by the twelfth century BCE Egypt was again on the decline.[9] This in turn meant the idea of ‘repeating of births’ once again sprang to the forefront, being officially made the name of a new era during the turbulent and politically unstable reign of Ramesses XI (r. 1099-1069BCE).[10] Ultimately, these efforts to give new life to the New Kingdom did not prove successful and fragmentation returned with the onset of the Third Intermediate Period (1069-664BCE), but the ill-fated efforts of Ramesses XI and his government do at least point to the ongoing ideological relevance of ‘renaissance’ as a concept.   Moving on to the first millennium BCE, new political realities meant that the language of renaissance changed somewhat, as the Egyptian state would never again be reconstituted on the same territorial scale, but the general idea of rebirth after a period of hardship—and, at times, even existential crisis—emerged stronger than ever before. This is evidenced by a strong tradition of oracular literature, works such as the Demotic Chronicle , the Dream of Nectanebo , and ultimately the early Roman-era Egyptian texts known as the Oracle of the Lamb and the Oracle of the Potter .[11] All of these highlight the challenges first millennium BCE Egypt faced in view of its occupation by one foreign power after another: Nubians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and finally Romans. However, the Oracles —which typically purport to be the recorded utterances of divinely-inspired prophets—all conclude with a promise of the Egyptian state being reborn under a future ruler who will take the country to a destiny greater than at any time in the past. While such hopes were not borne out by events, they nonetheless serve as a testament to the enduring appeal of ‘renaissance’ as an idea in the Egyptian public consciousness.   The ‘renaissance’ of the individual and the divine in Ancient Egyptian thought   Set against this backdrop of the state repeatedly reinventing and recreating itself—or at least trying to—are various Egyptian beliefs on how mortal individuals and deities might themselves go through a ‘renaissance’ of their own.[12] The most famous of these is undoubtedly the Ancient Egyptian conceptualisation of the afterlife. Egypt was the first civilisation in the world to produce a detailed set of writings on what happens beyond the grave and how a new beginning may be achieved after the ultimate point of destruction: death. Starting with the Pyramid Texts  of the Old Kingdom,[13] through the Coffin Texts  of the Middle Kingdom,[14] and culminating in New Kingdom’s Book of the Dead ,[15] the Egyptians developed an increasingly sophisticated theology on reanimation in the next life. In its canonical form, this involved the inert dead body, preserved as a mummy, regaining vitality after the heart of the deceased had been judged and found worthy by the divine assessors of the Hall of Two Truths—symbolised by the weighing of the heart against the Feather of Truth ( Maat ).[16] With this test overcome, the deceased could enter the lush ‘field of reeds’ that represented the Egyptian afterlife.[17]   Parallels with this story of reanimation are visible in a range of other Egyptian beliefs. Osiris, the chief chthonic deity, was believed to have originated as Egypt’s first King in this existence, but was thought to have transmuted himself into an afterlife ruler after his death. Having been murdered, cut into pieces, and dispersed—hence becoming deprived not only of life but also of physical form—Osiris was nonetheless put back together again and arose in a new life.[18] Those who died subsequently could then merge with him after their own passing, thereby partaking in the original reanimation.[19] Meanwhile, back in the world of the living, it would fall to the son of Osiris, Horus, to initiate renewal and lead the next generation. It is, therefore, unsurprising that this regenerative Horus identity was bestowed on each new King, every incoming ruler explicitly named as the living incarnation of that god as part of the royal titulary.[20]   However, the Osiris mythology went far beyond offering ‘renaissance’ for individuals and the King. It was also connected to an even more fundamental cycle of cosmic renewal—that of the sun and its god Re, threatened with final destruction daily after sunset by a cosmic serpent but nonetheless reborn every day after a perilous journey through the Twelve Hours of the Night.[21] Each night Re was thought to descend into the afterlife to physically unite into one body with Osiris, thereby obtaining the power necessary for his own resurrection as the rising sun.[22] Going back to the individual, we can see that the rebirth of each person relies on essentially the same mechanism as the rebirth of the sun: entry into the afterlife (death), merging with Osiris who had overcome death, and emerging afresh in a new existence. In such a theological setting, the rising of the sun every morning would have brought considerable comfort; here was highly visible evidence of a solar ‘renaissance’, a recurring sign that people too could be reborn.   Indeed, so profound was the Ancient Egyptian focus on cycles of rebirth that it was even reflected in how they conceptualised time itself. Jan Assmann has demonstrated that the term used to denote cyclical time, neheh , differed to the term used for the unending progression of time, djet .[23] The conventional expression denoting ‘for all eternity’, typically used on tomb inscriptions, invoked both these concepts: its literal reading, r neheh hena djet  (‘for cyclical time together with unending time’), underlined the nature of existence as both cyclical and linear at once.[24] The Egyptians clearly recognised that time was passing and that, among other things, they themselves were getting older, but parallel to this they could see cycles of renewal all around them: whether the daily cycle of the sun, the centuries-long cycles of fragmentation and reunification in Egyptian history, or religious beliefs around Osiris and their own eventual rebirth. No doubt the cyclical nature of the annual Nile flood, so central to Egyptian agriculture, would have further consolidated this focus on different types of renewal as part of day-to-day lived experience.[25]   Lessons from Ancient Egypt: ‘Renaissance’ as a way of living   To the Ancient Egyptians, ‘renaissance’ was not an abstract concept associated with a particular historical epoch or artistic tradition, but rather a way of living, something fundamental to existence itself on the level of gods, people, and the state. There was an acknowledgement that everything had to end—and that at times such endings could be brutal—but there was also immense confidence that everything could be reborn too. No destruction was seen as permanent.   In our world today, we could draw considerable benefit from similar lines of thinking. This is because, at least at first sight, our situation seems fairly bleak: there is no shortage of apocalyptic news, ranging from the impending and seemingly inevitable threat of global climate catastrophe to growing concerns about nuclear war. All this is set against the backdrop of a mental health crisis among the young and a cost of care crisis among the old, unprecedented levels of irregular and dangerous migration, and generally declining living standards among vast tranches of the population with no obvious solution. This looks like a recipe for a disaster every bit as frightening as anything the Egyptians could envisage in their own oracular tradition, but, unlike the Egyptians, our own society does not seem to share their optimism in expecting renewal. This tendency towards demoralisation is a cause for concern, not least due to its potential capacity to breed resignation and inaction.   Clearly, none of this should be interpreted as a call for us to wholeheartedly embrace Ancient Egyptian beliefs—relying on a new ‘renaissance’, in an act of blind faith, to simply come along automatically and solve all our problems as a matter of course is obviously not a viable strategy. However, paying more attention to the renewable elements of our own lives—and in particular what we can do both as individuals and as a society to bring about instances of ‘renaissance’ great and small—would be far more meaningful. As we go about recycling plastic, rebalancing the carbon cycle, or recalibrating European and global security, we could do a lot worse than contemplate the Egyptian notion of neheh —the cyclical time that allows things to start over again even as the arrow of time, djet , presses on. Such a way of thinking proved helpful to the Egyptians over three millennia, so perhaps it can help us too. There certainly seems to be no harm in giving it a go. Alex Loktionov Alex Loktionov is an Egyptologist. He is a Fellow of Christ’s College and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Egyptology at the Institute of Oriental and Classical Studies at HSE University, Moscow. He is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College, London. [1] Daniel J Boorstin, The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination  (Random House 1992) 153. [2] Examples are numerous. For the pyramids specifically, see for instance Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, Giza and the Pyramids  (Thames and Hudson 2017) 80-107; Miroslav Verner, The Pyramids: The Archaeology and History of Egypt’s Iconic Monuments (American University in Cairo Press 2020). For other examples, see for instance Edna R Russman, Eternal Egypt: Masterworks of Ancient Art from the British Museum  (British Museum Press 2001); Pierre Montet, L’Égypte éternelle  (Marabout 1964). [3] Jacobus van Dijk, ‘The Amarna Period and the Later New Kingdom’ in Ian Shaw (ed), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt  (Oxford University Press 2000) 309. For more detailed surveys of Egyptological sources mentioning this term, see Andrzej Niwinski, ‘Les pèriodes whm mswt dans l’histoire de l’Égypte’ (1996) 136 Bulletin de la Société Française d’Égyptologie 5-26; Rolf Gundlach, ‘Wiederholung der Geburt’ (1986) 6 Lexikon der Ägyptologie   1261-4. [4] For a helpful summary of key political, social, and economic developments across the entire Pharaonic period, the standard reference work remains Ian Shaw (ed), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt  (Oxford University Press 2000). The chronology given in that book serves as the basis for dates in the present article. For more detailed chapters on practices in specific periods, as well as extensive further references, see Juan Carlos Moreno García (ed), Ancient Egyptian Administration  (Brill 2013). [5] The literature on climate change at the end of the Old Kingdom is sizable. See for instance Fabian Welc and Leszek Marks, ‘Climate change at the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt around 4200 BP: New geoarchaeological evidence’ (2014) 324 Quaternary International 124-33; more recently Judith Bunbury, The Nile and Ancient Egypt  (Cambridge University Press 2019) 63-76. [6] For more on this, see Dorothea Arnold, ‘Amenemhat I and the Early Twelfth Dynasty at Thebes’ (1991) 26 Metropolitan Museum Journal   18. [7] For more on these population movements and associated questions of identity and social perception, see Danielle Candelora, Redefining the Hyksos: Immigration and Identity Negotiation in the Second Intermediate Period (UCLA PhD Dissertation 2020) < https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01d9d70t > accessed 10 August 2023. [8] For the latest study of Egypt as an empire in this period, see Ellen Morris, Ancient Egyptian Imperialism  (Wiley-Blackwell 2018) 117-252. [9] For a convenient brief overview of these processes, see van Dijk (n 3) 305-9. [10] For a concise recent treatment of developments in the reign of Ramesses XI, see Kathlyn Cooney, ‘The New Kingdom of Egypt under the Ramesside Dynasty’ in Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller, and Daniel Potts (eds), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Vol. III: From the Hyksos to the Late Second Millennium BC (Oxford University Press 2022) 337-41. [11] For summaries of all of these and further literature, see Alexandre Loktionov, ‘Egyptian Oracles and the Afterlife’ in Hilary Marlow, Karla Pollmann, and Helen van Noorden (eds), Eschatology in Antiquity  (Routledge 2021) 51-7. [12] The distinction between the mortal and the divine individual was notoriously blurred in Ancient Egypt. As will be shown, this makes ‘renaissance’ concepts equally applicable to both. For a useful introduction to the nature of the divine in Ancient Egypt and the relationship between gods and mortals, see Richard Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (Thames and Hudson 2003) 26-35. [13] A convenient edition is James Allen (ed), The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Society of Biblical Literature 2005). [14] These represent a vast corpus of literature pertaining to survival and transformation in the afterlife—see Adriaan de Buck and Alan Gardiner (eds), The Egyptian Coffin Texts , 7 vols (University of Chicago Press 1935-1961). [15] Raymond Faulkner (ed), The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead  (British Museum Press 2010). [16] This theology is stated in Book of the Dead  Spells 30B and 125—see ibid 27-34. [17] For more on the terminology and imagery of the ‘field of reeds’, see Dieter Mueller, ‘An Early Egyptian Guide to the Hereafter’ (1972) 58  Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 99-125. [18] The canonical version of this myth is preserved in Plutarch’s Moralia . See < http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/moralia/isis_and_osiris*/a.html > (accessed 10 August 2023). [19] The deceased is called ‘the Osiris N’ throughout the Book of the Dead— see Faulkner (n 15). [20] For a study of the royal titulary and a comprehensive set of accompanying royal names, see Ronald Leprohon, The Great Name: Ancient Egyptian Royal Titulary (Society of Biblical Literature 2013). [21] For full details on this set of beliefs, see Erik Hornung and Theodor Abt (eds), The Egyptian Amduat: The Book of the Hidden Chamber (David Warburton tr, Living Human Heritage Publications 2007). In this story, the sun god Re overcomes a new challenge in every hour of the night, until he is eventually reborn on the eastern horizon in the morning. [22] For more on Osiris-Re syncretism and the associated iconography, see Wilkinson (n 12) 35, 120. [23] Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt (Metropolitan Books 2002) 18. [24] For a very recent and extremely comprehensive study of neheh and djet  and their full range of uses in Egyptian texts, see Steven Gregory, Tutankhamun Knew the Names of the Two Great Gods: d̠t and nḥḥ as Fundamental Concepts of Pharaonic Ideology (Archaeopress 2022). [25] The Nile flood and the mud it brought was also explicitly associated with Osiris—see Wilkinson (n 12) 122.

