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).

Chapter 2 assesses what stereotypes are and explains what makes them both wrongful and harmful. The chapter begins by defining stereotypes, explaining their relationship to prejudice and implicit bias, and showing how they are maintained due to cognitive biases. I examine factors that go into making the judgments involved with stereotyping. Then I analyze what makes stereotypes wrongful, including their rigidity, their falsity, and the way they overgeneralize about a person’s experience so as to erase its nuance and complexity. I look at descriptive and normative components of stereotypes and show that negative stereotypes always make a normative judgment about the badness and inferiority of a person who fits the stereotype.

It is well past time to take scholarly disputes about words seriously, for where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Conceptual disagreement is a manifestation of disagreements about ideas. Yet no attempt has been made to measure the degree of conceptual disagreement that exists or to track those concepts identified as essentially contested. Accordingly, it is unclear how one might distinguish contested from uncontested concepts or test propositions about the causes of contestation. This chapter begins by introducing an approach to measuring conceptual contestation within social science. Next, the chapter explore factors that may help to explain variation in conceptual contestation. The characteristics of concepts – their value, abstraction, and normativity – explain most of the variability in conceptual contestation.

The Introduction opens with a (personal) precursor to the writing of the book. It discusses the methodological, normative, and theoretical basis of the book. It offers an overview of the argument and the chapters, and outlines sources employed in the research.

The concluding chapter summarizes the results and emphasizes the impact of the findings on future heritage language research and studies on bilingualism and language change in general: It stresses the necessity of including grammatical and pragmatic contact phenomena and discusses the importance of the interplay of extralinguistic factors and various types of linguistic developments: acquisition context, impact of schooling and literacy, contact with different registers and speakers. It explains individual processes in heritage language speakers, such as entrenchment processes, co-active activation of languages in the bilingual brain, as well as language awareness and metalinguistic knowledge. In addition, the role of normativity in diaspora communities, the challenge of relic varieties and the role of Standard German as language of schooling are discussed. Moreover, the chapter includes general observations on language maintenance in German heritage communities. It emphasizes the implications for future research: implications for the development of the German language in general, implications for the theory of language contact and implications for heritage language research.

This chapter charts the evolution of Kant’s thinking about theodicy and explains the fundamental shifts in his attitude towards the project. It begins by examining his pre-critical sketch for a theodicy that remains firmly within the Leibnizian mould while repairing its structural inconsistencies and gaps. At the heart of his reparative measures is a different conception of divine freedom, one that Kant will retain throughout his critical period. The chapter ends with a consideration of his late essay On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy of 1791, in which he rejects the entire tradition of rationalist theodicy, whilst still maintaining the importance of an ‘authentic’ alternative. The basis of his rejection of previous theodicies is moral: the very pursuit of such a theodicy involves sacrificing individual freedom and rejecting an autonomous stance. Accordingly, the central sections of the chapter explain Kant’s critical concept of autonomy and how the theory of normativity it entails is fundamentally incompatible with a rationalist conception of value.

Chapter 5 addresses these weaknesses by combining STS with sociological systems theory, which provides a persuasive account of law in society, but has been criticised as technology-blind. This does not mean, however, that systems theory lacks the means to conceptualise the interface between the materiality of a distribution medium (e.g. the Internet) and the sociality of communicative systems (e.g. law), since structural coupling provides the means to explain how operatively closed systems can relate to each other, e.g. the sphere of technical materiality (the technosystem) and the sphere of communicative sociality (society and its subsystems). A separation between the material and the social is the prerequisite for adopting a critical or normative position vis-à-vis digital media, enabling us to empirically study the diverse interrelations between the two spheres in online communication. To do so, technologies must be understood as artefacts possessing affordances, that is possibilities and constraints, raising the question of how digital technologies acquire affordances. The final question concerns the concept of normativity in the digital ecosphere, namely whether normative expectations about digital technologies can emerge. Since normative expectations structure the legal system, our answer will explain the nature of the structural coupling between law and technology.

