Abstract: Abstract In virtue of their capacity for political agency, political agents can possess special rights, powers, and responsibilities, such as rights to political participation and freedom of speech. Traditionally, political theorists have assumed that only cognitively unimpaired adult humans are political agents, and thus that only those humans can be the bearers of these rights, powers, and responsibilities. However, recent work in animal rights theory has extended the concept of political agency to nonhuman animals. In this article, I develop an account of political agency that identifies the capacities that one must possess to be a political agent and captures the fact that political action is a distinctive type of action. Crucially, this account makes sense of the standard assumption that only some humans count as political agents, and explains why few nonhuman animals, human infants, and severely cognitively impaired humans are likely to possess the capacity for political agency. I go on to reject the view, recently advanced by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, that nonhuman animals can be ‘nonintentional political agents’. I conclude by suggesting that most nonhuman animals, as well as human infants and humans with severe cognitive impairments, cannot straightforwardly be assigned rights to political participation. PubDate: 2020-07-27
Abstract: Abstract A number of scholars have argued that we should pay closer attention to the role that philanthropy plays in shaping our societies. Philanthropic foundations are inherently political. They use private money for public purposes, and they receive tax advantages for the donations they make, but they typically lack transparency and public accountability. In this article, I argue that elite philanthropy may also violate three other democratic principles: (1) the all-affected principle; (2) the principle of non-arbitrary power; and (3) the provisionality principle. In response, I argue that we should consider using innovative democratic institutions — such as participatory budgeting processes — to decide how philanthropic funds should be used and distributed. Taking measures to democratize philanthropy would help mitigate some of the democratic concerns with elite philanthropy while acknowledging the important role that philanthropy plays in shaping our present, unequal societies. PubDate: 2020-07-27
Abstract: Abstract For the past half-century, critical pedagogy has represented perhaps the most influential response to traditional ‘banking’ models of education and the political obedience and social conformity they are purported to engender. Precisely because of its lasting impact, however, it has tended to overshadow other possible visions of the critical political potential of education. In this article, I trace the origins and development of a distinctive yet under-discussed concept in Michel Foucault’s late ethical work – psychagogy – to pursue an alternative depiction of education as a critical political practice. Attending to the origins and meaning of psychagogy in Foucault’s work is valuable, I argue, for two reasons. On the one hand, the concept offers a vision of political education that avoids reproducing problematic juridical binaries – truth and ideology, rationality and irrationality, absolved and condemned – that Foucault believed inhered in Enlightenment-era conceptions of emancipation. On the other hand, it demonstrates how political problems of our present might be rendered workable not only through recourse to the authoritative discourses of experts or collective demands of revolutionaries, but also through exercises in subjectivity formation that are rather more quotidian, experiential, and conditional in nature. PubDate: 2020-07-20
Abstract: Abstract Political protests involving clashes with police are often delegitimized by governments for using “uncivil” and “violent” means. Drawing on a creative video clip (“Breaking Billboards”) made by a group of Gezi protestors, this paper theorizes an alternative response, which refuses the dichotomy between peaceful and violent struggles and instead seeks to transform the field of judgement. The protestors in the clip, by echoing a verse originally written by poet Cemal Süreya, reconstruct destructive activity – breaking billboards – playfully and detached from its presumed ends. Placing their performances in conversation with Giorgio Agamben’s theory of mediality – means without end – I argue that the clip reconstructs political action in play-form, corroding the significance of the means-ends relationship. In doing so, it frustrates the usual grounds of judgement within which the meaning and value of protest activities are arbitrated. PubDate: 2020-07-14
Abstract: Abstract Carl Schmitt sees the 1933 Nazi seizure of power as a revolution that inaugurates an entirely new era of political-legal order. Analyzing Schmitt’s rarer Nazi-texts, diaries, and correspondence, I argue that from 1933 to 1936 Schmitt attempts to theorize the Nazi revolution by developing an entirely new political language of Nazism, cleansed from non-German ways of thinking, especially nineteenth-century liberalism. I focus on three conceptual transformations through which Schmitt understands the remaking of the German state: (1) The shift from the liberal democratic neutral state to a new one-party state or a Führer-state dominated by a movement – a shift symbolized by the “death of Hegel”; (2) the transformation of sovereign power into Führertum (“leadershipness”), represented by the symbolical deaths of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, whose thought cannot comprehend the totality of the Nazi movement, and (3) the perversion of the liberal-democratic equality before the law to the völkisch equality of the race (Artgleichheit) as the basis of all Nazi political–legal life. Criticizing previous interpretations of Schmitt’s Nazi thinking, I demonstrate that when Schmitt abandons his own decicionist thought in favor of concrete order thinking in 1933/1934 the idea of race becomes the basis of his political–legal thought. PubDate: 2020-06-19
Abstract: Abstract The neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination has emerged as a powerful framework for conceptualizing the dynamic relationship between power, democracy, and constitutionalism in modernity. Despite this, I argue that adaptations of republican freedom to the problem of slavery displace attention to race and foreclose more productive ways of addressing how racial slavery constitutes a distinct form of oppression. To illuminate the limitations of neo-republicanism, I turn to the political thought of abolitionists David Walker and Ottobah Cugoano. Both utilize comparative histories of race and slavery to reveal the specificity of modern slavery as a form of oppression, which cannot be captured as an issue of domination in the technical sense of the term. They thus pose challenges to neo-republican theory for its failure to fully appreciate the historical differences between ancient and modern slavery. To do so would illuminate how neo-republican theory faces severe limitations in providing an adequate conceptualization of oppression in the case of racial slavery. PubDate: 2020-06-19
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