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Professor Jan-Werner Müller is the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He has published many books—including  Contesting Democracy  (Yale University Press 2011), What is Populism?  (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016), and Democracy Rules  (Penguin 2021)—and voluminously in academic journals and public fora including the Guardian , The New York Times , and Project Syndicate .   This interview was conducted on 3 January 2024—before the re-election of Donald Trump—and has been edited for length and clarity.   CJLPA : Good afternoon, Professor Müller. The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art  is singularly lucky to have you here with us today. To begin, can you tell us a little bit about your personal and intellectual biography and in particular what draws your theoretical focus to democracy?   Jan-Werner Müller : I’m glad we have about five hours so that I can pontificate at length about my autobiography! Many academics are rightly reluctant to go down a very autobiographical path because there’s the danger of seeming very narcissistic. But maybe less obviously, there is also the danger of appearing reductionist about one’s own interests, of simply reducing intellectual commitments to completely contingent contexts. So, with these caveats, I’ll be relatively brief: contrary to what is often said today, which is that the 1990s were an age of liberal triumphalism, complacency, supposedly ‘The End of History’, nobody quite believed that (and nor had everybody truly understood what Frank Fukuyama was really trying to say).   Contrary to that cliché, it’s important to point out that, at least in certain respects, the 90s were a moment of insecurity, of uncertainty, of liberals feeling that they may have lost their bearings. This is partly because the great struggle with communism, for shorthand, seemed to be conclusively over. And at the same time, issues were appearing that liberals felt they didn’t have much of an answer to. One of them was nationalism (which is not to say that nationalism had not been politically important during the Cold War).   For many years, if you lived in Europe, you were bound to be preoccupied with what was happening in the former Yugoslavia. Many of us became disturbed by questions about liberal democracies’ ability to respond to questions about belonging, where to draw borders, and what really holds people together in a democratic polity. As a result, there was much handwringing and agonizing by liberals at the time. Of course, I’m not saying that we had the answers soon after. I’m also not saying the story about complacency is completely wrong. But in certain ways, it was a very unsettling time. In the country that I originally come from, Germany, there were also questions about belonging, given that for many decades we had laws on the books that basically said you had to be ethnically German to be a citizen. Questions of belonging in a democracy, questions of social cohesion, questions of citizenship were very much alive in those years.   It was also in the 90s that a curious revival of the thought of the German political and legal thinker Carl Schmitt started. This was puzzling for many people at the time because, up until that point, there had been a general view that Schmitt’s reputation was simply too tainted by his involvement with National Socialism, and by plenty of evidence that even after the war he had no real regrets, and that he remained an anti-Semite. The assumption was that his theories could not come back into general circulation. But again, some of us who perhaps didn’t feel all that complacent at that time got the idea that Schmitt, whatever else one thinks about him, is a formidable critic of liberalism, and of democracy in certain regards. It’s important to take his critique seriously and to work out arguments that might respond to the kinds of anti-liberal and anti-democratic attacks that he had been advancing.   CJLPA :   One of the things that personally stuck with me when I first read Alexis de Tocqueville was a somewhat piercing comment he made about the future of democracy. He suggested that there was a wonderful chain that aristocracy had provided for the West, and what democracy did was break the chain. ‘Each man would be thrown upon himself alone…there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart’—a very foreboding comment about the future of communities and belonging in general.   JWM :   It’s interesting you bring this up. Let me react with two observations. Of course, the 90s were also a heyday of the so-called liberalism and communitarianism debate, and there was plenty of pressure on self-declared liberals to prove that somehow liberalism was able to generate resources for community building. Some of them reacted, rightly I think, by saying that the idea of community being held up by some communitarians was either undesirable or profoundly unrealistic. Plenty of people pointed this out, also among those who might not really see themselves as liberals at all—think of Iris Marion Young, for instance. Communitarian and liberal nationalist claims were also a reason for me to think about the concept of constitutional patriotism, often criticized as being, to invoke the particularly inappropriate metaphor that often comes up in this context, ‘bloodless’. A concept that supposedly only exists on paper, or supposedly a concept that only works for particular countries. For better or for worse, I tried to vindicate this idea and defend it against what I see as often very clichéd and superficial critiques.   The other thing I would say is that of course Tocqueville’s observation about what he would have called individualisme —a really bad thing for him, meaning atomization and isolation, not autonomy—has experienced a revival in our era. It very often serves as shorthand for a quasi-sociological explanation of why we may have seen the rise of right-wing populism, or, some would say, outright authoritarianism or even fascism. Of course, there are many important thinkers one can invoke in this context, not just Tocqueville. Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the emergence of mass society and atomization. All I would want to say in this context is that while certainly it is a diagnosis worth taking seriously, I worry that sometime these claims are made a bit too quickly, and that they, first of all, add up to a certain kind of psychologizing. Secondly, they sometimes underestimate that people who are tempted by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, fascism—whatever you want to call it in the context of our conversation here—are not always particularly isolated. In fact, sometimes they are extremely well organized.   Again, it’s worth remembering that, already in the 90s, our colleague Sheri Berman wrote an important article about civil society in the Weimar Republic, because civil society was a 90s buzzword. Many immediately framed civil society as normatively desirable and essential for democracy and so on. I don’t want to dismiss these arguments, they are important of course. But the thought didn’t occur to too many people that in the Weimar Republic you had an absolutely flourishing scene of associations and clubs—a wonderful, if you like, Tocquevillian civil society life—except that it was full of people who hated democracy, who were all-out racists, and who quite often celebrated violence for its own sake. So, all I’m saying is that we should be very careful with casual Tocquevillian readings.   CJLPA : You talk in Democracy Rules  about three bedrock principles of democracy :  equality, freedom, and uncertainty. I spent some time last year reading Montesquieu, who contends that for a republic to successfully operate there needs to be the passion of love or reverence, either for the principles undergirding the republic or for the particular republic itself, in order for it to be maintained. What role do history, culture, and indeed patriotism play in the strength or atrophy of a democratic state today?   JWM :   Like Hannah Arendt (again!), and many others, I would shy away from the language of love. I don’t think love has a place in the public realm. Again, the thought can too easily lead to a certain type of kitschy communitarianism; after all, we live in—here I am invoking Iris Marion Young once more—a polity of strangers. In certain respects, that’s a good thing. It’s also a good thing that we are not constantly pressured to make confessions, reveal emotions, or relate to people beyond what of course cultural pessimists would see as a certain kind of superficiality. The flipside of being strangers is that, especially in the anonymity of the modern metropolis—I am simply repeating what we have known at least since Georg Simmel’s writings—we can engage in forms of self-invention, of liberation, trying out different lifestyles, finding out who we really want to be. Of course, that’s never a totally isolated process, but I think that if in doubt we should go easy on the on the kitschy emotion talk.   On a more theoretical level, you might say, those who want us to have more emotions in politics often have a very hard time explaining how much exactly is needed, where exactly you find that magic balance of reason and emotion. I would hope that in this regard we’ve also moved beyond the 90s with its very stark oppositions of reason and emotion (or all-out universalism versus particularity all the way down). For one thing, emotions are based on what Jon Elster calls cognitive antecedents—anger, for instance, is not some incomprehensible, irrational outburst, but based on a sense of unfairness, for instance (that sense may or may not be justified).   CJLPA :   Fantastic. I asked this question in part because we’ve seen in America a recent revival in certain, you might say, right-wing domains of this idea of a sort of civic religion. That might be in the legal academy, through what is sometimes called Common Good Constitutionalism, or from political theorists themselves who look at America’s founding and they consider it as a sort of a step in the greater path that ended with some form of certainty in the realm of community. It’s an incredibly parochial view of history, but one that’s unsettling, at least in my eyes.   On the point of pluralism: we have in the modern day shifted towards a language of significant absolutism about certain what you might even call very necessary courses of political action. What would you say to someone who would deny the standing of a political adversary that resists or questions, for example, climate change or climate change related policies?   JWM :   If I may, can I follow up just very briefly on what you said earlier about civic religion? It’s important to bear in mind—work by colleagues like Philip Gorski at Yale is very helpful in this regard—that what is today sometimes propounded by way of Common Good Constitutionalism, or also Integralism, or for that matter Christian nationalism (very important phenomenon), that this is really categorically different from what people were talking about in the 20th century as American civil religion.   It doesn’t mean you have to like that old version of American civil religion—there are plenty of things one can find very problematic about it. Plenty of people would say, ‘let’s get religion out of political discourse altogether’. But it’s worth recalling that theorists who perhaps aren’t read that widely any more—like Robert Bellah, who initially came up with a whole theory of American civil religion—thought of these issues very differently than some of our contemporaries who really mean ‘religion’ when they say ‘religion’. The latter really mean that a good regime would basically use public coercive power to impose certain understandings of religion, certain forms of morality. This is a phenomenon that didn’t quite exist as recently as ten years ago. Now it’s possible to be quite open with the idea that certain aspects of what some of us understand to be crucial to democracy as such—including uncertainty of outcomes; repeat play in the democratic game; accepting that you lost an election even if you think that your moral conceptions are the correct ones or that you somehow possess the truth—might be of secondary importance or dispensable entirely. One more gesture to Hannah Arendt: let’s not forget that political judgment is about the ability to draw distinctions. And what is sometimes now sold as a new version of the old civil religion might really be quite different. Especially, of course, Christian nationalism, as it has become much more prominent in recent years.   Anyway, forgive the interludes and digressions. To your question and point about pluralism: what matters is that democracy, as plenty of other theorists have said, is not ultimately about necessarily finding consensus. It’s not about maximizing cohesion under all circumstances. Again, that’s the kind of communitarian kitsch which we hear far too often, where people say, ‘oh, we’re so divided, that’s so horrible, why can’t we all come together?’. But conflict is normal and legitimate in a democracy; the real question is: which ways of conducting conflict become dangerous for democracy? So, one has to think about what the boundaries of conflict are, such that conflict remains containable or ideally becomes productive for a democracy.   One of the boundaries, I would say, is that you do not delegitimate your political adversaries. You don’t treat them like enemies, you don’t deny their standing. This is what in my view, right-wing populists always do when they essentially say that the others don’t really belong to the polity to begin with. ‘She should be disposed of in Anatolia’. That’s more or less a paraphrase of what a leader of the German far right not too long ago said about a German politician whose family just happens to have Turkish origins. Or when, in the US it was said that certain politicians should go back to, forgive the word, their ‘shithole countries’. That makes it impossible to conduct a conflict because you’re communicating to people that the other person shouldn’t really be in the conflict to begin with, that they have no standing, that they don’t belong here, that they are not even a legitimate person to engage with.   The other boundary has something to do with facts. Of course, the line between facts and opinions is not always exactly clear, to put it mildly. And yet, drawing one more time on Hannah Arendt, if I may: it remains important in our conceptions of democracy to hold on to some kind of distinction between facts and opinion; to say that, of course, people can have their own opinions, but that opinions have to be constrained by something that is recognizable as fact. And ‘the truth’ we should probably leave out of democratic politics altogether. Because we do not say to losers in elections that somehow it was shown that they failed to grasp the truth. No, all that was shown was that maybe their opinions, their judgements, their programs and promises weren’t as popular, weren’t as attractive as those of the other side.   Now, there can be plenty of opinions about climate, but it’s hard to see how conflict with someone who claims that global heating is an invention of the Chinese government to destroy our manufacturing industry could turn out to be productive. Of course, some people would say that such views should somehow be sanctioned or should even become subject to what in some countries is known as militant democracy—the idea that you should restrict people’s basic political rights because of the dangers they pose to democracy. I don’t think that in this case that is remotely appropriate. What you have to do is, first of all, argue on the substance as best as you can. But then also occasionally bear in mind that democratic conflicts have audiences; it’s not just about you and your adversary. You also have to bear in mind what effects there might be on the audience. Occasionally, at least, it’s also important (even though it can sound very academic) to go somewhat meta and say, ‘look, we might have all kinds of disagreements, and I’m not going to vilify my adversary. I’m also not going to say that they’re stupid or anything. But here’s the evidence. And let me also explain beyond pointing to the evidence how this kind of stance just makes it extremely difficult to have a productive conflict in a democracy’. Because even if my adversary in this case were to accept some of the facts, that doesn’t commit them to particular view about what we should do. There’s plenty of room left for saying ‘Oh, we shouldn’t do anything. Let’s just all enjoy ourselves now’, or ‘I trust that in five years, some fantastic technological innovation is going to come along that will help us to deal with all these climate-related challenges successfully’.   As always, the facts are not going to somehow determine their political choices. Choices will always be informed by value commitments, by what Rawls famously called the burdens of judgment. So, you might be very risk taking; I might be very risk-adverse. Or you and I read history and the lessons it might offer very differently. There might be many other factors that come into the picture such that one could not simply say ‘being risk averse is illegitimate; hence you have no space in this conflict, et cetera’. Facts do not eliminate profound disagreements.   Long story short: it’s important not to fall into the trap that, alas, sometimes liberals have fallen into (especially since 2016) where they’ve very complacently settled on the view that whoever disagrees with an ‘us’ that is somehow taken for granted hasn’t understood the truth or necessarily is dealing in falsehoods, and we can simply dismiss what they say. To be sure, populists do lie. To be sure, they often propound conspiracy theories. But you can’t always know that in advance. And sometimes it’s important to say ‘let’s actually deal with the harder questions about differences in values, differences maybe in how we read history, etc’—as opposed to adopting a de facto technocratic stance which assumes that anyone who disagrees must be irrational.   CJLPA :   You recently wrote an op ed for the Guardian about Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is getting a lot of attention these days, and the potential disqualification of Donald Trump from the presidential ballot. This, one might say, is an example of militant democracy, effectively removing someone from a political process. In the piece, you take issue with commentators who argue that he should be properly defeated at the polls. Could you speak to your thought process in observing this legal dynamic play out and the political ramifications in light of what we just spoke about?   JWM :   That’s a very good but very difficult question, one with many layers. We could have a longer discussion about constitutional interpretation, but regarding the specific militant democracy angle that you also alluded to, I would say that removing somebody from the political process is of course an extremely serious, fraught decision that should never be taken lightly. It is not something that democracies should get into the habit of doing. There are countries like Turkey, for instance, which have a long record of constantly banning parties, and that’s one reason—never mind what has happened under Erdoğan more recently—to say that this was always a very flawed democracy at best because political associations were far too casually taken out of the process, of course in many cases because they were advocating for Kurdish citizens.   One has to take seriously the worry that has always shadowed militant democracy, which is that, as you are busy trying to save democracy, it’s actually you who is destroying it by restricting people’s basic rights, outlawing parties, substituting the Judiciary for part of the political process, and so on. One should never imagine that militant democracy is some quasi-technocratic fix, where you remove one or two bad actors and everything will be well.   Having said that, it also matters that militancy is usually something that plays out over time. Well-meaning actors, people who are aware of the dangers of militant democracy, would say, ‘yes, we should never be too quick in these judgments. We should leave some room for things to sort themselves out politically, ideally, before judges get involved’. That’s always much, much better than to imagine that, in quasi-technocratic fashion, somebody could rush in and somehow ‘fix it’. The flip side of that emphasis is that if, over time, you see certain patterns of behaviour and you don’t see any process of self-correction, perhaps you see even processes of radicalization, that also matters. So, with all due respect to some of my very learned and esteemed colleagues who say the political process should take care of all of this, they somehow seem to assume that the political process itself will not be endangered, will be clean somehow. And then, they assume, once Trump is defeated at the polls he will concede, and his followers will politely accept what happened. Then it’s over, finita la commedia . But we already know that this is very unlikely because we’ve already seen how this has played out once. We’ve already seen how in the campaign Trump is not signalling that he understood that inciting people to violence or denying the standing of adversaries is wrong. He’s not saying this time, ‘I’m going to win in a clean way that is in line with our basic liberal democratic commitments in the United States’.   One last thought, to signal that I’m not some gung-ho crusader for militant democracy. One of the most serious points that we can make about this whole approach is that there is a fundamental paradox about its application. When you can apply militant democracy, and when you can apply it in such a way that the outcome is accepted, you probably didn’t need it in the first place. A classic example would be West Germany in the 1950s. We can debate whether it was right or wrong to ban when the Communist Party at that point. Nonetheless, the Communist Party was banned and so was a de facto neo-Nazi Party, and that was accepted as an outcome. People did not say this did lasting damage to the political culture, but in retrospect, they also said, ‘look, probably West German democracy would have been fine, even without these bans’. Conversely, in countries where, broadly speaking, anti-democratic actors do enjoy large amounts of public support, and where maybe the public support is even increasing, or let’s say in a two-party system where one party seems to have turned away from democracy, it’s very unlikely that a ban would simply be accepted. But it’s in those situations precisely where it would be more urgent to actually have militant democracy because the threat is much more real than, say, some still relatively marginal neo-Nazi party. I don’t want to minimize the dangers; even small parties can terrorize people. It’s not like there’s no danger. But in terms of them getting hold of the national levers of power? No, very unlikely.   In other situations, anti-democratic actors might actually succeed. But precisely because it could happen, that also means that the outcomes of militant measures are probably not going to be accepted. So, the paradox is: when you can have militant democracy in a constitutional system, you probably don’t need it, and when you would really need it, you might not be able to have it, given the empirical circumstances. Some of our colleagues in the US today seem to suggest that the circumstances are such that militancy is too dangerous—which is another way of saying: we are being blackmailed by the MAGA movement. The threat is, ‘if you ban our candidate, we’re going to be on the streets and going to be violent’.   CJLPA :   What, perhaps besides what we’ve already talked about, do you identify as being some of the most immediate crises or problems with modern democracy right now?   JWM :   Again, let me say two things, preceded by a rather pedantic observation. We should take on board the lesson that recently was put forward by our esteemed colleague Adam Przeworski in his book about crises of democracy. There, he at least initially says, ‘look, folks tone it down a bit’. Not every policy challenge, even a very serious one, is quite the same as a crisis of democracy. In line with his in certain ways very minimalist understanding of democracy, he then argues that you really have a crisis if something like a peaceful transfer of power is no longer accepted; if people do not understand that, in a very specific sense, democracy is about uncertainty—which is to say we can never be certain about the outcomes, we can only be certain about the process. In autocracies, it’s the other way around. We all know who’s going to win in Russia this year, but the process could change all the time, up to the last minute, as it did last time, because the powerful are fiddling with various regulations up until the last minute to make sure that the one and only right person wins.   