This chapter discusses the most famous hypothesis about the development of property law: that Western social evolution was determined by a passage “from slavery to feudalism,” from the ownership of humans in the slave economies of Antiquity to the ownership of land in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. That hypothesis was embraced by Marx, Weber, Bloch, and many others, but has been rejected today, because it rested on claims about economic history that have been proven dubious. The chapter argues that there was truth in the classical hypothesis, but that it should be reinterpreted as an account of transformation in the legal imagination. The chapter investigates the origins of the classic theories, and makes the case that the classic thinkers erred by mistaking the imaginative orientations in the legal sources for the economic realities.

Beginning in 1840, the acceptance of emancipation among liberals became more general, no doubt, but still remained deeply ambivalent. The chapter uses the example of Baden to show this fact and moves from there to the early stages of the 1848 Revolution, during which pogroms against Jews, first in the French provinces along the border with Germany and then within Germany itself, gradually spread across the country. Once again, the fate of the Jews represented the duality of the overall German situation. Meanwhile, efforts to formulate a new constitution at the Paulskirche did indeed grant full emancipation to the Jews, but soon suffered the fate of the rest of the liberal constitution, with the collapse of the revolution. The Prussian king refused to cooperate with the revolutionaries, but even more important for their final collapse was their own weakness vis-à-vis the forces of reaction and the inner split among them due to their inability to reconcile liberalism, democracy, and nationalism.

Beauty does not rest in the forms we encounter it, or match with the idea we have of it. The young Karl Marx writes that ‘the eye’s object is different from the ear’s’, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that ‘when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it’. Beauty happens in this difficult gulf between hand and eye, between eye and ear. This essay approaches the problem of beauty through the dialogue between Zadie Smith and E. M. Forster, as conducted in Smith’s 2006 novel On Beauty. In staging her novel as a reprise of Forster’s Howards End, Smith enacts the taking place of the artwork in the duplications it urges on us, as beauty ‘brings copies of itself into being’ (Elaine Scarry). Beauty eludes expression; but in the ground that lies between On Beauty and Howards End, this essay looks for a kind of critical language and a kind of political institution in which the idea of beauty might find expression.

The radical ethics of critical theory, from Marx to Habermas, proposes principles through which ethical deliberations might be pursued. The radical nature of Habermas’s ethics involves a recognition of “the other” as worthy and valid in their own right. Such radical openness to others has the potential of transforming us toward what is better. When an individual’s conception of the good life necessitates an awareness and orientation toward what is good for “others,” ethics converges with the moral point of view through what is just: the good life as synonymous with just living. The chapter begins with a compelling story of a Ugandan peaceworker through which the authors draw out critical ethical principles. Then, the authors apply the radical ethics of Habermas’s critical theory to the contemporary US policy discourse around trans athletes’ participation in school sports. That discourse is analyzed according the principles introduced through the story at the beginning of the chapter.

John Ruskin and Karl Marx – two heterodox economic thinkers writing in England in the 1860s – both considered production, circulation, and exchange in relation to the natural environment. After first discussing the imbrication of the economic and the ecological in their work, this chapter turns to George Eliot’s Felix Holt [GK19](1866) and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm [GK20](1861–62) to explore points of intersection between heterodox economic thought and literary realism. Focusing on soil fertility, an issue that evokes the uses of water, soil, and manure in service of capitalism, the chapter shows that Eliot and Trollope trace the ways in which ownership, labor, or trade transforms humans’ relations to animals, plants, and landscapes. Heterodox economic thought and literary realism in the 1860s took into account historical dimensions of the natural world, especially its economic involvement.

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marxism emerged as a major rival to both economic liberalism and neomercantilism in debates about the international dimensions of political economy around the world. With their focus on ending class inequality and exploitation by challenging capitalism, Marxists put prioritized distinctive goals from those prioritized by economic liberals and neomercantilists in the pre-1945 years. This chapter examines Karl Marx’s ideas about the world economy as well as those of a number of his influential European (including Russian) followers. The latter include thinkers commonly discussed in IPE textbooks, such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, but also other thinkers who usually receive less attention, such as Carl Ballod, Rudolph Hilferding, Henry Hyndman, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and Georg Vollmar. The chapter highlights important disagreements among these various Marxist thinkers on issues such as free trade, imperialism, multilateral cooperation, strategies for challenging capitalism, the prospects for socialism in one country, and the relationship between capitalism and war.

Why connect state violence with representation? The book proposes a rethinking of democratic theory based on the Arab Uprisings of 2011, also known as the Arab spring. The introduction provides definitions of the key concepts of representation, democracy, participation and civil society, and describes the sources and methods. The book argues that cultural representation and political representation come together through the theme of violence. Historically the means of coercion have been turned against Arab citizens; in 2011 these citizens proposed that democratic accountability be added to the management of legitimate violence and state coercion.

