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.

For many of us, Rousseau remains a central theorist of popular sovereignty. Less well known is that Rousseau was also among the first francophone political thinkers to theorize the concept of public opinion. This chapter makes two main claims. First, I argue that Rousseau advocated a sleepless public opinion as a complement to a sleepless sovereign. Second, I contend that, at key junctures of his work, Rousseau posited that direct popular sovereignty was constitutive of democracy. The chapter unfolds chronologically. I first reconstruct the mid eighteenth-century political debate in Rousseau’s native Geneva, which serves as a prelude to understand the conception of the people’s two powers that Rousseau associated with an ideal small city state in the Letter to d’Alembert, The Social Contract, and the Letters from the Mountains. I then turn to Rousseau’s account of public opinion and popular sovereignty in large countries, focusing on England and Poland. The chapter concludes by highlighting how, for subsequent generations of political thinkers in France, Rousseau’s distinction between public opinion and popular sovereignty opened new pathways for thinking about democracy.

This chapter analyzes the role of multinational enterprises in driving both globalization and deglobalization waves historically. Emerging from industrialized Western economies, multinationals played a key role in expanding global capitalism after 1840 by transferring financial, organizational, and cultural assets across borders. They took various forms and proved highly resilient, withstanding shifts in policy regimes and often reinforcing rather than disrupting institutional and societal norms that restricted growth outside the West. Their ability, and motivation, to locate value-added activities in the most attractive locations means that they have often strengthened clustering and reinforced gaps in wealth and income. The most successful non-Western economies since the 1960s – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and later China – limited foreign multinationals or required technology transfers to local firms. Multinationals frequently contributed to global challenges rather than solving them, yet their overall impact was a complex mix of positive and negative factors.

This chapter reads images of capital’s bloodsucking thirst in works of Mozambican literature as an aesthetic registration of the destructive impact of capitalist extractivism upon the life and land of southern Africa. Focusing on Noémia de Sousa’s poem ‘Magaíça’ (1950) and Orlando Mendes’s novel Portagem (1966), it argues that writers have turned to spectral motifs and gothic devices as a figural means of coming to terms with the historical legacy of migrant labour in the political economy of colonial Mozambique. This cross-border economic system subordinated the interests of the Portuguese settlers to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation in neighbouring South Africa, at the same time as it ensured the continuing immiseration of the colonised population. Mobilising an aesthetics of vampirism and spectrality, Mozambican texts have limned a world-gothic critique both of the local history of semi-proletarisnisation in the country, and of the insertion of the region of southern Africa into the global circuits of (post-)colonial capitalism.

Self-love is a central yet somewhat neglected theme in Works of Love. While the mission of this text is to distinguish the spiritual from the worldly conception of love, when it comes to self-love commentators tend to presuppose our merely worldly understanding. But there is an essential split between the spiritual and worldly conceptions of self-love, hence this cannot be what Kierkegaard has in mind. To illustrate this, I identify two places where the worldly conception and Kierkegaard’s claims clash. My aim is to explain the spirit’s conception of self-love, thereby to explain Kierkegaard’s claims. I propose to reduce self-love to "willing to be oneself," a self-relation figuring in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death. A person loves herself in that she wills to be herself. Yet she may do this properly or improperly: properly when she takes God as the criterion for the self she wills to be, improperly when she takes a merely human criterion. This account clarifies Kierkegaard’s claims about self-love in Works of Love.

This chapter extends our neo-Aristotelian theory of the firm by examining the role of financial markets and corporate governance in promoting eudaimonic efficiency. Financial markets promote efficient capital allocation primarily by aggregating information about relevant risks and opportunity costs. Yet the “uniqueness paradox” and the “investment dilemma” reveal the limits of the standard agency-based theory of corporate governance. Members of the board of directors must go beyond minimizing opportunism in order to mediate competing stakeholder interests in ways that foster stakeholder collaboration and firm-specific investment. This demands that directors and financial market actors exercise a range of role-differentiated virtues, including justice, courage, honesty, and trustworthiness. Our virtue-based model offers a more complete account of the moral responsibilities of relevant market actors in the governance and allocation of capital for firms, challenging the MFA’s sole focus on agency problems.

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.

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.

Deals with the problem of “religion and morality,” focusing on interpersonal commandments. Does God prescribe certain actions because they are right, or are they right because God prescribes them? Does God prohibit certain actions because they are wrong, or are they wrong because God prohibits them? Put another way, does Judaism believe in a standard of ethics that is correct independent of God’s commands and will? The chapter begins with two biblical episodes, the akedah or binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) and the sin in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3). I argue against Soren Kierkegaard’s celebrated reading of the akedah, and then argue that Genesis as a whole supports belief in an independent standard. After that, I discuss the role that morality plays in motivation for performing interpersonal commandments and then the role it plays in the Jewish legal system.

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.

Chapter 6 is Senecan in theme. While it includes some discussion of various classical concepts – casus and occasio in particular – which are picked up by Machiavelli to talk about the effects of chance and contingency in the world of states which he wishes to analyse, the chapter is mainly devoted to staking out the philosophical opposition which Machiavelli’s contentions about fortuna in his theory of the state are designed to overturn; and that opposition is deeply Senecan. The chapter lays out an account of the role of fortuna in Seneca’s moral philosophy. It illuminates the providentialism and determinism underpinning all his thinking about the concept, and draws particular attention to Seneca’s persistent tendency to personify Fortuna as a mistress of slaves and to pictorialize a tyrannical realm under her arbitrary government. The chapter then shows how this Senecan treatment becomes central to humanist thinking about Fortuna from Petrarch onwards and explains why Machiavelli is profoundly bothered by its currency in his own day. Machiavelli takes it as a form of delusion emanating from beliefs about a providentialist world emptied of all the contingencies which must be countered by any truly virtuoso agent in charge of governing the state.

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.