We introduce the subjects beginning with the early works of Hegel, followed by a description of the emphases provided by Levins and Lewontin in their volume. Then we elaborate on the particularities that become involved in the application to the issues of food and agriculture more generally, and specifically to agroecology. We end the chapter with a discussion of the meaning of agroecology as both a field of intellectual inquiry and a platform for political action.

Chapter 21 examines Goethe’s relationship to German Idealism. Although the speculative nature of the Idealist method appears alien to Goethe’s own thought, and he himself expressed reservations about it, his poetic and scientific works display a significant degree of sympathy with the concerns that motivated his contemporaries. The chapter highlights the importance of Spinoza in the alignment between Goethe and Idealist thought, before considering in detail the significance of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and above all Schelling, whose philosophy of nature and art is particularly resonant with Goethe’s own.

Chapter 20 reflects on Goethe’s unique way of thinking and his persistent challenges to orthodoxy. It builds on Goethe’s own assertion that he was ‘not naturally equipped to do philosophy in its proper sense’, and argues that his thought engages the figurative power of ‘improper’ (that is, poetic) language to do philosophical work. The chapter notes his criticism of the modes of, among others, Kant and Hegel, and highlights places in Goethe’s oeuvre, including in his literary works, where we can see new and unconventional pathways for thought being built.

Chapter 19 examines Goethe’s relationship to philosophy, which throughout his life was one of both interest and guarded distance. It considers the transformations which philosophy as a discipline underwent during his lifetime, details Goethe’s attitudes to intellectual developments in his own time, above all the work of Kant, and devotes particular attention to Spinoza, without whose inspiration Goethe’s work is unthinkable, even if it cannot be reduced to a Spinozist position. The chapter also emphasises the singularity of Goethe’s own thought, which was forever transforming any influences that it received, becoming a source of inspiration and critical reflection for contemporary and succeeding generations of philosophers.

Though he was both friend and collaborator of Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Weimar, Schiller was not significantly influenced by his fellow playwright. We find no allusion in his quasi-Aristotelian definition of ‘Tragedy’ to the famous triad canonized some thirty years later by the master of Weimar: Epos, Lyrik, Drama – the ‘three natural and authentic forms of poetry’. Admittedly, Goethe was at pains to nuance his thesis precisely in relation to ‘das ältere griechische Trauerspiel’, ‘the ancient Greek tragedy’. He explained that in a first phase of development of the genre the three natural forms of poetry merged into one, inasmuch as the main character was still the chorus and the lyric mode was predominant. Later, the three forms tended to diverge and to organize themselves in sequence within individual tragedies. Goethe therefore found within the genre of tragedy the clarity of narrative epic, the exaltation of lyric emotion and the personal action of drama.

To get to the root of the grave misunderstanding underlying modern notions of the lyric mode we must revisit this chapter in the history of tragic criticism.

In the introduction, I argue that Yeats’s revivalism, far from being prior to or separate from his modernism, is in fact a principal component of it. This claim is based on new research on revivalism as a movement and a way of thinking about Ireland, its past, and its future. My theoretical point of view is determined by three intertwined concepts: recognition, temporality, and the world of the work of art. The concepts of recognition and misrecognition, as I use them, derive from Hegel’s philosophy and are fundamental to his dialectical method. I explore at length Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenological concept of worldmaking, according to which the aesthetic object consists of a represented and an expressed world. The dialectical relation of these two worlds in the work of art led to the creation of new time signatures, new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. These innovations, which I argue are characteristic of Yeats’s revivalism and his modernism, sanction, through artistic means, the creation of new histories and stories for understanding Ireland’s past. They also sanction the creation of new worlds – possible and impossible – in art and other cultural forms. Yeats’s work, propelled by a lifelong commitment to revivalism, introduces into modernism a constellation of new worlds.

