The Introduction reflects on Hegel’s unique approach to social and political philosophy, the distance that separates him from other modern thinkers and the contemporary reception of his ideas. Although the charges of conservatism and intolerance raised by Hegel’s early critics have since been discredited, the current tendency to regard him as a social-minded liberal fails to capture the true depth of his political thought. And this failure follows, it is argued, from the tendency to read the Philosophy of Right in a linear or horizontal manner, as a progression in which each dialectical stage is merely completed or expanded by subsequent ones. Introducing the book’s main thesis, the chapter claims that only a vertical reading, which recognizes the progression’s transformative nature, can do justice to Hegel’s overall argument. Moreover, anticipating the critical reconstruction of the Philosophy of Right undertaken in the book’s second part, it is claimed that such a reading leads beyond Hegel’s own political and economic views, towards a more progressive vision of modern society.

The Conclusion offers a brief recapitulation of the book’s main argument, highlighting its critical and reconstructive components. First, the criticism of the liberal reading that has come to dominate Hegelian scholarship is reiterated. The rational state envisioned in the Philosophy of Right, grounded in a dialectical synthesis of the particular and the universal dimensions of human freedom, is irreducible to the liberal state found today in most democratic nations. Second, the chapter insists on the need to move beyond Hegel’s own political and economic choices in order to bring out the true implications of his views. As argued throughout the book, only a fully democratic state, in which political and economic power are shared among all the citizens, can be deemed rational, in Hegelian terms. Finally, it is suggested that this alternative reading is not only more faithful to Hegel’s philosophical vision, but also more relevant for contemporary critical theory.

Chapter 5 discusses the economic structure of a rational state. Anticipating Marx’s critique of capitalism, Hegel associates the maximization of self-interest promoted by the modern market to an inconsistent and ultimately irrational conception of freedom. He argues that the elevation of freedom to a rational form requires not merely a readjustment of the economic sphere, but a change of paradigm, and this change is entrusted to a system of professional corporations in which competition is replaced by cooperation and trust. Yet although these groups can help mitigate capitalism’s worst excesses, they are not up to the conceptual role Hegel wants them to play. This does not mean, however, that his associative strategy cannot be successfully revived. The chapter’s final section shows that a rational economic sphere implies not only the common ownership of society’s productive resources, but also the democratization of the productive sphere. Drawing on the market socialist tradition, it is suggested that the corporations can be fruitfully reconstructed as worker-directed enterprises, capable of recapturing their communal spirit while avoiding their main limitations.

This chapter takes up a theme that has underlain all previous chapters: were these men capitalists or how are they positioned in the history of capitalism? It also explores the question of whether these merchants formed a class and, if so, in what sense. I argue that they did form a class based on their role in the economy, but that their identity was fashioned by drawing on other ideological registers as well. The complex “class identity” they constructed allowed them entry into their period’s moral economy. It also provided later merchants with a model that would enable a narrative about their own self-worth.

This notebook contains some of the ideas, ambitions, hopes, anxieties, interrogations, and fears that randomly or expectingly came to punctuate the writing of the previous chapters.

This chapter discusses the relation of global extractivisms to global deforestation, making novel claims about the role of forests in the international system. This is a global, world-ecological analysis of why forests seem to have not mattered in the interstate system and how they are still overlooked in favor of a free flow of commodity trade and interstate competition. The impacts of the world system on forests are explored over the past 5,000 years, focusing especially on the past 550 years. “Epochal moments,” for example, wars or events like the COVID-19 pandemic, are particularly detrimental to retaining the world’s old-growth forests. One should avoid overgeneralizations of how global capitalism or humanity (as the “Anthropocene”) drive deforestation. Thus, the chapter utilizes a long-term, world-system perspective, focusing on how the current structures of the world-system drive deforestation. The chapter uncovers how the nature of the interstate system affects the efforts by global environmental governance and other means to try to curb or control deforestation. This curbing is fundamentally restricted by the lobbying and political power of RDPEs.

This book analyzes the role of different political economic sectors that drive deforestation and clearcutting, including mining, ranching, export-oriented plantation agriculture, and forestry. The book examines the key actors, systems, and technologies behind the worsening climate/biodiversity crises that are aggravated by deforestation. The book is theoretically innovative, uniting political economic, sociological, political ecologic, and transdisciplinary theories on the politics of extraction. The research relies on the author’s multi-sited political ethnography, including field research, interviews, and other approaches, across multiple frontiers of deforestation, focusing on Brazil, Peru, and Finland. Why do key global extractivist sectors continue to expand via deforestation and what are the differences between sectors and regions? The hypothesis is that regionally and sometimes nationally dominant politically powerful economic sectors are major explanatory factors for if, how, and where deforestation occurs. To address the deepening global crises, it is essential to understand these power relations within different types of deforesting extractivisms.

Conclusion: The book ends by reflecting on the boundaries of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in the context of maritime writing and the range of texts that render the different forms of lived experience associated with seafaring. It restates the book’s focus on the everyday global sea of the long nineteenth century that shaped the lives, labour practices, and imaginative worlds of working-class individuals and their families.

This chapter maps out the trajectory of British postmodern fiction in three specific phases: a gradual emergence characterised by slowly increasing textual experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s; a second phase notable for a high level of fictional critique of the political and economic order in the 1980s and 1990s; and a third period in the early twenty-first century, by which point both the techniques and ideas associated with postmodern literature had become so commonplace that they could no longer be considered critically oppositional. In identifying these phases, the chapter departs from Fredric Jameson’s famous suggestion that postmodernism embodies the cultural logic of late capitalism and is therefore completely unable to generate any effective criticism of the dominant ideology of global capitalist societies and shows that at its height British postmodern fiction constituted a genuinely critical form of writing with regard to that ideology.

This chapter asks: how did notions and practices of individual equality arise out of the growing marketisation and monetarisation of economic production, exchange and consumption?

The introduction initially approaches the topic of money and American literature via key passages from the work of Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison. It then traces three key threads running through the following chapters. Firstly, it considers the close interrelationship between money and ideas of American nationhood: how the unity of the “United States” has been fostered, and unsettled, through monetary initiatives, schemes, and experiments. Next, it addresses the interplay between materiality and immateriality – “real” and “imaginary” forms of value – that has been a persistent topic of debate in American monetary history, as well as the closely related question of money’s deep affinity with writing as a different but connected form of value-bearing inscription. A pivotal, money-themed chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) serves as a case study. The introduction’s final section foregrounds the fundamental question of money’s relation to power and identity: its constitutive role in structures of inequality, exploitation, and marginalization and, in particular, its inextricability – as society’s dominant measure of value – from conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nella Larsen serve to illustrate these ideas.

This chapter argues that antebellum sensationalism, broadly defined, offers a key archive for understanding the emotional life of capitalism. The first half of the chapter examines the period’s two best-selling novels, George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and argues that sensationalism adopts and makes use of the affective excesses of melodrama. The chapter shows how, repeatedly, these and other sensational texts stage characters whose postures of emotional distress reflect a desire for spiritual meaning and social connection that transcends the modern, rational world of capitalism – that which Max Weber famously describes in terms of “disenchantment.” The second half of the chapter turns to urban sensationalism. Here, the chapter contends that most of these popular texts revolve around a sentimental logic whereby the tears of the financially distressed act as the markers of middle-class sensibility. Affect thus becomes an alternate currency. The chapter concludes with the most canonical example of urban sensation fiction: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). The argument here is that “Bartleby” turns the emotional registers of sensationalism inside out. For though Bartleby is the melodramatic and sentimental victim of capitalism and disenchantment, he also rejects the emotional gestures of these genres.