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This chapter focuses on narrative metalepsis in the novels of George Eliot, the most central figure in studies of Victorian realism and often the standard through which Irish novelists are deemed not realist enough. But William Carleton’s and Charles Kickham’s ethnographic realism allows us to understand Eliot’s provincial realism in a new way: as divided rather than integrative. In novels that encourage institutional consolidation, Eliot uses narrative metalepsis to question modern institutionalism’s drive toward futurity. Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) produce a form of anachronistic literacy—a mode of reading and remembering that collapses historical distance as it celebrates the immediacy of the past—to question women’s fraught relationship to modern institutionalism. Eliot’s embrace of anachronism is surprising because her novels seem to produce a form of historicism grounded in path-dependency: in her novels, past choices tend to constrain present decisions. But, in novels that otherwise confirm the existing path, Eliot’s anachronistic literacy creates radical ruptures that mobilise anachronisms to imagine otherwise.

In this chapter, Price-Smith discusses the relationship between energy flows and the evolution of civilization. He analyses the historical influence of oil on the conduct of US foreign affairs, arguing that the USA’s symbiotic relations with the corporate sphere, in its quest to obtain foreign oil (for itself and for the other OECD countries), has contributed to its frequently illiberal behavior in the conduct of foreign policy. Thus, the USA’s drive to maintain its hegemony over international energy flows (particularly oil) reveals the illiberal core of the modern liberal international order. Moreover, Price-Smith argues that this symbiotic association between the state and oil corporations has generated path dependencies that limit positive adaptation.

This chapter establishes the main issues to be explored in this book, including the dramatic transformation that Sinn Féin and the IRA underwent. It provides a critique of existing explanations, arguing that they mistakenly assume the politics of Sinn Féin is driven primarily by the military capacity of the IRA. Existing explanations also assume that interplay between the British state and Irish republicans led to their moderation, but these explanations neglect the wider institutional context in which republicans chose to change their strategy. In contrast, this chapter sets out the argument that sustained contact with, and inclusion in, key political processes, namely party politics and a consolidated framework of democratic institutions, extracted moderate concessions from republicans in a gradual and path-dependent process.

Between 1972 and 1975, the issue of cross-border co-operation provoked much political debate. As part of the Sunningdale Agreement, the British and Irish governments agreed to establish an all-Ireland with executive functions. The Council was controversial, especially for unionists, many of whom interpreted as a potential stepping-stone to a united Ireland. The Council was thus a focal point for unionist disaffection during the UWC strike. Some recent scholarship has claimed that the Irish government indeed sought to use the Council as means to achieving Irish unity. However, contemporary documents reveal that only one Irish government department, foreign affairs, sought to establish a Council of Ireland with such evolutionary potential. Most Irish departments were ill-disposed to devolve any significant powers to the Council, and its potential to bring about Irish unity was therefore negligible.

This chapter constructs a genealogical narrative of post-war British aviation by delineating the social, political and fantasmatic logics that worked together to forge and prolong the contradictory regime of aviation expansion. Analysing in particular the predominance of Heathrow, the deregulation, liberalisation and privatisations of the 1990s, and the campaigns of local residents, it argues that aviation expansion resonated with the crucial myths of post-war Britain. Successive governments, it suggests, had recourse to a series of fantasmatic narratives, which articulated both the ‘beatific’ benefits of aviation expansion for the British economy, as well as the ‘horrific’ threats of overcapacity at British airports and of competition from the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. Once lodged in the fabric of the British state, as well as the nation's psyche, the logic of aviation expansion thus acquired a path dependence, which proved difficult, if not impossible to dislodge.

This chapter introduces the problems involved with responsive social policies. It start from the assumption that social policies are to be characterised as highly-institutionalised, path dependent systems. But against this background, various external development challenge the status quo of social policies. The chapter discusses both Dutch and international examples of the complex challenge of developing responsive social policies in societies that seem to be constantly changing. Building upon theoretical approaches on welfare regimes, the chapter discusses the three domains of social policies that play a central role in this: sheltered work, social assistance and labour market policies. This chapter argues that the current economic and financial crisis makes the issue of responsive social policies even more urgent and magnifies the tensions and dilemmas involved with responsive social policies.

Chapter six reveals why conflict-driven processes of institutional change result in new arrangements that are inevitably hybrid. Facing challenges from both rival and marginalized actors, dominant actors are compelled to retool institutional arrangements in an effort to preserve their institutional privileges and stabilize existing rules. This chapter demonstrates how the USDA and transnational merchants launched preservation strategies that aimed to reconstitute the institutional arrangements in ways that would both appease challengers and maintain their institutional privileges. Institutional change thus results in hybrid arrangements as even dominant actors participate in the reconstruction of rules and contribute to a process of track-switching, or the redirecting of these institutions along a new path-dependent trajectory.