For much of history, from the dawn of Greek historiography to the postmodern 1970s, genealogy has been synonymous with continuity of origins and blood identity, and therefore closely connected with the concepts of the classic and the canon. Yet, during the last half century, specially thanks to the Nietzschean and Foucauldian philosophical deployment, it has shed its narrative garb to become an agent of discontinuity, and thus the nemesis of the classic and the canon. Many scholars have analyzed the modern development of genealogies after Nietzsche’s alleged foundational statement and its Foucauldian reception. But none of them has provided a systematic history of the trajectory of this concept, from antiquity to the present. This chapter attempts to fill this gap by providing a history of the concept of genealogy and its associated ideas, delving specifically into its historiographical uses, and connecting it to the four previous concepts discussed in the book. I will, specifically, emphasize its polysemy, try to locate what has remained and what has changed in this long trajectory, and explain the (only recently) radically opposed nature (nemesis) between the concepts of genealogy and canon – and the implications that this opposition brings to historiography.

Chapter 1 argues that V. S. Naipaul’s works are critically co-extensive with world literary formations and demonstrably foundational to the conception of the modern idea of world literature. Naipaul’s entry into world literature is via a writing that reads the literary world as an aesthetic totality. Kant’s critique of judgement is critical here even if Naipaul departs from Kant who read human cognition as discursive and not intuitive. Naipaul’s aesthetics is grounded in an intuitive mode of human cognition. His idea of “seeing” (and here he means “critical seeing”) via a “sensible intuition” is the basis of all his writings. Naipaul’s declaration of the primacy of the intuitive intellect – Proust is cited as exemplary – in the artistic process has no need for concepts or guiding principles, a prior idea or even a politics. However, Naipaul heeds Kant’s warning that if we were to rely purely on intuition – which would generate a non-contingent world with no distinction between objects that are real and those merely possible because all objects for the intuitive intellect are real – there would be no universal concepts generated by understanding and only individual representations grasped directly and immediately.

This chapter traces the modern reception of the Sophists from their rediscovery in the Latin West to the first edition of Hermann Diels’ Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903). Its focus is the Sophists’ uncertain place in the historiography of Greek philosophy, in relation both to the “Presocratics” and to Socrates and the Socratic tradition. The “Sophists” emerge as an historiographical category in the late eighteenth century and become pivotal in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) systematic account of philosophy’s development. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), his key successor, revises but also reinforces the still dominant Hegelian narrative. The chapter also discusses two outsiders to the German historiographical tradition, George Grote (1794–1871) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who challenge the Sophists’ assimilation to progressivist views of Greek philosophy, but from radically different perspectives.

This chapter offers an interpretation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s award-winning work of feminist science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, from the standpoint of a Hegelian understanding of the politics of recognition. It identifies three approaches to the politics of recognition, associated with the ideas of the politics of difference, the politics of identity, and the politics of identity-and-difference. The first is based on the notion of order, hierarchy status, and relationships between those who consider themselves to be unequals. The second is based on the notion of dialogue and communication between those who consider themselves to be equals. It sets aside all differences as being morally irrelevant. As such, it is associated with the notion of strong cosmopolitanism. The third attaches importance to both the similarities and the differences that exist between individuals. Le Guin’s commitment to feminism in the novel is sometimes associated with the second of these approaches. She is thought to be a strong cosmopolitan thinker. The chapter argues that Le Guin is in fact an advocate of the third approach. She is best thought of as a weak cosmopolitan thinker.

“What now? Enough is enough. Now we have to begin. Into our hands, life has been given.” With these exasperated words, Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia begins like no other work of philosophy. In anger and aspiration, it does not begin with a pedantic preface or scholarly introduction. It begins in situ with a catastrophe that has thrown human existence back upon itself, from which no deliverance seems to be at hand. What is to be done? How can one survive? Caught in the condition of pitching “senselessly back and forth,” something nonetheless endures, we know not what, we know not how, but with nothing in our hands save our own obscurity, life still darkly speaks, for which, in this end of days, we want to be its initiative as well as its end.

Chapter 2 places Hegel’s views on the nature of constitutions in the context of contemporary discussions of what may be termed constitutional transferability, engaging in particular with the French Revolution and the English constitution. It introduces Hegel’s conception of the constitution as an organism, his denial of the possibility of deriving constitutions ‘a priori’, and his simultaneous support for the introduction of written constitutions and legal codification. Hegel’s account of the nature of constitutions is interpreted as supporting a specific kind of constitutionalism while discrediting another. Through a constitutionalist approach to world history, Hegel sought to resolve the inherent tension between universal demands of reason and local particularity, inscribing the progress of world history with freedom and the representative system. By showing that he could draw on prevailing views in doing so, Hegel’s influential attempt to reconcile organic growth with the demands of reason, history with freedom, and community with the individual is lifted out of isolation. His identification of the representative system with subjective freedom, introduced in this chapter, forms a recurring theme throughout the book.

