Ethical thought typically aims to provide a general account of the good. This essay explores a form of localized ethical attention through British Romantic writing that eschews that aspiration, privileging individual cases in all their detail and particularity. This form, which I term “microethics,” is small in two senses, permitting extremely close observation of individual cases and limiting itself to equally small conclusions. It is most recognizable in poetry but recurs across fiction, drama, and philosophical prose. Considering such thinking allows us to assess and extend recent arguments for the value of Romanticism's small and marginal forms. While Romantic microethics develops in opposition to emerging utilitarian thought and the politically repressive conditions of the 1790s, it anticipates a range of later forms, from Adorno's ethical fragments to deconstruction to anthropological method. At once literary and philosophical, it binds both writing and reading practices to acts of singular attention.

A central, secularizing plot of John Milton's Paradise Regained is the dissolution of Satan. As the Son passes from scriptural figure to reality, Satan is gradually reduced from mythological character to metaphor. While both the demythologization of evil and the explanation of religious concepts as metaphor have long histories as central examples of secularization and of the liberalization of religion, theorists from the political-theological right (e.g., Carl Schmitt) and postsecularist left (e.g., Talal Asad) have called attention to the analogies that can be drawn between apparently secular concepts and stories and earlier, religious doctrines and myths, claiming that such analogies call into question the legitimacy and distinctiveness of the secular. Against those critiques, I argue that secularization stories can be distinguished from religious narrative, albeit not for their naturalism, their liberalism, their rationalism, or other doctrinal content. Rather, they force us to face their own constructed, literary qualities.

Yael Farber's Molora blends themes from the Oresteia, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Xhosa folk singing to produce an aspirational vision for an equitable postapartheid South Africa. This blending draws on ubuntu ethics—the living philosophy that holds that subjects become properly human only through their interaction with others and a commitment to making the world better—by combining these cultural forms and signs without hierarchically privileging any. Farber's revision of the plotline of the Oresteia emphasizes human community because the chorus of Xhosa women collectively introduce order and justice, as opposed to the imposition of order and justice by Athena in Aeschylus's play. The chorus protects Elektra and Orestes from violence and offers them—as well as Klytemnestra—the chance to return to a human community through forgiveness and the renunciation of violence. This is precisely ubuntu's aspiration.

W. E. B. Du Bois's novel Dark Princess (1928) has become a paradigmatic text for left internationalism and Afro-Asian solidarity. Du Bois's hybrid progressivism enchants the American welfare state by giving it an intellectual genealogy that emphasizes Eastern political thought. Dark Princess engages with the Arthashastra, an ancient work of political theory that was ostensibly written by the chief adviser to Chandragupta, who unified the Indian subcontinent. The Arthashastra, and the legend concerning its composition, stimulated a Du Boisian fantasy of global leadership, one that parallels the contemporary recuperation of the Arthashastra for power politics. However, the Arthashastra's discussion of social programs and infrastructure also introduces the concept of the welfare state. Interweaving the Arthashastra with Black life in Chicago, Du Bois gives the progressive activist Sara Andrews a surprising agency. Today the most important aspect of Dark Princess is its vision of an antiracist and culturally syncretic New Deal.