This short summary chapter recalls the “arc of corruption” that the book depicts, the caricatures of German corporate behavior that the Nuremberg trials fostered, and their consequences for historical interpretation. The book concludes by recentering the consequences of business leaders’ actions, rather than the pragmatic motivations that produced these actions, in any judgment of their conduct.

This chapter addresses two works set in post-war Japan: Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story ‘The Summer After the War’ (1983) and novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986). It begins with a survey of various forces (legal, social, and political) which convinced contemporary commentators that moral sense had been left bewildered and judgements rendered ephemeral by the events of the Second World War and early Cold War, and then goes on to trace how this crisis of faith influenced the style and ethical consciousness of Ishiguro’s early fiction. Together ‘The Summer After the War’ and An Artist of the Floating World display a powerful interest in those Japanese citizens who flourished in a society operating with transient and ultimately dangerous values, and whose lives were threatened and emptied of meaning following their nation’s defeat. The chapter contains close readings of both texts and shows how subtle stylistic features contribute to their presentation of individuals endeavouring, through imaginative acts of narration, to attain absolution and stability in the face of changing moral norms and shifting geopolitical alliances.

This chapter tells the tragic tale of the Weimar Republic. It begins with a description of the political violence that was typical of its early years, based on the half-forgotten book by the socialist statistician Emil Julius Gumbel. It then moves on to observe the double message of the new republic to the Jews. As everyone was suffering the consequences of one economic or political crisis after another, and the endless social strife and political disagreements, Jews had to confront antisemitism too, and that just as they learned to enjoy their final and complete equality. From the tale of the “stab in the back” till the rise of the Nazi Party, Jews were targets of hate and repeated public attacks. Three women represent here three generations of Jews living under these conditions: the social activist Bertha Pappenheim, the socialist physician Käte Frankenthal, and the young Hannah Arendt. Their life-stories allow us to glimpse the social-work efforts of the older Jewish community, the attraction of the socialist vision for Jewish men and women of the middle generation, and the creative intellectual work of some members of the younger generation.

I stake out a contemporary context in which democracy seems to be under attack from the populist right, and neglected by parts of the progressive left caught up with a politics of the personal. In a polarised world, persuading others to change their sense of who they are has become more difficult. I draw on Jonathan Haidt to show how most decisions are made on the basis of emotion rather than reason. Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe argue for the importance of public argument and the theatricality of political life, prioritising social roles over personal authenticity. From a liberal perspective, Judith Shklar speaks to the inevitability of hypocrisy in democratic politics. Matthew Flinders, Alan Finlayson and David Runciman are contemporary theorists who identify the need for political science to take on the problem of rhetoric. From truth and hypocrisy, I turn to the question of representation. A democratic politician represents those who vote for her or him much as an actor in a play represents a character. Theatre offers a lens through which to contemplate problems of selfhood and identity, and the paradox of the sincere liar.

This chapter establishes the broader contours of politics, conceived as a discrete domain of ethical behaviour. It begins by detailing some paradigmatic instances of political action, organised into two categories: 'direct' and 'indirect'. Next, it examines the relationship between political action and violence, arguing that although individual violent acts might instantiate ethically valuable politics to some degree, truly endemic violence is inimical to politics. Having established this, it turns to the relationship between politics, equality, and inclusion, arguing that politics takes place primarily within geographically demarcated communities and that, as a result, we are justified in prioritising the participation of our compatriots. Finally, this chapter examines the role played by governance institutions within contemporary states, arguing that they fulfil an essential facilitating function. This grants them 'quasi-independent' value as political 'artefacts', 'focuses', and 'forums'. Taken together, these various arguments bridge the conceptual and normative gap between the analysis of the previous chapter and the account of state creation advanced later in the book.

This chapter offers an investigation of what Socrates may have meant when, in his infamous appearance before a jury at Athens in 399 BCE, he referred to himself as a myōps – typically translated as a gadfly. The chapter illustrates that the natural world does not just serve to naturalize (and thus normalize) collective political systems that are already firmly in place. As in the case of Socrates, it can also serve as a potent strategy to seek to naturalize (and thus normalize) the individual political stance outside of the collective. The chapter shows that, by carving out a space for dissent, Socrates defined a form of citizenship that resonates far beyond the ancient world. It, for example, helps to explain the ambivalence surrounding modern dissenting voices (such as those of Julian Assange, Michael Moore, and Edward Snowden). The chapter ultimately traces the buzzing of the Socratic gadfly into Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy and illustrates the important tole that this peculiar ancient creature plays in her critique of the perils of modernity.