Under such circumstances it is justified to speak about a crisis of democracy, or also the possible end of democracy. This is also helpful in terms of assessing the real meaning of January 6th. One can debate how likely it was that the peaceful transfer of power was ultimately going to be impeded, but there was an attempt, and an attempt that, as we now know, was maybe more systematic than we had understood immediately at the beginning of 2021. In that sense, yes, that is a crisis. It’s also a crisis if—again, I refer to the idea of right-wing populism—you have actors who basically say only one outcome is legitimate because there is only one representative of what right-wing populists often call ‘the real people’ (such that actually not all citizens are the people). Only those who fit that understanding of the supposedly ‘real people’ are the people. That poses a permanent danger. It doesn’t mean that every single election outcome will be met with violence, but probably every single election outcome where a populist loses is going to be declared somehow illegitimate, problematic, not quite right, that there must have been a conspiracy, probably by liberal elites behind the scenes, such that the real people or—another famous or infamous expression— ‘the silent majority’ couldn’t really express itself. Even in situations where losing right-wing populists do not mobilize people to impede the peaceful transfer of power, very often they insinuate to their supporters that the outcome is illegitimate and must have been brought about by nefarious actors behind the scenes manipulating the system. In that sense they always cast doubt on the system and erode trust.   Now, allow me to add—because I’m not saying that we should all just simply trust the system—that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing, let’s say, the American election system. In fact, there’s plenty to criticize and to criticize in other countries as well, especially the extraordinary role of money which is one of the most structural problems for democracy today. But there’s a fundamental difference between a loser who says, ‘well, our system is rotten, because I didn’t win’ and somebody else who says, ‘well, I would like to point out that the power of the wealthy is far too large’. Or who says: ‘We have sections of the population who have basically quit the political process altogether, who simply don’t vote any more at all because they think there’s nothing in it for them’. I mean, these are very serious structural challenges, which one should talk about, but one doesn’t have to talk about them in the vein of right-wing populism.   CJLPA :   You wrote recently about how there is a popularly perceived decline happening in democracy in general, amongst the public. I wonder to what extent the perceived decline of democracy is a corollary of another popularly perceived decline, namely universities—whether indicated by rows over public school curricula in the US, or by commentary now surrounding the resignations of prominent Ivy League leaders.   JWM :   By now you know I’m going to say that I’ll say two things. The first takes issue with the more general diagnosis and the second is more specifically about higher education. Firstly, I think we should be very cautious with colleagues and pundits who tell us that the people themselves are sort of disenchanted with democracy. I don’t see a lot of evidence for that. Most people want to hold on to democratic ideals. And even in countries where things are not going well for democracy, such as India, it remains supremely important for Prime Minister Modi always to point out that ‘we’re the world’s largest democracy. We have a very important tradition of having democracy and diversity at the same time’, and so on. You may recall that when Biden had his first democracy summit in 2021, even Beijing came out with an official paper saying, ‘actually what we’re doing is democracy, it is much better than the chaotic, messy US where nothing is working any more’. That’s one indication that people still want to claim the D word. And they wouldn’t do that if they didn’t feel that the people themselves actually like democracy.   If I may add one other thought to that: it’s very clear by now that in many countries where democracy is in danger or has already been replaced by more-or-less soft versions of autocracy, it is usually not the people who collectively endorsed that shift. It was usually a set of elites who said, ‘actually, we can do without democracy’, or ‘we get certain benefits from a different system’. As always, one should be very careful with the sort of macro comparisons with previous eras, but it’s not totally unjustified to say that, at least in some instances, we already saw this pattern in the twentieth century. So, in 2022, we commemorated 100 years of the March on Rome. And there was, of course, a March on Rome. But we sometimes forget that Mussolini arrived very comfortably by sleeper car from Milan because what in those days actually would have been known as liberal elites basically invited him in to take over the government. That was not a singular, isolated incident. That’s something that marks a certain pattern. I dare say we are sometimes seeing the same pattern today.   To your question about universities: here it’s very important to keep two things apart. We can have a very serious, learned, important discussion about academic freedom, which is not the same as free speech, even though the two are very often conflated. We can have a discussion about student clubs and what kind of speakers they invite and how under those circumstances which are not primarily, sometimes not at all, about academic freedom, you might or might not have certain limits on speech. All these are important discussions. But this is only one aspect. The other aspect is that a huge right-wing culture war machine is now engaged in systematic attacks on higher education. And we’ve seen this in countries that have already left the fold of democracies. You may recall that it was pretty important for Viktor Orbán to get Central European University out of the country. We’ve seen in the US what has been happening in Florida. On the one hand, the strategy contains glorifications of free speech, on the other it involves restrictions on what teachers can actually do, what professors may say—in many cases completely clear violations of academic freedom.   Why is this happening? Well, two hypotheses. For one, it’s always an easy way to prove you’re ‘populist’ by attacking universities. To be sure, this is not my understanding of the term ‘populism’. But one can see why there is an incentive for what in effect are elite actors to say: ‘we are going after the elites, we are with the common people against experts, against snooty professors, who tell us what’s what and tell us how to live’, and so on. It is basically a cost-free way of sending signals like this. Secondly, it’s about undermining centres of authority. I mean, most of us in universities don’t feel that we have all that much authority. But in some circumstances, it does matter that somebody can contradict a government official or tell a foreign journalist who’s just come to the country, ‘look, actually, we study this stuff, and we think this is a bit different than what the power-holders are telling you at the moment’. For some actors, it’s extremely important to remove these centres of rival authority.   Even if they don’t succeed—this is the third sort of quasi-hypothesis—it’s enough to cause confusion and obfuscation. This is the maybe less obvious point about what has been happening in the US more recently. As right-wing culture warriors themselves explain, their thing doesn’t work if they do not reach people beyond the already converted. Members of the MAGA movement know already that liberal professors are evil; the point, then, is to capture a wider audience, and to persuade people who do not think of themselves as remotely MAGA. This is the fateful pattern among many actors—sometimes politicians, sometimes pundits, sometimes academics—who see themselves as the reasonable centre. They’re basically saying, ‘oh, I prove to myself that I am the reasonable centre by being very carefully balanced and by being very moderate in my judgments’. Since you mentioned both Tocqueville and Montesquieu, of course this is something where one can very easily find very important backup in terms of saying, ‘it is a liberal virtue to look for a certain juste milieu ’. I’m not saying that this is necessarily always nefarious But, to use a word that has played a huge role in debates here more recently, context  does matter. And sometimes very self-conscious moderation and centrism become a colossal failure of political judgment.   I worry about the self-declared liberal who basically says, ‘yes, I’m really worried about Trump coming back, but I’m also extremely worried about’—and I think if you use this word in a pejorative sense you’ve already given away the game of where you really stand—‘I’m also really worried about the woke on campus’. You end up with a false equivalence. But if you present it this way, it’s very convenient. It’s very easy to say, ‘look, I’m the reasonable person who sees all the problems on all sides’. It’s actually a failure of political judgment. Those strategists in the right-wing cultural war industry, they’ve understood something that actually is not new. Steve Bannon already explained that it didn’t matter if you had Breitbart say that Hillary Clinton was corrupt; what you had to do was to get the New York Times  to run an article about a story of possible corruption.   Now, this does not mean, I hasten to add, that there are taboo subjects or, God forbid, that serious investigative journalists should hold off on stories that might hurt liberals politically. Of course not. But a lot of the stuff of what is sometimes now rightly called ‘reactionary centrism’ is mere opinion. Nobody went anywhere to investigate something. It’s usually somebody who banged out the op-ed piece in half an hour by recycling the same ten anecdotes about some crazy stuff that happened on some campus, supposedly, plus a quote from someone in some university who says, ‘I don’t feel like I can still say what I want to say’. And bang, there is your op-ed piece that sounds so reasonable and well informed. Zero reportorial labour has gone into this. Very often, with all due respect, zero intellectual labour gone has gone into this. But—to repeat—I’m not denying that we should be having a more serious discussions about the normative basis of academic freedom. We should think more systematically about how academic freedom and democracy hang together, for instance. It’s not like we have all the answers ready.   CJLPA :   My last question, since our hour is about up, concerns your current projects. We understand that you’re working on a new book?   JWM :   Yes, I’m trying to finish a volume on architecture and democracy. Among other things, I’m asking the question: what kinds of spaces might either represent democracy or sometimes concretely facilitate democratic conduct? This is something that I’m of course not the first to think about. We talked earlier about Rousseau. Think about his arguments against the theatre: why did he think that theatre was giving us passive citizens, why should we have festivals instead, where everybody can see everybody else and be affirmed in their belief that we’re all committed to a shared political project together? Quite a few political figures, eminent ones, have given thought to this, but there aren’t very many systematic accounts of the issues at stake.   A further point I would make in this context is that it is also important to rethink some of the basic, if you like, communicative democratic rights which are essential for the working of democracy; some of them require physical space. I’m thinking in particular about freedom of assembly. Of course in the US context it goes very, very far back. In other countries it’s much more recent as a codified right. It’s generally not a very robust right. If you think about what’s been happening in the UK, in terms of new legislation to supposedly prevent public disorder, some of that is very draconian. Even where demonstrations are allowed, they’re often unreasonably constrained. Often, people can’t demonstrate where they want to demonstrate. They might be shunted aside, they’re told to go to places which symbolically aren’t important or where they’re very unlikely to be in the face of other people.   If you make a criterion for permits that ‘assemblies must never disturb anybody’, then you’ve taken away the edge of freedom of assembly, of demonstrations, because that’s one moment where—going back to our earlier discussion about community in big cities—people want to be in each other’s face in a certain way, where they want to bother each other, where they want to start conflicts—and sometimes that can be unpleasant. It would obviously be a mistake to think that only nice progressive people do demonstrations. But that’s something that, as long as it remains peaceful, we have to put up with and should try to engage with. We should even, I think, be more tolerant of civil disobedience than has been the case—even if it can be annoying and causing all kinds of inconveniences. It’s part of the cost of democracy, so to speak. Even if now you don’t see any big reason to demonstrate out there, if we move to a system where it’s much more about technocratically managing dissent—as opposed to having somewhat more unpredictable, dare I say uncertain, forms of protest—you might regret that shift; you might want to be able to protest in a noisier and more disturbing way one day.   CJLPA :   The concept of a debate chamber being the absolute heart of a democratic republic is something which both Joseph Schumpeter and Carl Schmitt have spoken about. For them, these are not genuine debate chambers any more, but simply shells. They reflect a normative bedrock that no longer exists, which is the commitment to a particular discursive legislative process.   JWM :   Then again, Schmitt was making a bad faith argument in this context. He was arguing that in the nineteenth century, supposedly, parliaments were real sites of deliberative democracy, if you like. But then it became very easy to say, ‘let’s hold up this ideal, which proves that in the twentieth century and beyond—in an age of mass democracy, mass parties, and committee meetings where things are actually decided—this is no longer the case’. You can have a much more realistic view of parliaments; it’s not really the case that somebody makes an argument and then somebody across the aisle says ‘yeah, now that I think about it, that’s a really good point’. That is pretty rare, in fact. In many countries, things only really come to the debate chamber when they’ve already been decided. But even the speeches are important, as they dramatize conflict; it is a way to tell citizens what the different sides are thinking—all this goes back to the point that there is nothing wrong with conflict, even if conflict doesn’t result in consensus agreement or anything. As you’re hinting, that’s being endangered if now our representatives are mainly there to produce short social media clips and then, as Ted Cruz famously did, immediately check themselves on Twitter to see ‘is it playing well? Is it working?’ and so on. That’s not very helpful in terms of citizens getting a wider view of what’s actually at stake in a certain conflict, what are the different contending positions, and so on. I don’t have any sort of obvious solution to this, but at least realizing it’s a problem, even if you don’t have a terribly idealistic view of parliamentarism to begin with, might be helpful in terms of finding our bearings and putting our present situation into a bit more of a historical perspective.   CJLPA :   Professor, it has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today. On behalf of The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art , thank you.   JWM :   Well, thank you for having me. Thank you also for the thoughtful questions—and I don’t always say that! Benjamin Keener, the interviewer, is a law student at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where he is an articles editor for the Journal of Constitutional Law . Ben received his MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge and writes and publishes on topics of legal history and theory.

One of Adolf Hitler’s favourite musicians was Richard Wagner. His thunderous compositions were meant to instil a violent pride within the listener, with pieces like the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ roaring into one’s ears with bombastic brass and screeching violins. It is fitting, then, that an anti-war film like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now  (1979) chose it to accompany a horrific act of violence, in a scene that involves US military helicopters launching rockets and firing machine guns at a Vietnamese settlement. The scene is emblematic of much of the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s. It is bleak, uncompromising, and deeply cynical, but also indulgent and excessive, revelling in its own glorification of stomach-churning violence.   In Jarhead , his memoir, former US marine Anthony Swofford describes his experience watching the movie during the Gulf War. His platoon would ‘concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals’.[1] In Sam Mendes’ 2005 film adaptation of the book, Swofford and his platoon are depicted singing along to the fascist anthem, cheering as Robert Duvall shoots down Vietnamese people. It is important to note that, within Jarhead , the Apocalypse Now clip is played out of context, separated from the preceding or following scenes. It is through this lack of context that the military can turn an ostensibly anti-war scene into a pro-war experience. ‘Come get some, marines!’, the announcer says after the clip finishes playing. Just like Coppola’s characters, Swofford and his platoon cannot wait to smell napalm in the morning.   ‘There’s no such thing as an anti-war film’, French director François Truffaut once said.[2] According to the New Wave pioneer, the camera turns the world into a spectacle, the horrible into the voyeuristic, reality into construction. It is, in fact, why he refused to adapt 81.490 , a book comprising Alexandre Chambon’s recollections of a   concentration camp. ‘I couldn’t resolve to have characters weighing 30 kilos played by 60[-]kilo extras, for here, the physical, visual and bodily reality [was] too important to be sacrificed’.[3] Truffaut explains the sacrificial aspect of narrative cinema, where one is forced to create a representation of the ‘real’, sacrificing the actual ‘real’ in the process. The concept of construction (or reconstruction) was very much at the core French New Wave’s ethos. A movement focussed on the noticeable arrangement of shots and edits, and spearheaded by Truffaut himself, the French New Wave drew attention to cinema’s artifice with the intention of revealing its hidden truth. When Truffaut saw a film, he saw a beauty in its fakery, a reality within its unreality. Though no match for personal experience, film represented history and life in a manner that stood apart from other art forms.   This aspect of cinema collides with a tragedy as cosmic as war. How does one reconstruct what it feels like to partake in legalised mass murder when armed with nothing but a camera? The anti-war film is nothing new. An early example is Westfront 1918  (1930), GW Pabst’s study of PTSD. War, in its glory and horror, has long been a bedfellow of the cinematic form. Edmund Burke suggested in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful  that there   was a perverse thrill in extricating beauty from violence. Misery is more palatable when viewed through a well-composed camera lens and perfectly positioned lighting. To say that cinema can’t have a destructive aspect does a disservice to the medium. DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation  (1915) was more than just a movie. It was a javelin   aimed at the heart of Black America and must be remembered and condemned as such. But this hate crime on celluloid had its intended effect. What happens when the opposite is true? How can a director contend with the possibility of their message being received not indifferently, but with a rapturous wrongness?   Anthony Swofford contends with this inner turmoil with his journalistic integrity. Sam Mendes does so with his reflexive visual grammar. The opening of Jarhead , often accused of plagiarism, is an intentional copy of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket  (1987). Swofford himself noted that the monstrous drill sergeant (R Lee Ermey) inspired many real-life drill sergeants. This is another example of the dangers of reappropriating art. Devoid of context, an anti-war statement on dehumanisation and abuse produces a manner to aspire to, complete with gendered and racialised jokes. However, there is a contrast between Kubrick’s and Mendes’ shooting styles. Kubrick emphasises the homogeneity of the military boot camp with stable, static, centred framing. Mendes uses an unsteady handheld camera. His intention differs greatly from Kubrick’s. Instead of a portrait of a genericised collective, he makes a statement on the unsteadiness of the drill sergeant in Jarhead . By literally destabilising the camera, Mendes destabilises our perception of both the soldiers and the instructor. He thus calls attention to both the artifice of his visual grammar and the artifice of the sergeant.   We use stories to make sense of our world.[4] Therefore, the lack of narratives around Swofford’s Gulf War turns his and his fellow soldiers’ lives into nonsense. It denies the catharsis that comes with making sense out of something as abstractly horrifying as war. The Gulf War was not given the same preferential treatment by cinema as the Vietnam War. This fact is referenced in Jarhead  when a helicopter passes overhead playing ‘Break On Through (To the Other Side)’ (1962) by The Doors. ‘That’s Vietnam music. Can’t we get our own music?’, moans Swofford in the film. Music is prevalent not just in the Mendes film, but in the history of war itself. Take, for instance, ‘Rock the Casbah’ (1982) by The Clash. The song was written by Joe Strummer with an anti-war intention. However, ‘one thing the pacifist anarchist Joe Strummer certainly never intended was for “Rock the Casbah” to become the anthem of the Gulf War soldiers during Operation “Desert Storm”’.[5] This was a particularly horrifying act of artistic reappropriation. It was more than just an act of disrespect by American ‘imperialists’. It was a desperate attempt to narrativise the unnarratable, using the sentiment of anti-war music to create the opportunity for the dramatic that Vietnam presented. When the war ends and the soldiers celebrate, they dance to ‘Fight the Power’ (1989) by the leftist hip-hop group Public Enemy, oblivious to the irony that they represent that same power.   Art presents a catharsis by narrativising the absurdity of life. Is it possible, then, to create ‘uncathartic’ art? It seems that this is Mendes’s intention with Jarhead , a war film that presents very little warfare, if any. Swofford, and by extension the audience, feels ‘blue-balled’ by the Gulf War—promised adrenaline-fuelled action but presented with monotony. The frustration and lack of release are literalised in Swofford’s inability to masturbate to a picture of his girlfriend. By relating the catharsis of violence to the orgasm (or lack thereof), Mendes links death to pleasure. Boot camp trained Swofford to treat the taking of life as a pleasurable act, but his incomplete masturbation represents a refusal of pleasure. It is a moment in which Mendes shows his intention to create an ‘uncathartic’ war film. Perhaps this is how Jarhead avoids Truffaut’s trap. Can the war film avoid glamorisation by simply refusing to show warfare? Perhaps the considerable loss Jarhead  made at the box office, despite its action-packed trailer, provides an answer. Perhaps audiences were hit with the same frustrations Swofford and his platoon felt. Tricked into expecting the indulgences of cinematic violence, they were instead left with a version of Waiting for Godot  set in the blistering desert. It is through this very lack of release, this intentional frustration, that audiences were taught to reject cinematic depictions of violence. Nobody gets to take their shot. Keshav Srinivasan   Keshav Srinivasan is an MPhil student in Film and Screen Studies at Wolfson College, Cambridge. In the past, he has worked as a filmmaker and writer, writing and directing several short films. After his degree, he plans on returning to America to pursue a career in filmmaking. [1] Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles  (Scribner 2005) 6. [2] Tom Brook, ‘Is there any such thing as an “anti-war film”?’ ( BBC , 10 July 2014) < https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140710-can-a-film-be-truly-anti-war > accessed 19 February 2021. [3] Antoine De Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography  (University of California Press 2000) 162. [4] Frank Rose, ‘The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?’ ( WIRED , 3 August 2011) < http://www.wired.com/2011/03/why-do-we-tell-stories/ > accessed 19 February 2021. [5] Amin Farzanefar, ’25 Years of “Rock the Casbah”: Anthem of US Marines’, ( Qantara.de , 2007) < https://en.qantara.de/content/25-years-of-rock-the-casbah-anthem-of-us-marines > accessed 19 February 2021.

