This chapter traces early migration from Europe during the Gold Rush and the change from multiculturalism to monoculturalism with the advent of the White Australia policy. However, it focuses primarily on first-generation migrant writers from Europe following World War II. The chapter argues that migration should be viewed through the lens of heterogeneity, shaped by geographic, cultural, linguistic and class disparities. The chapter discusses how first-generation migrants existed as ethnic minorities who often experienced hostility and were directed towards manual employment. It examines the emergence of ethnically specific periodicals, following by literary journals, literary and cultural associations, poetry collections, and anthologies. The chapter identifies a predominant theme of nostalgia, with related elements of loss and hope. Another identified theme is social justice, including empathy for the impact of displacement felt by Aboriginal peoples and a support of Aboriginal sovereignty.

Pasquale draws from the world of literature and film to explore the role of emotions in being human and the ways that affective computing both seeks to duplicate and constrain caring as a fundamental human quality. Focusing on digital culture, he discusses various films (e.g. Ich bin dein Mensch), novels (e.g. Rachel Cusks), and TV series (e.g. Westworld) in order to unpack the alienation and loneliness which robots and AI promise to cure. He argues that cultural products ostensibly decrying the lack of humanity in an age of alexithymia work to create and sustain a particular culture, one that makes it difficult to recognize or describe human emotions by creating affective relationships between humans and technology. He concludes with critical reflections on the politico-economic context of those professed emotional attachments to AI and robotics.

Keywords and images are deployed to communicate the gospel message that, in the person of Jesus, the divine Father has made himself known in a world otherwise lost in error and illusion. Its readers are taught to regard themselves as the elect, called out of darkness into light.

A number of philosophical themes run throughout Marx’s corpus. Foremost is his focus on free social and political relations – on emancipated people governing themselves together rather than being mastered by others. There is no doubt, however, that Marx was a sharp critic of law, justice, and right (Recht) – which Kant had argued can only be realized in a state – and that Marx’s communist social ideal is nonjuridical. A second theme is that although Marx rejects the modern deontic conception of morality, he is very much aware that his own ideal of freedom is a modern conception, which is based, like modern morality, in a view of the unique value of human persons – the “self-worth of men” as “free.” A third is Marx’s communitarian emphasis on “a community of people [organized] for their highest ends”: a “democratic” society of free people, whether organized as a state or not. It is important that Marx does not ground his democratic conception as orthodox liberal moderns do in a deontic conception of fundamental equal human authority. Ultimately, Marx’s ideas must be understood as a liberal egalitarianism of the good rather than of the right.

The other philosopher writing in Kant’s wake who figures prominently in the origins of “continental” philosophy is Hegel. Although many of the seeds of Hegel’s thought were planted by Fichte, Hegel’s works ultimately had far greater direct impact. Hegel was not, however, an ethical or moral philosopher like Fichte. T. H. Irwin plausibly claims, indeed, that Hegel actually denies that moral philosophy is “a distinct discipline.” But Hegel had a massive influence on the history of ethics even so, including on “modern moral philosophy.” Partly this was as a critic, not just of moral philosophy, but also of the modern conception of morality itself. Hegel argues that what he and other moderns call “morality” (Moralität) is a formal abstraction that is incapable of “truth” or “reality.” Moral philosophers who focus on oughts and obligation mistake, in his view, an abstract moment of practical thought for something realizable; they fasten on a desiccated abstraction rather than the “living good” that is embodied in actual modern (liberal) customs and institutions, what Hegel calls “ethical life.” Hegel’s critique of morality begins a tradition that runs through Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and through Anscombe and Bernard Williams in the twentieth.

