The chapter re-examines the notorious Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI in light of widespread political protests across the globe. The bloody chaos of Cade’s failed popular uprising contains within it an important flash – or counter-memory – for the political imagination. First, the popular movement creates a break with the oppressive social order by revealing the systematic silencing and oppression of the commons. It makes the invisible visible. Second, the mass movement makes a positive demand for justice that differentiates the people from the State. Examining the rebels’ “Edenic egalitarianism”, the chapter draws on the recent work of Chris Fitter, Lorna Hutson, and Annabel Patterson in reassessing Shakespeare’s representation of popular politics. However, the chapter critiques the critical tendency to concentrate on what is “useful” or “effective” at the level of plot. It instead turns to imagination as the key to thinking Shakespeare’s popular politics. The force of the “people” is not located in one figure, be it Cade or Salisbury, but is dispersed across the drama. The spirit of the “in-common”, in all its absurdity and impossibility, lives on as a form of negative, or spectral, thinking and dramaturgy. The audience is the ultimate carrier and agent of this political imagination.

Mathematical models based on evolutionary and ecological principles can help explain and predict variation in political organization and inequality across societies. This chapter introduces five major themes in human behavioral ecology that contribute to this goal. First, vertical power relationships between dominants and subordinates arise when resources are economically defensible and environmental or social circumscription limits outside options. Second, inequality increases when resources are durable and can be accumulated and inherited between generations within lineages. Third, egalitarian leveling can limit dominance behavior and inequality when there is a high degree of social interdependence, contributions to cooperation can be voluntarily given or withdrawn, or leveling coalitions facilitate collective bargaining. Fourth, organizational hierarchies are favored when they provide net benefits to group members compared to more egalitarian alternatives; inequality within these hierarchies is limited by the ability to replace aggrandizing leaders or move between groups. Finally, large-scale territorial hierarchies such as states and empires arise under conditions of escalating competition between groups over concentrated and defensible resources, such as high-quality agricultural land. The ecological parameters highlighted by these models define a multidimensional space of possibilities for human political organization and inequality.

Status hierarchy likely exists in all human societies, whether pronounced or more subtle, and even in more egalitarian societies where resources are widely shared and overt status-seeking is actively policed. This chapter reviews models of the evolution of status hierarchy, including models from behavioral ecology as well as from evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution. A central concern of these disparate models is the adaptive problem of why any individual should adopt a subordinate status if higher status tends to increase fitness. Solutions to this problem involve the benefits to individuals from avoiding costs of repeated competition over resources or from deferring to prestigious others. Hierarchy can facilitate coordination and collective action that, in humans, enables both the massive scale of our societies and unparalleled levels of exploitation. These explanations are summarized in detail while addressing related questions, including: Do women and men differ in status-seeking? What contributes to variation in status hierarchy across species and across human societies? The goals of this chapter are to highlight consilience and provoke new directions within the evolutionary literature on status hierarchy.

Chapter 5 notes that the anarchist argument against private property underdetermines which positive position libertarian property rights theorists ought to endorse. One option is to simply concede that people lack any sort of claim rights when it comes to natural resources ‒ that is, endorse what the chapter calls the Hobbesian conclusion. However, the chapter argues that this proposal must be rejected because it violates the moral tyranny constraint. Instead, the chapter argues that libertarians and property rights theorist should accept what it calls the anarchist conclusion. This thesis holds that persons do possess certain claims against others using unowned resources, where these claims correspond to the prescriptions of a luck egalitarian principle of distributive justice. The chapter then argues that libertarians have limited basis for rejecting the anarchist conclusion, as it is compatible with both their favored property-based theories of justice and the arguments that support such theories.

Having a satisfying romantic relationship and satisfying employment is important to most people but maintaining the balance between these two domains is not easy. Both roles require a significant investment of time, effort, and cognitive and emotional resources. There is an increased realization in academia that the separation between studying relationships and studying work is artificial and does not represent the many intersections of these roles. In this chapter, we discuss how work and romantic relationships can interact with each other and impact individuals’ outcomes. We first cover workplace romantic relationships, workplace sexual harassment, and organizations’ attempt to regulate romantic relationships at work. Then, we continue with reviewing the positive and negative associations of work and romantic relationship. Lastly, we introduce an economic perspective to examining romantic relationships and consider the workplace as a local marriage market.

Recent scholarship has sought to read Smith in TMS as an ethical critic of market inequality, one motivated by egalitarian commitments. This chapter pushes back against this reading, arguing that the position Smith adopts in TMS is most accurately labelled sufficientarian, not egalitarian. However, Smith’s sufficientarian considerations are deliberately focused on what is most apt for securing individual happiness. He says little of direct or decisive bearing on the plausibility of egalitarianism as a political commitment. Yet because ethical questions are not, in this area at least, isomorphic with political ones, we ought not to assume the latter can straightforwardly be read off the former. This ought to temper both our reading of Smith’s argument, and what we can appropriately extract from his text for present normative debate.

Critics of Rawls’s principles of justice complain that they ignore considerations of merit or desert. As meritocracy is the chief justification for the extremely wide inequalities between workers at the top and bottom today, we need to examine this complaint. I argue that ideas of desert or merit are inherently unsuited to informing principles of justice for the basic structure of society. Moreover, attempts to raise the principle of desert to the systemic level have historically formed the ideological grounds for irresolvable class warfare. Rawls’s principles of justice supply a normative perspective that wisely aims to transcend class warfare. Rawls’s conception of property-owning democracy, culturally shaped by public affirmation of the difference principle, offers a plausible vision of how society may achieve such transcendence.

The tension between democratic autonomy and judicial authority over democratic process cannot be wholly resolved. The best way to balance this dilemma incorporates an unsettling reality about the freedom that vindicates democratic self-rule: the values and realization of freedom are necessarily the subjects of ongoing intractable struggle over its moral meaning. This perpetual contestability also offers the possibility of reimagining judicial review. This chapter exploits the election law doctrine’s fiercely unsettled case law to suggest that continual judicial debate about the appropriate terms of democratic freedom is the best way to reconcile judicial review with constituent self-determination. Conceiving of judicial review of election law as a dispute over self-rule answers the challenge at three levels: it (1) explains how nonaccountable courts can play a legitimate institutional role in democratic self-determination; (2) allows courts to opine on self-rule without overdetermining the meaning of freedom, and thus undermining its moral value; and (3) offers the best account of the doctrine as a battle over the meaning of liberalism.

In this chapter, I turn to an unlikely source for democratic inspiration: Plato’s Republic. I argue that, understood correctly, Plato’s Republic provides insights into what a flourishing democracy looks like and how education can help produce such a democracy. While Plato does not provide an explicit defense of democracy, his criticism of corrupt democracies in Book VIII and his often-ignored advocacy of egalitarian communities in Books II, III, and IV offer contemporary educators insights into a mode of education that could strengthen contemporary democracies. Once this interpretation is in place, I will discuss the ways contemporary democratic educators might use Plato’s ideas to support students in their development as democratic citizens.

Chapter 7 explores ways in which people’s perceptions of the actual risks posed by climate change can be elevated adequately to motivate them to engage in individual and collective action to counteract it.