ABSTRACT There cannot be a coherent democratic theory because democracy is not a determinate topic. Representative democracy is a relatively modern regime form. It now needs rehabilitation because so many instances have performed poorly for so long. Representative democracy is now also an aging regime. As a type of state, it is subject to the territorial contentiousness and contested legitimacy of any state. It claims its legitimacy from iterative popular choice, but the plausibility of that claim is increasingly strained by the drastic disparities in life chances reproduced through the property systems it protects. The inherent difficulty for citizens to judge how to advance their collective interests is aggravated by the recent transformation of the information economy. In the cumulative damage inflicted by climate change it faces a deadlier peril than any previous regime and one which only a citizenry that can enlighten itself in time can reasonably hope to nerve itself to meet. This text was initially prepared for and delivered as the first Sakurada-Kai Foundation Oxbridge Lecture at Keio University, Tokyo on Tuesday 13 January 2026.

Orthodox Christians have long been wary about the modern regime of human rights, given its common association with liberalism, libertinism, and individualism; its insistence on separating church and state, if not secularizing society altogether; its disastrous effects on post-Soviet Eurasia; and its growing attacks on majority and minority religions alike. His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, however, has recently encouraged his followers to see that rights and liberties are God's gifts to humanity, even if they have sometimes become prodigal and dangerous when not well rooted and routed. Rights and liberties depend on Christian and other ontological beliefs and values for their grounding and reformation. Particularly Orthodox theologies of conversion and theosis, symphonia and society, church and state, sacrifice and martyrdom, silence and love have much to offer to modern human rights around the world.

Building upon Heidegger’s notion of the “world-picture” (Weltbild) , Peter Sloterdijk introduces the concept of “spherization of the world” as a way to reconceptualize the history of Being (Seinsgeschichte) . Heidegger’s macro-spherology provides an important explanatory path for Warburg’s late proposition “From Star Demons to Celestial Spheres”. The celestial sphere, as the prototypical form. of spherical being, defines its spatial relationship with the world as a whole. Both Warburg and Sloterdijk situate the human relationship with the heavens at the core of their respective narratives of historical consciousness. Warburg’s late research plans (including the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne and his curatorial work at the Hamburg Planetarium) are profoundly cosmological and metaphysical colors. The figure of Atlas serves simultaneously as the origin of spherical world-imaging and as the earliest archetype of the Weltbild. As such, Atlas furnishes Warburg’s late project with both an ontological (spherological) foundation and a methodological (cartographic) model. Reframed as a spherological apparatus, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne reveals a vertical ontological axis structured by the celestial globe and the terrestrial globe. Moreover, the planetarium emerges as the highest spatial form. of the Atlas (or in Nikolai Fedorov’s terms of the museum) . Warburg’s late cosmological work thus offers a response to the ontological crisis precipitated by the modern regime of the world-picture.

Strike action has played a pivotal role in advancing and securing the socio-economic interests of workers in South Africa, first for white workers, then for black. Rights were won only in the aftermath of serious and sustained labour unrest, for white workers in the twenties, for black workers fifty years later. None of the legislative attempts at modulation ever quite went to plan, and the degree of deviation has arguably increased across the decades. The Industrial Conciliation Act 11 of 1924 set out to institutionalise conflict in respect of the favoured class of workers while ignoring the majority. But eventually demographics, international pressure and a groundswell of political and industrial resistance obliged the minority government from the late seventies and into the eighties to open an adjusted but unstable labour relations system to all. The Labour Relations Act 66 of 1995 (LRA) heralded a modern regime of great promise. That potential has not been realised under the weight of accumulated historical disadvantage and grievance, and the inability of the new constitutional and political order to repel corruption, violence and incompetence. It is difficult to see how the objects of the 1995 Act can be realised if — among other weighty challenges — the social parties cannot find a way to grow more co-operative, productive and competitive workplaces. Ironically, the voluntary suspension of the hard-fought right to strike might need to feature as part of any workplace culture reset.

