Chapter 1 provides an introduction to evolving complexity theory (ECT) of talent development (TD), a new theory that adopts a relational developmental-systems perspective on how talent is developed and human excellence achieved. A developmental-systems theory has to address the questions of what develops, how it develops, when it takes place, where (i.e., social-historical conditions and cultural contexts) it takes place, with each constraining one’s chance of success. Evolving complexity refers to the nature of TD as encompassing biological, experiential, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects in developmental self-organization, resulting in distinct individuality, of which specific talent achievement is a manifestation. ECT distinguishes itself from other TD models in its emphasis on the primacy of action/interaction, and the nature of TD as adaptation to task affordances and constraints. ECT also views TD as the means to an end of creating a productive, fulfilling life, and there are many niches and pathways to excellence within and across domains.

Kierkegaard’s thesis that lacking faith is necessarily a state of despair leads to the conclusion that Either/Or’s fictional character Judge William, who belongs to the “ethical” rather than the “religious” stage of life, is, despite the many virtues of his position, in a state of despair. What does his despair amount to, then? Relying on Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death, I claim that the failure in the Judge’s view of life is rooted in his misguided understanding of what it is to be a “self.” By taking himself to have ultimate control over the way he is (in a manner akin to what Sartre’s means by “radical freedom”), the Judge fails to acknowledge that he possesses what I term an individual essence, bestowed upon him by God in a state of potential. This chapter explains the conception of individual essence and demonstrates how it applies to the Judge’s despair.

Thomas Hobbes’ affinity for certain core conceptions of liberalism has been noted by critics and admirers alike. Nonetheless, these proto-liberal aspects have tended to be overshadowed by his more obvious institutional support for absolute monarchy. This tension has sparked generations of disagreement. While building on familiar scholarly debates, the chapter sheds light on three less explored Hobbesian conceptual revolutions. The first is Hobbes’ distinction between persons and individuals. The ascendancy of the individual at the expense of the personage gives rise to a second building block of modern conceptions of popular sovereignty: namely, the reign of quantity and the depreciation of quality. Assuming an underlying identity among such individuals, popular sovereignty is predicated on an ability to measure their respective wills quantitatively. Finally, the Hobbesian theory model of solidarity is distinguished by its aspiration to uniformity. What Hobbes castigates as asperity on the part of individual subjects must be resisted not only because the existence of discrepant wills challenges uniformity, but also because such persons are representative of differences.

In the Early Modern Period the idea of a unified Christian community in Western Europe shattered due to Protestantism and the religious wars that ensued. The idea of self-governed, sovereign, states emerged, as did the idea that ruler were put in place to serve and protect the people under his reign. In this time of discovery and early Enlightenment novel notions like that of a conditional social contract between a ruler and his subjects, the role of the state, individuality and individual freedom came up.

Marx adopts a triadic model of the concept of property and emphasizes how this concept assumes different historical forms, including private property. I seek to explain why Marx must be thought to commit himself to the complete abolition of private property by beginning with how he speaks of property, equality and freedom as forming a constellation of concepts within capitalist society. This approach enables me to show how, for Marx, private property functions within a social world structured by contractual relations established between allegedly free and equal rights-bearing persons, whose self-conception and relations to one another are determined by an abstract exchange value that finds legal and political expression in a purely formal notion of equality. I argue that there are two key elements in Marx’s critique of private property. The first concerns how individuals are unable to relate to themselves and to others as genuine individuals in an economic and social system governed by exchange value. The second concerns how a system of exchange governed by this form of value dominates individuals and is thus incompatible with ‘free’ individuality.

This essay focuses on Nellie Campobello and Juan Rulfo to study how the Mexican Revolution by midcentury produced a singular aesthetic form in the guise of the unique short story or narrative sketch. This process involves a violent segmentation of the common, together with a no less forceful production of the singular. While Campobello and Rulfo tap into the resources of collective storytelling, they subject these oral materials to a process of aestheticization whose fundamental values lay in an image of self-standing beauty, or singularity, rather than community. Literature, even when its topic is the aftermath of the revolution, thus seems to run counter to the latter's ideals of collectivization. The chain of oral storytellers is typically interrupted with the appropriation of orality on behalf of an individual author with a unique signature. Based on the examples of Campobello and Rulfo, we might even ask whether there ever was such a thing as a novel of the Mexican revolution to begin with: not only because their sketches and short stories hardly can be considered novels but also because theirs amounts to a narrative of the counter-revolution.

