Schiller develops a Leibnizian sense of perfection as the unity of unity and multiplicity, and draws out its political implications. He defends a republican order of spontaneous beauty, emergent in freedom, against imposed perfection. In addressing the problems of the incipient modern division of labour and the prospects for political community, he defends variety against uniformity, while distinguishing historically progressive from regressive types of diversity. Schiller insists on processes of aesthetic self-formation and determinability, which make possible a mutual adjustment of interests as an achievable practical outcome, rather than as a metaphysical presupposition. Interests in modern civil society are diverse and troublingly fragmentary, but potentially reconcilable.

Leibniz defends teleology or purposive activity against the overly mechanical worldview of Thomas Hobbes, and develops an idea of spontaneity as self-originating action irreducible to mere mechanistic reaction. He links free activity with justice as the enabling conditions for the exercise of freedom, and with the progressive deployment of individual and collective powers. He thus sets the agenda for subsequent idealism, which reconfigures the idea of spontaneity and reflects on the harmonisation of diverse individual efforts as a problem of ongoing juridical reform

Kant’s critique of perfectionism in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals launches lively debate on the limits of coercion and the requisites for free action, foundational for post-Kantian perfectionism. The Critique of Practical Reason reformulates the Leibnizian concept of spontaneity as a ‘true apology for Leibniz’, salvaging what is most vital in his thought. Spontaneous freedom does not externalise a unique content, as in Leibniz, but now conceived as negative liberty, signifies the will’s ability to abstract from external causes or to admit them selectively according to rational criteria. Spontaneity is the condition for an order of right, as the sphere of compatible external actions among juridical subjects. Here Kant effects a second modification of Leibniz, in the idea of mutual causality or reciprocity. The Metaphysics of Morals of 1797 elaborates the distinction between pure and empirical practical reason, freedom and happiness, and delineates the sphere of rightful interaction. Neither happiness nor virtue are subject to constraint, but in the sphere of right coercion or mutual limitation is the condition that assures and generalises freedom.

Summary of the argument, implications, directions for further research.

Humility is neither a virtue of caring nor an enkratic virtue, but consists in an absence or dearth of concern for the pseudo-good of self-importance, the kind of personal “importance” that people seek in being envious, vain, domineering, conceited, and arrogant. Self-importance is not the same as the true importance of persons, the kind that is affirmed in people’s loving and respecting others. The vices of pride are important because they spoil or exclude the virtues of caring. Their absence purifies and liberates the personality to love the good, and that is the moral value of humility. Proper pride is a sense of one’s importance as a person where ‘importance’ refers to the real dignity and excellence of oneself as expressed in one’s concern for the good. The absence of the vices of pride that are expressed in self-display – for example, vanity and pretentiousness – is sometimes called modesty, but the more general term for this virtue is ‘humility.’

In his Doctrine of Right, Kant claims that freedom is the only innate right. The Feyerabend Lectures, in contrast, contains a list of many innate rights. I compare Kant’s conception of innate right with Achenwall’s as well as those of Heineccius, Meier, and Hutcheson. Although in Feyerabend Kant lists various innate rights (plural), they roughly correspond to the “authorizations” that Kant develops in the Doctrine of Right from the single innate right of freedom, and even in Feyerabend they are linked to freedom. Not only did Kant have a different basis for right in freedom, his explanation of what the others call innate rights in terms of freedom better explains their importance.

The textbook Immanuel Kant assigned for his course on Naturrecht was Gottfried Achenwall’s Natural Law. In the Feyerabend transcript of his course (1784), Kant not only explains Achenwall’s text but also criticizes him and expounds his own alternative theory. Since it is not always obvious from the lecture notes whether Kant is explaining Achenwall, criticizing him, or presenting his own theory, one must know the basics about Achenwall’s positions when reading Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. In this essay, we introduce Achenwall and his handbook to readers of Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. We start with some background information and then discuss Achenwall’s position on freedom and obligation, natural law and right, and his theory of property and the state. We end by pointing out a few of the main points of disagreement between Kant and Achenwall that emerge from the Feyerabend lectures.