Funding for the arts is quite frequently commended by political philosophers and political pundits—whom I shall call ‘edificatory perfectionists’—as a policy that can incline people to improve their ways of life by taking advantage of cultural opportunities.[1] By contrast, this article advocates such funding because it can promote the occurrence of outstanding achievements and thereby help to bring about the conditions under which every citizen can be warranted in feeling a strong sense of self-respect. Such a rationale will be designated here as ‘aspirational perfectionism’. Naturally, the tenor of aspirational perfectionism would be especially plain in policies that establish competitions and prizes for excellence in the arts. However, for the purpose of sharpening the contrast between aspirational perfectionism and edificatory perfectionism, let us continue to focus on subventions disbursed by a system of governance to enable the producers or organizers of artistic events to price their tickets at affordable levels. Subsidies so aimed can indeed sensibly figure among the techniques plied by a system of governance in pursuit of the objectives of aspirational perfectionism.   Whereas edificatory perfectionists favour such subsidies as means of steering members of the public toward more sophisticated pastimes and lifestyles, aspirational perfectionists favour them principally as means of sustaining the sundry aesthetic ventures through which great accomplishments can emerge. In the absence of those subventions and in the absence of any private-sector subventions that would be of approximately the same scale and efficacy, the number of people in attendance at high-art events (with staggeringly expensive tickets) would dwindle to the point where most such events might lose their viability altogether. As a result, there would be a sharp diminution in the abundance of the fora wherein painters and composers and playwrights and authors and musicians and other practitioners of the high arts are able to present their endeavours to the public. Those endeavours would consequently be set back, as practitioners of the high arts would struggle to come up with their livelihoods and with the audiences on whom they could try out their ideas. If public subsidies for events in the arts can avert such setbacks by keeping the events affordable and by thus providing the practitioners of the high arts with ample opportunities to gain attention for their offerings, the subsidies can encourage the aesthetic striving that is necessary for the attainment of excellence in the high arts. They can also promote a rich cultural tapestry that is itself a mode of societal excellence.   Of course, the scenario sketched in the preceding paragraph adverts to a number of empirical contingencies that might or might not obtain in any given society. For one thing, as has already been suggested, the likelihood or unlikelihood of adequate private-sector subventions for the arts in the absence of public subventions is obviously a matter that can vary from one society to another. That matter and the other contingencies recounted in the aforementioned scenario would have to be explored by the relevant officials in any system of governance before they could legitimately go ahead with disbursals of funding for the arts. Still, although the legitimacy of such disbursals will hinge partly on those contingencies, a situation in which the facts do militate in favour of public funding is not at all implausible. On the contrary, the facts can align in favour of some public subventions in many credibly possible societies.   Under the aspirational-perfectionist rationale for public financial support of the arts, any enhancement of the aesthetic sensibilities of the citizenry is a byproduct rather than a justificatory factor. Welcome though such a byproduct undoubtedly is, it does not contribute to the justificatory basis for the policy of public subventions. To invoke it as an element of that justificatory basis would be to evince the meddlesome mentality of edificatory perfectionism. That is, if a system of governance adopts a policy of funding the arts, and if one of its aims in doing so is to increase the urbanity of its citizens, its policy is tainted by the officiousness of a busybody. Its policy is a product of edificatory perfectionism rather than solely of aspirational perfectionism.   Nonetheless, although an aspirational-perfectionist system of governance that provides subsidies for the arts is not thereby endeavouring to refine the sentiments and outlooks of citizens, it is endeavouring to improve their lives in quite a different fashion. Its immediate aim in supplying the subsidies is to nurture excellence in the arts by helping to ensure that audiences and livelihoods will be available to the practitioners thereof, but its underlying objective through the promotion of excellence is to enable every citizen to be warranted in harbouring a robust sense of self-respect. Given the centrality of warranted self-respect to a good life (not only by the reckoning of aspirational perfectionists, but also by the reckoning of Rawlsians), aspirational perfectionism does indeed aim to make each person’s life better. However, instead of trying in the manner of a busybody to elevate the lifestyle or sensibilities of each person, it tries to endow a society with estimableness on which the warranted self-respect of every member of the society can be partly based.   Thus, the aspirational-perfectionist rationale for the subventions envisioned here is considerably more complex than the edificatory-perfectionist rationale. Under either of those justifications, the immediate effect sought through the subventions is on the members of the public whose inclinations to attend high-art events will be triggered by the affordability of the tickets for the events. However, edificatory perfectionists seek that effect in the hope that the members of the public will be uplifted through their engagement with aesthetically sophisticated performances or exhibitions. By contrast, although an aspirational perfectionist can of course applaud the edification of members of the public and can perceive that it is a likely consequence of the policies which she commends, her prescriptions are not oriented toward it. Rather, aspirational perfectionists seek the attendance of members of the public at high-art events to sustain the flourishing cultural conditions in which the occurrence of outstanding feats of creativity is encouraged. In other words, the effect on the members of the public is sought for the sake of the resultant effect on the practitioners of the arts—composers, authors, playwrights, painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, and so forth—whose creative striving will be vitalized. In turn, that effect on the practitioners of the arts is pursued by aspirational perfectionists for the sake of the resultant effect on the warrantedness of everyone’s sense of self-respect. Insofar as the vitalization of the creative striving undertaken by the practitioners of the arts does fruitfully lead to top-notch achievements, it will have imbued their society with a mode of excellence. If the society is likewise excellent in some other ways and is governed as a liberal democracy, it comprises the conditions under which every citizen can be warranted in feeling a high level of self-respect. (Of course, as this chapter will remark, the excellence of a society is only a necessary condition rather than a sufficient condition for the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect on the part of each citizen. Numerous specificities of the conduct of any particular individual will bear on whether she is warranted in harbouring a strong sense of self-respect, and those specificities along with numerous specificities of her temperament will bear on whether she actually feels such a sense of self-respect.)   Naturally, some aspirational-perfectionist policies—for example, some prizes or fellowships or other such awards—will be more straightforwardly aimed at promoting the occurrence of outstanding achievements than are the subventions for the arts that have been pondered here. Public support for the arts and for other endeavours can be channelled by sundry routes. However, subsidies of the type contemplated here are important not only because they are familiar and because their immediate beneficiaries are quite numerous, but also because they can help to shape a rich medley of cultural offerings that will cumulatively constitute a form of excellence with which a society can be endued. Thus, my outline of the aspirational-perfectionist rationale for such subsidies is an apt point of departure for my elaboration of aspirational perfectionism as an alternative both to edificatory perfectionism and to any position that opposes subsidies for the arts.   1. Societal excellence and warranted self-respect   Perhaps the aspect of aspirational perfectionism most in need of clarification and defense is the connection which it postulates between the excellence of a society and the warranted self-respect of the individuals who belong to that society. Why would the warrantedness of anyone’s sense of self-respect depend partly on the occurrence of great accomplishments by other people in his society? If somebody has not been at least tenuously involved in any of those accomplishments, why would the occurrence of them make any difference to the warrantedness or unwarrantedness of his feeling a high level of self-respect? Are aspirational perfectionists preposterously suggesting that individuals should take credit for the feats of others in whose exploits they have not participated at all? Are aspirational perfectionists suggesting that warranted self-respect is partly a vicarious property?   These and related questions may seem to pose serious difficulties for aspirational perfectionism. They manifestly have to be addressed. One thing to be noted straightaway is that these questions are ethical rather than psychological. They are about the warrantedness of certain attitudes rather than about the likelihood that such attitudes will be held. Aspirational perfectionism is premised on ethical claims about warranted self-respect rather than on empirical claims about self-respect. (John Rawls did not sufficiently differentiate the former claims from the latter in his famous discussions of self-respect in Part Three of A Theory of Justice .)[2] Nonetheless, despite the crucial differences between ethical assertions about warranted self-respect and empirical assertions about self-respect, we can fruitfully approach the ethical matters by briefly mulling over some empirical matters. My empirical observations will be at an elementary level and are meant to be suggestive as a transition to my ethical argumentation; they are decidedly not presented as the premises of an argument from which some ethical conclusions would be derived in defiance of the ‘is’/‘ought’ divide.   1.1. Pride in the accomplishments of others   Although the notion of taking pride in the accomplishments of other people can initially seem outlandish, it is in fact instantiated in many commonplace settings. Some of the most resounding instances arise from the fervour felt and exhibited by the followers of teams in various sports. Across many societies, people tend to identify themselves with teams on the basis of numerous different factors: current residence, past residence, institutional affiliation (often determinative in relation to collegiate sports, for example), national affiliation (often determinative in relation to Olympic sports and other international tournaments), and so forth. Myriads of people take great pride in their cherished teams, and they tend to feel better about themselves and their lives when their teams are faring especially well. Of course, such pride is not always entirely vicarious. Spectators who attend some sporting event can contribute quite significantly to the flow of play by cheering vociferously for their favoured team and by showing disfavour for the rival team. Still, the principal responsibility for victories by a successful team belongs to the athletes who make up the team, and no direct responsibility at all for those victories is attributable to followers of the team who have not attended any of the games or matches. All the same, countless devotees of teams who do fall into the not-having-attended category take pride in their teams’ triumphs. Their doing so is an everyday feature of life in most countries.   As has been noted, one of the factors that can lead people to associate themselves enthusiastically with a team is national affiliation. That factor, like each of the other factors mentioned above, extends far beyond the confines of sports. Patriotic sentiments, whether in perniciously chauvinistic forms or in more salutary forms, typically involve the taking of pride in others’ achievements as well as in one’s own achievements. Many people in Finland take pride in the musical accomplishments of Jean Sibelius, who was himself ardently patriotic; many people in England take pride in the magnificent plays and poetry of their countryman William Shakespeare; many people in the United States take pride in the ethical and oratorical greatness of their compatriot Abraham Lincoln; many people in South Africa take pride in the towering stature of Nelson Mandela as a statesman; many people in the Netherlands take pride in the formidable roster of superb painters among their countrymen, ranging from Rembrandt to Vincent van Gogh; and so forth. Patriotism is a pervasively felt attitude or set of attitudes whereby people feel better about their lives because they perceive themselves as belonging to a country that is admirable. Patriotism does not always involve hearty support for the currently reigning government in one’s country; indeed, one’s resistance to a government’s policies or demands can be impelled by one’s sense that the ruling officials have deviated from some commendable values or traditions of one’s country. Still, although patriotism does not always translate into support for the system of governance that currently prevails in one’s country, it leads people to feel lifted above their solitary lives by dint of their being linked to a nation whose institutions or traditions or fellow citizens are perceived by them as laudable.   Numerous people who enter major universities—whether to study or to teach—quite rapidly come to feel proud about the intellectual feats of their predecessors or contemporaries. Universities and many of their members brag about Nobel Prizes and other high-profile awards and achievements attained by those predecessors or contemporaries. They do so partly because the institutions gain prestige from the amassing of such awards and achievements, and because the members materially benefit from belonging to prestigious institutions. However, more generally, a lot of the people who study or teach at a major university derive pride and gratification from their connections to such a centre of learning with its illustrious exploits. Their awareness of those exploits can invigorate them in their own striving for academic excellence. (Of course, as has already been observed, some of the non-academic accomplishments attributable to universities—most notably their sporting triumphs—can also engender great pride in many of the members thereof.)   