Chapter 5 discusses the economic structure of a rational state. Anticipating Marx’s critique of capitalism, Hegel associates the maximization of self-interest promoted by the modern market to an inconsistent and ultimately irrational conception of freedom. He argues that the elevation of freedom to a rational form requires not merely a readjustment of the economic sphere, but a change of paradigm, and this change is entrusted to a system of professional corporations in which competition is replaced by cooperation and trust. Yet although these groups can help mitigate capitalism’s worst excesses, they are not up to the conceptual role Hegel wants them to play. This does not mean, however, that his associative strategy cannot be successfully revived. The chapter’s final section shows that a rational economic sphere implies not only the common ownership of society’s productive resources, but also the democratization of the productive sphere. Drawing on the market socialist tradition, it is suggested that the corporations can be fruitfully reconstructed as worker-directed enterprises, capable of recapturing their communal spirit while avoiding their main limitations.

This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.

The dominant assumptions positing a linear relationship among individualism, capitalism, competition, and inequality are often rooted in the perspectives of social scientists, whose focus is frequently confined to the West in modern times. I argue that these dominant assumptions have been formulated without sufficient opportunities or willingness to consider societies with cultures and systems different from those of the West. In this regard, this book challenges these dominant assumptions by presenting compelling counter-evidence that (1) competition occurs in every society throughout history whenever humans seek to survive and thrive; and (2) competition does not necessarily lead to inequality, but often serves as a tool to mitigate it, as competitions prevent absolute hegemony and allow individuals to challenge incumbent powers or privileged groups across cultures, systems, and eras. This closing chapter encourages readers to reassess their existing beliefs about the sources and consequences of competition and to strive for a deep understanding of competition arenas that they may choose to enter or inadvertently launch.

The ideology of Marxism–Leninism seemingly contradicts competition, yet competition was prevalent in former communist countries to foster productivity and economic growth. The Stakhanovite movement, originating in the Soviet Union, incentivized laborers to excel as an economic propaganda tool, while also honoring them as socialist heroes but also penalizing dissent as a political propaganda tool. Competition extended to managers of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) vying for government resources. Consumer competition arose from pervasive shortages, driving black market economies. Underground enterprises, which were protected from competition, resisted economic reform from a planned economic system to a more market-oriented system to maintain their privileged status. Post-World War II, some SOEs adopted market-based approaches, competing domestically and globally. This chapter argues that such forms of competition emerge when humans struggle for survival amid perceived inequalities in the existing system, prompting them to seek opportunities and thrive.

Just as we would be remiss to skip past a discussion of the role of entrepreneurs in innovation, we would be remiss to skip over the role of the state. In this chapter, we move through three starkly different visions of what role government ought to play in bringing about innovation in the economy. The first paper discussed, by Acemoglu & Robinson, suggests that the state actually plays a key role in creating the institutions that make innovation worthwhile. The second reading, a set of chapters from a book by Mazzucato, argues that this institution-oriented view is too limited, provides evidence of how ‘entrepreneurial states’ can also work to develop innovations, and suggests that this implies a state that is much more active in investing in and directing innovation. The third reading turns up this argument further, arguing that the urgency of the global climate crisis and the vast economic reorganization that it demands means that the state should not just be more active in investing and directing: the crisis, it argues, can only be solved by a complete socialization of the economy, by the state actively managing innovation and production.

The friendship between Shaw and O’Casey was so personally significant that O’Casey’s widow published an entire book on the subject. This chapter charts the course of that friendship, and examines the influence that Shaw exerted upon O’Casey and vice versa. The chapter begins by examining the way O’Casey knew of Shaw’s work before their first meeting, and traces the contours of their personal relationship after O’Casey moved to London in 1926. The chapter analyses the way that, once the Abbey had rejected The Silver Tassie in 1928, O’Casey turned to Bernard Shaw for friendship and advice, and gives a close reading of the reciprocal influence that can be found in the two men’s playwriting and political viewpoints.

This chapter discusses Sean O’Casey’s drama performed in Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. The main focus is on plays addressing political turmoil and revolutionary upheaval. Some German-speaking audiences for these plays were confronted with similar crises at the time that the plays were produced in the German language. As a hotspot of the East–West conflict, O’Casey’s plays performed in Berlin are of particular interest, and this chapter concludes with an appendix that lists key Germanophone premieres.

This opening chapter situates O’Casey in the Dublin of his time, describing the existence of O’Casey’s Protestant family in Dublin’s Northside. The chapter contrasts that lower-middle-class existence with the disease and insecurity of the slum areas of Dublin. We encounter the political and cultural sensibilities of the Irish capital’s Catholic working-class population, a population that profoundly affected O’Casey’s life and work. The chapter shows O’Casey to be a writer who moved between and across social and cultural groupings in Dublin, with this part of the volume highlighting the Irish capital’s differing religious and political affiliations in the early twentieth century.

This chapter analyses the place of class in O’Casey’s thinking and focuses in particular on a relatively unknown O’Casey script from 1919, The Harvest Festival, which revolves around a charismatic worker-hero who dies when a strike becomes violent. The chapter also examines the rewritten version of that play, Red Roses for Me (1943), in order to explore how O’Casey’s aestheticizing of class confrontation was developed and refined. The chapter shows how O’Casey wanted class analysis to replace ideologies like religion and nationalism, which he believed to be misdirections of humanity’s important longings.

