Chapter 6 expands on African legal cosmologies by demonstrating what it is that the world has missed out on by not incorporating customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms from the Global South much earlier into the jurisprudence on sustainable development. The different senses of the legal dimensions of the concept of sustainable development as embedded in non-positivist legal traditions and thinking about law differently have tremendous potential to ensure that the sustainable development becomes effectively local, a concern that must engage the attention of international law scholars. This is where eco-legal philosophies and ecological integrity interact to found ecological law which involves reorganising the law–ecology nexus by retrenching the overbearing dominance of Eurocentric law on the planetary community and its disproportionate dominance in the humanity–nature nexus. In this respect, the renewed normativity of sustainable development as ecological integrity recalibrates law as a subset of a universal whole where law is appropriately located within, and not external to, nature. This remedial task is made possible by forging a beneficial interconnection between customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms guided by the awareness that sustainable development reflects legal pluriversality and a significant feature of alternative legal ontologies.

Why educate? This question has been considered throughout history and around the world. Many reasons and rationales have been proposed. Some are overlapping, while others are competing. Considering why to educate is important for considering how to educate: that is, what policies, curriculum, and pedagogy to use, in relation to purposes. This chapter discusses some of the major frameworks underpinning various educational practices that have taken place historically and today. The aim is to elaborate ethical frameworks as they relate to justifications for educational practices, before giving some examples to clarify and demonstrate how choices among frameworks make a difference in relation to practice. Additionally, the chapter considers some of the noteworthy limitations of each.

In what sense is language social? I suggest we distinguish two questions here: First, what degree of social interaction is essential to constituting someone as a language-user? Second, what degree of agreement in meanings must language involve? Each of these questions may be given individualist, interpersonalist, or communitarian answers – not necessarily the same to both. For instance, Davidson is an interpersonalist concerning the first question and an individualist concerning the second. Kripke’s “skeptical solution” is commonly taken to imply a communitarian answer to both of these questions, but in the present chapter I argue that, despite its differences with Davidson’s view of language, it is compatible with constitutive interpersonalism and meaning-individualism. While it may seem as though a genuinely communitarian answer to the first question would imply communitarianism about the second as well, I close the chapter by suggesting that this is not as obvious as it seems.

This chapter argues that looking at how Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler approached the state of nature brings to the fore where the two political leaders converge and where they diverge. Sharing a belief in the existence of a quasi-Hobbesian state of nature, they disagree how to respond politically to that state of nature. Whereas Hitler thought that domestically the state of nature could be overcome through a strong state and through strong communitarian bonds holding people together, and whereas internationally he believed peoples simply had to live with the continued existence of an unregulated state of nature, Trump’s conclusions are different. He puts little faith in the existence of the state. Yet he believes that both domestically and internationally the state of nature can be tamed through an intricate web of power relationships within groups as well as between groups that creates a relatively stable system. Trump is part of two quintessential American traditions rather than of fascism: the Mafia subculture of New York City and the extreme individualism of Ayn Rand. The concept of fascism thus ultimately distorts our understanding of today’s America.

This chapter argues that Jewish philosophers throughout the ages have tended toward an epistemology that might be described as “communitarian.” To that end, it explores three key notions at the heart of Jewish epistemology: knowledge by testimony, corporate knowledge, and epistemic rootedness. These notions are mined from the Hebrew Bible in conversation with Rabbinic commentaries and two great medieval philosophers, Rabbi Yehuda Halevy and Maimonides. In contemporary times, a number of philosophers have described themselves as communitarian epistemologists. This chapter argues that they might more aptly be described as communist epistemologists, and that Jewish thought is a better guide to how a communitarian epistemology might look.

The US is often placed within a liberal-utilitarian model and the EU is often positioned within a social model. In corporate law theory, this distinction is presented as contractarianism versus communitarianism. The latter has traditionally represented the EU’s approach to corporate regulation, while the former represents the US approach. Rather than adhere to such neat divisions and other binary choices such as regulatory models versus voluntarist models such as the corporate social responsibility model, this chapter argues that the true resolution of difficulties associated with capitalism lies in the development of a new theoretical framework driven by an ethical challenge to those acting behind the corporate veil or under its shadow. This chapter exhorts that if we move on from binary divisions and present a meaningful ethical challenge to corporate actors such as shareholders and management, we can ensure better outcomes.

Human dignity is a contested concept. While “dignity as autonomy” reflects universalist liberal egalitarianism, “dignity as status”refers to an aspect of social relationship within a hierarchically ordered society. While all citizens have inherent dignity, individuals occupying certain offices or attaining certain accomplishments may enjoy special dignity, in the form of privileges and immunities. This is evident in Singapore, where the government promotes relational constitutionalism, which seeks to secure rights while sustaining durable relationships and solidarity within an ethnically and religiously diverse polity. While dignity is not an explicit constitutional value, this chapter explores how it is apprehended as a public value. The government has endorsed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirms human dignity as foundational. It considers how human dignity has been invoked before and beyond the courts, examining how the concept and cognates like honor, integrity, benevolence and virtue shape each other. Particular attention is paid to how human dignity is shaped as manifest in laws regulating political defamation and the treatment of migrant workers.

We move now to more familiar terrain. Throughout the history of International Relations as a field, the state has been the primary security referent of concern. In this chapter – as in the previous one and the next two – I will start by clarifying the referent conceptually, then proceed to assess the kind and degree of value it has (if any), identify prominent threats to it, and discuss which of those threats are worthy of what level of investment in security.

