This chapter explores how the proem situates Herodotus’ perspective and his approach while also delineating his subject matter. This demarcates Herodotus’ own unique approach to inquiry and judgment. I distinguish his approach from both his prosaic and poetic near-contemporaries and explore how his conception of judgment and inquiry both differs from – and yet speaks to – contemporary dilemmas of judgment. Herodotus foregrounds both personal experience and judgment – expressed as taste – while showing how tastes can shift and transform. To clarify the role of taste in his approach to judgment, I compare his approach to Hannah Arendt’s, which was explicitly influenced by her reading of Herodotus. Unlike Arendt, Herodotus does not abjure universals but rather searches for them.

Amis’s Holocaust novels make an ethical demand on the reader: to bear witness to their narrators’ failures to witness the atrocities they narrate even as they narrate them. The Zone of Interest dramatises an enabling banality that allows genocide to be conceptualised as a set of logistical problems, which the reader is expected to resist. But Amis here takes the banality of evil further, to the point of rendering the Nazi ideology that drove the genocide secondary to personal insecurities and petty grievances. Time’s Arrow, on the other hand, raises the question of banality only to reject it, presenting us with a perpetrator that embodies a ‘metaphysical’ evil. This is evil that is lifted out of the material world in which it is instantiated, and so the ideological causes of the Holocaust are again pushed to the sidelines. Both of Amis’s Holocaust novels, in short, risk depoliticising the Holocaust.

The 1930s did not resolve doubts about the viability of democracy, but military success in World War II enhanced democracy’s reputation. In 1951, Hannah Arendt pointed out that German citizens had not managed to stop Hitler, but discussion of their failure was set aside by American intellectuals focused on communism during the Cold War. They said, in “the end of ideology” movement, that democrats don’t have to think but to do – to oppose the USSR and to campaign for “incremental economic progress” at home. Therefore, when the Cold War ended, democrats were mostly wedded to marketplace practices of “neoliberalism” without strong political dimensions. Consequently, when that neoliberalism sagged in 2008, there was no widely shared democratic theory available to inspire resentful people. Into this vacuum stepped the Republican Party, which since Barry Goldwater had become ideologically committed to capitalism, hostile to “government activism” (such as the New Deal), enthusiastic about public “school privatization,” scornful of “abortion rights” but zealous about “religious tradition,” and set on appointing right-wing judges who would empower money more than people, as in permitting wealthy individuals and corporations to make unlimited political contributions (Elon Musk alone contributed $250,000,000 to the Republican Party in 2024). Thus the country lapsed more and more into a “culture war,” wherein Democrats were pluralistic and Republicans promoted ideological convictions.

Howat considers whether appeals to truth should play a role in political discourse. He examines two kinds of response: that of Richard Rorty and his followers, and of “New Pragmatists” like Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse. Rorty rejected the idea of objective truth and hailed as “anti-authoritarian” the sort of pragmatism that sets that concept aside. Howat notes some overlap between Rorty’s position and that of Hannah Arendt, who didn’t reject the idea of truth itself but still argued against the use of that idea in political contexts. Unlike Rorty or Arendt, the New Pragmatists hold that the principal goal of political discourse is not agreement but rather a view that can withstand critical scrutiny – and according to the New Pragmatists, such a view can qualify as true. While tentatively aligning himself with the New Pragmatists and against Rorty, Howat argues that not all political discourse has truth as its aim. He also argues that it is unclear whether the New Pragmatist account of democracy, truth, and political discourse has the resources to deal adequately with the ways in which “our bounded rationality” allows us to be exploited.

That the Declaration of Independence could be considered from the perspective of rhetoric might seem rather obvious, if not downright self-evident. Even so, appreciating how Jefferson thought about language not as an abstract concept but as a lived and material practice can help us appreciate the text of the Declaration from different perspectives. The text is shot through with the histories of race, nation, empire, and belonging that characterized the ideology of American revolutionary republicanism, and with Jefferson’s thinking about these forces and his own anxious place in them. In fact, despite and perhaps even in part because of his own difficulties with public speaking, Jefferson thought about the ability to access and marshal rhetorical exemplars and put them to use in legal and political argument as an elemental part of what it meant to be an effective citizen. His thinking about material rhetoric, about the absorption of what one read through notes, commentary, and commonplace books, turns out to be a critical component of how he thought about the legitimacy of the American project and of how he framed that project in successive drafts of the Declaration itself.

This Chapter considers the significance of voice in Coriolanus, especially the way voices are located within bodies. It shows how the patricians situate their voices in the “worthier” parts of the body and the citizens’ voices in the “worser,” leveraging anti-corporeal and anti-materialist ideologies to authorize their own speech and discredit the citizens’. Nevertheless, the voices in this play are highly mobile. They repeatedly move about within bodies and between bodies, undercutting the patricians’ conservative approach and allowing us to envision radical alternatives. Invoking work by Emmanuel Levinas and Adriana Cavarero, the Chapter concludes by fleshing out these radical alternatives.

The chapter offers an ethnographic study of a court trial of a former judge of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, who was accused of lying in his lustration statement about his past links with communist secret services. Through an observation of the court proceedings, analysis of the court file, and life history interviews with the judge, the chapter engages the questions of violence, guilt, and responsibility. In particular, the chapter focuses attention on the notion of “communist guilt” and the subjective effects of public shaming, and highlights the ways in which lustration articulates the entangled problems about socialist-era state violence and neoliberal capitalist violence, around which rightwing populist groups mobilize. In conversation with the work of Iris Marion Young and Hannah Arendt, among others, the chapter suggests a notion of political responsibility to address this entanglement and thinks past the narrowly construed, individualized, guilt-driven understanding of moral and legal responsibility.

