Here I move from historical analysis to philosophical explication of the concept of liberty, and I introduce the main conceptual components of the idea of freedom I defend.

This chapter argues that freedom requires certain modes of social recognition of the status and activities of free persons. I explain this claim and contrast it with similar views of thinkers such as Axel Honneth.

Chapter 5 argues that in Burney’s Evelina and The Wanderer hats become a kinesthetic means for women’s metamorphosis and for asserting rights laws do not ensure when characters employ them to hide their faces and thereby establish some security from aggressive male intrusion and threatening social expectations, a use which reveals consumption’s positive aspects by linking fashion and necessity. This chapter explores how, in both novels, hats positively facilitate nonrecognition by shrouding or changing the face, allowing women to assert the right to privacy: the liberty they experience allows for self-recognition. Smith’s Desmond, in contrast, offers instances in which characters fail to recognize and to belong with the human and nonhuman, while their very lapse inspires other characters’ (and readers’) recognition of how vital that communion is, especially regarding ecological preservation. One of this chapter’s largest concerns addresses the relationship between characters’ ability to pay attention to things and their potential capacity to secure justice for themselves.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Avishai Margalit’s misrecognition-based theory of political humiliation. For Margalit, humiliation is primarily understood as the culpable denial of self-respect. Margalit notes that political humiliation usually takes one of three forms – removing people from the human community (as when we liken them to animals), the negation of control (as in torture), and ignoring or looking through others. After providing an account of this theory, we argue that Margalit does not sufficiently consider the contagious nature of political humiliation nor the possibility that the feeling might be present even when recognition is offered or, conversely, that we might be humiliated even by those whose recognition we don’t want. We also look at the conceptual differences between humiliation, shame, and embarrassment. We note that despite these clear differences the way these emotions are experienced sometimes feels similar. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the effect of technology and, in particular, social media on the character of contemporary political humiliations.

Coriolanus manufactures his unbending martial spirit through both a life-and-death struggle for recognition (Hegel) against Aufidius and a life-defining opposition with the masses. Both oppositions seek to annul the other. By alienating our sympathies, first from Coriolanus and then the people, the play calls for our dialectical political thought. It asks us to see a mutuality, and hence a vision of justice (Plato), that those onstage cannot. We see them in failure and deadlock. His family’s love invades Coriolanus as a foreign force and shatters his self-sufficient oneness. He “melt[s]” before his wife’s silent “dove’s eyes”. In such moments, the subject (indeed the sovereign) becomes an other to itself. It observes itself from a point of estrangement and sees a previously obscured truth. Coriolanus breaks from his warrior-god role (and the master-slave deadlock) and is opened to something intersubjective: he is “not / Of stronger earth than others”. In Hegel’s terms, the masterful subject endures an experience of bondage, whereby “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations”. The chapter argues that Shakespeare turns his alienated audience into the “bondsmen” (or “slaves”) who must “work” on the play and think through its estranging oppositions.

The chapter examines how the radical Right’s counter-hegemonic struggle relates to other struggles for power in contemporary world politics and attacks on the so-called liberal international order (LIO). Drawing on recent literature on struggles for recognition, we show how the radical Right has built powerful transversal, global alliances based on a logic and discourse of difference and diversity rather than claims to Western superiority. We illustrate this through an analysis of an emerging global alliance in defence of the ‘natural family’. The radical Right’s civilisationalism and calls for multipolarity also enable complex, strategic convergences with illiberal states such as China and Russia, as well as states and people in the Global South. The multi-polar, civilisational world order envisioned by the radical Right is not anti-hierarchical and inclusive, but legitimises new differences and new forms of exclusion through its claims to cultural diversity. It is a more sovereigntist vision of the world in which exclusionary illiberal forces would be able to operate with fewer international constraints.

Research in conversational hand gesturing shows an array of philosophical senses of intersubjectivity. Gesturing is interpersonally rational, as demonstrated in studies linking gesturing to common ground achievements and effects and to markings of communicative intent. Gesturing is an ecological and interactional activity through which copresent interlocutors codetermine their own social and environmental relatings, building as well as attending to a shared world. Gesturing is an intercorporeal experience central to what it means to live as linguistic bodies. Taken together, research indicates that hand gesturing even as a variegated phenomenon offers insight into how language works. The full story of intersubjectivity and attendant features of recognition, interpretation, normativity, conventionality, and reference begins and ends with actual bodies interacting. As these matters concern the core of pragmatic philosophy, gesture research has radical relevance for all language theorists. An enactive approach to intersubjectivity and language offers a framework for making this case.

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.