This chapter examines Aimé Césaire’s engagement with Marxism from his neglected 1930s writings through his later talks and speeches from the 1950s and 1960s, where he articulates his notion of a “tropical Marxism.” It argues that Césaire takes up and transforms the Marxist concept of alienation to theorize the paralyzing impact of colonialism through assimilation and underdevelopment. This analysis of alienation undergirds the idea of a tropical Marxism, which emphasized the necessity for colonized peoples to integrate Marxism creatively to the particular conditions of their societies. By tracing the theoretical underpinnings of this idea of tropical Marxism through Césaire’s intellectual and political journey first as a student in Paris and then as a representative of Martinique in the French National Assembly, we glean the myriad of ways in which Marxism spoke to the problem of colonialism and therefore constitutes a seminal part of the canon of anticolonial social theory.

Chapter 4 explores the normative challenge of the experience of dehumanisation. It starts from a paradigmatic case of dehumanisation, as it was described from a first-person perspective: the torture of Jean Améry. This description offers a phenomenology of dehumanisation. In order to deepen the analysis, the experience of dehumanisation is subsequently confronted with recent work on alienation. This opens up the critical potential of the experience of dehumanisation challenging important concepts that figure prominently in debates on (the aftermath of) atrocities.

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.

Chapter 6 sets out in detail Paul Tillich’s formulation of the doctrine of salvation. Particular focus is placed upon Tillich’s existentialist framing of fallenness and his understanding of personal salvation as a transformation from Old Being to New Being.

Smiths analysis of the relationship between division of labour and the wealth of nations interpreted as per capita income is illustrated, through their connection with productivity. The division of labour also explains the existence and characteristics of social stratification and alienation. The classical tripartition in social classes – capitalists, landlords and workers – is discussed, considering both its explanatory value and its limits. Division of labour evolves through time: Babbages laws, Taylorism, the production chain, mechanization. The international division of labour and international value chains are considered. Marxs communist utopia with the disappearance of compulsory labour is recalled and confronted with less unrealistic utopias concerning the command structure within the firm or Ernesto Rossis labour army.

This chapter grows out of the strain of queer theory that revolves around questions of time. Many thinkers make sense of queer subjects by exploring their complex relationships to the past, present, and future as well as what time signifies in this context. Taking seriously the critical linkage between queerness and temporality, I consider how queer bodies make us aware of time – whether through temporal refusal, embrace, or displacement. I argue that contemporary novelists Mia McKenzie and Robert Jones, Jr., use queer characters to reorient narrative understandings of time and present new possible relationships to time. McKenzie’s The Summer We Got Free (2013) and Jones’s The Prophets (2021) both attend to the past to write Black queer life, and, in doing so, these authors provide meditations on time and the writing of history. Beginning with a consideration of the larger historical context of Black queer writing from the end of the twentieth century, the chapter highlights the narrative questioning of the temporal placement and meaning of the Black queer body and draws a connection between the narrative construction and conceptions of temporality that disrupt prevalent ways of thinking about time. In these texts, time emerges as a queer formation.

This final chapter concludes the book with a discussion of the theory’s significance for broader scholarly and policy implications that result from the central argument. Uneven access to public goods throughout a state’s territory can be reflective of historical exposure to institutions that alienated people from central state authority. Importantly, the argument and evidence presented in this book suggest that extractive institutions can affect modern access to public goods through both institutions and attitudes that get transmitted over generations. It also raises the point that while military colonialism is yet another example of the deleterious consequences of extractive institutions for development, it shows that what matters are the specific instruments of colonial extraction, including violence, the removal of private property, as well as underinvestment in public infrastructure and underprovision of public goods.

This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.

The thought of the meaning of work in the capitalist labour process has been a central pillar in many discussions of work, employment and organisational life in the social sciences. Meaningful work, however, is, if anything, an undercurrent in the modern classics of working life research, where the spotlight is on the struggle that is at the heart of workers’ attempts to derive meaning from paid work. In this chapter we discuss understandings of meaningful work that emerge between the nexus of the meaningfulness and the meaninglessness of wage labour in some of the most noted of this literature in the post–World War II period. From this discourse we crystallise six tendencies in discussions of the possibility to solve the problem of the lack of meaning of waged work. We derive from this discussion implications for approaching an understanding of the politics of meaningful and meaningless waged work.