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Professional colleagues (academics, media, policymakers etc): Email me here

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Authority and American Autobiographies

Craig Fehrman has a piece up at Vox on the  changing trends in American life-writing. Part way  through Fehrman makes an interesting observation on authority: In the first half of the 19th century only the clergy and criminals published autobiographies.  One group had divine authority to tell their life stories. The other had nothing left to lose. His essay ends by celebrating digital media as enabling a democratization of life-stories with Instagram et al representing a broader shift of authority from the nexus of the state and civic status to the personal realm. One might even think of this near century long turn as a great recommission of private meaning, one in which things of a private nature could be recast as being of public relevance, bringing with it accountability, justification, explanation, and special pleading. These are all the kinds of exchanges that come with the giving and taking of reasons along with the implicit knowledge that o...
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The Reactionary Mask

Reactionary politics the world over is hardly known for its robust intellectual foundation. Whether Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro, the core of this politics is built upon “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back,” as Corey Robin has noted. This is not to suggest that reactionaries are thoughtless. Rather that many of their justifications are contrived because they are driven simply by the desire to strike back at the “the emancipation of the lower orders.” For example, Edmond Burke’s objection to the French Revolution has less to do with its gratuitous violence and more to do with the overhaul of established deference and command. Indeed, conservatism claims that unequal relationships need to be preserved, as they are necessary for the advancement of civilization. Burke plays up the violence to create an affective charge in service of that agenda. Which brings us to David Bullard. Bullard is a minor figure in the small world of the South A...
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Rawls, Violence, and the State

Given the rise of the security state, one critique Rawls' work increasingly faces is that he did not give enough due attention to the problems of war and the violent capacity of the state. As an example, Paul Kahn in  Political Theology  charges that “Rawls and his followers never took seriously the violence of the state,” because the threat of “mutual assured destruction never appears within liberal political theory.” Further “the defence policies of the United States are always seen as somehow exceptional—more transitional arrangements than expressions of national identity.”  (Of secondary interest, Kahn holds that state violence derives less from conflict about political identity and affiliation, and more from the deeper realm of the apparent lawful order wherein“political violence has been and remains a form of sacrifice.” For Kahn the disadvantage of the majority of liberal political theory is that it cannot make that identification for “not reason but decision de...
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