Like national allegiances and institutional affiliations, regional and local ties are often operative in inclining people to experience greater esteem for themselves by reference to the achievements of others. A host of examples could be adduced here, but three literary instances from England will suffice to illustrate the point. The county of Dorset promotes itself as ‘Hardy country’; the county of Hampshire and the city of Bath compete to promote themselves as ‘Austen country’; and the county of Warwickshire around the town of Stratford-upon-Avon promotes itself as ‘Shakespeare country’. Doubtless, the promotional ventures of these regions and municipalities are undertaken principally in order to encourage potential tourists to visit. However, anyone who visits these places can quickly discern that many of the people who have been brought up in them—not just the tour guides—genuinely harbour feelings of pride from residing where such eminent writers worked.   Heretofore my examples of vicarious pride have pertained chiefly to some outstanding accomplishments attained by individuals or by small sets of individuals. However, people also take pride in great collective accomplishments of others and in glorious features of the natural environment. For instance, many inhabitants of the English city of York (or Ely or Canterbury) experience a somewhat heightened sense of self-esteem as a result of living in the proximity of one of the grandest cathedrals in the world. People who are not religious at all and who do not participate in the maintenance of the York Minster (or Ely Cathedral or Canterbury Cathedral) can nonetheless feel better about themselves as they daily savour its magnificent architecture in their midst.   Similarly, numerous residents of the states in the upper Midwestern portion of the USA have long taken pride in the flagship public universities which their legislatures have established. When describing this phenomenon, the sociologists Christopher Jencks and David Riesman directly analogized the outlooks of citizens in the Midwestern states to those of people who dwell in European cathedral cities: ‘Like medieval cathedrals, public universities in these states seem to have become symbols of communal solidarity, a focus of civic pride, and a tribute to faith in ideas that transcend the here and now’. Even citizens who have not studied or taught at the flagship university in their state can look upon its excellence as a source of gratification accruing to everyone who abides there.   Elements of the natural environment can elicit cognate attitudes. For many people who live in places with spectacular natural scenery, the breathtakingness of the environment serves to reinforce their self-esteem. This role of the natural topography was poignantly captured in June 2014 by Nashreem Ghori, who hails from Pakistan. Speaking to a Washington Post  reporter one year after a massacre perpetrated by Taliban terrorists against foreigners who were climbing in the northern mountains of Pakistan, Ghori lamented the precipitous decline in the flow of tourists and climbers to his country. Inhabitants of northern Pakistan were of course suffering financially from that decline, but they were more profoundly undergoing a collapse in their morale. As Ghori explained: ‘We have so little to be proud of, so if there is something as impressive as this [namely, the mountainous terrain of northern Pakistan], and foreigners come praise it, it’s a psychological lift’.[3] Because people so often identify themselves with the locations in which their lives unfold, the prepossessing features of those locations combine with individuals’ own doings as determinants of their levels of self-esteem.   In short, although the idea of vicarious pride might at first seem queer when it is broached in abstracto , a bit of reflection indicates that vicarious pride is manifested ubiquitously in everyday life. Of course, the pervasiveness of the practice of taking pride in the accomplishments of other people (and in the grandeur of natural environments) is consistent with the proposition that every instantiation of that practice is unwarranted. My empirical observations in this subsection are consistent with that proposition. Even more obviously, those observations are consistent with the proposition that some instances of the aforementioned practice are unwarranted; indeed, that latter proposition is plainly true. Nevertheless, what the observations in this subsection help to underscore is that the bolstering of people’s self-esteem through the achievements of others is not something opaque to us as if it were occurrent only in possible worlds that are highly remote from actuality. It is such a widespread phenomenon that we largely take it for granted.   1.2. Is vicarious pride ever warranted?   As has already been remarked, the discussion in the preceding subsection is not a set of premises from which some ethical conclusions can validly be derived. The ‘is’/’ought’ gap precludes such a derivation from empirical claims. Still, although no ethical conclusions directly follow from those claims, the role of the preceding subsection in drawing attention to the familiarity of vicarious pride is of relevance here. Notwithstanding that some instances of vicarious pride are unwarranted—sometimes egregiously unwarranted—the pervasiveness of such pride and the benignity of many of its manifestations should incline us to be surprised if no solid arguments could be advanced to support the warrantedness of some of its instances.   Unlike the instinct for revenge, which is probably as widespread as the tendency to take pride in the achievements of one’s fellows, the latter tendency is not inherently oriented toward the harming of others. Indeed, it is frequently not so oriented. As the comment by Nashreem Ghori makes clear, the experience of feeling good about oneself by reference to the accomplishments of one’s fellows or to the beauty of nature does not have to involve any denigration of other people. It does not have to involve any nasty gloating or sneering—types of conduct that are indicative of insecurity rather than of warranted self-respect. When an individual has reinforced his sense of self-respect by associating himself with some modes of excellence achieved by others, he can become more appreciative of excellence in its diverse forms. Such an effect is not inevitable in each particular case, but it is always possible and is not at all fanciful. As Rawls contended: ‘When men are secure in the enjoyment of the exercise of their own powers, they are disposed to appreciate the perfections of others’.[4] Rawls characteristically presented his readers with an excessively sweeping empirical assertion, but his thesis becomes much stronger if the disposition to which he referred is understood as a credible possibility rather than as something that always obtains.   Vicarious pride, then, is separable (though not always separate) from any malign attitudes toward others. Important though that point is, however, it does not per se suffice to establish that some instances of such pride are warranted. We still need to address the further ethical question whether the strengthening of one’s self-esteem through one’s association of oneself with the outstanding achievements of others is ever tenable. That question can be sharpened into two concerns. First, would the enhancement of one’s self-respect amount to taking credit for the exploits of others? Second, would it amount to a display of a person’s inadequacy, where the person relies on those exploits to compensate for the insufficiency of her own doings as a basis for her sense of her own worth? Let us designate the first of these queries as the ‘Credit Concern’ and the second as the ‘Inadequacy Concern’.   1.2.1. A first concern addressed   A response to the Credit Concern is quite straightforward. Although some instances of vicarious pride are doubtless impelled by delusions on the part of people who have hoodwinked themselves into thinking that they deserve credit for achievements to which they have not contributed, there are no grounds for thinking that all or even most instances are of that kind. In countless credibly possible situations in which the self-esteem of individuals is reinforced through the splendid exploits of other people or through the captivatingness of natural beauty, the individuals in question are not under any illusions that they are personally responsible for the greatness with which they associate themselves. Worth noting also is that not all instances of vicarious pride are purely vicarious. As has already been mentioned, some of the devotees of teams in various sports do contribute in certain ways to their teams’ victories by attending games or matches with clamorous ebullience. When the devotees feel better about themselves with reference to those victories, they are taking pride in triumphs for which they can accurately claim some small shares of the credit. Much the same is true of quite a few of the stonemasons who make repairs in the magnificent edifices of Cambridge and Oxford colleges.[5] They take pride not only in the results of their own labours, but also in the overall exquisiteness of the architecture which they have helped to preserve.   1.2.2. A second concern addressed   Somewhat more complicated is the second of the two queries broached above, the Inadequacy Concern. Like the Credit Concern, the Inadequacy Concern is accurate in relation to certain instances of vicarious pride. Some individuals who experience such pride are undoubtedly seeking to offset and obscure their own failures by absorbing themselves with the successes of other people. However, such self-deception is scarcely the only possible factor that can prompt a person P to feel a heightened sense of self-esteem through the accomplishments of other people. Instead of unworthily trying to play down any of his own shortcomings, P can simply be recognizing that the trajectory of his life comprises far more than solely his own doings. It also comprehends many of the doings of people who stand in sundry relationships to P. Any satisfactory assessment of the estimableness of P’s life will need to advert to the fortunes of those people, even though such an assessment will of course be focused primarily on P’s own endeavours.   Because P is positioned in the relationships just mentioned, P himself and other people aptly identify his fortunes partly with the fortunes of his contemporaries and predecessors and successors who are linked to him through those relationships. Gauging the goodness of P’s life partly by reference to the activities of some of his contemporaries and predecessors and successors is apt inasmuch as his relationships with them augment the lustre of his life through their successes and detract from the lustre of his life through their failures. Perhaps the most obvious examples of relationships that produce such effects by intertwining people’s lives are those of typical families. If P as a member of a typical family generally fares well in his undertakings, and if the other members of his family fare badly, the goodness of his life will have been lessened by the dismalness of their lives. Of course, the quality of P’s life is primarily determined by his own accomplishments and setbacks; but its estimableness is diminished by the lacklustre fortunes of people with whom P is significantly associated. Conversely, if P generally fares well and if the members of his family also fare well, the goodness of his life will have been augmented by their flourishing. As Rawls affirmed, ‘[w]e need one another as partners in ways of life that are engaged in for their own sake, and the successes and enjoyments of others are necessary for and complementary to our own good.[6] To be sure, the term ‘partners’ in this statement by Rawls should be construed loosely. Even in some families—and a fortiori  in larger and more diffuse groups—the members might seldom come into contact with one another and might not collaborate with one another in any structured fashion. Still, in a typical family and in any of the sundry other groups that Rawls designated as ‘social unions’,[7] the members are partners at least in the sense that their diverse activities cumulatively determine the character of their group to which they all are linked.   In a typical family, the members interact frequently and intimately. In any typical larger group, the members interact less frequently; in a group on the scale of a nation, most of the members will not encounter one another directly at all. Still, despite the limitedness of any direct or intimate interaction among most of the citizens of a sizeable nation, they are partners in the expansive sense that has just been specified. Their conduct cumulatively shapes the ethical character of their society, and that ethical character is a determinant—usually an ancillary determinant, though sometimes a central determinant—of the overall ethical quality of each citizen’s life. Even when somebody fiercely dissociates himself from the society to which he belongs, the trajectory of his life (including his dissociation of himself from his society and his perception of the need to dissociate himself therefrom) will have been inflected in its ethical bearings by the collectivity which he now ferociously excoriates. His very denunciation of that collectivity is expressive of the stake which he has had in its fortunes.   Given the importance of a society in affecting the overall course of the life of each individual who belongs thereto, its members have good reasons to feel better about themselves when other members enhance the society’s stature through their accomplishments. On suitable occasions, they have good reasons to partake in the practice of experiencing vicarious pride. So widespread throughout the world, that practice is often solidly justifiable. This point is particularly pertinent at the level of ideal theory, as Rawls recognized: ‘In a fully just society persons seek their good in ways peculiar to themselves, and they rely upon their associates to do things they could not have done, as well as things they might have done but did not […] It is a feature of human sociability that we are by ourselves but parts of what we might be. We must look to others to attain the excellences that we must leave aside, or lack altogether […] Yet the good attained from the common culture far exceeds our work in the sense that we cease to be mere fragments’.[8] As Rawls’s meditations on social unions serve to accentuate, the fundamental misconception underlying the Inadequacy Concern is the notion that all limitations on a person’s abilities and achievements are a cause for consternation. Some such limitations are indeed a cause for dismay, but the sheer finitude of each person is not. Instead of compensating for ignominious inadequacies, the outstanding feats that warrantedly elicit vicarious pride are such as to complement and enrich the contributions made by other citizens to the overall lustre of their society from which every citizen can benefit.   