The chapter traces the emergence of the ‘Promethean’ conception of knowledge and history in the long nineteenth century in France. First, it describes the environment in which Vichian ideas were resurrected. It explains why a reinvented Vico’s philosophy might have become indispensable in a bustling new epoch of inventions, political transformations, and industry. Then it focuses on Marx’s reading of Vico and Marx’s earlier formulation of ‘praxis epistemology’. Finally, it explores the philosophical synthesis of the French engineer Georges Sorel, who connected Vico, Marx, and the American pragmatists to formulate a new ‘praxis epistemology’ where human and natural sciences could find a convenient and consistent integration.

This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s critical engagement with thinkers from his own era. It notes that Schopenhauer often focused his scrutiny of Kant and Hegel on their political arguments. In the former case, Schopenhauer claimed that Kant’s moral theory was in fact a concealed political theory. In the latter case, he claimed that Hegel’s philosophy of the state conflated politics, religion, and morality for the purpose of serving the Prussian state. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s reputation as an apolitical thinker is misleading since his elaborate criticisms of Kant and Hegel are partly generated by his conception of politics. It also argues that Schopenhauer’s demystifying critique of statehood in German Idealism places him in a position similar to the radical Young Hegelians, including the early Marx. Yet while the young Marx attacked the bourgeois vision of state rule over a market society composed of atomized, competitive individuals, Schopenhauer affirmed it.

This chapter places Marx’s well-known critique of individual rights in On the Jewish Question (1843) in the context of a more widespread indifference to rights languages in the early socialist movements of Britain, France, and Prussia. For all their differences, early socialists agreed that genuine human flourishing would require transcending what Marx was to call the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right.” The chapter charts the swinging pendulum of rights discourse in the early nineteenth century. While the century began in both Britain and France in reaction against revolutionary rights language, the years from 1815 through the early 1830s saw a revival of rights claims among British radicals, culminating in the Chartists’ embrace of natural rights, and in France, where radical republicans demanded manhood suffrage in the name of the Rights of Man. Proudhon’s What Is Property?, written in reaction to the 1830 Revolution, signaled and also helped to shape a decisive turn against rights among incipient socialist movements: in its explicit critique of individual property rights as failing to recognize the socialized character of production, but also in its more general lack of interest in rights discourse. French socialists, in the splintering Saint-Simonian movement, embraced democracy rather than rights as the language of emancipation, while in Germany the socialists emerging out of the fragmenting Young Hegelian movement likewise saw rights, especially property rights, as impediments to true, human, emancipation. Yet because rights were not central to their adversaries’ program, socialists including Marx largely ignored them. Finally, after 1860, rights claims saw something of a resurgence among socialists, with social democratic textbooks asserting rights demands as appropriate in the early stages of socialism.

For Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, the significance of rights lay in the value of freedom. The distinctive feature of persons, their capacity to determine their own ends, grounded the obligation of other human beings to respect the conditions of free agency and thus to acknowledge one another as bearers of rights. All understood rights as universal and intersubjective: it follows that rights can only be fully realized in an appropriately constituted social state. For Kant, this meant that rights in the state of nature are merely provisional, and that to make rights claims is to commit oneself to the pursuit of a civil state, indeed to a civil state in federation with other such states, subject to principles of international law and cosmopolitan right. For Fichte, the intersubjective nature of rights was even more central to their meaning, for the guarantee of rights enables our self-understanding as free beings, with the capacity to cultivate our individuality and pursue a distinctive identity. Rights thus understood not only respect our personhood but actually constitute us as persons. Kant’s emphasis on external freedom, freedom from outside interference, led him to focus almost exclusively on property rights, while Fichte recognized far more expansive socioeconomic rights as security the material conditions of free agency. Finally, Hegel’s account, though deeply influenced by Kant and Fichte’s grounding of rights in the value of freedom, maintained that individual rights are insufficient for the realization of complete freedom, which must be realized in common. In so doing he partly anticipated Marx’s critique of the limitations of rights as fundamentally bourgeois property rights and thus as incapable of undergirding truly human emancipation.

This chapter will not question the terms of comparison and analogy in abstract methodological models; instead, it will place actors and debates in their appropriate historical context in order to understand why they were interested in comparison and why, in a given context, they practised it in one particular way and not in another. Moreover, each context will be resolutely trans-regional and comparison will be identified as a cross-cultural practice. I will therefore take some distance from current arguments relating comparison only to European colonial expansion. Infra-European tensions and competition were no less important in justifying comparisons than encounters with non-European worlds.

