Chapter 3 focuses on Hegel’s critique of liberalism. It starts by discussing the preface to the Philosophy of Right in order to challenge the widespread assumption that Hegel is averse to robust social criticism. Afterwards, the chapter considers two main causes for the limited recognition of his work’s critical dimension. The first is the tendency to read Hegel’s book as a horizontal progression, fuelled by the accumulation of different aspects or layers of freedom. This kind of approach misrepresents the qualitative transformation that is at stake in the transition from civil society to the state, which only a vertical reading can adequately convey. Second, the Philosophy of Right’s critical import has also been obfuscated by some of Hegel’s own philosophical positions. Despite his intended sublation of the stage of civil society, his account of the state remains wedded, in important ways, to the former’s underlying logic. As the chapter seeks to show, if we accept Hegel’s claim that a rational state must synthesize the particular and the universal dimensions of human freedom, we must reject some of his political options as partly or wholly un-Hegelian.

We model discrete-time dynamical systems using a specific class of lenses between polynomials whose domains are equipped with a bijection between their positions and their directions. We introduce Moore machines and deterministic state automata as key examples, showing how these morphisms describe state transitions and interactions. We also explain how to build new dynamical systems from existing ones using operations like products, parallel composition, and compositions of these maps. This chapter demonstrates how polynomial functors can be used to represent and analyze discrete-time dynamical behavior in a clear, structured way.

Chapter 4 reassesses Hegel’s views on property and its role within a rational state. In the Philosophy of Right’s initial stage, devoted to ‘abstract right’, each person is defined as an independent legal agent, with the right to own and exchange property. From this standpoint, the political sphere is but a prolongation of the legal sphere and the state is reduced to an external authority, charged with regulating existing property relations. As the progression unfolds, however, this legalistic framework is called into question: it turns out that individual rights are not the true foundation of the state, but a part thereof, subordinated to a wider commitment to the common good. Yet while this commitment is clearly affirmed by Hegel, it is at odds with the priority he accords to private property, in the progression’s later stages, over other forms of ownership. Taking a different path, the chapter argues that a Hegelian theory of property entails a critical revision of Hegel’s actual treatment of property rights. If the state is to bring together the citizens’ particular interests and the common good, the ownership of society’s productive resources must be shared by all of its members.

This chapter explores how the ranching-grabbing RDPE is supported by moral economic changes, which in this context is veneration for the cowboy lifestyle and scorn of traditional/Indigenous livelihoods. The cowboy lifestyle is often seen in a positive light, despite the violence that accompanies forest removal. These changes in the moral economy help to explain how locals increasingly welcome ranching-land speculation, even inside multiple-use conservation areas. Another key factor in deforestation processes are the policies and infrastructure investment decisions made at the federal and state level, which render large areas available for appropriation. These problems are also international, as groups expanding deforestation are still often funded by international banks, creating investment lock-in, as investors are more interested in preserving returns on investments than curbing illegalities. Simultaneously, there is a wide variety of activists in local communities who are resisting these extractivist pushes. The chapter examines where and how Indigenous peoples/forest-dwellers successfully resist land grabbing and clearcutting on their lands.

The Finnish pulp sector is the key actor responsible for the preference for a homogenous clearcut forest economy. This chapter examines the historic roots and global connections related to Finland’s post-2015 so-called bioeconomy boom. This boom prompted the construction of large “bioproduct” mills, which in practice produce export-oriented pulp that will be turned into cardboard and tissue. Finland is transforming from being the core of global paper production to being a semi-commodity producer. Fiber mass production and its accompanying energy production are key in delineating how forests are used, what kind of trees are grown, where, for how long, and based on what logic. The reasons why the pulp-driven forestry strategy and clearcutting model have continued against all logic are explored. This chapter uncovers how the pulp sector became dominant and the effects of the new contentious forest politics in the context of the “bioeconomy” and European Union (EU) legislation.