1.2.3. An apparent objection   By pointing to facts that markedly contrast with those which I have highlighted in §1.1, a wary reader might impugn my effort to ground aspirational perfectionism on the warrantedness of some instances of vicarious pride. Such a reader would submit that, although the attainment of excellence by certain people can heighten the self-esteem of many of their fellow citizens, it can also produce much more deleterious effects. In response to the great achievements of illustrious predecessors or contemporaries, some people can feel daunted and demoralized because their own talents seem to them paltry in comparison. Alternatively, or additionally, some people can feel envious and embittered as they sense that their own exploits have been overshadowed by the remarkable accomplishments of certain predecessors or contemporaries or successors. Far from enhancing the self-esteem of the people who develop these negative attitudes, the remarkable accomplishments in question have substantially impaired their self-esteem. Whether or not such reactions are as common as the practice of taking pride in the great achievements of others, they certainly are familiar.   Any objection to aspirational perfectionism along these lines would be misconceived. As has been emphasized, the empirical observations advanced in §1.1 are not premises from which this chapter has sought to derive ethical conclusions. Rather, in arriving at ethical conclusions, this chapter has inquired whether any of the patterns of behaviour recounted in those empirical observations are warranted or not. My ethical conclusions, reached through ethical reasoning, are an answer (an affirmative answer) to that ethical inquiry.   Now, the empirical observations in the penultimate paragraph above—which of course are consistent with the observations in §1.1, even though their tenor is markedly different—are likewise not premises from which any ethical conclusions can validly be derived. If they are to be parlayed into a challenge to aspirational perfectionism, they will have to be subjected to ethical scrutiny like the scrutiny to which the observations in §1.1 have been subjected. That is, we have to ask whether people are ever warranted in responding to the outstanding achievements of others by feeling daunted and demoralized or envious and embittered. Such attitudes do indeed detract from people’s self-esteem, but are the reductions in self-esteem ever warranted?   On the one hand, if the self-esteem of some person Q is currently at an inordinately high level, his exposure to some sterling accomplishments by other people might salutarily decrease his self-esteem to an appropriate level. He might come to be accurately attuned to his own limitations and merits. If so, the diminution in his self-esteem is warranted. Of course, any such diminution could easily go too far. If Q does become demoralized because of his shedding of his illusions about his abilities, he will unwarrantedly have gone from one excess to another. Nonetheless, if his exaggerated estimation of his own talents is lowered to an apt level without plummeting further to a level of despondency—and without leading to a sour-grapes sense of resignation or sullenness—the reduction in his self-respect will have been warranted.   On the other hand, if the self-respect of Q is currently at an apt level (or even if it is not), and if he becomes dispirited or seethingly envious in response to somebody else’s towering achievements, his reaction is unwarranted. A reaction of either type may be humanly understandable, but it is ethically unworthy. If Q does indeed fall prey to dejected torpor or to envy, he is exhibiting his own ethical weakness by focusing his appraisal of himself largely on the fact that he is not someone else.   Somebody with a warranted sense of self-respect focuses her appraisal of herself on what she is and does: on her abilities, on her accomplishments, and on her relationships with other people and her surroundings. (Of course, if her accomplishments fall well short of what could reasonably be expected on the basis of her abilities, she is warranted in lowering her sense of self-esteem commensurately.) Given that her level of self-respect is pegged accurately to her own abilities and accomplishments and relationships, that level is not degradingly centred on the fact that she lacks someone else’s abilities or on the fact that she has not performed someone else’s deeds. Unlike Q in the preceding paragraph, a person with a warranted sense of self-respect will have attained that sense positively by reference to what she does and is—including her relationships with other people—rather than negatively by reference to her not having done what somebody else has done.   In sum, although the empirical observations at the outset of this subsection are true, they cannot be parlayed into any conclusions that are problematic for aspirational perfectionism. It is quite likely that some people will become demoralized or bitterly envious in response to the outstanding achievements of others, but such self-abasing reactions are always unwarranted as an ethical matter (even if they are psychologically understandable). Any curtailment of someone’s self-esteem that is attributable to such reactions is unwarranted. When a person harbours a proper level of self-respect, that level will have been bolstered rather than sapped by the sterling exploits of others in her society.   1.2.4. Another apparent objection   Wary readers might thus press forth with a different objection to my grounding of aspirational perfectionism on the warrantedness of some instances of vicarious pride. Such readers might point out that, when somebody has grown up in disadvantaged circumstances and has risen above those circumstances to achieve success in some field(s) of endeavour, he will be warranted in harbouring an especially high sense of self-esteem. He can rightly pride himself on his fortitude and talents that have enabled him to overcome the obstacles which he would not have encountered if he had grown up in more auspicious circumstances. Wary readers might also point out that somebody who campaigns effectively against injustices can aptly take satisfaction in what he has done to rectify wrongs. An ancient Hebrew prophet such as Amos or Jeremiah, or a modern-day prophet such as Martin Luther King or Václav Havel or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, could quite properly take pride in his forthright condemnation of iniquity under conditions of grievous peril and persecution. Had such a prophet lived in a better society with much less severe injustice, there would probably have been fewer occasions for him to display his courage and eloquence.   Unlike the riposte to my theorizing that has been plumbed in §1.2.3, this new riposte—which I will henceforth designate as the ‘Struggling Against Adversities Objection’—presents some empirical claims that are already subsumed into ethical propositions about the warrantedness of enhanced levels of self-respect under certain kinds of circumstances. Still, the purport of the Struggling Against Adversities Objection is not entirely clear. It appears to be directed against my thesis that the warrantedness of a high level of self-respect for each person in any society depends partly on the occurrence of outstanding achievements within the society. That thesis does stand in need of further defense, which it will receive in §1.3 of this chapter. By contrast, the arguments in §1.2 have been marshalled not in support of that thesis but in support of an anterior proposition: namely, the proposition that people can sometimes warrantedly take pride in the great accomplishments of others who belong to their society. At any rate, although the Struggling Against Adversities Objection is somewhat premature, three rejoinders to it are pertinent even at this stage.   1.2.4.1. Illegitimate measures   First, this article is primarily a work of political philosophy. Its argument about the warrantedness of some instances of vicarious pride is ultimately in the service of conclusions about the proper role of any system of governance. More specifically, those conclusions pertain to the ways in which any system of governance is both morally obligated and morally permitted to bring about the conditions under which every citizen can be warranted in harbouring a strong sense of self-respect. Even if the Struggling Against Adversities Objection were correct in suggesting that every citizen could be so warranted as a result of coming to grips with obstacles posed by injustices or by natural hardships such as disabilities, no system of governance would ever be morally permitted to inflict injustices on citizens for the sake of providing them with opportunities to meet the ensuing challenges. No system of governance can ever legitimately perpetrate injustices for any purpose—not even the purpose of promoting the incidence of warranted self-respect.   The dialectical situation here is somewhat akin to that which confronted the apostle Paul in his Letter to the Romans. Quite early in that letter, Paul noted that some of his opponents had accused him of propagating the message that sinful behaviour is permissible and even commendable because it gives rise to occasions for the working of God’s redemptive grace: ‘And why not do evil that good [in the form of God’s forgiveness and salvation] may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying’ (3:8). When Paul returned to this matter subsequently in the letter, he emphatically affirmed that sinful behaviour is never permissible even when it is undertaken in pursuit of benign ends (6:1–2): ‘What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?’   In short, even if the Struggling Against Adversities Objection were unproblematic in all other ways, it would not be broaching a prospect on the basis of which any system of governance could ever legitimately act. Aspirational perfectionism is located within an array of deontological constraints. Each such constraint is absolute in that it is always and everywhere morally binding. Contraventions of a deontological constraint are never morally permissible even if they are somehow promotive of good consequences such as the strengthening of a person’s warranted self-respect. Yet a system of governance would blatantly violate deontological constraints if it were deliberately to afflict people with poverty or disabilities or other serious hardships in order to furnish them with opportunities to surmount those hardships. Hence, the Struggling Against Adversities Objection does not cast any doubt on the proposition that every system of governance is morally obligated and morally permitted to avert or remedy injustices rather than to generate them.   1.2.4.2. Warranted self-respect impaired   In any event, the Struggling Against Adversities Objection errs in suggesting that a country where prophets need to rail against iniquities is a land in which a system of governance has secured the conditions under which every citizen can be fully warranted in harbouring a strong sense of self-respect. Specifically, what is missing is the mode of excellence that consists in the realization of the requirements of justice. Of course, a society can attain that mode of excellence without being perfectly just; however, a society debased by injustices on a scale that elicits well-founded prophetic remonstrations is not a community whose members can warrantedly take pride in their status as members. It is not surprising that what suffuses the declamations of the Hebrew prophets, in addition to a sense of truculent indignation, is a sense of shame. Although the prophets were not personally responsible for the depravity against which they inveighed, they were warranted in feeling ashamed of belonging to a community that had succumbed to such depravity.[9] A prophet could recognize that the trajectory of his life included his membership in a deeply unjust society, and he could warrantedly conclude that that trajectory was tarnished pro tanto . Notwithstanding that he could warrantedly derive satisfaction from his own indefatigability in condemning and countering the heinous   wrongs committed by his fellow citizens, the conditions for the full warrantedness of a robust sense of self-respect on his part (or on the part of any of his fellow citizens) were not in place.   1.2.4.3. Insusceptibility to generalisation   Even if the other shortcomings in the Struggling Against Adversities Objection were to be pretermitted, the objection would fail because the conditions which it recounts as potentially underpinning the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect are not susceptible to being universalized. A society S in which every member acts as a prophet who aptly fulminates against injustices is not possible—partly because the basic life-sustaining functions of a society would not be adequately fulfilled in S if every member were devoting his time and energy to prophetic denunciations,[10] but even more importantly because S would no longer be properly subject to such denunciations if everyone within it were firmly and appositely opposed to injustice. In a situation where every member of S is endowed with the moral uprightness of Amos or Havel or King or Bonhoeffer, there would not be any suitable targets for prophetic reproaches. (Throughout this discussion I have been assuming that prophetic rebukes are grounded on correct principles of morality. Such an assumption is safe in application to the rebukes uttered by the four men just named, but it fails in application to some other prophets. For example, the Hebrew reformer Nehemiah trained his ire on his countrymen partly because of their inter-ethnic marriages. Insofar as his tirades were benightedly rooted in a xenophobic moral outlook, he could not warrantedly feel a heightened sense of self-esteem by dint of his having engaged in them.)   Likewise insusceptible to being universalized are the conditions under which a person can warrantedly feel a strong sense of self-esteem as a result of having overcome special hardships on the way to a successful life. If everyone were subject to some limitation or adversity, then no one could correctly claim to have transcended any special disadvantage by virtue of succeeding in the presence of that   limitation or adversity. A disadvantage is not special or distinctive if everyone shares it; to assign oneself special kudos for flourishing in spite of it would be akin to assigning oneself special kudos for flourishing in spite of one’s inability to fly by flapping one’s arms.   In sum, although the Struggling Against Adversities Objection purports to highlight certain conditions under which everyone could be warranted in harbouring a high level of self-esteem, those conditions cannot be extended to everyone—either because they cannot be extended to everyone tout court  or because they cannot be extended to everyone while still performing the role ascribed to them by the Struggling Against Adversities Objection. By contrast, feeling proud about the great achievements that occur in a society is something that everybody within the society can warrantedly do. In other words, when aspirational perfectionism specifies certain conditions that are necessary for the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-esteem on the part of everyone in a society, it is adverting to conditions that can be applicable to everyone simultaneously. Thus, far from undermining the tenets of aspirational perfectionism, the Struggling Against Adversities Objection helps to reveal one of the strengths of those tenets.   