By necessity, immigrants must think, act, and live experimentally when they arrive at their new destination. Given that the essay also possesses an experimental quality, it is unsurprising to find that in the United States – often called the land of immigration – the essayistic canon includes a vast corpus of writing by immigrants. Indeed, the dual or multiple identity of an immigrant-essayist is one of the most common in American writing. This chapter is concerned with a particular group of such immigrant-essayists: those who arrived in the United States as a result of exile from Germany. It focuses particularly on Hans Richter, Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Kantorowicz, Thomas Mann, and Herbert Marcuse (as well as his student Angela Davis) who – like countless other artists, scholars, authors, directors, and other intellectuals – fled to the United States from war, persecution, and precarity in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s. The final section explores the works of Christa Wolf, an author who grew up in socialist East Germany and whose visits to the United States before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain strongly influenced her essayistic writing.

This chapter uses Heidegger’s and Arendt’s joint reading in 1925 of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) to argue that Heidegger’s lived literary practice in the 1920s does not match the invocations of poetic specialness that the philosopher theorizes from the mid 1930s onwards. Drawing on Heidegger’s letters to Arendt, as well as on the lecture courses from the mid 1920s which Heidegger used to clarify the arguments that became Being and Time, the chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s response to Mann’s novel. The episode suggests a counterfactual alternative mode of Heideggerian literary reading. Mann’s novel, as a model to think with, emphasizes the exchange with others and the competing discourses that resist grounding in a more fundamental viewpoint, such as the phenomenological ontology of the early Heidegger or the “thinking” of the later Heidegger. At the same time, the reading of Mann allows us to re-contextualize Heidegger’s engagement with his scientific and philosophical contemporaries, such as Einstein, Bergson, and Russell.

This chapter details the rapid and radical changes experienced by Jews in Nazi Germany, focusing on the ways in which Baeck reacted to the annexation of Austria, the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht), and the German genocidal politics. Besides detailing Baeck’s political activities, this chapter is the first to offer a full analysis of his most contested work, a 1200-page unpublished manuscript he co-authored with Leopold Lucas and Hilde Ottenheimer. Although Baeck claimed it was produced for the conservative resistance, archival documents suggest it was written at the command of Nazi officers. Baeck’s discussions of race and Jewish colonization throughout history as they appear in this text reveal that he is treading very cautiously, citing Nazi scholarship on the one hand, while insisting on the rights of Jews on the other. This ambiguity is best explained by treating this manuscript as forced intellectual labor, an understanding that sheds light on Baeck’s imperial imagination at a time when the organization he headed came under Nazi supervision. Now named the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, needed to make difficult choices, including regarding deportations.

Chapter 2 turns to the role of language in the context of strategy, specifically investigating how rhetoric and persuasion can open and close spaces for the airing of opinions freely amongst speakers. It is in creating and expressing opinion (and not truth) in the polis – the space of appearances – that the question of who one is receives its full disclosure. We then turn to the appearance of strategy in ancient Greece, first in the figure of Pericles, then Alcibiades, and in particular the latter’s skilful performances in the polis, and a gifted if contested career blighted, we suggest, by a failure to apprehend the distinction between the polis (rhetoric) and oikos (sophistry and instrumentality). The failure of Alcibiades also hints at some of the difficulties of language as the means of self-disclosure and so also for Arendt’s idealized association of action with talk, for it is in Alcibiades’ struggle as a strategos that opinion becomes twisted into event: Things get done, even if the action is consumed by failure and ruin. The case of Alcibiades takes us from talk to the body, and back to the polis in which the everyday is suspended so that action, freed from instrumentality, can occur and recur, each time alive and enlivening.

