Within the framework of the politicization of the personal, this chapter explores the essayistic writing of a loose group of socially conscious actors who belong to the political Left, a capacious category that includes leaders of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the New York Intellectuals, the New Left, the environmental movement, and groups with a range of progressive agendas. With a focus on the twentieth century, the wide variety of styles and themes of leftist prose writing is analyzed. The chapter dwells on the contributions of important figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Randolph Bourne, Jane Addams, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine Hong Kingston, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Richard Rorty. As a form of "prose that thinks," the essay has been an excellent site of intellectual reckoning where writers may publicly take strong positions on various political and social issues, expressing these in a highly personal style.

Writers in Latin America’s Black press frequently publicized and denounced particularly egregious examples of discrimination or racism, including many that involved painful accusations having to do with pernicious stereotypes about Black sexuality. In so doing, they responded to claims by Latin American politicians and intellectuals that racism was mild or non-existent in their countries, and that to speak about racism was itself racist, and would have the effect of dividing the national community. The rhetorical strategies writers in the Black press adopted included barely contained expressions of outrage, skillful deployment of irony, careful efforts at debunking, and, quite frequently, with expressions of agreement with the premise that racism was inconsistent with the local political culture.Authors who wrote about racism consistently presented the United States as a yardstick against which the existence or severity of racism could be measured, or as a source for the importation and imposition of racism that was at odds with local values and tradition.Finally, writers discussed and debated the mechanisms that should be employed to combat racism.

As in other areas of social engineering, Sweden is considered as world-leading in creating systems that address social inequality. One of the cases in point is the Swedish day-fine system which has been considered as pioneering by systematically considering both the wealth of the offender and the seriousness of the offence when imposing the penalty. This chapter analyses in detail the Swedish day-fine system. The case study of Sweden sheds light on the pros and cons of day-fines by recalling the discussion in Sweden prior to introducing the system and the recent academic debates on extending the use of day-fines. The chapter also offers an account of the comprehensive prosecutorial guidelines as well as an analysis of the relevant case law, particularly in relation to adjustment of day-fines. The chapter argues that the Swedish day-fine system overall must be considered as a largely successful project which holds high esteem among courts and practitioners. The common view is that it is a merit of the system that it forces the courts to consider the economic circumstances of the accused and to articulate openly for the way in which such consideration has been done.