This chapter explores favela upgrading in the communities of Pavão-Pavãozinho and Cantagalo in the wake of a terrible mudslide in 1983, under the administration of socialist governor Leonel Brizola. The chapter explores the huge ambitions of Brizola’s administration and the linked upgrading projects in Pavão-Pavãozinho in particular, analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of those projects, and places this in the context of larger economic, political and demographic transitions in the city.

The September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government signaled the end of a radical political experiment, a “democratic road to socialism.” In its 1,000 days in power, Allende’s coalition state instituted a series of substantial political and economic changes, including the socialization of industries, agrarian reform, and the redistribution of wealth and authority. Unidad Popular faced fierce challenges from an increasingly mobilized opposition, who mounted campaigns in congress and in public space that fomented a climate of crisis in which the military might intervene. It also faced pressures from its own supporters, who occupied factories, lands, and city spaces in an effort to convince the state to radicalize the pace of change. Ruthless military intervention sought to “turn back” the political gains of the twentieth century that had reached their apex under Allende, and the military regime headed by Augusto Pinochet turned again and again to state-sponsored terror to entrench a “foundational project” that couple political authoritarianism with a neoliberal economy.

The radical, working-class political movements of the nineteenth century found Percy Shelley’s work quite useful. His poetry was quoted, reprinted, and set to song by Chartists in the 1840s and 1850s and by socialists near the century’s close. These activists selected a particular version of Shelley. They memorised, shared, and reprinted the poems – like Queen Mab, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, and ‘Song: To the Men of England’ – that were, on the one hand, most available and affordable, and, on the other hand, most conducive to collective political action. Chartist editors, political orators, and socialist songwriters all strategically excerpted these poems, avoiding Shelley’s profound reservations about revolutionary action and transforming his work to serve their own political purposes. Across the nineteenth century, working-class activists collaboratively constructed a Shelley of their own.

The modern world has as its central characteristic the claim of man’s emancipation from submission to ecclesiastical authority. Born with the Enlightenment, this claim extended from the cultural level to many areas of social life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This process has found significant expressions in movements such as liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, which have marked the history of that period. It is commonly believed that only the Second Vatican Council has produced a turning point: the recognition of the “iusta autonomia” of earthly realities has led the Church from confrontation to dialogue with modernity. The historical judgment must be more nuanced. From the Enlightenment onwards, the papacy has sought to safeguard the submission of men to ecclesiastical authority, but it has also endeavored to adapt Catholicism to the needs of modern men for autonomy in order to be able to better communicate its message of salvation to them.

Among Americans in the nineteenth century, literary interest in the image, idea, and practice of “community” extended beyond any conventional historical understanding of national togetherness. The abiding conception of community that obtained in the United States between the American Revolution and World War I was also informed by an emergent theory and practice of communitarianism. This was especially the case for those contemporaries who regarded the changes to an increasingly modern society and economy from a collectivist, and typically socialist, perspective. Across a range of early national, antebellum, and postbellum phases of the communitarian experiment in the United States, American writers gave expression to communitarianism’s unique reformist program through a variety of genres and political positions. Among the former were works of fiction, nonfiction, and polemic. Among the latter (in both book and short-form formats) were writings by several generations of authors and journalists that reveal a complex array of interpretive positions and ideologies, ranging from advocacy at one end of the political spectrum to skepticism at the other. The differences in their politics notwithstanding, many of the era’s communitarian-minded writers shared a desire to shape the course of events in American life with their work.

On 23 July 1980, Vietnamese pilot Phạm Tuân became the first Asian and the first citizen of a developing nation to fly in space when he participated in the Soyuz 37 mission to the Salyut space station. This elaborately staged, hugely expensive piece of cosmic theatre underlined Eastern bloc mastery of the technologies of space flight at the same time it emphasized international cooperation, social and racial inclusiveness, and engagement with the developing world. As much as Phạm Tuân’s flight formed part of the Eastern bloc’s global diplomatic strategies, it was also central to a vision of the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam as part of a revolutionary vanguard, defeating the forces of capitalism and imperialism and progressing towards a modern, industrialized, and prosperous future under the leadership of the Communist party. This chapter explores how representations of Phạm Tuân ’s historic space flight drew from conventional Soviet representations of cosmonauts and space flight, but also reflected particular Vietnamese cultures and contexts. The result sheds light on the important, but often overlooked cultural dimension of state power in late socialist Vietnam, and highlights not just the limits but also the potential to create a coherent, shared vision of the nation.

How did new forms of mass politics and culture that included and gave voice to all men and women finally develop in Britain between 1885 and 1931?

This chapter analyzes Schopenhauer’s political beliefs in the context of his biography. Schopenhauer was a well-traveled son of a merchant who failed to gain a foothold in academia and never pursued another career in the professions, business, or government. Without traditional prospects, he settled into a rentier existence. He retained much of his background’s bourgeois attitudes toward property, individual industry, and frugality, but since he was confined to a life outside professional circles, he came to occupy an outsider position and opposed both conservatives and progressives, orthodox Christians and secular radicals. Committed to the idea of a natural intellectual elite, he was skeptical of collective political movements, such as the nationalism and socialism of his own time. Yet he was also critical of the traditional aristocracy with its relative independence from the modern state. His preferred political regime was a nondemocratic, monarchical statism that would protect individuals and their property.