Research

With Matt Shafer, Theory & Event, 2026
Why didn’t Marx write about advertising? While not a few Marxist theorists have attempted to account for advertising’s role in the later development of capitalism, Marx’s own inattention to this economic form has only rarely been recognized as the genuine puzzle that it is. Here we examine the role of advertising in Marx’s own time and his strange silence about it in his work. We demonstrate that prevailing Marxist accounts of advertising’s development not only fail to explain its absence from Capital but also underplay its significance for capitalist dynamics today. Yet we argue as well that Marx’s own concepts can in fact clarify fundamental aspects of how advertising functions in our time, as in his—but only if those concepts are turned against his own apparent view about how advertising should be understood.

History of Political Thought, 2025
What is the ‘nature’ of the right to private property? Rousseau offers a surprising response. Where the dominant, Lockean imaginary of natural property rights takes their original, pre-political givenness within human reason as grounding for their inviolability, Rousseau asserts that ‘nature’ itself provides a critical and normative standard for evaluating legal property rights. In this article, I analyse Rousseau’s various models of nature in order to reveal the distinctive way in which nature operates as a normative standard across his work, uniting what otherwise might seem like disparate and contradictory arguments about property rights into a coherent account. I argue that private property is not a natural right for Rousseau; instead, it is a right that must be made natural.

Modern Intellectual History, 2025
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.

Polity, 2024
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.

Political Theory, 2021
This essay argues that 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.

Critical Review, 2020
Isaiah Berlin's value pluralism remains attractive because of its compelling account of tragic loss. The expectation and recognition of tragic loss can alert us to, and help guard us against, the fanaticism, the distortion of values, and the self-deception that may result from even the most well-meaning and good-faith pursuit of political ideals.

Politics and Religion, 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, 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 as well as other emerging publics whose modes of engagement defy prevailing notions of reasonableness and civility.

With Ian Shapiro. In The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin, 2018
An account of how Berlin’s conceptualization of freedom was shaped by the political context of the Cold War debates around him.

With Andrew F. March. In The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, 2018
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.

History of European Ideas, 2023
Invited contribution to a symposium on Joshua Cherniss’ Liberalism in Dark Times, questioning the claim that ruthlessness is the defining feature of illiberal politics today.

Hackett, 4th Edition, 2023
Co-editor, with Ian Shapiro.
This new edition of Abortion: The Supreme Court Decisions includes all of the major Supreme Court decisions on abortion since the 1960s—as well as many majority, dissenting, and plurality opinions—carefully edited for use by researchers, journalists, and teachers in a variety of disciplines. With a new introduction by Steinmetz and Shapiro.