Alberti never mentions Florence in De pictura. This is intentional as the tract not so much ignores as merely suggests previous periods of art, and Alberti’s refusal to specify those interludes, such as Romanesque, Gothic, or medieval, reflects the need for a humanist audience to have all precepts couched in the domain of antiquity. His cryptic indication of sources consequently demands forensic scrutiny of his visual paradigm before Florence. The text itself invites this. In the face of no hard evidence or documentation, Alberti’s claim in De pictura to be an ostensible painter begs the query as to where or with whom he began his study of draftsmanship, either in the studio or in practice. Although he had left Padua for Bologna by 1420, conjecture suggests that while in Padua he may have seen and even studied the art of genius before and contemporary to his age.

Introduction

There was a time in political science and in political philosophy when emotionality and rationality were regarded as opposites and when the presence of emotions as such (especially of ‘passions’) in politics was seen as inappropriate, if not as outright suspect. Since the nineteenth century, many even liked to think that emotionality in politics was a preserve of unruly mobs and crowds. In democratic theory, politics was predominantly conceived as an arena in which various actors were basically pursuing their interests in a deliberate and rational way. Therefore, rational choice theory and coalition formation theory came to be seen as the best instruments to explain democratic politics according to most political scientists.

Since the ‘affective turn’ started in politics and in political thinking in the 1980s – spearheaded by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Chantal Mouffe – this time is no more: emotions are increasingly appealed upon and taken seriously as objects of analysis (Nussbaum 2013; Mouffe 2005). Since then it is no longer possible in politics to criticize political opponents by simply unmasking that their beliefs and actions are based on emotions – and this obviously also holds for right-wing, exclusionary populism because political feelings are as old as modern politics itself (Frevert et al. 2022). Instead, the task of the critics of populism is to analyse the emotional repertoire used by populists in a comparative-historical perspective and to explain why it is successful in terms of mobilizing electoral support (Tietjen 2022; Demertzis 2019).

In this chapter, I address these issues by asking whether the emotions that populism appeals to form a specific set that distinguishes populism from other ideologies or discourses, especially from ethnic nationalism and nativism. However, in order to answer this first question, I first need to clarify the definitions of populism, ethnic nationalism, and nativism that I adopt. I depart from the well-known definition of populism formulated by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser and indicate the problems connected with this kind of definition in the light of ethnic nationalism. Then I elucidate the concept of ethnic nationalism and its relationship to populism because at least in Western Europe and in the United States of America (USA) they both appear to be very closely related.

This chapter studies the interlocked biographies of three interwar figures: Charlie Chaplin, Charles Lindbergh, and Mickey Mouse. All three achieved renown as changemakers and the title “greatest of all time” in their various social/cultural arenas. More importantly, for this chapter, all three figures undergo a steep decline, forcing the American public to reconsider the contours of greatness. Chaplin is branded a Communist. Lindbergh a Nazi. Mickey Mouse is eventually seen as too unmasculine to support patriotism during World War II and is therefore swapped by Walt Disney for Donald Duck. The chapter highlights the historical contingencies of greatness.

• Drug use is common. It is estimated that one in ten people in the UK have tried an illegal psychoactive drug in the last year.

• Young people use more drugs than any other age group, many by their mid-teens.

• Cannabis is the most commonly used illegal psychoactive drug.

• People use psychoactive drugs to change the way they feel.

• Psychoactive drug use can result in new feelings that would otherwise be hard to experience, or take away unwanted feelings. To feel good, or stop feeling bad.

• Sometimes psychoactive drugs are used for social gain, bringing a sense of belonging and identity.

• As we will see in Chapter 11, some people experience mental health problems which increase their risk of using drugs

• The UK has two drug laws, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016. These laws place all psychoactive drugs under control and rank some drugs according to their potential to cause harm.

• The UK drug laws make it an offence to produce, supply, import or export and, in some cases, possess a psychoactive drug.

My ongoing engagements with international and national debates on climate justice are a result of an intellectual journey over the past two decades that has brought me time and again to the complex intersections of environmental protection and social justice. Market-based solutions became the backbone of ostensible global responses to climate change at the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Bali in December 2007. The sense of excitement among environmental economists then is difficult to describe from where we are today. However, to those of us who had spent time in the field, this euphoria was evidently and grossly misplaced. The journey that marketbased solutions would have to take, from Bali to places like Bastar in Chhattisgarh, where they would be eventually implemented, is not paved with the freedom of choice that pro-market advocates like to celebrate.

