This book studies a central but hitherto neglected aspect of Rousseau's political thought: the concept of social order and its implications for the ideal society which he envisages. The antithesis between order and disorder is a fundamental theme in Rousseau's work, and the author takes it as the basis for this study. In contrast with a widely held interpretation of Rousseau's philosophy, Professor Viroli argues that natural and political order are by no means the same for Rousseau. He explores the (...) differences and interrelations between the different types of order which Rousseau describes, and shows how the philosopher constructed his final doctrine of the just society, which can be based only on every citizen's voluntary and knowing acceptance of the social contract and on the promotion of virtue above ambition. The author also shows the extent of Rousseau's debt to the republican tradition, and above all to Machiavelli, and revises the image of Rousseau as a disciple of the natural-law school. (shrink)

The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of this book, sharpens mechanisms of exploitation and domination indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, between retirees and welfare recipients. They are all "debtors," guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor.--from The Making of the Indebted Man Debt -- both public debt and private debt Has become a major concern (...) of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of "public safety" through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the "entrepreneurs" of our lives, of our "human capital." In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured. How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt. (shrink)

An analysis of how capitalism today produces subjectivity like any other “good,” and what would allow us to escape its hold. “Capital is a semiotic operator”: this assertion by Félix Guattari is at the heart of Maurizio Lazzarato's Signs and Machines, which asks us to leave behind the logocentrism that still informs so many critical theories. Lazzarato calls instead for a new theory capable of explaining how signs function in the economy, in power apparatuses, and in the production of (...) subjectivity. Moving beyond the dualism of signifier and signified, Signs and Machines shows how signs act as “sign-operators” that enter directly into material flows and into the functioning of machines. Money, the stock market, price differentials, algorithms, and scientific equations and formulas constitute semiotic “motors” that make capitalism's social and technical machines run, bypassing representation and consciousness to produce social subjections and semiotic enslavements. Lazzarato contrasts Deleuze and Guattari's complex semiotics with the political theories of Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, and Judith Butler, for whom language and the public space it opens still play a fundamental role. Lazzarato asks: What are the conditions necessary for political and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity represents the primary and perhaps most important work of capitalism? What are the specific tools required to undo the industrial mass production of subjectivity undertaken by business and the state? What types of organization must we construct for a process of subjectivation that would allow us to escape the hold of social subjection and machinic enslavement? In addressing these questions, Signs and Machines takes on a task that is today more urgent than ever. (shrink)

Nationalism and patriotism are two of the most powerful forces shaping world history. In this paperback edition of a highly successful, wide-ranging study, Maurizio Viroli shows exactly why patriotism is a political virtue and nationalism a political vice.

In this book, Esposito presents a historiography of organicist and holistic thought through an examination of the work of leading biologists from Britain and America. He shows how this work relates to earlier Romantic tradition and sets it within the wider context of the history and philosophy of the life sciences.

Sex robots are already a reality: in this provocative text, Maurizio Balistreri explores the fascinating world of future sex, exploring the ethical questions raised by the existence of a sex robot industry.

This paper aims to argue for the thesis that it is not a priori morally justified that the first phase of space colonisation is based on sexual reproduction. We ground this position on the argument that, at least in the first colonisation settlements, those born in space may not have a good chance of having a good life. This problem does not depend on the fact that life on another planet would have to deal with issues such as solar radiation (...) or with the decrease or entire absence of the force of gravity. These issues could plausibly be addressed given that the planets or settlements we will feasibly colonise could be completely transformed through geoengineering processes. Likewise, the ability of humans to live in space could be enhanced through genetic modification interventions. Even if, however, the problems concerning survival in space were solved, we think that, at least in the first period of colonisation of space or other planets, giving birth to children in space could be a morally irresponsible choice since we argue, the life we ​​could give them might not be good enough. We contend that this is the case since when we decide to have a baby. We argue that it is not morally right to be content that our children have a minimally sufficient life worth living; before we give birth to children in space, we should make sure we can give them a reasonable chance of having a good life. This principle applies both on Earth - at least where you can choose - and for space travel. (shrink)

Chapter 1st of the book. This chapter explores the fundamental ambiguity of the concept of plasticity – between openness and determination, change and stabilization of forms. This pluralism of meanings is used to unpack different instantiations of corporeal plasticity across various epochs, starting from ancient and early modern medicine, particularly humouralism. A genealogical approach displaces the notion that plasticity is a unitary phenomenon, coming in the abstract, and illuminates the unequal distribution of different forms of plasticities across social, gender, and (...) ethnic groups. Taking a longer view of the plastic body as a ubiquitous belief in traditions predating and coexisting with modern medicine will help contextualize the seeming radicalism of today’s turn to permeability and the exceptionalism of Western findings. By highlighting the complex biopolitical usages of plasticity in the past, the chapter warns against simplistic appropriations of the term in contemporary body/world configurations driven by findings in neuroscience, epigenetics and microbiomics. (shrink)

