Herodotus’ comparative inquiry leads him to decree that isegoria, or equal right of speech, is best in all things. The example that he gives is Athens, although his treatment has often been regarded as unclear. I argue that Athens has to be taken as a whole – that to see the effects of one particular custom, isegoria, one has to trace its consequences throughout the city as a whole. Herodotus’ account of Athens thus grants his readers vicarious experience of isegoria, thereby allowing them to feel the underappreciated virtues of democratic life. His treatment of Athens, however, is nuanced – highlighting both its virtues and its vices as well as the connections between these. This chapter explores these nuances, arguing that Herodotus’ careful account of Athenian political life reveals the way his inquiry into human flourishing avoids both relativism and simplistic universalism, instead offering a textured and nonideal account of the good.

Before Susanna Wheatley’s death in March 1774, Phillis had used personas to address the subject of slavery covertly. Once free, Phillis became the unofficial prophet and poet laureate of the new United States, turning toward more secular and political subjects, using an increasingly patriotic and self-confident tone in her writings. In 1778 Phillis married the formerly enslaved John Peters, an ambitious entrepreneur. Phillis Wheatley Peters’ life and career seemed secure. Despite the optimism and joy Phillis expresses in Liberty and Peace, her 1784 poem celebrating the conclusion of the American Revolution, by then she and John had fallen on hard times in the post-Revolution depression. He was probably in jail for debt when Phillis Wheatley Peters died in relative obscurity on December 5, 1784, three months after her last attempt to find subscribers for a second book. The manuscript of Phillis’s proposed second book, which was to include correspondence, remains unfound.

This chapter shows how Tacitus uses paradiastole throughout his oeuvre to put two different kinds of political language into dialogue: the language of liberty and the language of empire. By using speakers with different standpoints, such as Calgacus, Cerialis, and Otho, Tacitus shows how history-writing can foster dialogue and serve as political theory. The chapter also analyses the collapse of speech-acts at the start of Tiberius’ principate, Maternus’ speech in Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus, and Tacitus’ narrative of civil war in Histories One.

This chapter explores Aquinas’s account of God’s perfection, goodness, and the problem of evil. Aquinas argues that God is perfect because he lacks all potentiality and is wholly actual, with every creaturely perfection pre-existing eminently in him. God is good, not as a member of a genus, but as the Creator whose nature grounds and causes the goodness of creatures. Goodness, Aquinas maintains, is convertible with being, while evil is privation of good – either as suffering (malum poenae) or wrongdoing (malum culpae). He denies that God directly causes evil, holding instead that evils suffered arise incidentally from the flourishing of other beings, while evils done derive from human free will. The chapter contrasts Aquinas’s approach with modern debates – such as Mackie’s logical argument from evil, Rowe’s evidential argument, and Plantinga’s free will defence—showing how Aquinas resists theodicy by emphasising God’s transcendence and the derivative character of creaturely goodness and freedom.

This chapter examines Aquinas’s account of God as omnipotent and eternal. Aquinas distinguishes active from passive power, attributing only active power to God, who as pure actuality is wholly the source of effects. Divine omnipotence, he argues, does not mean God can do just anything, but that God can bring about all that is absolutely possible – that is, all that does not involve contradiction. Hence God cannot undo the past or contradict his own immutability, though he can work miracles, which Aquinas understands not as interventions but as events beyond the natural capacities of creatures. The chapter considers modern critiques, such as Geach’s challenges to defining omnipotence and Plantinga’s free-will defence, and contrasts them with Aquinas’s view that divine causality grounds rather than negates human freedom. Turning to eternity, the chapter explains Aquinas’s claim that God is utterly unchangeable and ‘altogether at once’ (tota simul) thereby transcending time without negating his causal presence in history.

The scope of the book – with a theological focus, Luther’s central teachings of a viable Christian religion engaged in light of his spiritual motivations, biblical interpretation, personal experience of freedom, and critical theological arguments that fueled his reform agendas.

Discussion on the rationale and potential for religion and being religious today. Naming Luther as a viable conversation partner with his theology of grace and hope, and particularly his freedom perspectives.

The Cold War involved a set of ethical, moral, and even aesthetic struggles alongside the economic, scientific, political, and military competition between the West and the Soviet Bloc. Individuals, no less than nations, were pressured to choose between self-actualized enactments of freedom or submission to presumed systems of constraint, whether that constraint came in the guise of political totalitarianism, complacent middle-class conformity, or even aesthetic rigidity. For nearly half a century, American narrative literature featured protagonists whose journeys toward knowledge, self-mastery, worldliness, and agency were expressed in a Cold War rhetoric of freedom and choice. We can posit, in opening this volume, that American literature of the era was shaped by affective geopolitics: American experience as recorded in cultural documents was ineluctably rendered in a Cold War discourse that pitted freedom against constraint – that envisioned the aspirational subjectivity of human beings as engaged on almost every front in a contentious battle with the forces of unfreedom. This introduction also briefly surveys the themes of the upcoming chapters of The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Cold War.

