The Introduction examines the historiography of the idea of the state in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Machiavellian scholarship. It analyses the empirical and methodological problems associated with this specialist literature, before then outlining a new way of reconstructing Machiavelli’s theory of lo stato – and of interpreting it as the very crux of his political philosophy – by laying out a new intellectual basis upon which to reorient our present understanding of the foundations of Machiavelli’s conceptualization of the state from his earliest writings onwards. It draws new attention to the formative role in Renaissance political discourse of a sequence of theories – subsequently discussed in each chapter of Part I of the book – which were drawn from classical Roman political, moral, rhetorical, and aesthetic thought and which came to shape decisively Machiavelli’s own theory. And it forwards the contention, substantiated in detail in Part II, that his theory underwent two redactions, first in The Prince and then in the Discourses. The Introduction closes by broaching the crucial question of whether, in classifying Machiavelli as a singularly pioneering theorist of the state in the early modern period, we should also see him as a theorist of state personality.

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 closing chapter of the book illustrates the practical implications of Kant’s political and legal philosophy for climate change. Texts like the Doctrine of Right and Toward Perpetual Peace are used to rethink the complex political and collective challenges of the climate crisis. These, once again, confound the individualist and nonconsequentialist standard reading of Kant. First, I argue that Kant’s state of nature theorizing leads to prescriptions that are compatible with and justify coercive domestic and international policy to address the crisis. Second, I zoom out to consider whether Kant’s political philosophy as a whole remains too conservative or outdated to provide guidance regarding deep climate adaptation, mitigation, and radical institutional reform, answering in the negative. I close by discussing political obligations owed to peoples, interpreted in the face of the Hobbesian call for a global climate leviathan.

This introduction presents the main arguments of the book, develops a novel terminological framework, and situates the book in current research. First, from the perspective of international economic and social human rights, this is not an age of human rights triumphalism. The main human rights advocates featured in this book were concerned with international justice and redistributive justice, and theirs was a long quest to lift international economic and social human rights onto a level-playing field through three phases: internationalizing rights, criticizing global inequalities through rights, and attempting to secure the legitimacy of these rights once and for all. Second, on a broader egalitarian plateau, human rights advocacy can be situated on a redistributionist terrain. Third, this book supplements institutional, organizational, diplomatic, political, and movement-centered research on international human rights. There is a gap in existing scholarship in understanding historical interrelations between human rights and inequalities, which is where this book intervenes, above all from an intellectual historical perspective.

The human being is freely ‘self-determined’ rather than determined through some external authority (whether theological or teleological). This dichotomy conveniently expresses the usual understanding of modern political thought’s divergence from preceding tradition. By comparison, pre-modernity is teleological, anthropomorphic, realist; in a word, naïve – with its substantively rational nature, dictating essential ends to which we are subject. These received truths are past due for a re-examination. Just how naïve or dogmatic was the Greek understanding of freedom and nature? In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s view of man as naturally political is more complex and multivalent than our historical categorizations allow. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which, for him, politics does indeed depend upon a natural model. That model, however, is the Idea of the Good. And here, where Plato seems furthest from us, lies his greatest challenge to contemporary understandings of nature and freedom.

The Introduction sets out the argument of the book, and distinguishes the approach taken from those of Louis Althusser and Daniel Brudney. It offers a preliminary assessment of the difference made by reading Marx’s project as that of the actualization of philosophy, and of the implications for understanding his relationship to his philosophical predecessors.

This chapter examines Marx’s important but understudied text Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. It is shown that Marx, beginning from an enthusiasm he shares with Hegel for developing an organic theory of the state, shows Hegel’s execution of his project to be deeply flawed. Hegel’s defence of constitutional monarchy has the strange result of producing, when properly thought through, a defence of radical popular power. His attempt to use the ‘estates’ as an element in the state performing multiple many-way mediations further serves to reveal that something is amiss in the role that Hegel’s logic is being called upon to play.

Despite their centrality within discussions on AI governance, fairness, justice, and equality remain elusive and essentially contested concepts: even when some shared understanding concerning their meaning can be found on an abstract level, people may still disagree on their relation and realization. In this chapter, we aim to clear up some uncertainties concerning these notions. Taking one particular interpretation of fairness as our point of departure (fairness as nonarbitrariness), we first investigate the distinction between procedural and substantive conceptions of fairness (Section 4.2). We then discuss the relationship between fairness, justice, and equality (Section 4.3). Starting with an exploration of Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness, we then position distributive approaches toward issues of justice and fairness against socio-relational ones. In a final step, we consider the limitations of techno-solutionism and attempts to formalize fairness by design (Section 4.4). Throughout this chapter, we illustrate how the design and regulation of fair AI systems is not an insular exercise: attention must not only be paid to the procedures by which these systems are governed and the outcomes they produce, but also to the social processes, structures, and relationships that inform, and are co-shaped by, their functioning.