Political Theory recent issues

From the Editor

Dietz, M. G. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:03:54 PST

The Socratic Narrative: A Democratic Reading of Plato's Dialogues

Saxonhouse, A. W. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:03:54 PST

Plato wrote dialogues. While there has been attention to the dramatic elements of Plato’s dialogues by a number of scholars, there has been much less attention to the narrative style of the dialogues. I argue that we should consider whether the dialogues are recited or presented like dramatic works with each character speaking his own words—or as a mixture of these narrative forms. By employing this interpretive tool to read the Republic, I illustrate how paying attention to the narrative style enables us to see a democratic Socrates who undermines readings of the Republic famously offered by Karl Popper and Leo Strauss. Plato appears then as neither a defender of the "closed society" nor an advocate of the elite rule of the wise over the many.

Approaching Others: Aristotle on Friendship's Possibility

Bryan, B. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:03:54 PST

The essay sheds light on Aristotle’s understanding of friendship and its relation to political life.The author challenges the usual view that Aristotle postulates three distinct kinds of friendship. Instead the author argues that Aristotle understood there to be only one kind of friendship, and that other "friendships" were to Aristotle "unfinished" and thus not friendship at all. Aristotle shows that the relation between friendship and politics is grounded in friendship’s possibility for human beings, and not as something cherished for its actuality. By looking at proper friendship as possibility and not actuality, we could only ever interpret the infamous statement attributed to Aristotle—"my friends, there are no friends"—not as illuminating of what friendship is but rather as a nostalgic diagnosis of the decay of the possibility of friendship, and hence of politics. By extension, and more poignantly, interpreting Aristotle’s work on friendship in this light, we stand ready to reinterpret the mobilization of Aristotelian friendship for contemporary understandings of democratic practice.

Reconstructing Dewey on Power

Hildreth, R.W. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:03:54 PST

One of the most enduring criticisms of John Dewey’s political thought is that it is unsuspicious of power. This essay responds to this critique by advancing the claim that power is an integral but implicit element of Dewey’s conception of human experience. Given Dewey’s indirect treatment of power, this essay has two primary tasks. First, it reconstructs and develops an explicit conception of power for Deweyan pragmatism. Second, it evaluates the extent that Dewey’s political and social philosophy is able to criticize power relations. Taken together, I aim to provide a more coherent and realistic defense of the political dimensions of Dewey’s democratic theory. This defense moves Deweyan pragmatism toward a democratic politics that neither elides conflict nor evades power.

Violence, Weak Ontology, and Late-Modernity

White, S. K. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:03:54 PST

This essay responds to the characterization Ted Miller offers (in his December 2008 essay in Political Theory) of the kind of nonfoundationalism I have referred to as "weak ontology," and that Gianni Vattimo frequently calls "weak thought." Miller argues that such a position embodies, first, a philosophy of history in which strong ontologies (e.g., religion) are assessed categorically as passé, and, second, are associated essentially with violence. I show that while these characterizations may be appropriate for Vattimo’s thought, they are not for weak ontology as I understand it. Finally, I suggest that the former might more usefully be categorized as "antifoundationalism" and the latter as "nonfoundationalism."

In Hermeneutic Circles: A Reply to White

Miller, T. H. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:03:54 PST

Review Essay: The Spaces of Capitalism: Alexandra Kogl (2008). Strange Places: The Political Potentials and Perils of Everyday Spaces Lanham, ND: Rowman & Littlefield. 157 pp. $60.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper). Margaret Kohn (2004). Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space New York: Routledge. 240 pp. $35.95 (paper). Margaret E. Farrar (2008). Building the Body Politic: Power and Urban Space in Washington D.C. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 192 pp. $36.52 (paper)

Walker, B. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:03:54 PST

Making Representative Democracy Work: Andrew Rehfeld (2005). The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy, and Institutional Design New York: Cambridge University Press. 259 pp. $88 (cloth). Kevin O'Leary (2006). Saving Democracy: A Plan for Real Representation in America Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 290 pp. $22.95 (paper)

Gerken, H. K. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:03:54 PST

Book in Review: Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (2007). Hannah Arendt: Reflections on Literature and Culture Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 360 pp. $24.95 (paper)

