This chapter introduces and explains the concept of market virtues – role-differentiated traits that enable agents to act well in market contexts – by building on the neo-Aristotelian framework introduced in Chapter 2. In response to the practical limitations of the Market Failure Approach (MFA), we elaborate the ideal of eudaimonic efficiency, which defines good transactions as those that enhance human flourishing without unjustly harming others. While cardinal virtues like justice and practical wisdom remain essential, they must be adapted to the unique norms of market institutions. We argue that market virtues such as honesty, trustworthiness, respect, and competitiveness not only mitigate market failures but also facilitate mutual benefit in ways that go beyond the MFA’s imperatives. Drawing on the work of Bruni and Sugden (2008; 2013), we defend markets as sites of moral formation, countering critics who view them as corrosive to virtue. We also address concerns about instrumentalism and the adversarial nature of markets. Ultimately, we argue that market virtues are both necessary for sustaining eudaimonic efficiency and constitutive of human flourishing within a market society, enabling individuals to constitute themselves as agents through virtuous participation in economic life.

This chapter presents a neo-Aristotelian account of stakeholder deliberation, arguing that a range of virtues is needed to ensure that consensus among stakeholders with large power imbalances is based on trust and authentic deliberation rather than zero-sum competitive interactions. We identify three stylized phases of stakeholder deliberation that highlight how the need to cope with vulnerability drives interactions with other stakeholders that, in turn, foster the development of a range of deliberative virtues. In the first phase, involving the acknowledgment of dependence and vulnerability, the virtues of justice, mercy, and benevolence help mitigate stakeholder myopia by enabling weaker voices to be heard. In the second phase, involving the establishment of common ground, the virtue of benevolence plays a crucial role in overcoming differences in modes of discourse by creating trust and goodwill between stakeholders and preventing deliberative processes from devolving into merely self-interested posturing and negotiation. In the third phase, the virtues of justice, courage, honesty, and practical wisdom reduce the risk of decoupling, ensuring that deliberative processes promote the flourishing of diverse market actors.

This chapter initiates a neo-Aristotelian theory of the firm by arguing that firms are not merely governance mechanisms to overcome market failures but sites of moral formation that foster the development of practical wisdom and the virtues. Building on critiques of the Market Failure Approach (MFA) and insights from the Knowledge-Based View (KBV) of the firm, we challenge the assumption, common in market morality literature, that internal firm norms can be evaluated independently of their effects on external stakeholders, arguing that virtuous relationships with external stakeholders play an important role in establishing and maintaining efficient internal norms. We also argue that, regardless of their efficacy in promoting organizational performance, hierarchical authority and cooperative norms are justified only insofar as they contribute to organization members’ flourishing. Drawing on McDowell’s notion of Bildung, we show how organizational life can “open employees’ eyes” to valid reasons for action, shaping their character in ways that contribute to their flourishing while also promoting organizational performance. This chapter thus reframes the firm as a moral community and provides the foundation for a virtue-based account of corporate purpose, to be extended in Chapters 5–9.

This chapter extends our neo-Aristotelian theory of the firm by arguing that firms exist not merely to minimize transaction costs but also to foster entrepreneurial agency that contributes to human flourishing. Building on the theory-based view of the firm (Felin & Zenger, 2009; 2017), we contend that firms institutionalize eudaimonic efficiency by enabling members to specialize in value creation through collaborative experimentation and moral development. Whereas the Market Failure Approach (MFA) is bound to static efficiency and Pareto optimality, our neo-Aristotelian account emphasizes the dynamic, epistemic role of the firm in discovering new combinations of resources, which markets alone cannot coordinate. Drawing further on McDowell’s notion of Bildung, we argue that the moral formation of employees in the firm involves a range of virtues that support firm innovation, including benevolence, justice, entrepreneurial perceptiveness, and humility. This virtue-based framework offers a rich account of the way managerial authority can be morally justified, namely when it supports employees’ flourishing and the discovery of better ways to meet human needs. In short, firms are moral communities that inculcate and are sustained by virtues that support collaborative innovation.

