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The purpose of this chapter is to place contemporary debate about European democracy in a wider historical context by considering how analyses of the institutions that underpin democracy in Europe have evolved over time in tandem with political developments. It is said that those who neglect history are doomed to repeat it, and that can be also true of social science. We depend on the insights of successive generations of scholars for much of what we know about democracy, and by examining how their analyses shifted as European governance itself evolved, we can develop perspectives with which to understand the problems confronting Europe today. The survey is necessarily brief survey, but references are provided that lead to deeper debates. The different sections of the chapter are: The Feasibility of Popular Government; The Importance of Culture, Organization, and Social Conditions; Technocracy, Neo–Corporatism, and the Romantic Revolt; The Move to the Market; and Contemporary European Democracy.

This chapter examines the protective measures implemented by merchants and rulers in Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam to deal with violent threats such as theft, robbery, or even outright warfare. It shows that the existence of an international network of commercial cities created strong incentives for local and central governments to offer protection to international traders to enhance the position of individual cities in this network. It also considers how imminent changes in a city's position in the international urban hierarchy led to the massive use of force, citing as examples the Flemish Revolt and the Dutch Revolt. Finally, it discusses the unification of the Habsburgs as rulers of the Netherlands and its impact on the safety of merchants, along with the rise of the Dutch Republic.

This chapter provides the basic biographical material necessary to understand the course of Wyclif’s life. The first section traces Wyclif’s career at Oxford University, specifically at Merton and Balliol Colleges. Wyclif was a prolific writer, and while establishing a precise chronology for his works as they have come down to us is difficult, given his apparently extensive re-editing of his works, the chapter describes the organization of his two major philosophical collections, the Summa de Ente and the Summa Theologie. The second section surveys Wyclif’s career in the service of the Duke of Lancaster, his subsequent dismissal from Oxford University, and his ongoing disputes with Bishop William Courtenay of London. During his final years in exile in Lutterworth, Leicestershire, Wyclif produced a significant body of writing, ranging from exegesis to polemics, remaining active in his criticisms of the ecclesiastical status quo.

This chapter covers the outbreak of the Greek revolt in 1821 and the early diplomacy of the crisis. It considers the origins of Ypsilantis's revolt in 1820–21; the Tsarist reaction in 1821–22; the Second Army and the study of the Greek revolt. Following the receipt of reports from Pestel, lnzov, and other military agents, Kiselev established his Main Staff as the centre for the investigation of the Greek revolt. In early 1822, he informed lnzov of his intention to commission the writing of the first historical account of the revolution. To this end, Kiselev outlined the various areas of research that were still required. They related to the connection between the first Greek secret society and the Russian Hetairia movement; the role of Napoleon and the French revolutionaries in these societies; the level of co-ordination between the revolts of Ypsilantis and Vladimirescu; and the character of Ypsilantis.

Racial tensions have been recurring phenomena deeply embedded in New York City's past, as they have been in American history in general. Among others, there were significant protests in Harlem in 1935 and again in 1943 that prefigured the types of ghetto revolts that would come to be characteristic in other cities in the late 1960s. These culminated in the 1964 Harlem riot that spread almost instantaneously to the city's “Second Ghetto” in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant. The immediate casus belli of the 1935 Harlem riot was when a sixteen-year-old boy was apprehended and accused of stealing a penknife from Kress's variety store on the busy commercial thoroughfare of 125th Street in Harlem. The immediate casus belli of the 1943 Harlem revolt was an altercation between a white policeman and a female black client at a local hotel.

This chapter discusses how Medicaid and Medicare created uncontrollable inflation within the health care system, thus leading to a purchaser's revolt, first studying how the beneficiaries were notified, before focusing on the implementation of Medicaid and of Parts A and B of Medicare. It also shows how costs were controlled in the health care sector.

This chapter shows how the failure of federal cost containment provoked corporate purchasers to experiment with their own methods for controlling costs, leading to managed care in the 1990s and triggering a huge conflict between insurers and physicians. The first section identifies the origins of the corporate revolt, and looks at the downsizing of the private welfare state. The chapter then studies the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, which is considered as an irregularity in the history of Medicare, and ends with a section on the different piecemeal approaches in health care management.

In this chapter the Athenians' idealistic expression of 8.144—with its slogans of ‘freedom’ and ‘Greek unity’ (to Hellênikon)—introduces a discussion of these key ideal motives and the role of rhetoric in the Ionian Revolt narrative, which proves an important touchstone for assessing the later campaign. Herodotus' text foregrounds the complications of rhetoric, problematising idealising readings and yielding salient ironies, including that of how freedom (as in the case of the ‘polis tyrannos’ of the Athenian democracy) promotes and even entails rule over others. The ideas on motivation in the previous chapter are refined, since the question of whether motives are principled or pragmatic is not after all wholly clear-cut: the Histories' concept of motivation is dynamic, allowing for the possibility of progression in response to changing circumstances, and sensitive also to the potential for complex psychology.

This chapter discusses the encounters between the British East India Company in early nineteenth-century Assam and Singpho communities who had expanded their territorial possessions in the region because of the regional disorder of the previous century. These encounters are placed in the context of changes in the nature of the state in Asia as well as in European trading empires, raising questions about the relevance of a simple dichotomy between notions of ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ at this time in this region. The effects of the nascent Assam tea industry are discussed in relation to Singpho migration and internal dynamics of kinship relations and the creation of local hierarchies. The failure of the Company to develop local political institutions that could map onto Singpho-Jinghpaw political culture is explored through the Singpho revolt of 1843 and the effect of this in creating a local outcome of political exclusion.

The rise of market exchange, and the related competition, was the main dynamic force of the later Middle Ages and the motor behind social changes. This chapter shows how its force was refracted by the regional prism of power and property, resulting in a sharpening of the distinctions between regions. Some rural areas saw the rise of large tenant farmers and a multitude of pauperized wage labourers, while others saw the fragmentation of peasant holdings combined with proto‐industrialization. In the towns, which rapidly grew—in what was becoming the most urbanized part of Europe—similar differences can be observed, although less pronounced than in the countryside. Craftsmen and peasants sometimes succeeded in protecting small‐scale production and their ways of self‐determination, occasionally by extreme measures such as revolts, but gradually lost out to the growing financial power of merchant‐entrepreneurs and their Burgundian and Habsburg rulers. Moreover, growing population pressure undermined real wages, and poor relief and the actions undertaken by public authorities were hardly able to curb the negative effects on welfare.