This essay focuses on Nellie Campobello and Juan Rulfo to study how the Mexican Revolution by midcentury produced a singular aesthetic form in the guise of the unique short story or narrative sketch. This process involves a violent segmentation of the common, together with a no less forceful production of the singular. While Campobello and Rulfo tap into the resources of collective storytelling, they subject these oral materials to a process of aestheticization whose fundamental values lay in an image of self-standing beauty, or singularity, rather than community. Literature, even when its topic is the aftermath of the revolution, thus seems to run counter to the latter's ideals of collectivization. The chain of oral storytellers is typically interrupted with the appropriation of orality on behalf of an individual author with a unique signature. Based on the examples of Campobello and Rulfo, we might even ask whether there ever was such a thing as a novel of the Mexican revolution to begin with: not only because their sketches and short stories hardly can be considered novels but also because theirs amounts to a narrative of the counter-revolution.

Here we uncover the mysteries of the baby as it develops in the womb, discussing how fetal development is controlled. We give insights into aspects of pregnancy not widely known, from the fetus starting to breathe months before it is born, to the question of whether it sleeps – and dreams. We discuss the ways in which information about the mother’s life and her environment affect the baby’s development. Although birth may seem the first major milestone for a baby, we emphasise that many other milestones have been passed before that, inside the womb, out of sight but over which parents can have substantial influence. We give insights into new discoveries about how the organs of the fetal body develop in prediction of the world in which that individual ‘expects’ to live, and what happens when the prediction turns out to be wrong. The idea that the fetus is preparing for life after birth will get the reader thinking about the long-term consequences of the way a fetus develops. Each of us is unique as a result of our development – and nobody is perfect. Our unique development starts from the moment of conception, which introduces the next chapter on sex.

Sex. We walk the reader through why it matters to generate variation in a species. The mixing of genes from two sexes will be familiar to most readers as the reason for the uniqueness of each of us, right from the moment of conception. But we give insight on the other, less widely understood, ways that the differences between us come about. This leads to explanation of the early ‘conversations’ between the mother and her embryo that take place, and why they matter. We give some current and long-standing examples of mankind’s attempts to control conception or to encourage it, including the eugenic sterilisation agenda, artificial insemination and pregnancy termination after fetal sex determination. We explore one of the most hotly debated areas of medicine, assisted reproductive technologies, to which many people will relate. We encourage the reader to challenge the way they think about the preconception period, and consider why the responsibility seems to fall on girls and women, with its consequences for gender equality. This leads to the next chapter.

Addressing the barriers we put in the way of our writing. The need to be prepared to experiment: all landmark fiction has tried something that hasn’t been tried before. Understanding that ‘failure’ is part of the learning process. Don’t listen to inhibiting inner voices: there is nothing you’re not allowed to write and you can always edit later. Allow yourself substandard drafts – then you have something to build on.

‘Accept the difficulties, expect things to be initially unsatisfactory, and start writing.’

Mismanagement of property was always a threat to family survival and patrimonial continuity. Law provided a process by which an imprudent manager could be deemed unfit, even insane (furiosus), and placed under guardianship. While prudence was a quality too slippery to define, it was also generally expected, such that the "prudent man" was a standard of behavior. Here too, things were not simple and conflicts arose, as the sharing economy of the household was under strain by the demands or actions of someone others thought insane.

Why did women and men want more stuff? What did such goods mean to those who produced, marketed, purchased, and used them? This chapter examines the social and cultural context of the consumer revolution. Borrowing from sociologists Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, and Norbert Elias, historians have long explained the rise of consumption in terms of social emulation. According to this theory, lower social groups imitated higher social groups, spreading new practices of consumption down the social hierarchy. However, while social emulation did occur, it does not explain everything. Patterns of consumption did not always reflect traditional social hierarchies. Examining eighteenth-century material culture, this chapter suggests an alternative approach, which considers how producers, retailers, commentators, and consumers attached meanings to consumer goods and creating a host of new consumer values, including novelty, fashion, selfhood, domesticity, comfort, simplicity, authenticity, cleanliness, health, and exoticism. Such values reflected the development of a modern Enlightenment consumer culture that valorized the present over the past. The social ramifications of eighteenth-century consumer culture were complex. Rising consumption was accompanied by egalitarian ideas, but it did not always promote social mobility. Many consumers bought into the world of goods to reinforce horizontal claims of respectability, not to leap into a new class. Poor laborers who could ill afford to express new consumer values through consumption were marginalized.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

Many of Cicero’s translations of Greek concepts (assent, comprehension, quality) have become common terms in philosophy but also in ordinary language in many European countries. Some of them, pertaining to epistemology, ethics, or physics, are studied in this chapter to show why and how Cicero set out to create a Latin philosophical vocabulary. He wanted to extend the supremacy of Rome to an area formerly reserved to the Greeks. He tried to avoid technical terms or neologisms and preferred open notions to closed concepts. He aimed at conveying the complexity of Greek philosophical doctrines in Latin and sometimes brought out certain nuances which did not exist in the Greek terms (as in the case of probabile). Cicero’s originality as a philosopher does not lie in creating a new system but in providing philosophy with a new language and in promoting the idea that philosophy was not the privilege of Greek culture but a field open to human ingenuity.

