This chapter explains and defends Kierkegaard’s conception of neighbor love as a duty against Kant’s well-known claim that a duty to love is “absurd,” because we do not have volitional control of our emotions. For Kierkegaard, neighbor love is a “passion of the emotions” that requires humans to love all other humans. I distinguish short-term occurrent emotions from long-term, dispositional emotions, and neighbor love is the latter kind of emotion, which Kierkegaard calls a “higher immediacy” or “immediacy after reflection.” We do not have volitional control of the former, but the long-term dispositional character of the latter means that over time they can be fostered or inhibited. Emotions are understood using Robert Roberts’s view that emotions are “concern-based construals.” The ground of neighbor love is a recognition of the “inner glory” that all humans possess as creatures made in God’s image. Neighbor love is good because it recognizes the value that humans possess, but it is a duty because it is required by God, who has the standing to make such a demand on humans. God has this standing both because God has created humans from nothing but also because God is love and destines humans for a loving relation with him that “does not end at a grave.” God requires humans to love their neighbors both because it is good, and because God knows that human sinfulness requires that love be a duty. Although neighbor love is a duty, it is also a virtue, though one that requires divine assistance to acquire. It is a virtue not only because of its goodness, but because it contributes to human flourishing by securing three goods humans naturally desire: perseverance of our loves, autonomy, and meaning or significance. To the degree that neighbor love is actualized as a virtue, its status as a duty becomes less important, though it does not cease to be a duty for anyone short of eternity, unless that person is a perfected saint.

This interpretive chapter attends to an often overlooked feature of the Dialogues: the tone of its repeated disputes. It asks what is the meaning of the tone and probes its value. To do so, it begins with a consideration of character in a dual-sense: the moral character of these disputes between literary characters. It argues that critical engagement with characterization via the lens of literary theory reveals that it is a category mistake to reduce the voice of a fictional character (e.g., Philo) to that of a real person (e.g., Hume). It further contends that if we think of each fictional character as merely a solitary component of a larger narrative flow we are more likely to focus on the basic action that is internal to the narrative, that is: disagreement, rather than who the character speaks for. Finally, it claims that the virtuous disagreement between interlocutors here rehearses an ethics of responsiveness that can be viewed as pointing towards a moral element. Hume’s dramatic sensibilities obscure the ethical temperament of the disagreements yet their posture reflects a gestural phenomenon of responsiveness (per Elise Springer) that might come close to expressing Hume’s ideal form of religion.

Folk music, and especially in the United States, has frequently been grounded in the fertile soil of labour struggles. Beginning with a cultural analysis of the Industrial Workers of the World and the little red songbook, the argument of this chapter is that folk offers a vision of the worker as a figure in which two contradictory phenomena are experienced at once. The experience of labour, in this account, is to live under a curse but to also embody the promise of collective redemption, to know that, when labour acts strictly as a class, it might yet abolish all classes and with that bring about the conditions of its own emancipation. Counterpoised to its many descriptions of wage work, folk articulates an alternative and hopeful vision of the worker as a collective subject defined by expansive solidarity, class antagonism, and common property. To make this argument, the chapter listens to three well-known folk songs from within the context of their composition and with an ear to the indivisible politics of class and labour: ‘Solidarity Forever’, ‘Which Side Are You On?’, and ‘This Land is Your Land’.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

This chapter attends to the legacies of Indian Ocean migrations in Indian contexts, where nationalist politics also underwent a process of conflating national identity with not just territory, but with women as integral to that territorial sense of nationhood. Specifically, it examines queer desire and the gendered construction of the nation through Mauritian writer Ananda Devi’s novel Indian Tango (2007). Devi rewrites Satyajit Ray’s cinematic adaptation (1984) of Rabindranath Tagore’s influential national allegory Ghare-Bāire (The Home and the World) (1916) from a transnational queer feminist perspective. Examining the novel’s intertextual relationship with Tagore’s text, Ray’s film, and early twentieth century anti-indenture discourses, the chapter argues that Devi reorients feminine desire towards an erotic autonomy that reimagines diasporic affiliation and challenges the control of female sexuality within the heterosexual family as the basis of the nation. The assertion of diasporic connection through female erotic autonomy doubly deconstructs the Indian nationalist subject defined through the exclusion of the diasporic other as well as the queer female other.