The aims of this chapter are, first, to track the development of the notion of the material constitution in selected authors associated with Western Marxism and, second, to explain its intermittent presence in the Marxist canon.The chapter focuses on four turning points in the social and intellectual history of the material constitution: its Marxist origins in the second half of the nineteenth century (Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, who coined the term); the crucial years of the Soviet revolution and the First World War(Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg); the interwar period (Antonio Gramsci); and the tail end of the twentieth century (Étienne Balibar and Antonio Negri). At each turning point, a certain slack between the concrete constitutional order and the codified or written constitution has pushed scholars to revisit the material constitution. Although the chapter registers the decline of interest in the material constitution after the Second World War, it also underscores that the series of crises over the last two decades have again pushed the notion to the centre stage of constitutional enquiry. The chapter thus highlights the insight offered by these authors for understanding the material constitution in the twenty-first century.

Understanding economics is critical to understanding the history of humanity, from hunter-gatherers to today. Economics is the study of decision-making and how humans make decisions. Without understanding economics we cannot understand the trajectory of history over the last 10,000 years. This chapter reviews basic economic principles, and how economies have evolved through time. It discusses the economic principles of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the differences between a market economy and a command economy, and the political and historical implications of the clash between those two models.

This chapter argues that the essay begins the eighteenth century as a bourgeois form and ends it as a radical one. Over the course of the century the form and style of periodical essayists such asRichard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Shaftesbury are taken up by writers with revolutionary politics, such as Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Paul Marat, and Karl Marx.

Chapter 2 examines the extent to which theories of social pathology are committed to thinking of human societies on the model of animal organisms. It rejects the thought that societies exhibit a complete teleological harmony, where all parts work together perfectly to maintain the organism's stability and cohesiveness. Societies are totalities in the more modest sense that their parts – institutions or practices – cannot be adequately grasped or evaluated in isolation. Like organisms, societies are functional beings in that how they are constituted and how their parts interact cannot be understood without ascribing ends to both parts and the whole they make up. Societies are, moreover, functionally organized in that they carry out their characteristic functions – including both material and spiritual reproduction – via specialized and coordinated functional subsystems (or social spheres). Finally, even though social functions extend beyond material reproduction, the latter remains an essential part of healthy social functioning.

Chapter 1 begins to define the concept of social pathology and to assess its usefulness for social philosophy. It distinguishes five conceptions of social illness different from the one employed in this book, which places dysfunction, rather than suffering, at the core of social illness. It argues, further, that while social pathologies must be bad in some way for social members, those individuals are not typically ill themselves. Although there are good reasons for approaching the concept of social pathology with caution – societies differ in important ways from biological organisms, for example – judicious use of the concept can bring to light critique-worthy social phenomena to which theories focused exclusively on justice are blind. The method espoused for diagnosing social illnesses is a form of ethically informed immanent critique that bears some similarities to medical diagnosis but refrains from ascribing moral blame to the individual participants in unhealthy social practices.

This book examines the concept of social pathology as it figures in the thought of Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Comte, Marx, and Durkheim, demonstrating what it means to describe societies as "ill" and what the fact that we are so often drawn to conceiving of social problems as illnesses says about social ontology, or the kind of thing human society is. It explores the connections between social pathology and such phenomena as alienation, anomie, ideology, and social dysfunction and argues for the continuing relevance of the idea of "social sickness" for social critique. The aptness of the concept of social pathology in comprehending social ills points to important respects in which human societies are to be grasped as functionally-constituted, "living" beings and therefore as analogous to biological organisms, even if there are equally important respects in which the analogy does not hold, deriving primarily from the self-conscious and potentially free character of social activity. Human societies are understood as "spiritual" entities, the functions of which extend beyond material reproduction to include freedom, recognition, and self-transparency.

Chapter 3 examines some problems Marx takes to be inherent in capitalism that can be regarded as social pathologies, clarifying how dysfunction must be understood if his most sophisticated critiques are to be grasped. It focuses on forms of social pathology bound up with Marx's account of the formula for the circulation of capital, which distinguishes capital from mere money in terms of the function of each. Marx's biological language makes it plausible to interpret the dysfunctions of capitalism as pathologies: for example, its cancer-like growth that ignores the needs of producers. Yet these dysfunctions cannot be grasped without taking into account the spiritual aspects of human social being. Marx regards social life as spiritual – as informed by the aspiration to unite the ends of life with those of freedom in one's social activity – and capitalism's failure to allow for this unity as its principal defect.

Chapter 4 examines the importance of labor in Marx's diagnoses of social pathologies. Marx conceives of labor as social, productive activity that has the potential to make material reproduction a spiritual phenomenon subject to normative standards beyond those internal to biological life. Meeting those standards requires a re-appropriation of our activity that turns alienated social powers into free activity, where re-appropriation takes place along three dimensions: knowing (or understanding) it as it really is; collectively controlling or organizing it; and affirming it without illusion as appropriate to human beings' spiritual nature. In other words, unalienated social powers must be transparent, self-determined, and productive of the good of those whose powers they are. Moreover, making social powers productive of the good, and hence genuinely affirmable, requires re-organizing, and not merely re-interpreting, our activity so as to make it social in a sense that in capitalism it is not.