2. Why is societal excellence necessary?   In the preceding paragraph, I have again referred to the aspirational-perfectionist proposition that the warrantedness of a high level of self-respect for each person in a society depends partly on the occurrence of outstanding accomplishments which endow the society with excellence. Let us designate that proposition as the ‘Societal Warrant Thesis’. In §1.2, I have argued in favour of one of the presuppositions of the Societal Warrant Thesis: that is, I have argued that each person in a society can warrantedly take pride in any splendid feats of human endeavour by others who belong to the society. Let us designate that presupposition as the ‘Taking Pride Premise’. However, although the vindication of that premise is necessary for the vindication of the Societal Warrant Thesis, it is not sufficient. Some further argumentation is needed, since the warrantedness of each person’s taking pride in any sterling achievements by members of her society does not per se establish that the occurrence of such achievements by members of her society is necessary for the full warrantedness of her harbouring a strong sense of self-respect.   To see why the occurrence of great exploits by oneself or by other members of one’s society is necessary for the warrantedness of one’s maintaining a high level of self-respect, we should note that the considerations in favour of the Taking Pride Premise also militate in favour of a converse proposition. If some person P would be warranted in feeling better about herself by virtue of belonging to a society that is endued with excellence, then conversely she would be warranted in feeling worse about herself by virtue of belonging to a society that is devoid of excellence. Suppose that the country to which P belongs is drably mediocre, or suppose that it is worse than mediocre (perhaps because it has long been convulsed by a civil war with atrocities on all sides). In that event, given that the connection between P and her country is an important constituent of the overall trajectory of her life—even if, or perhaps especially if, she views her country with disdain—she will be warranted in lowering her sense of how well her life has gone.   Of course, if P has managed to attain success in many of her endeavours, any warranted lowering of her self-esteem in response to the mediocrity or depravity of her country will most likely leave her warranted self-esteem at quite a high level. Nevertheless, the level would have been even higher and more solid if it had not been held down by the failings of the society to which P belongs. Had her country been a place of excellence in which she could warrantedly have taken pride instead of warrantedly feeling abashed or dismayed about her connection to it, her warrantedness in feeling good about herself and in pursuing her projects with gusto would have been strengthened. Thus, even for a successful person like P, the full warrantedness of her experiencing a strong sense of self-respect depends partly on the flourishing of her society.   Naturally, if P had been a towering genius such as Shakespeare or Beethoven or Albert Einstein, the warrantedness of her harbouring an extremely high level of self-esteem would not have been perceptibly impaired by her belonging to an otherwise unaccomplished society. Had P been of that calibre in her achievements, those achievements alone would have endowed her society with excellence. However, the vast majority of people are not even close to the rank of towering geniuses (or toweringly great athletes). For them as for P, more modest degrees of success are their personal bases for the warrantedness of their self-respect. For them, then, the excellence of their society is necessary for the full warrantedness of their feeling robustly good about their lives.[11] Here we can see that, although aspirational perfectionism might initially seem to be an elitist doctrine, its concern with enabling everyone to be warranted in feeling a solid sense of self-respect is quite strongly egalitarian.   2.1. A focus on warrantedness   As in §1.2, the focus throughout the present discussion has been on the warrantedness of individuals’ feelings of self-respect rather than on those feelings themselves or on individuals’ judgments about the quality of their society. That is, in two principal ways the focus of the present discussion has been objective rather than subjective. First, I have not been addressing any array of empirical questions about the conditions under which people will tend to experience high levels of self-respect. Such questions, which fall within the domain of social psychology, are of some interest here—as can be inferred from my observations in §1.1—but they do not have any determinative bearing on the ethical matters into which I am enquiring. As this article has sought to make clear, the property under investigation here is not the psychological property of self-respect; rather, it is the ethical-cum-psychological property of warranted self-respect. Hence, the present discussion has not been seeking to support the proposition that the endowment of a society with excellence through the occurrence of outstanding accomplishments is necessary for the experiencing of a high level of self-respect on the part of each person who belongs to the society. Instead, the present discussion has been seeking to support the proposition that the endowment of a society with excellence through the occurrence of outstanding accomplishments is necessary for the warrantedness of a high level of self-respect on the part of each person who belongs to the society. Whereas the former proposition is an empirical claim, the latter is an ethical thesis.   Second, the nexus between a society’s excellence and the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect for each member of the society is objective in that the decisive property on the former side of that nexus is actual excellence rather than perceived excellence. What matters for the warrantedness of a strong sense of self-respect on the part of any particular person in a society S is not whether the person perceives S as endowed with excellence, but whether S actually is endowed with excellence. Of course, as my reflections in §1.1 suggest, actual excellence and perceived excellence frequently coincide. There are no grounds for thinking that there is always or usually a discrepancy between the two. Nonetheless, some sterling feats might long be ignored or contemned, even while some mediocre achievements or evil deeds are erroneously regarded as wonderful. More broadly, a country might be lauded by many of its citizens as estimable notwithstanding that it is in fact bleakly mediocre or viciously corrupt, and a country might be despised by many of its citizens as paltry even though it in fact comprises an array of outstanding accomplishments and instances of natural beauty. Such incongruities between actuality and perception might not arise very often, but they are always possible. When discrepancies do arise, actuality takes priority over perception in determining whether a heightened degree of self-respect on the basis of societal excellence is warranted for each person in S or not—and in determining whether a lowered degree of self-respect on the basis of societal shabbiness is warranted for each person in S or not.   2.2. A first role of justice   As has been underscored in §1.2.4.1 above, the prescriptions issued by aspirational perfectionists are located within a matrix of deontological constraints. Hence, one way in which the value of justice bears on the promotion of excellence for aspirational-perfectionist purposes is that it imposes a set of restrictions on the routes by which those purposes can legitimately be pursued. Injustices can never permissibly be perpetrated for the sake of endowing a society with excellence that will help to constitute the conditions under which every member of the society can warrantedly feel a robust sense of self-respect. Indeed, were injustices to be perpetrated in furtherance of such an aim, they would be counterproductive; the warrantedness of any heightening of everyone’s self-respect is an ethical property that cannot be realized through unethical means. Such an upshot is a corollary of the general resistance of deontological principles to any end-justifies-the-means rationale.   2.3. A second role of justice: Rawls on social unions   To discern another way in which the value of justice bears on the promotion of excellence for aspirational-perfectionist purposes, we can turn to A Theory of Justice . Although Rawls of course did not have in mind aspirational perfectionism as such, and although he naturally centred his discussion of justice and excellence on his own principles of justice (whereas I am prescinding here from questions about the specific contents of the correct principles of justice), his ruminations on the implementation of justice as a mode of excellence are valuable for aspirational perfectionism conjoined with any credible liberal-democratic account of justice. His ruminations are set within the contractualism of his theorizing, but—suitably construed—they can be incorporated into a resolutely non-contractualist approach to matters of justice and political legitimacy.   The final chapter of A Theory of Justice  is entitled ‘The Good of Justice’, and it contains numerous piquant and perceptive lines of thought that could fruitfully be explored at this juncture. However, the only line of thought that will be highlighted here is from Rawls’s account of social unions. Rawls applied the designation ‘social union’ to any group in which the members share some fundamental end(s) and in which the activities of the group are valued for their own sake. He made clear that the sharing of a fundamental end is consistent with a high degree of competitiveness among the members of a social union. For example, although the teams in a sporting league such as the National Basketball Association all strive to outperform one another, they are united by the aim of engaging in strenuously contested games wherein their sport is played with commendable proficiency.   Having expounded the nature of social unions in general, Rawls proceeded to characterize a well-ordered society as a social union of social unions: ‘The main idea is simply that a well-ordered society (corresponding to justice as fairness) is itself a form of social union. Indeed, it is a social union of social unions. Both characteristic features are present: the successful carrying out of just institutions is the shared final end of all the members of society, and these institutional forms are prized as good in themselves’. Because every person in a well-ordered society is possessed of a motivationally efficacious sense of justice, ‘the members of a well-ordered society have the common aim of cooperating together to realize their own and another’s nature in ways allowed by the principles of justice […] Each citizen wants everyone (including himself) to act from principles to which all would agree in an initial situation of equality’.[12]   The first aspect of a well-ordered society as a social union—the fact that its members share the end of sustaining the operations of just institutions—is a corollary of Rawls’s general conception of a well-ordered society. Slightly more complicated is the second aspect, the fact that the operations of just institutions in such a society are inherently good. Rawls set out to explain why ‘the fundamental institutions of society, the just constitution and the main parts of the legal order, can be found good in themselves once the idea of social union is applied to the basic structure as a whole’.[13] He began his explanation by adverting to the propensity of citizens in a well-ordered society ‘to express their nature as free and equal moral persons, and this they do most adequately by acting from the principles that they would acknowledge in the original position’. Because citizens in a well-ordered society act in accordance with the basic status attributed to them by any liberal-democratic reckoning—namely, their status as free and equal persons—they endow their society with the mode of excellence that consists in instantiating the ideals of liberal democracy. ‘When all strive to comply with [correct principles of justice] and each succeeds, then individually and collectively their nature as moral persons is most fully realized, and with it their individual and collective good’.[14]   Continuing his explanation of the inherent goodness of the just institutions that prevail in a well-ordered society, Rawls submitted that ‘a just constitutional order, when adjoined to the smaller social unions of everyday life, provides a framework for these many [smaller] associations and sets up the most complex and diverse activity of all’. Subsumed within such a framework, the projects of private individuals and associations are harmonized in relation to one another through their common subjection to principles of justice that are administered by the officials of the constitutional order: ‘Thus the plan of each person is given a more ample and rich structure than it would otherwise have; it is adjusted to the plans of others by mutually acceptable principles. Everyone’s more private life is so to speak a plan within a plan, this superordinate plan being realized in the public institutions of society’. Rawls emphasized that the overarching institutional framework of a well-ordered society, with its coordination of the activities of individuals and associations, does not impose any comprehensive doctrine such as Roman Catholicism. Instead, it is guided only by the end of giving effect to the requirements of justice. Its superordinate plan consists in that very end: ‘The regulative public intention is […] that the constitutional order should realize the principles of justice’.[15] In much the same way that the diverse individuals who belong to a well-ordered society share only the end of sustaining the operations of the society’s just institutions, the workings of those institutions are all oriented toward the end of implementing the correct principles of justice.   