Chapter 4 presents the epoch of technē, which is marked by the play of the fickleness of nature, luck (tuchē) and the fragility of early human stratagems. Technē is both a means of controlling the world, as well as one of violence. Indicated by humble and pre-scientific inventions such as the almanack, they allow little gains to be wrest from an otherwise unforgiving surround by knowing when to sow or harvest in accordance with the almanack’s alignment of experiential, mythical and cosmological clues. The epoch of technē is characterized by an intimacy between humans and their surroundings, the term planning itself finding its roots in the way in which seedlings are pushed into the ground by a farmer’s foot. But there is also violence; both imposed on the human body, whose shape is bent and twisted, ground down and severed by the acts of labour and the growing numbers of devices that extend human reach; as well upon nature, which becomes a place in need of taming and cultivating; cutting, slicing, ploughing, killing and using.

Chapter 6 reaches the end of our foray into Heidegger’s analysis of technology. The chapter examines Sloan’s memoirs of General Motors and identifies a cybernetic fantasy of control in the ghost-written account, laid bare by the increasing inability of technological systems to reveal anything; and where humans are not even the ordinary fabricators anymore, the earth merely becomes a globe, that is gridded and dug over. The invention of the radio that for Heidegger heralded an epoch of the nearness of the distant and the gigantic, soon eclipsed any real nearness to being and to the world (and so also the possibility of pluralistic appearances in spaces such as the polis), was itself soon itself eclipsed by technologies no longer need to bring ‘any-thing’ near, where things and pictures and meaning and desires and ends are giving way to patterns and correlations; the cycles of the Gestell become one continual switching (there ‘is’ nothing as such to extract, unlock, store etc.., save for information).

J. M. Coetzee is widely recognised as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of post-colonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Austin, Texas). This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee’s project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee’s false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

Meaning of life and technology are not normally theorized together. But once we realize that all human activity is always technologically mediated, we see that any acts in pursuit of personal significance, too, are so mediated. However, this point then opens the possibility that technology enters the quest for meaning the wrong way. This chapter explores what that possibility means and how to respond to it. I use as my starting point Nozick’s proposal for how to think about the meaning of life. Nozick’s account makes central the idea of “limited transcendence,” essentially folding the kind of transcendence normally involved in interaction with divinity into a finite life. Nozick’s high-altitude view does not make sufficiently clear how technology enters. But once we bring in additional ideas from Ihde and Arendt, we can see clearly how it does. Next, we turn to Wiener’s classic God & Golem. Wiener is concerned with “gadget worshippers,” people who surrender control over their lives to machines in ways that are not appropriate to what these machines can do. Working with this notion, we can throw light on how technology can enter into the quest for meaning the wrong way and offer advice for how to counterbalance this challenge.

Building on ideas experimentally developed in revolutionary practice and elaborated in the works of Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis, and others, this chapter develops the contours of a new – grounded and pluralist – understanding of revolution that does not subordinate the radical democratic practices in the “here and now” to some future project, but, rather, grounds revolution precisely in this “here and now”. The radical-democratic potential of revolution, which is evidenced in contemporary movements and struggles of migrants and indigenous peoples, is tied to its internal heterogeneity and ambivalence that needs to be preserved against the urge of homogenizing its subject, its practices, its aims and its trajectories. As the chapter argues, it is precisely the revolutionary and democratic potential of the apparently marginal – as exemplified, amongst others, in the struggles of migrants and indigenous peoples today – that allows us to see that revolutionary practices are essentially practices of enacting radical democracy “here and now”.

We discuss the broad organizational power-structures that regulate the virtues of doing science, the values upheld, and the introduction of novices into the scientific community. Aristotle’s scheme of knowledge is used to introduce the relevance of a value-laden praxis, of phronesis, which is the virtue of ‘doing’. We discuss these ideological issues in the context of classic philosophical notions put forth by Hannah Arendt (and her work on action) and Bruno Latour (and his work on praxis, actor networks, and inscription devices). This chapter thus serves as a broad foundation for analyses of the ways in which scientific virtues are deeply intertwined with the activities of psychological science. It sketches psychology as action-based and virtue-laden, based on the notion of a dynamic praxis consisting of interacting agents.

Tyranny’s lengthy history in European debate lends itself to a linear narrative, and this chapter inserts, into that frame, debates over tyranny from archaic Greece to the contemporary era. Linearity often presents a false picture of continuity, progression and coherence, none of which can be bestowed upon tyranny. Rather, there are controversies and contingencies: the rise and fall of empires, the emergence of the Catholic Church, colonialism, constitutionalism, democracy and individual and collective roles contribute to contemporary tyranny’s complexity. Progressing through a history of Western thought – including its imperialism – highlights how changing attitudes towards governance affected accounts of tyranny. This account reveals how Roman hatred of monarchs, attitudes towards gender, the invention of race, the emergence of contemporary democracy and consequent concerns over majority tyranny demonstrate a consistent concern built into a European tyrannical theory subsequently projected onto the rest of the world.

In this chapter, I explore the topic of the economic rights of non-citizens through the lens of the history of philosophy. I make two different but interconnected arguments in this chapter. In the first part of the chapter, I examine the claims made by John Locke, Adam Smith, and Friedrich von Hayek that a well-regulated market, supplemented by robust government support, is necessary for the realization of basic economic rights. Though the views of Locke, Smith, and Hayek are important in understanding how economic rights can be realized and the role the state should play in this, they do not directly address what this might mean for non-citizens. I suggest in the next part that their views must be supplemented by the work of Hannah Arendt and her concept of the right to have rights. I suggest that her argument that the right to have rights is more fundamental than human rights can be extended to economic rights. Non-citizens need a right to have economic rights, that is, a right to belong to an economic community. I conclude by discussing the example of refugees in the Global South and some ways that we might support a right to have economic rights.