Becky Shaw is a Senior Associate at Boodle Hatfield in the firm’s art law and commercial litigation teams. She has worked on cases including  The Creative Foundation v Dreamland Leisure Limited and Others  [2015], one of the first cases to look at ownership of street art and what it means for property laws. In this interview she talks about why she and Rebecca Foden set up the  Art Law & More blog, what working through the pandemic has been like for the art world, and what emerging from it could look like.   Rebecca Foden is a Senior Associate at Boodle Hatfield. Although her practice spans many aspects of commercial litigation, she has achieved professional recognition in her work in art law, including working on the Caravaggio case  Thwaytes v Sotheby’s [2015]. In this interview, she discusses setting up the blog  Art Law & More , the changes the pandemic has wrought on the art world, and why sharing this information not only with professionals but the public at large is important.   Becky Shaw and Rebecca Foden, senior associates at Boodle Hatfield, are highly experienced art lawyers. Shaw has worked on the return of the Banksy mural  Art Buff  to Folkestone. Foden specialises in art litigation, and was involved in the well-publicised Caravaggio case Thwaytes v Sotheby’s .   Boodle Hatfield was founded in 1722, but its respectable heritage has not stopped it innovating. Shaw and Foden founded the Art Law & More  blog, and during the pandemic it has let their firm stay   in contact with the wider art scene. Shaw and Foden have both written long-form legal pieces for their firm’s website, but when I spoke to them on Zoom, they emphasised how the shorter, less technical nature of blog posts lets them publish more often and on more topics. The blog, along with its Twitter and Instagram accounts, has let them connect not only with people looking for legal information, but also with artists, auctioneers, collectors, students, and casual browsers.   Shaw recalls that they were inspired by similar blogs, like the Art Law Report  blog run by American firm Sullivan & Worcester.[1] However,  Art Law & More  focusses on English cases and news, and features   specialist contributors from the art world. These include museum professional Rachel Feldman and art historian Jasmine Clark.[2] Contributors write up much of the news section, but also contribute wonderful extras. For example, the ‘Strawberry Hill Treasure Hunt’ series followed art historian and provenance researcher Silvia Davoli as she prepared the eccentric Strawberry Hill House, built by Horace Walpole, for the ‘once-in-a-lifetime exhibition’ ‘Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill’.[3] Walpole had a large furniture collection, but it had not been seen since it was disassembled and sold in 1842. The 2018–19 exhibition gathered its components and reunited them with Walpole’s house. Art Law & More  provides information for any readers who believe they own furniture from Walpole’s collection, and the posts from the series will interest both future researchers and casual browsers.   The blog’s Instagram page has been used to advertise Boodle Hatfield’s arts sponsorships. For example, the firm has funded a prize for the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair since 2019.[4] In 2020, the firm was able to present it in person, but in 2021 it had to do so online, and its established online platform became very useful. The Art Law & More  Instagram showcased the prints, including Maite Cascôn’s Tricksters Tree I , and the blog published interviews with printmakers shortlisted for the prize, including Virginia Bridge and Jake Garfield.   The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the art world. Rosie Adcock, another member of Boodle Hatfield’s art law team, was seconded to the Royal Academy’s legal team and has continued to assist them remotely with pandemic-related issues. Shaw is a trustee to the De Morgan Foundation, an independent charity that displays and cares for the works of husband and wife William and Evelyn de Morgan. William De Morgan was a member of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts circle, while Evelyn is best known for her spiritual, feminist Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Like many other art organisations, the Foundation had money problems as a result of the pandemic: it struggled to secure loans, and it was forced to cancel exhibitions. However, it was helped by ticketed online talks, which gathered speakers and viewers from all over the world.   Similarly, Art Law & More  let Boodle Hatfield maintain its connections when in-person and informal meetings became impossible in March 2020. It did so through a series of interviews with notables of the commercial art world, called ‘A View from the Market’. The interviews have become a time capsule from ‘Lockdown One’, especially from April and May 2020, and Foden has enjoyed seeing whose predictions were the most accurate. For example, Sarah Hardy, curator-manager of the De Morgan Foundation, predicted that the digital art audience will remain powerful after the pandemic.[5] It is highly international, and its members have been able to appreciate culture more in the pandemic than they would have otherwise. Her prediction is probably accurate.   Online platforms have never been more important than during the pandemic. Jet-setters have found themselves grounded, and interior decorating and auction houses have provided a source of entertainment. One of Foden’s clients has had unprecedented success selling soft furnishings and antique rugs. Online auction technology has advanced rapidly, but smaller auction houses have struggled, and even Christie’s has cut archive staff.[6]   The decrease in travel has dramatically reduced footfall in Mayfair, a hub of small galleries. The area’s exorbitant rents had already forced out the twenty-first-century art gallery Blain Southern in February 2020.[7] How many more will go under when the furlough scheme ends and Mayfair rents return? The market has been innovative in response to these challenges. Many galleries have discovered the value of online sales during the lockdowns, and many are considering whether rent, once an assumed cost of a business, is necessary. Yet for many people, looking at artwork on a screen or attending an exhibition on Instagram will never match doing so in person. Foden visited Cromwell Place, a stretch of townhouses in South Kensington that offers short-term exhibition spaces to rent. Such spaces are a compromise between the isolation of the online experience and the high costs of a permanent physical base.   Despite these successes, we look forward to the return of in-person exhibitions and interactions. These are foundational to the world of art law. However, even once normality has in some form been restored, spaces like Art Law & More  will prove new necessities. Esmee Wright, the interviewer, is a final-year undergraduate in Modern and Medieval Languages at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, specialising in medieval French and Russian. She has written and edited for a number of student and professional publications, focusing on the arts. [1] See ‘Art Law Report’ < https://blog.sullivanlaw.com/artlawreport > accessed 1 March 2021. [2] See ‘Contributors’ ( Art Law & More ) < https://artlawandmore.com/home-2/contributors/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [3] ‘Strawberry Hill Treasure Hunt’ ( Art Law & More ) < https://artlawandmore.com/category/strawberry-hill-treasure-hunt/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [4] Woolwich Print Fair, ‘Prizes’ < https://www.woolwichprintfair.com/prizes > accessed 1 March 2021. [5] ‘A View From the Market—Q&A with Sara Hardy, Curator-Manager at the De Morgan Foundation’ ( Art Law & More , 23 April 2020) < https://artlawandmore.com/2020/04/23/a-view-from-the-market-qa-with-sarah-hardy-curator-manager-at-the-de-morgan-foundation/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [6] Anna Brady, ‘Christie's closes access to historic archive due to staff cuts’ ( The Art Newspaper , 11 February 2021) < https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/dealers-and-academics-mourn-suspension-of-access-to-christie-s-huge-archive > accessed 1 March 2021. [7] Anny Shaw, ‘Blain Southern goes into administration as artists reveal debts owed by gallery’ ( The Art Newspaper , 25 February 2020) < https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/blain-southern-artists-reveal-debts-owed-by-closed-gallery > accessed 1 March 2021.

Fig 1. Sacred and Profane Love (Titian 1514, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. . The sacred’ and ‘the profane’ might sound, at first, like the sorts of technical terms intelligible only to theologians and religious scholars. On closer inspection, however, it appears that they mean vastly dissimilar things to people from many different walks of life. Not only do the words ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ appear in the titles of numerous paintings and orchestral and choral compositions, showing that the relationship between the two has been a topic of interest for artists and musicians alike, but the dichotomy has also been the subject of lengthy written treatments by anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers. The sacred-profane opposition is often considered to have its origins in the work of Scottish orientalist and Old Testament scholar William Robertson Smith, who lived during the second half of the nineteenth century.[1] Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, both students of Émile Durkheim, were among the earliest thinkers on the continent to build upon Robertson Smith’s research into the sacred and the profane, and indeed Durkheim’s ideas about how the two were interrelated, a subject covered in his groundbreaking 1912 study The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life , were profoundly influenced by the work his pupils had previously undertaken. Since then, British anthropologists Jack Goody and Edward Evans-Pritchard, and the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade have been some of the many academics to have investigated the sacred-profane opposition.[2] In more recent years, the phrase ‘sacred and profane’ has occurred in the names of everything from podcasts to documentaries on the Lakota Sioux.[3]   But although Robertson Smith may have been responsible for popularizing the dichotomy, in no way should we suppose, as Jan Bremmer does, that the opposition only originated around 1900. There is good evidence to suggest it had existed long before that. Lindsay Mann observes that the sacred-profane opposition underlies much of John Donne’s metaphysical poetry.[4] Moreover, Gregory Nagy has argued that, although the songs of Sappho and Alcaeus might seem worlds apart, what unites them is the logic of the sacred and profane.[5] Perhaps we should regard Nagy’s arguments with a degree of suspicion, however, since in neither Sappho’s nor Alcaeus’ poetry is the opposition between the two made explicit. It might be argued that such a distinction is implicit. But, even if this were the case, one could object to this mode of interpretation on the grounds that, rather than examining these poems in a manner sympathetic to the contexts in which they were composed, we are instead looking at them through the distorted lens of our modern scholarly preoccupations. We have no idea as to how residents of Archaic Lesbos conceived of sacredness or profaneness. Furthermore, it seems inevitable that, whenever one undertakes to reduce the content of a poem or other work of literature to a straightforward binary opposition, one ends up overlooking much of its richness of language, complexity, and profundity.   Literature aside, several paintings and musical compositions have also made use of the sacred-profane dichotomy as a structuring device. Amongst those artists and musicians to have taken inspiration from the relationship between the sacred and profane are: Claude Debussy, composer of the 1904 Danse sacrée et danse profane ; Benjamin Britten, whose last major choral composition, from 1974-75, was the Sacred and Profane  song cycle; and the Baroque painter Giovanni Baglione,   best known nowadays for his rivalry with Caravaggio and for his painting Sacred Love and Profane Love , which exists in two versions, exhibited in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie and Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica respectively.   Britten   The question remains, what makes one piece of music more ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’ than the next? In the case of Britten’s song cycle, a lot of it has to do with the lyrics. Britten selected and set to music eight short medieval poems, dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. It is believed he discovered the texts in Reginald Thorne Davies’ 1963 book Medieval Lyrics: A Critical Anthology ,[6] which was published a few years before Britten began work on Sacred and Profane . Scholars have chosen to divide up the ‘lyrics’ (another word for song) into two groups, the secular and the religious. This is because collections of medieval lyrics, such as those housed in the Harleian Library, are known to have included both secular and religious songs. Secular lyrics frequently had an instrumental accompaniment and formed the basis of many popular songs, including drinking tunes like the ‘Song of Lewes’. Religious lyrics, on the other hand, did not always have an accompaniment and were generally written for liturgical use. The ‘profane’ songs in the collection (nb here, ‘profane’ is being treated as roughly synonymous with ‘secular’) discuss topics such as love between man and woman, the joyousness of springtime, and the arrival of winter, while the ‘religious’ songs (which we might, in turn, call ‘sacred’ lyrics) concentrate on Christ’s Passion and, in particular, his crucifixion; in fact, the seventh lyric, Ye that pasen by , is written from the perspective of Christ as he gazes down from the cross, and urges onlookers to contemplate his suffering and sacrifice.   Debussy   If, then, the poems that Britten uses provide the key to explaining his collection’s title, what are we to make of Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane ? The two dances are joined together to form a single movement, lasting approximately ten minutes in total. Writing to Manuel de Falla in 1907, Debussy referred to the distinctive ‘colour’ of each of the dances, comparing the ‘gravity’ of the one with the ‘grace’ of the other. With the opening bars of the danse sacrée , Debussy is said to be creating an atmosphere of ancient   religiosity, an effect he achieves through a combination of almost medieval harmonies and chant-like phrases in the strings. It has been suggested that he is endeavouring to reproduce the sounds and character of Roman or Classical Greek music, and that he writes the harp part in such a way as to deliberately evoke that instrument from antique times, the lyre. The danse profane , on the other hand, is of a decidedly exotic character. In French, the adjective ‘profane’ often comes with connotations of earthiness and sensuality, and we cannot fail to be struck by the more ‘impressionistic’ and lush style of the second dance. The harp line, here, is especially redolent of Spanish music. It is also interesting to note in this context that the cross-strung harp is believed to have originated in Renaissance Spain. Along with the sea, Spain was one of Debussy’s great loves; its bright colours and rich, expressive music intrigued him. Many of the composer’s other works, as well, show signs of having been influenced by Spanish music, such as the piano piece La puerta del vino  and the three movements of Ibéria  (the second of Debussy’s three Images pour orchestre ).   But where did Debussy get the idea to write one dance which was ‘sacred’ and another that was ‘profane’? Does his familiarity with the sacred-profane dichotomy suggest that the opposition was more widely known about than we might initially expect? Or did the inspiration to write a piece about the ‘sacred and profane’ come from somewhere else, somewhere other than the intensely academical works of Durkheim and Robertson Smith? Perhaps Debussy was struck by a painting he had come across, maybe one that was even in Rome at the same time as he was living at the Villa Medici, where he stayed for a period of two years during the 1880s. Ultimately, this is pure speculation—to my knowledge, there is no evidence linking Debussy’s two dances with either Baglione’s Sacred Love and Profane Love or Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love . What this   article aims to highlight is the possibility of a connection between Debussy’s composition and one or both of these paintings. The Galleria Borghese, where Titian’s work is displayed, did not open until 1903, and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, where one version of Baglione’s painting is exhibited, did not start welcoming visitors until 1893, so in both cases the establishment of the gallery postdates Debussy’s residency at the French Academy in Rome.   But perhaps—yet more conjecture—he found out about them some other way. This is not impossible, nor is it inconceivable that seeing the painting(s) inspired Debussy to write a composition to do with the sacred and profane. In fact, we know for certain that one piece of music Debussy wrote, the symphonic suite Printemps , was inspired by his experience of seeing a painting by the Italian Renaissance master, Sandro Botticelli. The painting in question, Botticelli’s Primavera , graced the walls of the Villa Medici during the years when Debussy lived there, and it made such an impact upon the composer that he undertook to capture, using music, the exuberance and vitality of the characters represented on Botticelli’s canvas. Given Debussy had already used this painting as a source of inspiration for one of his compositions, what was there to stop him from using other paintings as further sources of inspiration? Of course, what this thesis of mine fails to establish is that it was a painting  that provided the inspiration for the title of Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane .   Baglione Fig 2. Sacred and Profane Love (Baglione 1602–03, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. . It remains for me in the concluding part of this article to sketch some of the major interpretative theories about Titian’s and Baglione’s ‘sacred and profane’ paintings. Baglione was, in addition to being an accomplished draughtsman and painter, an art historian. His 1642 book on the lives and times of artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Le Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori et Architetti , which contains biographies of Caravaggio, Carracci, and Orazio Gentileschi, among others, also has an entry about Baglione himself. There he explains how he made for Cardinal Giustiniani ‘two paintings of two Divine Loves, holding under their feet the profane Love, the World, the Devil, and the Flesh’.[7] This might be taken as concrete proof that the titles which the two paintings go by nowadays were the ones the artist always intended his artworks to have. It is commonly believed that Baglione meant Sacred Love and Profane Love  to be a response to Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit . Orazio Gentileschi’s deposition from the libel suit that Baglione later brought against Caravaggio certainly seems to suggest Baglione set out to rival Caravaggio so as to curry favour with the Giustiniani. Although we are hardly able to take Gentileschi’s testimony at face value,[8] not least because the information he gives is often imprecise or categorically wrong, we cannot doubt that Baglione was consciously imitating aspects of Caravaggio’s style, such as his dramatic use of chiaroscuro and the abruptness of presentation. Baglione’s painting has also been read as a visual accusation of sodomy against Caravaggio. The devil in the bottom left-hand corner of the Rome picture has frequently been identified as a caricatured portrayal of Caravaggio (nb we might observe how, by contrast, the face of the devil in the Berlin version is turned away). It could be, therefore, that Baglione is drawing attention to Caravaggio in more than one way, and in neither instance is he being particularly subtle.   Titian   If we turn from Baglione’s to Titian’s painting, the difference could not be more striking. While Baglione’s Sacred Love and Profane Love  is an agonistic painting, conceived as a retaliatory response by one artist to the work of another artist, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love  was commissioned to mark the occasion of a grand, aristocratic marriage, that of Niccolò Aurelio, chancellor in the city government of Venice, and Laura Bagarotto of Padua. An overview of some of the different interpretations of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love  will suffice to show the multiplicity of scholarly approaches to this most enigmatic of paintings. Walter Friedlaender drew attention to the connection between Titian’s work and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili ,[9] a romance by the fifteenth-century writer Francesco   Colonna. He hypothesized that the seated figure on the left of the painting was Venus, and the standing one on the right was Polia, a figure from Colonna’s narrative, who has recently joined the service of the goddess of love. Erwin Panofsky argued that the two women represent the Twin Venuses of Neoplatonic philosophy,[10] who personify transient and eternal love respectively. Eugene B Cantelupe, in turn, asserted that Titian’s painting is an exploration of the dual nature of love in Platonic philosophy and Christian doctrine. He believed Sacred and Profane Love  to be ‘an allegory of pagan-Biblical love’[11] and highlighted the complex symbolism of much of the painting’s iconography. For instance, Cantelupe regarded Adonis, whose sarcophagus we see in the painting, as a pagan prefiguration of Christ, in that just as Christ returned to life, so Adonis was resurrected, after having been killed whilst out hunting. Both Christ and Adonis, therefore, can be viewed as symbols of rebirth and eternal life.   The task of deciphering the meaning of Titian’s painting is made infinitely harder, however, in view of the fact that Sacred and Profane   Love  was not even the work’s original title, in all probability. The first mention of the painting occurs in a poem of 1613, where it is listed as ‘Beauty Adorned and Beauty Unadorned’. We cannot even be certain whether this was the name Titian used to refer to his work. What, then, is contained in the title of a painting? It is more than just a label. It is a description of that painting’s subject matter. Nor is it just that, for, as Paul Barolsky notes, ‘description is never mere description’, it is also implicitly interpretation.[12] So much of our understanding of Titian’s painting hinges on the particular title we use to describe the work. Not much is ultimately knowable or definite about Sacred and Profane Love , apart from the circumstances surrounding its creation. But in many respects this is what makes it such a captivating artwork. We must try our best to make sense of the painting’s complex imagery but, without the parameters of interpretation suggested by the work’s original title, the title given it by the artist, we can afford to be much freer in our ‘reading’ of the picture than might otherwise be the case. Who the two women in Titian’s painting are meant to be, no one knows. But what arguably matters just as much is who people think  they are. And the fact that we are still asking these questions, and still discussing this painting centuries after it was made, goes to show what a timeless and fascinating work of art Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love really is. Matthew Sargent   Matthew Sargent is a third-year undergraduate in Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Among his diverse interests are Greek historiography, literature, and political thought. He was the joint recipient of the 2020 Porson Prize, for Greek verse composition. He hopes to do an MPhil at Trinity, focussing on leadership theory and paraenetic discourse. [1] Jan N Bremmer, ‘“Religion”, “Ritual” and the Opposition “Sacred vs. Profane”’ in Fritz Graf (ed), Ansichten griechischer Rituale: Geburtstags-Symposium für Walter Burkert  (BG Teubner 1998) 25. [2] ibid 28. [3] Jack Goody, ‘Ritual and Religion: The Definitional Problem’ (1961) 12(2) The British Journal of Sociology 142; Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion  (Oxford University Press 1965); Mircea   Eliade, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion  (Willard R Trask tr, Harcourt 1959). [4] Lindsay A Mann, ‘Sacred and Profane Love in Donne’ (1986) 65(4) Dalhousie Review 534. [5] Gregory Nagy, ‘Lyric and Greek Myth’ in R. Woodard (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology  (Cambridge University Press 2007). [6] Christian Damon Stirling, ‘A Study of Britten’s Unaccompanied Choral Cycles’ (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2015) 106ff. [7] Maryvelma Smith O’Neil, ‘Giovanni Baglione - Seventeenth-Century Painter, Draughtsman and Biographer of Artists’ (DPhil thesis, Oxford 1992) 42ff. [8] ibid 44. [9] Walter Friedlaender, ‘ La Tintura Delle Rose (the Sacred and Profane Love) by Titian’ (1938) 20(3) The Art Bulletin, 320-1, 323-4. [10] Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks  (University of California Press 2000) 78. [11] Eugene B Cantelupe, ‘Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love Re-examined’ (1964) 46(2) The Art Bulletin, 224. [12] Paul Barolsky, ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ (1998) 17(3) Notes in the History of Art 25.

