Accounts of African letters have been riven by debates about who owns modernism and revelations about covert CIA sponsorship of African cultural institutions. Rather than relitigating the question of whether modernism in Africa is always (covertly) Euro-modernist, this chapter treats modernism as inherently dialectical. It considers African literary modernism in relation to the modernist aesthetics of Uche Okeke, who illustrated Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, to the Cold War-era criticism of Es’kia Mphahlele and performed poetry of Atukwei Okai, and to the chimeric category of modernity as figured in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu. At the end of the day, untethering modernism from the chimera of modernity may well enable more persuasive analyses of each. The chapter concludes with Yvonne Vera’s fiction to sketch how modernism emerges as a historical discourse and stylistic repertoire that some African writers continue to make part of practices of freedom.

As in the first volume, my attention here will be devoted mainly, though hardly entirely, to ethical philosophers’ attempts to come to grips with deontic morality understood in the terms of Anscombe’s critique. Sometimes, these will be defenses and theoretical accounts, as with, for example, the nineteenth-century utilitarians – whether empiricist, like Bentham and Mill, or “philosophical intuitionist,” like Henry Sidgwick – or the moral theories of British idealists like T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley. But unlike mainstream seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moral philosophy – for instance, the modern natural lawyers, Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, and Cumberland, the British rationalists, and Kant – the ethical philosophy of the nineteenth century is more often concerned to criticize deontic morality or to put it in its place. Examples here are Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and, of course, Nietzsche.

What Fichte found most inspiring in Kant’s critical philosophy was its Copernican focus on the transcendental conditions of conscious thought, its doctrine of the autonomy of reason, and, most especially, its fundamental commitment to freedom of the will. Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophies of right are especially close in form and content. Both works treat the philosophy of right as a separate subject that is independent of ethical philosophy, and both ground their theories in a fundamental right of freedom from interference. We see, right at the outset, the importance of freedom in modern moral philosophy in Anscombe’s sense. We begin, however, with Fichte’s ethics. Fichte’s ethics of autonomy or, as he usually prefers to say, “self-sufficiency” or “independence,” departs from Kant’s in several important ways. The most important structurally is that whereas autonomy is at the heart of grounding what Kant takes to be the fundamentally formal character of the moral law. Fichte holds, against “all of the authors who have treated ethics merely formally,” that self-sufficiency or independence is a “material” kind of freedom. Fichte’s ethics sets autonomous self-determination as a fundamental moral end, and is ultimately consequentialist.

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.

Chapter 2 discusses Hegel’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy and reality, as well as the much-debated issue of whether the Philosophy of Right should be read as a normative enterprise. Focusing on the methodological argument outlined in the work’s preface and introduction, the chapter argues that Hegel is committed to a critical reconstruction of received reality, aimed at revealing the norms and institutions that best embody and promote human freedom. Moreover, it is claimed that this critical effort comprises a conceptual and a temporal dimension, corresponding to two different argumentative moments: the progression leading from the stage of ‘abstract right’ to that of the state, which deals with the immanent development of the concept of freedom, and the book’s final section, ‘world history’, which charts the historical actualization of the concept of freedom. While most interpreters tend to focus on the former dimension, the chapter shows that the latter is just as important to understand Hegel’s overall position.

A theoretical intervention into the challenge of thinking through the complexities of life, in Iran or elsewhere. Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault offer us a model of thinking as a practice. Each attempted one project in which they were thinking systematically about ongoing events, and offering that thinking as a contribution to public understanding. Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to observe the Adolf Eichmann trial, and her contemporaneous writing was published in The New Yorker magazine. Foucault traveled to Iran to observe the early stages of the revolution, and his contemporaneous writing was published (mostly) in the Corriere della Sera newspaper. These two projects have commonly been regarded as their author’s most controversial and have often been ignored or used to denigrate the writer’s entire theoretical oeuvre. Yet they offer compelling models of thinking as a practice that critically links the self and the world. Rescuing theory from the confines of academic specialization restores it, and us, to the possibility of thinking as a practice of freedom, and freedom as the daily possibility of beginning anew.