Chapter 1 covers the raising of consciousness and conscience and the interplay of authenticity and estrangement through a reading of Hannah Arendt, whose work we have found a profound inspiration throughout the book, notably her re-imagining of the ancient Greek city state of Athens and the polis as its political forum. The polis is an idealized space in whose relational confines an organized condition of authenticity can appear. It is a space to which those responsible for the administrative defence of the city, the strategoi, belong, but over which they have no authority. Separated from the household (oikos, the root term for economics), the polis is not primarily concerned with necessity, a condition Arendt calls labour, preoccupied with activity aimed at sustaining the metabolic persistence of life. Nor is it primarily a matter of work, of making and fabricating functional, symbolic and institutional things that last, such as temples, or laws, and that in return let the makers and fabricators ‘live on’ in reflection of the things they have produced. Drawing from the structure of the polis, we argue in this chapter for the intimacy between strategy and authenticity

Waseem Yaqoob examines how four prominent German political philosophers responded to the ‘crisis of historicism’ by re-thinking the relation between ethics, politics and history. The trigger for the crisis was Germany’s defeat in World War I, when the presumed convergence of the monarchical nation state with ethical fulfilment and historical destiny dissolved in defeat and political upheaval. Among the first to respond was Friedrich Meinecke, whose earlier confidence in that convergence was replaced by an awareness of historical contingency, and of the difficulty of aligning ethics with reason of state. Notoriously harder line was Carl Schmitt, for whom an appreciation of contingency in a ‘world of enemies’ entailed the assertion of sovereignty at the expense of ethics. With the collapse of Nazism and advent of the Cold War, Reinhart Koselleck renewed Schmitt’s critique of moralising historical philosophy (identified with the Enlightenment), before turning to ‘conceptual history’ to suggest that the state would best adapt to the accelerating temporality of modernity by avoiding all normative choices. By contrast, Hannah Arendt would seek in the contingency of history the space to make such choices, and the opportunity to revive the ancient ideal of active citizenship. In conclusion, Yaqoob sets German post-Historicist thinking off against the anti-historical tendency of Anglo-American political philosophy associated with John Rawls, suggesting that the former may offer a more sophisticated historical ‘realism’ than that current among Rawls’ critics.

While not typically considered a postcolonial writer, Ishiguro’s work often engages with the question of British and Japanese imperialism and colonialism, either directly in works such as An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and the Ishiguro-scripted film The White Countess, or through subtle allusion to the American post-war occupation of Japan in A Pale View of Hills or the Suez Crisis in The Remains of the Day. Writing from the ‘inside’, from the perspective of individuals who are unwittingly complicit in the structures of oppression entailed by colonial rule, Ishiguro offers complex and unsettlingly sympathetic depictions of the psychological denials and displacements that allow individuals to operate within these regimes. Focusing on An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and The White Countess, this chapter responds to the ways in which Ishiguro’s fiction attends to the relationship between individual and collective responsibility and historico-political forces.

This chapter argues that Ishiguro’s novels frame ethical issues through questions of agency. Hannah Arendt’s ideas about agency and action provide a way to understand this in detail: for Arendt, speech and action reveal ‘who’ the speaker is, and shows their involvement with the ‘web of human relationships’ and the ramifications of their actions; the representation of action is inextricable from style and form. Using these ideas, the chapter demonstrates that there are significant changes over Ishiguro’s work: the first three novels concern reflections on past actions; the second three explore different conditions of agency in both content and in style; the two most recent novels deal with the impact and risks of actions and reactions. This also illuminates two recognizable literary devices used by Ishiguro: the way his characters ‘project’ themselves onto others, and what he calls the ‘dream grammar’ in relation to some aspects of his prose and plotting.

Jeffrey Gore’s entry on technē offers a survey of diverse workers throughout Shakespeare’s writing: artisans, lawyers, medical doctors, and educators. It situates the Greek word technē – meaning “technical expertise,” “craft,” or “skill” – within Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics as both a pedagogical model (“the craft analogy”) and a marker of social class among different laborers, from “leather apron” craftspeople to elite Latin learners and modern teachers of the liberal arts. In brief accounts of Hannah Arendt’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings on Aristotle, the entry addresses how technē was often believed incompatible with some ancient and early modern notions of citizenship and demonstrates how many of Shakespeare’s characters – such as the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – challenge us to understand the role of craft in facilitating artistic expression and strengthening political community.

Rowlands responds to the volume’s focus on the politics of (in)gratitude, showing how refugee regimes have weaponized gratitude to maintain inequality and injustice, but also how gratitude – as recounted by refugees themselves – has been a powerful vehicle for hope through acts of remembrance.