In the search for a Cuban road to socialism, those advocating a gradualist and pragmatic approach clashed with Che Guevara and his supporters, who called for a radical and voluntarist development strategy. While criticized by Cuba’s Soviet and Eastern Bloc allies, Che’s radical economic ideas, which dominated Cuban policy by 1968, were shaped by North Korea’s example as well as its material support. North Korea appeared to show a tested path through which a small country emerging from colonialism and underdevelopment could transform rapidly into a modern, industrialized, socialist republic. The Cuban–North Korean ideological encounter reflected a broader discourse taking place within the international Left at the time reflecting disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the appeal of alternative models of socialism from the global South. As an ideological consensus between Cuba and North Korea solidified in the 1960s, the two governments became principal defenders of voluntarist economics within the socialist world, in resistance to the dominant trend towards “market socialism.” This partnership was given its most vibrant expression in the 1970 sugar harvest, Cuba’s pivotal experiment in voluntarist economics, in which North Korea participated directly.

The ascendancy of French political power supported literary success and scientific achievement. Investigators such as Lagrange, Laplace, and Lavoisier gave mathematical and empirical support to modern chemistry, physics, and biology. In parallel, philosophical discourses on psychology led to a reinterpretation of Descartes’ formulation to focus on sensation. Condillac, Bonnet, and La Mettrie argued for the equation of mental operations and sensory input, with the result that they reduced psychology to sensation. Helvétius and Cabanis attempted to back off from such extremism by asserting the mediating role of a central ego, although both remained committed to sensory physiology. Biran and Comte recognized the consequences of reducing psychology to mere sensory physiology, but each worked out separate solutions. Biran rejected sensationalism as inadequate, suggesting an individual psychology based on consciousness and the will. In contrast Comte ultimately accepted sensationalism and dismissed psychology. For him, the individual person should properly be studied by physiology; the individual behaving in a group is the province of sociology. Comte, however, advocated a spirit of objective observation that was eventually useful to psychology. Thus, the successors to Descartes in France left psychology in a somewhat tenuous position, removed from recognition as a formal discipline.

This chapter discusses the polemical works that Pufendorf wrote in response to the violent criticisms directed against his main natural law work, the Law of Nature and Nations. Pufendorf collected these controversial writings under the title Eris Scandica (Scandinavian dispute) in 1686. Despite being indispensable for the reconstruction of Pufendorf’s thought, and notwithstanding its great success among his contemporaries, this work is one of the least known and used works by scholars of natural law. In beginning to make good this deficit the present chapter offers insights not only into the philosophical arguments of our author, but also into his formidable satirical style, at once strongly contentious and imaginative. Much of the ferocity of the disputes is explained by the fact that Pufendorf’s enemies were actually accusing him of heresy, which helps to clarify the centrality of the work’s philosophical-theological themes and the violence of Pufendorf’s reaction. In presenting the variety of philosophical issues covered in Eris Scandica, the chapter covers not only the classic themes of natural law—state of nature, moral entities, obligation—but also elucidates Pufendorf’s views of the relation between philosophical reason and Christian philosophy, thence philosophy and theology, and his stance towards Cartesianism.

This chapter shows that early modern metaphysics was far more important for Pufendorf’s moral philosophy than has often been thought. In particular, it is essential to understanding Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities. This theory is often regarded as voluntarist and anti-metaphysical. Opposed to this, it has been argued, was a rationalist belief in objective and eternal moral values that was exemplified by philosophers like Leibniz. However, the main distinction for Pufendorf was not between voluntarism and rationalism, but between moral rules that were specific to a certain society because they were merely conventional, and others that were universal because they were natural, in the sense of being grounded in the physical characteristics of human nature as it had been created by God. The latter, according to Pufendorf, were necessarily true, though their necessity was hypothetical rather than absolute. Pufendorf’s intention was to turn moral philosophy into a science, which would supersede traditional Aristotelian-scholastic views that morality was concerned with the contingent circumstances of actions, and therefore incapable of ‘scientific’, that is syllogistic proof. Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities was central to this project of a moral science, which required him to provide a metaphysical foundation for these entities.