Current debates about patriotism and nationalism have so far failed adequately to take into account the historical meaning of republican patriotism. For classical and modern republican theorists, love of country is a charitable love of the republic and of its citizens. It is an attachment to the political values of republican liberty and to the culture based upon them. As such, it is a theoretical alternative to both civic and ethnic nationalism, and it is not at all confined within the (...) bygone experience of city‐states. (shrink)

As space travel and intentions to colonise other planets are becoming the norm in public debate and scholarship, we must also confront the technical and survival challenges that emerge from these hostile environments. This paper aims to evaluate the various arguments proposed to meet the challenges of human space travel and extraterrestrial planetary colonisation. In particular, two primary solutions have been present in the literature as the most straightforward solutions to the rigours of extraterrestrial survival and flourishing: (1) geoengineering, where (...) the environment is modified to become hospitable to its inhabitants, and (2) human (bio)enhancement where the genetic heritage of humans is modified to make them more resilient to the difficulties they may encounter as well as to permit them to thrive in non-terrestrial environments. Both positions have strong arguments supporting them but also severe philosophical and practical drawbacks when exposed to different circumstances. This paper aims to show that a principled stance where one position is accepted wholesale necessarily comes at the opportunity cost of the other where the other might be better suited, practically and morally. This paper concludes that case-by-case evaluations of the solutions to space travel and extraterrestrial colonisation are necessary to ensure moral congruency and the survival and flourishing of astronauts now and into the future. (shrink)

Niccolò Machiavelli is one of most influential modern political thinkers. His works, above all The prince, The discourses on Livy, The Florentine histories, and The art of war, are still passionately discussed in the intellectual community. Against the trite commonplace that Machiavelli was a teacher of evil who justified political immorality, Maurizio Viroli shows, on the basis of a rigorous study of his texts, that Machiavaelli taught instead the best way to attain true glory through political action.

The theme of human extinction is increasingly at the center of the current debate on moral philosophy and bioethics. We look at space missions and station construction projects capable of accommodating a large population and at the colonization of other planets with great hope. However, solutions are not excluded either, which for now certainly appear to be much more original. One of the most original projects involves launching a spacecraft containing cryopreserved human embryos, which, once they arrive at destination on (...) another planet, must be thawed and birthed by intelligent machines through artificial wombs (ectogenesis). In this paper, I do not intend to analyze whether the embryo space colonization project is indeed feasible. Instead, I will focus on examining the primary moral questions raised by the embryo space colonization project to determine whether, at least prima facie, it can be deemed morally acceptable. I will begin by discussing the objection advanced by Konrad Szocik (2021), according to which any embryo space colonization project is doomed to failure because it cannot offer the hoped-for solution to the problem of the extinction of the human species (second paragraph). In the third paragraph, then, I will ask whether embryo space colonization is able to ensure the people it brings into the world an adequate or at least the morally appropriate quality of life. Finally, in the fourth and last paragraph, I will examine the question of the morality of human reproduction that passes through the guidance and choice of intelligent machines. I will argue that to evaluate the morality of this project we should consider not only the interests and quality of life of the first people who could be born but also the interests of all possible subsequent generations. (shrink)

The Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato reveals the underpinnings of contemporary subjectivity in the aesthetics and politics of mass media. This book discloses the conceptual groundwork of Lazzarato's thought as a whole for a time when his writings have become increasingly influential.

There is a growing body of scholarship that is addressing the ethics, in particular, the bioethics of space travel and colonisation. Naturally, a variety of perspectives concerning the ethical issues and moral permissibility of different technological strategies for confronting the rigours of space travel and colonisation have emerged in the debate. Approaches ranging from genetically enhancing human astronauts to modifying the environments of planets to make them hospitable have been proposed as methods. This paper takes a look at a critique (...) of human bioenhancement proposed by Mirko Garasic who argues that the bioenhancement of human astronauts is not only functional but necessary and thus morally permissible. However, he further claims that the bioethical arguments proposed for the context of space do not apply to the context of Earth. This paper forwards three arguments for how Garasic’s views are philosophically dubious: (1) when he examines our responsibility towards future generations he refers to a moral principle (which we will call the principle of mere survival) which, besides being vague, is not morally acceptable; (2) the idea that human bioenhancement is not natural is not only debatable but morally irrelevant; and (3) it is not true that the situations that may arise in space travel cannot occur on Earth. We conclude that not only is the (bio)enhancement of humans on Earth permissible but perhaps even necessary in certain circumstances. (shrink)

