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What kind of hypocrite should voters choose as their next leader? The question seems utterly cynical. But, as David Runciman suggests, it is actually much more cynical to pretend that politics can ever be completely sincere.Political Hypocrisyis a timely, and timeless, book on the problems of sincerity and truth in politics, and how we can deal with them without slipping into hypocrisy ourselves. Runciman draws on the work of some of the great truth-tellers in modern political thought--Hobbes, Mandeville, Jefferson, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Orwell--and applies his ideas to different kinds of hypocritical politicians from Oliver Cromwell to Hillary Clinton. He argues that we should accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics--the most dangerous form of political hypocrisy is to claim to have a politics without hypocrisy. Featuring a new foreword that takes the story up to Donald Trump, this book examines why, instead of vainly searching for authentic politicians, we should try to distinguish between harmless and harmful hypocrisies and worry only about the most damaging varieties.

This article describes and discusses a late-nineteenth century utopian text, The Curse and Its Cure, set in the city of Brisbane, capital of the state of Queensland, Australia. The first half of this book by Dr. Thomas Pennington Lucas posits how Brisbane was utterly destroyed in the early twentieth century so that by the time at which the story is set—in the year 2000—little remains of the abandoned city except scattered ruins overrun with weeds and vermin. In the second half, Lucas postulates how, by the year 2200, Brisbane had become the New Jerusalem in the South Pacific, a true Utopia leading the world to morality, affluence, peace, and sanity. The Curse and Its Cure has long been out of print and, as far as can be discovered, only one full copy and one partial copy remain, both held by the John Oxley Library, Brisbane. I uncovered it as part of my research into Australia's utopian literature. Although other Australian scholars such as Nan Albinski, Vincent Buckley, Verity Burgmann, Andrew Milner, Bruce Scates, Richard Trahair, and Robyn Walton (as well as an American academic, Lyman Tower Sargent) have all written about the prodigious amount of Australian utopian literature, none of them discovered Lucas's text.

For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of \"true womanhood.\" She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the convergence of these two discourses to imagine women's romantic desire. Therefore, in sentimental literature, images of eroticized domination are not antithetical to female pleasure but rather can be constitutive of it. The book, however, does not simply celebrate that fact. In readings of Warner's The Wide Wide World, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Dickinson's sentimental poetry, it addresses the complex benefits and costs of nineteenth-century women's literary masochism. Ultimately it shows how these authors both exploited and were shaped by this discursive practice.

Datong or Grand Harmony, the traditional Confucian concept, plays a role in China much like that of freedom in American society, and inspires many extraordinary and utopian undertakings. To satisfy this deeply rooted desire for datong, hard work and benevolence of others must be encouraged and communism must be put off to an indefinite end.

Hatred underwrites citizenship in Charlotte Bronte's fiction. Since Bronte's protagonists suffer greater hardships while holding tenaciously to their principles, their struggle with renunciation is more traumatic and socially revealing.

Wood examines the significance of the doctrine of optimism in Voltaire's book \"ou L'Optimisme.\" An optimist in the modern sense, the young hero of the book, Candide, represents the philosophical doctrine as evidenced by his struggles to focus on the bright side of things and to bury many moments of discouragement.

Names, false names, and absence of names seem to have special importance for Daniel Defoe’s novels.¹ None of his fictional narrators, with the exception of Robinson Crusoe, tell their stories under the names they were born with.² The Narrator ofA Journal of the Plague Yearis anonymous, signing his account at the end with the initials “H. F.” In the other novels, the narrators receive their names in something like a special christening. Bob Singleton is given his name by one of the series of “mothers” through whose hands he passes after being kidnapped from his true parents. Colonel

In the UK and many other Western countries increasing concern has been expressed in recent years about a decline in the standard of public behaviour. Many cultural commentators have claimed there has been a marked fall in respect for others, with Lynne Truss, for example, feeling herself moved ‘to mourn … the apparent collapse of civility in all areas of our dealings with strangers’, and sadly concluding in her bookTalk to the Handthat rudeness is the new cultural norm.¹ Anyone who lives in the UK will be very aware of how much incivility and rudeness has come in

Peter Clecak argues against the popular view of America's recent cultural and political past as being fragmented beyond repair