Rebecca Salter is a painter. She is President of the Royal Academy of Arts, the first woman in the role. She has a strong interest in Japanese woodblock prints.   Past and present leaders of the Royal Academy of Arts come together here to discuss the role and power of art in today’s world, and the difficulties and responsibilities of running an institution seen as the country’s cultural trendsetter. These conversations raise questions of ethics, artistic merit, and political compromise. CJLPA : What do you think about the current state of the world, and art’s part in it?   Rebecca Salter : I think for quite some years the art world has been becoming increasingly global and increasingly aware of its carbon footprint. It is predicated on massive growth and prices going up and up and up. I think what will happen now may change that—it will be more difficult for art sellers, probably for a while. So I think the money circus will slow down slightly. I hope it’s a good time to reassess.   CJLPA : Do you think that the pandemic will increase people’s interest in seeing art in person?   RS : I think so, partly because it will increase people’s interest in actually making, housing the made, and the whole process. Because people have had a huge amount of time on their hands, many have found themselves doing things which they never thought they would—making things. So I think there will be more of an interest in the physical object, and also that we will be so fed up with online by the end of the pandemic that we will just want to see the real thing.   I think we have realised there is a difference in seeing an object online. It’s a substitute for now, but nothing can beat the actual experiences of the object. In the object, you can feel the traces of the artist’s hand and as a result of that you can, to some extent, enter their head. I think we lose a lot of that when we look at things online.   There’s a Japanese term which translates to ‘your eyes sit’. It describes the difference between actively looking, on the one hand, and seeing, on the other. Your eyes relax so much that you almost disappear into the artwork because you’re no longer actively scanning it, you’re just ‘being’ with it.   CJLPA : Arts funding: a public or a private affair?   RS : As President of the Royal Academy—which of course gets no government funding—I think it’s a combination. We’re quite lucky in this country as we have a mixed model, wherein some places get government funding and are topped up with private funding. What’s going to happen after this I don’t know, because the government will be looking to reduce its support in all sorts of areas of life. One worries about the arts, because people always make the argument that they are not important and we don’t need them in the way we need roads and hospitals. I would argue that a country without any kind of cultural sector would be so impoverished it wouldn’t be worth living in.   CJLPA : The arts make life worth living in lots of ways.   RS : Exactly. But when you’ve got very difficult decisions to make, it’s not easy to make the case for arts funding when you’ve got schools, and hospitals, and paying back all this money we’ve borrowed over the pandemic. That’s going to be the crunch. Being more optimistic about it, I think that—again, during lockdown—people have recognised the value of the arts sector. So many arts organisations, including the Royal Academy, put stuff online very, very quickly. You could argue that by doing that—and by doing that for free—all the arts organisations contributed to the mental wellbeing of the country.   Nobody has figured out how to monetise the online offerings, because we’ve been effectively just giving them away for free. Just asking people to donate? But if more of what you do goes online at some point—and this is a question that comes up the whole time— how do you monetise art? I’m not sure anybody’s got the answer yet, but I also think that people who are fairly wealthy and are able to support the arts have, again, realised the importance of the arts during lockdown. One can start to have confident conversations with philanthropists, or potential philanthropists, about how they could support the arts. Because people during lockdown look to values in life and in organisation more closely than they might have done before, they want to support organisations that have values they agree with and they think are important.   CJLPA : In a revolution, statues tumble. Are we witnessing a revolution?   RS : I’m not sure whether I’d call it a revolution, but I think it’s always helpful to look at things again and reassess things. There are some truly egregious examples where statues should be tumbled, but in many cases I think it is much more important to have really good conversation about objects and their interpretation. I think if you’re not careful, the tumbling doesn’t actually achieve very much, except for taking something away. What you really want to do is add to the quality of the debate.   Look at how history has been interpreted. The Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition that has just opened at the National Gallery is incredibly interesting. For a long time, Gentileschi was sidelined almost completely in art history. There were some concerns that she was being exhibited at the National Gallery as a sort of token woman. But there is no way you could go around that exhibition and think she is a token woman. Her painting is unbelievably powerful, and by rights should have been in the canon right from the beginning. The exhibition wasn’t just run because she was a woman. She’s at last taken her rightful place.   CJLPA : How do you feel, being a woman in the art world? I know it’s a lot better recently, but I saw in Tate the posters of the Guerrilla Girls, and I thought about how they were making art not so long ago. I was always into art and drama. They are always labelled as very feminine subjects, whereas men are put towards maths and sciences. Some things have changed, but the art world is still quite male-dominated, for example in terms of salaries.   RS : There still are some very uncomfortable statistics about the art world. All the highest-paid contemporary artists are male. When I was at art school the gender split may have been close to 50–50, but I was never taught by a woman. All the teachers were men, and this applied to my cohort too. Courses with predominantly women are emerging, but there are still fewer women teaching, fewer women as career artists, and the statistics are very odd.   I fear it’s going to get worse. You need to spend some part of your week working for money, and then you need to find time to work on your art. The real pinch point is when you introduce children into that mix. Then, it becomes almost impossible, unless you’ve got an other half who is doing half the work. Quite a few of us older women Academicians don’t have children. Some of the younger ones do but it’s quite a struggle.   CJLPA : Planning your time is quite difficult as an artist, because you have to be immersed in what you’re doing.   RS : Yes, it’s tricky and time consuming. You can’t shortcut it and say, ‘I’ve only got an hour’. But there are more women, and we’ve elected more women at the Royal Academy in the last ten or so years, so the balance is changing.   CJLPA : You were the first female President. Congratulations!   RS: Thank you! It only took 252 years, but we got there in the end. Shockingly, the Royal Academy had two female members when it was founded in 1768, but then the next woman was elected in 1936. That tells you what the nature is of the organisation. Of course, the irony is that—as so often happens— it’s a woman in post when all the sweeping up has to happen, which of course is what’s happening with the pandemic. I get to do all the hard work.   CJLPA : Institutions such as the Royal Academy are the shapers of taste. How did you view this responsibility during your time as President?   RS : I think the Royal Academy might be flattered to think it is a shaper of taste, really! The wonderful thing about the Royal Academy is that it is independent and can do what it wants, money permitting. So even though it has ‘Royal’ over the door, and is in a rather grand place on Piccadilly, there is room to be radical. But I think taste is probably shaped virtually now. I suspect the real world just piggybacks on.   CJLPA : Surely the Royal Academy has a big influence?   RS : Well, it depends on which bit of the Royal Academy. Is it the exhibition we just had on Picasso, or is it the Summer Exhibition? They are very different: one is a scholarly, curated exhibition and the other is really a celebration of creativity. I don’t think the Summer Exhibition shapes taste in any meaningful way now. I think it used to. There’s a hilarious film on YouTube of the Summer Exhibition in 1976—everybody is chain smoking, the women are wearing hats and pearls, and the men are all dressed up in tweeds. But a few hundred yards away you’ve got the Sex Pistols. The Royal Academy really lost touch around this time. But I would argue we’ve moved a long way since then. You can look at the most recent artists we’ve elected, people like Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, and David Adjaye. It’s a very different place.   CJLPA : So do you think it has become more ‘with the times’?   RS : Yes. One of the tricky bits was that when you’re elected as an academician, you’re elected in a category: painting, sculpture, printmaking, or architecture. For an awfully long time, people were saying, ‘Well, what do we do with photographers?’, or, ‘We can’t have photographers because we don’t know where to put them.’ But now Isaac Julien can get elected as a Painter. It’s just a label.   CJLPA : In 1863, the Paris Salon rejected the works of Courbet, Manet, Pissarro, Jongkind, and Whistler. Today’s great art contests, such as the RA Summer Show, are sometimes viewed not as competitions but as lotteries. Do you think there is a risk of great works falling through the cracks? And might there be scope, as there was in 1863, for a Salon des Refusés?   RS : I think the nature of the Summer Exhibition has changed slightly. Back in the old days, there was a consensus about what should be hanging in the Royal Academy, but now for the last six years, maybe more, there’s been a curator coordinator. We’ve had Michael Craig-Martin and Grayson Perry, and this year it was Jane and Louise Wilson. Every year now the Exhibition has a slightly different vision, because the coordinator and committee are different each year. It’s just a reflection of the particular angle of that year’s committee, so it’s not quite as black and white as ‘in’ or ‘out’ and those ‘out’ are cast into darkness. It just means, ‘Not this year but maybe next year.’ Before I was elected, I submitted to the Royal Academy and never got in once.   CJLPA : Was it the same when you applied—that they were still changing curators?   RS : When I was putting in work, I think it was possibly still with a fixed academy view, but it just goes to show that not getting into the Royal Academy doesn’t mean very much if you end up as the president! So it is very different, it’s not really a shaper of any great   taste as it was in the past. Being refused I think is really just ‘try again   next year’ when it’s a different committee.   In the year that Grayson Perry did it, which was our anniversary year, the fact that he was the coordinator shaped the kind of work that was submitted. A huge number of people painted portraits of him, which of course the next year wouldn’t get in at all. Whereas Grayson took them all in because it was quite entertaining to have a wall full of portraits of Grayson. So it’s a much more complex relationship than it was before, because everybody looks at the committee and thinks, ‘OK, I might get in this year because they like the kind of work I do.’ It’s shaped by the committee that we put together, really. It’s not monolithic as it was before.   CJLPA : How do you view your place in the discourse of contemporary art?   RS : I’m in a slightly odd position. When I left art school, I went and did my postgraduate in Japan. This was considered very eccentric in 1979 because everybody wanted to go to New York. I’ve never regretted going to Japan. It was extraordinarily valuable to look back at your own culture, and European culture, through the eyes of a very different culture. It taught me many lessons about one’s narrow assumptions and interpretation of the world. Western perspective, for example, is just the way we choose in the West to represent the world on a flat surface. In Japan and China, they do it in a completely different way. These different visions of the world have been hugely enriching for me.   I was always fascinated by Japan and just wanted to go, though I’m not quite sure why. I got a scholarship and went. Japanese art was what I was drawn to, but I didn’t know much else about Japan, because in those days you didn’t really. Partly it was that things were economically really bad here in the early eighties, whereas Japan was booming. Also, by then I’d learned the language, and once you’ve done that it seems like a waste not to go back! I spent six years there in the end, two in university, and I go back as often as I can.   CJLPA : Has Japan inspired your art?   RS : Yes. When I was there I thought about my work in Japanese, because I lived with Japanese people and had mostly Japanese friends. This was really powerful, and I still do it sometimes. For much of my stay I hardly spoke English at all. When I came back to England, I couldn’t really talk or think about my work in English because it had been ‘created’ in Japanese. It’s like I’ve got two circuits in my head: every now and again when I’m working, I think about the work in Japanese because it can unlock things. My experience in Japan was very valuable indeed. Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin, the interviewer, is a Fashion and Arts & Culture writer, editor, and stylist interested in exploring the intersection of fashion, performance, and identity. Currently, she serves as the editor for The COLD Magazine  where she works across the art and fashion departments, attending key industry events like London Fashion Week, editing and writing features. She is also the External Arts Relations Officer at CJLPA , focused on cultivating partnerships with arts institutions and supporting editorial projects in both visual and performing arts.

Bury [music] so deep under the earth that no sound or echo of it may rise again. —Attributed to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb[1]   Over 10,000 farmers in India committed suicide in 2019, with indebtedness cited as the predominant factor leading to the deaths. In certain states, a farmer is over 80% more likely to take their own life compared with other members of the population.[2] And now, this agrarian crisis has been acutely pressured by the hurried enacting of three new farm laws in September 2020, opening up agricultural trade to private corporations and destroying what little price protection the country’s small and marginal farmers—who constitute 85% of the farmer populace—rely heavily upon to survive market vagaries.[3]   The government’s decisions have been deemed’ ‘undemocratic’ by those in India’s opposition party. Yet in the face of a seemingly bleak prognosis, the response, especially from the Sikh-majority state of Punjab, has been a remarkable exhibition of solidarity in civil resistance. The six months from August 2020 to February 2021 have seen an estimated 300,000 farmers march from Punjab to Delhi and erect settlements at its borders, besieging the city in demonstration against the laws.[4] What is striking about the images from the borders of Singhu, Tikri, and others, is that the protest sites are more resemblant of makeshift towns than rallies. Overhead shots display a tessellation of tractor trollies scattered with marquees offering 24-hour free hot meals, exercise facilities, and even a school for underprivileged children led by volunteer protesters. It is abundantly clear that the farmers are sat in for the long haul. And amongst the array of media, one theme consistently pervades: music.   From the sound of Sikh devotional hymns, or keertan , ringing through the tents, to the iconic figures of the Punjabi pop universe singing to gatherings of thousands, music has served to not only amplify the voice of the masses but also to let their spirits endure during the harsh winter months spent sleeping out in the cold. And it is no coincidence that musical expression has been a prominent medium for harnessing this sentiment, as it is fundamentally inseparable from both Sikh tradition and Punjabi culture.   The centrality of music to Sikh praxis   It is difficult to overstate the centrality of music to Sikh devotional practice. The vast majority of its canonical scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, has been arranged in  rāg.  A melodic framework designed for musical improvisation,  rāg  is akin, but not equivalent, to the melodic modes found in Western music theory. Each composition within the Granth Sahib is written in poetic measure and assigned a  rāg  to which it should be sung. The founder of the faith, Guru Nanak, goes so far as to identify himself as a minstrel, whose message is to be sung, not simply preached.[5] In a sense, Sikhi embodies a sonic theology.   Importantly however, the place of music within the tradition extends beyond mellifluous melody. One of the distinguishing features of Sikh religious observation is a confluence of the meditative and the heroic, with music acting as a thread to bind them together. Its significance is as much temporal as it is spiritual, and nowhere is this epitomised greater than in the flourishing of the  dhādi  tradition during the early seventeenth century. The  dhādi s, literally ‘bards’, were originally thought of as local amateur musicians who weren’t skilled enough to warrant a place in the Mughal courts. Under the sixth Guru of the Sikhs, Hargobind, a deliberate use of the same term was employed as a resignification of the vocabulary. The  dhādi  was not only celebrated in the Sikh tradition, but brought into courts and patronized by the Guru, being referred to as his ‘beloved’.[6] Although a little crude in its periodisation, this time period is also argued to have been an iconoclastic moment in Sikh history, transforming the psyche of the population from one of sainthood to one of warriorhood, and alongside it a more formal establishment of Sikh political authority.   The  vār s (ballads) the  dhādi s sing consist of tales of valour and heroism, intended to evoke a martial spirit and, as Joyce Pettigrew succinctly puts it, ‘overwhelm the conditions of injustice and oppression’.[7] Sikh hagiography places the arising of the  dhādi  along with a materialisation of militancy in the community. The theme of sacrifice for greater good is all but ubiquitous in their renditions:   It is not given to everyone to be a martyr. This position is the highest anyone can attain. The names of those will never remain Who fear death. Great are those fighters who give their life for the nation, Who give their life for the nation.[8]   The strength of the narrative was that it tugged at strings of sovereignty. Martyrdom in the name of justice was to be valorised, not feared, and by being expressed within melody was to increase its efficacy.   *   Fast forward a hundred years, and the place of music is reified again during the milieu of Mughal India under the reign of the emperor Aurangzeb. Italian writer Niccolao Manucci, who spent almost his entire adulthood detailing the lives of the Mughal rulers first-hand, recounts in his famous Storia do Mogor :   Not resting content with the above orders [prohibiting alcohol, drugs, long bears, etc], Aurangzeb … ordered the same official to stop music. If in any house or elsewhere he heard the sound of singing and instruments, he should forthwith hasten there and arrest as many as he could, breaking the instruments.[9]   Whilst the extent of Aurangzeb’s prohibition is debated by musicologists and historians alike, the continuation of the various musical traditions was now most certainly a vehicle of defiance of an oppressive and at times tyrannical kingship. With this antecedent, the use of music to amplify Sikh and Punjabi voices of resistance during the largest mass mobilisation in India’s postcolonial history should by no means come as a surprise.   The Punjabi music industry   A genre that in recent times has been largely typified by a glorification of violence, the Punjabi music industry now resonates with an entirely new flavour of rebellion. Since the start of the protests, dozens of songs have been released by both native Punjabi and diaspora artists in support of the demonstrations, characterised not only by their messages of solidarity but their damning critiques of the Indian polity. The same vibrations of the  dhādi  epics echo through the lyrics that have been fuelled by, and given renewed determination to, the movement.   Kanwar Grewal, a Sufi singer whose work has gained large popularity within the commercial space, is a regular feature on stages throughout the protest site. Crowds have gathered in their tens of thousands to listen to his acapella performances, and he has become something of a talisman for the effort. But his artistry has not been without rebuttal.   Grewal, who hails from a farming family in rural Punjab, has recently had one of his songs removed by YouTube in India. ‘Ailaan’ (‘Proclamation’) was confirmed to have been taken down by YouTube’s headquarters in California after the Indian government filed a complaint. None of the lyrics appear to breach the site’s content guidelines themselves. Instead they violate ‘certain rules and policies laid down by the Indian government’, noted the song’s producer, Harjinder Laddi.[10]   Oh Delhi, you are going to be troubled by this gathering, But only a farmer will have the final word about his crops.[11] —Kanwar Grewal, ‘Ailaan’   This is not the only instance of government retaliation. Singer and lyricist Pawandeep Singh Mohali, more commonly known by his alias Shree Brar, was arrested on 6 January 2021 under the Police Incitement to Disaffection Act for his lyrics encouraging gun culture and exalting lawlessness. The Senior Superintendent of Police, Vikram Jeet Duggal, claimed that ‘[t]he lyrics of the song very much encourage the youth to commit crimes and antisocial acts’.[12] The song in question, ‘Jaan’, was released just a week before the equally provocative ‘Kisaan Anthem’ (‘Farmer Anthem’) which features Brar and nine other Punjabi artists.   ‘Kisaan Anthem’ utilises an evocation of the Sikh Gurus to facilitate an emotion of virtue and righteousness. Brar sings of Guru Nanak blessing the Sikhs with a farming heritage, and implying that their rights have been divinely bestowed. Music, religion, and political resistance are deeply intertwined in these works. It is apparent in Brar’s lyrics, as it is in those of numerous others, that these songs are not designed to generate album sales or bolster fame. Instead, they are saturated by a tangible essence of challenging the hegemony, the source of which is is a long lineage of musical defiance.   O master of the hawk [the tenth Sikh Guru] place your hand on our head and protect us, As we walk alone and our enemy is the government.[13]   —Shree Brar, ‘Kisaan Anthem’   For the thousands of farmers who remain steadfast in their struggle, these musicians and their artistic expression serve as much more than entertainment. There is a deep-rooted sense of heritage and dynasty that vibrates with every note. The lyrics, melody, and rhythm that rang 500 years ago, whose resonance permeates the protests today, are not simply just a chorus of sacred sound. Nor are they merely demonstrations of political recalcitrance. These songs, hymns, and ballads are articulations of a sovereignty, and have become the anthems of a movement. And the orchestra that played to defy injustice over half a millennium ago appears to be just as loud today. Jeevan Singh Riyait   Jeevan Singh Riyait is currently studying for an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has degrees in Mathematics from the University of Leicester, and Theology and Religion from the University of Oxford. Outside of his career in investment banking, his interests include the research and reading of precolonial Sikh history, as well as being an avid cricketer. [1] Katherine Butler Brown, ‘Did Aurangzeb Ban Music? Questions for the Historiography of his Reign’ (2007) 41(1) Modern Asian Studies 77. [2] Dominic Merriott, ‘Factors associated with the farmer suicide crisis in India’ (2016) 6(4) Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health 218. [3] Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers Welfare, All India Report on Agriculture Census 2015-16  (New Delhi: Ministry of Agriculture   & Farmers Welfare, 2021) 28 < http://agcensus.nic.in/document/agcen1516/ac_1516_report_final-220221.pdf > accessed 20 March 2021. [4] Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘Indian farmers march on Delhi in protest against agriculture laws’ Guardian  (London, 30 November 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/30/indian-farmers-march-on-delhi-in-protest-against-agriculture-laws > accessed 24 March 2021. [5] Guru Nanak, Guru Granth Sahib  (first published 1604; Sant Singh Khalsa tr) 151 < http://srigranth.org/servlet/gurbani.gurbani?Action=Page&Param=468&g=1&h=0&r=0&t=1&p=1&k=0 > accessed 27 March 2021. [6] Michael Nijhawan, ‘From Divine Bliss to Ardent Passion: Exploring Sikh Religious Aesthetics through the Ḍhāḍī Genre’ (2003) 42(4) History of Religions 375. [7] Joyce Pettigrew, ‘Songs of the Sikh Resistance Movement’ (1991) 23(1) Asian Music 86. [8] ibid 101. [9] Niccolao Manucci, Storia del Mogol di Nicolò Manuzzi veneziano  (first published 1708, Franco Maria Ricci 1986) 8. [10] Pawanjot Kaur, ‘YouTube Removes 2 Songs on Farmers’ Protest, Producer Says HQ Cited “Govt Intervention”’ ( The Wire , 8 February 2021) < https://thewire.in/agriculture/youtube-removes-farmers-protest-song-himmat-sandhu > accessed 24 March 2021. [11] Vari Rai, ‘Ailaan’ ( Rubai Music , 2020, song recorded by Kawar Grewal) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1t91auJVnM > accessed 27 March 2021. [12] Express News Service, ‘Patiala police arrests singer, lyricist Shree Brar for “glorifying” lawlessness’ ( The Indian Express , 6 January 2021) < https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/chandigarh/shree-brar-arrested-punjab-7134659/ > accessed 24 March 2021. [13] Shree Brar, ‘Kisaan Anthem’ ( PB Studios , 2020, song recorded by Shree Brar et al) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiVuPmh9A > accessed 27 March 2021.