In 1924, a wealthy New York philanthropist, Dorothy Straight (née Elmhirst), married a Yorkshire-born agricultural economist, Leonard Elmhirst. The First World War had made both of them question the self-oriented, market-driven doctrine of laissez-faire liberalism that underpinned the Western world. ‘I found that the bottom of life had dropped out,’ Leonard Elmhirst wrote, ‘and that the old beliefs could not stand the test’. Both wanted to dedicate themselves to creating a community apart from mainstream society, where a better mode of holistically integrated, democratic living could be pioneered. In 1925 they bought a run-down estate in South Devon, Dartington Hall, and began a social, cultural and education experiment that they hoped would ‘set the pace’ for Britain and the rest of the world. They devoted the rest of their lives to this project, which became one of the best-known and most influential of the many small-scale interwar utopian experiments.

What does it mean for politics that human beings have transitioned, or are still transitioning, from the Holocene to the Anthropocene? The latter marks the rise of a new political actor, namely humanity as a whole. Although the disruption of the Earth System was not the result of a conscious decision, securing the habitability of the planet requires a concerted effort on the part of living humans. This chapter suggests that the shared vulnerability of human beings on an increasingly unstable planet may encourage a new self-understanding of the species as a global political agent. In the meantime, three approaches to the Anthropocene can be distinguished: liberal democracy, eco-authoritarianism, and green communitarianism. None of them is being globally implemented, and it would be naive to expect otherwise. They will most likely coexist in the future, thus expressing in different ways the common will to face the dangers of the Anthropocene.

Notwithstanding his reputation in the contemporary United States as a sort of political conservative, Tocqueville in his own lifetime was very much a figure of the centrist-left. In the French politics of his day, Tocqueville was closely associated with various causes of reform, most notably the abolition of slavery. In this chapter, Robert T. Gannett, Jr. reminds us that Tocqueville’s calls for decisive action and concerns with social reform were appreciated by many figures on the political Left in the twentieth century. These Left interpreters of Tocqueville range from postwar intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Albert Salomon to latter-day communitarian thinkers such as Robert Putnam and William Galston to community organizers such as Saul Alinsky and Gene Sharp. Gannett reveals how Tocqueville plays a major role in the writings of Alinsky and Sharp and thus indirectly shaped the theory and practice of community organizing as it has come to be known in the United States and throughout the world.

Emanuel Adler’s 1997 article ‘Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics’ is the most highly cited effort to position constructivism on a terrain between the dominant mainstream theories of neorealism and neoliberalism and their critical theoretic challengers. More than this, it is a constellation point for ideas Adler had advanced in earlier writings, and that he would develop to great effect over the coming two decades, most notably in his magnum opus, A Social Theory of Cognitive Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). This chapter explores the difficulties of holding the middle ground through a reading of Emanuel’s writings over the past three decades. I draw a distinction between two different approaches to seizing the middle ground, which I term, for want of better words, singular and dualist. The former, as part one details, is found in Martin Wight’s tripartite distinction between realism, rationalism, and revolutionism. This distinction is noteworthy because it is at once a typology of different ontological positions, arraying theories with very different assumptions about the nature of the political universe, and a classification of different views of the potential for normative change, or progress. The second, dualist approach separates questions of ontology from those of progress, imagining two middle grounds. Exemplified in Alder’s work, the first middle ground is between the ideal and the material and the individual and structural. But when Adler discusses progress, which is a prominent and enduring theme in his work, he introduces a second, less remarked upon, middle ground. In his early work he called this position ‘humanist realism’, locating it between stasis, on the one hand, and utopianism, on the other. The difficulties of holding the middle ground in singular approaches is apparent in Hedley Bull’s constant back and forth over the relative priority of the values of order and justice, a relationship central to rationalism’s location between realism and revolutionism. The difficulties of the dualist approach are evident in Emanuel’s shifting reconciliations between his two middle grounds. In his early work, reconciliation was to come through a condominium between constructivism and communitarian normative theory. In his most recent work, it comes through the concept of practice. Neither of these reconciliations are entirely satisfactory, however, and I conclude by suggesting three possible ways of better combining the ontological and the normative.

This chapter uses Adler’s analysis of power to unpack his political and explanatory theory by making two claims. First, Adler’s understanding of power accentuates the agentic components of power – and hence order – and downgrades the role of domination in social order. Whereas his ontology would allow for a wider conception, his communitarian political theory does not. Second, in his explanatory theory, power (as ‘epistemic practical authority’) becomes a central cause for understanding the evolution of social orders. Yet, assuming evolution to be constituted by contingent and contextual processes that remain indeterminate, epistemic practical authority cannot carry this causal weight.

Richard A. Musgrave (1910-2007) is the architect of modern public finance. Born and educated in Germany, Musgrave was a widely read scholar who fought attempts to narrow the scope and methods of economics. He had always been critical of what we now call welfarism, and more generally of strict methodological individualism. This chapter reviews the history of Musgrave’s connection with the idea of community. Musgrave’s limited opening – often implicit – for the idea of community provides a basis for an alternative conception of welfare. He realised the importance of a social or communal frame late in his life and left cursory remarks. Musgrave never fully articulated a coherent vision of what the idea of community belonging might entail for a democratic theory of the government’s budget. Yet, securing an ontological status for societies or communities allowed him to theorise a larger scope for public interventions than other economic models of the state. It provided a new meaning to his concept of merit wants. Reframing merit wants as ‘community wants’ is explained by the revival of moral and political philosophy in the 1970s and revisiting older German theories.