“Isaiah Berlin’s Liberal Reformation,” Modern Intellectual History, published Online First December 2024.
This article clarifies the relationship between Isaiah Berlin’s liberalism, pluralism, humanism, and “aestheticism” by analyzing his unique approach to, and stories about, the history of ideas. I argue that Berlin should be understood as a reformer of liberalism, who understood his intervention in intellectual-historical terms. Reacting against what he saw as threats to human liberty and dignity rooted in the monist rational–scientific aspirations and expectations of Enlightenment-influenced political ideologies, Berlin responded by reinterpreting liberalism’s commitment to negative liberty through an aesthetic conception of the human being and a pluralist way of thinking about politics. In addition to reconstructing how Berlin’s writings on the history of ideas enact this liberal reformation, and clarifying the ways in which his resulting liberalism is and is not aesthetic, I also evaluate the potential implications of Berlin’s work for thinking about liberal politics in the present.
“Why the Imaginary Needs the Imagination,” Polity 56/4 (October 2024): 558 – 583.
This article reexamines the contested status of imagination in contemporary politics by analyzing the disjunction between theorization of “the imagination” and accounts of “the social imaginary” since the mid-1960s. I argue that what is at stake in the separation between the two concepts are different notions about the status of reality and its relationship to agency in imaginative thought and action—a separation that may imperil our ability to make historical and political judgments about emancipatory change. First, I reconstruct the shift from a mimetic to creative concept of imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the implications this transformation had for thinking about the relationship between reality and agency. Next, I show how Marx and Engels, through their critique of “ideology” in nineteenth-century German idealism, sought a unified materialist account of reality and agency, but in terms that were increasingly seen as problematic by many twentieth-century social theorists. Finally, I evaluate the rejection of the Marxist concept of ideology in postwar French social theory and Cornelius Castoriadis’s subsequent writings on the putatively emancipatory character of radical imaginaries. In conclusion, I suggest that for all the analytical and political gains that the social imaginary approach offers, the status of reality and the purpose of agency within this approach remain open questions which may require the recovery and reintegration of the insights of older theories of imagination and ideology.
“Is Ruthlessness the Enemy? On Joshua Cherniss’ Liberalism in Dark Times,” History of European Ideas (forthcoming 2023)
Abortion: The Supreme Court Decisions, 4th edition, Hackett (2023) (co-edited, with a new co-authored introduction with Ian Shapiro)
“Hobbes and the Politics of Translation.” Political Theory, Vol. 49, Iss. 1 (2021): 83-108
This essay argues that Thomas Hobbes’s work as a translator was fundamental to his mature political philosophy. A proper appreciation for the significance of Hobbes’s lifelong engagement with the politics of translation clarifies both the relationship between Hobbes’s humanist and scientific work, and the meaning of his simultaneous critique and use of rhetoric in his political writings. Against the interpretation held by many scholars that Hobbes simply traded his early humanist interests for his mature political and scientific views, I demonstrate that Hobbes was consistently concerned with the political instability generated by the vernacular translation of classical Greek and Roman texts. In responding to this instability, Hobbes developed his geometrical approach to speech while also, through his analysis of the relationship between translation and metaphor, finding ways to employ humanist rhetorical techniques consistent with this approach. Yet I show that Hobbes continued to rely on translation in areas of speech where he thought science alone could not provide persuasive answers.
“Value Pluralism and Tragic Loss,” Critical Review, Vol. 32, Iss. 4 (2020): 556-573.
This essay argues that Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism continues to be relevant because of the compelling account of tragic loss that it provides. I advance this argument through a series of four central questions, using them to think with Berlin, but also beyond Berlin, about the promise of pluralism and loss in our political present: Why must there be loss? What makes loss difficult? Why should we expect loss to occur? How does loss orient action? Ultimately, I suggest that the expectation and recognition of tragic loss can alert us to, and help guard us against, the fanaticism, distortion of values, and self-deception that may result from even the most well-meaning and good-faith pursuit of political ideals.
“Negative Liberty and the Cold War” in The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin, ed. Steven Smith and Joshua Cherniss (2018) (with Ian Shapiro)
Berlin’s famous defense of negative liberty has enjoyed remarkable staying power in the contemporary West, which some commentators attribute to its compatibility with the individualism that lies at the heart of market economics. Shapiro and Steinmetz propose an alternative account that is rooted in the intellectual context of the Cold War. Drawing on the wealth of new evidence that has become available due to the publication of Berlin’s letters over the past decade, they show that Berlin’s defense of negative over positive liberty was indeed rooted in the antipathy for the Soviet Union that he shared with such contemporaries as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, and George Kennan. But Berlin’s account was distinctive in that he also explored the underlying insecurities that rendered people susceptible to positive liberty’s allure. This exploration left him skeptical that negative liberty would triumph once communism collapsed unless the sources of that insecurity could be addressed – a salutary warning that continues to be relevant in the post-Cold War era.
“Sanctuary and the Limits of Public Reason: A Deweyan Corrective.” Politics and Religion. Vol. 11, Iss. 3 (2018)
This article contributes to the debate over the appropriate place of religion in public reason by showing the limits of this framework for understanding and evaluating the real-world religious political activism of social movements. Using the 1980s Sanctuary Movement as a central case study, in which Central American migrants along with US citizen religious actors challenged the non-recognition of asylum claimants under Cold War politics, I show how public reason fails to appreciate the complex religious dynamics of this movement, the reasons actors employ religious reasoning, and, as a result, the very meaning of these acts. In response, I argue that a Deweyan perspective on the tasks and challenges of the democratic public offers a richer, more contextualized approach to evaluating the status of religion in the public sphere by tracking how the shifting perception of new issues and populations as part of “a public” informs the moral orientation of political claim-making.
“Religious Reasons in Public Deliberation” in The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. Andre Bächtiger, John S. Dryzek, Jane Mansbridge, and Mark Warren (2018) (with Andrew March)
This chapter reviews the history of and analyzes current trends within normative debates about the role of religion in public deliberation. Starting with the idea of an "exclusivist" approach, we look at the status of religious reasons within the frameworks broadly inspired by Rawlsian and Habermasian theories of public reason and deliberation, and recount seven core arguments against excluding religious reasons from public deliberation. The second section reviews approaches which work from similar moral assumptions and principles to those of exclusivism, but take the critiques surrounding the status of religious reasons seriously, leading to the development of a wide variety of models that we refer to broadly as "liberal inclusivist." In the final section, we treat models which seek to incorporate religious reasons by rejecting the standard assumptions of public reason and communicative action, sometimes in the process, also rethinking the fundamental goals and methods of deliberation as such.
Powered by Squarespace