This paper analyzes the political use of Mexican history during the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Using the methodology of historiographic analysis, we analyze certain passages of Mexican history that this administration used as a platform for its political projects. It studies the presidential vision of projecting his administration as a continuation of Mexican history, the «Fourth Transformation». The article uses to understand AMLO’s contributions to Mexican historiography, through his communications and his books where a nationalist discourse was detected to explain his government project. A conclusion reached is to give an example of the validity of the uses of the past as an analytical category of those modern regimes that see history as a teacher of life or as an inheritance of the historical processes of their respective countries and their political repercussions.

This article focuses on the individuality of language. How can language be individuated, grasped as an indivisible unity, and compared to other languages that are also assumed to be individual unities? I will attempt a historical investigation concerning the individuality of language on the one hand, and the formation of the modern international world in which individuated languages are supposed to be juxtaposed to one another. The translation is the instance in which languages are originally figured out as individuals; I will investigate how a new way of managing translation, the modern regime of translation, was introduced.

This paper analyzes the political use of Mexican history during the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Using the methodology of historiographic analysis, we analyze certain passages of Mexican history that this administration used as a platform for its political projects. It studies the presidential vision of projecting his administration as a continuation of Mexican history, the «Fourth Transformation». The article uses to understand AMLO’s contributions to Mexican historiography, through his communications and his books where a nationalist discourse was detected to explain his government project. A conclusion reached is to give an example of the validity of the uses of the past as an analytical category of those modern regimes that see history as a teacher of life or as an inheritance of the historical processes of their respective countries and their political repercussions.

Abstract: This article proposes “capitulations” and “contracts” as a framework for reassessing how the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) regulated foreign merchants. Capitulations are an established subject of study in other contexts, but this work brings the concept to bear on early modern Japan. Comparing documents exchanged with the Chinese, Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish communities in the seventeenth century, we find that Tokugawa capitulations changed in form and content. Initial Tokugawa capitulations to the Dutch and other newly arriving foreign communities provided assurances in the form of written orders carrying the shogun’s personal seal. But in time guarantees of privileges direct from the shogun yielded to the issuance of restrictions that were communicated orally and put to paper (if at all) by lower-ranking officials. Later contracts made with the Dutch East India Company were agreed between local merchants and Company merchants, likely without the involvement of authorities. Together, capitulations—organizing relations between hegemons and merchants, and contracts—organizing trade among merchants, fulfilled many of the functions later assumed by commercial treaties. Using this conceptual framework helps integrate Tokugawa Japan into the broader historiography exploring how early modern regimes engaged with commercial actors straddling multiple polities during intensifying long-distance trade.

Abstract This article addresses the limited attention the concept of historical thinking has received in professional historiography, particularly amid the current crisis of the modern regime of historicity. It aims to define historical thinking by examining recent developments in global historiography and historical theory. The text is structured into three sections: the first summarizes postcolonial critiques of modern historiography, the second explores premodern conceptualizations of historical thought beyond the Global North, and the third discusses global reapproaches to historiography. The article concludes by suggesting that conceptual history provides essential tools for developing a multilingual and transnational understanding of global historical thought, thereby expanding the boundaries of historiographical research beyond Western-centric frameworks.

Taking aesthetics as a racial regime of modernity, the focus of Bradley’s Anteaesthetics is experiments in Black art which are not ‘worlding but an illimitable descent made to come before the world’. With a powerful introduction reflecting upon Nina Simone at the Montreal Jazz festival, and chapters which take us through 19th-century paintings, cinema, texts, video installations, and digital art, Anteaesthetics forces us to encounter the horror, beauty, and racially gendered dimensions of a negative inhabitation substantiated through the absolutely dispossessive field of worlding aesthetic refrains. Working against the grain of debate, aesthetics is not generatively enrolled for the modern subject possessed of ontological security to productively world itself in new ways. Rather, Anteaesthetics enables us to critically interrogate how investing in aesthetics requires working with the negative, taking an uncompromising stance towards aesthetics as a constitutive force of the ongoing violent legacies of modernity.

