x

Fifteen Eighty Four

Academic perspectives from Cambridge University Press

Menu

Can Governments Trust Their Citizens? The Paradox of Voluntary Compliance

Every policymaker knows the dilemma: should governments trust people to do the right thing, or make sure they do it? The safer option has usually been enforcement. Write the rules, monitor behavior, punish...

Yuval Feldman | 20 Oct 2025

Imagination and Thinking Well

Section 1: What are Thought Experiments For? Thomas Kuhn famously asked how it was possible for thought experiments to lead to new scientific knowledge in the absence of new data. In philosophy,...

Eleanor Helms | 20 Oct 2025

Reassessing the Peloponnesian War

In the early summer of 431 BCE, villages and farms in Attica were abandoned as people moved into Athens. They were fleeing the advance of one of the largest armies ever assembled in ancient Greece. At...

Samuel Gartland, Robin Osborne | 17 Oct 2025

Rethinking the Lawyers’ Monopoly: Access to Justice and the Future of Legal Services

For more than a century, the legal profession in the United States has tightly controlled the delivery of legal services. Lawyers enjoy a monopoly: only licensed attorneys can provide legal advice, represent...

David Freeman Engstrom, Nora Freeman Engstrom | 17 Oct 2025

The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad

No text attracted as much critical attention in Greek antiquity as the Iliad. Homer’s monumental epic was the cornerstone of primary education in ancient Greece, and it remained at the forefront of...

Bill Beck | 15 Oct 2025

Armed Internationalists

In a 1954 poem called ‘Spain in America’ (España en América), the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara likened Castillo Armas’s coup in Guatemala to General Franco’s onslaught...

Carl-Henrik Bjerström, Morten Heiberg, Enrico Acciai | 13 Oct 2025

How to Read a Banana

Recent U.S. tariff policies have made mundane commodities remarkably visible, with almost every week bringing news about the logistics of importing or exporting essential items, from hamburgers to cement....

Sudesh Mishra, Caitlin Vandertop | 13 Oct 2025

The What, Why, and Whither of Faculty Tenure

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the New York Times documented over 145 instances of workers being disciplined or terminated for comments related to Kirk. Many of those workers were...

Deepa Das Acevedo | 9 Oct 2025

Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War (1937–1945)

As a historian of war, I’ve always been curious about how wars have been fought–not just on the impersonal levels of strategy and operations, but also in the much more intimate terms of the everyday....

Jennifer Yip | 8 Oct 2025

DEMOCRACY EXPANDED OR ERODED? ‘Publicity Politicians’ and the Transnational Media Politics of Empire

‘The powerful ruler is today unable to steer the press in his directions simply through his will. Words of command echo as empty calls in the empire of typesetting and rotation machines,’ observed...

Betto van Waarden | 8 Oct 2025

The Relevance of Public Christian Worship

Particularly in Western countries, where the so-called secularization supposedly hit harder than in other parts of the world, many people do not really engage with Christian liturgy. But that does not...

Joris Geldhof | 8 Oct 2025

The Recasting of the Latin American Right: Polarization and Conservative Reactions

The past ten years have been surprising, to say the least, for observers of the Latin American right. There was a time where the left was the star of the show in the region; in the 2000s and 2010s, leaders...

André Borges, Ryan Lloyd, Gabriel Vommaro | 7 Oct 2025