Christian Wolff develops a theory of Enlightened absolutism and a paternalistic interventionist state on broadly Leibnizian promises, assigning to the state the role of promoting happiness amongst its subjects as material, intellectual, and spiritual thriving. He posits a state of nature characterised not by conflict but by stagnation. The duty of self-perfection impels individuals to leave the state of nature and to surrender their natural rights, and the state assumes the duty of co-ordination and steering of individual efforts, consistently with cameralist political economy. Herder reads Leibnizian monads as collective or national subjects, each contributing to the progressive realisation of species-capacities, and in principle harmoniously integrated with all others. He gives rise to expressive Romanticism, where self and world correspond, in contrast to ironic Romanticism, where such accord is in principle impossible, and to idealism, where the accord is a practical task.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how the African Association (AA) utilized the political concept of umoja to build an organizational structure that would create the unity needed to create progress in their various spheres of action: local, territorial, regional, and global. The organizational pinnacle of their African unity were five Association-wide conferences with continental aspirations. However, the continental vision and project of the AA was dramatically altered in the late 1940s and early 1950s due to both changing geopolitics and interassociational feuds that spurred territorial self-interest and the splitting of the Association. Using a framework of competing nationalisms, the chapter demonstrates how the moves from a continental African nationalism to territorial anti-colonial nationalisms were contested and not inevitable. Thus, the creation of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in Tanganyika and the Afro-Shirazi Party in the Zanzibar Protectorate stemming out of the AA were not natural progressions but constituted a shrinking of vision and reengineering of aspirations.

Humility is neither a virtue of caring nor an enkratic virtue, but consists in an absence or dearth of concern for the pseudo-good of self-importance, the kind of personal “importance” that people seek in being envious, vain, domineering, conceited, and arrogant. Self-importance is not the same as the true importance of persons, the kind that is affirmed in people’s loving and respecting others. The vices of pride are important because they spoil or exclude the virtues of caring. Their absence purifies and liberates the personality to love the good, and that is the moral value of humility. Proper pride is a sense of one’s importance as a person where ‘importance’ refers to the real dignity and excellence of oneself as expressed in one’s concern for the good. The absence of the vices of pride that are expressed in self-display – for example, vanity and pretentiousness – is sometimes called modesty, but the more general term for this virtue is ‘humility.’

This chapter introduces the concept of punctuated equilibrium from paleontology, showing that contrary to Darwin’s theory, the history of biological evolution tends to be characterized by fits and starts, protracted periods of seeming stasis to be followed by sudden, large leaps of transformation. This process characterizes many other aspects of the natural and physical world as well as human affairs.

Chapter 4 identifies one of the most troubling developments in copyright law over the past generation: the surprising and remarkable story of how its exemption from First Amendment scrutiny has enabled powerful interests to cynically weaponize copyright as a forceful, state-backed vehicle of censorship to silence critics and suppress dissent. Thus, copyright has a growing free speech problem – one that threatens to undermine both the vitality of our regime governing the use of creative works and our most basic free speech rights. After surveying the growing use of copyright law to stifle legitimate discourse on issues of racism, religious discrimination, reproductive rights, gay rights, corruption, torture, and police brutality, the chapter examines the conditions empowering such lawfare and considers how we might better ensure that copyright law stops serving as a transparent censorial proxy enabling the powerful to silence the powerless and, instead, returns its focus to vindicating the appropriate economic interests of rightsholders.

After the conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru, Spanish dominance in the Americas was maintained through a combination of “soft” and “hard” power: a mixture of armed coercion and an elaborate legal-administrative apparatus which ensured that tension rarely escalated into full-blown conflict. The sturdiness of Spain’s empire may also be attributed to other significant factors, including epidemiology (differential immunity), topography, and the avoidance of certain types of military engagement, all of which tended to intersect with or reinforce the deployment of “soft” and “hard” power. There were at least three broad threats to Spain’s dominance: external enemies, particularly rival European states covetous of the economic advantages Spain obtained from its New World dominions; unsubdued Amerindians on the fringes of Spanish settlement, who clung to their autonomy and effectively controlled vast swathes of territory through to the end of the colonial period; and an internal, heterogeneous group from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, from wealthy, privileged merchants to mistreated African slaves. At some point or other from 1521 until 1808, an internal challenge to Spanish dominance emerged from every sector of colonial society. Whether by design or felicitous coincidence, external and internal threats to Spanish dominance were rarely coterminous, which may help to explain the empire’s resilience and longevity.

This book is prompted by a concern that those who offend are blamed too much when they are held criminally responsible, suggesting that the law is running at a moral and social justice deficit. This concern represents an enduring criticism of the criminal law which is variously characterised as a failure to recognise crime as a social problem, its subjects as real people, or its own role in perpetuating injustice through its doctrine and principles of responsibility. In response, the book argues that the boundary placed around what factors can and cannot be included in assessments of culpability, and the apparent red line drawn between guilt and non-guilt, are both more permeable and less definitive than the law might have us think. The introduction explains and summarises the core arguments to support a Universal Partial Defence for the criminal law, based on a Real Person Approach to blaming people.

Leibniz is the genuine initiator of German Idealism, developing ideas of freedom as spontaneity or self-originating action, and linking freedom with justice and progress in ways that are decisive for Kant and later idealists. Rethinking spontaneity as negative freedom, Kant criticises the paternalistic perfectionism and Enlightened absolutism of Christian Wolff, a distinct development from Leibniz, but opens the way for a new perfectionism of freedom. The origins of perfectionism in Aristotle and the Stoics are surveyed, and the various formulations of post-Kantian perfectionism from Humboldt to Marx are outlined.

The Filipino people struggled for three years to free their land from Japanese occupation. Hundreds of thousands resisted, while most did their best to just survive, providing what support they could to the resistance. A few Americans, civilian and military, also remained behind and formed a leadership cadre around which Filipinos could coalesce. Theirs was a lonely existence until the first fragile contact was established with Allied forces in Australia. First, they fought to survive. Next, they fought for recognition from MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area headquarters, which would bring with it legal protection, promotions, supplies, arms, equipment, money, and prestige. Finally, they often fought one another, sometimes as a matter of ideology but more often for power. The resistance grew on the back of Japanese atrocities that turned the Filipino people firmly against the occupation of their homeland. Slowly, steadily, inexorably, American and Filipino leaders formed the framework for a robust guerrilla struggle against Japanese occupation that morphed into one of the great resistance movements of World War II.