Though a prominent strand of Wallace Stevens studies argues that his poetry has neither a sense of the interpersonal nor any actual human audience to speak of, recent critics are at last taking Stevens seriously as a poet of community—a key word in recent work by several critics and a peripheral or secret subject in countless other studies. Questions of community and audience, Spaide finds, have helped these critics to reconceive both “the poem of the idea” and “the poem of the words”: critics drawn to the former have focused on Stevens’s historical and personal crises, political philosophy, aesthetics, place, and affect; those drawn to the latter have focused on Stevens’s diction, genres, forms, speakers, and lyric pronouns. Community and audience, for Stevens, are always counterbalanced by their others—individuality, impersonality, inhuman nature, aesthetic autonomy. Closing on a reading of “The Sick Man” (1950), Spaide concludes that Stevens’s truest subject is not community, not individuality, but the never-settled contest between the two.

Christians have wrestled with conscience from Christianity’s beginning to the present. Does it exist? Do religious and nonreligious people have it? Is conscience a subjective or objective reality? Christians have asked if it is God’s voice, human beings’ own voice, or the voice of the community. Is conscience found in natural law? Is it a combination of the mind, will, heart, and/or the soul? Is it a divine judgment or a self-evaluation? What are the consequences of following an erroneous conscience? Lately, questions have arisen about conscience in a pluralistic society. What ought to be the relationship between conscience and law? Commentators also struggle with questions about accommodating institutions’ conscience claims. Which institutions might qualify and why? Lawmakers also contend over conscience claims made by individuals concerning military service, or over state laws about family matters increasingly at odds with Christian commitments. This book explores sources having lasting influence upon questions about conscience, including the New Testament, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Roger Williams, US federal and state constitutions, and Pope Benedict XVI, among many others.

This chapter explores Fichte’s two arguments for ethical content in the "System of Ethics" and examines the difficulties they raise for the coherence of his overall position. The chapter argues that Fichte has good arguments for deriving ethical content on the basis of the original freedom of the I, but that these arguments put serious pressure on the appeal to formality in the basic argument for conscience as an absolute criterion. The argument for individuality and intersubjectivity in later in the "System of Ethics", in particular, raises questions about whether the methodological individualism of the formal derivation is compatible with the account of content.

Simmel’s focus on individuality in ambivalent interaction within the context of the metropolis constitutes a central feature of his contribution to sociology. He was not inclined to issue laments about the presumed end of the individual due to modern forms of domination; rather his work focuses on the possibilities for individual action in modern societies predicated on novel cultural values. This article illustrates that it is essential to view his work in terms of the dialectics between work and play, as well as that between the realms of necessity and leisure.

Vincenzo Mele is Associate Professor of General Sociology in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pisa. He is the author of Metropolis: Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Modernity (2011), Aesthetics and Social Theory: Simmel, Benjamin, Adorno, Bourdieu (2013), and Globalizing Cultures: Theories, Actions, Paradigms (with Marina Vujnovic, 2015). He is editor of the journal Simmel Studies.

Chapter 7, “The Demands of Practical Reason and Self-Formation”, completes Kant’s account of psychological personhood by showing that the idea of the soul defines the unifying form of a person’s mental life. It finally establishes the self-formation view via the second central thesis that psychological persons first form themselves in the course of realizing their mental capacities under the normative guidance of a unifying idea. The idea of the soul demands, for instance, that we realize ourselves as unified across time (according to the presupposition of substantiality), as the self-efficacious common cause of all mental activity (according to the presupposition of a fundamental power), and as self-directing towards a rational personality (according to the presupposition of personal identity). The chapter explicates the intrinsic normativity of personhood in terms of a demand for inner systematicity across three distinct, though interrelated spheres: the epistemic, the practical, and the affective. This demand is finally articulated in the form of two imperatives: the imperative of self-formation and the imperative of self-knowledge.