This chapter takes stock of the various definitions and valuations the essay has accrued over the course of the history of American literary theory and criticism. Starting with the historical-materialist criticism of the Great Depression era and moving on to the New Criticism of the 1940s and ’50s, then delving into the myriad structuralisms and poststructuralisms of the Cold War and postcommunist eras, before concluding with contemporary critical trends, it tracks the discipline’s trajectory in the American context, all the while zeroing in on the essay’s shifting position therein. The chapter throws into relief the fundamental dialectic between hermetic formalism and committed social criticism that has shaped literary studies in the United States since its rise early in the twentieth century and teases out the way this perennial vacillation has rendered more or less appealing, and more or less useful, the essay as a form and object of analysis.

The socialist movement had two worldviews, monist materialism a la Ludwig Büchner and dialectical materialism a la Karl Marx. This chapter examines how party leaders and secularist intellectuals theorized the relationship of the two and then looks at the role of popular science in party educational policy. It then moves from the theoretical and policy level to an investigation of the intellectual world of rank-and-file socialists. It opens up new perspectives to explain the well-established fact that workers more happily read works of scientific materialism than the works of Kautsky or Marx. Autobiographical texts are examined to understand why conversion experiences were usually tied to the acceptance of scientific rather than historical materialism. It introduces the role of secularism in the biographies of important socialist leaders, such as Walter Ulbricht, the future leader of the GDR (1949-71). Based on the growing realization that many social groups organized in socialism were attracted to secularist worldview, the chapter will also look at the women’s movement inside the SPD and its particular take on monism.

Chapter 10 reconstructs Durkheim's conception of sociology as a science of morality, which includes three tasks: orienting our conduct via an account of a morally healthy society; illuminating the connection between social functioning and morality (explaining why moral and social health are the same; and explaining why the moral ideals animating a given society do so and how they vary with changing social conditions. Durkheim's science of morality is similar to Marx's historical materialist account of morality, although the former leaves the moral authority of the rules it explains largely intact. While Durkheim's accounts of specific pathologies imply a critique of certain social rules, they do not discredit the fundamental norms at work in the societies he studies. The chapter concludes that Durkheim does not adequately explain how historically specific moral systems can claim a moral authority irreducible to the narrowly functional value they have for social reproduction.

Chapter 4 examines the importance of labor in Marx's diagnoses of social pathologies. Marx conceives of labor as social, productive activity that has the potential to make material reproduction a spiritual phenomenon subject to normative standards beyond those internal to biological life. Meeting those standards requires a re-appropriation of our activity that turns alienated social powers into free activity, where re-appropriation takes place along three dimensions: knowing (or understanding) it as it really is; collectively controlling or organizing it; and affirming it without illusion as appropriate to human beings' spiritual nature. In other words, unalienated social powers must be transparent, self-determined, and productive of the good of those whose powers they are. Moreover, making social powers productive of the good, and hence genuinely affirmable, requires re-organizing, and not merely re-interpreting, our activity so as to make it social in a sense that in capitalism it is not.

The chapter engages in a Critical Discourse Analysis of the language used in the media reporting of the most recent prime ministerial elections in Israel, in 2019. It draws on the tradition of Cultural-Historical and Activity Theory to highlight the impact of the wider historical context of the Israel–Palestine conflict in the media reporting of events in the region. It is a comparative study of the BBC’s and Al Jazeera’s reporting of the elections, examining a period from August 2019 (the pre-election period) through to October 2019 (the immediate post-election period). The data collected consists of six and nine online reports by the BBC and Al Jazeera, respectively. An overriding aim is an examination of the impact and the role of the history of the region in reporting on significant events. The work aims to contribute to other studies on the Israel–Palestine conflict which have argued that media is a contested space, and the news is not a neutral product.

With post-1968 ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’, the idea of a single, universal, history was displaced by a pluralism of historical approaches. Cognizant of recent shifts in the conceptual frameworks of history and archive, the editors ask how the history of theatre should be written today. How could it be written to reveal the tensions between and contradictions in the past and present imaginations shaping events and objects? How could it accommodate different, often contradictory, historiographic strategies? They contend that ‘it is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’, as Walter Benjamin put it. Given these contexts, the editors propose a particular historiographic approach in the organization of chapters that challenges synchronic approaches to theatre history, and instead build historical narratives through ‘constellations’, a direct reference to Benjamin, who constructed novel conceptions of historical time and historical intelligibility based on spatial dialectics.

This chapter examines private transnational law, which is argued to be a prominent form of transnational authority in the global political economy today. It approaches private transnational governance from the vantage points of international relations theory and international legal theory, arguing that neither captures the ontological significance of transnational corporations and elites as agents of transnational governance. The chapter draws upon critical political economy to advance a praxis conception of transnational law that better articulates the importance of these private sources of power and authority in the contemporary global political economy and opens up space for more progressive governance.