Vecchiarelli Scott, J. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:03:54 PST

Book in Review: Thomas Dumm (2008). Loneliness as a Way of Life Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 193 pp. $23.95 (cloth)

Orlie, M. A. — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:03:54 PST

Going Public: Hannah Arendt, Immigrant Action, and the Space of Appearance

Beltran, C. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:09:51 PDT

While other theorists have turned to Arendt’s analysis of statelessness and superfluity to consider questions of immigration, "illegality," and the status of noncitizens, this essay argues that Arendt’s account of labor and her nonconsequentialist account of action offer a richer optic for considering the undocumented in the United States. To explore this claim, this essay constructs an alternate account of the nationwide demonstrations for immigrant rights that occurred in 2006. Rather than defining "success" in terms of replicability or immediate legislative results, the author’s analysis of the 2006 protests emphasizes the significance of noncitizens laying claim to the public realm. Considering Michael Warner’s concept of counterpublics, the author argues that the demonstrations can be best understood as a moment of initiation and an inaugural performance of the political. Rereading Arendt’s notion of animal laborans, the essay concludes by exploring the limitations of noncitizens invoking labor as a way to gain civic standing.

Autonomy, Respect, and Arrogance in the Danish Cartoon Controversy

Rostboll, C. F. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:09:51 PDT

Autonomy is increasingly rejected as a fundamental principle by liberal political theorists because it is regarded as incompatible with respect for diversity. This article seeks, via an analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy, to show that the relationship between autonomy and diversity is more complex than often posited. Particularly, it asks whether the autonomy defense of freedom of expression encourages disrespect for religious feelings. Autonomy leads to disrespect for diversity only when it is understood as a character ideal that must be promoted as an end in itself. If it by contrast is understood as something we should presume everyone possesses, it provides a strong basis for equal respect among people from diverse cultures. A Kantian conception of autonomy can justify the right to freedom of expression while it at the same time requires that we in the exercise of freedom of expression show respect for others as equals.

Communicating Depth: Habermas and Merleau-Ponty on Language and Praxis

Haysom, K. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:09:51 PDT

This essay takes as its task the critical comparison of two thinkers who are rarely matched or studied in tandem: Jürgen Habermas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It stages a (largely) speculative dialogue between the two thinkers, considering not only the points of convergence but their likely objections to each other’s accounts of communication and language. I will argue that Merleau-Ponty, whose own concerns significantly overlap with Habermas’s, while simultaneously pulling in a different direction, serves as a useful counter-point to Habermas. This is so because Merleau-Ponty offers us an intersubjectivist account of praxis, from which can be extrapolated an ethics of communicative engagement between self, other, and world. Such a phenomenological and/or existential rereading of the central Habermasian problematic not only compensates for the notorious abstraction of Discourse Ethics, but better underscores possibilities for social transformation inherent in intersubjectivity and the lifeworld than are acknowledged by Habermas.

The Paradoxical Hobbes: A Critical Response to the Hobbes Symposium, Political Theory, Vol. 36, 2008

Springborg, P. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:09:51 PDT

Attention has turned from Hobbes the systematic thinker to his inconsistencies, as the essays in the Hobbes symposium published in the recent volume of Political Theory suggest. Deborah Baumgold, in "The Difficulties of Hobbes Interpretation," shifted the focus to "the history of the book," and Hobbes’s method of serial composition and peripatetic insertion, as a major source of his inconsistency. Accepting Baumgold’s method, the author argues that the manner of composition does not necessarily determine content and that fundamental paradoxes in Hobbes’s work have a different provenance, for which there are also contextual answers. Hobbes was a courtier’s client, but one committed early to a materialist ontology and epistemology, and these commitments shackled him in treating the immediate political questions with which he was required to deal, leading to systemic paradoxes in his treatment of natural law, liberty, authorization, and consent.

