Mycenae’s LH IIIA2-IIIB palatial stonework was spectacular, and attention is given here to the innovative construction processes and specialized stonecutting tools that elicited awe. A fresh look at Mycenae’s final three tholoi illustrates the strategy of conveying power through stonework. The chapter also assesses the semiotics of the site’s architectural sculpture.

Total war meant unprecedented intrusion of states into the patterns and practices of economic and social life, with massive consequences for the structure of industry, organization of the labor process, and regulation of labor markets. New triangulations among government, employers, and unions settled into institutionalized arrangements of corporatism. Persuasive public discourses of “war socialism” and the “socialized state at war” captured those logics. Together, mass conscription of men and economic mobilization of women regendered the character and perceptions of work, employment, family, and citizenship. By 1917–1918, the intensified hardships of warmaking, both militarily and on the home front, brought impending societal collapse. Collective action – in strikes and shopfloor militancy; mutinies and desertion; food shortages and urban protests – threw political order into crisis.

This chapter and Chapter 9 offer a detailed reading of central arguments in The Human Condition. A striking fact about this study of the “active life” is the absence of any discussion of morality, apart from minimum obligations to keep promises and forgive unintended consequences of action. The chapter sets out the problem, and then offers a conjecture about what moved Arendt to neglect morality: her fear that moral constraints would handcuff human action, which in her view makes life meaningful. The following chapter analyzes that conjecture in depth. The remainder of this chapter sets the stage by examining central themes and vocabulary in The Human Condition. It explains what Arendt means by “human condition”, unpacks her concepts of labor, work, and action and the risks of confusing them, and explains why the human condition of natality (“unto us a child is born”) matters so crucially.

While Sancho discussed slavery in his letters decades before British opposition to that institution coalesced and became institutionally codified, he undeniably took a firmly anti-slavery and anti-racist stance in his manuscript correspondence. He used his familiar letters to critique and oppose slavery as a practice and an institution as well as to reject and undermine the validity of emerging concepts of “race” in an effort to oppose their effects in the world. Three core strategies emerge: first, satirizing and critiquing the metaphorical mapping of moral character onto skin color in the service of white supremacy; second, reappropriating and resignifying animal metaphors and racial tropes to undermine their efficacy in subjugating humans and non-humans alike within a slaving society; and third, recovering self-determination and agency for Black subjects by asserting ownership over his own body through the manual labor of writing.

Neruda’s temperament was not theoretical, yet several “canonical” poems of his are infused with Marxist thinking. Although there is no evidence that Neruda read Marxist theory, in his thirties he assimilated its totalizing thought from party activism, from his second wife Delia, and from his friend, Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, each a lifelong communist. As an instance, Neruda’s poem “La United Fruit Co.” brings together four types of corporations, economic control of the state, the transportation of product, and subordination of labor. “The Strike” depicts the role of class conflict in the production process. “Cristóbal Miranda (shoveler-Tocopilla)” is one of fifteen portraits of industrial workers focusing on ordinary folk-history-from-below. “Los dictadores,” with its monster engendered by the wealthy autocrat in his palace, demonstrates the functioning of the dialectic in history. Neruda’s Marxism, though more intuitive than discursive, shapes these and other related poems of his.

Several authors have connected Hegel’s view on action with Elizabeth’s Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge. This chapter first develops the notion of practical knowledge in Kant and Fichte, noting their similarity to Anscombe’s view. Practical knowledge is a knowing of what one is doing in acting. Yet Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit goes beyond this. Practical knowledge yields products or “works” (Werke), which are also products of concepts. Conceptual knowledge of such works, which often stem from institutional histories, is what Hegel calls “absolute knowledge.” It is argued that Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge is qualitative rather than quantitative: it concerns a transparent form of knowing rather than a certain massive extent or even finality of knowing. The constellation between the topics of concepts, artifacts, and social-historical realities present in the Phenomenology becomes a precedent for the more abstract argument for concrete conceptual truth in the Logic.

Contract and consent had important roles in early modern English labor relationships. The scholarship in social and economic history and legal studies has rarely tried to reconcile the legal framework of voluntariness with the practical unfreedom of early modern work. The Introduction proposes that the foundations of freedom of contract and the sanctity of an individual’s consent developed in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, in part, from the exploitative labor systems of parish apprenticeship, transatlantic indentured servitude, military impressment, and prisoner of war labor. Charity, colonization, and war were the key factors that drove masters and middlemen to reach for consent as a tool to bind people into labor. The ideology of "natural laborers" justified presuming consent in people of appropriate profiles. Moments of consenting were fraught with power imbalances, and they reinscribed social hierarchies. Contemporary examples of coerced consent show an ongoing acceptance of this pairing. The legal context, chapter summaries, and a consideration of the method of historicizing consent complete the Introduction.

The Conclusion reviews the argument that English masters and brokers wielded consent as a tool of labor coercion in the early modern period. Presumptions, shaped by people’s age, gender, and social status, determined if consent had been given or not. While the subjects of this book largely aimed to stabilize their social worlds, their use of consent in labor relationships often had the opposite effect. In the discourse of enticement, individuals bore the burden of choosing correctly in a labor market where structural inequalities exposed some people to jobs that most would never accept. The conclusion further considers methods and sources for the history of consent. The connected study of charity, colonization, and war has allowed the identification of trends in contract labor coercion that might otherwise be seen as aberrations. The book ends by considering how captured consent was meaningful in the past and continues to have a significant legacy.

Abraham Lincoln entered onto the presidency even as the breakaway southern confederacy was in the process of detaching itself from the union. Lincoln undestood this as a defiance of the constitution and an undermining of democracy (as represented by the election of 1860) and he initiated war measures to suppress what he would recognize only as a rebellion. He was careful not to agitate public opposition by billing this suppression as an abolition campaign. Nevertheless, union forces met with repeated defeats, and Lincoln was frustrated by over-mighty generals who believed that they knew better than he what was at stake. This frustration nudged him further toward incorporating some form of abolition into his war plans.

Chapter 5 compares laws of employment protection, compensation, and labor unions in the three countries, and describes how the different laws affect incentive bargaining of the firm and corporate governance. The US employment-at-will rule gives employers almost complete discretion to dismiss employees unless there are either contractual protections or discrimination. The Japanese abusive dismissal rule strictly restricts employers’ discretion in dismissing employees even in business downturns. Relative to Japanese companies, the US companies rely heavily on performance-based pay, which includes generous stock options. Among the compensation packages in China, the portion of payment for social insurance and welfare benefits is large. Performance-based bonuses play a significant role in privately owned enterprises (POEs). The US labor unions are basically industry unions and adversarial to management, while Japanese labor unions are company unions and are rather agreeable to management. All labor unions in China are government-backed, organized only on individual enterprises, and expected to mitigate labor disputes.

In this chapter, a new Lockean argument for intellectual property rights is offered, emphasizing self-defense, self-preservation, and the moral significance of investment. It is argued that creators and inventors have defensible claims to the values and income streams derived from their intellectual efforts, akin to their rights to protect their physical capacities and powers. These claims are grounded in two arguments: (1) the right to defend created values against unjustified interference, supported by Lockean principles of self-preservation and respect for persons; and (2) the moral asymmetry between creators, who invest time, labor, and resources, and copiers, who do not. Addressing challenges such as the non-rivalrous nature of intellectual works and the balance of societal needs, it is argued that intellectual property rights are morally justified to protect the autonomy and livelihoods of creators.