The family is often presented as an opponent to the state as the location of power, or as an alternative to state institutions. The 2004 law which banned French public school pupils from wearing religious symbols, implicitly focusing on the veil, exposed a ‘tension between abstract universalism and embodied particularism’.[1] That is to say, it centred the debate on laïcité (secularism, roughly) onto the issue of an imagined conflict between a universal French republican identity and a specific religious identity which was embodied by the veil, taken as a synecdoche of Islam. Family is significant to this, as the French doctrine of laïcité essentially dictates that religious freedom is welcomed but only so long as it remains in the private arena. Balibar (2007) perfectly exemplifies the laïque  (secularist) view by arguing that it is religion which organises the private sphere, specifically family and sexuality.[2] While a private–public binary is clearly artificial and religion does in fact shape both, he demonstrates the French assumption of the republican ideal of religion, as something that stays in the family. Therefore, when we talk about the ‘religion versus the state’ debate in a French context, we are exploring the ideas of private versus public spheres, even when family is not explicitly mentioned. Bowen argues that the foundation of laïcité  is the existence of a public space where there is freedom of expression. La croyance  (belief) must stay out of it, as a threat to free expression, while le culte , organised religion, must be regulated within it.[3]   I propose that an anthropological exploration of French experiences of family and religion would enable us to identify what is really at stake in the French headscarf debate. I first explore Foucault’s theory of biopolitics and discipline and how this interacts with ideas of the private sphere and family. I then examine Iteanu’s theory of hierarchy and values as inherently linked, suggesting that the veil debate centres on a perceived hierarchisation of familial/religious values over state/ republican values. Finally, I critically discuss Abrams’ approach to the state as an idea, which suggests that a reification of the state leads to essentialised categories of religious family and state, further obscuring the fault lines in this debate. I prove that an ethnographic focus on families sheds light on the insecurity of the French state, and its reliance on the public/private dichotomy.   Firstly, Foucault suggests that as the modern state emerges with its distinctive habits of biopolitics and discipline, the family as the main unit of governance is forced to retreat. He argues that the modern state makes the family into an instrument of governance, rather than a model of the state, as information required to control the population is gained through the family.[4] Before the modern state emerged, Foucault theorises, the state had had the power to make die and let live—that is, to execute or not. In practice, this is a weak form of power because the state ended up having little control over the living.[5] Killing someone may have been a power, but it was one that was abruptly ended when that person actually died. Therefore, a biopolitical shift to making live  and letting die  empowered the state by creating the arena of power as one where the state could actually act— the realm of the living.[6] However, Foucault’s perspective on the state is limited in its usefulness in a discussion of religion because it attributes atheism to the citizens. It relies on them being focussed on life over death, assuming they ultimately desire to stay alive as long as possible and surrender up freedoms to the state so as to be made to live.   Talal Asad, an anthropologist of religion and secularism, highlights that religion causes subjects to look to ‘other-worldly’ concerns, meaning that the state needs to assert its place as a ‘worldly’ power.[7] This may explain why the French republican state is so concerned with keeping acts of religious belief out of its public sphere. An assertion of worldly power is evidenced in the discourses around the alleged oppression of Muslim girls by their families, who boundary their sexuality by ‘forcing’ them to veil. For example, the 2003 Stasi commission argued that Islamism threatened secularism and women’s rights in the banlieues (suburbs).[8] The family and its transcendent religious values infringe on state power in state institutions such as schools, and in areas like the banlieues . They limit state sovereignty within their territory. The French state is essentially insecure about its grip on power, and transcendent religious values highlight that its power of making live is only relevant so long as people desire material life above all other things.   It is commonly argued that the French state’s choice of headscarves as the religious symbol to target is born of racism and imperial mores. Returning to Foucault, he argues that racism is a natural result of the biopower of making live and letting die so far discussed.[9] The state racialises groups within the human ‘species’ which allows it to leave some ‘inferior’ subspecies to die or be dominated, with the ultimate aim of strengthening the overall population. I argue that this is not the case in the veiling debate. Rather than dehumanising Muslim girls so as to abandon them to oppression and subordination, the French government is instead trying to force them up from the family  level of identity to a universal  French republican level of identity. It is trying to strengthen the republic as a whole by integrating  everyone rather than excluding  some.   The anthropologist André Iteanu demonstrates that banlieue  Muslim girls, who are at the heart of the veiling discourse, actually do better than the boys at school, losing their accent more easily and integrating more into the urban world of work.[10] He suggests that their Islamic revival and return to veiling has arisen not because they feel excluded from wider French society, but in fact because they feel comfortable in this context and able to express themselves and their religious identity. Another anthropologist of secularism, Mayanthi Fernando, described Muslim French youth, second- or third-generation immigrants committed to citizenship and gaining academic qualifications beyond the Baccalauréat (taken at the same age as A levels), in such a way as to support this picture.[11] Iteanu suggests that the predominantly North African immigrant communities of the banlieues , low-status as they may be in mainstream French society, are relatively free from state influence, as police are less present or effective with them than with other groups. However, this freedom is reliant on the banlieusards ( banlieue -dwellers) accepting a subordinate position.[12] The French state banning headscarves in school may be an expression of discomfort and insecurity at the fact that socially devalued girls are managing to achieve by its own measure of success—the Baccalauréat—even as they also embrace religious values in wearing the veil.   The anthropologist Didier Fassin (2006) suggests that this is a kind of racism without race. It culturalises biological difference so that it can be presented in a form more palatable to a nation that thinks of itself as egalitarian—a clash of Muslim family values versus laïque French society, rather than brown versus white.[13] While biopolitics’ racist method of biologically constructing an Other is irreversible, ‘culture’ is allegedly something one can be integrated into or out of. This explains a French state policy which seems to be at best hypocritical and at worst foolhardy. The state simultaneously legislates to keep individual Muslim signs out of its institutions and  to integrate Islam into its institutions, for example by giving it a Sunday morning slot on the French Two television station. The French state is trying not to force out  the banlieue  Muslim population, but to force it into  the ‘family’ of   the nation state. Muslim identity is acceptable when it is subordinate to French identity, and so an institutionalised religion which one picks up as a hobby, or listens to on the radio on Sundays, is no threat. What is a threat is a hierarchy of values where one’s duty to (Muslim) family comes first. The French state has read this prioritisation of values into Muslim girls choosing to wear the headscarf to school.   Iteanu demonstrates this link between values and hierarchy by proposing that values necessarily imply hierarchy, as one thing is valorised over another.[14] He argues that this idea of hierarchy is unpopular in Euro-America and so the link between the two is concealed in an ‘ideological twist’.[15] In fact, there is an ideological twist at the heart of laïcité , and this mystification explains why the French mainstream appears incapable of seeing the ludicrousness of the claim that children’s clothing threatens the nature of the French state. Underlying the debate, I argue, is an assumption that state values of secularism come into conflict with family values of religious duty, along with state insecurity about the hierarchy of values being established with state below family. Such insecurity leads the state to assert itself by, for example, banning the veil in public schools. All the while, it has to reject the idea that there is a hierarchy or even an alternative source of identity for citizens to itself, as this would threaten the claim of the unity of French society.   It is perhaps hard for a non-French person to understand how deeply this desire for unity runs. As an example, the historian Camille Robcis argues that both sides in the French debates over legalising same-sex marriage drew on this ideological notion to support their argument. The ‘anti’ side argued that writing into law the legality of gay relationships reified difference, thus hurting unity. The ‘pro’ side argued that not allowing gay marriage singled out a group and reified difference thus hurting unity.[16] The French republican ideological project cannot openly acknowledge that there is a threat to its internal one-ness.   Iteanu draws parallels between the debate over giving the women the vote and the headscarf debate. Formerly, the state argued that women couldn’t have the vote, not because of a lesser humanity, but because they were not as educated as men, which meant their choice of their vote might be swayed by their husband or priest.[17] The anxiety at the core of this position is that the private sphere would invade the public sphere which people enter when they vote, causing them to become ‘occasional politicians’, in Weber’s words.[18] In the case of the veil, the state’s argument is that Muslim women are not rationally fit to be French citizens because they subscribe to dogma and are spiritually and materially (in terms of their clothes) controlled by their families. The state’s designation of the headscarf as a religious symbol is about psychological as well as visible differences. It assumes that Muslim women desire to wear the headscarf and so to belong to a particular system of values. The state conceals the fact that it is attempting to place its own values higher in this perceived hierarchy by labelling the debate as one about égalité  (equality) and rescuing oppressed women. Herein lies the ideological twist.   Why the veil particularly? As one anthropologist joked to me: when in doubt, use Foucault. Foucault’s expansive theorising on state power includes a version of power premised on discipline, which works on the individual body and can coexist with a biopolitics focussed on controlling the population.[19] I argue this disciplinary kind of control better explains the veil situation, a conflict in which the French state has essentially taken against an embodied sign (the veil) and required individuals to change how they use their body as a result.   Fernando highlights the small scale of the issue at Jean Nouvel school, where there were around 20 veiled girls in a school of a thousand people. With only 20 bodies to remember and control, a girl called Nawel was repeatedly targeted, with or without her veil, because her name was remembered.[20] Iteanu argues that as conversion is treated by the state as an individual choice, the punishment can be individual. Indeed, the state had to view the banning of the veil in public schools as bodily discipline rather than spiritual control, as the latter would breach the principles of laïcité .[21] Asad builds on this by suggesting that the debate essentially boiled down to a misunderstanding of religious signs.[22] The state saw wearing the veil as merely a choice to demonstrate belonging to a community, while Muslims saw it as a duty  to God and to their families. The state took a material sign and tried to assume a transcendent, familial meaning behind it, a choice to belong to one community more than the French national community.   Furthermore, Foucault argues that discipline and biopower as two forms of power overlap in the case of sexuality, something highly relevant in the case of the veil. Foucault suggests that sexuality is the meeting of biopolitics and discipline because it combines both population-wide focuses on fertility and reproduction, and individual focuses on the body and its experience of pleasure.[23] While the biological focus is not there in the case of the veil, there is a combination of two different scales of approach. Sometimes the state’s discourse zooms in on individual Muslim women’s bodies, allegedly constrained in their sexuality by being forced to veil by family. Sometimes it zooms out to the privatisation of sexuality through the covering of hair and body, considering this a threat to the concept of a sexually free, rational French citizenry. On the one hand, Nawel was told by a teacher not to cover her ‘beautiful hair’, in a comment on her individual beauty and attractiveness perhaps intended to boost her confidence and empower her to free her sexuality from her male family’s control (a caricature of Nawel’s actual motivations for wearing the veil).[24] On the other hand, we can connect the conversation around sexuality, as does Iteanu, to a broader pattern of French politicians being almost expected to have affairs, and to chastity being distinctly un-French. Iteanu uses the example of Rachida Dati, a highly significant French politician of North African heritage. Dati garnered a frenzy of popular interest when she announced her pregnancy but would not say who the father was.[25] Iteanu proposes that the French tabloids were ecstatic to see Dati, a woman who grew up in a conservative Muslim home, choosing a supposedly French ‘free’ sexuality over family rules. The veiling debate reveals an interest in sexuality both at the level of the individual body and in broader conceptions of French identity.   A final remark is necessary on the risks of reifying the concept of the ‘state’. I suggest that a more productive route is to follow the sociologist Philip Abrams’ logic of the state being an incredibly powerful idea, rather than a concrete object. Much discussion of family in relation to the state assumes the existence of a state that its values can clash with. In fact, the state is a ‘unified symbol of actual disunity’, something very evident in the headscarf debate.[26] For example, the argument that conflict over the veil emerges from complex colonial relationships implies that, before colonialism, the French Republic was unified in its identity. In fact, ‘France’ as an imagined community is very new. In 1794, only 11% of people living in its territory spoke French as a first language, which implies provincial identity was a much more powerful source of belonging than the nation.[27] One was, say, Basque, rather than French. Even the idea of laïcité , treated by the French as a cornerstone of their history, was not legally enshrined as a term until the 1946 constitution.[28] The state considers itself ancient and unified, despite all the historical evidence to the contrary. Bowen suggests that the French state idea emphasises ‘continuity over rupture’, assuming universal, historical French values such as laïcité  so that so-called private—familial, religious—values can be treated as new impositions on a unified whole. The debate is therefore constructed as ‘Muslim communities versus[29] the State’—’State’, that is, with a capital ‘S’, reified in its institutions, in this case the education sector. In fact, if the state exists, it is as a series of interwoven ministries and people and ideas, all of which cannot be expected to be ideologically cohesive. In the case of the headscarf, for example, the Education League, the largest teachers’ body, with two million members, opposed  the 2004 law.[30] Conversely, we cannot homogenise ‘Muslim community’ as holding one driving ideology.   It may be too obvious a point that the three and a half million Muslims living in France are not unified in their position on the headscarf. First-generation immigrants encourage their children and grandchildren to pursue integration and financial success, while those in the younger generation criticise their parents for being ‘bad’ Muslims.[31] Bringing the family into an exploration of the construction of a state idea lets us examine essentialised categories and expose the lie of unity in the state. In this way, an ethnographic focus on families allows a deeper examination of the public– private sphere binary, and of the insecurities and falsities that such distinctions attempt to cover up. Mary Osborne   Mary Osborne is a second-year undergraduate in Human, Social, and Political Sciences at Christ's College, Cambridge, specialising in Sociology and Social Anthropology. She is particularly interested in the anthropology of ethics, sexuality, and intellectual disability, and hopes to pursue postgraduate research in the anthropology of disability after she graduates in 2022. [1] Mayanthi Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradicitions of Secularism  (Duke University Press 2014) 7. [2] ibid 16. [3] John R Bowen, Why The French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space  (first published 2006, Princeton University Press 2010) 21. [4] Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality  (University of Chicago Press 1991) 100. [5] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976  (Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana eds, David Macey tr,   Penguin 2004) 241. [6] ibid. [7] Talal Asad, ‘French Secularism and the “Islamic Veil Affair”’ (2006) Spring/Summer 2006 The Hedgehog Review 94. [8] Bowen (n 3) 11. [9] Foucault (n 5) 254. [10] André Iteanu, ‘The Two Conceptions of Value’ (2013) 3(1) HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory 165. [11] Fernando (n 1) 13. [12] Iteanu (n 10) 166. [13] As cited in Fernando (n 1) 17. [14] Iteanu (n 10) 156. [15] ibid. [16] Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France  (Cornell University Press 2013). [17] ibid 167. [18] Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures  (David Owen and Tracy B Strong eds, Rodney Livingstone tr, Hackett Publishing Company Inc 2004) 39. [19] Foucault (n 5) 242. [20] Fernando (n 1) 3. [21] Iteanu (n 10) 166. [22] Asad (n 7) 98. [23] Foucault (n 5) 252. [24] Iteanu (n 10) 167. [25] ibid 167. [26] Philip Abrams, ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State’ in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (eds), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader  (Blackwell Publishing 2006) 124. [27] Fernando (n 1) 9. [28] Bowen (n 3) 31. [29] ibid 14. [30] Fernando (n 1) 8. [31] Iteanu (n 10) 165.