UnParadoxical Hobbes: In Reply to Springborg

Baumgold, D. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:09:51 PDT

Review Essays: Man of Peace: Hobbes Between Politics and Science

Dienstag, J. F. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:09:51 PDT

The Radical Hobbes: The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, by Jeffrey R. Collins. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005. 326 pp. $125.00 (cloth), $55.00 (paper). Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat, by James Martel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 240 pp. $34.50 (cloth)

Abizadeh, A. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:09:51 PDT

Book in Review: Return of the Repressed: Merleau-Ponty Redivivus

Dallmayr, F. — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:09:51 PDT

Brian Barry (1936-2009)

Goodin, R. E. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:23:49 PDT

Among Prelates and Primates: From Darwin to Rousseau

Thomas, P. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:23:49 PDT

Darwin's understanding of evolution as involving his original concept of natural selection involves discussions of development, progress, human pride, the construct o `primitivism,' and slavery. These discussions have to a remarkable extent been ignored by political theorists. This omission is all the more surprising in that these same discussions also call to mind Rousseau's often misunderstood concept of perfectibility.

The Machiavellian Rousseau: Gender and Family Relations in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Saccarelli, E. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:23:49 PDT

Rousseau's argument concerning gender and family relations in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality is a Machiavellian one. According to Rousseau, while Machiavelli at first glance seemed to flatter the tyrants, he actually intended to expose their unjust rule. I argue that this original and provocative interpretation of Machiavelli provides a key to Rousseau's own understanding of women as tyrants, and the family as the seat of their rule. My interpretation begins from a number of apparently ambivalent passages found in its Dedication to the Republic of Geneva, and challenges prevailing notions concerning Rousseau's understanding of the masculine reason of the Enlightenment, the character of modern civilization, and the relations of power intersecting the private and public spheres. I also consider the implication of the fact that, although Rousseau attacked what he perceived to be a sinister matriarchy, his arguments have and continues to be appropriated by feminist authors.

The Last Artificial Virtue: Hume on Toleration and Its Lessons

Sabl, A. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:23:49 PDT

David Hume's position on religion is, broadly speaking, "politic": instrumental and consequentialist. Religions should be tolerated or not according to their effects on political peace and order. Such theories of toleration are often rejected as immoral or unstable. The reading provided here responds by reading Hume's position as one of radically indirect consequentialism. While religious policy should serve consequentialist ends, making direct reference to those ends merely gives free reign to religious-political bigotry and faction. Toleration, like Hume's other "artificial virtues" (justice, fidelity to promises, allegiance to government), is a universally useful response to our universal partiality—as Established uniformity, however tempting, is not. This implies that toleration can progress through political learning, becoming broader and more constitutionally established over time. A sophisticated Humean approach thus shares the stability and normative attractiveness of respect- or rights-based arguments while responding more acutely and flexibly to problems the former often slights: antinomian religious extremism; underdefined political agency; and internationalized, politicized religious movements.

Living without Freedom: Cosmopolitanism at Home and the Rule of Law

Bohman, J. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:23:49 PDT

For Kant and many modern cosmopolitans, establishing the rule of law provides the chief mechanism for achieving a just global order. Yet, as Hart and Rawls have argued, the rule of law, as it is commonly understood, is quite consistent with "great iniquities." This criticism does not apply to a sufficiently robust, republican conception of the rule of law, which attributes a basic legal status to all persons. Accordingly, the pervasiveness of dominated persons without legal status is a a fundamental violation of the rule of law. This legal status can be understood in Kant's sense as an original "right to freedom," one that is not derived from or acquired by membership in a community or from citizenship. The realization of this kind of legal status can already be found in the "cosmopolitan constitutions" of many democracies, which include rights of persons (and not just citizens) to habeas corpus and other statuses that protect those vulnerable to domination. In order that all persons have the appropriate institutional space within which to exercise the powers of persons to address and make claims, institutions such as human rights courts to which those who lack legal status can appeal and be recognized are necessary for a form of the rule of law that is adequate to current circumstances.

Review Essay: Time of the Antichrist: Paul's Subversion of Empire

Miller, C. R. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:23:49 PDT

"In the Beginning All the World Was . . .": Political Vision, Critical History, and the Possibilities of the Present

Morefield, J. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:23:49 PDT

Book in Review: Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory, by Nancy J. Hirschmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. 342 pp. $24.95 (paper)

Zivi, K. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:23:49 PDT

Book in Review: After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Gender, by Georgia Warnke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 251 pp. + xiii. $29.99 (paper)

Smiley, M. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:23:49 PDT

Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy?