The chapter recounts the history of the concept of risk and of early modern insurance practices as they evolved from communal attempts, mainly in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, to discipline and commodify earlier forms of speculation. The processes eventually involved in risk assessment, pooling, and diversification were neither inevitable nor entirely capricious. They were complicated and indeterminate, and accommodating structures of government developed in tandem. The chapter also provides an orientation to increasingly complicated scholarship focused on the governance of risk and uncertainty as considerations of their consequences migrate over time and geographic space. It notes how leading business firms around the world, not just in the insurance industry, came to base their strategies on sophisticated models that take for granted commonplace, and even simplistic, notions of risk. Those models are dynamic and they now shape larger structures within which firms and people interact. As collective impressions of risk become more complex, shared sources of uncertainty also rise, often because economic and political systems are misaligned.

History for German idealism is the expression of practical reason, the process of gradually bringing about the accord of subject and object. In Hegel’s conception of the history of freedom, different configurations of ethical life embody changing assessments of the self and the world, and contain essential contradictions whose resolution is the key to progress towards new and more complex forms. The dialectic of the will in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is an exposition of the idea of spontaneity, endowing itself with concrete content as it moves through its dimensions of universality, particularity, and singularity. Hegel demonstrates that modern institutions are not mere limitations, but legitimate conditions for the exercise of freedom. The rationality of the real, however, does not preclude a critical engagement. Close examination of current relations and institutions as exemplifying ideas of freedom reveals nodal points where practical interventions are likely to be fruitful in effecting change. An implicit, historicised ‘ought’ in Hegel, arising from his reworking of the logical categories, marks his place within post-Kantian perfectionism.

The term “school adjustment” refers not only to the state or phenomenological description of a student at a given point in time; it also refers to the process that newcomers experience once they start to make the transition from home to early childhood care or kindergarten; from kindergarten to elementary school; from elementary school to secondary or junior high-school; from secondary school to high school; from any one school to another (e.g., due to parental divorce or immigration); and from high school to institutions of higher education. The state of school adjustment refers to students’ exhibition of expected academic outcomes, expected interpersonal outcomes, a general motivation to learn, and personal outcomes (e.g., positive self-esteem, lack of depressive symptoms). The process of school adjustment is the advancing process by which the students’ readiness and even eagerness to meet the aforementioned criteria of a state of school adjustment gradually emerge. As one of the life-course transitional events, adjustment too school can be articulated by the Stress and Adjustment Model (STA; Israelashvili, 2023).

The textbook Immanuel Kant assigned for his course on Naturrecht was Gottfried Achenwall’s Natural Law. In the Feyerabend transcript of his course (1784), Kant not only explains Achenwall’s text but also criticizes him and expounds his own alternative theory. Since it is not always obvious from the lecture notes whether Kant is explaining Achenwall, criticizing him, or presenting his own theory, one must know the basics about Achenwall’s positions when reading Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. In this essay, we introduce Achenwall and his handbook to readers of Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. We start with some background information and then discuss Achenwall’s position on freedom and obligation, natural law and right, and his theory of property and the state. We end by pointing out a few of the main points of disagreement between Kant and Achenwall that emerge from the Feyerabend lectures.

This chapter traces Qiu Jun’s use of Classical ritual texts, legal debates, and historical cases to discuss the political, emotional, and ritual dilemma of filial revenge, the ancient obligation of a child to avenge a parent’s murder. Legal and ritual precedents are given in order to find a balance between the Confucian tenets embodied in the central virtue of filial piety and ensuing ritual obligations, personal feeling, and popular sympathy, with legal sanctions and imperial power, while also elevating filial revenge to a cosmic principle. His chosen texts and commentaries urge leniency and sympathy and for individual filial revenge cases to be considered at the highest level. I argue that there is a palpable unease at the heart of Qiu’s discourses, in that his lifelong attachment to ritual studies and his filial piety complicate his responses as a loyal minister in handling the perennial problem of filial revenge.