Voluntarism, and its associated virtue, has long been a legitimation device in the construction of public authority. It has been theorized, at least in Western political philosophy, as a counterweight to the excesses of big government or big business. In some studies in Africa, voluntarism has been married to instrumentalist accounts of doing politics. This chapter highlights the nuanced complexities in invoking voluntarism, its ideational and material components, and the multifaceted opportunities and obligations it affords. It demonstrates continuity between government and non-government around the production of this form of authority. However, legitimation is a practice negotiated by its ‘publics’. In this case, this comprises volunteers who must negotiate the vertical, often extractive pressures from external actors of their physical and emotional labours as well as lateral contestation by peers of their own authority to act in the interests of Others. This chapter explores the material and ideational legitimation that volunteer networks afford non-governmental organizations as well as the negotiation and contestation of voluntarism’s work on the part of volunteers themselves.

Human rights and business have long been perceived as two separate domains, with human rights considered to be a shield and protection against the abuse of governmental power. It has only been more recently that private actors such as corporations have come onto the radar of human rights scholars, while those concerned with corporations and corporate responsibility have hardly adopted a human rights perspective. Hence, bringing business and human rights together has not been intuitive for either human rights scholars or corporate responsibility researchers. Accordingly, learning “business and human rights” (BHR) actually means unlearning both business and human rights, at least to some degree. A certain taken-for-grantedness of “business as usual” often provides fertile ground for corporate human rights violations and the inadequacies of the current international legal system that provides the shield for their impunity.

The will is the key component of Duns Scotus’s moral theory, both because Duns Scotus held (quite uncontroversially) that we are morally responsible only for our free choices and their outcomes and because (more controversially) he thought that most principles detailing what is morally good and what is morally bad depends on God’s free decisions. The key, then, question is how we know contingent practical principles. This essay offers an account of our knowledge of such principles that is (a) consistent with what Duns Scotus says about the relationship of the moral law to the divine will and to human nature, (b) consistent with what he says more generally about our knowledge of contingent truths, and (c) consistent with his actual argumentative practice in dealing with contingent practical principles. The examination of Duns Scotus’s argumentative practice uncovers a third, hitherto unnoticed, sense of ‘natural law’. This essay suggests that the core unifying sense of ‘natural law’ for Duns Scotus is precisely the epistemic status of the precepts of natural law as non-inferentially evident.

When doing policy analysis, economists assume that a good policy is a consumer-preferred policy. When economists think about the policy process or political institutions, their normative standard is the same. The good representative is a clerk-like aggregator of consumers’ preferences. This normative standard leads many economists to be supportive of direct democracy, such as initiatives and referenda.

The founders viewed direct democracy with great alarm, because their study of history showed that the political ignorance and strong passions of the people frequently brought down democratic regimes. They favored a representative democracy, because it tended to refine and enlarge the public’s views through a deliberative process. Initiatives and referenda lead to “We win, you lose” decisions. Representative institutions are more likely to reach conclusions that reflect some minority points of view, and such compromises are more likely to be enforceable.

By encouraging deliberation, our large republic’s legislative process also encourages the selection of representatives with temperaments predisposed to consider the needs of others and the “permanent and aggregate interests of the Community.” Although the sharp splits in our nation and thus in our political institutions make deliberation less likely, the splits also make it more necessary. In Congress there are many recent examples of a deliberative process at work.

Having examined the judgment crucial to the hylomorphically structured act of choice, this chapter turns to the act of choice itself, which is a volition. It does not yet offer an account of choice’s hylomorphic structure but lays important groundwork for doing so in Chapter 5 by shedding light on Aquinas’s general account of volition and its dependence on judgment. It first argues that a volition differs from judgment because it involves a world-to-mind rather than mind-to-world direction of fit. It then examines how volition depends on judgment. Aquinas himself characterizes judgment as the formal as well as the final cause of volition. The chapter suggests that these are two descriptions of one and the same dependence relation: judgment orders volition to an end, which makes it a final cause, and in so doing it also determines the volition’s kind, which makes it a formal cause. The last two sections deal with Aquinas’s view that the will “moves itself.” They argue that this does not imply any freedom of the will to operate independently of reason. In short, the chapter advocates a strongly intellectualist account of the will’s freedom.