A recent study in the United States indicated that the rate of Americans identifying themselves using political terms has almost doubled in the past five years.[1] This article considers whether this shift towards stronger political identities is indicative of a wider polarisation in Western politics which is, in turn, creating a space for more autocratic decision-making.   The study, carried out by Nick Rogers and Jason Jones, analysed a random sample of Twitter bios (ie the 160 characters you use to describe yourself) for explicit and implicit political keywords. Explicit words included the terms ‘conservative’, ‘Democrat’, and ‘socialist’ and implicit political terms included ‘woke’ and ‘blue lives matter’. The aim of the study was to measure the extent to which Americans are defining themselves by political affiliations and whether they are changing their identity in a way that saliently incorporates their politics.   According to Rogers and Jones, an individual’s identity goes beyond mere attitudes and behaviour: it is the all-encompassing sense of self that informs attitudes and behaviour.   Whilst identity politics may be slightly less prevalent in the UK than in the US, the rise of political engagement throughout the Western world is undeniable. Despite the restrictions imposed on the Presidential campaigns as a result of COVID-19, the US elections saw the highest rate of voter turnout for 120 years. Similarly, for the 2019 UK elections, voter turnout was at its second highest rate since the landslide 1997 election of Tony Blair.   Arguably, this rise in political engagement has brought with it a shift towards increasingly polarised political groups. Jones and Rogers explain this as tribalism: fostering ingroup pride and outgroup animosity. In a political context, studies show that ‘deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, towards a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation’.[2] It was certainly true that in the aftermath of the US election, which saw a swathe of Republican devotees (accompanied by a number of alt-right political activists) march on the Capitol, they demonstrated an almost cultish commitment to their political ideals. Their actions marked an unprecedented assault on modern US democracy and were indicative of the strength of support held across America for its former autocratic leader.   As Jones and Rogers point out, if people define themselves increasingly by their political allegiances, ‘their feelings towards political “others” can be expected to become more negative, and debate on matters of policy will become more emotional and intractable’. Traditional methods of political persuasion may cease to be of use as changing someone’s mind on a particular issue requires ‘an adjustment to an entire sense of group identity’.[3]   The rise in autocratic leadership   COVID-19   Arguably the polarisation of political views, most marked recently in the US but also of course seen in the UK in relation to Brexit, enables autocratic leadership to flourish.   The model of representative politics, adopted by liberal democracies, generally requires the government of the day to place legislation before an elected body of representatives for debate. In this way, legislation has the opportunity to be shaped by representatives of the broader electorate rather than purely the Party in power. This model facilitates political oversight and encourages moderation through compromise. Political parties in the UK have often been accused of all seeking to occupy the centre ground: all endeavouring to strike the perfect balance between conservatism and liberalism. This is no coincidence. Decision-making, in a liberal democracy underpinned by representative politics, requires consensus.   As Lord Sumption notes elsewhere in this issue, there has been a shift away from liberal democracy towards authoritarian government. He identified the Brexit referendum as a turning point for modern representative politics in the UK. Noting the use of referendums by some of the notorious autocrats (including Putin, Mussolini, and Hitler) he explains that they undermine the system of representative politics on which a liberal democracy is based by preventing it from accommodating differences among the electorate on incredibly divisive issues. The natural consequence of this, according to Lord Sumption, is the election of a government with a strong authoritarian streak.   Recent efforts by the government to expand the remits of executive power can be viewed as a manifestation of this trait. It is widely recognised that during periods of uncertainty the electorate looks for strength and stability from its leadership. Indeed, a US study in 2016—in the run up to Donald Trump’s election—showed that 40% of Americans favoured authority, obedience and uniformity over freedom, independence and diversity.[4] Similar trends are visible in relation to the handling of Brexit and the pandemic in the UK. The 2019 Conservative Party manifesto depicted the UK as ‘paralysed by a broken Parliament’ and one of the most commonly cited reasons for supporting the Conservative Party was the promise that, by hook or by crook, Boris Johnson would ‘Get Brexit Done’.[5] Until recently (with the rise of protests concerning the ongoing restrictions), the public have willingly ceded their individual rights in favour of decisive leadership and the government’s autocratic tactics for handling this pandemic have largely gone unchallenged.   Since March 2020, the government has laid approximately 415 pieces of coronavirus-related legislation at an average rate of seven statutory instruments per week. Only 26 of these statutory instruments have been laid before Parliament in draft form.[6] The government has relied on the use of statutory instruments (rather than primary legislation) to govern by Ministerial decree. The primary legislation underpinning the coronavirus regulations is the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. Under section 45R of this Act, Government can dispense with the obligation to obtain Parliamentary approval for regulations if the regulations ‘contain a declaration that the person making it is of the opinion that, by reason of urgency, it is necessary to make the order without a draft being so laid and approved’ . [7] The advantage of this method of legislating is that the regulations can be enacted without delay. In the early days of the pandemic, Government scrambled to enact the Coronavirus Act 2020. The legislation passed through Parliament at breakneck speed but there was, at least, a forum for debate. The same does not apply to the social distancing or lockdown regulations which have, to date, been governed by statutory instruments. Whilst the section 45R urgency justification was entirely plausible at the outset of the pandemic, its continued use undermines Parliamentary sovereignty.   Despite the fact that a number of these statutory instruments have imposed unprecedented restrictions on our personal freedom, with criminal sanctions for breaching the restrictions, the legislation has regularly been published only hours before coming into force.[8] On at least one occasion, legislation was laid after Parliament was no longer in session, despite having been announced in the media several weeks earlier. Legally curious fans of Channel 4’s It’s a Sin  might have noted that the same primary legislation used by that government to issue decrees for the detention of young AIDS sufferers is now enabling the imposition of urgent legislation authorising our detention. Whilst generally the UK population seems to accept the need for such unprecedented restrictions on their freedoms given the health crisis, there remains significant unease regarding Government’s dismissive attitude towards Parliament. The Coronavirus regulations are detailed and complex statutory instruments that warrant considered analysis and parliamentary scrutiny. Parliamentary scrutiny has the dual advantage of requiring the relevant Ministers to prepare for a debate, and in doing so often alerting them to potential shortcomings with the legislation, as well as providing Members of Parliament with the opportunity to point out loopholes or potential consequences that were not immediately apparent to the Minister responsible for drafting the legislation. This process is widely believed to enhance legislation.   Curbing judicial powers   The barrister Adam Wagner recently noted that, ‘the easier it is for freedoms to be taken away, the greater the temptation to limit them again in the future’.[9] This observation may in part explain the gathering momentum behind the expansion of executive power beyond pandemic related legislation.   During the course of the past six months, the government has launched the Independent Review of Administrative Law (IRAL), to conduct a review into the workings of judicial review, the Independent Human Rights Act Review (IHRAR), to consider whether the Act is working in practice and has also now hinted that it will consider reviewing the judicial appointments process. Whilst the decision to commission both the IRAL and IHRAR already constituted red flags as to the government’s direction of travel regarding constitutional law reform, its response to the IRAL panel’s report (the Faulks Report) is even more concerning. It was notable that Robert Buckland described the consultation launched in response to the Faulks Report as a ‘once in a generation opportunity’ to broaden the conversation.[10] This explanation seems a little far-fetched given that the last government consultation of judicial review was conducted in 2013. A more plausible explanation is that the government is seeking to capitalise on the political momentum it has gathered through its recent spate of autocratic decision-making. Although both reviews were alluded to in the Conservative Party’s election manifesto for the 2019 election, the government’s efforts to push through reform at ‘breakneck speed’ have been widely remarked upon.   The Foreword to the government’s consultation stated that ‘[t]he Panel’s analysis identified a growing tendency for the courts in Judicial Review cases to edge away from a strictly supervisory jurisdiction’ and that ‘the panel found courts were increasingly considering the merits of government decisions themselves, instead of how those decisions were made—moving beyond the remit of judicial review’.[11] Panel members have vocalised their concerns regarding the government interpretation of the Faulks Report with Lord Faulks himself confirming, on the Law in Action podcast, that he did not believe this was an accurate representation of the panel’s findings. He explained, ‘I think we found that there were one or two cases which we particularly pointed out where there was considerable tension between what was legitimate to be considered by the courts and what was really a matter of politics. But those were particular cases. We do not think that there was an overall trend that you could extract from those cases’.[12] The government consultation goes well beyond the Faulks Report’s recommendations, proposing reforms to the use of ouster clauses (to broaden their use and thereby limit the justiciability of decisions by the courts) and mandatory remedies that would significantly restrict the court’s ability to declare a government decision null and void.   The IHRAR panel has been tasked with considering the application of the European Convention of Human Rights (the Convention Rights) under UK law and, amongst other things, whether the courts should retain the power to interpret legislation compatibly with Convention Rights under section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 (the HRA). The government’s position is that the courts have a tendency to interpret legislation in a manner inconsistent with the intentions of Parliament in enacting the legislation. If section 4 declarations of incompatibility were a first instance consideration, rather than the interpretative powers used by the courts under section 3 of the HRA, it would severely hamper an individual’s access to a remedy. Mishcon de Reya’s data analysis of cases involving the HRA indicates that the average lag between a declaration of incompatibility being issued and the relevant legislation being amended or repealed is 17 months.[13] Any amendment, following a declaration under section 4 of the HRA, relies on Government making time for the issue to be considered in the legislative agenda. This would impose a significant legislative burden whilst hamstringing the court’s ability to provide individuals with a timely remedy.   Whilst, as yet, no consultation has been officially announced, Robert Buckland’s speech at Queen Mary University on 25 March 2021 gave some insight into the next administrative law issue on the government’s agenda. In February, the think tank Policy Exchange published a report titled ‘Reforming the Lord Chancellor’s Role in Senior Judicial Appointments’ which proposes reforms to the current judicial appointments system so as to grant the Lord Chancellor a greater role in determining senior judicial appointments.[14] In his speech, Robert Buckland expressed his intent to examine the role of Lord Chancellor in the context of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. He referred to strands of reform surrounding judicial appointments that are worth examining to ensure that they ‘continue to provide the appropriate framework for the Lord Chancellor to exercise their duties in respect of our constitutional arrangements’.[15] This topic has been hotly debated in the UK in the past, not least because of the very real fear of moving towards a more political US-style system.   Following the 2018 Supreme Court decision concerning the incompatibility of Northern Irish abortion laws with Convention Rights, it was proposed that a parliamentary committee should play a role in the appointment process for the Supreme Court. Under the current judicial appointment process, judicial appointments are made by a commission, chaired by the President of the Supreme Court and including representatives of the Judicial Appointments Commissions of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, at least one of whom must be a lay member. In fact, the Judicial Appointments Commission for England and Wales comprises a 50/50 balance of judicial members and lay members. Rightly, according to Lord Pannick, whilst ‘[s]ome candidates for Supreme Court appointment take (in broad terms) a more expansive approach to judicial protection of human rights, and others less so’ these factors are not ‘the subject of public discussion’.17 The constitution of the commission does, however, mean that those responsible for approving appointments to our high courts have a diverse professional background. Lord Pannick notes the potential perils of a political system, reflected by the experiences of the US: ‘The unsurprising reality, as Senate experience over the past 30 years has shown, is that the involvement of politicians in the appointment of Supreme Court judges results in political motives and considerations playing the primary role in the process’.[16] Any efforts to incorporate a political element into this decision-making process has the potential to disrupt the balance of the entire British constitution: removing the guarantee of judicial political independence that is essential to maintaining the separation of powers that protects the rule of law.   What can be learnt from the current political situation in Poland?   Since the fall of Communism in Poland in 1989, the country has shown impressive economic growth, record lows of unemployment and strong wages. As a result, it has become an increasingly popular prospect for international investment, with a number of US companies establishing headquarters there during the past decade. However, since the return to power of the Law and Justice party (PiS) in 2015, the Polish judiciary has been the target of policy and legislative amendments leaving it vulnerable to political influence.   Reforms include politicising the appointment of the First President of the Supreme Court (the equivalent of our President of the Supreme Court) and restrictions on legal challenges to judicial and constitutional bodies as well as law enforcement agencies. The Index of Economic Freedom showed that judicial effectiveness had dropped to 42.8 points in 2020 which places it in the ‘repressed’ category, over 15 points lower than its score in 2017.[17] This is severely impacting on the country’s ability to attract foreign investment.   It is impossible not to note here that PiS was founded under the banner of nationalism, populism and Euroscepticism: these are of course all themes that have featured, to varying degrees, in recent Conservative manifestos in the UK (and formed the basis of 2016’s Leave campaign).   According to the European Commission, ‘effective judicial institutions that uphold the rule of law have been identified as having a positive economic impact. Where judicial systems guarantee the enforcement of rights, creditors are more likely to lend, businesses are dissuaded from opportunistic behaviour, transaction costs are reduced and innovative businesses are more likely to invest’.[18] Interestingly, this sentiment has been expressed repeatedly in response to the IHRAR consultation. Respondents have expressed concern in relation to the government’s efforts to row back from its commitments to Convention Rights and limit the powers of the UK judiciary, which is widely respected across the world, to interpret legislation and provide adequate protection for Convention Rights.   The expansion of executive power in Poland has seen a surge in the number of protests in the country, recently resulting in the enactment of laws restricting freedom of assembly. Advocacy groups have identified a trend amongst governments with authoritarian tendencies using the pandemic to weaken democratic standards: in particular, in relation to freedom of association and the independence of the courts. According to a 2020 survey, only 34% of the public and 27% of businesses trust the independence of the Polish judiciary.[19]   Indeed, only last year it was noted that ‘the surge of populist far-right in central and eastern Europe has meant repression which seemed unlikely just a few years ago is slowly appearing’.[20] In Poland, this has taken the form of the imposition of an outright ban on abortion and political harassment of LGBTQ groups and individuals. In a deeply concerning move towards the end of last year, the Polish state-run oil company, PKN Orlen, purchased one of the country’s private media outlets—Polska Press—with a readership of 11 million Poles per day.   Clearly, the expansion of executive power, partly through proposed judicial reforms, in the UK does not exactly align with the situation in Poland. The UK remains politically and democratically stable. However, the political situation in Poland gives cause to consider the possible consequences of constitutional reforms. Over the past year we have accepted unprecedented restrictions on our personal freedom and the current proposals, which seek to limit an individual’s ability to challenge Government decisions, should be viewed through this lens and with extreme caution.   Conclusion   The division fostered by autocratic decision-making has been particularly evident in Poland, the US and the UK. Indeed, Mikołaj Łoziński, a Polish author, observed last year that ‘No one is surprised anymore by the sight of nationalists marching with torches, throwing flares on the main streets of major Polish cities’.[21] The same is true in many cities across the US, and in recent months the UK has seen a sharp rise in the number of violent protests, primarily in relation to the ongoing lockdown restrictions.   The political situation in Poland demonstrates how quickly a liberal democracy can slip towards authoritarian rule and the impact that this instability has on foreign investment and the protection of individual rights.   However, PiS’s transition towards autocratic governance has not passed unnoticed. Concerns regarding the protection of LGBTQ rights and the independence of its judiciary have been the subject of significant media attention and the European Union is considering steps to restrict Poland’s access to European funds until an independent judiciary is restored. With a moderate President in the White House, PiS (which counted Trump as an ally) will doubtless be feeling more vulnerable in the face of the criticism of its European neighbours. Equally, Trump’s appointment of two Supreme Court justices during his single Presidential term shows the potential peril in allowing too much political influence over judicial appointments. In light of this we must all view attempts to tinker with the constitutional arrangements here in the UK with caution—particularly those aimed at providing more power to the executive at the expense of the judiciary. Emily Nicholson and Alexandra Agnew   Emily Nicholson is a Legal Director at Mishcon de Reya. She acted for Gina Miller in her successful constitutional judicial review cases concerning the Prime Minister's prorogation of Parliament.   Alexandra Agnew is an Associate at Mishcon de Reya. She has recently advised the Jewish Labour Movement in relation to its submissions to the Equality and Human Rights Commission on Labour Party antisemitism. [1] Nick Rogers and Jason J Jones, ‘Using Twitter Bios to Measure Changes in Self-Identity: Are Americans Defining Themselves More Politically Over Time?’ (2021) 2(1) Journal of Social Computing < https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9355032 > accessed 20 April 2021. [2] Cass R Sunstein, ‘The law of group polarization’ (2002) 10(2) Journal of Political Philosophy 175 (as cited in ibid). [3] Rogers and Jones (n 1). [4] Matthew C MacWilliams, ‘Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of Americans’ ( Politico , 23 September 2020) < https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/23/trump-america-authoritarianism-420681 > accessed 20 April 2021. [5] See ‘The 2019 Party Election Manifestos and the European Union’ ( European & International Analysts Group ) < https://www.eiag.org.uk/paper/2019-party-election-manifestos-european-union/ > accessed 20 April 2021 [6] Hansard Society, ‘Coronavirus Statutory Instruments Dashboard’ (9 April 2020) < https://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/publications/data/coronavirus-statutory-instruments-dashboard > accessed 20 April 2021. [7] Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 s 45R. [8] Meg Russell and Lisa James, ‘MPs Are Right: Parliament Has Been Sidelined’ ( UK in a Changing Europe , 28 September 2020) < https://ukandeu.ac.uk/mps-are-right-parliament-has-been-sidelined/ > accessed 20 April 2021. [9] Adam Wagner, ‘Taking Liberties: Covid-19 and the Anatomy of a Constitutional Catastrophe’ ( Prospect Magazine , 26 March 2021) < https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/adam-wagner-covid-lockdown-law-democracy-essay > accessed 20 April 2021. [10] Eduardo Reyes, ‘Buckland’s Judicial Power Project’ ( Law Gazette , 29 March 2021) < https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/analysis/bucklands-judicial-power-project/5107951.article > accessed 20 April 2021. [11] Ministry of Justice, ‘Judicial Review Reform: The Government Response to the Independent Review of Administrative Law’ (2021) < https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/975301/judicial-review-reform-consultation-document.pdf > accessed 20 April 2021. [12] Joshua Rozenberg, Interview with Lord Faulks ( BBC , 23 March 2021) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000td1g > accessed 20 April 2021. [13] Mishcon de Reya, ‘Response to IHRAR’ < https://www.mishcon.com/assets/managed/docs/downloads/doc_3246/Response%20to%20IHRAR.pdf > accessed 20 April 2021. [14] Richard Ekins and Graham Gee, ‘Reforming the Lord Chancellor’s Role in Senior Judicial Appointments’ ( Policy Exchange , 2021) < https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Reforming-the-Lord-Chancellor’s-Role-in-Senior-Judicial-Appointments.pdf > accessed 20 April 2021. [15] Ministry of Justice and The Rt Hon Robert Buckland KC, ‘Law and Politics – the Nightmare and the Noble Dream’ ( Queen Mary University Conference, London , 25 March 2021) < https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/lord-chancellors-speech-law-and-politics-the-nightmare-and-the-noble-dream > accessed 20 April 2021. [16] David Pannick, ‘Brett Kavanaugh Scandal: a Supreme Case of Why Politics Must Stay Out of Judicial Appointments’ The Times (London, 27 September 2018) < https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/brett-kavanaugh-scandal-a-supreme-case-of-why-politics-must-stay-out-of-judicial-appointments-bdz8m67k6 > accessed 20 April 2021. [17] ‘Index of Economic Freedom’ ( heritage.org ) < https://www.heritage.org/index/visualize?cnts=poland&type=11 > accessed 20 April 2021. [18] European Commission, ‘2020 EU Justice Scoreboard’ (10 July 2020) 5 < https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/ PDF/?uri=CELEX:52020DC0306&from=EN > accessed 20 April 2021. [19] Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Country Forecasts, ‘Outlook for 2021-2025: Political Stability’ (2021). [20] Rima Marrouch, ‘Going Nowhere: Europe’s Right-wing Populists Will Survive the End of Trump’ The Independent  (London, 29 December 2020) < https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe-trump-populism-poland-hungary-b1780027.html > accessed 20 April 2021. [21] ibid.

Elizabeth Susan Wahl suggests that during the eighteenth century, homosexual relations between women became an ‘open secret’ that was ‘embedded and even coded within a multiplicity of … medical, literary, and pornographic discourses’.[1] In Coleridge’s Christabel , the homosexual relations between Geraldine and Christabel are ‘embedded’ within the literal ‘bed’ of consummation. It is in this ‘bed’ that the ‘secret’ of homoerotic desire becomes ‘open’ to the reader. However, whilst Coleridge allows the reader inclusion to the ‘open secret’ of homosexual relations, it remains just that, a secret.   Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her essay ‘Epistemology of the closet’ names this idea of ‘secret’ homosexuality ‘the closet’. The concept of ‘the closet’ delineates a social construct of homosexual repression which subjugates and conceals homosexual instincts. The image of a ‘closet’ is an apt metaphor as a literal closet conceals items of clothing, removing them from sight with a physical surrounding structure. Sedgwick applies this literal structure to the social structure of homosexual repression, stating: ‘The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century’.[2] However, examining Coleridge’s eighteenth-century poem Christabel  and its homoerotic undertones suggests that the figurative ‘closet’ is applicable not only ‘in this century’. In Christabel , Coleridge presents an alternative item of furniture, the ‘bed’, that ironically serves to produce an antithetical effect. Whilst Sedgwick’s ‘closet’ serves to repress homosexual transgressions, the ‘bed’ Christabel shares with Geraldine actively brings these repressive and subconscious impulses to fruition. The ‘bed’ is therefore the ‘closet’ Christabel enters unknowingly. Entering the bed sparks her sexual awakening and acts as a catalyst for her homoerotic desires, juxtaposing the function of the ‘closet’ in which an individual knowledgeable of their homoerotic desires must repress them.   And thus the lofty lady spake— ‘All they who live in the upper sky, Do love you, holy Christabel! And you love them, and for their sake And for the good which me befel, Even I in my degree will try, Fair maiden, to requite you well. But now unrobe yourself; for I Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie’.   Quoth Christabel, So let it be! And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness.[3]   The rhyming couplet of ‘I’ and ‘lie’ at the conclusion of the stanza disrupts the ABCACBC rhyme scheme and attracts the reader’s attention to the rhyming relation between the personal pronoun ‘I’ and the intransitive verb ‘lie’. (‘But now unrobe yourself; for I / Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie’.) The stanza takes the form of Geraldine’s direct speech, meaning the ‘I’ is in reference to herself and the ‘lie’ is in reference to the ‘bed’ in which she will ‘lie’. The syntax ensures that the word ‘I’ visually surrounds ‘lie’ both atop and preceding, forcing the reader to associate the ‘bed’ with the image of Geraldine lying on it. This image of Geraldine following her imperative speech ‘But now unrobe yourself’ gives the bed sexual connotations, as the reader becomes aware that the ‘unrobe(d)’ Christabel and Geraldine will ‘lie’ in ‘bed’ together. The imperative but flattering rhetoric of Geraldine ‘Fair maiden, to requite you well. / But now unrobe yourself’, where ‘fair maiden’ and ‘unrobe yourself’ are in close conjunction, leads the reader to suspect that the impending relations within the ‘bed’ may not be platonic. Whether Christabel herself is aware of the suggestive nature of Geraldine’s rhetoric is unclear, but her exclamatory ‘So let it be!’ implies her eager responsiveness and unchallenging coercion to Geraldine’s commands.   Sedgwick notes the conceptual inseparability between knowledge and sex, suggesting that ‘ignorance’ becomes ‘sexual ignorance’. The ‘wide eye’ trope the poem associates with Christabel within the narrative ‘her fair large eyes ‘gan glitter bright’ and ‘raised to heaven her eyes so blue’ implies her innocence and thus lack of ‘sexual knowledge’ to the reader. The reader, according to Sedgwick, is therefore placed in a position of power. ‘The position of those who think they know something about one that one may not know oneself is an excited and empowered one’.[4] The combining suggestive factors of Geraldine’s rhetoric forewarn homosexual relations within the ‘bed’ that Christabel seems ‘sexually ignorant’ to. If the now sexually charged ‘bed’ acts as a symbol for Christabel’s homoerotic sexual awakening, the ease of her coercion to ‘undress’ and ‘lay down in her loveliness’ by an unknown woman advocates an already present but subconscious sexually transgressive desire, meaning despite her ‘sexual ignorance’ the ‘bed’ is able to awaken this desire within her.   But through her brain of weal and woe So many thoughts moved to and fro, That vain it were her lids to close; So half-way from the bed she rose, And on her elbow did recline To look at the lady Geraldine.   Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, And slowly rolled her eyes around; Then drawing in her breath aloud, Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture from beneath her breast: Her silken robe, and inner vest, Dropt to her feet, and full in view, Behold! her bosom and half her side— A sight to dream of, not to tell! O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!   A volta occurs when Christabel becomes active in the sexual exchange, warning the reader to her sexual awakening: ‘So half-way from the bed she rose, / and on her elbow did recline, / To look at the lady Geraldine’. Christabel begins to observe Geraldine through the male gaze in place of being the one observed, the disruption of the poem’s prosody by the spondaic foot ‘To look’ disrupts the readers iambic meter and focuses on the observational quality of the rhetoric. This volta, Christabel’s interest in observing Geraldine’s form, occurs once she physically places herself on the bed: ‘So half-way from the bed she rose’. The ‘bed’ thus acts as a catalytic symbol for the emergence of sexual awakening, bringing forth the sexual desires of Christabel, not repressing them as Sedgwick’s ‘closet’. The effect is not immediate however, with the compound ‘half-way’ suggesting a transition between ‘sexual ignorance’ and ‘sexual knowledge’.   Sedgwick’s ‘closet’ does become relevant however once Christabel’s homosexual yearnings are brought to fruition. The final stanza deconstructs the female anatomical form—‘eyes’, ‘breast’, ‘feet’, ‘bosom’—whilst employing plosive alliterative ‘b’s, rhyming couplets, and the continuing bounding iambic tetrameter to accelerate the readerly experience of the stanza. The repeated female anatomical language and hastening readerly tempo mimics Christabel’s visual digestion of the female form and subsequent overwhelming sexual desire. The consequent acceleration bounds the reader towards the poetic climax, mimicking in the prosody the acceleration towards Christabel’s sexual climax. The deconstruction of the female form insists that the female body is viewed through the male gaze, despite the lack of any male presence. The newly discovered ‘sexual knowledge’ of Christabel as a result of the sexually charged ‘bed’ insists an entry into patriarchal attitudes towards the female body as a sex object. Coleridge’s text further suggests that this sexualised attitude of the male gaze is corrupting to the feminine and virginal ‘sweet Christabel’, who must be ‘shield(ed)’ from sexual discovery.   Despite this, Christabel’s sexual desire becomes evident through exclamatory language: ‘Behold! her bosom and half her side’. This connotes exuberance, and the plosive alliterative ‘B’ of ‘Behold’ couples this exuberance with the ‘bosom’ of Christabel’s female counterpart. Now that Christabel’s sexual desires are plain, being brought to the forefront by the catalytic ‘bed’, Sedgwick’s social ‘closet’ becomes relevant. Christabel now must ‘not to tell!’ of her sexual transgressions, ‘shield(ing)’ and repressing them socially in order to uphold her socio-normative ‘sweet’ and heterosexual appearance. Therefore, although the ‘bed’ brings Christabel’s repressed sexual desires to the forefront, the realisation of these desires ultimately forces her into Sedgwick’s inevitable ‘closet’. Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin   Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin, the interviewer, is a Fashion and Arts & Culture writer, editor, and stylist interested in exploring the intersection of fashion, performance, and identity. Currently, she serves as the editor for The COLD Magazine  where she works across the art and fashion departments, attending key industry events like London Fashion Week, editing and writing features. She is also the External Arts Relations Officer at CJLPA , focused on cultivating partnerships with arts institutions and supporting editorial projects in both visual and performing arts. [1] Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment  (Stanford University Press 1999) 14   (as cited in Catherine Craft-Fairchild, ‘Sexual and Textual Indeterminacy: Eighteenth-Century English Representations of Sapphism’ (2006) 15(3) Journal of the History of Sexuality 408, 409). [2] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Epistemology of the Closet’ in Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pelegrini (eds), Queer Theory and the Jewish Question  (Columbia University Press 2003). [3] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Christabel’ (first published 1816) in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel & Kubla Khan (e-artnow 2019). Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent quotations are also from Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’. [4] Sedgwick (n 2).