Chapter 23 stresses that four sets of ideas need to be added to the principles and the topics of focus mentioned in Chapter 22. First, neither international order nor national order can be sustainable if the contradiction that exists today between, on the one hand, the celebration of human rights and, on the other hand, the tendency to treat individuals as disposable, deepens or simply persists. Second, the global justice agenda cannot credibly claim to be feasible if it does not factor in the views of the rest of the world. It is imperative to integrate what the non-West thinks. The ownership of a global agenda cannot be lopsided. Third, a cosmopolitan approach does not have to call for the removal or elimination of the state and sovereignty; rather, it is their reconceptualization and the application of this reconceptualization that are recommended. Fourth, institutional innovation will help implement this agenda.

An international authority is necessary for the features of international legitimacy—that is, international membership, rights holding, fundamental principles of international law and hierarchy of rights holding, and rightful conduct—to be identified and operationalized, to become the expression of legitimacy and legitimacy in action internationally. Since the end of World War II, the United Nations (UN) has embodied this international authority. Having been established by the will of states and the UN Charter, the UN serves as the international authority of the time, the framework in which most of the construction and evolution of international law—be it through lawmaking treaties, the resolutions of the UN Security Council, or the work of the UN General Assembly and other UN organs—has taken place since the end of World War II. In the process, it has played a central role in determining what is and is not legitimate in international life.

The issue of international rightful conduct, as an expression of international legitimacy advanced by international law, concerns not only the state and the individual but also international organizations. However, this chapter focuses on the state and the individual because they are particularly significant international rights holders. Due to the hierarchy among international rights holders, with the state at the top, the determination of the rightful conduct of states is a crucial aspect of rightful conduct. This introduces the question: What are the right or legitimate ways for states to behave? The answer to this question is based on the actors with which states interact and toward which they project their power—that is, other states and individuals. Thus, this chapter analyzes the issue of rightful conduct (1) in the setting of interstate relations and (2) in the setting of the attitude of the state toward individuals.

This chapter investigates one-person decision problems under uncertainty. The main building block is that of a conditional preference relation: a mapping that assigns to every belief about the states a preference relation over the decision maker’s choices. Under certain conditions, such a conditional preference relation admits an expected utility representation, which allows us to summarize the conditional preference relation by a finite utility matrix. Throughout the book it is assumed that the conditional preference relation indeed has an expected utility representation.

This chapter wraps up the arguments and delineates possible avenues ahead for central banks. Central banks may become Banks of the State, financing government deficits as they have done recently. This may imply a retreat from central bank independence. With large holdings of public securities in central bank balance sheets, the pressure to finance governments would increase. Another option is for central banks to change their job profile, becoming Banks for Everybody. This would happen if they decided to issue all-purpose retail central bank digital currencies. This would risk weakening private initiative in the payment industry, a sector where private markets have worked well recently. The third avenue is for central banks to remain Banks of the Banks, the dominant model that prevailed until the Great Financial Crisis of 2008–09. Central banks would continue to exert rigorous surveillance and use their regulatory powers to encourage further progress and foster efficiency and stability in the underlying settlement infrastructures. We express support for this line but also highlight some challenges, first and foremost the regulation of crypto assets and the extension of safety nets and central bank competence on “shadow banking,” the growing unregulated segment of financial markets.

The final chapter concludes with broader implications. After recapping how the previous chapters fit together to form a larger window on social control beyond coercion, it scrutinizes the limits of political atomization with a focus on perverse outcomes that result from the accumulated effects of individualization. Next are implications for China for inequality, the economy, migrant welfare and citizenship, and the authoritarian state’s social control toolbox. China is not alone in using political atomization, and a comparative perspective can spur future research on how the phenomenon already exists in not only other developing and authoritarian countries but also in democracies and developed countries. It ends with an examination of inequality and the state, noting that individual-level schemes are no match for systemic deflection and demobilization to address the entrenchment of inequality in social policy.