This chapter examines the vocational odyssey of the most famous humanist of the Italian Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti, as he struggled to pursue a literary and creative life against the background (and sometimes obstacles) of his merchant natal family. It analyzes how he dealt with his vocational decision and aspirations in a variety of genres: a comedy (Philodoxus), dinner pieces (Intercenales), a treatise on the practical and moral features of learned professions (De commodis litterarum atque incommodis); consolatory and psychological dialogues (Teogenio, Della tranquillità dell’animo); his celebrated dialogue on the family (Della famiglia), in which he simulates paternal advice from his father and various surrogate fathers from within the family; and a treatise on vocational advice to the young (De iciarchia).

This chapter presents and discusses important challenges to sufficientarianism as a theory of distributive justice. First, the groundlessness objection claims that sufficientarianism cannot reasonably be grounding on any relevant value. Second, the outweighing priority objection says that sufficientarianism implausibly allows small benefits to people below the threshold to outweigh large benefits to people above it. Third, the indifference objection observes that sufficientarianism is counterintuitively indifferent to even significant inequalities above the threshold. Finally, the threshold problem refers to the difficulty in identifying and justifying the threshold. The chapter responds to all these objections and concludes that sufficientarianism is largely unmoved by them. The chapter argues that the response to the indifference objection uncovers a minor intuitive problem in relation to sufficientarianism’s ability to explain the asymmetry between benefit-driven and burden-driven inequalities at high levels. And, that the threshold problem is not in and of itself an objection to sufficientarianism but rather an essential part of the development of sufficientarian theory.

Chapter 3 investigates how military modernization and capitalist transformations converged to reorganize the labor force, understanding naval service as a form of military labor, and modern conscription as a modern form of labor coercion. Modern conscription promised the Ottoman elites the ability to employ workers with industrial skills for long periods in a more reliable disciplinary scheme, with wages far lower than the market. The chapter describes how the navy employed conscription as a tool to reduce dependency on civilian wage workers by deploying conscripts in both the Arsenal and the Yarn Factory, and by devising a detailed scheme to militarize the labor force. Ottoman reformists systematically attempted to utilize modern conscription as a way to draft non-Muslim (mainly Greek) subjects from coastal areas, skilled in shipbuilding and naval crafts, as regular soldiers to the Ottoman navy. The chapter analyses the conscription process, introduces the profile of the military labor force in the Arsenal and the Yarn Factory, the militarization plan and the attempts to conscript non-Muslims, and the impacts of resistance against naval conscription and the militarization plan.

The chapter analyses how racialised differences have been represented in artistic practice in Colombia, and the relationship between negatively racialised artists and the art world. The first two sections cover from the colonial period to the first half of the twentieth century and address the representation and participation of Black and Indigenous people, using examples from visual arts, literature, music and dance. White and mixed-race artists tended to represent racialised subalterns in primitivist and paternalist ways, although some displayed socialist sympathies in depictions of social inequality, without racism coming into clear view. By the 1930s and 40s, Black artists were critiquing social inequalities and explicitly identifying racism. We then analyse the increasing politicisation of Black art practice, which was linked to international currents such as Négritude and Black Power. Also important was the Black social movement in the country, which began in the 1960s and gathered strength with Colombia’s 1991 constitutional multiculturalist reform. The fourth section explores the work of the Colombian artists – mostly but not exclusively Black – who collaborated with us in CARLA to show how their diverse art practices have addressed racism in increasingly direct ways.

This chapter gives a thorough introduction to sufficientarianism as a distributive theory. It begins by presenting the enough intuition as the intuitive idea at the core of the sufficientarian view and unfolding it as a distributive ideal. The chapter then defines sufficientarianism, accounts for some early instantiations of the view, and compares the sufficientarian framework with other principles of distributive justice to better understand how it is distinct from competing ideals. The chapter then provides three arguments in favour of sufficientarianism. The first argument relates to the advantage in capturing the moral primacy of eliminating deficiency. The second argument refers to sufficientarianism’s elegant handling of the problem of individual responsibility. The third argument emphasize the advantage of the rejection of the value of distributive equality. The chapter ends by giving an overview of different contemporary strands of sufficientarian theory, including headcount sufficiency views, basic minimum views, and multiple-threshold views. This lays the foundation for the development of sufficientarian theory in later chapters.

This chapter examines prominent solidarity conceptions used in legal discourses in the context of unfair economic arrangements, typically associated with neo-liberalism. It finds that prominent solidarity conceptions are from a legal theory perspective either circular, redundant, or too aspirational. The conceptual shortcomings of solidarity are echoed in standard policy proposals to counter and unwind neo-liberal economic arrangements. Those proposals typically involve imposing new legal duties on dominant economic actors and states, making their effectiveness depend on adopting new national, regional and international laws, on compliance by dominant economic actors, and on enforcement by legal authorities. The proposals imply that the normative resources for change lie outside existing law. This chapter explores an alternative understanding of law based on existing positive law: law as a public service. Dominant economic actors rely on law as a public service. They need legal authorities, especially judges, to declare their neo-liberal economic arrangements legally valid and enforceable. Positive law already offers judges the normative resources to refuse the help of the law whenever neo-liberal economic arrangements structurally lack minimal reciprocity and fairness. Rather than waiting for a global social solidarity movement, judges of Western civil and commercial courts can already make a difference.

This chapter reflects on possibilities for anti-racism in artistic practice. Drawing on the work of the diverse artists we have collaborated with in the project Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America (CARLA), I focus on two types of intervention that I believe help us to think about various ways of doing anti-racism through art. The two types are challenging stereotypes and working with communities, and I explore how various artworks engage with these modes of artistic action and how they create emotional traction and affective intensity. The aim of the exercise is to be productive and helpful in the struggle against racism by providing some tools that artists and organisations can use to think strategically about anti-racism as a practice and reflect on the opportunities and risks that attach to different interventions.