Chapter 4 analyses Hegel’s reasons for choosing the bicameral system at a time when it was anything but widespread and in fact hotly contested. It reconstructs the arguments advanced then, both in favour of a two-chamber system and in opposition to it, and argues that Hegel’s acceptance of bicameralism must be understood as taking a deliberate stance in the constitutional debate of post-Napoleonic Germany. Essentially, he advances two arguments for the institution of two chambers. First, the division of the Estates Assembly into two chambers will lead to improved decision-making and second, there will be less direct opposition between the Estates and the government. The contextualisation of these two arguments reveals that Hegel distils only the main arguments of one side in a heated controversy while excluding counter-arguments and ideas of alternative mechanisms in circulation at the time. In the process, this chapter especially explores arguments about the role and composition of the first chamber, which corresponds to what is nowadays conventionally called the second chamber and often dubbed a ‘house of review’. Important questions about the social implications of the bicameral system are also raised in this context.

In July 1914, Vladimir Lenin and his comrade Gregory Zinoviev found themselves as political émigrés “in a god-forsaken little mountain village in Galicia.” Under gathering clouds of war, Zinoviev recalls making a bet with Lenin that the German Social Democratic Party would never support financing a war. Lenin gladly took up this wager in full confidence that European socialist parties, as declared by the Second International, would call for a general strike of the proletariat in the event of war. As Zinoviev recalls, Lenin observed that “no, they [German Socialist Party or SPD ] are not such scoundrels as all that. They will not, of course, fight the war, but they will, to ease their conscience, vote against the credits lest the working class revolts against them.”

Chapter 1 shows that the discussions which dominated intellectual and public life in the years immediately preceding the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right revolved around the constitutional question as the central and definitive element of political discourse in Germany. It argues that Hegel consciously entered this constitutional debate and that his book constituted a timely intervention in the politics of the immediate post-Napoleonic period. By demonstrating the pan-German and European dimensions of contemporary constitutional concerns, Hegel’s political thought is at the same time lifted out of the exclusively Prussian context to which it has so often been confined.

Chapter 5, in parallel to the preceding one, focuses on the other, elected chamber of the Estates Assembly (or Parliament) and discusses Hegel’s characteristic notion of a representation of interests, along with the broader societal conditions for successful representation. The chapter first reconstructs and contextualises the electoral mechanism as envisioned by Hegel and elucidates the political significance of corporation membership, which connects Hegel’s civil society and state. In this context, special attention is paid to the exclusion of women, while Hegel’s purported negligence of farmers is refuted. The chapter then sets out the conditions Hegel considered necessary for the successful representation of societal interests, which include freedom of the press and trials by jury, notwithstanding his ambivalent attitude towards public opinion. The final section shows that these very preconditions were under siege at the time Hegel was writing, following the politically motivated murder of Kotzebue and the institution of the so-called Karlsbad decrees. The direct bearing of these circumstances on the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right rounds off this contextual study.

Chapter 1 focuses on the concept of ’the lyric’, considering various definitions of the term from literary criticism (the lyric mode in poetry), philosophy (via Hegel and Adorno), and musicology. It argues that the lyric mode’s professed ’unitary nature’ is offset by a distinctly sectional and disjunctive musical setting (via Marx’s Liedsatz), and illustrates this critical tension through an analysis of Schubert’s ’Ihr Bild’. Second, it examines Felix Salzer’s account of lyricism in Schubert’s sonatas, isolating the questions raised by this regarding the potentiality of lyrical themes and their will to repetition in contrast to the sonata’s imperative to develop. Third, it presents Schubert’s lyric parataxis (Mak, Adorno) as a viable alternative to the ’dramatic-dialectic’ model of sonata form exemplified in Beethoven’s music and explores the implications of this for the temporal unfolding of the music and the sense of directionality it articulates. In Part II, the chapter lays out three central propositions for a definition of lyric form and explains the book’s analytical methodology, placing it into the context of recent developments in the field of the new Formenlehre.