What explains the backlash against the liberal international order? Are its causes economic or cultural? We argue that while cultural values are central to understanding the backlash, those values are, in part, endogenous and shaped by long-run economic change. Using an original survey of the British population, we show that individuals living in regions where the local labor market was more substantially affected by imports from China have significantly more authoritarian values and that this relationship is driven by the effect of economic change on authoritarian aggression. This result is consistent with a frustration-aggression mechanism by which large economic shocks hinder individuals’ expected attainment of their goals. This study provides a theoretical mechanism that helps to account for the opinions and behaviors of Leave voters in the 2016 UK referendum who in seeking the authoritarian values of order and conformity desired to reduce immigration and “take back control” of policymaking.

Authoritarian regimes frequently attempt to justify repression by accusing their opponents of violent behavior. Are such claims successful at persuading the public to accept state-sponsored violence, and can these claims be contested effectively by human rights organizations seeking to publicize evidence contradicting the regime’s narrative? To evaluate these questions, we conducted a survey experiment in Egypt using Facebook advertisements to recruit respondents safely. The experiment evaluates the persuasiveness of competing information provided by a human rights organization and the Egyptian security forces in shaping attitudes toward an incident of state-sponsored violence in which security forces killed several leaders of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood. We find evidence for the ability of Egyptian security forces to increase support for this repression when they control the narrative about why violence was used. However, we also find that the effects of this propaganda disappear when paired with information from Human Rights Watch that counters the security forces’ justifications. These findings provide experimental evidence that propaganda can help authoritarian regimes to increase public support for repression, but they also indicate that human rights organizations can play some role in mitigating this support when they succeed at disseminating countervalent information in these contexts.

Our tendency to interpret facts in ways that are consistent with our prior beliefs impedes evidence-based attempts to persuade partisans to change their views on pressing societal issues such as immigration. Accordingly, most prior work finds that favorable information about the impact of immigration has little or no influence on policy preferences. Here, we propose that appealing to individuals’ moral values can bolster the persuasive power of informational interventions. Across three experiments (total N = 4,616), we find that an argument based on the value of in-group loyalty, which emphasized that immigrants are critical to America’s economic strength, combined with information about the economic impact of legal immigration, significantly increased Americans’ support for legal immigration. We also find a significant effect of the moral component of this message alone, even without factual information. These results show that moral arguments can strengthen the persuasiveness of informational appeals.

How can the effect of appeals on immigration attitudes be bolstered? Partisans’ tendency to interpret facts consistent with their priors impedes evidence-based persuasion. Accordingly, most prior work finds that favorable information about the impact of immigration has little or no influence on policy preferences. Here we propose that appealing to moral values can bolster the persuasive power of information. Across three experiments (total N = 4,616), we find that an argument based on the value of in-group loyalty, which emphasized that immigrants are critical to America’s economic strength, combined with information about the economic impact of legal immigration, significantly increased Americans’ support for legal immigration. Additionally, we found a significant effect of the moral component of this message, whereas the effect of the information alone was of similar size but only marginally significant. These results show that moral arguments can strengthen the persuasiveness of informational appeals.

rejection of justice, legality and rights among admittedly different schools of thought; hence my reference to what has become the "orthodox" view.As for approaching Marx's ambivalent statements about rights in the German Ideology and elsewhere, the book tries to assess Marx's positions in "real time"-that is, by examining where he stood when issues of justice, legality and rights were critically at stake. Examples include the 1843 petition by leaders of the Rhenish Jewish community for equal rights, which Marx endorsed; his consistent defence of civil and political rights during the European Revolutions of 1848; and his detailed reflections on legally enforced limits on the working day in Capital. In all these critical instances, Marx's political actions speak louder than his ambivalent statements about rights. As Gray dutifully acknowledges, Revisiting Marx's Critique of Liberalism offers a " 'reconstruction' of Marx's critique of liberal rights and law." In Habermas' terminology, a critical reconstruction "signifies taking a theory apart and putting it back together in a new form in order to attain more fully the goal that it has set for itself " (1979: 95). There are retrospective and prospective dimensions to the critical reconstruction that was pursued in the book. Retrospectively, the book revisits Marx's critical reflections on justice, legality and rights, as well as their political reverberations in the twentieth century, taking stock of possible paths that remained untravelled. 1 Prospectively, it looks to the present and foreseeable future, identifying features of Marx's thought that remain prescient for a world confronting vast inequalities and exhibiting widespread assaults on hard-won rights and liberties. Note1 A more detailed consideration of these issues will appear in a future volume, The Revolution of Law: Developments in Soviet Legal Theory, 1917Theory, -1931, jointly edited and translated by Rafael Khachaturian and Igor Shoikhedbrod.