This Introduction has three objectives. The first is to situate this volume within the current phase of South Africa’s difficult engagement with land reform in particular and transformative constitutionalism in general. For this purpose, we characterise the recent debate on ‘Expropriation Without Compensation’ (EWC) and the political developments leading to the tabling, and failure, of the Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Bill. In section two, we begin with an account of the research project and conference that led to this volume and then review the book’s three-part structure and its individual chapters in relation to each other. While there are important points of convergence with regard to the contested assemblage of law, land reform and redistributive justice, there are also divergent views for probing further. In the third section, we respond to this challenge by addressing three interlinked issues that emerge from a transversal reading of the chapters, which we regard as central for the future of redistributive justice in South Africa. These are, first, the respective roles of the state, popular politics and the private sector in driving this project; second, the relative importance to be attached to productive and redistributive measures as building blocks of change; and third, the scale of the structural changes that are needed.

Women have been perceived as a ‘problem’ for visions of social justice since the emergence of the ‘social question’ in the nineteenth century, prompting feminist debates about whether social justice for women is best pursued on the basis of their equality with, or difference from, men. This chapter reconstructs those debates with a focus on Central Europe, the heartland of the late nineteenth-century European socialist and sexual-reform movements and, throughout the twentieth century, the site of conflicts between fascist, state-socialist, and liberal-democratic regimes of social justice. But these conflicts also have a strongly contemporary character, given the deeply gendered experiences of transition to a capitalist economy in the former socialist states of Central Europe since 1989. The absence of an agreed definition of how social justice for women might be achieved (and in which political contexts) was reinforced throughout the twentieth century by the weight of embedded inequalities of gender, which have remained a defining element of Europe’s modern experience. Bringing women into the story of social justice in twentieth-century Europe highlights the perceived deficit of social justice that the editors of this volume identify as the hallmark of contemporary understandings of social justice in Europe today.

This chapter examines how precarity affects the experiences of low skilled dirty workers – a group characterised by stigma and devaluation. Utilising Axel Honneth’s ideas of mutual recognition and the normative significance of work for identity, we explore how precarious working conditions affect self-understanding at the intersection of class and gender. Drawing on ethnographic data from street cleaners and refuse workers across four London boroughs, our findings demonstrate lack of secure employment has resulted in experiences of self-doubt and diminished sense of self-worth. Additionally, our findings highlight how secure employment and the ability to provide for one’s family is imperative to these workers, due to the heavy reliance on working class masculinity norms for affirming identity. Thus, we argue the centrality of work for a positive sense of self remains classed and gendered. We also show how the increasingly precarious nature of work is perpetuating feelings of vulnerability and therefore undermining opportunities for class solidarity through collective action in the face of moral injury for working class men.

Infectious diseases that can spread rapidly have always been able to cause outbreaks. Rapid international travel has allowed what were once localised public health issues to extend beyond national borders and develop into global pandemics. The challenges posed by a novel disease may be enormous, and include initial recognition in a previously unexposed population, development of a clinical case definition allowing accurate descriptive epidemiology of its progression in the community, laboratory diagnosis of a novel pathogen, establishment of evidence-based management protocols for patient care, identification of routes of transmission allowing targeted public health interventions, and development of therapeutic interventions to reduce transmission or prevent severe effects. The consequences of large-scale outbreaks extend beyond their direct impact on human health. They may have economic effects as a direct result of illness or of control measures, and impacts on social wellbeing, including damage to national and local infrastructure, civil disruption, or even conflict.

Humboldt personally inspired American linguists of the early nineteenth century such as Peter S. Duponceau and John Pickering (both by correspondence) plus A. Albert Gallatin (probably in person by Alexander’s introduction and perhaps by correspondence) as the first generation of American Humboldtians. Whereas Duponceau had already been impressed by Humboldt’s sociolinguistic field study of Basque, he and Pickering responded to Humboldt’s inquiries for information on North American languages; but Duponceau and Pickering also drew on the Prussian as a descriptive-analytical linguist with a broad hemispheric, even global comparative foundation, a solid interest in linguistic-cultural alterity and diverse language use, language change, and linguistic typology. Thus, they came to share a broad range of linguistic topics. In contrast, Gallatin likely found primary inspiration in Humboldt's early model of linguistic cartography for his own early maps of American languages and for his cultural ecology with language at the center.

It is clear that, under customary international law, the state that has suffered an armed attack must request aid before other states can provide it with that aid in the exercise of collective self-defence. There are a range of factors that need to be considered that do (or, at least, may) have a bearing on the ‘validity’ of that request. This chapter analyses perhaps the most controversial of them: the question of who can issue a collective self-defence request. In so doing, it examines the view that only states can request aid in collective self-defence and, indeed, further asks whether the issuer of the request must be a UN member. The bulk of the chapter then examines how one identifies the de jure government of the state for the specific purpose of issuing a collective self-defence request. A traditional reference point for the recognition of governments in international law generally has been the effective control of territory. However, this is of minimal – if any – importance to the identification of the entity that can request aid in collective self-defence. Instead, other factors, such as democratic and constitutional legitimacy, are of greater importance.