The article analyzes the influence of the political thought of late scholasticism on the formation of the secular political regime of Modernity. The author shows two research approaches that differently assess the influence of medieval poli­tical doctrines on the formation of modern political culture. Representatives of the first approach (E. Gilson, A. Gewirth, Q. Skinner) tend to see in the works of such authors as Dante, Marsilius of Padua and Ockham, if not the direct ori­gins of ideas about a secular political regime, then at least conceptual models that allowed such ideas to appear. Representatives of the second approach (A. Black, J. Canning, A. Brett, B. Klyuchko, Yu. Sokolov), appealing to the ana­chronism of reading scholastic texts through the prism of modern conceptualism, either directly deny such influence or propose to refer to it with major limita­tions. To clarify this issue, the author turns to the analysis of the political ontol­ogy of Dante, Marsilius of Padua and Ockham. Innovations that were proposed by these authors in the matter of understanding the purpose, source and subject of political existence are explicated. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that in late scholasticism a view of political reality was proposed, which made it pos­sible to see in it an immanent, self-valuable nature. Accordingly, the statement about the connection between the political thought of late scholasticism and modern political a priori is not unfounded.

The Caribbean-born, Harlem Renaissance writer Eric Walrond is beginning to receive increased attention among scholars interested in transnational modernisms, Black diaspora cultures, and postcolonialism. Although he died in obscurity, his collection of short stories, Tropic Death (1926), was once much lauded for its modernist portrait of the Caribbean during the US construction of the Panama Canal. This essay tries to show that Walrond’s allusions to the US South in Tropic Death and his later fiction reveal his abiding preoccupation with the modern US empire’s fundamental indebtedness to Southern plantation codes. As the relationship between capitalism and slavery comes under new scrutiny, Walrond’s fiction offers one avenue into a long-established Caribbean critical tradition, the key figures of which are C. L. R. James, Fernando Ortiz, and George Beckford, who insist that the plantation represents a prototypically modern regime. Reading Tropic Death through the lens of this critical tradition illuminates Walrond’s grappling with the persistent postslavery legacy of the plantation as a transnational, technological, scientific, and essentially capitalist institution. In representing the modern plantation environment, the essay argues, Walrond’s fragmented, experimental style manifests a multivocal, multiperspectival cross-culturality that the plantation unintentionally produces and then cannot adequately contain.

This study aims to assess the effects of the most recent remineralizing agents, casein phosphopeptide-amorphous calcium phosphate (CPP-ACP), CO2 laser irradiation + topical fluoride (CO2 laser + TF), and Nanosilver fluoride - M. oleifera (NSF-MOLE), on the shear bond strength (SBS) and bond failure between resin composite and remineralized caries affected dentin (CAD). Fifty human molars with occlusal caries reaching approximately halfway through the dentin were immersed in a 4% thymol solution. The infected dentin was removed using an excavator and the CAD surface was exposed. The sample was allocated into five groups (n=10) based on the remineralizing agent applied. Group 1: no remineralizing agent, group 2: CPP-ACP, group 3: Riva Star, group 4: NSF:MOLE, and group 5: (CO2 laser + TF). The shear bond testing procedure was conducted utilizing a universal testing machine and a stereo-microscope was used to study the failure pattern. The researchers utilized a one-way analysis of variance. The Tukey post hoc test was conducted for multiple comparison tests. Group 4 (NSF-MOLE) (13.77±1.94 MPa) treated testers recognized the highest bond values of tooth color restoration to the CAD surface. Nonetheless, group 1 test samples with no mineralization unveiled the minimum outcome of bond integrity (9.12±1.14 MPa). Intergroup comparison exploration showed that group 2 (CPP-ACP), group 4 (NSF-MOLE) (13.77±1.94 MPa), and group 5 (CO2 laser + TF) established comparable values of SBS. Furthermore, group 3 (Riva Star) displayed better SBS than group 1 but lower than group 2, group 4, and group 5. Remineralization of CAD using modern regimes (CPP-ACP, NSF-MOLE, and CO2 laser + TF has the potential to be used to enhance the bond strength of CAD to composite restoration.

