Ronald Stade's chapter treats what are described as the ‘distinct and incompatible impulses’ of human sociability and unsociability: universally it is the case that individuals oscillate between a will to be sociable and a will to be unsociable. Stade's point of analytical origin is a Kantian reference to the human ‘dilemma’ of being both social and wanting to have everything one's own way. ‘Unsociable sociability’, as Kant termed it, means that human beings combine a propensity to enter into society with a resistance that threatens constantly to break up society. The inner life of the human individual entails the perpetual predicament of desiring an (unsociable) autonomy and at the same time needing to be sociable and recognised by others. Three strategies for life present themselves, Stade suggests: masked unsociability, radical sociability and radical unsociability; his chapter is a review of each option. Stade's conclusion is that, unsociable sociability, while an existential dilemma, is also a rich source of human creativity, and that, for the most part, the comfort of sociability is compatible with voluntary periods of unsociability. What is needed, ethically, are social arrangements whereby individuals are able to manage unsociable sociability in ways beneficial and gratifying to themselves.

In liberal political philosophy, from Michel de Montaigne to Judith Shklar, cruelty - the wilful inflicting of pain on another in order to cause anguish and fear - has been singled out as 'the most evil of all evils' and as unjustifiable: the ultimate vice. An unconditional rejection and negation of cruelty is taken to be programmatic within a liberal paradigm. In this contribution, two anthropologists triangulate cruelty as a concept with torture (Stade) and with love (Rapport). Treating the capability to practise cruelty and the liability to suffer from cruelty as universal aspects of a human condition, Stade and Rapport aim to instantiate the precise enactment of cruelty, firstly, and secondly, to propose a process of its social negation. CIA training manuals and quotidian practice within the British National Health Service are employed as illustrative materials.

The anthropology of morality and the morality of anthropology are separate yet inextricable issues. They can be considered separate in a narrowly defined methodological sense; and they are inextricable in a theoretical and practical sense. It is from a methodological perspective that anthropologists tend to offer their students the rather crude idea that they, as observers, should suspend judgement in order to understand and make sense of other people’s morality. This chapter presents two metalogues on moral anthropology. One is called ‘Three perspectives on morality and the absurdity of their coexistence’; the other, ‘Wobbly universalism’. The first metalogue distinguishes between three types of philosophical-methodological-anthropological perspectives on morality and concludes that the tension between them cannot—and should not—be resolved. The second metalogue argues that relativism, moral and otherwise, is a desert that anthropologists, as well as non-anthropologists in search of open-mindedness, need to cross.

Concepts have cultural biographies and social lives. Some concepts become social and political keywords that can be both indicative of and instrumental in social and political conflicts. (It might even be possible to speak of conceptual violence.) But they are not just contentious; they also tend to be contested. Contentious and contested concepts have been studied by historians and social scientists from varying temporal and spatial horizons. It is a research area that lends itself to cross-disciplinary approaches, as is demonstrated in the three contributions to this section, the first of which investigates the Russian obsession with the concept of “Europe.” The second contribution to the section explores the military roots of the concept of “creative thinking,” and the final contribution examines the social life of “political correctness” as a fighting word.

Political correctness has become a fighting word used to dismiss and discredit political opponents. The article traces the conceptual history of this fighting word. In anthropological terms, it describes the social life of the concept of political correctness and its negation, political incorrectness. It does so by adopting a concept-in-motion methodology, which involves tracking the concept through various cultural and political regimes. It represents an attempt to synthesize well-established historiographic and anthropological approaches. A Swedish case is introduced that reveals the kind of large-scale historical movements and deep-seated political conflicts that provide the contemporary context for political correctness and its negation. Thereupon follows an account of the conceptual history of political correctness from the eighteenth century up to the present. Instead of a conventional conclusion, the article ends with a political analysis of the current rise of fascism around the world and how the denunciation of political correctness is both indicative of and instrumental in this process.

In recent decades, research on human violence in the social sciences and humanities has focused on debunking the notion that there is such a thing as senseless violence. All types of violence are said to carry meaning and violence ought therefore be considered a form of communication. The anthropologist David Graeber suggests instead that violence, including structural violence, is predicated on a reduction of meaning. According to Graeber, the charging of violence with meaning is an asymmetrical affair: the perpetrators need not bother with understanding their victims; the victims exert themselves to comprehend even the smallest gesture of the perpetrator. Consequently, the retention of power through violence produces systemic stupidity, which is enacted by bureaucrats, the police and other state institutions at all levels. The idea of systemic stupidity will be tested out with the case of Gezi and coupled to a discussion of the tyranny of the majority in order to show that the state monopoly on legitimate violence is not a sufficient precondition for systemic stupidity.

She had to carry a bag of heads. Blood was dripping from the bag. The armed men made her laugh about this. When they arrived, the bag was emptied and she saw the heads of her children. This happened in Sierra Leone toward the end of the twentieth century. An account of the event was given by the woman who had been forced to carry the bag. Hers is a story of cruelty and suffering, reminiscent of similar stories told and sometimes recorded over the millennia. It is a story about the twin constellation of cruelty and suffering, perpetration and victimhood. Cruelty is the intentional inflicting of suffering. It is suffering plus agency. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can also be to delight in or be indifferent to the pain or misery of others and to act in a merciless, hard-hearted fashion. There is, of course, also suffering without cruelty and perpetration: there can be no cruelty without suffering, but there can be suffering without cruelty. Human beings can and do suffer without anyone in particular being responsible for the suffering (although magical and conspiratorial thinking, with their belief in excessive agency, will attempt to identify a perpetrator, someone to hold accountable). Contemporary politics of life, with its focus on the maximization of vitality, is likely to define suffering as an absence of intervention, as an act of omission.

In recent years, Arjun Appadurai has discussed the unequal distribution and development of the human capacity to aspire in an attempt to synthesize different analytical strands into a unified perspective on poverty. In this chapter, the concept of the capacity to aspire is disaggregated into its constituent conceptual parts for the sake of advancing the discussion on the politics of hope, especially with regard to the philosophical legacy of Ernst Bloch.