As Rawls reached the culmination of his reflections on the inherent goodness of the realization of justice in a well-ordered society, he drew connections between the moral virtues of the governing institutions in such a society and the moral virtues of the citizens who support those institutions:   We have seen that the moral virtues are excellences, attributes of the person that it is rational for persons to want in themselves and in one another as things appreciated for their own sake, or else as exhibited in activities so enjoyed […] Now it is clear that these excellences are displayed in the public life of a well-ordered society […] [M]en appreciate and enjoy these attributes in one another as they are manifested in cooperating to affirm just institutions. It follows that the collective activity of justice is the preeminent form of human flourishing. For given favourable conditions, it is by maintaining these public arrangements that persons best express their nature and achieve the widest regulative excellences of which each is capable. At the same time just institutions allow for and encourage the diverse internal life of associations in which individuals realize their more particular aims. Thus the public realization of justice is a value of community.[16]   2.4. A second role of justice: Summing up   As has already been remarked, several aspects of Rawls’s meditations on the goodness of justice—such as his contractualist appeals to the selection of principles of justice in the Original Position—should be set aside. One problematic aspect not mentioned in the opening paragraph of §2.3 above is that his pronouncements on the nature and goodness of any well-ordered society are pitched entirely at the level of ideal theory. Still, the insights to be gathered from his pronouncements can be extended beyond the confines of well-ordered societies where every citizen is unfailingly supportive of just institutions and their requirements.   Most prominent among those insights is that the operations of the institutions which implement the requirements of justice in a liberal democracy are an outstanding collective accomplishment. Both on the part of legal-governmental officials and on the part of ordinary citizens, the patterns of self-restraint involved in the workings of just institutions are prodigious. Every generally law-abiding person who belongs to a society governed by a liberal-democratic regime can warrantedly take pride in those workings. Of course, in any actual liberal democracy—as opposed to a well-ordered Rawlsian society—the operations of the prevailing institutions are imperfectly just, and the compliance of citizens with the just requirements of those institutions is likewise imperfect. Nevertheless, in any society whose system of governance is liberal-democratic to a high degree and whose citizens are largely faithful to the values of liberal democracy, the realization of those values through the system of governance is a mode of excellence in which every generally law-abiding citizen can warrantedly take pride. It is a mode of excellence that pro tanto  enhances the life of every generally law-abiding person who belongs to the society. In any actual liberal democracy, where citizens naturally tend to concentrate on the shortcomings of the regnant institutions, many of them sometimes lose sight of the magnitude and preciousness of the achievement that consists in the sustainment of those institutions. All the same, they can warrantedly derive satisfaction from that achievement—as the overall trajectory of the life of each generally law-abiding person P is made better by it. Because the course of P’s life is inevitably affected (for better or for worse) by the tenor of the system of governance that presides over the society with which P is associated, the adherence of such a system to the values of liberal democracy is something that bolsters the level of self-respect which P can warrantedly feel.   As should be evident from earlier portions of this article, my claim here about the bolstering of each person’s warranted self-respect is not an empirical conjecture about the likelihood that each person will be materially better off as a result of the sway of a liberal-democratic system of governance in his or her society. On the one hand, there are quite strong and familiar correlations between liberal-democratic systems of governance and material prosperity. On the other hand, such correlations—important though they are—are not directly to the point here. My claim about the bolstering of each person’s warranted self-respect is focused on the inherent moral quality of liberal-democratic governance rather than on the beneficial consequences that are likely to ensue causally therefrom.   Rawls well captured two of the ways in which the inherent moral quality of liberal-democratic governance raises the level of self-respect which each generally law-abiding person in a society can warrantedly feel. In the passages quoted in §2.3 above, he frequently declared that a liberal-democratic system of governance enables its citizens to realize their nature as free and equal persons. His contentions to that effect should be construed as making two main points. First, each person under a liberal-democratic system of governance is treated with the respect due to somebody who is a rationally deliberative agent possessed of the two Rawlsian moral powers. Second, each person under such a system of governance is morally and legally required to exercise the self-restraint that is due to other rationally deliberative agents. Being required to exercise such self-restraint is a hallmark of one’s status as a free and equal person, as is being treated with commensurate forbearance by everybody else. Patterns of reciprocal forbearance among citizens, and patterns of forbearance in a government’s interaction with citizens, give expression to the status of every sane adult as a free and equal person. Rawls grasped and indeed emphasized that those patterns of forbearance increase the level of self-respect which every generally law-abiding person is warranted in experiencing. Having reminded his readers that his ‘account of self-respect as perhaps the main primary good has stressed the great significance of how we think others value us’, he proclaimed that a key ‘basis for [warranted] self-esteem in a just society is […] the publicly affirmed distribution of fundamental rights and liberties’.[17] He elaborated: ‘In a well-ordered society then self-respect is secured [partly] by the public affirmation of the status of equal citizenship for all’.[18] Of course, in addition to referring to the fundamental rights and liberties of citizenship, Rawls should have referred here to the fundamental responsibilities thereof. Each citizen’s status as a free and equal person—along with the quantum of warranted self-respect that is appurtenant to that status—is upheld not only through her being endowed with the fundamental rights and liberties, but also through her being expected and required to accept that each of her fellow citizens is endowed with those rights and liberties.   For a further regard in which the sway of a liberal-democratic system of governance elevates the level of self-respect which everyone in a society can warrantedly harbour, we need to go somewhat beyond Rawls in the direction of aspirational perfectionism. As has already been remarked, the sway of such a system—notwithstanding its imperfections—is a sterling collective achievement that should elicit feelings of pride in every generally law-abiding member of the society over which the system presides. Because the trajectory of the life of each such member includes her association with a country in which that great achievement has occurred and been sustained, each such member can warrantedly conclude that her life has gone better by dint of the association (quite apart from any material benefits that have causally accrued to her as a result of it). Pro tanto , she can warrantedly feel better about herself and her projects than she otherwise could.   Conversely, of course, somebody who belongs to a society governed by a repressively illiberal regime can warrantedly conclude that her life has gone worse by dint of her links to that society (quite apart from any material hardships that have beset her as a result of the regime’s grim oppression). Because the overall course of her life includes her connection to the country ruled by that regime, it is marred by the collective failure of the citizens of that country—among them, most notably, the regime’s officials—to uphold the values of a liberal democracy. As has been underscored in §1.2.4.2, this point about the ethical worsening of a person’s life is independent of her supportiveness or unsupportiveness of the tyrannical regime. On the one hand, the trajectory of her life will be substantially worse ethically if she has been complicit in maintaining the regime’s grip on power. On the other hand, my point here has not been about her personal responsibility for the regime’s persistence or any of its iniquities; rather, this paragraph is about the collective responsibility of her fellow citizens with whom she is associated as a member of their community. Even if she has been like one of the prophets discussed earlier (King or Havel or Bonhoeffer) in struggling gamely against the despotism of the system of governance in her country, her life that has been elevated by her struggling is worsened ethically by the need for her struggling—because the need for her struggling is a product of a collective failure on the part of a community to which she belongs.   2.5. Concluding remarks on multiplicity   As can be gathered from the foregoing reflections on any just system of governance as a mode of excellence, the outstanding achievements and features that can imbue a society with estimableness are multifarious. Perfectionists of all stripes have mostly concentrated on aesthetic and intellectual modes of excellence, but, hugely important though those modes of excellence are, they are only some of the possibilities that are serviceable for the purposes of aspirational perfectionism. The realization of the values of liberal democracy through a system of governance that treats its citizens as free and equal persons is another mode of excellence. It is a precious collective accomplishment. Athletic feats and ventures of exploration can be still further modes of excellence, and sundry other areas of human endeavour—such as mountaineering or chess or restaurateurship or tailoring—might likewise produce great achievements in which all the members of a society can warrantedly take pride. Moreover, the diversity of ethnic / religious communities and practices sought by multiculturalists can constitute an entrancing medley that is itself a mode of societal excellence. Much the same can be said about a rich tapestry of cultural offerings in a society whose citizens can warrantedly look upon that tapestry as a source of pride (on top of its lucrativeness as a cynosure for tourists). Furthermore, mountains or mighty rivers or other magnificent topographical features can warrantedly bolster the self-esteem of the people who live in countries that are graced by such features. People can similarly feel proud about wonderful gardens and other places of great beauty in their society. All these modes of excellence can serve the ends of aspirational perfectionism.   Though Rawls never quite invoked the notion of vicarious pride that is central to aspirational perfectionism, he highlighted the multiplicity of modes of excellence and the synergetic interaction among them when they occur alongside one another in any society. As he wrote in the final paragraph of his ruminations on social unions, which I have partly quoted earlier:   [W]e cannot overcome, nor should we wish to, our dependence on others. In a fully just society persons seek their good in ways peculiar to themselves, and they rely upon their associates to do things they could not have done, as well as things they might have done but did not […] It is a feature of human sociability that we are by ourselves but parts of what we might be. We must look to others to attain the excellences that we must leave aside, or lack altogether. The collective activity of society, the many associations and the public life of the largest community that regulates them, sustains our efforts and elicits our contribution. Yet the good attained from the common culture far exceeds our work in the sense that we cease to be mere fragments.[19] Professor Matthew Kramer   Professor Matthew H Kramer is a legal philosopher and a leading proponent of legal positivism. He is Professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at Churchill College, Cambridge, and heads the Cambridge Forum for Legal and Political Philosophy. [1] This article is a modified version of a portion of Chapter 8 from my book Liberalism with Excellence  (Oxford University Press 2017). I am grateful   to Oxford University Press for permission to republish this version of several sections from that chapter, which have been considerably modified and abridged. [2] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice  (Harvard University Press 1971). [3] Tim Craig, ‘One Year after Shocking Terrorist Attack, Pakistan’s Peaks Bereft of Foreign Climbers’ Washington Post  (Washington DC, 29 June 2014) < https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/one-year-after-shocking-terrorist-attack-pakistans-peaks-bereft-of-foreign-climbers/2014/06/29/b72beaa8-f7b6-11e3-a606-946fd632f9f1_story.html > accessed 20 February 2021. [4] Rawls (n 2) 523. [5] This empirical claim is based on my conversations with several such masons in Cambridge. [6] Rawls (n 2) 522–23. [7] ibid §79. [8] ibid 529. [9] Having encountered Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1942, Bishop George KA Bell wrote that Bonhoeffer was ‘completely candid, completely regardless of personal safety, while deeply moved by the shame of the country [Germany] he loved’. George KA Bell, ‘Foreword’ in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship  (SCM Press 1959) 7. [10] Note that, when Amos took up his calling to be a prophet, he had to leave behind his occupation as a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees (Amos 7:14–15). [11] A somewhat similar observation has been made by Robert Yanal: ‘Spinoza, exiled and excommunicated, could  have had good self-esteem. Yet such instances strike us as heroic (or perhaps a little mad), but in any event beyond the pale of how normal people operate’ (emphasis in original). Robert Yanal, ‘Self-Esteem’ (1987) 21(3) Noûs 363, 368. [12] Rawls (n 2) 527. [13] ibid 527–28. [14] ibid 528. [15] ibid. [16] ibid 528–29. [17] ibid 544. [18] ibid 545. [19] ibid 529.

