“Philosophers of the Cabal” inaugurates a line of inquiry devoted to the Volk (people). A powerful critic of Kantian anthropology, Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the “spirit of a people [Volksgeist]” is grounded in a common structure of sensibility or Sinnlichkeit. This shared sensibility derives in part from the notion of the sensus communis theorized by British empiricists in the early eighteenth century. After tracing the influence of British aesthetics on Herder, the chapter moves forward to consider E. B. Tylor, a towering figure of Victorian anthropology known for the evolutionary theories that displaced Herder’s diversitarian model. I show that Tylor actually retained key Herderian premises regarding collective sensation, which modernists like W. B. Yeats then incorporated into a primitivist style. Hence the communalist aesthetics running from Shaftesbury through Herder and Tylor leads ultimately to modernists who came of age during the fin-de-siècle.

“Eusynoptos” takes its title from the Aristotelian notion of εὐσύνοπτος: “easily taken in at a glance.” In the Politics, Aristotle maintains that the size of a city is strictly delimited by the number of citizens that can be visually comprehended at a glance. But what if a machine were to augment the sensory capacities of humans? Could a political entity then be expanded beyond its natural limits? Confronting these questions in his film theory, Walter Benjamin modernizes eusynoptos by showing how the movie camera records large masses of individuals in a manner impossible for the naked eye. Informed by Benjamin’s idiosyncratic Marxism, the coda examines the reception of Nazi propaganda films in the United States in order to develop a critical theory of collective spectatorship that promotes a rational politics, thereby pressing back on an irrationalist tradition in aesthetics leading from Schelling and Schopenhauer through Nietzsche to fascism.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 proclaimed its goal as the creation of ‘new people’: the transformation of human bodies and minds to correspond to the transformation of society. Literature became a space in which this new model of human life could be explored. This chapter traces the genealogy of the ‘new person’ from the nineteenth century to the figure of the ideal worker in Socialist Realist texts of the 1930s and beyond. The temporal focus of the chapter lies in the decade following 1917, when urgent but often contradictory political imperatives shaped the new person in literary texts. The chapter focusses on three key tensions: the relationship between the individual and collective; competing ideals of spontaneous energy and iron discipline; and the ideal of the transformation of body and mind. It shows how texts explore the relationship between abstract ideals of humanness and their lived reality.

This chapter will discuss Carnap’s engagement with various social issues through the lens of his scientific world view, and connect it to Thomas Uebel’s argument that Carnap’s philosophy was intended to be “political in its broadest sense.” I will build on Uebel’s characterization of Carnap as someone who believed in philosophy as fundamentally a collective effort and show how that played out in several of his organizational efforts. For example, Carnap notably protested the loyalty oaths required by the University of California, refusing both a lecture invitation and a visiting professorship on those grounds, citing concerns about academic freedom. Later in his life, Carnap, together with AJ Ayer, Max Black, Herbert Feigl, Carl Hempel, and Morris Lazerowitz, wrote a letter in the New York Times urging that Nicolas Molina Flores and Eli de Gortari be set free; Carnap also visited Molina and de Gortari in Mexico in 1970 and reported on it for the Journal of Philosophy. I will consider the extent to which social involvement like this, reflected in concern for the intellectual community as a whole, can be seen as continuous with his commitments to philosophy as a collective enterprise, and how those ideas might improve the practice of philosophy generally.

Historically condemned for their commercial exploitation of poesy, and threat to authorial autonomy, the literary anthology was nevertheless one of the signal forms of literary modernism, in the US and beyond. It was at once a salient means for circulating and preserving verse and a genre in its own right. Although the little magazine has been the more attractive genre of study – both for the form’s closer proximity to collaborative literary production and for their amenability to digital scholarly methods – the anthology often had a symbiotic relationship to little magazines in the modernist period, and has endured as a form for aesthetic and political self-identification, speculative interpellation, preservation, and reclamation, as well as being a mode of reaching audiences beyond the “field of restricted production.” This chapter traces the US career of the anthology from Des Imagistes to An “Objectivists” Anthology, emphasizing the genre’s key importance for Black American writing.

What has triggered this new concern with an impersonal yet singular life? In what sense do these formal innovations in contemporary aesthetics open up new ways to understand shared experience? In the belief that the analysis and reading of these cultural practices can help us foster the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences, this chapter wishes to unlock the ethical and political challenges of our time as they are elaborated and discussed in contemporary art practices by Teixeira Coelho, Diamela Eltit, Sergio Chejfec, Rosângela Rennó, Gian Paolo Minelli, and Claudia Andujar.