A theoretical intervention into the challenge of thinking through the complexities of life, in Iran or elsewhere. Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault offer us a model of thinking as a practice. Each attempted one project in which they were thinking systematically about ongoing events, and offering that thinking as a contribution to public understanding. Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to observe the Adolf Eichmann trial, and her contemporaneous writing was published in The New Yorker magazine. Foucault traveled to Iran to observe the early stages of the revolution, and his contemporaneous writing was published (mostly) in the Corriere della Sera newspaper. These two projects have commonly been regarded as their author’s most controversial and have often been ignored or used to denigrate the writer’s entire theoretical oeuvre. Yet they offer compelling models of thinking as a practice that critically links the self and the world. Rescuing theory from the confines of academic specialization restores it, and us, to the possibility of thinking as a practice of freedom, and freedom as the daily possibility of beginning anew.

Tracing the development of an inclusive political subjectivity through decades of political upheaval leading up to and since the revolution, Iranian society has been regularly wracked by intense political upheavals that challenge state authority and the status quo of established powers and institutions. Most of these protest movements have seemed to fail and have often been followed by a period of apparent quietism. Yet by consistently expanding the participatory claims of an active citizenry, these movements have furthered the democratic potentials of Iranian society. Reconsidering the achievements of the 1999 university protests, the women’s movement (in both its secular and Islamist forms), the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2022–2023 Women, Life, Freedom movement, this chapter argues that Iranians have been actively creating themselves and recognizing each other as fully developed citizens. Drawing on the accounts of women of different generations involved in separate movements and protests, this chapter considers evolving changes in consciousness and practices as women struggle for full acceptance and equal participation as Iranian citizens.

Serving tea, women’s social labor, and the intergenerational problem of negotiating “our culture.” Despite the enjoyment of New Year (Nowruz) ritual social visits, a treasured national holiday respite is a dreaded domestic endurance test, and a quiet war between generations of women. While men quote poetry rhapsodizing over the joys of spring celebrations, women dash between guests, stove, and front door in order properly to serve tea. Woe to the daughter who would prefer to retreat to the more intimate pleasures of the nuclear family achieved through partnership marriage. Unlike religious traditions that some women can challenge through informed argument over proper interpretation, secular social obligations can be experienced as oppressive but nearly inviolable. Hannah Arendt’s theorization of “the social” as a nonnegotiable sphere lacking in possibilities for free action helps explain why it might be easier to rebel against religious norms and laws than dare to defy the accumulated familial and national weight of social tradition, and informs the situation of younger Iranian women at odds with, while trying to remain loyal to, the cultural norms their mothers still uphold.

The chapter explores the meanings of the word “philosemitism” before the Holocaust (late nineteenth century to 1945) and since then. It states the book’s main argument: the valorization of Jews in European liberalism from the Holocaust to the present. The chapter also includes a discussion of the existing literature on philosemitism.

Chapter 3 is a close reading of several documents and transcripts of the Case of Duch of the Cambodia Tribunal. Interestingly, notions of humanity and inhumanity were used by several parties: prosecutors, attorneys for civil parties but also the defendant’s lawyer and Duch himself declared that the latter was dehumanised. In a second move, these findings will be put in a philosophical context by bringing them in conversation with the work of Hannah Arendt, thus showing the structure of dehumanisation and rehumanisation.

This chapter examines how the Holocaust affected thinking about the humanities and social sciences throughout the West. It offers an intellectual history of key responses to the Holocaust, with an emphasis on political philosophy and social theory. Major intellectuals (Arendt, Adorno, Agamben), as well as less well-known thinkers (Günther Anders, Moishe Postone) are considered. The trajectory of post-Holocaust thought forms the throughline. In the first postwar decades, the Jewish genocide was considered as part of a broader eruption of war and totalitarian violence, while more recent thinkers have tended to subsume the entire history of Western violence, perhaps even “the West” itself, under the sign of the Holocaust.

As Hannah Arendt taught us, we must create something new in the world. Human action can make a new beginning for humanity. We must pursue self-liberation through participation with others in mutual action to attain full human flourishing in a sustainable world. The participatory action we take must be democratic action. Democratic action is the only kind of action that can lead to the full flourishing of human freedom. Only democracy provides an institutional framework for the fullest extent of political freedom, economic freedom, and every other kind of freedom. We must embrace the responsibility of freedom by working together to apply reason to the world. This requires active engagement for a common purpose in a truly participatory democracy. A common purpose can be found in seeking accomplishment of the social, economic, and environmental aims of sustainable development. As John Dewey insisted, democracy must become a way of life. Democratic participation is the way to attain a deeper freedom. We see this in the emergence of a multitude of bottom-up sustainable development networks worldwide.

This short summary chapter recalls the “arc of corruption” that the book depicts, the caricatures of German corporate behavior that the Nuremberg trials fostered, and their consequences for historical interpretation. The book concludes by recentering the consequences of business leaders’ actions, rather than the pragmatic motivations that produced these actions, in any judgment of their conduct.