We introduce the subjects beginning with the early works of Hegel, followed by a description of the emphases provided by Levins and Lewontin in their volume. Then we elaborate on the particularities that become involved in the application to the issues of food and agriculture more generally, and specifically to agroecology. We end the chapter with a discussion of the meaning of agroecology as both a field of intellectual inquiry and a platform for political action.

Guitar shop showrooms are museums of design. As visitors walk by rows of instruments, they encounter a tactile history of popular music. However, shoppers may notice that the majority of electric guitars available in the modern marketplace are strikingly similar. While there are certainly instances of radically new styles, they are outnumbered by instruments that resemble mid-twentieth century designs, such as the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul. This chapter explores moments in electric guitar design history that speak to marketplace tensions between historical consciousness and innovation. There is a widespread belief that the electric guitar was perfected half a century ago. Therefore, new design choices must be in conversation with the past. Success stories—such as Fender’s Custom Shop series—rely upon such historical nods. Design flops—such as Gibson’s “G-Force” automatic tuner—fail because they innovate beyond what buyers are willing to accept. So, is the electric guitar dead, as some commentators have proclaimed? I argue that the instrument is in a persistent state of rebirth as new models move forwards by looking backwards.

This chapter offers an account of postmodernism. It begins by drawing a distinction between two broad approaches to the postmodern: one that outlines the contours of a new historical period (postmodernity), and another that places emphasis on finding new ways of understanding modern practices of knowledge and politics (postmodernism). The second part of the chapter examines how postmodern ideas entered international relations scholarship, and how ensuing contributions continue to reveal important insights up to the present day. Defining postmodernism is no easy task. Postmodern scholarship is characterised more by diversity than by a common set of beliefs. Add to this that the postmodern has become a very contentious label, which is used less by its advocates and more by polemical critics who fear that embracing postmodern values would throw us into a dangerous nihilist void. But while the contours of the postmodern will always remain elusive and contested, the substantial issues that the respective debates have brought to the fore are important enough to warrant attention.

This chapter introduces students to the rich and controversial legacy of Marxism and one of its major offshoots in the twentieth century, Critical Theory. The chapter is presented in two parts. The first part touches on the historical and intellectual context that ‘created’ Marxism, Marx’s notion of historical materialism and the issue of how Marx’s ideas have been received in IR. The second part concentrates on the two strands of Critical Theory that have emerged within IR: one derived from the so-called Frankfurt School and the other from Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci.

This chapter presents a fleeting history of key changes in global trade and finance in the post-war period, organised around the themes of crisis and cooperation. The first section of the chapter discusses the key themes. The second section considers the emergence of the post-World War II Bretton Woods regime. The third section outlines the rise of private capital in the 1970s through to the debt crisis of the 1980s. The fourth section considers discussions of global financial architecture in the 1990s to the 2000s. The fifth section discusses changes in the last fifteen years, focusing on how the trade regime has stalled and the financial regime has been partially rolled back. Finally, the concluding section reflects on the ever-present need to foster cooperation in the global financial and trade architecture.

This chapter gives an overview of the theory and practice of global climate politics. First, it provides a brief history of the politics of climate change as they play out in the international negotiations on the issue overseen by the United Nations . Second, it looks at the formal organisational and institutional structures that exist to manage the international community’s response to climate change. Third, it reviews the ways in which different theories of International Relations have been applied to climate change, assessing both their potential and their limitations. Finally, the conclusion offers some thoughts on the evolving nature of the ‘global’ governance of climate change.

The nature of modern economies, and their ideological dimensions. The cultural challenges of capitalist economies and their “socialist” alternatives.

This chapter examines the relationship between poems and the commodities that structure both our intimate lives and the vast social geographies of the globe. If the content of a poem must often be discovered through interpretative work, reading between the lines of its figurative expressions and other such devices, the commodity, too, is a form of appearance which conceals its origins in labor and the exploitation of that labor. Beginning with this correspondence, and analyzing examples by Bernadette Mayer, Claude McKay, Keston Sutherland, and others, the chapter maps out several ways in which poems both present and negate the commodity. It discusses the poetic representation of labor itself as a commodity, of nonremunerative care work, of the factory and global commodity chains, and of the circulation of commodities through colonial networks. In conclusion, the chapter argues that learning to read the poem is inseparable from learning to read the commodity, for in both cases, the reader's success lies in the ability to re-suture the text to, rather than rescue it from, its worldly net.

The chapter explains the context of writing the Grundgesetz (the German Constitution). It introduces Article 15 which allows to ‘socialise’ land (and housing) and turn it into democratically managed commons. It also shows how the notion of ‘misuse of economic power’, an important context in which Article 15 was written into the Grundgesetz, gains a new meaning today.

“’Flung out of Space’: Class and Sexuality in American Literary History" explores the relationship between class and queer sexuality in American literary history, suggesting how neither of these histories can be understood without accounting for the other. Reading literary texts such as Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” alongside queer theory and LGBTQ history, Lecklider suggests how class structures queer literature throughout American history, particularly since the 19th century. Particularly emphasizing how labor structures desire, this chapter argues that working-class sexualities – and their intersections with race and gender – must be taken seriously in order to fully appreciate both the contributions of queer literature and the legibility of labor in American history.

Chapter 32 considers the question of modernity as explored in Goethe’s Faust. In his hands, the cast of mind of the restless central character constitutes an analogy of modernity. The chapter argues that the duo of Faust and Mephistopheles epitomises the mood of Goethe’s own time, which paved the way for the modern industrial era. It demonstrates that Part I radicalises the revolt against tradition which is an essential part of the original Faust legend, while Part II thematises incipient capitalist economics and the manipulation of nature through technology.

This chapter will address contrasting ways in which Argentine literature has reflected on, and borrowed from, scientific theories and practices. Many nineteenth-century writers (such as José Mármol, Eugenio Cambaceres, and Lucio V. Mansilla) drew on (pseudo-)scientific discourses to lend legitimacy to their arguments, while others developed a critical approach to the legacies of positivism in Argentina. Dystopian visions of the imbrication of science, technology, and the politics of authoritarianism dominate the twentieth century, in texts that explore the experience of mass society or dictatorship. However, this chapter will also highlight cases of much greater ambivalence, such as that of Roberto Arlt, in whose work the pursuit of science and technology becomes both an instrument of violence and a fount of beauty and liberation. Furthermore, it will construct an important genealogy of authors – from Eduardo Holmberg in the final decades of the nineteenth century through to the contemporary writer Marcelo Cohen – who have conducted innovative metafictional explorations into the relationship between literature and science, and who have understood the porous boundary between them to be a source of great creativity.

The main aim of this chapter is to show that sexuality and capitalism are intrinsically related. Such an endeavour demands extracting sex from the domains of nature, reproduction, and the private, and relating it to the intricate norms of capitalism. The first part of the chapter looks at why capitalism and sexuality have been articulated as belonging to separate spheres of life. How did it come to seem that “being a sex” and “having sex” is so entirely removed from the “investment of money to make more money”? The second part of the chapter provides an overview of the historical evolution of capitalism and its relationship to sexuality, focusing on the nineteenth-century transition from the household family-based economy to a fully developed capitalist free labour economy. The main characters of this chapter are homo economicus and his economically invisible wife, the producers of valuable social relations, as well as various “reformable” or “irreformable” others whose sex is deemed of no value or even against value. The chapter presents social relations as capitalist and sexual, and treats the dichotomies social–natural, public–private, and economic–cultural as interwoven in the (de)politicization of both sexuality and capitalism.