In Chapter 4, I offer a new theory of citizen power. Every adult male citizen would have been free, but this also made him kurios, or empowered, as opposed to ceding his power to a slave master. When substantivized, kurios indicated a male citizen’s institutionalized role as the head of a household. The lens of the household kurios generates an understanding of citizen power that encompasses both private and public domains. Not simply power as domination, kurios also indicated a shared power to act. As a conceptual metaphor, kurios was applied to the political sphere and structured thought across these different domains. Thus, qualities of the term kurios in its original domain, the household, corresponded systemically in the applied domain, the city. The laws and the corporate citizen body, too, were understood as kurioi. While there may be competing claims to power, the identification of the citizen as sharing in power with and through the laws and the dēmos is distinct from the modern conception of the individual versus the state. The negotiation of power in this way has repercussions for debates regarding sovereignty and the rule of law.

Rousseau’s Social Contract is often viewed as one of the early modern attempts to construct a theory of positive liberty. This interpretation makes sense. In Book I, Rousseau writes of freedom as a form of rational self-determination that enlarges and ennobles minds. Some theorists, most notably Isaiah Berlin, have argued that this notion of freedom opens the door to tyranny and blame Rousseau for the authoritarianism and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. However, Rousseau is probably best considered a theorist of negative liberty. The Social Contract is in many respects a deeply practical work that primarily seeks to prevent both government and interpersonal domination and is animated by an underlying skepticism toward Rousseau’s very own solutions to these problems.

● Francis Galton helped invent a model that describes how family names can disappear from a population purely by chance; it provides a good entrée to the subject of neutral evolution. ● Strict neutrality needs to be distinguished from near neutrality. With strict neutrality, each token allele at a locus has a probability of 1/2N of eventually going to fixation if the population is diploid and contains N individuals; there is strict neutrality here because there is zero variation in fitness. ● The relationship of strict neutrality to the hypothesis of a molecular clock is clarified. ● Strict neutrality is a null hypothesis; the epistemic status of null hypotheses is discussed – are they default assumptions, to be viewed as innocent until proven guilty? ● Alternatives to the hypothesis of strict neutrality are discussed, including Tomoko Ohta’s theory of near neutrality, which says that nearly all genes are strictly neutral or slightly deleterious. ● Whether drift is a cause of evolution, and whether it is a process distinct from natural selection, are discussed, and so is the question of what it means for drift to be a stronger cause than selection in the evolution of an allele.

The author makes the case for a new understanding of the role of consent in international law. She begins by noting that the question of consent should be as central to international law as it is in other fields of law because legal norms give rise to power relations and impose constraints upon those to whom they apply, and those in power want these constraints to be accepted. Yet, the question of consent was, as the chapter claims, never raised in the classical era when State sovereignty made it possible for States to adopt international norms without their subjects’ consent. With the Enlightenment, however, the people’s consent through representation became the foundation of domestic law. Yet, most of the time, representation is, according to the author, formal and serves to justify the law as if it were produced by the general will. Because international law reflects the fickle concurrence of States’ wills, the world community’s law does not rely on popular consent. The world community is confronted with difficult challenges, and it needs, more than ever, norms that can meet this moment.

This chapter asks whether Robert Dodaro and John Milbank are correct in their claim that Augustine thought that the earthly city was necessarily a place of political vice. To this end, this chapter examines Augustine’s idea of the love of material possessions, the love of glory, and the love of domination, and finds that while he looked on these loves as always sinful, he held that they did not necessarily lead people to commit politically vicious actions, but could in fact act as a restraint on people’s actions, ensuring that people conformed their lives to the highest political and social standards.

This chapter introduces the micro-sociological approach to the study and practice of conflict transformation. Unlike traditional conceptions of conflict resolution and transformation, the micro-sociological approach does not seek to address the root causes of a conflict in the sense of “that which the conflict is about,” but rather to change the interaction patterns and the larger web of relations sustaining and making up the intergroup or international conflict. Rather than a tree with deep roots, conflict is envisioned as a system of rhizomes; that is, a web of interactions. The chapter discusses how antagonistic interaction can be disrupted and transformed with the assistance of a mediator or through social activities, and how rituals of apology and reconciliation can restore relationships. Moreover, the chapter analyzes the micro-sociological significance of turning points, shared laughter and domination in processes of dialogue. Finally, the chapter discusses the challenges to conflict transformation.

The chapter takes us to the moment of biological conception and explores the question of male autonomy in embryonic fertilization and development. We will follow Lucretius’ lead into the reproductive organs of men and women to show how generative material supplied by female and male sexual partners both competes and cooperates at conception. What Lucretius reveals in forceful language and imagery is that men are impotent in the face of universal physics and that female reproductive assertiveness gives the lie to exclusive male dominion from the moment when genetic material from both parents first coheres in utero.

