Micronations are incredibly diverse. Some micronations are speculative experiments in statehood, perhaps utopian examples of how nations could or should be organised. Others are established for personal entertainment, fantasy or artistic expression. Where a town or small community supports the idea, micronationalism can even promote tourism and deliver an economic boost to a region. Others still are formed to challenge and critique statehood and sovereign authority or as a way to make quick money by fair or foul means. Some of the more enduring micronations emerge as personal grievances take on a political dimension as anger, frustration and desperation push individuals into taking extreme action. In this chapter, we undertake a survey of some of the most prominent micronations by focusing on the myriad of (often overlapping) motivations for their creation. This study complements our definition and conceptual framework, explored in the previous chapter, by expanding our knowledge of the justifications provided for micronations and the assorted rationales that underlie their assertions of statehood.

Chapter 4 critiques contemporary Islamic economics as a disciplinary synthesis of Western economics and basic Islamic tenets. The first part of the chapter discusses the intricate relation between Sharīʿa and the field of economics in Islam by critiquing the legal premise of contemporary Islamic economics. The second part critically examines the Islamic economic project’s epistemology and methodology, and the amalgamation of the two epistemic systems: Islamic conceptual history and Western economic tradition. This composition provided Islamic economics with a hybrid framework, consisting of Islamic ethics and a neoclassical economic outlook.

Almost every reader’s first encounter with Kant comes through either the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals or the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, but while the former work occupies a central and revered place in the philosophical canon, the Prolegomena is often viewed much more ambivalently.

International lawyers are very familiar with the claim that international law has taken a turn to history since the tumultuous decade of the 1990s. As debates over the interpretation of past texts, events, and practices have intensified in the context of a rapidly changing field of international law, history has been presented as offering a silver bullet. While international lawyers are criticised for instrumentalising or mythologising the past in ways that are biased, partisan, and political, professional historical methods are presented as offering an objective, impartial, and evidence-based alternative. This chapter outlines the cross-disciplinary hermeneutic of suspicion that has structured the resulting debates over how the history of international law is understood. It sets out the assumptions underpinning that debate and explores its consequences for the way lawyers and historians represent the nature, functions, potential, role, and limits of international law.

This chapter examines the main trends in the international parodies of Ibsen from the late 1880s and ’90s, both those intended primarily for print and for the stage. Proceeding from Margaret Rose’s model of parody as ‘comic refunctioning of preformed linguistic or artistic material’, the chapter examines the parodic treatments of Ibsen as a retrospective measure of his reception context: where his contemporaries in Great Britain, Norway, Sweden and Germany saw him crossing the lines of conventional drama, lines that the respondents either were invested in defending or simply calling attention to in order to understand through parodic distortion the contributions Ibsen was making. Two areas that provoked repeated parodic treatment had to do with varying international perceptions of the dramas’ cultural specificity and their generic indeterminacy.

The Russian radical émigré Alexander Herzen left three works that focus on 1848: two volumes of essays, and his great autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, in which his life story pivots around 1848. Herzen, who emigrated in 1847, describes himself as arriving in Paris as pilgrims once arrived at Jerusalem. By his own account, he rapidly discovered the fundamentally bourgeois character of French civilization and then witnessed the crushing of the June insurrection. The political debacle was compounded by personal tragedy – the deaths of his mother and son and his wife Natalie. In all his writings we find Herzen seeking a perspective from which the collapse of his pre-revolutionary ideals would make sense. His most powerful essays are jeremiads lamenting his broken dreams, replaying the June insurrection, and reflecting on the powerlessness of historical actors to change the world. Attempting to explain what went wrong in 1848, Herzen insists on the inability of European radicals to get beyond models drawn from the first French Revolution or Christianity or both. For Herzen, as for Proudhon (whom he admired) and Marx (whom he did not admire) the fatal weakness of the left lay in its inability to emancipate itself from memories that served to justify and cloak the return of repressive centralized government.

Millán Brusslan focusses upon what was unique about Schlegel’s philosophical lens, a lens uniquely suited to capturing social injustice. She undertakes an examination of the roots of Schlegel’s philosophical pluralism and his project of blending philosophy and poetry. She argues that Schlegel’s push to blend disciplines was part of a project to reform our approach to truth, a topic explored in Sections One and Two of the paper. The new philosophical lens developed by Schlegel allowed him to see what other thinkers overlooked and to address urgent social issues that needed attention, especially the exclusion of women from philosophy. The reforming spirit of Schlegel’s thought is most systematically developed in an essay on Kant’s Perpetual Peace, and so in Sections Three and Four of the paper, Kant’s essay and Schlegel’s critique of it are analyzed to highlight the political implications of Schlegel’s thought.

Affective states and their representational forms have been as crucial to critical constructions of modernism as to the writing we associate with its multiple movements, moments, and legacies. At the confluence of represented feeling and registrations of affect, ambitions of otherwise historically distinct writers come into conversation. To see how this conversation might enhance modernist studies’ critical-affective literacies, this chapter follows a transhistorical rather than a discretely periodized arc, gauging the conceptual challenges and interpretive opportunities that come with close reading affective representation as it interlaces modernism’s stylistic aspirations and political valences. It considers how changing disciplinary priorities are transforming the ways in which modernist studies addresses affect’s critical purchase. And it encompasses both early twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures (Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Storm Jameson, Ian McEwan, and Rachael Cusk) to explore analytical synergies between vocabularies of feeling and evolving strategies of experimental form.

This short final chapter summarises the main arguments of the book with a particular emphasis on the law’s indeterminacy and its relation to structural bias. The author argues that apart from evidencing the law’s total openness, the constant oscillation of ‘civilisation’ between ‘improvement’ and ‘biology’ in fact evidences its links to the contradictions of global capitalism. As a consequence, the structured indeterminacy of ‘civilisation’ can be useful to actors who accept the basic desirability of capitalism, but it can be profoundly damaging to radical projects.

Chapter 7 analyzes the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic entitled “On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection.” Using Leibniz’s monadology as a prism, Kant here seeks to account for the ultimate premises of his critique and intended reform of metaphysics. More specifically, the chapter conceives of this critique as a variety of transcendental reflection that is guided by four pairs of concepts, including sameness and difference. In order to contextualize this account, the chapter briefly discusses Wolff’s and Baumgarten’s treatment of these concepts. Commentators generally assume that the activity called transcendental reflection is carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason alone. The chapter argues, by contrast, that Kant distinguishes the version of transcendental reflection that informs the ontology of his predecessors from the critical version enacted in the Critique. On this basis, it outlines Kant’s understanding of the difference between a Leibnizian employment of the concepts of reflection and his own.

The second chapter seeks to clarify how Kant in the late 1760s and early 1770s came to conceive of the aim and main arguments of what was to become the Critique of Pure Reason. It focuses in particular on Kant’s evolving understanding of the act of critique. The heart of the chapter consists in an analysis of the Inaugural Dissertation. Challenging the prevailing view, the chapter highlights the critical impetus of the treatise by arguing that the specific criterion it employs to curb the ambitions of metaphysics – intellectual purity – is directed against an assumption common to Wolff, Crusius, and early post-Leibnizian philosophy in general. Moreover, it puts into perspective the alleged break between the Dissertation and the Critique by arguing that this early instance of critique is preserved in the Critique of Pure Reason. The chapter argues that Kant in this work introduces a new form of critique by arguing that any a priori cognition of objects necessarily rests on pure intuition.