The Introduction outlines the central question of the book: how should we interpret the TRIPS Agreement when addressing the legitimacy crisis of international intellectual property (IP) rights? The COVID-19 pandemic and current trade tensions highlight both structural and cyclical tensions of the global knowledge economy. In this context of instability, the introduction sets the stage by considering the TRIPS as the structuring agreement for international IP protection. The chapter introduces this republican conception of non-domination as the core normative framework and previews how this concept will be applied across the book’s chapters. The chapter sets out the interdisciplinary methodology, bridging legal analysis and political theory, and clarifies the intended contribution: a reframing of the TRIPS that takes its legal character seriously and evaluates its moral legitimacy as part of international law.

Life was conceived by the Romantics as the underlying force of nature, and they sought to identify its norms and rules of transformation. For them, life oscillates between contraction and relaxion, between potentiality and actuality. Life establishes and renews the norms they set. However, these sequences do not only lead to the form of living beings. Life is immanent and its creations flourish in every sphere. As we will see in this chapter, this idea of ‘life’ prompted the Romantics to focus on rhythm and habit, as the way in which life gives itself a dynamic order. Habit is the key for the Romantic reformulation of the political lexicon: it enhances sociability; individualities are not isolated beings but rather carry in themselves the inexhaustible transformative forces of life that deploy in and outside the individual. The individual is therefore always influenced by the context. For this reason, her freedom is not formulated as autonomy but rather as creativity or wisdom. This interpretation of ‘freedom’ bridges the gap between humans and nature and demonstrates that, in order to rethink our relationship with nature, we have to reformulate our political concepts.

The chapter focuses on the Romantic philosophy of nature. This will permit us to point out how the relational idea of the Romantic Self is consistent with the image of the human being as located within nature. The human is not opposed to nature and is neither her master, but she is immersed in (and even constituted by) the entanglement of natural forces. Following a line of reflections that unites Spinoza, Leibniz, Herder, and Goethe to the Romantics, I will show the centrality of ‘life’. This is the inexhaustible source of forms created through repetitions and metamorphoses. As we will see at the end of the chapter, the Romantic interpretation of life is at the basis not only of their anthropology but also of their idea of normativity. Norms are, for the Romantics, instructions provided with a compelling force and are not only the formulation of interdictions. The dynamic conception of nature allowed the Romantics to reintegrate human beings into it and overcome the opposition between nature and freedom, nature and politics; however, a distinction between human and animal, or human and plants, is maintained. It is, though, not maintained in the sense of domination.

In these pages, the problematic at the centre of the book is introduced. It explores how the concepts of sovereignty and freedom and the human/nature relationship are linked and how they influence the idea of self. This Introduction also displays past and current interpretations of the Romantic conception of subjectivity and of Romantic political philosophy, highlighting the shortcomings of these readings. Indeed, they neglect the political essence of the Romantic Self. This chapter closes with an overview of the structure of the book and a list of the Romantic authors considered.

The Introduction examines the historiography of the idea of the state in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Machiavellian scholarship. It analyses the empirical and methodological problems associated with this specialist literature, before then outlining a new way of reconstructing Machiavelli’s theory of lo stato – and of interpreting it as the very crux of his political philosophy – by laying out a new intellectual basis upon which to reorient our present understanding of the foundations of Machiavelli’s conceptualization of the state from his earliest writings onwards. It draws new attention to the formative role in Renaissance political discourse of a sequence of theories – subsequently discussed in each chapter of Part I of the book – which were drawn from classical Roman political, moral, rhetorical, and aesthetic thought and which came to shape decisively Machiavelli’s own theory. And it forwards the contention, substantiated in detail in Part II, that his theory underwent two redactions, first in The Prince and then in the Discourses. The Introduction closes by broaching the crucial question of whether, in classifying Machiavelli as a singularly pioneering theorist of the state in the early modern period, we should also see him as a theorist of state personality.

According to Kant, it is possible to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate laws by means of a certain formal procedure. His criterion for the legitimacy of a draft law is whether or not it corresponds to the ‘General Will’ of a people. The test question Kant has in mind is this: could a people give its consent to a proposed particular law? This chapter discusses the question of how this ‘General Will Test’ (GWT) is related to the Categorical Imperative (CI). As it will turn out, normatively valid laws are justified, in Kant’s view, by the fact that their content is established in a significantly non-ideal way, by a quasi-CI, namely the GWT. Thus, an intermediary position between the two mutually exclusive standard interpretations of Kant’s political philosophy is defended: the ‘derivation reading’ and the ‘separation reading’.

The closing chapter of the book illustrates the practical implications of Kant’s political and legal philosophy for climate change. Texts like the Doctrine of Right and Toward Perpetual Peace are used to rethink the complex political and collective challenges of the climate crisis. These, once again, confound the individualist and nonconsequentialist standard reading of Kant. First, I argue that Kant’s state of nature theorizing leads to prescriptions that are compatible with and justify coercive domestic and international policy to address the crisis. Second, I zoom out to consider whether Kant’s political philosophy as a whole remains too conservative or outdated to provide guidance regarding deep climate adaptation, mitigation, and radical institutional reform, answering in the negative. I close by discussing political obligations owed to peoples, interpreted in the face of the Hobbesian call for a global climate leviathan.

This introduction presents the main arguments of the book, develops a novel terminological framework, and situates the book in current research. First, from the perspective of international economic and social human rights, this is not an age of human rights triumphalism. The main human rights advocates featured in this book were concerned with international justice and redistributive justice, and theirs was a long quest to lift international economic and social human rights onto a level-playing field through three phases: internationalizing rights, criticizing global inequalities through rights, and attempting to secure the legitimacy of these rights once and for all. Second, on a broader egalitarian plateau, human rights advocacy can be situated on a redistributionist terrain. Third, this book supplements institutional, organizational, diplomatic, political, and movement-centered research on international human rights. There is a gap in existing scholarship in understanding historical interrelations between human rights and inequalities, which is where this book intervenes, above all from an intellectual historical perspective.

The human being is freely ‘self-determined’ rather than determined through some external authority (whether theological or teleological). This dichotomy conveniently expresses the usual understanding of modern political thought’s divergence from preceding tradition. By comparison, pre-modernity is teleological, anthropomorphic, realist; in a word, naïve – with its substantively rational nature, dictating essential ends to which we are subject. These received truths are past due for a re-examination. Just how naïve or dogmatic was the Greek understanding of freedom and nature? In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s view of man as naturally political is more complex and multivalent than our historical categorizations allow. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which, for him, politics does indeed depend upon a natural model. That model, however, is the Idea of the Good. And here, where Plato seems furthest from us, lies his greatest challenge to contemporary understandings of nature and freedom.