Genesis of Moral Freedom in Kant

In Kant’s writings, we can discover four key moments in the realization of moral freedom: i) The original possibility of being free, ii) The act described by Kant as radical evil, iii) The opposite act, that is, an inner conversion to good, and, finally, iv) The long process of the self-development of virtue extending to immortality. There are further issues such as the double concept of moral evil, and practical temporality. Moral freedom is originally located (and presupposed in Kant’s transcendental deduction) in the individual, her decisions, and the maxims or principles that guide her actions, even though a community (as both a „kingdom of ends” and social reality) provides the scope wherein all this takes place and its socially and historically-situated shapes. This paper tries to systematize these crucial stages of Kant’s moral philosophy with the focus on the concept of virtue.

Peace, Protest and Precarity: Making Conceptual Sense of Young People’s Non-violent Dissent in a Period of Intersecting Crises

The current young generation are living through socio-historically situated intersecting crises, including precarity and climate change. In these times of crisis, young people are also bearing witness to a distinctive global wave of youth-led activism involving protest actions. Much of this activism can be deemed dissent because many young activists are calling for systemic change, including the radical disruption, reimagining and rebuilding of the social, economic and political status quo. In this interdisciplinary article, between politics and peace studies, we investigate how the concept of peace plays an important role in some young dissent, and specifically the dissent of young people taking action on climate change. We observed that these young environmental activists often describe their actions in careful terms of positive peace, non-violence, kindness and care, in order to express their dissent as what we interpret as positive civic behaviour. They also use concepts grounded in peace and justice to navigate their economic, political and social precarity. Based on a youth-centred study, drawing on insightful face to face semi-structured interviews in Britain and France with school climate strikers, Friday For Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) activists, we explore how young environmental activists themselves related their dissent, and especially how they attached importance to it being non-violent and/or peaceful. Stemming from our findings, we discuss how young environmental activists’ vision of violence and non-violence adapted to the structural and personal violence they face at the complex intersections of young marginalization, global inequalities and injustices in the lived impact of climate change and the policing of protest.

The international politics of truth: C. Wright Mills and the sociology of the international

C. Wright Mills's critical work on international relations is well known, but is often dismissed as being unscholarly, reductionist, and overly polemical. However, seeing the work in the context of his earlier career can allow for a new perspective, with Mills's activist views on war and militarism shaped very clearly by his earlier theoretical and political commitments. Mills developed a distinctive political sociological understanding of international politics, theorising the state as a historically-situated structural determinant of international power: a network of elite power that was contextualised by the influence of the socially constructed realities of the international created by elites. Mills's crucial critical contribution was to see the role of the intellectual as criticising these realities through the imaginative reconceptualisation of the world, which he called the ‘politics of truth’. The article argues the international politics of truth was not only Mills's distinctive theory of the international, but that it was clearly supported by his early theorisation of the international. A revised view of the importance of Mills's international relations work can help to situate Mills as part of a broader tradition of IR scholarship, a lost lineage of the critical historical and political sociology of the international.

Ruins of Resilience: Imaginaries and Materiality Imagineered and Embedded in Civil Defence Architecture

This chapter examines ruin towns: civil defence training grounds that replicated urban war zones. The ruins provided a stage for enacting nuclear war, where the merely imagined was given a tangible expression. The chapter sketches the transnational extension-by-invitation of a British model of ruins to Denmark, and through architectural and historical analysis, it asks how it was re-embedded into a new national context and appropriated to local needs to become part of the common Danish civil defence landscape. The chapter, then, discusses how these ruin towns contributed to an affirmation of social norms and values, arguing that they caused a taming of the nuclear catastrophe as well as reflecting and reinforcing a specific political and historically situated understanding of social urban order and the good society.

To Confront the Totality: A Critique of Empiricism in the Historiography of the People's Republic of China

Most recent research on the first three decades of the PRC has avoided theoretical reflection on the period, instead claiming an empiricist fidelity to the heterogeneity of lived experience. Yet the refusal of theory allows unexamined conceptualizations to structure the findings—conceptualizations whose plausibility arises not from the archive but from the historian's own historically situated sensibilities. This article identifies a deep orientation at work in an otherwise highly diverse set of scholarship on the early PRC. A research paradigm privileging the individual over the collective, civil society over the state, diversity over homogeneity, contingency over necessity, and fragmentation over totality has achieved important advances, but it has also foreclosed essential new directions for research. The article then sketches an alternative approach that does not simply reverse these binaries but aims to encompass both sides through a reappropriation of classical social theories such as those of Marx, Durkheim, and Freud. Building on long-neglected aspects of these theories, such as their varied approaches to a co-constitutive relation between social appearance and essence, would not displace careful empirical investigation but deepen it by revealing the full complexity of the sources.

Governmentality and Grand Strategy

This chapter explores the implications of Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” for grand strategy. It argues that debates on governmentality and grand strategy share an interest in wider conditions and practices of government that extend beyond strategic decision-making. They also mirror each other in analyzing the rational frameworks that accompany and support practices of government and strategy. The chapter reflects on the work of Sir Basil Liddell Hart in this light, particularly his focus on conditions of strategic success beyond war fighting. The argument is that governmentality offers a way to critically engage with grand-strategic discourses and their historically situated assumptions about the nature and scope of government. The chapter concludes with a brief case study on the relationship between foreign development aid, grand strategy, and governmentality.

Rich man, poor man, middleman, thing: Distributing power

The author reviews the fine ethnographic analyses in this special issue and argues that they become more coherent if power is understood as a sociotechnological network. This further implies that anthropologists' conclusions about how power is exercised must be modest, both historically situated and politically targeted, if the discipline wishes to contribute meaningfully to holding the powerful to account.

The conflict market polarizing consumer culture(s) in counter-democracy

At the beginning of the millennium, consumer culture researchers predicted that people would increasingly demand that marketplace actors subscribe to contemporary ethics of liberal democracy. Although their prediction indeed came true, they did not foresee that an algorithm-powered media ecosystem in combination with growing authoritarian movements would soon come to fuel an increasingly polarized political landscape and challenge the very fundament of liberal democracy per se. In this macroscopic, conceptual article, I discuss three assumption-challenging logics—counter-democratic consumer culture, de-dialectical algorithmic manipulation, and growing illiberal consumer resistance—according to which the market increasingly monetizes the conflicts accompanying this polarization and, thereby, reinforces it. I call this new logic a conflict market and illustrate it through three, historically situated and currently conflicting, consumer ideoscapes—the neoblue, the neogreen, and the neobrown—between which consumers engage in marketized conflicts, not in a de-politicizing way, but in an increasingly un-politicizing, de-dialectical, and polarizing way. At the technologically manipulated conflict market, the role of marketers is to monetize politically sensitive topics by creating conflict, knowingly renouncing large groups of consumers, and giving fodder to the political extremes.

The Practical Origins of Ideas

Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? In The Practical Origins of Ideas, Matthieu Queloz presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts across the analytic–continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having.