Not just embraced by reactionaries, aristocrats, or committed duelists, the idea of honor had widespread cultural and sociopolitical purchase in the Romantic era. As a master value – or a value so prolific that it is becomes the hidden assumption of a range of different theories and practices – honor, this introduction argues, addresses three major developments in modernity: the growing split between private and public selves, the development of new kinds of civic virtue, and the ascendent place of affect in cultural production. Placing Keats, Coleridge, Equiano, Wollstonecraft, Burke, Kant, and Hegel in conversation with contemporary critics such as Wai Chee Dimock, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Achille Mbembe – all of whose recent work is concerned with honor and mutual recognition – this introduction further reveals Romantic cultures diagnosis of the limits of liberal republican notions of liberty when faced with the social necessity of material forms of dignity.

As the central villain of Infinite Jest, entertainment is a persistent preoccupation in Wallace’s writing. He presents it as a locus of neoliberal power in ways that anticipated the development of tailored entertainment services well ahead of time. This chapter examines Wallace’s representation of entertainment, couching it particularly in its antagonistic relationship with attention and engagement, which his work elevated as cardinal virtues. This chapter situates Wallace’s vision of entertainment in a critical paradigm of entertainment as a form of individual and social control, and as the ultimate Jamesonian manifestation of late capitalist flattening, arguing that the anhedonia of Wallace’s characters is a direct result of the dominant forms and agendas of entertainment on display in his writing. The chapter also argues that the forms of entertainment in Wallace’s work invite and reflect the idea of absorption, which is characterized positively and negatively depending on its genesis. That is to say, the absorption of entertainment is contrasted with the absorption of boredom, and again with the absorption of attention, with widely diverse effects on the postmodern subject. Entertainment constitutes a seductive and deadening force that both unites and isolates the subjects of Wallace’s writing, the great threat to the contemporary self.

For Pufendorf, pacts are the means by which humanity creates the institutions that separate them from the state of nature, in keeping with the natural law command to cultivate society. By pacting people impose new obligations on themselves in addition to those that exist by the law of nature, creating strict rights and duties that enable peace and social cooperation. Analyzing explicit, tacit and implicit pacts Pufendorf considers what counts as signs expressing intention. Language is the original social institution that is logically prior to the agreements about other adventitious states. The language pact curtails the natural liberty to use the faculty of speech as one pleases and gives others the right to require that signs are used in accordance with the communicative duty. There is an analogy with the creation of property, which, similarly, is not a natural quality of things but a moral entity imposed by to overcome conflicting claims upon a world that is naturally common. The last section of the chapter deals with foundations of the price or value of things, the introduction of money, and the interpretation of pacts.

This chapter interrogates trends in how the natural world is taken up, governed and constituted by international law, in particular the growing marketisation of environmental governance. This chapter suggests it is fruitful to understand these contemporary forms of governance as constituted by the co-articulation of two older anthropocentric modalities of exercising power over nature: appropriative domination and stewardship. It provides a background to both these modalities, showing that though these are often understood as opposites, on a deeper level they are similar. It suggests that the ‘offset’ relation is the paradigmatic example of the co-articulation of these two modalities, as the ‘offset’ establishes a relationship between activities that damage the environment at one site and activities intended to protect, repair, or improve the environment elsewhere. This chapter situates such mechanisms as one element of a broader project to make nature legible in economic terms. In closing, this chapter considers the effects of the rise of ‘green governmentality’ and maps the terrain against which struggles for different nature/human relations take place.

As a species, we spend a great deal of time, energy, and money on security. The world’s military budgets alone totalled more than $1.9 trillion U.S. dollars in 2020, an average of 6.0 percent of government spending and 2.0 percent of Gross Domestic Product.1 The United States accounts for more than a third of the total all by itself and spends upward of $70 billion on foreign and military intelligence (a figure that excludes black budget expenditures).2 Add in spending on border controls, coast guards, and funding for national security–related research and development across a variety of fields, and it is clear that many countries invest very heavily indeed in protecting against foreign threats.

This chapter introduces the notion of value as a normative concept, as the price that something ought to exchange at. This does not mean that there is only one price that is its value for everyone, as objectivist theories of value assume: each of us forms our own opinion of the value of a thing. However, there are social forces that tend to produce convergence in our valuations. Value is thus normative, as it is influenced by assessment of what is a just price, and these assessments themselves depend on social norms about valuation. Building critically on the economics of conventions school and recent sociological work on valuation as a process, the chapter explains these normative assessments in terms of what it calls lay theories of value: norms about the fair price of commodities. It then discusses how valuation contributes to price determination, as one of multiple mechanisms in open economic systems. The second section of the chapter introduces the critical realist view of causation that enables us to make sense of this role for theories of value.