This chapter considers the place of the desert in relation, following Nietzsche and Heidegger, to the character of human development in the modern era – “the wasteland grows; woe to him who hides wastelands within”. It looks at Heidegger’s concern with technology and language, or the way technological progress has reduced language to “idle talk”, against which the only adequate resistance, as Heidegger saw in Hölderlin, is a rebirth of the poetic. It then looks at how language interconnects with politics and science through the work of Hannah Arendt, and her distinctions between labour, work, and action in The Human Condition. Here recovering language from the colonization of science, technology and mass data begins by restoring the forms of political discourse qua speech, which in turns requires dispensing with what Uwe Poerksen calls “plastic words” that professionalize, institutionalize and modularize language. The chapter concludes these thoughts by returning to Heidegger’s question of poetry, and specifically to words by Matthew Arnold, where the desert that is in our words might become our saving power.

"Compositions of the Crowds of Modernism" gives a preliminary assessment of modernist crowds’ of-what and with-what, that is, the experimental taxonomies and relations of collective life as composed in fiction by writers such as Conrad, Woolf, and H.G. Wells. The chapter describes some of the terrains and territories of modern crowds, including the structures and political ecologies within which mass societies were forming and to which modernist literatures respond. It enlists concepts such as equal relations, virtuality, and crowd symbols to understand the twentieth century’s disruptive struggles over inherited and established identities such as nation, gender, class, or race.

Justice is a political value that holds across reasonable comprehensive doctrines. I introduce the notion of a frame of human life. For Aristotle, the polis does that job, but nowadays the institutions and practices that do so are embedded into the human web. To call something a “political value” – beyond the generic sense of pertaining to the creation of order – means that it pertains to the design of that frame. Justice is the value of giving each their own within this frame. The political value of distributive justice gives rise to principles of justice, which generate rights and duties. Justice honors the distinctiveness of each within the distinctively human life. That is why the value of distributive justice is the most stringent value. Justice as a value radiates into different domains of practical reasoning in ways that principles, rights, or duties do not. It takes exceptionally strong considerations to offset justice.

Hannah Arendt disapproved of all conceptualisations of popular power in terms of sovereignty. This abolished human plurality by prioritising the need to represent the people as a unitary body having a unitary will. By contrast, politics for Arendt had to be structured around a radically different conceptualisation of popular power, and constituent power served precisely that purpose. Arendt thus aimed to rescue the democratic principle of popular authority by presenting constituent power as a radical alternative to the notion of sovereignty. The former was not a conceptualisation of popular power but its practical instantiation. It did not find its origins in the canon of Western philosophy but in the historical practice of people promising and acting together in the public space. By showcasing the plurality inherent to politics, constituent power testified that popular power does not have to disappear once the political order is created, but must be continuously exercised through the state’s institutional structure. This had to be republican, as the exercise of power would be devolved, via federal structures, to local assemblies. In addition, the state’s foundations would be constantly augmented through procedures of collective constitutional revision and amendment. Constituent power thus ends up being, once more, an alternative to sovereignty.

The first chapter, following the path of Arendt’s work throughout her life, shows how her questions arose from her own experiences, and how her thinking responded to events that eluded or exceeded traditional forms of thought. It argues that the question of the political was an implicit but central concern in all of her writing. Totalitarianism was essentially an anti-political form of government, in her view, which had to be opposed in part through an affirmation of political life. But such an affirmation was difficult, Arendt thought, because Western philosophy had never had a pure concept of the political. So an overarching aim of her thought was to work out a new approach to political theory, an approach that would let her see politics “with eyes unclouded by philosophy.”

The Introduction sets out the questions at stake in the book. It argues that while practical political life is always guided by a pretheoretical understanding of politics, among theorists today there is no common agreement on the question of what politics actually is. The most illuminating response to this question has come from Hannah Arendt, but to fully grasp her response we have to do two things: to make explicit the understanding of politics implicit in her work; and to follow the way of thought by which she reached this understanding.

The third chapter follows Arendt’s approach to the question of the political. She argued that theories of politics have been led astray by several prejudices: that politics is a universal part of human life; that politics is a means to nonpolitical ends; that rule is essential to politics; and that politics is ultimately a struggle for power. In her view, these prejudices distort our view of politics by abstracting the word from the history of the classical polis, which was the origin of the word “politics” and the prime example of a political community. Arendt worked out her concept of the political by retrieving and conceptualizing the nontheoretical understanding of politics implicit in classical literature and history. She argued that the polis excluded relations of rule between citizens; citizens ruled over those excluded from politics (women, children, slaves, foreigners), but that full citizens themselves were not divided into rulers and ruled. Politics, in her view, is a way of being together, based on principles of equality and nonviolence, in which people decide what to do and how to live together through open debate and common deliberation on matters of public concern.

The second chapter lays out Arendt's way of thinking. She appropriated the methods of existential phenomenology she learned from Martin Heidegger, but she used them to work out a distinctly non-Heideggerian concept of the political. In her view, political philosophers had been guided and misguided by the metaphysical assumptions implicit in their most basic questions. Her aim was to “critically dismantle” these metaphysical assumptions in order to grasp and bring to light what had been overlooked or distorted by traditional political philosophy. This chapter lays out the three tasks of thought proper to existential phenomenology – “Destruktion,” “Reduktion,” and “Konstruktion” – and shows how Arendt worked through each task in her critical dismantling of traditional concepts of rule.