The US Supreme Court has canceled the right of women to end their pregnancies. Could this court now cancel gay rights and other personal liberties, from contraception to parental rights? Yes, Chemerinsky says, if “originalist” judges have their way. The court has weakened the national government's ability to combat unfair labor practices, racial and gender discrimination, and environmental degradation. Could the court further weaken the government's power to address the needs of the American people? Yes again, Chemerinsky says, thanks to originalism. The court seems poised to allow the return of prayer to public schools and taxpayer support for religious activities. Businesses operated by religious believers may soon have a right to deny service to same-sex partners that the law says they must provide to members of minority races (as long as they are straight). Could the old states’ right to establish religions be restored? Yes, Chemerinsky says, for an originalist view of religious freedom would permit this result, and Clarence Thomas, the present court's leading originalist, advocates it.Of course, Thomas and other originalists claim fidelity to the Constitution rather than to personal values and preferences. They say that through research into public understanding of constitutional provisions at the time they were ratified—research into “original public meaning”—judges can avoid imposing their personal values on the country. Chemerinsky does more than dismantle this claim; he exposes it as a calculated fraud. In the book's longest chapter, he surveys half a century of scholarly analysis to demonstrate, point by point, that the personal values of the justices determine the outcome in all but a few of the cases that reach the Supreme Court. Chemerinsky shows that in no question involving guns, religion, personal morality, or governmental power is there a “public meaning” that does not require normative choices. He shows further that no uncontroversial “public meaning” can be inferred from contemporaneous social or governmental practices. Thus, some judges may choose to interpret the Civil War amendments to the Constitution in view of the antimiscegenation and other racist laws widespread in 1868, but no judge has to do so. The amendments’ general language can as easily be thought to envision a color-blind society and to empower color-conscious measures in pursuit of that result. To readers open to evidence and logic, Chemerinsky demonstrates that originalist appeals to historical usage, practices, and intentions, beyond precedent cases and the constitution's general language, are merely “rhetorical ploys”—ways to avoid public responsibility for the value choices that judges cannot avoid making.That originalism is a deliberate fraud rather than a well-intentioned mistake is evident in the hypocrisy of originalists. One of Chemerinsky's several examples involves affirmative action, an issue made especially salient by developments since the publication of the book under review. Their self-styled originalism notwithstanding, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have opposed affirmative action explicitly on the basis of their personal beliefs about its consequences for the country's race relations. They could not have opposed affirmative action on originalist grounds, for the Reconstruction Congress, which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted many laws and established several agencies to provide special help for the freedmen struggling in the white supremacist South.Chemerinsky's book disappoints in only one respect: it advances to a threshold that it does not cross. If originalism is as intellectually and morally indefensible as Chemerinsky shows; if it is as subversive politically and culturally as he shows; if “we should be afraid” of originalist judges, as Chemerinsky urges in his concluding chapter, then what about the originalist professoriate—the law professors of the Federalist Society and the political scientists of the constitutional studies programs at American colleges and universities that right-wing organizations fund? Should we not be afraid of them too? Chemerinsky has been a leading legal intellectual for more than a generation. He is also a leading legal administrator. No one is better positioned to influence the agenda of the American legal academy. A question missing from this agenda is what to do about academics who, after half a century of unanswerable criticism, continue to support originalism. Academic freedom does not preclude calling out academic originalists as incompetent or dishonest. Originalism is by now so entrenched academically that nothing less than a national campaign against it would be proportional to its power. Responsible scholars should launch this effort whether Chemerinsky will join them or not, but they should hope that figures of his caliber will do so.

Abstract Beginning with the sources of antipolitics, evident in the process of Italian national unification in the nineteenth century, this article explores the complexities of antipolitical thought and temperament in Italy. The various states that composed what is now the Italian Republic were then governed by powers perceived to be alien and distant, with the result that popular sentiment was diffident about most varieties of governance and political practice. State power indeed was mostly regarded as illegitimate. More recently, especially since World War II, that diffidence toward politics has evolved toward abhorrence, in response to a kind of partisanship in which political competitors are treated as enemies. The article then traces the further evolution of antipolitics in the postwar era, including the Qualunquismo of Guglielmo Giannini, the intellectual critique of partitocrazia (party rule) by Giuseppe Maranini, and the Five Star Movement of Beppo Grillo. In each case, popular enthusiasm has been followed by disappointment as each movement has degraded into a mere political party of populist bent, either right- or left-wing. Being antipolitical has proven to be a stance impossible to maintain for those who seek a role in politics.