Abstract: In Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Dewey concludes that “morals is education.” However, what does the statement mean for how we educate today? In this chapter, Wiberg argues that in equating morals with education, Dewey is underscoring that all educational processes have a normative dimension. The chapter connects Dewey’s idea of moral conduct in HNC to his other works on ethics and moral education. On Dewey’s account, conduct – which involves reflection, judgment, deliberation, and potentially critique of established ideas and standards – can be possible in democratic societies. But here the role of the educator is crucial. The chapter underscores Dewey’s view that moral education is not a matter of direct instruction in how to act in a moral way. Instead, the educator’s task is to support students to learn how to deeply reflect on moral issues. In this learning process, the learner’s engagement in social communities is essential for growth, an idea Wiberg connects to Hegel’s notion of Bildung. Ultimately, the chapter emphasizes that Dewey’s moral educational thinking is highly relevant in our present multicultural world as it suggests the importance of providing students with opportunities to discuss connections between various moral ideas, principles, and actions and their consequences for humanity.

While reaction ruled, Germany was in the midst of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and overall modernization, and the Jews were often considered as prime agents of this development. However, a close look discloses Jewish communities living mainly in small towns, working in local commerce and in traditional branches of industry. Still, it seems that they were moving forward more quickly than others, more easily accepting change, enjoying more favorable demographic trends, and quickly improving their educational level. As a typical example, the chapter presents a sketch of one family history, that of the Liebermanns, who held on to their commercial interests in cotton and silk, but then slowly expanded to become larger-scale industrial entrepreneurs, centered in Berlin and later in Silesia too, gradually moving to more modern and more large-scale production sectors. On the whole, the Jewish way of modernization added one more route to the multiple varieties of such routes in Germany. Through their unique perspective, the various possibilities of moving towards modernity are more easily perceived, enriching the overall picture of this process as a whole, especially in Germany.

This chapter sets the scene for the remainder of the volume. It establishes the conceptual foundations of English language teaching as a profession and highlights its complexity. Professional teaching needs to be regarded as a multidimensional process that combines issues pertinent to the classroom context and teaching–learning with institutional and general pedagogical factors. The process of becoming a professional teacher therefore implies an ongoing commitment to educational change and growth. By adopting a broader perspective, practitioners will be able to teach in a manner that is beneficial to students and society alike. This chapter also elucidates the fact that professional language teaching entails the use of culturally and socially embedded communication and an ability to connect pedagogy with language learning. To address these issues successfully, teachers need to engage in ongoing processes of reflection and theorisation of their practice. To conclude the chapter, a synopsis of all the chapters in this book is provided, highlighting the key themes that emerge from each.

Modern objections to Romantic music criticism often take aim at its hieratic posture, as if it were committed to the absolute metaphysical ‘truth content’ of the works it paraphrased. In fact the Idealist philosophical basis of sentimental-Romantic critical practice was a much more subjective interrelationship between feeling and reflection. As theorized by Herder, this formed the basis of Bildung, the originally anthropological idea of ‘cultivation’ later fetishized by the German middle classes. Through Kant and Schiller it tied into notions of ‘character’ and poetic ‘characterisation’, developed during the 1790s and soon a firm part of Romantic music criticism. Romantic poetic imagery could be pressed into the service of religious dogma, as it was by Joseph d’Ortigue writing on Beethoven’s instrumental music. But other forms of Romantic criticism after Herder used ‘characterisation’ instead as an empathetic path to understanding the diversity of musical cultures, an approach exemplified by Joseph Mainzer.

This chapter traces the evolution of the educational concept Bildung, beginning with its roots in ancient Western thought, then to its formation in Weimar classicism and Hegel’s thought, and finally to the adoption of those German traditions in contemporary American educational thought.