Chapter 1 retraces the history of the critical reception of Hegel’s social and political thought, from the publication of the Philosophy of Right to the present. The chapter discusses the charges of conservatism raised by Hegel’s first critics, the liberal rehabilitation of his work in the second half of the twentieth century and the communitarian interpretation introduced in British and American debates from the 1980s. Finally, the chapter focuses on the ‘middle ground’ approach favoured today by most Hegelian scholars, based on a compromise between the liberal and the communitarian positions. This kind of interpretation is undoubtedly a step forward from the one-sided approach of many previous readings. However, by favouring the practical dimension of Hegel’s arguments over their logical or metaphysical foundations (an attitude referred to as methodological pragmatism) and by regarding the social dimension of freedom as an adjective rather than a substantive component of his position (an attitude referred to as structural individualism), this interpretative trend ends up reiterating the liberal framework Hegel seeks to transcend.

Tracing the development of an inclusive political subjectivity through decades of political upheaval leading up to and since the revolution, Iranian society has been regularly wracked by intense political upheavals that challenge state authority and the status quo of established powers and institutions. Most of these protest movements have seemed to fail and have often been followed by a period of apparent quietism. Yet by consistently expanding the participatory claims of an active citizenry, these movements have furthered the democratic potentials of Iranian society. Reconsidering the achievements of the 1999 university protests, the women’s movement (in both its secular and Islamist forms), the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2022–2023 Women, Life, Freedom movement, this chapter argues that Iranians have been actively creating themselves and recognizing each other as fully developed citizens. Drawing on the accounts of women of different generations involved in separate movements and protests, this chapter considers evolving changes in consciousness and practices as women struggle for full acceptance and equal participation as Iranian citizens.

The Introduction reflects on Hegel’s unique approach to social and political philosophy, the distance that separates him from other modern thinkers and the contemporary reception of his ideas. Although the charges of conservatism and intolerance raised by Hegel’s early critics have since been discredited, the current tendency to regard him as a social-minded liberal fails to capture the true depth of his political thought. And this failure follows, it is argued, from the tendency to read the Philosophy of Right in a linear or horizontal manner, as a progression in which each dialectical stage is merely completed or expanded by subsequent ones. Introducing the book’s main thesis, the chapter claims that only a vertical reading, which recognizes the progression’s transformative nature, can do justice to Hegel’s overall argument. Moreover, anticipating the critical reconstruction of the Philosophy of Right undertaken in the book’s second part, it is claimed that such a reading leads beyond Hegel’s own political and economic views, towards a more progressive vision of modern society.

The Conclusion offers a brief recapitulation of the book’s main argument, highlighting its critical and reconstructive components. First, the criticism of the liberal reading that has come to dominate Hegelian scholarship is reiterated. The rational state envisioned in the Philosophy of Right, grounded in a dialectical synthesis of the particular and the universal dimensions of human freedom, is irreducible to the liberal state found today in most democratic nations. Second, the chapter insists on the need to move beyond Hegel’s own political and economic choices in order to bring out the true implications of his views. As argued throughout the book, only a fully democratic state, in which political and economic power are shared among all the citizens, can be deemed rational, in Hegelian terms. Finally, it is suggested that this alternative reading is not only more faithful to Hegel’s philosophical vision, but also more relevant for contemporary critical theory.

Chapter 6 focuses on the political structure of a rational state. In the Philosophy of Right, by handing the bulk of the state’s political power to unelected agents, Hegel is in effect compromising the reconciliation of particular and collective interests he regards as essential to a rational political order. However, his wariness of democracy is more than a mere relapse into some pre-modern, reactionary standpoint. This chapter argues that Hegel is right to denounce the atomism favoured by mass electoral systems, which tend to reduce the citizens’ political identity to that of individual voters, but that he is wrong to dismiss mass democracy altogether. His critique is overly severe because his conception of democracy presupposes the liberal logic of civil society, which he attempts to sublate in a strictly political manner. As this chapter seeks to show, the atomism he argues against is best avoided not by limiting democracy, but by extending it to the economic sphere. In a democracy that is both political and economic, individuals are no longer mere atoms, but part of collective social units organized around commonly held goals.

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.

In his chapter, Gregory Castle explores the cultural need for heroism expressed by W. B. Yeats and Alice Milligan at a time (the first decade of the twentieth century) when hope for the future was an explicit component of revivalist discourse across the arts and the political spectrum. Yeats’s In the Seven Woods (1903) offers a vision of legendary and contemporary heroism in which love and desire are transformed in a process in which the experience of beauty and its loss, as well as the representation of this experience, become heroic endeavors. In Milligan’s Hero Lays (1908), heroism does not rely on a transposition of love into the context of heroism. Rather, her vision is informed by political activism; her poems mine the ancient legends for a model of heroic action that would be suitable for the nationalist cause of her own time. For both poets, the heroic ethos of the legendary past is sustained as part of the contemporary poet’s bardic responsibility.