The Protestant Reformation produced Western Christianity's greatest ideological rift in the 1,200 years between the Arian controversy and the French Revolution, leaving a permanent mark on Western Christendom and its cultural offshoots that even Arianism had failed to imprint. What survives today of European religion and its flourishing outgrowths worldwide is sharply divided between Catholic and Protestant. In the sixteenth century, England was a marginal player in this story, a second-rank power on the European scene and in more than one sense insular, but over a century and a half it emerged as one of the most successful Reformations, its Protestantism so vital and creative that a single state church failed to contain it. As this outcome became clear in the 1690s, a wider significance was emerging for the Atlantic archipelago: the regime in Westminster that had once governed only part of those islands not only brought political union to England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but emerged as a seaborne world power that briefly extended farther than any previous global empire.As a result, the story of the English Reformation has much more than local significance. Walsham, with her usual originality and ability to pick out the important patterns from a vast array of evidence, makes here a major intervention into the historiography. Her subject is multifaceted and difficult to summarize better than in the subtitle of her book. What began as a revolution (though, in England, a revolution largely directed by the monarchy) settled down into a slowly unfolding process. The Church of England, with aspirations to monopolize English religion, found itself in the center of a religious spectrum, flanked by oppositional communities established on principle: on the one side obstinately surviving Roman Catholic communities, and on the other “Dissent”—multiple Protestantisms seeking purity of Reformation in a variety of contradictory forms. That pluriformity was bequeathed to the thirteen English colonies in North America, and beyond them into the British world empire, which only disintegrated in the twentieth century, shaping the contours of many new societies across the seas.Walsham's intricate construction of themes around this narrative highlights the way in which all the different players on the religious scene, from Catholic recusants right through to Quakers, dipped into the rhetorical dressing-up box, often grabbing for the same garment, to provide identities for themselves amid changing realities. Everyone wished to lay the best claim to what everyone assumed to be norms: the centrality of the family, the role of the patriarch, the dutifulness of children. Was Protestantism/Catholicism a religion of youthful enthusiasm or wise age? If one followed the stern doctrine of double predestination—to salvation or damnation (following the Catholic Augustine of Hippo or the Protestant John Calvin)—what did that say about beloved children in a devout family? Might they be predestined to salvation by heredity, just as they inherited their father's land? It was a real headache in those North American colonies founded on strict Protestant principles, where later generations seemed distressingly less inclined to sign up to the pioneering theological package that had brought the original settlers to those transatlantic shores.And then there were the problems posed by a Protestant insurgency that became the establishment. Did one celebrate, minimize, or even conceal discontinuities and ruptures?—a particular problem for the Church of England, some of whose members came to feel embarrassed by much that the Reformation achieved, especially its destructive aspects, and sought to present their church as a better representative of Catholicism than the pope's version. Yet Roman Catholics, now cast as rebels against godly society, might find themselves drawing on tropes of resistance that had first sustained Protestant heretics, when they sought to withstand the persecution unleashed on them by Elizabeth I and her successors.Early modern English society became ever more obsessed with genealogy and pedigrees, which for Protestants meant some hard thinking to do about the salvation of unavoidably Catholic pre-Reformation ancestors but also brought worries about present-day relatives who held different religious convictions. Destruction of Catholic buildings and objects such as medieval tombs eventually produced antiquarian nostalgia and regret even among some Puritans who were supposed to hate what those signified. Walsham walks us decorously through this clamor of rival clichés and human confusion seeking to present itself as coherence. She never raises her voice, leaving Reformation noise to babble out from her quotations and judiciously chosen illustrations. Amid the portraits, contemplate the aged faces of Mary Honywood, who at her death, aged 93, looked out on 367 living descendants, or her contemporary “Old Parr,” who claimed to be 152 when he died in 1635. They had seen it all tumble past their eyes, but now Walsham can sort it all out for them.