Our understanding of body–world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer world – ‘plasticity’ or ‘metabolism’- or external influences on the body - ‘environment’ or ‘milieu’ – appeared with the rise of modern science. On the other side, although premodern science lacked a unifying term for it, an anxious attentiveness to the power of ‘environmental factors’ in shaping physical and moral traits held sway in (...) nearly all medical systems before and alongside modern Europe. In this article, I build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault’s claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon born in the European eighteenth-century. I look in particular at the collective usage of ancient medicine and manipulation of the milieu based on humoralist notions of corporeal permeability (Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sīnā) in the Islamicate and Latin Christendom between the 12th and the 15th century. This longer history has implications also for a richer genealogy of contemporary tropes of plasticity, permeability and environmental determinism beyond usual genealogies that take as a starting point the making of the modern body and EuroAmerican biomedicine. (shrink)

This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body – that is plasticity as a form of life – is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizing narratives, I draw on genealogical method to illuminate the unequal (...) distribution of plasticity across gender and ethnic groups. Finally, after analysing postgenomics as a different thought-style to genomics, I outline some of its implications for notions of plasticity. I argue that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental control of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead closer to an alter-modernistic view that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community. (shrink)

A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the strategic uptake of environmental epigenetics by Indigenous researchers and policy advocates. We focus on the relationship between epigenetic processes and Indigenous views of (...) Country and health—views that locate health not in individual bodies but within relational contexts of Indigenous ontologies that embody interconnected environments of kin/animals/matter/bodies across time and space. This drawing together of Indigenous experience and epigenetic knowledge has strengthened calls for action including state-supported calls for financial reparations. We examine the consequences of this reimagining of disease responsibility in the context of “strategic biological essentialism,” a distinct form of biopolitics that, in this case, incorporates environmental determinism. We conclude that the shaping of the right to protection from biosocial injury is potentially empowering but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance through claimants’ identification as “damaged,” thus furthering State justification of biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives. (shrink)

In this paper I first offer a systematic outline of a series of conceptual novelties in the life-sciences that have favoured, over the last three decades, the emergence of a more social view of biology. I focus in particular on three areas of investigation: (1) technical changes in evolutionary literature that have provoked a rethinking of the possibility of altruism, morality and prosocial behaviours in evolution; (2) changes in neuroscience, from an understanding of the brain as an isolated data processor (...) to the ultrasocial and multiply connected social brain of contemporary neuroscience; and (3) changes in molecular biology, from the view of the gene as an autonomous master of development to the ‘reactive genome’ of the new emerging field of molecular epigenetics. In the second section I reflect on the possible implications for the social sciences of this novel biosocial terrain and argue that the postgenomic language of extended epigenetic inheritance and blurring of the nature/nurture boundaries will be as provocative for neo-Darwinism as it is for the social sciences as we have known them. Signs of a new biosocial language are emerging in several social-science disciplines and this may represent an exciting theoretical novelty for twenty-first social theory. (shrink)

This paper draws from Foucault’s analysis of liberalism and neoliberalism to reconstruct the mechanisms and the means whereby neoliberalism has transformed society into an ‘enterprise society’ based on the market, competition, inequality, and the privilege of the individual. It highlights the role of financialization, neglected by Foucault, as a key apparatus in achieving this transformation. It elaborates the strategies of individualization, insecuritization and depoliticization used as part of neoliberal social policy to undermine the principles and practices of mutualization and redistribution (...) that the Welfare State and Fordism had promoted. It shows that the aim of neoliberal politics is the restoration of the power of capital to determine the distribution of wealth and to establish the enterprise as dominant form; this requires that it target society as a whole for a fundamental reconstruction, putting in place new mechanisms to control individual conduct. The analysis refers to the case of workers in the culture industry to illustrate the operation of these mechanisms in practice. It also outlines the main elements of the analytical apparatus that makes visible the new role of the state as an ensemble of apparatuses constituting the conditions for neoliberal market capitalism and the new type of individual appropriate for it. The paper thus adds a new dimension to Foucault’s analysis. (shrink)

The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS - Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche.