Climate activists across generations and borders demonstrate in the streets, while people also take climate actions via everyday professional efforts at work. In this dispersal of climate actions, the pursuit of personal politics is merging with civic, state and corporate commitment to the point where we are witnessing a rebirth of togetherness and alternative ways of collective organising, from employee activism, activist entrepreneurship, to insider activism, shareholder activism and prosumer activism. By empirically investigating this diffuse configuration of the environmental movement with focus on renewable energy technology, the commercial footing of climate activism is uncovered. The book ethnographically illustrates how activism goes into business, and how business goes into activism, to further trace how an ‘epistemic community’ emerges through co-creation of lay knowledge, not only about renewables, but political action itself. No longer tied to a specific geographical spot, organisation, group or even shared political identity, many politicians and business leaders applaud this affluent climate ‘action’, in their efforts to reach beyond mere climate ‘adaptation’ and speed up the energy transition. Conclusively, climate activism is no longer a civic phenomenon defined by struggles, pursued by the activist as we knew it, but testament of feral proximity and horizontal organising.

International liability and international criminal law are presented as alternatives to the law of state responsibility. Both regimes have developed out of real-life incidents to which state responsibility has not offered a sufficient enough solution. With their respective focus on adequate compensation and the desire to penalize perpetrators for the most serious violations of international law, they represent qualitatively different approaches to state responsibility. A more limited test of functionality is conducted in order to analyze whether the practical utility of these two regimes is higher than concerning the law of state responsibility. Three criteria that are crucial to a well-functioning and practical responsibility regime are explored: social control, collectivity, and signalling effect. The thematic evaluation of the two responsibility regimes shows that in some respects these particularized regimes fare better than state responsibility while also suffering from problems internal to their particular regimes. The core of the matter is that both regimes have their own rationale from which they do not purport to slide.

The introduction sets the theme of the book by illustrating an experience of intense, rapid change which can lead to a loss of self, arguably a key modern experience and not one unique to the twenty-first century. I argue that there was an intense sense of profound societal transformation at the end of the nineteenth century, when the discipline of sociology was born. Most crucial, it is analytically fruitful to reinvigorate classical crowd theory in order to understand individuality and collectivity, both then and now. I situate this main argument vis-à-vis existing discussions of modernity as well as present an outline of the book’s chapters, along with a brief discussion of the montage approach deployed in the book.

In Chapter 1, we saw that ‘negotiation is a process by which two parties with differences’ come together to resolve them. Up until now, we have kept the idea of ‘two parties’ quite simple, and for the most part considered what happens between two negotiators, one on each side. However, we have also seen that negotiations are ‘messy’. The core process of negotiation outlined in Chapter 4 is made more complex when the negotiators are acting on behalf of others. Few negotiate solely on their own account – two business development teams negotiating over a potential joint venture represent their respective companies, as does an IT manager negotiating to acquire a new system for their company. A union official negotiating a new enterprise agreement represents the membership. Members of a delegation to the local council seeking a change in the parking regulations represent their neighbours up and down their street. When the CEO of Air Berlin negotiated over lunch, then shook hands with the CEO of Airbus on a US$7 billion deal to supply aircraft, each executive had complete authority but was at the same time representing their company and all their employees (Newhouse 2000, p. 40). Similarly, with regard to ‘Brexit’, British Prime Ministers David Cameron and later Theresa May had a series of meetings with each of the European leaders over Britain’s departure from the European Union. The countries’ leaders on either side of the table would be using their personal authority to make progress but at the same time be fully conscious of the need to represent their nation’s political viewpoint. In these situations, negotiators can find themselves acting as a bridge, spanning the two sides and forming a channel of communication and accommodation. When the negotiators are not able to broker a deal this may be due more to the pressure on them than to their poor negotiating.

Chapter 3 argues that Stevens’ imaginative compositions of collectivity and audience provide another vantage point from which to highlight the contextual dimensions of his poetics of autonomy. In his longest and most intricate poem, “Owl’s Clover,” Stevens explores both the potentials and limits of aesthetic separation and autonomy for imagining new forms of collective agency, including the working classes. This exploration unfolds in tension with the period’s political-artistic aspirations to the inclusive “rhetoric of the people.” Stevens’ search for an inclusive “common” or “civil fiction” leads to a complex questioning of the imagination’s potential to expand from a local to a global vision of collectivity. The chapter demonstrates how by acknowledging the ideological pressures (fascist war and colonialism) that impede the aesthetic creation of a globally inclusive model of communal presence, Stevens takes the further step of resisting them, to affirm the continual need of poetry for envisaging prospective forms of collective life.