How can we regulate private power in a globalized, digitized world where state-centered sovereignty, territorial boundaries, and traditional legal frameworks fall short? This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book, its arguments, methodology, and contributions, addressing the urgent need for accountability mechanisms to tame the increasingly unilateral global governance by a handful of corporations. Focusing on content moderation, it examines two key case studies: the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Meta’s Oversight Board. Both exemplify “emulation,” where public law mechanisms, particularly constitutional and administrative, are adapted to private governance.

Analyzing these “Emulated Guardians”–institutions borrowing the legitimacy of courts while operating in private or hybrid contexts–this book highlights their reliance on performativity and public perception to assert authority. Through interdisciplinary analysis, empirical findings, and expert interviews, the book reveals the ambivalent outcomes of emulation: promising tools for accountability yet sometimes lacking practical efficacy. Ultimately, this work frames these mechanisms as harbingers of new accountability norms, arguing that governance in the digital age demands not only novel institutions but also robust public engagement. It situates these developments within broader debates about power, legitimacy, and the evolving role of public law ideals in globalized, networked environments.

Chapter 7 discusses anger in relation to gender. A character’s ability to display or suppress anger is tied to expectations of external judgment. In the Iliad, male characters frequently express anger; mortal women do not. Homer’s text highlights the gap between a female character’s words and her inner thoughts, creating an ambiguity that puzzles male audiences and characters attempting to read their minds. The chapter surveys theories of anger (from Aristotle to cognitive science) and analyses Homeric emotional expressions, including the emotional ‘script’ of anger. It focuses on ancient readings of Achilles’ anger. Aristotle’s influential definition of anger, presupposing Achilles as a model, shaped scholarly understanding but excluded anger from the emotions women could feel. Later, Seneca and Plutarch opposed this, linking anger to a lack of self-control, associating it particularly with women and barbarians. Ancient theories consistently stressed the connection between anger, rationality, and revenge.

In this chapter, I demonstrate that Hegel removes three Kantian obstacles that stand in the way of an elaboration of autonomy as a form of life. Hegel rearticulates the form of autonomy in such a way that we can recognize living beings as a basic case of autonomy. Secondly, Hegel shows that internal purposiveness is not a derivative concept, making positive knowledge of natural purposiveness intelligible. Thirdly, Hegel provides a positive account of the lived reality of freedom. Taken together, these shifts open up the possibility of understanding practical autonomy not just as analogous to living self-organization but as an actual form of living self-organization. The second half of the chapter shows how this account is underwritten by Hegel’s new understanding of the distinction between the realm of nature and of freedom. By reference to Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, the chapter shows how he modifies Kant’s distinction in crucial ways. Firstly, he gives a new substantive account of the realm of nature, revealing how it includes a form of natural freedom. Secondly, Hegel clarifies that the realms of freedom and nature are not externally juxtaposed and argues that the differentiation of these two realms is internal to spirit. Thirdly, Hegel considers the ways in which spirit reproduces the forms of a realm of nature within itself in the shape of a second nature.

All societies mobilize resources for different purposes. The product of human labor, these goods and services become especially important in the formation and support of multi-scalar organizations that include communities, regional polities, and beyond. The labor and its resources must be mobilized to finance these organizations as they are developed and maintained across time.

This Introduction provides an overview of the main themes of the book and questions the democratic potential we often attach to “community” and to “the common.” Community might be what we desire from political life, and it is tempting to hope that a return to community can correct much of the current disillusionment with liberal constitutional democracy and the state of civil society. Instead, I argue that, as models for the normative organization of political life as a whole, neither community nor the common are compatible with the normative demands of democracy. The communitarian desire of much political thought often stands in sharp contrast to the pluralism of democracy.

This chapter examines Plato’s critique of sophistry and rhetoric as pseudo-technai. It argues that Plato targets these rival intellectual traditions by exposing their lack of specialization and rationality – two essential features of genuine technai. Through analyses of the Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias Minor, and Euthydemus, the chapter shows how figures like Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Euthydemus, and Dionysodorus fail to meet the standards of professional expertise. They either claim mastery over too many fields or rely on superficial persuasion rather than causal reasoning. Plato’s rhetorical strategy is to portray these figures as quacks – imposters who mimic the appearance of wisdom without its substance. By contrast, philosophy is positioned as the true technē of virtue, requiring lifelong training and intellectual rigor.

This chapter introduces the fundamental idea of The Life of Freedom in Kant and Hegel: the notion that we can only make sense of autonomy by returning to the concept of life. This return is needed to understand fully the genesis, the form, and the reality of human freedom. Such an account can be developed by means of a systematic reconstruction of Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies of freedom. As we can learn from Kant’s account, the notion of autonomy is threatened by the paradox of self-legislation and an opposition of freedom and nature that makes the reality of freedom unintelligible. As Kant already indicates and Hegel goes on to develop, we can overcome these problems by reconceiving of autonomy as a form of life. The chapter outlines the reading of Kant and Hegel supporting this view, situates the resulting systematic position in current debates on the sources of normativity and the nature of human freedom, and defines its relation to other approaches norm and nature (ethical naturalism, forms of life, and biopolitics).

We start by considering the complementary relationship between the goals of self-sufficiency and specialization in human economies. Self-sufficiency seems to have often been a goal to retain control and independence for a social unit, but as we describe, specialization was frequent because of the complexity and risks of tasks and the availability of lower-cost options through exchange. Among households, self-sufficiency in production for internal consumption was a reasonable objective of many traditional economies. Households often sought to retain economic independence for most subsistence foods and some everyday technology. Marshall Sahlins (1972) captured this traditional objective as the domestic mode of production (DMP), and it is foundational for Kenneth Hirth’s (2020) analysis of traditional economies. The independent household was idealized in early Western philosophy. In the Archaic period of Greece, the autarkic peasant household was desirable, and many ancient farmers produced most of their own food. In Politics written in the fourth century BCE, Aristotle maintained that, although the individual could not be self-sufficient, households could and should achieve it for daily needs. The village community could then be self-sufficient in more than basic needs.

The section on ‘Homeric Editions and Scholia’ introduces readers to these textual corpora. The section lists and discusses the editions of Homer (especially Allen’s and West’s) and of the Homeric scholia (especially Erbse’s and van Thiel’s) that will be used in the book. The medieval scholia report, in an edited form, many ancient interpretations of Homer. Ancient readers were the first to attempt to ‘read the mind’ of the Homeric characters and, at times, of the Homeric narrator. Ancient commentaries will often be cited in the book; they not only provide the first detailed interpretations of the text but also influenced subsequent interpreters, directly or indirectly. This material is essential for understanding the interpretive history of Homer and the critical tradition surrounding his work.

This chapter studies the works of Jules Verne, primarily his forgotten work The Purchase of the North Pole (1889). Providing ideational background, it compares Charles Fourier’s fantasy of the anthropogenic correction of the Earth’s axis in Theory of the Four Movements (1808) with Eugène Huzar’s secularisation of the apocalypse as the result of technoscientific intervention in The End of the World Through Science (1855). Delving into The Purchase of the North Pole, the chapter analyses how Verne exposes the Promethean ambitions of the Baltimore Gun Club by acutely describing the imminent natural disasters following their attempt to correct the axis and climate of the Earth. It concludes that Verne represented climate intervention as a potentially catastrophic practice, rendering the planetary consequences of anthropogenic climate change intelligible through an apocalyptic rhetoric.