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.

This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

A particularity about the literature on the meaning of work is that the concept of meaning is discussed extensively and deeply, while the concept of work is hardly debated at all. Tackling this shortcoming, we start out by taking up contradictions in the social science debate on definitions of the concept of work. Four such contradictions stand out: (1) Subjective vs. objective definitions; (2) a single vs. several work concepts; (3) certain activities in themselves vs. any activity within specific social relations are to be regarded as work; and (4) empirical vs. ontological basis of the concept. In investigating them, we take help from what are often said to be the three most important classics of social science: How have Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx handled the concept of work? Specifically, can we get inspiration from them to take stands concerning the contradictions? The answers to these questions lead us to suggest this definition: Work is any activity performed in internal social relations that structure the sphere of necessity. Finally, we discuss the three suggested explicit conceptualisations of ‘work’ that we have found in the meaningful work literature.

The first section of this chapter explores Nietzsche’s attempt to explain the origins and continued prominence of metaphysical philosophy in terms of the utility it produces. It argues that Nietzsche takes seriously Schopenhauer’s diagnosis of ‘humanity’s metaphysical need’, but explains this more precisely as a form of narcissistic impulse. The second section of the chapter aims to address Nietzsche’s seeming ambivalence over whether ‘humanity’s metaphysical need’ is a fundamental and static feature of the human condition, or whether it is acquired and, therefore, in principle eradicable via a new naturalistic and ‘historical’ philosophy. The final section of the chapter situates Nietzsche’s views on science, suffering, and progress in the context of the ‘social question’, arguing that the Nietzsche of the late 1870s is closer to the likes of Marx and Dühring in taking suffering to be capable of being significantly reduced, thus ejecting the need for art and religion to endow it with meaning.

This chapter expands on the material underpinning of popular sovereignty and self-and-other-determination by theorizing racialized alienation from nature and manual labor as allowing for environmental destruction, a process mediated by technology. Diagnostically, Du Bois’s essays on development and economic value first connect the intensification of racism to western technological needs, turning upside down techno-racist claims that equated whiteness and technological superiority. Instead, he argues that racism and colonialism are necessary to procure raw materials on the cheap to secure industrial profits. Racist ideologies operate within this context to confine nonwhite bodies to strenuous manual labor close to nature. Relatedly, Du Bois contests the inferior value assigned to manual labor that follows, showing both the centrality of raw materials and manual labor to high-tech societies and clarifying its political origins. On the critical side, Du Bois first contests the desirability of speedy “development” and forced integration into the global economy, which curtails racialized peoples’ orientation toward their wellbeing. Second, Du Bois claims the technological mindset and orientation toward profit are poor standards of progress because they obscure the cooperative character of production and prevent the political imagination from envisioning new worlds.

In his work of 1844, Marx claims that human beings realize their nature through the joint activity of labor in a true communist society. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls calls the joint maintenance of a just society “the preeminent form of human flourishing. He says that “persons best express their nature” by maintaining just institutions. For both writers, what makes these joint activities central to the human good is the relationships they maintain among individuals who do not know of one another’s existence, relationships among distant unknowns. A necessary condition for these relationships to obtain is, in each case, a particular social ethos. If a standard left-wing critique of the market is cogent, and if the well-ordered society of Theory involves a widespread market, then the several elements in the desired social ethos of justice as fairness might be in tension with one another, might not be capable of being satisfied simultaneously. Rawls’s desired relationships might not obtain.

“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.

Marx adopts a triadic model of the concept of property and emphasizes how this concept assumes different historical forms, including private property. I seek to explain why Marx must be thought to commit himself to the complete abolition of private property by beginning with how he speaks of property, equality and freedom as forming a constellation of concepts within capitalist society. This approach enables me to show how, for Marx, private property functions within a social world structured by contractual relations established between allegedly free and equal rights-bearing persons, whose self-conception and relations to one another are determined by an abstract exchange value that finds legal and political expression in a purely formal notion of equality. I argue that there are two key elements in Marx’s critique of private property. The first concerns how individuals are unable to relate to themselves and to others as genuine individuals in an economic and social system governed by exchange value. The second concerns how a system of exchange governed by this form of value dominates individuals and is thus incompatible with ‘free’ individuality.