Autobiographies usually precede the biographies that make use of them as a source, but Jeunesse arrives ten years after François Dosse's biography of Pierre Nora. The challenges are clear enough. How will a major historian of memory confront his own memories? How will the man who asked other historians to produce “ego-histories” write his own? Nora's response is a mixture of genres—vivid snapshots of the experiences of a Jewish child living in a French village during the Second World War, an essay on his identity as a Frenchman who is also Jewish (as opposed to that of “intellectuels juifs de langue française”), and an account of “the making of Pierre Nora,” the route he has taken to his distinguished career as both a historian and a publisher. One crucial experience was his repeated failure to enter the École Normale, discouraging him from a conventional academic career. Another, about which he says all too little, was spending two years in Algeria as a teacher. A third was his discovery of the “new history” associated with the journal Annales, which encouraged Nora to add history to a portfolio of interests that included literature, philosophy, and the social sciences, a combination of interests that underlies his later success as an editor at Gallimard. Tantalizing readers, Jeunesse ends when its author is in his midthirties, on the threshold of his career as a publisher. All we can do is look forward to another installment of his bildungsroman.

Abstract Climate action stands as a paramount challenge in contemporary society, but solutions are often impeded by vested interests tied to electoral democracies. As a result, the past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the practice of sortition—a variety of democracy that is not electoral but lottocratic—in Ireland, the United States, and in other venues from Belgium to Canada to India and South Korea. Recent scholarly literature, including the five-installment Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” to which this article is a contribution, argues that citizens’ juries and other such deliberative forums can clear a path for climate action. This essay examines one of the first assemblies chosen by lottery to attend purely to climate change and describes in detail how the assembly came about, how it operated, how it successfully influenced Irish government policy, and the possible applications beyond Ireland of lessons that have been learned from the experience.

Abstract Half of this piece appeared under the title “Postscript on Cultivation: Editorial Note” in Common Knowledge 8, no. 2 (spring 2002), and half was written in 2023 by one of the coauthors as a posthumous tribute to the other. The historian Natalie Zemon Davis died on the fourteenth day of the latest war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza. The relevance of “Postscript,” which was written following the attacks by al-Qaeda in the United States on September 11, 2001, is that it redirects the attention of scholars from the battlefield and mass media to the ivory towers in which intellectuals are sometimes said to hide. Cultivated civilians ought to know that cultures strive to erase one another in ways vile but unsurprising. Those who learn history expect atrocity and should busy themselves less with assignment of blame than with archaeology, the preservation of objects, the collection of reports and stories, and the reinforcement — by retiring from the streets into libraries and other spaces of patient cooperation — of the partition between barbarism and civilization. With reference to the religious wars of the sixteenth century, during which — Davis showed in a famous essay — Catholics and Protestants fought each other by day but met by night to collect and distribute alms, Perl commends the urge to withdraw from both combat and protest into institutions doing good works quietly.