The adoption of the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was a major step for the practice of International Development worldwide. In addition to legitimising the benevolent nature of the UN, the Declaration established a precedent for understanding the human condition as a universal experience. Through the Declaration, all people were declared ‘free and equal in rights’ despite geographical, cultural, or socio-political differences that influenced the unequal distribution or diverse understandings of human rights.[1] The UN’s concept of universalism became a tool for enforcing how human life should be as opposed to acknowledging how it is , thus failing to address diverse human needs. This further entrenched a hierarchy that favoured western perceptions of an ideal life—a postulation that went on to inform the practices of many disciplines and professions. From medicine and anthropology to multinational corporations and development studies, universalism has influenced the ‘right’ way to cure, reconstruct, commercialise, and order different societies. Moreover, as the UN’s western concept of humanity gained international traction, human rights became more universal and less transcultural.[2] This resulted in confining not only the rights of adults within a western perspective, but also those of children, and the concept of childhood itself.   The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as any human being below the age of 18 and affirms that children should be afforded their own rights ‘by reason of [their] physical and mental immaturity’.[3] This western view categorises childhood as a stage of vulnerability and innocence that makes children averse to the physical or financial responsibilities of an adult. The Convention’s universalist perspective acknowledges childhood as a ‘coherent group, or a state defined by identical needs and desires, regardless of class, racial or ethnic differences’.[4] This categorisation enables the concept of ‘global childhood’, where children are removed from their socio-political contexts and grouped within a universalist belief in childhood. The ideology of global childhood, however, misrepresents the reality that childhood is experienced differently in different spaces, such that no one ideology of childhood can account for all children’s experiences.   The concept of global childhood is heavily contested on various grounds, including the child labour discourse and the extent to which children should be allowed to work given their presumed innocence. These discussions often highlight the should versus is dilemma, where it is argued that a child should  stay out of the labour force without addressing why a child is  in need of or desires the labour force. In this paper, I will examine the impact of universalism as it relates to global childhood and assess how these perspectives transform the practices and beliefs of child labour. I argue that it is not possible to speak of global childhood because its universal perspective misrepresents the needs of children around the world. Furthermore, I argue that in trying to assert the existence of a global childhood, one puts oneself in a position to mould and manipulate the concept of childhood for their own, as opposed to the child’s, benefit. I begin by assessing the concept of global childhood, its historical legacy, contemporary understandings, and the consequences of its prevalence. I then analyse how child labour laws and practices have been impacted by the global childhood ideology and how this affects the children and nations involved. Finally, I use UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited policy as a case study to show how dominating the universal definition of childhood makes it possible to manipulate the labour market in favour of international organisations, businesses, and governments.   From Barbarism to Globalisation   The concept of global childhood is an amalgamation of various characteristics, including immaturity, vulnerability, and innocence, that encapsulates a western, idealised version of a child. These characteristics, however, are neither ahistorical nor apolitical. For centuries, childhood has been weaponised against colonised, racialised, and ethnic ‘others’ who are deemed inferior in the eyes of the western overseer. In this section, I analyse both the historic and contemporary uses of global childhood to discern how the imposition of western notions of childhood misrepresents and delegitimises non-western livelihoods.   Since the inception of European colonialism, the characterisation of indigenous groups as ‘childlike’ beings was essential for intervention and domination. From Rudyard Kipling’s description of the colonised as ‘half-devil, half-children’[5] to Cecil Rhodes asserting that the ‘native is to be treated as a child and denied franchise’,[6] childhood has assigned a negative stereotype onto the non-west. To be childlike was to be degenerative and thus it became justified for paternalistic Europeans to intervene in foreign worlds. The colonies were imagined to be at an earlier stage of European civilisation, or even the ‘childhood of Europe itself’, which the colonial administration used to validate the governance, discipline, and control of the natives.[7] As a result, the trope of childlike behaviour, or being encased in perpetual childhood, became a way to reframe violence ‘as necessary, legitimate, and even benevolent’.[8]   The patriarchal domination imbued in European colonialism infiltrated many disciplines, one of the most influential being medicine. French doctors in the Maghreb region during the nineteenth and twentieth century, for example, routinely diagnosed colonised people with ‘mental infantilism’. Due to the authority bestowed on these medical professionals and their alleged regard as ‘pillars of science and modernity’, mental infantilism became a common diagnosis for colonised people worldwide.[9] The infantilised colonial subject, however, was not simply placed in a category of childhood that was incomparable to any other childlike behaviour. The colonised were deemed developmentally akin to white children. Here, we see the beginning stages of white children dominating the idea of childhood and becoming the yardstick against which all childhoods are measured. The difference between the colonised and white children, however, was that the white child was bound to grow and become mature, while the colonised would remain ‘stuck within a state of savagery and “mental infancy”’.[10] The western child became the ideal model for childhood, while non-western people were condemned for their stagnant development.   The children of the colonised also played an important role in the conceptualisation of childhood. Through colonial schools, missionary interventions, and a host of child ‘protection’ initiatives, colonial administrations set out to ‘save’ colonised children from their barbaric impulses.[11] By intervening at a young age, Europeans assumed the authority to define the ‘right’ childhood and curtail all the negative influences of indigeneity. The stage of childhood for the colonised child thus became of grave importance to the colonial administration; one that could either spell doom if the child maintained their indigenous beliefs or one where childhoods could be reconstructed to fit within the colonial regime. Colonial interventions within diverse childhoods established a form of epistemicide, or the ‘failure to recognise the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe provide meaning to their existence’.[12] By determining that there was one way to be a child and that all other childhoods were savage or underdeveloped, Europeans codified a single story of childhood which was then claimed to be universal. In so doing, they misrepresented the needs and desires of children around the world, using the imperial ideology of childhood to assert dominance over non-western people.   Following the end of World War II in 1945, international development agencies and governments started to legitimise ideas of a homogenous human experience and eventually a homogenous experience of childhood. Beginning with the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, criteria were being established to determine the rights of all human beings. The establishment of these rights, however, also enabled development agencies and governments to intervene in the ‘underdeveloped’ world as a means of securing human rights for all. Development actors such as President Truman in his 1949 inaugural address claimed that ‘for the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these [formerly colonised] people’.[13] Western countries were believed to possess the skills necessary to rectify the dysfunction of the non-west and carry on their roles as paternalistic leaders.   The passing of the Convention on the Rights of the Child brought with it its own prejudices on the ‘right’ childhood. Within the Convention, a universal / global childhood was set as the standard by which all children could live a free and just life, ‘in particular [those] in the developing countries’.[14] As Olga Nieuwenhuys argues, however, the Convention was ‘grounded in the assumption both of the superiority of the childhood model as it has evolved in the north and of the need to impose this model on a global scale’.[15] This model had reinvigorated itself through various power relations including international development and child-rights movements that prioritised western childhoods as ideal.[16] This not only flattened children’s various experiences of childhood but also excluded the majority of children from the concept of childhood.[17] Instead of acknowledging the varied understandings and experiences of a child, global childhood implied that children who did not live up to western standards were being robbed of their childhood. By promoting the western notion of childhood on a global scale, western beliefs came to ‘dominate the experience of being human’.[18]   Who is a Child Labourer?   Whether to make money for themselves or their families, children have had to adjust to the economic and social demands of a globalised world. As globalisation expanded post-World War II, it redefined childhood and brought it into the clutches of international elites. Under capitalist motivations, northern and southern elites clung to the concept of global childhood and used it to determine not only the ‘right’ way of being a child, but the ‘right’ way for a child to labour. In this section, I analyse how global childhood impacts child labour practices, and how these practices vary between different geographies and populations. I argue that this variation exposes the myth of global childhood and highlights how only certain childhoods are protected while others are subjugated to satisfy the capitalist world system.   The triumph of neoliberalism and its structural adjustment policies beginning in the 1980s brought children of the ‘developing’ world under a universalist regime. Within this regime, only one childhood mattered enough to be protected—the childhood that promoted a western, ‘autonomous, liberated consumer’. The non-consumer southern child, however, was branded as deficient and in need, which could only be rectified by becoming a ‘full participant in the new market-approach of development’.[19] As such, child labour in the Global South was heavily promoted, but participation in the market did not (and does not) guarantee the benefits it promised. Studies such as Michael Bourdillon’s 2010 documentation of working girls in Morocco highlight how international child labour policies greatly affect the consistency of work for children of the Global South.[20] In Morocco, working girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen were targeted in a Marks and Spencer (M&S) garment factory after a TV programme investigated the prevalence of child labourers in the workplace. Before the programme could air, M&S sent representatives to the factory and ensured that all workers under the age of fifteen were fired. For M&S and the TV programme, this is where the story ended, but the girls who were fired were now forced to find new work, often in less desirable sectors. Bourdillon’s study begs the question of whose interests are served. By firing the girls, M&S advanced their corporate image and profit but did nothing to ensure the well-being of the children they claimed to care so much about. What became of the children was no more important than the desire to ‘settle the British conscience’.[21] Global childhood’s claim to secure children’s well-being is, therefore, not always upheld for children in the Global South.   Globalisation is a force to which people have adapted out of necessity, taking on extra responsibilities to do so. Children in the Global South, and marginalised youth in the Global North, are among those most impacted by this adaptation as they set out to economically contribute to poverty reduction, while being simultaneously shunned by the global public for child labour. In many cases, children enjoy their work, gain social and interpersonal skills, use work to improve their lives, and gain educational experiences while working.[22] These benefits, however, are often not highlighted in mainstream child labour discourses, where child labour is instead used as a scapegoat to hide political and financial motivations.[23] As seen in the ‘raid-and-rescue’ operation in Morocco, a focus on child labour can simply be a means for raiding and rescuing a company’s reputation. This then puts children of the Global South at risk of unjust termination, without safeguarding their rights promised by global childhood.   In addition to inciting the need for children to work, globalisation also determines the extent to which certain children can work. Beginning in the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution’s Romantic Movement declared that western children were no longer fit to work in factories for fear of ‘corrupting the natural innocence of children and destroying their potential for moral and intellectual development’.[24] This, coupled with the fact that children’s inconsistent work patterns were economically burdensome to employers, set a precedent for condemning child labour for those in the north. During the same period, however, children in the colonies were exploited and their labour was not banned by any authority, including the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in their 1919 Convention on Child Rights. Instead, child colonial labour was endorsed and disguised by claiming that the children were under apprenticeships, that they were attending school during their downtime, or that they were simply helping their mothers with menial tasks. In some cases, colonial administrations argued that the colonised child matured faster, meaning that the working age could be lowered.[25] These framings enabled childhood to only be seen as innocent in the north and among specific racial and ethnic distinctions. This persists today as black and brown children are overly criminalised, expected to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and work towards a better life, due to the belief that they are not really children.[26]    Political and financial investments in child labour by ruling elites in the north and south further distinguish between children who are protected and those who are exploited. For southern countries, publicly adhering to child labour movements through NGOs and aid can provide significant financial advantages. On the other hand, if southern governments lower their labour standards and conceal the existence of child labour, they gain a competitive advantage in the global market. This is often referred to as the race to the bottom , where countries lower their labour standards to attract foreign investment, incentivising other countries to do the same.[27] This competition can promote abusive labour standards for children in the Global South and marginalised communities in the Global North, while elite children are largely unaffected.   