An important challenge in economics is explaining the factors that drive transformation processes in economic systems, often resulting in complex and contradictory structural changes. One notable historical example is the late Russian Empire’s transition from a Malthusian regime to a “modern” regime of economic growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This article explores theoretical and methodological approaches from recent economic history literature concerning Russia’s role in modernization and catch-up development. By employing tools from economics and related social sciences, such as sociology and demography, the study analyzes empirical evidence grounded in quantitative data. The study contributes to economic theory by reevaluating the modernization paradigm and the “modern regime of economic growth.” It reinterprets A. Gerschenkron’s concept of economic development in “backward” countries, highlighting the role of human capital accumulation, challenging linear and pessimistic views of material well-being, and emphasizing the significance of non-material aspects in well-being dynamics. Drawing on Russian evidence, the study also partially confirms models in unified growth theory, such as the relationship between human capital accumulation and the demographic transition, where the former is shown to have preceded the latter. Additionally, the analysis identifies a bell-shaped pattern in economic inequality dynamics: S. Kuznets’ cyclical model of individual income inequality and J. Williamson’s observation that the downward phase of spatial inequality in Russia began earlier than in reference countries due to the growing role of central government investment in education. The article concludes by identifying promising directions for future research, particularly concerning the “Great Divergence” and the long-term dynamics of productivity and well-being gaps between Western Europe and East Asia.

IntroductionAstarte borealis holds great potential as an archive of seasonal paleoclimate, especially due to its long lifespan (several decades to more than a century) and ubiquitous distribution across high northern latitudes. Furthermore, recent work demonstrates that the isotope geochemistry of the aragonite shell is a faithful proxy of environmental conditions. However, the exceedingly slow growth rates of A. borealis in some locations (<0.2mm/year) make it difficult to achieve seasonal resolution using standard micromilling techniques for conventional stable isotope analysis. Moreover, oxygen isotope (δ18O) records from species inhabiting brackish environments are notoriously difficult to use as paleoclimate archives because of the simultaneous variation in temperature and δ18Owater values.MethodsHere we use secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) to microsample an A. borealis specimen from the southern Baltic Sea, yielding 451 SIMS δ18Oshell values at sub-monthly resolution.ResultsSIMS δ18Oshell values exhibit a quasi-sinusoidal pattern with 24 local maxima and minima coinciding with 24 annual growth increments between March 1977 and the month before specimen collection in May 2001.DiscussionAge-modeled SIMS δ18Oshell values correlate significantly with both in situ temperature measured from shipborne CTD casts (r2 = 0.52, p<0.001) and sea surface temperature from the ORAS5-SST global reanalysis product for the Baltic Sea region (r2 = 0.42, p<0.001). We observe the strongest correlation between SIMS δ18Oshell values and salinity when both datasets are run through a 36-month LOWESS function (r2 = 0.71, p < 0.001). Similarly, we find that LOWESS-smoothed SIMS δ18Oshell values exhibit a moderate correlation with the LOWESS-smoothed North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) Index (r2 = 0.46, p<0.001). Change point analysis supports that SIMS δ18Oshell values capture a well-documented regime shift in the NAO circa 1989. We hypothesize that the correlation between the SIMS δ18Oshell time series and the NAO is enhanced by the latter’s influence on the regional covariance of water temperature and δ18Owater values on interannual and longer timescales in the Baltic Sea. These results showcase the potential for SIMS δ18Oshell values in A. borealis shells to provide robust paleoclimate information regarding hydroclimate variability from seasonal to decadal timescales.

Abstract Drug dosing based on the body surface area (BSA) has been the mainstay of oncological treatment over the last decades. Although this seems to be an adequate measure of an individual’s appropriate dose for traditional chemotherapeutic drugs according to their somatometric data, it is currently being questioned due to the delivery of novel treatments such as monoclonal antibodies. Most modern regimes require either a flat (fixed)-dosing model, independent of body weight, or a weight-based administration pattern, mainly depending on specific pharmacokinetic data. However, even in this case, some controversy exists about whether this model is sufficient. Given the recent findings from pharmacokinetic studies, perhaps we should reconsider the solid hypothesis that drug efficacy correlates with dose, as many molecules seem to be efficient even in the lowest doses administered, with minimum toxicity.