In Book III of the Plato’s Laws, we are told that under the ancient constitution of Athenian, citizens ‘lived in willing servitude’ to the city’s laws and to its officers (archontes). How are we to understand the servitude (douleia) invoked in this slogan, and what are we to make of the qualification of the servitude as willing (hekontes, ethelontes)? Against those who suggest that Plato here construes willing servitude as a kind of freedom, I argue that the slogan is intended to emphasize the ways in which the ancient Athenians were unfree. Plato uses it to promote, as a political ideal, acceptance of the limitations on freedom that are the inevitable concomitant of political rule.

The human being is freely ‘self-determined’ rather than determined through some external authority (whether theological or teleological). This dichotomy conveniently expresses the usual understanding of modern political thought’s divergence from preceding tradition. By comparison, pre-modernity is teleological, anthropomorphic, realist; in a word, naïve – with its substantively rational nature, dictating essential ends to which we are subject. These received truths are past due for a re-examination. Just how naïve or dogmatic was the Greek understanding of freedom and nature? In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s view of man as naturally political is more complex and multivalent than our historical categorizations allow. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which, for him, politics does indeed depend upon a natural model. That model, however, is the Idea of the Good. And here, where Plato seems furthest from us, lies his greatest challenge to contemporary understandings of nature and freedom.

This chapter excavates a conception of autonomy from Olympiodorus’ (495–570) commentary on Plato’s Gorgias. For Olympiodorus, the subject of the dialogue is the ethical principles that lead to constitutional happiness, i.e., the well-being of one who exhibits a proper interior ‘constitution’, psychic arrangement or order. Such a person knows himself insofar as he identifies himself with the rational soul and rules himself accordingly. The principal interlocutors in the dialogue falter and stumble primarily because they do not know themselves, and this self-ignorance renders them heteronomic. The present essay therefore detects in Olympiodorus’ commentary an insistence on self-knowledge as the archaeological ground upon which an autonomous human life is based. By reading the pages of the Gorgias, Olympiodorus aspires to draw forth for his students a notion of freedom that is truly human. This chapter attends to Olympiodorus’ commentary with the hope of accomplishing a similar outcome.

One of the Supreme Court’s most significant First Amendment rulings may be in peril. For the past 60 years, the landmark 1964 decision of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and the cases that followed have secured strong First Amendment protections for the press and others who speak on public affairs. Under these cases, public officials and public figures must show that the speaker acted with “actual malice” or “reckless disregard” of the truth in order to win a libel suit. This chapter draws heavily on my book Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023). Scholars and advocates have long celebrated Sullivan as one of the most important Supreme Court rulings for the protection of press freedom. Yet, this history also lays bare the high stakes of losing the First Amendment protections recognized in Sullivan. Prior to the Court’s ruling in Sullivan, government officials and other public figures routinely weaponized libel laws to suppress their critics, particularly members of the press. This chapter uses history to explain how and why Sullivan nearly eliminated those overwhelming threats to the press. If New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and related cases are overruled, libel suits could again become weapons of blatant political suppression.

This chapter moves beyond a captivity scholarship based almost entirely on the experiences of White or White-descent captives and their Indian captors to study an account of nineteenth-century borderland captivity in the US Southwest, where – contrary to what the plethora of Anglo captivity scholarship indicates – most captives were of Mexican and/or Indigenous descent. To do so, I read Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and the Goodness of God (1682) alongside María Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would’ve Thought It? (1872). This Mexican-American historical romance novel and, I would add, fictionalization of an Indian captivity narrative, retells the history of Mexican dispossession at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War through fictional Mohave captive and emerging Mexican American elite, Lola Medina. Within a broader rethinking of the captivity narrative genre, I argue that captivity narratives helped produced proto-Latinx subjects as racially discrete individuals, even while the factual condition of nineteenth-century captivity forced individuals of Latin-American descent into ambiguous relation with other racialized communities.

What are the core capacities that make for a flourishing life? It is an incredibly difficult question to answer. Every philosopher, public commentator, and backyard critic seems to have a different view on the matter. Occasionally the terms of what makes for a good life are developed explicitly, but mostly the grounding of such claims is either left implicit or undeveloped, as if we all agree and spelling out the terms of a good life is unnecessary. In the Global North, the most common appeals assume some variation on the capacities for freedom, connectivity, democracy, and inclusion, with the ideology of freedom usually prevailing. The dominant approach to human development, called the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and expressed in the Human Development Index, appeals to these liberal notions. This chapter sets out an alternative framework for understanding human capacities. It builds a matrix of capacities around the domains of vitality, relationality, productivity, and sustainability. These are seen as basic to a flourishing human condition.