This book takes a unique approach grounded in political and cultural discourse to develop a political theory of restitution. Challenging assumptions about restitution in the Western legal and political tradition, where it has become nearly synonymous with reacquisition and where legal studies focus on material objects and claims to their ownership, Zolkos argues that the development of restitutive norms has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty, and excavates the restitutive tradition's mythical-religious substrate. Bringing together texts from within and outwith the Western canon of political theory and philosophy, including the writings of Grotius, Durkheim, Freud, and Klein, as well as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the book undertakes a dual task: reading literary texts as a political theorising of restitution, and reading political or sociological texts as literary narratives with distinctive 'restitutive tropes' of repair, undoing and return.

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Imagining Restitution
• 1 In dominum pristinum statuere: Hugo Grotius’ Theory of Restitution and the Return of the Former Condition of Things
• 2 The Creature as a Figure of Unrestitutability, or Monsters in Paradise not Allowed: Benevolence and Restitution in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• 3 Émile Durkheim’s Restitutive Humanitarianism: from Organic Solidarity to the ‘Solidarity of Things’
• 4 ‘I only loved’: Restitution in Psychoanalysis
• Epilogue: Restitution that Doubles the Loss
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index