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é promover uma reflexão sobre o negacionismo da ditadura civil-militar como parte da ação política de Jair Bolsonaro e da extrema direita brasileira na criminalização dos movimentos sociais. Busca-se compreender como a negação do terrorismo de Estado promovido pela ditadura está relacionada à tentativa política de esvaziar a legitimidade dos direitos humanos e dos movimentos sociais na Nova República (1985-2020). Propomos que o projeto de poder de Bolsonaro inclui uma refundação das bases republicanas, sendo fundamental nesse processo alterar o regime de memória hegemônico construído a partir do processo de redemocratização. Nesse sentido, a hipótese deste artigo é de que o negacionismo histórico é um eixo estruturante no projeto de poder da extrema direita renovada e ocorre em um momento de crise do regime moderno de historicidade e de emergência do presentismo no Brasil. Nesse sentido, o uso político do passado recente pelo governo Bolsonaro se apoia na cultura política autoritária, no anticomunismo e no suposto combate à corrupção. Esses usos pretendem esvaziar qualquer agenda de direitos, favorecendo a consagração do modelo neoliberal.

Abstract This article discusses how denialism of the civil-military dictatorship constitutes a pivotal element in the political propaganda of Jair Bolsonaro and the Brazilian far right. We aim to understand the connections between, on the one hand, the disavowal of our last dictatorship and state terrorism and, on the other, political attempts to undermine the legitimacy of human rights and social movements during the New Republic (1985-2020). We posit that Bolsonaro’s vision for consolidating power entails a reimagining of the republic’s foundations. Crucially, this endeavor involves an attempt to reshape the hegemonic memory regime first established during the redemocratization process. In this sense, the central hypothesis of this article is that historical negationism constitutes a fundamental and structuring axis in the power project of the renewed far right, emerging in a moment of crisis in the modern regime of historicity alongside the rise of presentism. In this regard, the political use of the recent past by the Bolsonaro government hinges on authoritarian political culture, anticommunism, and the purported crusade against corruption. These uses intend to undermine any rights-based agenda, thereby paving the way for the consecration of the neoliberal model.

This paper studies the concept of “hybrid regimes”, not so much in defining and authenticating their functionality but, above all, to exhibit them as so-called “partial” constitutional concepts. Articulating the tensions, divergences, and antagonisms characteristic of these regimes, as well as highlighting the blurring boundaries between democratic systems and authoritarianism “with adjectives”, emphasizes the importance of the examined issues. The author introduces an alternative conceptualization and typology of hybrid regimes and a configurational approach. Instead of placing political regimes on a linear continuum – from authoritarianism to democracy – multidimensional solutions facilitating an alternative typology of the analyzed concepts have been exposed. The configuration approach, however, provides an analytically valuable way to evaluate and integrate hybrid regimes with other classification schemes. Such innovations, therefore, help alleviate conceptual confusion in the literature. Moreover, deepening the understanding of the concept of hybrid regimes, along with emphasizing its conceptual ambiguities and complexity – especially concerning the “politically correct” discourse on the current problems of fragile and politically unstable states – is necessary to better understand the complex and confusing nature of modern regimes of power frequently operating in the most politically unstable regions of the contemporary world.

Multiparty elections can reduce the likelihood of conflict and help dictators secure their rule, but when does a dictator create electoral institutions? Existing research finds that one of the major reasons regimes introduce multiparty elections is to gain information about opposition demands. This article builds on that argument to explain that a regime’s finances determine whether or not it is able to benefit from creating electoral institutions. Dictators use the revenue of the regime to invest in different means of deterring opposition rebellion. A regime’s first priority is to build repressive capacity, after which it invests in public spending to buy the support of its winning coalition. Regimes only benefit from multiparty elections when they have sufficient revenue to fund repressive capacity but lack the finances to also buy regime security through massive public spending. Low-revenue regimes cannot benefit from elections and high-revenue regimes do not need elections to help secure their rule. I test the implications of the argument for regime spending and the creation of multiparty electoral institutions using a global sample of dictatorships between 1972 and 2014. The results of the hypothesis tests indicate that as revenue increases regimes decrease their shares of spending on repressive capacity but increase shares of spending on the public. The results also indicate the probability that a regime introduces elections rises as revenue increases from a low level, but the probability declines as revenue increases from a high level. The study builds upon the literature for how regime resources and state capacity influence authoritarian strategies of political survival. The findings for spending patterns are consistent with recent research on late modern regimes, and the results for the emergence of electoral institutions are consistent with research that finds dictators must have sufficient resources to survive holding elections.