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Annelien de Dijn's Freedom: An Unruly History is a rich and thought-provoking work in intellectual history, tracing thinking and debating about political freedom in the West from ancient Greece to our own times. The ancient notion of freedom as self-government (what Quentin Skinner calls neo-roman liberty) is referred to as the 'democratic conception'. The argument is that this conception survived through the renaissance, the early-modern period and the 18th-century Atlantic revolutions only to be deliberately scrapped in the 19th century in favour of liberal freedom – absence of state interference – thus severing the ancient links between freedom and democracy and turning democracy into a threat to freedom. The book is an impressive achievement and the use of sources staggeringly wide. However, though the liberal turn is certainly a fact of history, I am not convinced that it was such a decisive break, nor that the relations between conceptions of freedom and attitudes to democracy are as clear-cut as de Dijn needs them to be. De Dijn claims, with regret, that the liberal view remains our view and is now an essential part of Western civilization, but I find that to be empirically under-substantiated. By using the liberal turn to define an age, de Dijn lets history play out through the lens of the elite.

If the twentieth century was the age of fear, the twenty-first is the age of shame. This is the most succinct way to describe how the dominant form of repression has changed. The twentieth century was full of terrible events and fearless heroes. The twenty-first century has not yet lasted long enough to exclude the possibility of similar tragedies and resultant challenges for the brave, but so far it seems to be a time of ordinary stories and ordinary people. As in the previous century, we live in a mass society, but the dominant emotion is no longer fear, but shame. Shame, unlike fear, is an emotion that can be hidden, and that is the entire point. It arises from a sense of inferiority. Fear does not necessarily violate dignity. In the twentieth century, fascist and communist totalitarian regimes perpetrated terrible crimes, but they ultimately failed because they could not effectively control people's identities. Too many individuals were able to maintain their inner freedom and dignity. Fear did not humble them. Adapted from the source document.

The 1867 Reform Act created a polity in which, for 50 years, age and householding status were frequently more important than class in determining British men's right to vote. In the debates leading up to the act, both age and householder status were deployed to manage fears of greater democratisation. This essay traces some of the associative connections parliamentarians made between the sexual and family status of potential voters; their relationship to their fathers or sons; the kinds of houses in which they dwelt; and their personal decisions to delay or undertake marriage. The claim that the new male voter was distinguished for his 'independence' has been much discussed. However, it is suggested here that it was equally the figure of the settled citizen which emerged as significant during parliamentary debate. This was a category which could be interlaced with a stream of connected ideas concerning attachment to the 'hearth', the community, and to Anglo‐Saxon heritage itself. During the age of reform, calls to raise the age of suffrage frequently surfaced. This contributed to a climate of opinion which legitimised arguments denigrating the political abilities of the young and which helped to make possible age‐related political structures. Analysed alongside debates over the merits of an education clause in 1866 and the amendment to enfranchise lodgers the following year, the essay considers how class‐specific distinctions of age and life cycle helped to uphold an enduring model of hegemonic masculinity, centring on the mature, householding male.

This book unites research in philosophy and cognitive science with cultural history to re-examine memory in early modern religious practices. Offering an ecological approach to memory and culture, it argues that models derived from Extended Mind and Distributed Cognition can bridge the gap between individual and social models of memory