This chapter begins with the First World War, when camels were used in unprecedented numbers by fighting armies. The First World War was the first step in the gradual transformation of the economic and political geography of the Middle East. It had deep influence on caravan trade and, following the caravans during the war and in the midst of borders negotiations, one can see how transnational and national form in parallel through overland mobility. With the following one, this chapter benefits from a dense and heterogeneous source base, which allows for the inclusion of lively narratives in order to give a full extent to Middle Eastern experiences of these transformations.

This chapter details Schopenhauer’s critique of a key modern ideology that grew increasingly strong during his own lifetime: nationalism. First, it notes how Schopenhauer argued that ethnic sameness cannot ground any moral obligations of individuals. Second, it turns to Schopenhauer’s critical dissolution of teleological national history, according to which nations are collective agents with a singular fate. For him, nations were not unified subjects with one shared destiny. Third, it reviews his caustic comments on the increased importance of the vernacular in scholarly communication and the attempt to establish an exclusively German literary canon. To Schopenhauer, nationhood was not even a useful category of cultural appreciation. Through this reconstruction, Schopenhauer emerges as a fierce antinationalist who questioned the importance of the nation as a supposedly cohesive community of mutual care, a unified historical subject, or even a meaningful cultural phenomenon.

The conclusion reviews Schopenhauer’s conception of politics as the management of human strife. For Schopenhauer, politics was both indispensable and insufficient: rational political coordination can prevent society from descending into a chaos of mutual aggression, but because rationality itself is limited and metaphysically subordinate, it cannot redeem a fundamentally broken world. Schopenhauer’s attitudes – a sincere sensitivity to human and animal suffering, an uncompromising commitment to frank philosophizing, but also a fearful antidemocratic and anti-emancipatory view of society – place him outside the major ideologies of the modern age, such as liberalism, libertarianism, progressivism, and conservatism.

The ‘linguistic turn’ in twentieth-century philosophy is reflected through Neurath’s writings of his British period. He responded to serious criticism that Bertrand Russell made in his book An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, developing the physicalism of the Vienna Circle into a cautious approach to ‘terminology’. Neurath revealed details of his index verborum prohibitorum, a list of ‘dangerous’ words to be avoided due to their misleading and metaphysical connotations. However, Neurath was resistant to the formalist tendencies evident in the work of Vienna Circle associates, in particular Carnap’s development of semantics. Their disagreement on the matter is examined through their prolific correspondence of the 1940s. While Neurath is often portrayed as losing this battle, we discuss how his own approach to the philosophy of language (including his ‘terminology’ project) prefigured the later development of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ to a certain extent.

The Conclusion argues that, taken together, the AKP’s combined authoritarian securitisation state is predicated on five authoritarian securitisation logics:1) repressive protection of the state; 2) cruel retributive punishment; 3) centralised and mass lateral control; 4) self-regulation through informalised rule of law; and 5) biosecuritisation as a doubled form of civic death. I then examine present-day global empirics concerning the global system of securitisation to argue that the differences between democratic and authoritarian governance are increasingly more of degree than kind. Asking the question of what next, I look briefly at signs of democratic optimism visible in Turkish citizen’s capacity for resilience and innovative resistance.

This chapter examines how women within the boundaries of the family and marriage became central to interwar Japan’s international relations. Scholars have argued that Japan’s politics, economy, and society shifted from liberalism and internationalism in the 1910s–1920s to conservatism and isolationism in the 1930s. While women’s history has been studied along the same lines, this chapter explores the continued reinterpretations of emerging ideals about gender, emphasizing the continuity and discontinuity of Japan’s modernity spanning those two decades. At the heart of those ideals were informal marital relationships – socialist and companionate marriages – introduced from Soviet Russia and the United States, and global concerns in the League of Nations about human trafficking involving prostitution and daughter adoption. Japanese intellectuals, social leaders, and diplomats continued to engage with reformist ideals to address women’s inequalities in marriage and the family. However, their appeals to progress redefined Japanese women in the preexisting family system and considered them to be promiscuous, reinforcing gendered burdens and sexual differences within Japan’s national contexts.

This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s complex discussion of human sociability. Schopenhauer thought that agents in the domains of politics and morality cannot conceive of human togetherness. For him, the areas of politics and morality correspond to the exercise of egoism and the spontaneous feeling of compassion, respectively. But he added that egoism is rooted in a form of practical solipsism, and compassion is rooted in a metaphysical insight into the inessential nature of individuals. It follows that neither egoistic nor compassionate individuals ultimately care about others as others. Yet Schopenhauer supplemented these treatments of others as reducible with his discussion of sociability. His analysis of social interaction exemplified by conversations, games, and other diversions includes accounts of interpersonal harmony and friction among individuals who remain distinct from one another. Even though Schopenhauer rejected sociable interaction as superficial and embraced misanthropy, his reflections on sociability contain a conception of human community.