The introduction does the following: it lays out the scope and argument of the book; it explains different senses of free will, a broad sense, which does not presuppose the ability to do otherwise, and a narrow sense, which does presuppose it; it presents broad definitions of historiographical labels: intellectualism and voluntarism, which respectively refer to theories that explain free agency mainly with reference to the intellect or the will; it summarizes the commonly accepted narrative of the fall of the angels, of which medieval thinkers discuss particular aspects in connection to free will; and it presents a brief chapter outline.

Focusing on the examples of astrology, astronomy, and cometography, this essay investigates the historical intellectual connections between the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, religious reformism, and metaphysics. It argues that it was the strong voluntarism, in particular the strong belief in the sovereignty of divine providence, that Calvinism inherited from late medieval metaphysical nominalism that led to the rise of modern empiricism, the breakdown of Ptolemaic cosmology, and the ancient science of astrology, thus preparing the way for a new heliocentric and mechanistic understanding of the universe.

Chapter 5 is the lynchpin chapter of this book. It offers contextual analysis of Locke’s most important tolerationist texts: the unpublished ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ and the famed Epistola de Tolerantia. These works are shown to have moved beyond the idioms of civil religion, monarchical prerogative, and prudential indulgence. They offer a full-blown, rights-oriented defence of religious freedom and free exercise. They justify, potentially, political resistance in defence of these rights. They also offer, for the first time, a Lockean ecclesiology: a positive theory of churches, their autonomy, and ends. In argument and tone the ‘Answer’ and the Epistola dramatically break with Locke’s earlier writings on toleration. This break is presented, from one angle, as a break with the politique tolerationism of Restoration Hobbism. Locke is shown to have developed a ‘non-domination’ account of religious freedom and free exercise. His thinking was no longer subservient to the needs of the state, and indeed his theory of conscience freedom could undermine those interests. This chapter interprets Lockean toleration theory as an emancipation from the civil religion and prerogative-oriented logic of Hobbesian toleration.

This chapter on participation in goodness, and on ethics or a good life, has been prepared for by the previous chapter, on beauty and desire. Like the chapter on truth and epistemology before that, this chapter on goodness is robustly realist: it sees what would be morally good for a person, community, or situation to align with the reality and good of the thing considered, which it has by participation in God. The twin focuses here are virtue ethics (which is explored in terms of the alignment of the good-as-moral with the good-as-excellent) and natural law (which is explored in terms of the alignment of the good-as-moral with the good-as-beneficial). No firm wedge, however, is driven between those two approaches, which are both related to God as source and goal in participatory terms. The chapter moves to a discussion of the expectation of the coherence of the good in a participatory framework, such that the goodness that creatures have (and, here, especially human beings) is expected naturally to align with the nature of the good as communicated, for instance, in revelation. This is explored in contrast with the thought of John Duns Scotus. The chapter ends with a participatory discussion of the nature of law in its various forms, including the participatory and theological backdrop to notions of international law.

The final chapters of this book look at how a participatory outlook can inform and has informed a vision of the world and what it means to live, act, pray, and seek God in it. This, the first of these chapters, considers knowledge and knowing in participatory terms. Knowledge is seen as a participation of the knower in the known, or a sharing from the known to the knower. This undergirds a 'realist' epistemology, in that knowing rests on the reality of the thing that is known. That said, it also stresses the creaturehood and particularity of the knower and the manner of knowing: that which is known comes to be in the knower in the manner of the knower, whether we are talking about our knowledge of an animal, of a plant, or of God. In the case of God, most of all, the knower never exhausts the depths of what is known. That also applies, however, although to a different degree, in the knowledge of even mundane things, since their deepest reality is a participation in God, which confers a creaturely form of inexhaustibility. In these ways, much of this chapter is an exploration of 'intra-finite participation': about how one creature participates in, or donates to, another. It closes with a discussion of the relation between reason and revelation.