Though southern countries are often shamed by their northern counterparts for their participation in child labour, it is no secret that northern countries participate in exploitative labour practices and turn a blind eye if the child labour in question benefits their bottom line.[28] Child labour is a tool through which countries can assert their moral or financial dominance. This then makes it dangerous and misleading to assume that child labour campaigns, established through the standards of global childhood, should be taken at face value. The decision to universalise or homogenise any diverse population is rarely done for that population’s benefit. Instead, the population is made more governable, manageable, and easier to dominate in the elite’s favour. In the next section, I examine this domination in UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited policy, in order to discern how international organisations use global childhood campaigns to carve out a ‘new field of consumer childhoods’.[29]   Generation Unlimited   Global childhood and child labour go hand in hand to determine what practices are suitable for a child. For decades, mainstream development discourses have championed the abolishment of child labour, premised on the belief that such labour ‘deprives children of their childhood […] [or] deprives them of the opportunity to attend school’.[30] In recent years, however, the tides have seemingly started to change as more and more development agencies call for an increase in youth employment. This change is evident in UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited, where the focus on youth labour practices, skills, and education has been rebranded to mark exciting possibilities in a globalised future. In this section, I analyse this rebranding to discern how concepts of global childhood and child labour are not universally applied and can be manipulated by development authorities (ie wealthy governments, development agencies, and multinational corporations) to further their economic interests. I argue that, by appealing to global childhood, children are put at greater risk of being exploited in the global market and are further bound to labour practices that reflect the needs of development authorities, as opposed to the needs of children.   In 2018, UNICEF’s global youth agenda, Generation Unlimited (GenU), was launched at the United Nations General Assembly. In response to the ‘demographic boom happening across much of the world’, UNICEF proposed GenU as an opportunity to ‘raise global productivity’[31] and counter ‘labour underutilization’.[32] As a global multi-sector partnership, GenU is committed to ‘preparing young people [aged 10-24] for the world of work’ by investing in education, training, and employment opportunities.[33] Through its partnership with the ILO, UNICEF finds that the labour participation rate of young people in the Global South has decreased, and though this reflects that as more children are in secondary and tertiary education, fewer young people are employed. UNICEF and the ILO argue that young people who are not currently employed reflect the ‘potential labour force’ whose full capability ‘is not being realized’.[34] To combat this, GenU targets young people in the Global South to boost their development prospects. By overhauling education systems that are fragmented and outdated to offering employment opportunities to youth,[35] GenU aims to ‘support every young person to thrive in the world of work’.[36]   At the outset, GenU’s target of young people aged 10-24 offers some questionable notions of work. First, there is the belief that new forms of child labour should now be desired and reconceptualised as exciting opportunities for the youth. Then there is the focus on children of the Global South who are expected to carry the burden of raising global productivity as opposed to attending school. How does this rebranding of child labour affect southern children, and who is GenU truly likely to benefit?   GenU identifies itself as a ‘coalition of leaders coming together for young people’, with established partnerships in the private sector, governments, UN agencies, financing institutions, and civil society organisations. These partnerships lay the groundwork and financial backing for GenU’s initiatives, and by March 2019 projects had commenced in Bangladesh, India, and Kenya.[37] In each of these areas, the focus was placed on creating jobs for young people through apprenticeships, establishing stronger links between the education system and employers, and facilitating skills training to prepare young people for the future of work. By April 2019, GenU entered into a formidable partnership with the World Bank, where the Bank pledged $1billion ‘for boosting job prospects for young people’.[38] This was later followed by the creation of the Young People’s Action Team (YPAT) in August, a group of eight young people (UN-appointed activists and entrepreneurs from the Global South) with whom GenU would interact to ‘ensure meaningful engagement of young people’ throughout the agenda’s implementation.   Though premised on providing the best outcome for young people, GenU created the YPAT nearly a year after its launch. As such, young people were not present in the discussions that would determine and transform the necessity of their work. If neither spearheaded by young people themselves nor discussed with them to determine the new importance of their labour, why had GenU brought the idea of working young people in the Global South—between the ages of 10 to 24—in vogue? Moreover, who were the people responsible for redefining acceptable labour practices for children and young people? The answers are provided by GenU’s governance, headed by its eleven board members. Of these eleven, seven are CEOs or Vice Presidents of some of the world’s largest private sector companies, including Microsoft, Unilever, IKEA, and PwC. The remaining four head some of the largest financial institutions such as the World Bank and Dubai Cares. The GenU board is thus dominated by economically driven institutions that have a vested interest in the future of the labour force. This interest, and their position as board members, enable development authorities to redefine the value of child labour in the Global South in favour of their economic interests, regardless of the impact it may have on children’s wellbeing.   By dominating the definition of global childhood and child labour, development authorities can manipulate these concepts in their favour. Within the Global South, GenU has enabled this manipulation by making the problem of child labour the inevitable solution. As GenU identifies ‘key gaps and opportunities for investment’ in the Global South, they do so by targeting children as an untapped labour market that foreign companies can incorporate into their business, often for a cheaper wage.[39] If the southern child was previously suffering from child labour, development authorities can argue that it was due to their exploitive work conditions in the informal sector. The formal employment opportunities available through multinationals, however, are claimed to offer southern children better opportunities for themselves and the world market. This taps into the underutilised labour potential of the Global South and makes child labour the new shining star of development. Ultimately, the dichotomy between white and colonised children is reinforced; the former are allowed to embody the innocence of global childhood, while the latter bear the burden of uplifting the global economy. Under GenU, development authorities rally funds, establish businesses, and secure contracts, creating a new business model around the southern child’s labour, one in which their well-being is no longer of much concern.   Once the narrative has shifted from anti-child labour to pro-youth employment opportunities, it becomes acceptable to establish education and training companies in the Global South that are dedicated to putting children to work. Microsoft, for example, partnered with GenU to create Passport for Earning, a remote learning platform that provides free certified education and skills training to users around the world. Likewise, Dubai Cares invested $2.5 million in Giga, an initiative to connect every school to the internet. Further investigation, however, finds that the flow of funds has gone less to the children concerned and more to the businesses involved. Microsoft’s Passport for Earning, for example, is not a new programme, but an extension of a previous UNICEF and Microsoft collaboration, the Learning Passport.[40] As such, the multi-billion-dollar company, Microsoft, is awarded a contract through GenU funding to further invest in their previously established Passport project. Likewise, Dubai Cares’ investment in Giga was an investment in UNICEF’s previously established partnership with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).[41] Together, UNICEF and the ITU created Giga as a flagship global youth initiative which was now being brought under the umbrella of GenU and funded with millions of dollars. The internal flow of funds between big businesses and development agencies highlights the profit to be made from promoting youth employment in the Global South.   Outside of UNICEF, many arguments have been made in favour of creating more work opportunities for youth and shifting from degree to skills accumulation.[42] Since the 1990s, business and political elites have championed deschooling and anti-college initiatives that expedite youth into the labour force through alternative certifications. Deschooling initiatives—mostly targeting marginalised youth in the Global North—support a ‘neoliberal, privatised and marketised model of education policy reform, in which the core purpose of education is narrowed to serving the needs of the marketplace’.[43] Instead of university degrees, businesses and governments support the accumulation of fast-track, skills-based certificates or enrolment in apprenticeship programmes. Though these measures claim to benefit the economic futures of all people, deschooling initiatives often target low-income and marginalised students to expand a nation’s labour potential. Through strategic closures of schools in low-income areas and the promotion of alternative certification for entry-level, low-paying jobs, neoliberal deschooling advocates exclude marginalised groups from valuable education and work opportunities. Marginalised youth are thus expected to rapidly join the labour force and forgo the protections promised by global childhood.   GenU piggybacks on the neoliberal ideals of deschooling by rapidly bringing marginalised youth into the global labour force. Moreover, GenU generates profit for businesses that provide education, training, and employment opportunities in line with their youth initiative. By speaking of global childhood, GenU claims to know what labour practices are best suited for a child, when in reality it misrepresents children’s desire to work while trying to meet the needs of the global market. Moreover, it and its partner organisations manipulate the idealised image of childhood to bolster their financial interests. GenU should not, therefore, speak of global childhood because their treatment and expectation of children vary across geographical contexts.   Conclusion     Global childhood is a universalist concept that unjustly privileges western ideals of childhood and misrepresents the diverse experiences of children around the world. As a result, global childhood can be used to determine the ‘right’ practices for a child to value, particularly the value of their labour. The universal authority imbued in the notion of global childhood impacts how child labour can be manipulated to benefit the needs of development authorities and cause greater harm to children. It is thus important to democratise the idea of childhood so that no elite group can proclaim any overarching decisions on what is best for all children. Likewise, children must be more involved in the decision-making processes that affect their livelihoods. Only then can a truly comprehensive and inclusive understanding of childhood be used to safeguard children’s well-being across the world. Donari Yahzid Donari Yahzid is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD candidate in the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is also a former Fulbright Scholar and MPhil in Development Studies Graduate (Cambridge), through which she began her work on researching Indigenous land rights movements throughout the globe. Now as a PhD candidate, and in addition to working as an editor for the CJLPA , Donari researches land rights for Quilombo and favela communities in Brazil.  [1] Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR] (1948) art I. 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[30] ILO, ‘What is Child Labour’ ( ILO , 6 August 2025) < https://www.ilo.org/topics/child-labour/what-child-labour > accessed 6 August 2025. [31] UNICEF, ‘Generation Unlimited enables young people to become productive and engaged members of society’ ( Brookings , July 2019) < https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Brookings_Blum_2019_Generation_Unlimited.pdf > accessed 6 August 2025. [32] ILO, ‘Global Employment Trends for Youth 2020: Technology and the future of jobs’ (2020) 13 < https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/%40dgreports/%40dcomm/%40publ/documents/publication/wcms_737648.pdf > accessed 31 July 2025. [33] UNICEF (n 31). [34] ILO (n 32) 13. [35] See Urmila Sarkar, ‘Generation Unlimited: Investing for and with young people’ < https://www.unicef.org/rosa/media/5661/file/urmila-sarkar-presentation-2019.pdf.pdf > accessed 31 July 2025. [36] ‘Generation Unlimited: Overview and Progress’ (2019) < https://www.generationunlimited.org/media/2351/file/Annual%20Report%202019.pdf > accessed 31 July 2025. [37] Sarkar (n 35). [38] (n 36). [39] UNICEF, ‘Generation Unlimited Operating Model’ 7-8 < https://www.unicef.org/genunlimited/media/1121/file/Operating%20Model.pdf > accessed 31 July 2025. [40] See Anupama Saikia, 2021. ‘Accenture, Dubai Cares, Microsoft and UNICEF launch digital education platform under Generation Unlimited to help address global learning crisis’ ( Generation Unlimited , 12 December 2021) < https://www.generationunlimited.org/press-releases/passport-to-earning > accessed 31 July 2025. [41] ‘UNICEF and Dubai Cares announce partnership through Generation Unlimited to scale Digital Connectivity’ ( Giga Global , 17 December 2020) < https://giga.global/unicef-and-dubai-cares-announce-partnership-through-generation-unlimited-to-scale-digital-connectivity/ > accessed 31 July 2025. [42] See Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education  (Princeton University Press 2018); Robert Halfon, ‘Why the obsession with academic degrees in this country must end’ ( New Statesman , 4 March 2018) < https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/2018/03/why-obsession-academic-degrees-country-must-end > accessed 31 July 2025. [43] Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock, ‘Deschooling from Above’ (2020) 61(4) Race & Class 68.