The Introduction sets out the argument of the book, and distinguishes the approach taken from those of Louis Althusser and Daniel Brudney. It offers a preliminary assessment of the difference made by reading Marx’s project as that of the actualization of philosophy, and of the implications for understanding his relationship to his philosophical predecessors.

This chapter examines the unstable intellectual situation of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, in which an abstract conception of the Hegelian subject–object that had allegedly been naturalized by Feuerbach into the pair human–nature jostles, on the one hand, with a recognition on Marx’s part of a historical dimension lacking in Feuerbach but which had already been present in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and, on the other, with an emerging familiarity with radical politics. Marx’s conception of the human as Gattungswesen, the basis of a communism that as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism, is still indebted to that of Feuerbach. At the same time, he is developing his own conception of the human that resolutely carries Aristotle’s theory of soul through into the case of rational soul where Aristotle himself suffered a failure of nerve.

Few historians would associate Nicole Loraux with the great Marxist historians who wrote on classical antiquity. Nevertheless, Loraux implicitly presented herself as such, when, in 1981 and, again, in 1993, she made ideology and the imaginary central notions in her work on the funeral oration. This chapter investigates the complex uses of these two ‘re-invented’ notions in The Invention of Athens. In particular, it situates the career of Nicole Loraux within her rich intellectual milieu and teases out how she broke from it. This encompassed Classical Studies because The Invention of Athens, by moving the object of study to the imaginary, was clearly responding to some Marxist readings of antiquity, such as those of Moses Finley and the Italian School. But this milieu also included the French intellectual scene because Loraux, in fact, was always engaged in a dialogue with philosophers and anthropologists, such as Louis Althusser, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis and Pierre Clastres.

The chapter suggests that personal data law includes contradictory views of personhood because it presupposes an autonomous person but a non-autonomous person is also protected.

This introductory chapter lays out the conceptual framework and main argument of the book. It begins by critiquing some existing approaches to understanding Middle Eastern regional order before explicating the concepts of competitive support-seeking and ideological externalisation. An understanding of these principles requires a broader and deeper conception of the state and its ideological apparatus than that normally employed in IR. The chapter advances such a concept, drawing in particular on the work of Marxist theorists Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. The final parts of the chapter provide an overview of how Middle Eastern states have contributed to the formation of regional order since the end of the First World War.