This chapter takes as its starting point a comparison of the trajectories of two women from different generations and different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Both were to a considerable degree ‘self-made’ women, and one question raised by their narratives is how is marriage relevant to their success? The stories that these women tell are replete with ethical judgements and reflections on their own and their parents’ marriages as well as those about others. The apparently tangential significance of marriage in these stories is suggestive. Seemingly, a necessary part of a normative life course even in an unconventional scenario, marriage here takes forms that are at once accepted and also ‘transgressive’. Both women had married foreign husbands; in one case, this ended in divorce; in the other, what seemed a successful partnership endured. We see how marriage allows the expansion of convention but, paradoxically, also reinforces social norms. Indeed, at the boundaries of difference and what is acceptable, marriage has the capacity to be re-enfolded into what is normative through its conventionality. In this way, it holds a promise of transformation for individuals and families, and for wider communities and nations.

According to Kant, it is possible to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate laws by means of a certain formal procedure. His criterion for the legitimacy of a draft law is whether or not it corresponds to the ‘General Will’ of a people. The test question Kant has in mind is this: could a people give its consent to a proposed particular law? This chapter discusses the question of how this ‘General Will Test’ (GWT) is related to the Categorical Imperative (CI). As it will turn out, normatively valid laws are justified, in Kant’s view, by the fact that their content is established in a significantly non-ideal way, by a quasi-CI, namely the GWT. Thus, an intermediary position between the two mutually exclusive standard interpretations of Kant’s political philosophy is defended: the ‘derivation reading’ and the ‘separation reading’.

The question of how politics and ethics connect, if at all, in our societies is crucial, especially given today’s socio-economic and geopolitical challenges. Commentators have sought answers in Kant’s texts: the relation between the Categorical Imperative (CI) as the fundamental principle of ethics, and the Universal Principle of Right (UPR) as the fundamental principle of politico-legal norms, has been variously interpreted as one of simple dependence, simple independence, or complex dependence. Recent interpretations increasingly agree that Kant was not a simple independentist. However, questions persist about the philosophical significance of Kant’s account, specifically whether certain aspects of his thought inconsistently commit him to simple independentism. One aim of this chapter is to illustrate this critical strategy starting from a specific interpretation of the UPR. It is argued that, although robust, this interpretation is not the most accurate. While this strategy opens new avenues for further objections to Kant, the chapter concludes that the complex dependentist reading is philosophically the most convincing to date.

Chapter 3 focuses on Hegel’s critique of liberalism. It starts by discussing the preface to the Philosophy of Right in order to challenge the widespread assumption that Hegel is averse to robust social criticism. Afterwards, the chapter considers two main causes for the limited recognition of his work’s critical dimension. The first is the tendency to read Hegel’s book as a horizontal progression, fuelled by the accumulation of different aspects or layers of freedom. This kind of approach misrepresents the qualitative transformation that is at stake in the transition from civil society to the state, which only a vertical reading can adequately convey. Second, the Philosophy of Right’s critical import has also been obfuscated by some of Hegel’s own philosophical positions. Despite his intended sublation of the stage of civil society, his account of the state remains wedded, in important ways, to the former’s underlying logic. As the chapter seeks to show, if we accept Hegel’s claim that a rational state must synthesize the particular and the universal dimensions of human freedom, we must reject some of his political options as partly or wholly un-Hegelian.

Chapter 2 discusses Hegel’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy and reality, as well as the much-debated issue of whether the Philosophy of Right should be read as a normative enterprise. Focusing on the methodological argument outlined in the work’s preface and introduction, the chapter argues that Hegel is committed to a critical reconstruction of received reality, aimed at revealing the norms and institutions that best embody and promote human freedom. Moreover, it is claimed that this critical effort comprises a conceptual and a temporal dimension, corresponding to two different argumentative moments: the progression leading from the stage of ‘abstract right’ to that of the state, which deals with the immanent development of the concept of freedom, and the book’s final section, ‘world history’, which charts the historical actualization of the concept of freedom. While most interpreters tend to focus on the former dimension, the chapter shows that the latter is just as important to understand Hegel’s overall position.