Chambers, S. — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:18:14 PDT

The pathologies of the democratic public sphere, first articulated by Plato in his attack on rhetoric, have pushed much of deliberative theory out of the mass public and into the study and design of small scale deliberative venues. The move away from the mass public can be seen in a growing split in deliberative theory between theories of democratic deliberation (on the ascendancy) which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives within democracies and theories of deliberative democracy (on the decline) that attempt to tackle the large questions of how the public, or civil society in general, relates to the state. Using rhetoric as the lens through which to view mass democracy, this essay argues that the key to understanding the deliberative potential of the mass public is in the distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary rhetoric.

On the Passing of the First-Born Son: Emerson's "Focal Distancing," Du Bois' "Second Sight," and Disruptive Particularity

Mariotti, S. — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:18:14 PDT

Both Ralph Waldo Emerson's and W. E. B. Du Bois' firstborn sons tragically died at very young ages. Drawing from the essays where they write about their grief, I explore Du Bois' "subversion" and "revision" of Emerson's thought by contrasting their visual metaphors: Emerson's "focal distancing" and Du Bois' practice of "second sight" and seeing through "the Veil." I show how the disruptive particular event of the deaths of their sons causes both to challenge the idealist elements of their respective gazes. I draw upon Theodor Adorno to explore the larger lessons of these reconsiderations. In recognizing the seductive dangers of the idealist gaze and the value of the disruptive particular, Adorno explicitly theorizes what Emerson and Du Bois also come to appreciate, in a less overt way, in their moments of loss.

The Logic of Random Selection

Stone, P. — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:18:14 PDT

This essay lays out the common reasoning underlying a diversity of arguments for decision making using lotteries. This reasoning appeals to the sanitizing effects of ignorance. Lotteries ensure that bad reasons are unable to affect a decision. (They also ensure that good reasons have no effect as well, which is why care must be applied in deciding to use them.) All arguments for or against the use of a lottery to make a particular decision will thus appeal to the same property that lotteries possess. This fact is compatible with continued vigorous disagreement about whether particular decisions should be made by lot. Such disagreements, however, will focus on the nature of the circumstances surrounding the decision. People can thus agree that a given set of circumstances calls for the use of a lottery even as they disagree over whether those circumstances hold.

Afghani on Empire, Islam, and Civilization

Kohn, M. — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:18:14 PDT

This essay provides an interpretation of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, a controversial figure in nineteenth-century Islamic political thought. One aspect of this controversy is the tension between "Refutation of the Materialists," Afghani's well-known defense of religious orthodoxy, and a short newspaper article entitled "Reply to Renan" that dismisses prophetic religion as dogmatic and intellectually stifling. In this essay I argue that close attention to Afghani's theory of civilization helps resolve this apparent contradiction. Afghani's interest in Ibn Khaldun and the French historian Guizot is well known, but has not been fully explored in the literature. I suggest that understanding Guizot's distinctive approach to the concept of civilization illuminates Afghani's writings on the political utility of religion. Afghani was an ardent anti-imperialist and his goal was to encourage reform in Islamic countries while resisting Western hegemony. He concluded that the tension between prophetic religion and critical thought could help Islamic civilization to flourish.

Review Essays: Pragmatism and Pluralism, Together Again: Dewey's Critical Pragmatism, by Alison Kadlec. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. 179 pp. $65.00 (cloth). Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. 1,072 pp. $50.00 (cloth). A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, by Robert B. Talisse. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. 176 pp. $135.00 (cloth)

Moore, M. J. — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:18:14 PDT

Review Essays: A Moral Logic to the Archives of Pain: Rethinking Foucault's Work on Madness: History of Madness (HM), by Michel Foucault. New York: Routledge, 2006. 776 pp. $40.00 (cloth). Abnormal (AB), by Michel Foucault. New York: Picador, 2004. 400 pp. $17.00 (paper). Psychiatric Power (PP), by Michel Foucault. New York: Picador, 2008. 416 pp. $16.00 (paper).

Hooke, A. E. — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:18:14 PDT

Book in Review: Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, by William Connolly. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 192 pp. $21.95 (paper)

Fowler, R. B. — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:18:14 PDT