The introductory chapter outlines the argument of the book and positions it both politically and intellectually. Politically, it challenges the naturalisation of financial assets as unproblematic objects with value in their own right and thus as just one more commodity that it is perfectly reasonable to buy and sell for profit. In reality they are nothing more than promises, and often highly tenuous promises, and their value depends circularly on the social construction of beliefs about their value. We must therefore doubt whether financial values bear any relation to the social value of financial products. Indeed, we are entitled to ask whether the buying and selling of financial instruments creates social value at all, or ultimately generates greater social costs than any benefits it may deliver. Intellectually, the book draws on recent work on valuation, but its explanatory framework depends on a critical realist understanding of causality and social structures.

This chapter considers English writing about market values from the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries – taking as its termini the dissolution of the monasteries, which began in 1536, and the trade depression of the early 1620s. The chapter portrays some of the give and take between proto-literary and proto-economic writing in this period by focusing on the emergent concept of productivity. It begins by outlining the changing material and ideological conditions that prompted writerly attention to money and trade from merchants, statesmen, and imaginative writers. It shows how apparently limited topics of monetary debate in the period – debasement, usury, and the export of bullion – were amplified into far-reaching critiques of value by imaginative writers. And it shows how these value critiques tended in turn to support an emergent arena of autonomous value in what we might recognize as literary production.

One of the great joys and benefits of ageing is the possibility of being in very long-term friendships – such friendships, by their very nature, are not available to the young. These friendships ground strong reciprocal special obligations. Such long-term friends have very strong obligations to care for each other as they age and as they become vulnerable as a result of declining mental and/or physical strength. These long-standing intimate relationships, insofar as they ground strong special obligations, are precisely what a friend ought to be thinking about as she is moved to care for her friend. Thus, in thinking about a duty, one is thereby thinking about the valuable relationship that has bound one to one’s friend over an important and extended portion of one’s life. Acting from a special obligation to a long-term friend is to act in precisely the right sort of caring way.

Although significant progress has been made in dealing with ancient economies through the establishing of new methodological approaches (like the New Institutional Economics), old-school Political Economy still plays an important role. It endeavours among other things to describe and evaluate the causes which lead to economic growth, thereby including factors which cannot be subsumed under the category of ‘institutions’ (exclusively focused on by the NIE) like demography or climate. Recently, this traditional approach has been intensively adopted to explain and measure the growth of ancient Greek economies between the ninth and fourth centuries, today viewed as an established fact in contrast to the older consensus, which was characterised by scepticism regarding the capability of ancient societies to generate sustainable growth. This chapter presents the most important factors that were (supposedly) conducive to growth and describes and their mutual interplay and interferences. In a further section, some methodological and empirical problems of the way 'ancient growth' is quantified in contemporary research are discussed. In a final section, some thoughts are offered on geo-economic factors, assumed by the author to have had a decisive impact in bringing about 'growth' or concentrations of wealth in some areas and milieus.

Ulysses’ mad pursuit of virtue and knowledge presumed that an exploration of physical facts can yield an understanding of value. In the examination on love in the heaven of the fixed stars, St. John first asks not what love is, but where Dante’s soul is pointed. To love is to have an aim, a point, a target. It is to value something more than other things and, in the hierarchy of all good things, there must be one that is the best of all. It is from the sphere of the constellations, of which Ulysses necessarily lost sight when he ventured beyond the known world into the southern hemisphere, that Adam reveals that the cause of his long exile was a trespassing beyond the sign. Since language, the logos, is what humans use to discern what is good and what is harmful, it enacts the role of the God of Bible who promised to reveal to Moses “every value.

What makes human social learning so powerful? While past accounts have sometimes prioritized finding the single capacity that makes the largest difference, our social learning abilities span a wide spectrum of capacities from the high-fidelity imitation of behaviors to inferring and learning from hidden mental states. Here, we propose that the power of human social learning lies not within a single capacity, but in our ability to flexibly arbitrate between different computations and to integrate their outputs. In particular, learners can directly copy the demonstrator’s actions in the absence of causal insight (policy imitation), infer their instrumental values (value inference), or infer their model of the world and intrinsic rewards (belief inference and reward inference). Each of these strategies trades off the cost of computation against the flexibility and compositionality of its outputs. Crucially, we have the capacity to arbitrate and exchange information between these representational formats. Human social learning, we suggest, is powerful not just because of the way it moves information between minds, but also because of the way it flexibly moves information within them.