This chapter explores the complex relationship between extractive industries, sustainable development, and Indigenous treaty law. It begins by examining the international law guidance available for extractive industries, analysing frameworks and principles that promote responsible and sustainable practices in resource extraction while considering the social, economic, and environmental dimensions. This chapter then focuses on the specific challenges of oil and gas exploration, highlighting the impacts on Indigenous communities and emphasizing the importance of meaningful consultation, consent, and fair benefit-sharing in alignment with Indigenous treaty rights. Furthermore, it explores the mining sector’s implications for sustainable development, considering the social, economic, and environmental aspects and emphasizing the role of Indigenous treaty law in ensuring responsible practices, equitable resource distribution, and the protection of Indigenous rights and lands. Thus, the chapter emphasizes the need for a balanced approach that respects Indigenous rights, integrates Indigenous perspectives and consent, and promotes sustainable practices.

This essay explores the relevance of William James’s thought for addressing the contemporary climate crisis, thereby putting his thinking to a pragmatist test: what can we do with James in today’s world, marked by an unprecedented shattering of certainties, indeed of worlds? In the first part of the essay, James’s writings are revisited and the echoes of the Anthropocene are traced in view of the continuities and ruptures between his time and ours. This seems important because, if, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out, the imprint of human action on the earth is so profound as to challenge the very sense of historical continuity, then we must question the continuing validity of our intellectual past in order to think through our present. In the second part, the essay reinterprets James’s radical empiricism and pragmatism as philosophical responses to worlds in upheaval, countering simplistic readings of James as a “happy pragmatist” who simply goes for what works. It is precisely because James thought in the face of a troubled present – and not simply about it – that his philosophy can be made to matter into today’s world in turmoil.

This chapter retraces the theoretical debates on autobiographical writing in Africa and proposes a pluralistic approach to the continuum of self-referential genres allowing for the writing of the self in postcolonial African contexts. Focusing on Francophone West Africa, firstly, the autobiographical imperative in the colonial French school system where writing on oneself was an imposed educational practice, is pointed out. Secondly, the function of autobiographical writing as a deconstruction of the condescending colonial ethnographical gaze on African cultures from the 1950s onwards is underlined. Using Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s set of memoirs as prominent examples, the chapter further elaborates on both the distress and richness of cultural hybridity in postcolonial life writing before venturing into the specificities of women writers’ contributions. Ken Bugul’s series of not less than five texts marked by their volatile autobiographical pact, oscillating between a referential and an autofictional mode, is analyzed in more detail. The chapter shows that African autobiographical writing in French has not produced a fixed genre that would imitate the colonizer’s canon, but rather that it is inventive in mixing and innovating established genres such as memoir, autoethnography, travelogue, childhood narrative, and autofiction.

This chapter explores the nature of Cold War liberalism by comparing how French and American sociologists who collectively elaborated a theory of “industrial society” reacted differently to the politics of the Cold War between the late 1940s and the eruption of the student protest movements in the late 1960s. It argues that these differences were not rooted in sociological theory, but in whether or not particular sociologists embraced an anti-totalitarian politics of emergency that saw democratic societies as vulnerable to dangerous degrees of political mobilization. While theorists of industrial society in both France and the United States were all in some sense social democrats, those who embraced what is now identifiable as Cold War liberalism had a more pessimistic disposition, and fear of the demos at home drove them to embrace conservative arguments against programs for political change.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

This introduction presents the volume’s premise and structure. It details why it is crucial to examine and harmonize the two worlds of law and knowledge to understand and amplify Indigenous guidance and wisdom found in treaty commitments. This introduction introduces the volume’s five parts, each discussing different aspects of understanding and implementing the various international, multinational, and nation-to-nation treaties to advance sustainable development and affirm Indigenous knowledge and rights in the various legal systems that we will explore.

This chapter offers an immanent critique of empiricism within interpretivist sociolinguistics, traces of which can be noted in scholars’ tendencies to reproduce the epistemic fallacy, and to explain broader social mechanisms and phenomena including linguistic inequalities by drawing directly from empirical evidence found in texts. Of specific critical interest in this chapter are works in raciolinguistics, a recent strand of interpretivist sociolinguistics which critically unpacks the said co-naturalisation of language and race. Although revealing valuable insight into the colonialist heritage of academic research on language and society, works in raciolinguistics are critiqued in this chapter as (a) reducing discourses to their producers, (b) failing to account for the necessary relationship between discourse and non-discursive phenomena, (c) providing reductive views of conceptual abstractions in sociolinguistics, and finally (d) denying the importance of universalism as crucial to the broader project of social emancipation. The contribution of critical realism in strengthening sociolinguistics as an interdisciplinary strand of the social sciences is also highlighted.