Markets are designed to facilitate the accumulation of surplus in the hands of those who can channel it higher up in the ‘food chain’. In most cases, the market ecosystem is essentially a centralizing force and does not work for the poor and marginalized. Unfortunately, this argument often falls through the cracks due to the lack of interdisciplinary work that is needed to produce knowledge that may help inform public debates on these complex questions. The market-based solutions institutionalized at the Bali climate conference, especially carbon offsets and carbon emissions trading, have proven to be colossal failures.

Perhaps even more embarrassingly, the advocates of market-based climate solutions lost the battle of ideologies to right-wing reactionary forces. Even in the supposedly knowledge-driven market economies of the Global North, ultra-conservatives have been successful in labelling neoliberal policies, such as offsets and cap-and-trade policies, as part of ‘the radical Left's progressive wish list’. This is not surprising to many on the left but this also offers much food for thought for students of policy analysis, who focus rather narrowly on coming up with ‘efficient solutions’. While smart analyses can be helpful, the belief that such analyses are sufficient to drive policy change has proven to be a chimera. This is why it is necessary to cultivate a strong awareness of the extent to which the beneficiaries of the status quo use their political and economic power to thwart sensible debates on the unprecedented environmental and social crises.

I first met the jhupri labourers behind a row of parked buses. They were sprawled out on the backs of their rickshaw vans after a night of work: some were asleep, some smoking, some playing ludo. Rubel was seated on a van with others huddled around him. He wore a white panjabi (kurta) and a sparse beard, giving the impression he was both pious and not in fact a labourer. Unlike the rest of the group who were lean from carrying heavy sacks of vegetables, he was large, or ‘short and fat’ as others would later describe him. Foreigners were not an unfamiliar sight at the bazaar. Nearby offices and a five-star hotel meant visitors passed by on their way elsewhere. Some took photos of the colours and chaos. Foreign sisters from the Missionaries of Charity occasionally shopped here. An Italian priest had for decades visited weekly to help children with small ailments and injuries. Some of the group later claimed that ‘bad foreigners’ used the cheap hotels to meet sex workers, with Australians for some reason singled out as particularly guilty.

As the first foreigner to speak to the group there, Rubel saw it as an opportunity to preach. He gave a speech about Islam that I barely understood and the group found amusing. He then stated provocatively, ‘We are all BNP here. Do you have a problem with that?’ The claim of affiliation to the opposition BNP was an odd one. The election a few months previously in early 2014 had been highly controversial: the opposition had boycotted, the nation had seen widespread violence, and with the Awami League re-elected, public claims of loyalty to their rivals were risky. Whatever Rubel's motivations, the encounter was precisely the opportunity I had been looking for. For the past couple months I had been walking around the city, getting to know it better, looking for a route in to study local politics, somewhere to embed myself and normalise my presence on the pavements, in the bastis and bazaars of the city. Scattered across Dhaka at the time were shelters run by local NGOs to support people living on the streets.

Introduction

In the Kingdom of Thailand, known as Siam until 1939, the great Sanskrit epic of the Ramayana, or rather the Thai-language Ramakien, composed under King Phra Phutthayotfa Chulalok (King Rama I, 1737–1809, r. 1782–1809), is omnipresent. It is the national epic of the Southeast Asian kingdom, taught not only in schools but encountered also in picture books and manga. The epic is deeply embedded in the kingdom's history and culture of everyday life. King Ramkamhaeng (‘Rama, the Bold’, r. 1279–98) of Sukhothai, named after the epic's hero, is today remembered in official historiography not simply as a great king but also as a founding figure of the Thai nation as a cultural community through his invention of the Thai script. He is depicted on banknotes, and major public works are named after him, such as a university and a major thoroughfare in Bangkok. And according to a late seventeenth-century chronicle, the former capital was founded in 1350 as Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya. Its founder took the title Ramathibodi (‘Rama, the Mighty’, 1315–69, r. 1351–69) upon ascending to his throne and founded the Phra Ram temple in the capital in 1369, the year of his death.

Ayutthaya was destroyed in 1767 by an invading army from Burma. After a short intermezzo under the charismatic King Taksin (1734–82, r. 1767–82) ruling from Thonburi, the current capital and dynasty were founded by Taksin's former general, King Phra Phutthayotfa Chulalok. He added Ayutthaya to the city's full name and included Ramathibodi to his full royal title. In addition to having had a new version of the Ramakien written, he also had murals with scenes from the epic added to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, where the kingdom's palladium of the same name is enshrined. The national dance drama of Khon is also based on the epic and can be found recounted in children's literature today. The epic is furthermore the source of proverbs and placenames far from royal palaces, such as Huai Sukhrip, or Sukhrip's Brook, a stream located near the city of Chonburi, close to Bangkok.

