Steuart was one of the earlier figures of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment. A major influence on the social theory of Hegel, Steuart's many years of exile throughout Europe afforded him a far richer understanding of how public and private sectors collaborate to generate modern productive economies than his countryman, Adam Smith, ever found. All who read Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) must read Steuart's Principles (1767) beforehand as inoculation, afterwards as antidote, or both.

Kant can be thanked for restoring the actively constructive, creative intellect to modern accounts of knowledge and its acquisition, ending decades of stale debate among so-called 'British Empiricists' and 'Continental Rationalists' in early modern debates on epistemology. His limning of the structural similarities among the intellect's roles in developing ethical and aesthetic as well as metaphysical understanding began the process of restoring coherence to modern self-conceptions.

Finance Minister in both prerevolutionary and revolutionary France, Necker pioneered the use of public finance as a means of reformist social engineering. His colorful memoirs of these adventures fired the imagination of the young Alexander Hamilton, then serving as Aide de Camp to General Washington during the Revolutionary War.

Alexander Hamilton, born out of wedlock in Charlestown, Nevis, Danish Virgin Islands, was orphaned as a child and 'discovered' as a prodigy by local merchants and clergy. An autodidact, he taught himself law and finance while serving in the Revolutionary War, then worked with seemingly boundless creativity and energy in devising the US Constitution, financial system, and public finance architecture. He has been my hero since age 7, when I too lived in (the northernmost city of) the Caribbean.

Lenin perhaps said it best: those who would understand Marx - in particular, the dialectical logic of internal relations among mutually constitutive parts of any organic whole - must learn Hegel. As with Kant before him, his greatest achievement might have been his re-centering of normative order as prerequisite to any intelligible conception of freedom - a classical Greek, Chinese, and Indian motif all but lost to the West amidst the intellectual wasteland of 'British Empiricism.'

Best known as the leader of the raid on Harper's Ferry shortly before the Civil War, Brown was not just a morally impassioned liberator but also a painstaking planner, forming a large guerilla army of Maroon and abolitionist families with Black as well as white generals, all bent on liberating all slaves in raids from base camps throughout the Appalachians. Prior to taking up arms, he founded one of the earliest racially integrated farm communities in America in Upstate New York.

Abraham Lincoln was a self-taught American boatman, day laborer, and eventual lawyer-statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. A champion of labor's right to own its own capital and passionate Congressional opponent of US President Polk's war of aggression against Mexico before becoming President himself, Lincoln was much admired by Marx, the two of them even having even corresponded by mail during the Civil War.

I fell in love with Kierkegaard during my youth - how could one *not* love a thinker who lived every moment in truth, wrote in so many voices while concealing his authorship, and was 'fuck you' enough to name one of his opuses 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript,' a flabbergasting achievement that punched me right in the face from the library shelf. THIS is how to write what you know to be true. He will never not be my favorite uncle.

Karl Heinrich Marx FRSA was a German philosopher, political-economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the four-volume Das Kapital. No intellect of which I'm aware has equalled his, and no human being has given or sacrificed more for the cause of comprehensive human liberation than Karl and Jenny Marx, my 'hero-couple' since secondary school.

Fyodorov was a Russian Orthodox philosopher who founded the school of Russian Cosmism, which holds that the aim of humankind must be to end the tyranny of physical limitation and death. His Philosophy of the Common Task is as astounding in the unabashed ambition set by its title as it is galvanizing and inspiring as a call to all to think beyond what is finite and familiar in bettering our lot through time.

Johan Gustaf Knut Wicksell was the leading Swedish economist and founder of the Stockholm school. His economic contributions would profoundly influence both the Keynesian and Austrian schools of economic thought. He was married to the noted feminist Anna Bugge, having begun his career as a radical journalist with a gift for mathematics. Coming to economics late in life and yet effectively founding modern endogenous money theory, he taught on the Law Faculty of Lund University in southern Sweden.

Clara Zetkin was a leader of the German Social Democrats both in and out of the Reichstag who sought to prevent Germany's entry into the First World War - a stance that disappointingly few Social Democrats took at the time. A founding figure in the German women's rights movement both before and after the war, she ultimately relocated to the Soviet Union after the Nazi rise to power, where her ashes lie interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist philosopher, SDP leader and anti-war activist. Her 'Accumulation of Capital' marked a major advance in the Marxian understanding of capital as an inherently expansionary mode of production that rendered colonialism and war all but inevitable. The depth of her work compares favorably to roughly contemporaneous works by Hilferding, Hobson, Bukharin, and Lenin on the same subjects.

A leader of the 'Austro-Marxian' school of Social Democracy, Hilferding showed how the ever-increasing concentration of finance capital onto the balance sheets of large financial institutions paved the way to public control of the real economy from the 'commanding heights' of finance.

Frances Perkins was a labor-rights advocate who served as the 4th United States Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest to serve in that position. Architect of at least half of the New Deal, which she first developed as then-Governor Roosevelt's State Industrial Commissioner of New York, Perkins was the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet, later teaching at Cornell ILR. I later lived in her old rooms as a Faculty Fellow of Telluride House behind Cornell Law School.

