The Introduction reviews the widely shared understanding of Schopenhauer as an apolitical thinker. It then articulates the challenge to this view. Schopenhauer, this book argues, defined politics as the rational management of perpetual human strife. The Introduction lays out the two main steps for recovering the full scope of Schopenhauer’s political thought. First, his attitude to politics must be historically contextualized. Against the backdrop of his era and the political ideas of other thinkers, the individual profile and polemical significance of Schopenhauer’s conception of politics come into view more clearly. Second, his textually dispersed political ideas must be assembled into a recognizable whole. Many of Schopenhauer’s reflections on political skills, values, ideologies, and regimes can be found in sections that do not explicitly deal with politics, and his core conception of politics becomes visible through a series of contrasts between politics and religion, politics and morality, and politics and sociability.

A philosophical account of worship will answer at least two questions: the constitutive question of what worship is, and the normative question of what normative standards govern worship. The questions are related because what normative standards govern worship depends on whether worship consists primarily of some attitude or some action. This chapter briefly surveys the theoretical terrain of answers to these questions, with special attention to identifying the minimal conditions under which worship is fitting or supported by reasons.

The conclusion reviews Schopenhauer’s conception of politics as the management of human strife. For Schopenhauer, politics was both indispensable and insufficient: rational political coordination can prevent society from descending into a chaos of mutual aggression, but because rationality itself is limited and metaphysically subordinate, it cannot redeem a fundamentally broken world. Schopenhauer’s attitudes – a sincere sensitivity to human and animal suffering, an uncompromising commitment to frank philosophizing, but also a fearful antidemocratic and anti-emancipatory view of society – place him outside the major ideologies of the modern age, such as liberalism, libertarianism, progressivism, and conservatism.

Production rather than preferences should play the leading role in the theory of markets, as in the book’s analysis of volatility and policymaking. Production is not only the fount of social wealth, it is organized by firms whose decisions are guided by a clear ordering principle, their profitability. There is moreover an institution, the market, that can weed out the firms that fail to pursue profits effectively. But the purging of inefficiency by the market confronts policymakers with the dilemmas of Schumpeterian creative destruction. Policies that compensate firms and their owners for any declines in profitability will also dampen the threat of bankruptcy; the enforcement of productive efficiency can require unfettered competition. An application to international trade illustrates some of the challenges: For foreign competition to lead to productive efficiency, domestic prices must be aligned with world prices, which will push some firms into liquidation.

Individuals can rationally pursue their interests without the preferences and marginal utilities that have long taken center stage in economics. Economics without preferences lays out the microeconomics of individual behavior, markets, and welfare when agents cannot always come to judgment. Although economic theory has claimed that self-interest requires agents to form preferences, individuals can protect themselves from harm by refusing to trade options they cannot rank. Many of the anomalies uncovered by behavioral economics – from status quo bias to loss aversion – thus have a rationality design. The absence of preferences also resolves the puzzle that classical economic agents are almost never indifferent between options whereas real-world agents often are. When individuals cannot judge trade-offs, gaps appear between the marginal valuations of gains and losses. These gaps explain why market prices can be volatile and render orthodox efficiency criteria indecisive. Policymakers will no longer be able to pin down an optimal provision of public goods. Traditional schemes that try to harness preference information to compensate agents harmed by economic change will allow virtually any decision to qualify as efficient. Governments should instead spur productivity growth, the main benefit capitalism can deliver, while shielding agents from the price upheavals that result.

The chapter examines the impact of human imprinting on Nature, blurring the boundaries between humans and Nature and diminishing human freedom. Enlightenment ideals granted individuals rationality, emphasizing their will in the realms of science and politics, enabling them to differentiate absolute truth from human-dependent matters. The blurred boundaries challenge rationality as a measure of norms and erode commonsense – the shared understanding of how the political system operates and the comprehension of causality. These developments lead to the “loss of the subject” and threaten the perception of the individual as an autonomous political agent. The erosion of the dualistic cosmology is also due to feminist theories arguing that women were wrongly placed within the realm of Nature rather than Culture. Similarly, postcolonial perspectives contend that Indigenous peoples were dehumanized and considered part of Nature under the dichotomous cosmology. In the postmodern era, there is a tendency towards hybridization and interactive dynamics. Ezrahi asserts that democracies in a hybrid world require “human-like” judgments from machines and algorithms, necessitating an examination of the intentions and interests of their designers. The question that needs to be asked is whether “humanized machines” serve the interests of a politics of freedom.

This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for separation of powers and federalism. It suggests that some major structural questions, such as the long-running debate over the president’s authority to fire or “remove” executive officers, hold an intensity out of step with their current political stakes. By contrast, other recent decisions, particularly those limiting agency authority over “major” policy questions and intensively reviewing the reasoned justification for certain policies, threaten to enable selective judicial disapproval of policies favored by progressives rather than conservatives. A preference for symmetry should support limiting or reconsidering these decisions. With respect to federalism, symmetry should likewise encourage the development of doctrines that grant parallel opportunities and protections to rival “red” and “blue” states dominated by either the Democratic or Republican Party.

Chapter 3 uses the letters of Gregorios Antiochos to explore the scholar’s body. Antiochos, who experienced chronic illness from a young age, combined his own bodily feeling with gender discourses to create a subversive image of the scholar which challenged ideals of military masculinity. He juxtaposed the strong body of the soldier, forged through physical exercise, to the frail body of the learned man hunched over his books, and declared his preference for the latter. He also expressed his own relationship with books and the furniture that facilitated his scholarly work, in disability terms: his cane, staff, armrest and guides. When at points the connection with scholarship was severed, Antiochos felt truly disabled. A body in crisis emerged that was assailed by unwanted becomings, prime among them the possibility of becoming-horse and losing his rationality. Despite this emphasis on reason, speech and self-determination, Antiochos’ letters present us with unexpected configurations of human and non-human bodies which blur the lines between organic and inorganic and help decentre man. In doing so, they posit the Eastern Roman scholar with his books and study furniture as a kind of antipode to the Western knight and his horse.