The first time I bought something at the Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo, I casually handed the cashier my credit card, barely grasped in one hand, while I riffled through my bag with the other. He received it reverently with both hands and a slight bow of the head. It was handed back to me in the same manner, held between the fingers and thumbs of both hands like an important document and presented in one fluid movement with a graceful downward slope. I had paid extra to have my item gift wrapped—a scarf for my sister-in-law for Christmas—and that too was a ritual of careful ornamentation. The result was a delightful origami of polyester cloth instead of paper, wrapped and tied around the scarf without the use of tape or visible seams, creating a package that was more attractive than the simple black scarf it held.I was reminded of my Uniqlo purchase when Han discussed “the intense formalism and aestheticism that . . . dominates everyday ritual practices in Japan.” Japanese parcels are his favorite example of this overabundance of the signifier—a case where the envelope outshines the item inside. The signifier so overwhelms the signified that it displaces the very longing for meaning. For Han, “the liturgy of emptiness dispels the capitalist economy of the commodity.” Han must not have shopped at Uniqlo.“Ritual” is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down, and our longing to define it is often tied up with our sense of its loss or absence. In Han's elliptical chapters, “ritual” shifts referents, entangled variously with other ideas that are meant to define it or sit near it: play, rites of passage, aestheticism, and formalism. Ritual is most definitely not work, productivity, or commodity. If ritual is best known as the absence of work, production, and commodities, it becomes hard to see the work that rituals themselves can do, or their own productive power. Indeed, there are almost no rituals named or encountered in the book except through historical distance and nostalgia.It is not Han's experience of Japanese parcels that is offered as a counter to the commodity logic of our age, but Roland Barthes's. Ritual is already assumed to be lost, shrouded in the mists of ages past or civilizations frozen in time, accessible primarily through white European nostalgia, mediated by Han's own pronouncements of judgment on our deritualized present. But nostalgia for ritual and a longing to capture its affects was one of the first levers for the global economy propelled by early modern European colonialism. Our assumption that ritual is already always lost obscures the way our very longing for it works upon us. Surely the executives of Uniqlo knew all of this, implicitly, when they trained their American workforce in the careful rules of ornamentation and empty signifiers and convinced me to cough over a few extra dollars to purchase the “magnificent envelope.”

Jonas, sixty-four, had never had a problem with the police and was reputed to be polite and calm. How then to explain the sudden outburst of violence when, on a given night, he shot a rifle at police officers? No one was harmed, but the perpetrator was arrested. It was in prison, a few hours after the incident, that Englebert, at the time a prison psychologist, met him. Englebert was also able to interview some of Jonas's family and friends, all of whom were astonished by the event. This book, written by Englebert in collaboration with philosopher Grégory Cormann, analyzes the case not so much to find an ultimate explanation for Jonas's act as to show the variety of ways in which one can frame the man and his actions.The most common way of framing the event, the one most of Jonas's acquaintances have employed, is to link the violence with madness, but temporary insanity is not really an explanation. To say that Jonas went mad is no more than saying that his violence was incomprehensible. Still, to assert that he was mad when he fired the rifle qualifies as an interpretation in that it splits the act from the rest of the man's life. By insisting on that separation, kin and friends unburden themselves of any feelings of guilt they may experience at not having been able to prevent the act.Jonas's wife has another version of the event. She connects it with the recent death of his mother. Jonas was very close to his mother: he had dined with her every night of his life, even after his marriage thirty years before she died. Indeed even after her death, a month before the episode with the police, he had continued to go every night to her house. He wanted to carry on his lifelong habit, without change. A dispute about the house with his twenty-year-old son led to the encounter with the police: Jonas had added to his will a provision that his son would inherit the house but would be prohibited from ever selling it. The son found this prohibition unacceptable, and their argument came rapidly to blows. Out of fear, Jonas's wife called the police. Jonas went to the attic and brought down his late father's rifle. The son fled, but Jonas remained on the doorstep, waiting for the police.All the data presented in this book appear to confirm that Jonas suffered from a “major depressive disorder with melancholic features,” characterized by strong attachment to order and regularity. In this interpretation, the shot was a desperate act, aimed somehow at precluding change. Hence the act marked not a break in the man's life but signaled continuation of a long-term disorder.Englebert and Cormann, however, advance a third version—the most audacious, the most original. They compare the shot (a moment of high excitation) to the electroconvulsive therapy sometimes used to treat manic depression. It seems that electroshock produces a temporary disruption in the brain that is followed by a higher neuroplasticity that can help patients to recover. By putting himself in a perilous situation, Jonas produced an excitation that could disrupt his neural circuitry. In the authors’ interpretation, the act suggests neither temporary insanity nor the symptom of a long-term illness, but a first step toward recovery. The rifle was an improvised instrument for self-treatment.The book reflects Jean-Paul Sartre's claim according to which “it is perhaps sufficient to seek the explanation for a crime in the social situation and the criminal's psychopathic makeup, but only a poet can elucidate its human meaning.” Englebert and Cormann prove to be poets by showing how Jonas could free himself from self-bondage.