This chapter paints the political and intellectual backdrop of Padua in the 1300s, which sets the stage for Alberti’s education. While Rolandino, Lovato, and Mussato were intellectual giants of a commune, Petrarch, Conversino, and Vergerio were literary giants at a court – that of Francesco Il Vecchio da Carrara, a patron of classical medals, art, and humanist educators and antiquarians. Accordingly, five factors made Padua a center of early humanism: independent university faculty, accession of classical rhetoric, Petrarch and his library, Carrara’s support for educators and antiquarians, and the city’s absorption by Venice, allowing unfettered education to gift Alberti a literary and visual universe.

Introduction

In Figure 9.1, we see a meme made by the Brazilian far-right portraying the president Jair Messias Bolsonaro (2019–2022) as a crusader. How to interpret the engagements with history embodied by images like this one?* Is it a traditional use of the past for a coherent ideological project, or is it something else? We believe that this image and, more broadly, Bolsonarist engagements with history reveal certain dimensions of contemporary historicity – by which we mean the articulation of the past, the present, and the future. In this chapter, we thus analyse how the populist movement embodied by Bolsonaro engages with history in a way that activates its heterogeneous political base. These engagements seem to be different from some aspects of modern chronosophies, such as their abandonment of synchronization and coherent presentation of a national history. Instead, the new Brazilian far-right populist historicity relies more on emotional attachment, a pragmatic and highly fragmented historical performance that, as we claim, is more akin to a historicity that we call ‘updatism’, meaning this historicity in which an empty and self-centred present is loosely and pragmatically related to the past, whereas the future is desired as a reserve for the linear expansion of an updating – and sometimes upgrading – present (see Araujo and Pereira 2019).

To demonstrate the affinity between ‘updatism’ and the specific Bolsonarist version of populism, this chapter is divided into three sections. First, we introduce the concept and the theory of updatism. Next, we characterize the populist dimensions of Bolsonarism – that is, the cultural and political movement represented by Jair Bolsonaro. Then we analyse the new Brazilian populism in its engagements with history, especially the performances of history by the three secretaries of culture of Bolsonaro's government and how the defactualization of reality gains momentum, creating the conditions of possibility for the past to be like a large wardrobe full of prêt-à-porter images and templates. Taken together, we can conclude that the affinities we see between Brazilian populism, or Bolsonarism, and updatist historicity are the following: both flourish in a communicational environment characterized by a shared and simulated reality that defies modern authorities and institutions; both tend to dissolve historical synchronization and thus lead to dispersion and agitation; and both have a more pragmatic engagement with historical content.

As the remnants of Picchi Hannan's gang failed to retake control at Kawran Bazaar, the more egregious aspects of his reign calmed. Kidnappings no longer plagued the business community and threatening demands for payment became less frequent. The severity of crossfire and widespread arrests made it clear that the ruling party and state would no longer patronise and tolerate the likes of Hannan. Those who wished to emulate him would face the same fate. The decline in such santrashis brought about a power vacuum, which for local leaders and cadres of the then ruling BNP represented an opportunity. As long as Hannan had been dominant, the various official wings of the ruling party had been largely sidelined locally, weak by comparison. Yet the condition of the party at the bazaar was still too fragile and politics too uncertain to take advantage. The years of fights and killings had taken their toll on the likes of Siddiq, and the resources of local leaders were depleted from violence and competition.

This power vacuum was prolonged by national politics, with an extended caretaker government in the period 2006–2008. It was widely alleged that during their term in office the BNP were attempting to have a favourable caretaker official in place for the 2006 election, prompting widespread protest. It furthermore seemed obvious to some that the democracy this system held together was one of the most corrupt on earth. In response, the military backed a new caretaker government in early 2007. Rather than calling a general election within ninety days as mandated, it extended its rule to almost two years in a failed attempt to bring radical reform and rid the country of political corruption. At Kawran Bazaar this was portrayed as a period of comparative calm, where businesses ran largely unimpeded and flagrant criminality and violence were minimised by the significant presence of security agencies in everyday life, which continued to arrest, imprison and allegedly ‘crossfire’ santrashi figures. Yet neither Hannan's death nor two years of a caretaker government cleaned Kawran Bazaar of crime and violence.