One of the problems of having lived a long life is that it brings home to one the many different identities one has occupied in the course of it.   My own case, I think (but this may be vanity), is particularly complex. For example, genetic analysis tells me I am only marginally white European Caucasian. The rest is 18 percent Jewish—a Jewish grandmother—and just over 30 percent Finnish or Estonian. That is to say, I am a descendant of the Central European tribes who settled on the shores of the Baltic before the Slavs got there. The ‘Lucie’ part of my surname is recorded as being London Dutch, but Dutch friends tell me that it cannot possibly be native to the Netherlands. It most likely comes from Huguenots, exiled from France by the Edict of Nantes, who transited from the Low Countries to London, and thence to the West Indies. My father’s family are recorded in Barbados, as plantation owners, from around 1630. My double-surname seems to have come into use in the mid-eighteenth century.   The family did not remain in Barbados. Having lost money, they translated in the early nineteenth century to Demerara, now Guyana, where they became lawyers. In this period an ancestor on my paternal grandmother’s side is recorded as having been a Jewish sea-captain from a Jewish family based in Curaçao, who had migrated there from Venezuela, after an episode of anti-Semitic persecution.   My great-grandfather arrived in Jamaica from Guyana in the early 1860s, having been appointed Lord Chief Justice. He brought with him his already adult son, my grandfather, who joined the Jamaican colonial civil service, a profession into which he was followed by my father. My father was the first member of my family to be born there.   I was not, however, the second. My father had a younger brother, a member of the Jamaica Militia, who went to Flanders to fight in the First World War. Soon he was ‘missing, presumed killed’. My father took leave from his civil service job to join the British army in Europe as a volunteer. He became a junior officer and arrived at the front in time to be gassed in the final, desperate German assault in the spring of 1918. Considered unfit for further service at the front, he was sent across the Channel to be the aide-de-camp of an elderly home-front general, a post for which his civil service training would come in useful. That was how he met my mother, an orphan who was the general’s niece.   This was not quite the end of the story. My father was not back in Jamaica until September 1919, a year after the war ended. He returned to resume his civil service job and was only then demobilised. Very soon afterwards he formed a relationship with a woman of colour, with whom he had a son, born in 1920. This son, my elder half-brother, not only used our unusual surname, but also was given my father’s almost equally unusual Christian name, which was Dudley. He is now dead—I never met him, and did not even know of his existence until quite recently—but his descendants believe that their parents were legitimately married. The barrier to this, however, is that, in the colonial Jamaica of that time, it would have been impossible for a member of the civil service administration to have a wife of African origin. If a marriage took place, it was a clandestine one. I believe, however, that my father went right on seeing his alternative family, long after he got married to my mother.   In the summer of 1922, he returned to the UK, on leave from his civil service job, linked up with my mother again, and proposed to her. She came out to Jamaica and married him in the spring of 1923. I did not appear until ten years later.   Both of them got something. My mother came from quite a distinguished family. Her great-grandfather had been prominent in the British East India Company, at a time when the Company, not the British government, ruled India. He was rewarded with a baronetcy. His younger son, my great-grandfather, was a Member of Parliament and a close ally of Wilberforce in opposition to the slave trade. My great-grandfather’s children were closely linked to the Pre-Raphaelites. One of them was responsible for introducing Edward Burne-Jones, not yet an artist, to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, thus setting in motion the second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism. Curiously enough, the Lushingtons (that was their surname) were also Logical Positivists—that is to say, Victorian atheists.   My mother was a neglected orphan, brought up by governesses in various seaside resorts, and lamed by polio when in her teens. In the years immediately following the First World War, when so many of the young men of her class and generation had been killed, her marriage prospects were not good. Both parties needed something. They had a deal. I am the product of that deal. Edward Lucie-Smith   Edward Lucie-Smith has been called ‘the world’s most legendary and prolific art critic’. He has published over 100 books, many of which form the basis of university art history programmes around the world.   CJLPA  invited him to boil down his knowledge and experience to a concise set of propositions.

Since I am now 87 years old, I have inevitably formed certain views about what I do, or try to do, both about writing in general, and more specifically about writing about the visual arts.   The first and most important of these is that the audience is king. If they don’t understand what you’re trying to say, you’ve lost the game. This applies even if they disagree with what you are trying to tell them. In art criticism, perhaps even more so than in most other forms of critical writing, there’s a constant temptation to lapse into gobbledegook. Pundits all too often try to make themselves look important, superior to the audience they are addressing, by using grandiose formulations. I try to resist this temptation.   More insidious is the related temptation, which is to treat the collective consciousness of the audience as a blank sheet, upon which the critic is entitled to scribble what they like. Nothing could be less true. Every member of the audience whom the critic addresses is an individual consciousness, different, even if only in small ways, from every other member. To a large extent, this audience may share a common culture, which leads them to react in—almost—the same way to the images and ideas that the critic presents to them. However, there is always a residue, in each of them, of purely personal experience, which affects how they will react to what is being offered. This means that successful criticism, like all successful writing, is essentially a conversation. It’s not going too far to say that you have to begin in the middle, not at what seems to you to be the beginning.   This attitude of mine is affected by the history of art commentary during my lifetime. Both the Late Modern and what we now call the Contemporary epochs have been much influenced by rival belief systems. First by Marxism then, as orthodox Marxism declined, by the rival credo of Structuralism.   A critic inspired by any faith of this kind naturally tends to put the belief system to which they adhere at the very centre of what they do. The system supplies a framework, upon which they can hang their observations about the art works and art enterprises they encounter. In addition to providing a useful framework, it also supplies a security blanket, reassuring them that what they say about the art they encounter must in essence be right. Any apparent errors or discrepancies can be refined away by further reference to the belief system they have embraced.   A further gloss upon this, where recent Western art is concerned, has been supplied by post-World War II politics. From the end of the war to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, there was a cultural rivalry that expressed itself through the competition between Western capitalist individualism and Eastern Bloc collectivism—art as an expression of the idealised socialist state. What this left out was the fact that the United States in particular promoted certain forms of art as a direct political response to Socialist Realism. Abstract Expressionism was a celebration of the power of the individual psyche, free to express itself without any form of governmental control. Not for nothing were some of the leading exponents of the style first-generation Americans. Abstract Expressionism, though it met with some resistance from McCarthyites in Washington, was skilfully publicised in Europe, and also here in Britain, by patrons connected to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.   Later, American art modulated itself, and Pop Art conquered most of the Western-affiliated art world, with a little help from a group of post-war British artists who had fallen in love with American popular culture, as compared to the dreariness of their own post-war circumstances. Pop was capitalist, but it was also visibly democratic.   Later still, American art began to choke on the purity of its own non-political idealism. Hence the Minimal Art (though he hated the term) of Donald Judd. It tried to remove itself entirely from the political arena. The effort did not succeed. To support art that seemed to wish to detach itself entirely from society became a political gesture in itself.   What changed the situation was the collapse of the Soviet Union. This seemed to remove the main antagonist of now triumphant capitalist art from the arena. However, what one seems to see now, nearly 30 years later, is a triumphant re-emergence of political and social art, as typified, for example, by the work of the anonymous British graffitist Banksy. This fetches huge sums when sold at auction, often for charitable causes. Or simply when detached by others from the walls where the still unknown artist has chosen to place it. At the same time there can be no doubt about its efficiency as propaganda.    Simultaneously, there was an even greater change—the contemporary art world became increasingly plural. This change had been preparing itself for a long time, but after the millennium it became fully visible. What I mean by ‘plural’ is that a number of separate art worlds emerged, quite separate from the world of Europe-plus-the-USA.   There was already a flourishing art world, with its own mechanisms, in Latin America. Now there were visibly separate art worlds in China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, the Gulf states, Australia, and New Zealand. I’ve been personally to all of these, with the exception of Pakistan and Bangladesh, often more than once. I was in Cuba in the late 1960s, in Mexico in the 1970s, and again later, and visited much of South America in the 1980s, with repeat visits to a number of countries. I’d guess that I may possibly be the most travelled British art critic. These non-European art worlds are often diversified within themselves. In Russia, it is no longer simply Moscow and St Petersburg that count, as was the case under the aegis of official communism. There are major art-producing centres in Siberia and in Kazan, to name but two. In China there is not only the Central Academy in Beijing but also the China Academy in Hongshan, plus art hubs in Shanghai and Hong Kong.   The dialogue between these various centres and what we call the West is often complex. They admire the West, but they also criticise it. One can, for example, find examples of Pop Art today in Russia, visibly influenced by what happened in America in the now long-ago 1960s. There is also art that refers to and memorialises World War II, which retains its hold on the Russian imagination far more powerfully than it does here in the West. Plus, art that romanticises the now ruined space stations, from which the Soviet Union sent cosmonauts into orbit. These are both peculiar to Russia.   In China, the two major academies, Beijing and Hongshan, dominate the art world. Ai Weiwei received almost all his early education in art in the USA, and is now again, after a fairly brief period in China during and after the Beijing Olympics in 2008, living in exile. He figures hardly at all in the ongoing history of contemporary art in China, though he is undoubtedly a major figure here in the West.   Meanwhile in the West itself there are manifestations that are changing the character of the art world. There is a great push for greater recognition of women artists, though those chosen for this are often either very senior or actually dead. There is an even stronger push for recognising artists from what are described as  ‘ethnic  minorities’—that  is,  minorities  within  society,  and therefore until very recently disadvantaged within Western cultural organisations and opportunities. To be more specific still, this tends to mean artists who are wholly or partly of African origin. The recent Black Lives Matter movement has had a powerful impact not only in the United States, where it began, but also here in Britain. The impulse to apologise for the insult of slavery has done much to re-politicise art in the countries where the Black Lives Matter movement has manifested itself.   What it has not done yet is to create much interest in the art of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The Dark Continent remains largely dark where contemporary art is concerned, in contrast to the other regions I have mentioned above. The one exception is perhaps South Africa. Edward Lucie-Smith   Edward Lucie-Smith has been called ‘the world’s most legendary and prolific art critic’. He has published over 100 books, many of which form the basis of university art history programmes around the world.   CJLPA  invited him to boil down his knowledge and experience to a concise set of propositions.

Introduction   Canonical Penance in the early Church and the modern concept of prison, broadly construed, are both processes of exclusion, reform, and reintegration in response to an infraction of law. Augustine’s writings on Canonical Penance are some of the most extensive, and consider a number of themes which might be relevant to criminal justice. Specifically, I will consider: the role of humility, both on the part of the authorities and the perpetrator, and whether an appropriate response places more emphasis on the nature of the infraction of the rules or of the person committing it.   Augustine is conveniently historically situated for an effective comparison. By the time of his birth, Canonical Penance was ‘an established and easily recognisable ecclesiastical institution’.[1] This enables us to avoid the potential pitfalls that come with attempting to compare the prison system with the more informal and hard-to-pin-down earliest forms of penance. North Africa was also at the heart of many of the early controversies surrounding penance,[2] meaning both that the historical setting is well documented and that Augustine responded to a variety of pertinent debates.   In attempting to construct an Augustinian ethic, I am not asking what Augustine would have thought of modern criminal sentencing, an impossibly speculative task. Rather, I am applying some of his ethical principles—which he expounded in relation to an institution with some significant parallels—to a modern ethical question. The value of this will vary depending on one’s starting point. For those with a theological commitment to Augustine’s principles, it may help to illuminate what criminal sentencing should look like. For others concerned with the ethics of criminal sentencing, it may help to reveal the assumptions underlying our discourse, and at least one other way of approaching them. Finally, for the intellectual historian, it may reveal something of how our approach to questions of humility and justice have or have not changed.   Canonical Penance at the time of Augustine   The earliest Christian penance was baptism. When adult baptism was the norm and Christianity was still a small sect, the act of turning away from the sinful world was an enormous commitment. Penance for one’s previous life was essential for a community that defined itself in opposition to the rest of the world. This is where the communal element of penance has its origins. Forgiveness of an individual’s sins was relevant not just to that individual, but also to the Church whose holiness in the face of an unholy world depended on it. The Church was a community that had developed a way to reintegrate those who had excluded themselves through the most serious of sins, in the form of Canonical Penance. When examining this reintegration, we must be careful not to lose sight of the fact that it was at heart ‘a kind of communal examination of conscience, rather than a way to bear down on individual sinners’.[3] Sin was a harm done to and a stain on the whole community, and so penitential processes, from baptism to canonical penance, aimed to make the community whole again.[4] Collective responsibility for sins is emphasised in some of the earliest writings on Christian penance in 1 Clement 2:6: ‘You used to grieve over the unlawful acts of your neighbours and considered their shortcomings your own’.[5]   By the time of Augustine, Canonical Penance was an ‘established and easily recognized ecclesiastical institution’.[6] Entry into Canonical Penance was a serious undertaking. Many were compelled to undergo it for acts of sin, though others chose to go through it: ‘Some people have asked for a place among the penitents themselves; some have been excommunicated by me and reduced to the penitents’ place’.[7] Though one’s status as a penitent was public information, the nature of the offence could be private. This is presumably a result of the gravity of the sins involved: requiring public confession would hardly encourage potential penitents to come forward.   One of Augustine’s sermons provides us with a description of the sins that required Canonical Penance: ‘There is a serious wound involved; perhaps adultery has been committed, perhaps murder, perhaps some sacrilege, a grave matter, a grave wound, lethal, deadly’.[8] A further indication of the significance of Canonical Penance was that it could only be undergone once, for fear of lessening its gravity through repetition.[9]   Penance was characterised by exclusion from the Eucharist, the result of estrangement from God following the breaking of one’s baptismal vows through serious sin. Additional penitential processes, including fasting and almsgiving, were used to enhance the corrective effect of temporary exclusion from the Eucharist.[10] This exclusion extended to praying separately from the rest of the congregation: ‘Pray, penitents - and the penitents go out to pray’.[11]   Canonical Penance concluded with readmittance into the congregation and the Eucharist. A ritual involving imposition of hands by the bishop and public prayers signalled the end of the process.[12] Its effects did not cease there, however, since former penitents could not be clerics, as Augustine discusses in one of his letters: ‘the Church established the rule that after penance for some crime no one should enter the clerical state or return to the clerical state or remain in the clerical state’.[13]   Humility of the offender   The notion of humility in Augustine is rooted in its ultimate manifestation, Christ humbling himself on the cross. Augustine took this to be the cure to humanity’s pride and therefore the source of humility: ‘So for the treatment of human beings God’s wisdom- in itself both doctor and medicine - offered itself in a similar way. Because human beings fell through pride it used humility in healing them … We made bad use of immortality, and so we died; Christ made good use of mortality, and so we live’.[14] The sight of God’s humiliation on the cross, when combined with God’s grace, is what Augustine claims leads to humility, shifting our perspective so that we can focus on matters of true importance. John Cavadini explains the operation of this process as ‘arresting our limited and empty vision on something real, the compassion of God, who was unashamed to put aside the power and prestige of divinity’.[15] We can see this shift of attention from the self to God in Augustine’s twenty-fifth homily on the Gospel of John, where the shift from pride to humility lies in the fact that the humble man ‘does not do his own will, but God’s’.[16]   The question for us remains how the process of Canonical Penance contributed to humility. We see in Augustine a distinct concrete aspect of, or contributing factor towards, humility—namely, being humbled. In the case of Christ, being humbled constituted becoming a man and dying on the cross. The penitent, on the other hand, is humbled by the restriction of status, both because of the lack of status associated with penitents[17] and because of concrete restrictions on their future ambitions, namely that they could not become clerics. In his letters, Augustine describes the reasoning behind this latter provision: ‘no one should be a cleric so that, without any hope of temporal dignity, the remedy of humility might be greater and more genuine’.[18] The idea here is that the stripping of status made it harder to take pride in one’s position, removing the barrier to refocusing on God, as required for humility.   The value of humility to Canonical Penance lies in its healing element. Penance and humility are both, for Augustine, processes of healing.[19] For Canonical Penance to be successful, one’s attitudes must change such that future action is directed not towards one’s own pride in status, but rather towards God. This is what Augustine’s concept of humility achieved, and why it played so central a role in his discussion of Canonical Penance.   Though humility is a central part of Augustine’s conception of Canonical Penance, he by no means considered it an inevitable consequence of the formal procedure of being humbled during Canonical Penance. Many of the instances where he emphasised the value of humility were descriptions of how it was lacking in penitents, specifically those compelled to undergo the process (as opposed to those undertaking it voluntarily): ‘those who have been excommunicated[20] by me and reduced to the penitents’ corner don’t want to rise from there, as though penitents’ corner were a really choice spot’ and, more explicitly, ‘it ought to be a place for humility, and it becomes a place for iniquity’.[21] Augustine is clear here that Canonical Penance is not just an externally administered process, such that it inevitably results in forgiveness and humility. The proper attitude on the part of the penitent is essential, however much the concrete removal of status might assist this.   We have from Augustine the idea that humility, constituting a shift away from a focus on the self, can be driven by concrete action to reform the individual, though the action can only assist and not guarantee humility. The difficulty with this notion is that, for Augustine, the goal shift was towards God, which cannot be replicated in a secular state. Equally, we can’t provide an endpoint which is an explicit alternative to God, since we would then undermine the Augustinian notion of humility and any value the insight might have. We require, then, a goal for this focus shift which has value from the vantage point of a secular state without displacing God.   We can find this goal in the good of loving others, concretely manifested in serving our community. This certainly has a scriptural foundation in John 13:34:[22] ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’. In his analysis of this passage from John, Augustine links the love of others to the love of God: ‘he who loves his neighbour in a holy and spiritual way, what does he love in him except God?’[23] We can therefore make the service of others the goal of the focus shift when using humility in reform, since for Augustine it mediates love of God.