The case for an unprecedented penetration of life mechanisms into the politics of Western modernity has been a cornerstone of 20th-century social theory. Working with and beyond Foucault, this article challenges established views about the history of biopower by focusing on ancient medical writings and practices of corporeal permeability. Through an analysis of three Roman institutions: a) bathing; b) urban architecture; and c) the military, it shows that technologies aimed at fostering and regulating life did exist in classical antiquity at (...) the population scale. The article highlights zones of indistinction between natural and political processes, zoē and bíos, that are not captured by a view of destructive incorporation of or over life by sovereign power. In conclusion, the article discusses the theoretical potential of this historical evidence for contemporary debates on ‘affirmative biopolitics’ and ‘environmental biopower’. (shrink)

This is the first definitive monograph on the concept of obligations erga omnes---international obligations owed to the international community as a whole and binding irrespective of consent---an increasingly important concept in contemporary international law. Ragazzi adopts a pragmatic approach that identifies five common elements among the examples of obligations erga omnes given by the International Court. These five common elements are then discussed in the light of other candidates of obligations erga omnes which have emerged in State practice and international (...) literature. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é examinar o conceito agostiniano de futuro tal como aparece em "Confissões", XI. Buscaremos mostrar que a noção de futuro é tanto uma parte constitutiva quanto uma expressão própria do conceito agostiniano de tempo. Vamos analisar inicialmente a reflexão agostiniana concernente à criação do mundo e à pergunta acerca do ser do tempo. Em seguida, vamos examinar o conceito de instante e sua natureza cinética. A terceira parte tratará da reflexão agostiniana sobre a medida do tempo, (...) isto é, sobre o tempo como objeto de quantificação. Finalmente, voltaremos à noção agostiniana de futuro e sua ligação com o conceito de movimento. The aim of this paper is to examine the emergence of the Augustinian concept of future in "Confessions" XI. We will argue that the notion of future is both an essential element and a specific expression of Augustine's concept of time. Firstly, we will focus on the Augustinian reflections about the creation of the world and the question whether time is a being or not. The notion of instant and its kinetic nature will be the center of our concerns in the second part of the paper. In the third part, we will examine Augustine's reflections about the measurement of time, that is, about time as object of quantification. Finally, we will be back to the notion of future and its connection with the concept of movement. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a design tool, the positioning cards that we have developed, validated, and used in different projects. These cards are built to allow CI4CG and Participatory Design researchers to discuss the political alignment of design projects, in iterative processes of design involving people in the definition of the technological features to be implemented. The background of the cards is the conceptualization of contemporary participatory design as public design, engaging with societally relevant phenomena outside the traditional environment (...) of the workplace. To engage with such an extended dimension of participatory design, we frame our contribution in the contemporary form of capitalism, stressing how contemporary capitalism dispossess the wealth created by social production. In this context, we argue, CI4CG designers need to engage deeply with the theoretical implications of their work. To support this effort, we built the cards combining a political perspective oriented toward nourishing the common—the ensemble of the material and symbolic elements tieing together human beings—with the “affect turn” in the social sciences—therefore including affective dimensions like joy, sadness, and desire in the design of CI4CG technologies. In the final part of the article we discuss how we have used the cards in four different projects. (shrink)

In recent years, the persuasion that Niccolò Machiavelli was a cynical, irreligious devious, ambitious, deceitful, and misogynous man has been gaining remarkable consensus among scholars. The most...

The idea that the phenomenon of morality and, consequently, our ability to distinguish between vice and virtue can be explained by sympathy has been challenged as a highly controversial hypothesis, since sympathy appears to be easily influenced by proximity and selective, and would therefore seem incompatible with the possibility of taking an impartial, objective point of view. We intend to show that even a sentimentalist moral perspective such as the ‘Humean’ one, which places empathy (or ‘sympathy’, as Hume calls it) (...) at the core of morality, is capable of accounting for and justifying moral responsibility to future generations. Moreover, if we consider things from a Humean perspective, it is immoral not only to harm future generations, but also not to care at all about the extinction of the human species. For in the former case, we perform actions that cause misery, pain and suffering, whilst in the latter, we are not at all concerned about the welfare (i.e., happiness) of possible people who may, in the near future, come into the world and have a life worth or very much worth living. That is, in both cases, we show no ability to empathize with the possible people who will or may be born tomorrow. (shrink)

The rise of molecular epigenetics over the last few years promises to bring the discourse about the sociality and susceptibility to environmental influences of the brain to an entirely new level. Epigenetics deals with molecular mechanisms such as gene expression, which may embed in the organism “memories” of social experiences and environmental exposures. These changes in gene expression may be transmitted across generations without changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is the most advanced example of the new postgenomic and context-dependent (...) view of the gene that is making its way into contemporary biology. In my article I will use the current emergence of epigenetics and its link with neuroscience research as an example of the new, and in a way unprecedented sociality of contemporary biology. After a review of the most important developments of epigenetic research, and some of its links with neuroscience, in the second part I reflect on the novel challenges that epigenetics presents for the social sciences for a re-conceptualization of the link between the biological and the social in a postgenomic age. Although epigenetics remains a contested, hyped, and often uncritical terrain, I claim that especially when conceptualized in broader non-genecentric frameworks,. (shrink)