Suchergebnisse

"Movements like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party embody some of our deepest intuitions about popular politics and 'the power of the people'. They also expose tensions and shortcomings in our understanding of these ideals. We typically see 'the people' as having a special, sovereign power. Despite the centrality of this idea in our thinking, we have little understanding of why it has such importance. Imagined Sovereignties probes the considerable force that 'the people' exercises on our thought and practice. Like the imagined communities described by Benedict Anderson, popular politics is formed around shared, imaginary constructs rooted in our collective imagination. This book investigates these 'imagined sovereignties' in a genealogy traversing the French Enlightenment, the Haitian Revolution, and nineteenth-century Haitian constitutionalism. It problematizes taken-for-granted ideas about popular politics and provokes new ways of imagining the power of the people"--

"Movements like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party embody some of our deepest intuitions about popular politics and 'the power of the people'. They also expose tensions and shortcomings in our understanding of these ideals. We typically see 'the people' as having a special, sovereign power. Despite the centrality of this idea in our thinking, we have little understanding of why it has such importance. Imagined Sovereignties probes the considerable force that 'the people' exercises on our thought and practice. Like the imagined communities described by Benedict Anderson, popular politics is formed around shared, imaginary constructs rooted in our collective imagination. This book investigates these 'imagined sovereignties' in a genealogy traversing the French Enlightenment, the Haitian Revolution, and nineteenth-century Haitian constitutionalism. It problematizes taken-for-granted ideas about popular politics and provokes new ways of imagining the power of the people"...

My discussion of Massimiliano Tomba's Insurgent Universality focuses on intertwined themes of historicism, normativity, and revolution that I find particularly generative. By drawing them together I hope to trace out important parts of the book's conceptual infrastructure, especially the way it uses insurgent moments of the past to conceptualize alternative modernities. My particular focus is the sense in which Tomba hopes to "reactivate" important aspects of past insurgent moments. In the end, I argue that his arguments actually go much farther to displace universalism than he credits them. Agreeing with the spirit of Tomba's work rather than its letter, I believe that he provides us with good grounds to focus on insurgent multiplicities rather than insurgent "universality."

This essay follows Michel Foucault's inspiration to develop an archaeology of subaltern politics. In the archives left from the Haitian Revolution, we find occasional references to slaves wearing the tricolor cockade, the famous symbol of French republicanism. The archives are silent on what wearing the cockade "meant," however, or why whites found it so threatening. Rich layers of meaning are packed into these silences. They reveal a great deal about the performative character of the public sphere and the epistemological complexity of mixing race with revolutionary politics. Wearing the cockade was a screen of projection for all kinds of ideas, including the paranoid fears and guilty conscience of white slaveholders. It probed tensions implicit within Enlightenment colonialism, making those tensions explicit to white elites. By eliciting this self-critical response, the cockade served as a disruptive enigma well suited to the critical and political needs of people not allowed to speak.

This article locates tensions at the heart of deliberative democracy by contrasting insights of Pierre Bourdieu and Jürgen Habermas. It argues that deliberation contains implicit presuppositions of two opposing sorts. Universalising presuppositions lead people to treat one another as equals. Differentiating ones lead people to treat one another as of greater or lesser worth in political dialogue. They undercut deliberative democracy by rendering some points of view less valuable than others. These contrary tendencies cannot be reconciled in a purely theoretical way; they are contextually specific challenges that must be negotiated in politics itself. In response, this article seeks to clarify the difficulties faced by deliberative regimes and better understand their relation to other forms of politics.