Due to the global environmental crisis and problems of climate change, but also the economic problems of neoliberalism and inequality, it is important to rethink our ideas about society, business, and economic organization in the context of a transition to a more sustainable society. Important themes of a political economy of sustainability are Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the philosophical underpinnings of governance and sustainability management. Reforming global economic and political institutions means finding new, creative, and imaginative solutions for managers, administrators, and members of government critically to evaluate our political economy and management concepts and values. It is important to rethink policies and strategies in the light of challenges of the global society. We will do this in what follows by focusing on important topics such as 1) The origin of our contemporary crisis 2) The political economy of the crisis 3) The transformation of governance for lasting change.

My extended project, for which this study of Machiavelli is the beginning, is to examine early modern constitutionalism in order to understand the modes of pluralism that were advocated either intentionally or unintentionally in the construction of the idea of the political that was bequeathed to us. I will consider the thought of two major figures in this historical section of the project, namely, Niccolò Machiavelli and James Madison. The first section will be focused on Machiavelli exclusively. This section will consider Machiavelli’s work in the context of three major interpreters: J. G. A. Pocock, Anthony J. Parel, and Isaiah Berlin. The topics will be: time and the construction of the political, nature and prescriptive normativity, and the plurality of values.

Is there a philosophical nationalism? Reading Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation and its use by the Nazis, Derrida concluded that all nationalisms are philosophical and onto-theological as they are posited beyond race, biology, and nature. However, Fichte’s text reveals a specific form of racism that insists on biology and nature. Fichte’s racism is a species of “hypophysics,” a consecration of nature as value. His theory of language is simultaneously biological and spiritual, these two aspects flowing from a single geistige Naturgesetz (spiritual-natural-law) and determining the hypophysical unity of language, community and “philosophy” (as he defined it). The logic of such a hypophysics is misrecognized and left unaddressed in the conventional categories of “naturalism” and “biologism.” Further, hypophysical-logic is not onto-theo-logic (in Heidegger’s definition). This imposes new questions for the history and future of philosophy: how does hypophysics enter philosophy; can there be philosophy without hypophysics and its attendant racisms?

In the circular sphere around the Pacific Ocean many volcanos have erupted, and, because of tectonic plates, numerous earthquakes have occurred. In Tonga, especially, the resulting devastation has been beyond our wildest imagination. Regarding such natural phenomena, we could not predict anything. Likewise, the Covid-19 pandemic appeared suddenly, and no one can say when its destruction will end. Protective measures against infection have affected the nature of our social interactions: masking has changed our spatial consciousness; observing social distancing has made us less dependent on one another and has influenced us to seek solitude. As a result, inter-subjectivity—the foundation of ethics—has been broken. All of these effects on our interpersonal relationships have instilled in us a new attitude towards nature, because the human being is a part of nature. This new attitude with nature opens up a new paradigm: dialogues with nature and their co-operative activities must be demanded, and we must wait for nature’s movement and ask for its help. It is, in a way, the traditional artistic attitude toward nature.

Without society there is no nature. Paradoxically, this is what Rousseau’s texts teach us. The paradox lies in the fact that the Discourse on Inequality seems to say the exact opposite. In the second Discourse, the history of the human species appears to unfold within the framework of an immutable, ahistorical natural order. In this article, I will highlight two points. First, I will show that nature understood as a whole does not really exist for the human being in the state of nature. It only exists for the educated, cultured, and therefore socialized human being. Second, I will analyze a passage from Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, which brings to the fore the “negentropic” function of human labor. Without human labor, the natural order disintegrates. This, I will argue, makes nature a political problem for both Rousseau and for us.

Within intellectual history there has been a widening interest over the last decades in rediscovering intellectuals who used to be renowned when they were active, but who for various reasons have been more or less forgotten over time. The Swedish writer Ellen Key (1849–1926) was a famous intellectual who gained her reputation through books, pamphlets, and hundreds of lectures on topics such as pedagogy, peace, and women’s rights—topics that were at the top of a general intellectual agenda around 1900. I will focus on her idea of internationalism that was founded on an evolutionary life philosophy of development. Her engagement in internationalism was built on an idealist foundation of philosophical, religious, and humanitarian beliefs organized around peace and a problematization of the nation. Key advocated a kind of patriotism as her path towards developing internationalism. In this article, Key’s work is contextualized and conceptualized in the discussion of internationalism of her contemporaries.

Pure nature, the nature that we distinguish from grace, spirit, nurture, society, history, culture, and the supernatural is an abstract fiction. A genealogy of the idea of pure nature reveals its source in the problematic theological idea of a purely human nature. But it was subsequently transformed and expanded by Rousseau into the idea of a state of nature from which all else derives. This all-encompassing nature stifles thought by dehistoricizing. Adorno’s “The Idea of a Natural History” and Sartre’s offer a dialectical approach that returns us to the concrete.

Failures of political will underestimate a cardinal element in the basically contested notion of so-called political will, namely social egoisms. This is what the founder of Eco-ethics, To­monobu Imamichi, described by analogy with “egoism” as “nosism.” I try to elaborate here Imamichi’s analogy in terms of the elusive fundamental notion not only of human nature itself but of the nature at issue in human nature. My basic claim will be that most political talk today of “the lack of political will” makes insufficient allowance for “the nature of human nature.” That is, the nature of human nature, I argue, involves necessarily a negative, major element of social and not just individual egoism. The nature in post-essentialist human nature is neither exclusively physical nor exclusively cultural. Rather, the nature in human nature is a dynamic, interacting mixture of both material and non-material aspects, including very powerful individual and social egoisms.