This chapter traces some common Enlightenment narratives of Beethoven and the problematic role that sacred music plays in defining what is included or omitted as “Enlightenment” in terms of its social, political and philosophical identity. These narratives, however, sit uncomfortably with the Missa solemnis and have resulted in some strange narrative maneuvers within Beethoven scholarship that not only skew the historical context but our image of the composer. The chapter ends by exploring an approach that tries to square “the Enlightenment” with the circle of sacred music without simply reversing the narrative of a progressive Beethoven with a reactionary one: religion is a radically creative force for Beethoven and his Enlightenment belief in “freedom and progress.”

Luther insists that salvation is a gift and brings one into a mystical union with Christ, which is the true meaning of Christianity. Passive righteousness, Christ’s favor and gift, becomes one’s own, and in faith gains knowledge of God, transformation, and holiness in conformity with Christ.

This chapter describes how the utopian logic of neoliberalism has come to capture political rationality, chaining political judgment to the grammar of its antipolitical operations while legitimating that rationality within a historical narrative emplotted with its ontological and social imperatives.

Interpretation of Luther’s spiritual despair that led him to discover the liberating gospel of grace from the Scriptures and to reset his religious compass to reorient the teachings and practice of Christian faith with the assurance of the security of salvation. The chapter proposes freedom as the way to interpret Luther’s reform impulses as well as his own spiritual journey, theological insights, and negotiating his authority as a reformer.

With his “born again” experience with Paul’s letter to the Romans about justification by faith alone, and criticizing the Christian church for ignoring people’s suffering, Luther called for reforms in teaching and practice, reimagining the parameters and depth of mystical God–human relationship, with an increased confidence of God’s mystical presence in human life and its transforming impact. Freedom from despair and freedom to compassionate living, with an assurance of salvation by faith became the pillars of Luther’s explicitly Christ-centric religion.

This chapter concentrates on two authors, two contexts, and two works: US schoolteacher Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1881) and British-Indian author Rokeya Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905). Extrapolating the techno-social emergence of female ballooning in the nineteenth-century United States and India, the chapter argues that the two feminist utopias intersect social and environmental freedom. Lane employs the underground setting popularised by Bulwer-Lytton to house a techno-feminist civilization controlling the climate at will, while Hossain describes the diffuse, oneiric terrain of Ladyland in which climate control supports a garden world. Comparing the two different feminist utopias and contexts, both marked by feminist aviation and atmospheric interventions, the chapters showcase the socio-political character of anthropogenic climate change: Hossain’s climate utopia is caring, inclusive, and decolonial, whereas Lane’s is cynical, exclusive, and imperialist.

This chapter introduces the fundamental idea of The Life of Freedom in Kant and Hegel: the notion that we can only make sense of autonomy by returning to the concept of life. This return is needed to understand fully the genesis, the form, and the reality of human freedom. Such an account can be developed by means of a systematic reconstruction of Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies of freedom. As we can learn from Kant’s account, the notion of autonomy is threatened by the paradox of self-legislation and an opposition of freedom and nature that makes the reality of freedom unintelligible. As Kant already indicates and Hegel goes on to develop, we can overcome these problems by reconceiving of autonomy as a form of life. The chapter outlines the reading of Kant and Hegel supporting this view, situates the resulting systematic position in current debates on the sources of normativity and the nature of human freedom, and defines its relation to other approaches norm and nature (ethical naturalism, forms of life, and biopolitics).

Mourning leading Lebanese journalist Kamel Mroueh, who was assassinated in 1966, Musa Sadr emphasizes the critical role of freedom, particularly in journalism, as essential for societal growth and individual dignity. The press is a vital battlefield for truth and justice, shaping public opinion, culture and society itself. Journalists bear profound responsibilities, acting as moral guides capable of uplifting or corrupting society through their work. Their freedom is both their right and society’s benefit, unleashing full human potential by removing external coercion and internal constraints.

Genuine freedom extends beyond mere absence of external control, encompassing liberation from personal desires and moral corruption. The ultimate freedom includes self-liberation through internal struggle (greater jihad), based on ethical purity and integrity. The text strongly condemns assassination and coercion as cowardly acts that undermine societal justice and morality, insisting society must protect journalists from economic hardship and threats.

Death is portrayed as a transformative rather than destructive force, moving humans toward spiritual perfection and eternal life. Mroueh (Abu Jamil) is honored as a martyr, whose death underscores the noble purpose of defending truth and freedom. Freedom alone ensures societal integrity and spiritual elevation. Only freedom safeguards humanity’s dignity and potential.