This chapter investigates various strands of influence, seeking to understand the role of musical ‘domestication’ in canon formation in the early nineteenth-century Viennese home. Answers are sought to fundamental questions: how the performance of music in the home influenced the creation of an authoritative list of musical ‘works’ to be championed in public; which genres were thus canonised, and how opera, which dominated ‘domesticated’ music, fared in the developing canon; and who were the ‘authorities’ and ‘publics’ in Vienna around the time of the Congress (1814–15 and just afterwards). The chapter focuses on middle-class circles, especially the salons that Leopold von Sonnleithner held and attended. Thanks to middle-class agency, repertoires were perpetuated and recreated, rethought and re-evaluated through musical arrangement and domestic performance. So in early-to-mid-nineteenth-century Vienna, concert life would develop in significant areas – repertoire, performance practices, and listeners’ behaviour, tastes, and values – all of which developed largely in the middle-class home.

Kant’s famous comparison of his transcendental critique to a revolution serves as the departure point for Nicolas Halmi’s chapter, which also explores the powerful conjunction between philosophy, criticism, and poetry in early German and British Romanticism, marked by acute self-consciousness. Halmi first discusses changes in the concept of revolution, and how the new meaning lent itself to politics and to philosophy, which both sought to give the subject greater autonomy and self-governance. He then examines different theories developed in response to Kant but also to the Revolution and its perceived failure, many of which call for a moral and intellectual revolution of the self as a preparation for democratic reform. These include Fichte’s theory of scientific knowledge, Schiller’s aesthetic education, Friedrich Schlegel’s transcendental poetry, and Shelley’s defence of the poetic imagination as a source of moral sympathy. Key ideas presented in the chapter include Bildung, the Absolute, Wechselerweis, romantic irony, and allegory. Halmi concludes with a section on Wordsworth’s poetic reform in the Lyrical Ballads, arguing that it emerged as a conservative reaction to revolution.

Chapter 1 unfolds the historical context of two central overarching notions in this book’s narrative: the German Kulturstaat and the country’s Bildungsbürgertum. Combining historical analysis with ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin during the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Germany’s largest theatre festival and observations at the city’s iconic Volksbühne, this chapter explores the moral significance attributed to institutionalised public theatres, as well as activist contestations of its state patronage and institutional structures. It also traces the role of cultural politics in facilitating the emergence of public theatres as sites for aesthetic self-cultivation (Bildung) and nation-building in the face of an increasingly diverse contemporary Germany. Expanding on the notion of institutions as traditions in Western contexts, it expands on the necessity for anthropology to take into account cultural history and art history as part of fieldwork.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

Climate activists across generations and borders demonstrate in the streets, while people also take climate actions via everyday professional efforts at work. In this dispersal of climate actions, the pursuit of personal politics is merging with civic, state and corporate commitment to the point where we are witnessing a rebirth of togetherness and alternative ways of collective organising, from employee activism, activist entrepreneurship, to insider activism, shareholder activism and prosumer activism. By empirically investigating this diffuse configuration of the environmental movement with focus on renewable energy technology, the commercial footing of climate activism is uncovered. The book ethnographically illustrates how activism goes into business, and how business goes into activism, to further trace how an ‘epistemic community’ emerges through co-creation of lay knowledge, not only about renewables, but political action itself. No longer tied to a specific geographical spot, organisation, group or even shared political identity, many politicians and business leaders applaud this affluent climate ‘action’, in their efforts to reach beyond mere climate ‘adaptation’ and speed up the energy transition. Conclusively, climate activism is no longer a civic phenomenon defined by struggles, pursued by the activist as we knew it, but testament of feral proximity and horizontal organising.

This chapter provides a general contextual setting for the subsequent analysis of Simmel’s work. It discusses the emergence and significance of a particular perception of modernity that became very common among German intellectuals in the last third of the nineteenth century. They believed that the central conflict of modernity lay in the tension between two polar imperatives: those of general culture and specialisation, or universality and particularity. In Germany, this particular tension acquired a high degree of significance and was often accompanied by strong feelings of urgency and even despair. The chapter offers a brief history of this issue as well as a genealogy of the related conceptual apparatus that included notions such as Bildung, Cultur, Beruf and Civilisation. The final section of the chapter introduces the central aspects of Simmel’s philosophy of culture that may elucidate this general context and are in turn elucidated by it.