[24] This also helps us relate the individual elements of reforming the criminal or sinner to the communal elements of crime or sin, since our response is directed at the community. We can therefore go some way to synthesising the interests of the individual and the community in our response to crime. In placing a value on humility, we are helping to reform the individual through shifting their focus, while also acknowledging the harm done to the community and shifting the focus of the offender to positive participation in that community.   In terms of concrete applications, such an Augustinian conception of reforming through shifting the focus of the offender towards their community might help us to construe the value of interventions like restorative justice and community service. It might also provide a reason to measure reform more broadly than through reoffending rates, since this kind of reform is directed at service of and being invested in the community, rather than just not committing further crimes.[25]   Humility in the authorities   Humility is not just a tool of reform for the Canonical Penitents themselves but also, according to Augustine, a necessary virtue of those who hold authority over the process, namely bishops. While his discussion of this in relation to Canonical Penance specifically is limited, he is clear that in dealing with crimes against civil or ecclesiastical law, humility is required in order to maintain the necessary attitude of mercy.   Letter 153 is a useful example of this. It helpfully relates the civil and ecclesiastical cases, as it is a response to Macedonius’ concerns over bishops’ intercessions on behalf of criminals.[26] In the process of explaining to Macedonius why it is right to intercede on behalf of the guilty, and how this does not make bishops complicit in their crimes, Augustine draws a link between our own status as sinners and our duty to be merciful towards others. Because we all require forgiveness, so we must extend it to others: ‘The judgment of God has filled them with fear so that they keep in mind that they need God’s mercy on account of their own sins and do not suppose that it counts as a failure in their office if they act mercifully in any way toward those over whom they have the legitimate power of life and death’.[27] The other side to this is that a lack of humility, that being in this case the failure to recognise our sinful nature and need for forgiveness, results in a pride and arrogance which leads to excessive severity. In discussing John 8:2-12, Augustine concludes that when Jesus points out that none of the accusers who present the adulterous woman to him to be stoned are sinless, ‘the pride of her pursuers yielded’.[28] There was pride in their judgement which, though within the law, ignored the fact that the accusers were sinners as was the accused. In forcing them into humility, Jesus forced them into mercy: ‘After he had said to those who presented the adulteress to him for punishment that the one who knew that he was without sin should be the first to throw a stone at her, their anger collapsed as their conscience trembled’.[29] Violence and severity come with arrogance, and are displaced by the mercy that comes with humility.   Robert Dodaro links this correlation between humility and mercy with Augustine’s dispute with Pelagius. Put simply, the Pelagian belief that human beings can be sinless and that the source of virtue can come from man rather than God’s grace means that they are not forced into humility by recognition of their sins.[30] This contrast with Pelagianism helps us to clarify how humility in authority is, as we previously discussed in the case of humility in penitents, a focus shift away from the self and towards God. For Augustine, humility in authority is the recognition that we attain virtue and avoid sin by the grace of God. The Pelagian arrogance is the assumption that we can be the source of our own virtue. The focus shift of humility in this case therefore lies in moving from identifying the source of our virtue in ourselves to identifying it as being external, namely in the grace of God.   We can take the following idea from Augustine’s discussion of the relationship between humility, mercy, arrogance, and severity: excessive severity can be a result of arrogance, while mercy can be the result of humility. The reason for this is that humility comes with the recognition of the role of external forces in shaping human decisions, whereas arrogance is blind to this in its attempt to claim individual credit for virtue. Severity which results from this arrogance is therefore a blind spot, a failure to acknowledge the origins of virtue and vice. We should therefore tend towards humility, which will establish a presumption of mercy. Movement away from this starting point of mercy towards severity should require careful justification, to avoid decisions based on arrogance. In discussing the applicability of these insights to the legal system, we must address an immediate disparity. Augustine grounds humility to authority in the fact that we are all sinners in need of God’s forgiveness. There is no direct parallel in the legal case. In fact, given the restrictions on who can become a judge or magistrate, none of those deciding on sentences are convicted criminals in need of the law’s forgiveness. What then, in a secular setting, need sentencers be humble about? It turns out the answer to this is not altogether different from the answer Augustine provides, namely the role of external forces in determining which side of the courtroom you find yourself on. For Augustine, virtue was to be attributed to the grace of God. In the case of the legal system, external forces, whether systematic privileges or simply luck of circumstances, play a role in whether you find yourself a judge or in need of a judge’s mercy.[31] This is not to remove personal choice from the equation. However, it would be an arrogant sentencer who failed to acknowledge that of the many factors that contribute to a crime, only some are the personal responsibility of the criminal. Moreover, not all these factors will be obvious, and therefore they may not be presented as mitigating circumstances. Humility will lead to the acknowledgement of imperfect information and the influence of external forces, and should therefore lead to an appropriate level of mercy. An Augustinian ethic of criminal sentencing would be a humble, and therefore merciful, one.   Sinner rather than sin   Reform is often portrayed, particularly in the popular press, as in the interest of the individual, while punishment of the act is in the interest of society. Therefore, in deciding how to treat an individual and whether to emphasise reform or punishment, we are effectively deciding between their interest and the interest of society.[32] One potential resolution of the tension between these apparent competing interests is to insist that reform is in both the individual’s and society’s interests because it prevents reoffending and therefore further societal damage.[33] This construes the value of reform, at least as far as society’s interests are concerned, as instrumental: reform is beneficial to society because it prevents harm to society. Augustine, however, places a non-instrumental value on reform.   Augustine makes clear that he desires reform of the individual rather than punishment of the act. The end at which the instrument of being humbled is aimed is to be discussed not in terms of what the act committed demands in a natural justice sense, but rather in terms of what most effectively reforms the agent. Being humbled is therefore an instrument of agent-reform rather than act-punishment. In other words, the emphasis is on the sinner rather than the sin. Being humbled is necessary for Canonical Penance, but not sufficient to bring about the humility required: ‘What’s the use of your humbling yourselves, if you don’t change your behaviour?’[34] This quotation from Sermon 392 makes it clear that for Augustine change of behaviour is a part of the aim of the process itself. Being humbled serves the aim of changing one’s behaviour, refocusing attention from the self to God, and in the process reorienting one’s actions from being directed towards the self, to being directed towards God.   Augustine’s most illuminating discussion of the emphasis on reform over punishment concerns the distinction between public and private reproving, found in Sermon 82. He argues for rebuking privately in the case of private sins and publicly in the case of public sins. Augustine is unambiguous in his reasoning behind this: ‘what I want to do is cure, not accuse’.[35]   Augustine is prepared, for the sake of private rebuke of private sins, to avoid civil involvement:   A bishop, for example, knows someone or other is a murderer, and nobody else knows he is. I want to rebuke him publicly, while you are looking for a chance to bring an indictment. Well of course, I will neither give him away, nor ignore his sin. I will rebuke him privately, set God’s judgement before his eyes, terrify his bloodstained conscience, try to persuade him to repent.[36]   Augustine’s attitude creates a primacy of ecclesiastical authority over civil equivalents. A bishop is to act not to facilitate an indictment—as one might think a citizen convinced of guilt is required to—but rather to maximise the curing effect, which Augustine argues is achieved through private rebuke. It might seem that we could account for Augustine not informing civil authorities as a simple application of the seal of confession, but in the next paragraph Augustine applies this principle to a case where the wife of an adulterer has come forward with her husband’s sin. She is not confessing a sin, so Augustine’s knowledge of the husband’s infidelity is not under the seal of confession. Yet he chooses to keep this sin private. This tells us that keeping sins private in the cases of the murderer and the adulterer is motivated by more than simple respect for the seal of confession. These cases show us that the emphasis is on the agent, not the act and the natural justice of publicly holding the perpetrator responsible, to the extent of keeping offences which are punishable by civil courts private when this best serves reform.   One fairly natural reading of this would be that Augustine has prioritised the individual sinner’s interest over that of the community. This may be an appropriate response for one charged with the pastoral care of that individual, but hardly seems applicable in the case of a criminal justice system with obligations towards the victims of crime and the public at large. However, to read Augustine like this is to ignore the communal context of the penance he is discussing. We have seen that in all forms of penance in the early Church, the response to sin was deemed necessary not simply for the sake of the individual sinner, but to make whole again the unity of the Church.[37]   For Augustine, the Pauline command in Galatians 6:2 to ‘Bear one another’s burdens and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ’ includes the burden of committing sin. Since we bear the burden of each other’s sins, in placing the emphasis on sinner rather than sin by focussing on agent-reform over act-punishment, we are lifting a burden off both the individual and the community. Augustine here makes implicit use of the usus-fruitio  distinction in arguing that if we neglect our responsibility to those who sin, then we fail to love God fully:   Thus if we love a weak person less because of the vice that made him weak, we should consider him in light of the one who died on his behalf. Not to love Christ, however, is not weakness but death. Hence we should be very careful and implore God’s mercy lest we neglect Christ because of a weak person, when we should love the weak person because of Christ.[38]   Augustine links this bearing of burdens at an individual level to the unity of the Church as a whole. In responding to the Donatists, who emphasised the purity of the Church over its unity,[39] Augustine argued that sinners were the responsibility of the Church, and that bearing their burdens was an essential part of maintaining its unity: ‘All of these catholic unity embraces in her motherly breast, bearing each other’s burdens by turns, and endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, till God should reveal to one or other of them any error in their views’.[40] In emphasising the reform of the sinner rather than punishment of the sin, Augustine was therefore not prioritising the individual over the group, but rather grounding the reform of the individual through Canonical Penance in the unity of the whole.   Put simply, when a member of the Church sins, the damage done is twofold. Firstly, the damage caused by the specific sin itself (for example a murder causes someone to die), and secondly, the burden of committing a sin. These are both burdens which, according to Augustine, we all bear. In emphasising the sinner over the sin, Augustine is allowing for proper reform. This is an attempt to lift the latter burden, in the process healing both the individual and the community that bear it.   The question remains: how do we apply this Augustinian insight to a criminal justice setting? In the case of Canonical Penance, the failure to reform the flawed individual was a failure to bear the burdens of others which, in the corpus permixtum , we all bear at some point. More broadly, in seeking the unity and success of a group (in Augustine’s case, the Church, in the modern case, wider society), we must be prepared to bear the burdens of those who break (canon or civil) law. Government documents of recent years[41] tend to conceive rehabilitation of prisoners as being valuable to society because it prevents reoffending and therefore further damage to the community. This treats prisoners as instruments of harm or benefit to the rest of society, and not as a 92,500 strong part of it. Augustine’s emphasis on reform of the individual recognises that those subject to criminal justice proceedings are a part of society and so society’s interests are intrinsically linked to theirs. If we are to bear the burdens of those affected by crime because they are a part of a society to which we have certain obligations, then we must bear the burdens of those who, as a part of the same society, commit crimes. Sentences that do not attempt reform (for example, whole-life imprisonment on ground of public protection) must not be regarded simply as ways to prioritise the interest of wider society over that of the criminal. It is not within the scope of this article to comment on whether they are ever necessary,[42] but it must be acknowledged that in Augustinian terms, in failing to bear the burden of the individual, they fail the society of which the individual is a member. Augustine’s insight here is essentially to add a dimension of value to rehabilitation. In creating policy and handing down sentences, we must recognise that proper rehabilitation is intrinsically (and not just instrumentally) in the interest of society.   Conclusion   From Augustine we have drawn three central principles for criminal justice based on his approach to Canonical Penance. Firstly, rehabilitation should aim at the creation of humility, constituting a goal shift towards service of the community. This is not only a standard against which to hold efforts at reform, it also helps synthesise the interests of the individual and the community. Secondly, severity can result from arrogance, and mercy from humility. Since arrogance is a blind spot, namely the failure to acknowledge the role of external factors in driving crime, which humility corrects, we should strive for a presumption of mercy, and for humility in sentencing. Finally, effective rehabilitation is intrinsically in society’s interests, independent of its instrumental value in preventing reoffending, since those who commit crime are members of society and the burden of a failure to rehabilitate is therefore borne by society as a whole.   The above provides principles against which an Augustinian ethic of criminal justice might be measured. A range of positions on criminal justice reform, ranging from small changes to sentencing processes right the way through to a complete overhaul of the justice system, are consistent with these principles as stated. Which changes one makes depends on both the empirical data on which strategies best achieve compliance with these principles, and other moral principles one holds which are relevant to the justice system. Augustine’s writings alone, though extensive, cannot provide these. However, we have found clear guidance in an Augustinian ethic: reform is the starting point, and aims to create humility at all levels. Alexander Levy   Alexander Levy is on a one-year master’s programme in Christian Ethics at Regent’s Park College, Oxford. His master’s research has examined the value of Christian thought for public policy, focussing on healthcare and the criminal justice system. [1] James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance  (Liturgical Press 1992) 57. [2] ibid 70. [3] Allan D Fitzgerald, ‘Penance’ in Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G Hunter (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies  (Oxford University Press 2008) 787. [4] From the fourth and fifth centuries, the lived experience of penance started to move away from its communal origins somewhat. See Fitzgerald (n 3) 801. However, since we are examining the thought of Augustine, who was writing before this process was complete and whose ecclesiology emphasised a mixed community of saints and sinners who bore one another’s burdens, it is nonetheless important to consider the act of penance, in its restoration of sinners to a Church so defined, as communal in nature. [5] In Bart D Ehrman (ed and tr), The Apostolic Fathers  (Harvard University Press 2014). [6] Dallen (n 1) 57. [7] Augustine, Sermons (230-272B) on the Liturgical Seasons  (Edmund Hill tr, John E Rotelle ed, New City Press 1993) Sermon 232 para 8. [8] Augustine, Sermons (341-400) on Various Subjects (Edmund Hill tr, John E Rotelle ed, New City Press 1995) Sermon 352 para 8. [9] ‘And yet it was a cautious and salutary provision that a place for that most humble penance be granted only once in the Church for fear that cheap medicine might become less beneficial for the sick’. Augustine, Letter 153 para 7 (Roland J Teske tr). [10] Claudia Rapp, ‘Spiritual Guarantors at Penance, Baptism and Ordination in the Late Antique East’ in Abigail Firey (ed), A New History of Penance  (Brill 2008) 123. [11] Augustine, Sermon 232 para 8 (Edmund Hill tr). [12] Rapp (n 10) 123. [13] Augustine, Letters 156-210  (Roland J Teske tr, Boniface Ramsey ed, New City Press 2004) Letter 185 para 45. [14] Augustine, On Christian Teaching (Roger Green tr, Oxford University Press 2008) Book 1 paras 28-29. [15] John Cavadini, ‘Pride’ in Augustine through the ages: an encyclopedia  (Allan Fitzgerald ed, Eerdmans 1999) 682. [16] Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John 1-40 (Edmund Hill tr, Alan Fitzgerald ed, New City Press 2009) Homily 23 para 16. [17] ‘It [the penitent’s corner] ought to be a place for humility’ Augustine Sermon 232 para 8 (Edmund Hill tr). [18] Augustine, Letter 185 para 45 (Roland J Teske tr). [19] For an extensive comparison of the operation of humility with that of medicine, see Augustine, Homily 23 on the Gospel of John para 16 (Edmund Hill tr). [20] ‘Excommunication’ here refers to temporary exclusion from the Eucharist as part of penance rather than permanent exclusion from the congregation. [21] Augustine, Sermon 232 para 8 (Edmund Hill tr). [22] New Revised Standard Version used henceforth. [23] Augustine, Tractate 65 on the Gospel of John , para 2 in The Fathers of the Church: St Augustine Tractates on the Gospel of John , 55-111 (John W Rettig   tr, Catholic University of America Press 1994) 52. [24] This is a simple instance of the uti-frui distinction. For Augustine’s explanation, see Book 1 of On Christian Teaching . [25] For example, see Christopher Stacey’s summary of the issues surrounding poverty in those who have a criminal record but have resisted reoffending: Christopher Stacey, ‘Looking beyond reoffending: criminal records and poverty’ (2015) 99 Criminal Justice Matters 4-5. [26] For a discussion of humility as a civic virtue in contrast to the Roman ideals, see Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine  (Cambridge University Press 2004) ch 6. [27] Augustine, Letters 100-155  (Roland J Teske tr, Boniface Ramsey ed, New City Press 2003) Letter 153 para 8. [28] Augustine, Letter 153 para 11 (Roland J Teske tr). [29] ibid. [30] Dodaro (n 26) 186-87. The chapter as a whole also provides an excellent elucidation of how Augustine places a penitential emphasis on leadership. [31] For one example of disproportionality in outcomes based on factors outside the individual’s control, see the Lammy Review, which examines the treatment of and outcomes for BAME individuals in the criminal justice system. Government of the United Kingdom, The Lammy Review (2017). [32] See, for example, the contrast Melanie Philips draws between the welfare of the criminal and that of society: ‘the Council’s concern is directed wholly at the welfare of the criminal rather than the welfare of society’. Melanie Philips, ‘Why we must take the public’s lead… and jail ALL drug dealers’ Daily Mail  (6 April 2011). < https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1373071/Why-publics-lead--jail-ALL-drug-dealers.html > accessed 26 September 2020. This was in response to a Sentencing Council consultation paper which recommended avoiding custodial sentences for more minor drug dealing offences in certain circumstances in order to avoid overly punishing those exploited by higher-level dealers. [33] See n 41 below for how recent government documents tend to construe rehabilitation’s value in terms of the prevention of reoffending. [34] Augustine, Sermon 392 para 6 (Edmund Hill tr). [35] Augustine, Sermons (51-94) on the Old Testament (Edmund Hill tr, John E Rotelle ed, New City Press 1991) Sermon 82 para 11. [36] Augustine, Sermon 82 para 11 (Edmund Hill tr). [37] See the section ‘Canonical Penance at the Time of Augustine’ above. [38] Augustine, Responses to Miscellaneous Questions: Miscellany of Eighty-Three Questions  (Boniface Ramsey tr, New City Press 2008) Question 71 para 7. [39] During the persecution of Diocletian’s reign, many bishops had lapsed before, at the end of the persecution, repenting. Donatists argued that repentance was not sufficient and that, having committed apostasy, they could longer be considered to be legitimately administering the sacraments. The resulting breakaway was the Donatist Schism. Augustine took the position that schism was a serious sin which violated the unity of the Church for the sake of unattainable purity. In doing so he elaborated his idea that the Church on earth was a corpus Pprmixtum  rather than a society free from sin. [40] Augustine, On Baptism, Against the Donatists  (JR King tr) in Marcus Dods (ed), The Works of Aurelius Augustine , vol 3 (T & T Clark 1872) Book 2 para 8. [41] See, for example, the Coalition Government’s 2013 document, Transforming Rehabilitation : ‘Whilst we continue to tolerate so many   offenders passing through the justice system and going on to commit more crimes, we are in fact tolerating more victims, greater cost to the taxpayer and further damage to communities’. Ministry of Justice, Transforming Rehabilitation: A Strategy for Reform  (Cm 8619, 2013) 9 < https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/transforming-rehabilitation/results/transforming-rehabilitation-response.pdf > accessed 30 July 2020. Notable for its absence is the effect on the prisoners themselves. See also Robert Blakey, Rehabilitation in Prisons (House of Lords Library Briefing 2017) < https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/LLN-2017-0102#fullreport > accessed 30 July 2020. [42] For example, it seems plausible that there is a situation in which they do the least damage to society, if not none, of the options available.