The logicized Kantianism of the early Wittgenstein's philosophy was, even if ultimately not sustainable without more refinement, quite seductive to one with my early pietist-cum-mathematical sensibilities. While that continues (somewhat ambivalently) to draw me, what endures most in his example is his intensity in seeking to get to 'the bottom of things,' which led him both into frequent seclusion (see photo) and into several flirtations with seeking early Soviet citizenship.

Before settling on the vocation that I did, I was fairly sure I'd be an architect, writer or filmmaker, having been born to a family of Swedish architects and writing and filming since early secondary school. By far the most inspiring architect to me, then and now, has been El Lissitzky. Like Mayakovsky and Vertov, also featured in this Module, he was a leader of the Soviet avant garde,the dynamism, inventiveness, and sense of infinite possibility of which still drives nearly all that I do.

Mayakovsky, a poet, philosopher, and multi-media artist, embodied as no other the restless dynamism and devotion to heroic striving that were the hallmarks of Russian Constructivism and Bolshevism in the early 20th century. Both of these commitments became 'tragic' when invasion from all directions and subsequent encirclement forced the Bolshevik revolution to take a more suspicious and inward by the late 1920s.

Before settling on the vocation that I did, I was fairly sure I'd be an architect, writer or filmmaker, having been born to a family of Swedish architects and writing and filming since early secondary school. By far the most inspiring film-maker to me, then and now, has Dziga Vertov. Like Mayakovsky and Lissitzky, also featured in this Module, he was a leader of the Soviet avant garde,the dynamism, inventiveness, and sense of infinite possibility of which still drives nearly all that I do.

C.L.R. James was a Trinidadian philosopher, journalist, activist and artist. A founding figure in the 20th century anti-colonial Marxian movement, his 'World Revolution' on the Third International and 'Black Jacobins,' on the Haitian Revolution are widely read to this day.

Edward Conze, best known today as an eminent scholar of Buddhism, began as a Marx-inspired dialectical logician. His ‘The Principle of Noncontradiction’ (1932) was decades ahead of its time.

Sister of the renowned French mathematician André Weil, Simone Weil became the more renowned of the two as a Marx-inspired Greek classicist philosopher, labor activist, and religious mystic. Like Husserl's distinguished student-turned-nun Edith Stein's, her transformation from secular Jewish bourgeois to revolutionary Christian martyr awed all who met her, from de Beauvoir through Camus to T.S. Eliot and Pope Paul VI.

Born in the Romanov Empire, Dunayevskaya immigrated to America in 1922 and worked closely with Trotsky until founding her own movement, now known as the Marxian Humanist school. Her dedication to liberation against all forms of repression, and her commitment to the unleashing of all human potentials, inspires all manner of social movement to this day.

This one's a bit personal too. Bill lived his last years in Lawrence, KS, where my closest friends and I did our undergraduate work. He developed a crush of sorts on one of us - Lori - thanks to her not having treated him as a celebrity at Dillon's, where Lori worked and Bill bought his groceries. He hung out at our house often after that. (Cf. my recollection at Leg's McNeil's website, linked here.) I always preferred 'Junky' to Bill's 'experimental' writing, but we all loved his singularity.

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Jones was a founding figure in Britain's and America's later 20th century feminist, anti-colonial, and black nationalist movements. A formidable Marxian social critic, she also founded Britain's first large circulation Black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette.

An anti-colonial leader during his youth, Nyerere led the free nation of Tanzania from 1964 to 1985. A judicious philosopher-statesman, his 'Uhuru na Ujamaa' eloquently elaborated a vision of cooperative commonwealth that cohered both with local tradition and with what later came to be called the 'Appropriate Technology' movement in developing countries seeking their own paths free of Western and Northern 'advice.'

This one's a bit personal too. It was Michael who led me to nonstandard logics during my early grad school days. And while I ultimately swore-off intuitionist logics in favor of dialetheist logics where 'ultimate' questions are concerned, I still find the former most useful for many normative-modeling purposes. Most influential of all, however, was Michael's moral and intellectual passion. The intensity with which he worked and prayed (at our shared church - St. Aloysius) are ever atop my mind.

Neither Malcolm X nor his protege Muhammad Ali require introduction. But, having fallen to assassins long before reaching old age as did Ali, Malcolm seems always in need of *re*-introduction. His refusal to *ask* for what already was his - his birthright as human - and his insistence that all who are oppressed both demand and, if necessary, *take* their right to build beautiful lives, galvanizes all who will take time to read or to listen.

This one is personal. Chaka, whose life and whose friendship with me is recounted in Chaka's Widows - among the projects catalogued here - was a self-described 'homeless entrpreneur' when we met. It was with him that I founded the 'Shoebox Bank' and 'Homeless Kibbutz' described in the book, and it was thanks to him that I decided ultimately to pursue law and finance degrees with a specialization in what I called 'financial engineering for the dispossessed.' He disappeared and I pray he lives.