Marx adopts a triadic model of the concept of property and emphasizes how this concept assumes different historical forms, including private property. I seek to explain why Marx must be thought to commit himself to the complete abolition of private property by beginning with how he speaks of property, equality and freedom as forming a constellation of concepts within capitalist society. This approach enables me to show how, for Marx, private property functions within a social world structured by contractual relations established between allegedly free and equal rights-bearing persons, whose self-conception and relations to one another are determined by an abstract exchange value that finds legal and political expression in a purely formal notion of equality. I argue that there are two key elements in Marx’s critique of private property. The first concerns how individuals are unable to relate to themselves and to others as genuine individuals in an economic and social system governed by exchange value. The second concerns how a system of exchange governed by this form of value dominates individuals and is thus incompatible with ‘free’ individuality.

This chapter begins by setting out the central elements of the distinctive idea of “the self” (das Selbst) that we find in Hegel’s Phenomenology. It demonstrates that the self must be understood as a determination of “spirit,” of the reciprocal interaction between self-conscious beings and their shared social world, so that Hegel defends a “social constitution” conception of the self. Conceptions of the self prescribe determinate relations of self-conscious beings to their actions and to one another, and depend on distinctive forms of language. It tracks the first two conceptions of the self that emerge in the text, that of the person, and of absolute freedom, and unpacks the criticisms of these conceptions implicit in Hegel’s account. While personhood can be affirmed universally of everyone, it is alienating since it cannot include individuals’ particularity. While individuals can understand themselves in terms of the norms of absolute freedom, that conception of the self undermines the bases for relations of reciprocity among them. It concludes by considering the implications of Hegel’s critiques for Stephen Darwall’s conception of recognition.

Du Bois delivered “To the World” as an address at the Second Pan-African Congress in London in August 1921, and the conference delegates approved its resolutions, as well as those of a separate manifesto addressed specifically to the League of Nations. Both were published in The Crisis in November 1921. “To the World” declares racial equality to be the “founding stone of world peace and human advancement and insists on the world’s duty to assist in the advancement of the “backward.” It projects a vision of “interracial contact” based on democratic political institutions and mutual respect and argues that poverty and class conflict in developed countries (“culture lands”) can be truly solved only when white nations stop perpetrating even greater poverty and injustice among “darker peoples.” The manifesto to the League makes three key demands: that the International Bureau of Labor establish a section to deal with Negro labor in Africa and the “Islands of the Sea”; that a man of Negro descent be appointed to the League’s Mandates Commission; and that the League attend to legal and cultural bias against “civilized persons of Negro descent.”

This chapter argues for a revised theory of moderate vaccine cosmopolitanism, grounded in a Thomistic natural law interpretation of the principle of solidarity, tempered by the principle of subsidiarity. Solidarity does call for love of neighbour, and therefore for global responsibilities of mutual care among nations. However, love of neighbour does not necessitate equality of treatment and resources, or equality of care and concern. Instead, it necessitates equity: love requires shared yet differentiated duties to care for those in need, according to their needs and our relationships to the most vulnerable. So, love tolerates – and even justifies – some partiality in taking care first of those in one’s own community, without abandoning outsiders to their own luck. This understanding of solidarity is predicated on the idea of equality of dignity – meaning, equal respectful consideration and loving regard among persons and nations. Equality of dignity is consistent with treating, caring, and being concerned with different people in different ways, according to their different needs and their different relationships to us, like the principle of subsidiarity suggests.

This chapter, the volume’s Introduction, formulates central analytical and practical challenges posed by the effort to render the solidarity principle in concrete regulations, policies and legal outcomes, that is in “inscriptions of solidarity” in the terminology adopted here. Actors and institutions have often relied on the solidarity principle in their response to new challenges but that reliance poses as many new questions as it answers. Some of these questions are related to the fact that invocations of the solidarity principle have thus far largely failed to effectively reverse the tendency toward growing inequality. The chapter identifies not only positive elements of solidarity’s “inscriptions” but also challenges, especially those that involve enforceability and that partly reflect the frequent use of soft-law instruments in renderings of the solidarity principle. The chapter also explores the interactions – in application – between the principles of solidarity and equality, underscoring the usefulness of efforts to build synergies between those two legal framings or “labels” for initiatives designed to protect vulnerable sectors of the population, constructing an inclusive solidarity. In practice, actors have faced choices about how to frame policies that address crucial social needs.

The proportionality exam as developed by the German Constitutional Court expresses the idea that constitutional rights cannot be overruled neither by other constitutional rights nor public interests. Instead, colliding rights and public interests should be satisfied as factually and legally possible. The chapter defends that the integrated proportionality test, which analyzes suitability, necessity and proportionality in its narrow sense, while including a modulation of the intensity of the scrutiny, may become a powerful adjudication device. It allows for a nuanced implementation of the three subprinciples of the proportionality exam, enabling courts to level the ground for disadvantaged groups. To show the usefulness of the modulated exam in dealing with structural inequality in Latin America, two cases involving political rights decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Castañeda Gutman and Yatama v. Nicaragua) are examined.

We all share a common interest in preserving the well-being of our planet. But the changing climate does not affect us in the same ways, at the same pace, or to the same degree. This is because of where we live, but also due to our respective levels of wealth and income, our physical and mental disabilities, the colour of our skin. We can’t address climate change without contending with issues of difference and inequality. It’s precisely because those least responsible for climate change will suffer its most severe impacts – within cities and regions and across the globe – that an approach which takes account of that imbalance is essential. Applying an equality lens to climate litigation is not just the right thing to do; it’s also more effective. By underscoring the ways in which climate change is a reflection of unjust power relations, a focus on equality makes it more likely that policy will attend to climate change’s causes and help ensure that the most culpable bear the greatest costs of redress. While some cases should advance the universal rights of everyone to a sustainable climate, litigation through an equality lens offers distinctive political, strategic, and jurisprudential advantages.

This chapter explores skills and training in archaeology, especially university-level training opportunities. It includes pre-university and school-level training opportunities and fieldwork opportunities, and it addresses accessibility and equality issues in archaeology.

Liberal constitutional discourse has been dominated by a proceduralist, acontextual, universalising worldview. This Rawlsian vision of constitutionalism castigates thick, substantive, moral commitments (other than fundamental rights) in constitutions as illiberal and unwise, at best to be tolerated as minor deviations only when absolutely unavoidable. In practice, however, the ideal of proceduralist constitutionalism is approximated only by a handful of liberal democratic states, arguably the United States and Australia.1 Many other (sufficiently or aspirationally) liberal-democratic states not only include thick moral commitments in their constitutions, tasking their governments with the duty to govern well, but also specify various facets of (what they believe to be required by) good governance.

Jeff King has characterised such thick moral commitments as constitutional ‘mission statements’.2 An important, but much-ignored, form of these thick commitments is a set of provisions I will call ‘constitutional directives’ or simply ‘directives’.

The collapse of traditional hierarchies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries forced political thinkers to wrestle with the practical implications of social and political equality, and gave birth to the liberal tradition of political thought. The liberal response to this development came in two overlapping stages. First, the democratization of public and private life made it clear that the power that we exercise over each other in modern societies is reciprocal, insidious, and pervasive, and gave new urgency to the problem of carving out a domain of nonresponsible conduct. Second, the rise of industrial capitalism exposed the tension between the dependence that we experience in our private lives and the independence that we are expected to display as citizens, and gave new urgency to the task of creating the conditions under which people become fit to be held responsible for what they do. Because these two projects are often at odds with one another, the characteristic note of liberal political thought is one of balance and compromise as we seek to strike an appropriate balance between republican and market freedom.