Global domination – including imperial oppression and commercial exploitation across borders and, especially, across continents – was a key concern for many modern thinkers, and among its roots and its remedies were often thought to be the various forms of antagonism and resistance that fundamentally characterize humans’ social practices and interactions. Unsocially sociable individuals, in this view, are characterized by a seemingly contradictory array of impulses that both draw them together in a spirit of humane association and yet pull them apart, as they seek to resist others either to forestall being dominated themselves or to indulge their prideful and hierarchical sense of superiority. Among the many treatments of what one could call "cosmopolitan unsocial sociability" are the incisive – and complementary – theoretical writings of the 1780s and 1790s respectively by the Afro-British political thinker Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant and Cugoano together exemplify an intriguing and complex strand of Enlightenment thought that viewed global connections as both corrosive to our shared humanity and yet essential for resisting the domination that afflicted both European and non-European peoples.

Black theology is an academic movement calling for the reevaluation of Christian thought based on the claim that God sides with the oppressed – or, put more vividly, that God is Black. From the perspective of Black theology, many virtues turn out not to be virtuous at all but rather practices that secure white supremacy. What are commonly dismissed as vices may, from the perspective of Black theology, turn out to be virtues: practices essential for survival and flourishing in the face of racial domination. The Tempest is, in part, a meditation on domination, and this chapter explores what it would mean to approach the play from the perspective of Black theology. The apparent virtue of Miranda and Ariel turns out to be white virtue, habits that claim objective goodness but that actually affirm and naturalize arbitrary rule. Caliban, attuned to primal enchantment and desiring liberation from arbitrary rule, exhibits habits that appear vicious but that may be read as virtuous from the framework of Black theology.

Chapter 2 is a detailed explanation of the theoretical methodology that the remainder of the monograph follows. It begins with an explanation of the main philosophical positions that are traditionally considered as relevant in situations of human–wildlife conflict, including anthropocentric, ecological and animal rights/welfare perspectives. Because the very nature of human–wildlife conflict is centred on differences in held values, these types of value-driven positions are not, by themselves, useful in responding to conflict, because of the alternate value positions that they alienate. The chapter then moves to an analysis of two theories – Martha Fineman’s Vulnerability Theory and Ecofeminism. The purpose of the chapter is to analyse the principles of both sets of theories and combine them to develop a new theory of environmental jurisprudence, which will be referred to as ‘Ecological-Vulnerability’. The chapter demonstrates that an ecofeminist approach to vulnerability theory (eco-vulnerability) not only explains the individual and institutional limitations in current methods of addressing human–wildlife conflict but can help to formulate principles that work to transform it.

This chapter looks at killers who were subject to abuse from their fathers. Heterosexual killer Richard Ramirez was subject to severe punishment and witnessed punishment of his brothers, while his cousin showed him photographs of the sexual assault of Vietnamese women. He consumed large amounts of drugs, which could have had a sensitizing effect on his violent tendencies. It appears that masturbatory fantasy involved domination and sexual violence against women. Danny Rolling is a heterosexual killer who had a terrible upbringing in which nothing seemed to go right. Rolling described the thrill of house-breaking. He took souvenirs from his killings and left his victims sexually posed, suggesting a signature. He described a struggle between right and wrong and showed dissociation. Heterosexual lust killer Keith Jesperson described the thrill that he derived from arson. Jane Toppan described a sexual thrill that she got from killing her patients with morphine injections.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the main insights of labor regimes scholarship, including its focus on questions of labor control and its use of the neo-Gramscian distinction between consensual and coercive mechanisms of labor control. It then explains the analytic limits of this consent–coercion dichotomy when analyzing labor regime dynamics in peripheral regions of world capitalism. It then develops an ideal-typical framework intended to understand the crisis tendencies of labor regimes that exist in peripheral locations of the world market, distinguishing “hegemonic” and “despotic” labor regimes from regimes marked by “crises of labor control” or “counter-hegemony.” It then draws from insights from world-systems scholarships on the social precarity of fully proletarianized labor systems and on the core–periphery dynamics of global commodity chains to explain how the convergence of processes of peripheralization and proletarianization, or peripheral proletarianization, has a particularly destabilizing impact on local labor regimes. It ends with a discussion of how both processes of proletarianization and peripheralization are impacted by larger structural and institutional dynamics associated with the rise and decline of US world hegemony.

This final chapter not only compares the different approaches in terms of conceptual strategies and theoretical premises but also evaluates their advantages and disadvantages. In particular, it shows that the German tradition provides the most general account of recognition but also lacks the critical observations made by the two other accounts. In the French tradition the emphasis on the potential for domination helps to overcome the “power-blindness” of the German notion of "recognition”; in the British tradition the emphasis on the importance of education and socialization helps to overcome the “educational blindness” of the German tradition. In this spirit the final chapter offers a systematic integration of all three notions of “recognition” that were reconstructed in the earlier chapters.

The conclusion summarizes the main arguments of the book, discusses how they could guide decisions about alternative ways of structuring welfare institutions, examines the context of the American welfare state, and discusses the potential future of the welfare state.