My research looks at how reason has been imagined in Western political thought, and how images of reason change over time. Works in progress include:
Claiming the World: Bourgeois Freedom and the Problem of Imagination (book project)
It is frequently said that the Enlightenment was the age of reason; but in the two centuries before the Enlightenment, political thinkers were much more interested in imagination. Claiming the World makes an argument about contemporary political thinking by telling a new story about its European early modern past. The argument is that the idea of reason as separate from, and often opposed to, the imagination is a fiction which has outlived its usefulness, and that imagination should be recovered as a central object of political-theoretical inquiry in the present. I build this argument by telling a new story about the development of bourgeois freedom as a process of wrestling with the powerful but unpredictable force of imagination amidst the rise of commercial society, a process whose stakes were the very boundaries of the “self” and the self’s sphere of proper control. Across the book, I show how a series of politically motivated visions of free selfhood produced successive transformations in how the relationship between imagination and reason has been understood. Specialists in early modern thought, and scholars in particular of Montaigne, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant, will find new readings that shed light on the imaginative roots of modern democracy and liberalism, while also finding resources in the book for analyzing the enduring contradictions of bourgeois freedom in the present.
“Isaiah Berlin’s Liberal Reformation” (article)
In this article, I reconstruct Isaiah Berlin’s understanding of the proper approach to the study and practice of politics in order to clarify his substantive liberalism. I argue that Berlin should be understood as a reformer of liberalism, and that he understood his intervention in historical terms. Reacting against what he saw as the totalitarian tendencies inherent in the rational-scientific grounding of classical liberalism and the growth of the modern social sciences, Berlin sought to reform liberalism on more aesthetic and humanist grounds. However, Berlin was also anxious to guard liberalism against the kind of aestheticization of the political that he saw in Nazi fascism. In analyzing how Berlin navigated between what he saw as the Scylla and Charybdis of politics as science and politics as art, I construct three categories – aesthetic-humanist, rational-scientific, and empiricist – and show how he sorted different aspects of the theory and practice of modern politics into each. I explore the implications of Berlin’s reformed liberalism for what kinds of political actors are valorized or viewed suspiciously, as well as for what issues are considered to be political in the first place.
“In Defense of Sophistry” (article)
Sophistry has usually been considered a negative force in democracy, and to be called a sophist is a term of abuse. The origin of sophistry’s bad name is well-known, since it forms the opening act in the story of (Western) moral and political philosophy’s evolution. A new type of thinker, teacher, actor, and “character type” arose with the sophistic movement of the mid to late fifth century BCE, rising to controversial prominence in the midst and wake of the Peloponnesian War. But as few of their writings have survived, there is scant direct evidence as to what their ideas and practices were, and indirect evidence comes mostly from depictions offered by their critics. What if the original critique of sophistry is not what it seems? What if sophistry’s greatest critics also offer resources for imagining more positive democratic possibilities for sophistry as well? This article analyzes one of the most central sophistic practices ideas - antilogic - as it is represented and employed in the work Aristophanes and Plato. I argue that each understood sophistry as a response to a larger process of cultural-political change, corruption, and crisis, and that each saw both negative and positive possibilities in the doctrines and practices of the sophists. Reading both authors’ understandings of sophistry together thus gives us a more well-rounded and useful perspective on what sophistry meant and might mean in our own time.
“From Natural Rights to the Nature of Rights: On Rousseau’s Theory of Property” (article)
In this paper, I contribute to the debate over Rousseau’s theory of property by analyzing the articulation of his theory through a variety of narrative forms, each of which expresses Rousseau’s view of what it means for a social practice to be “natural” or otherwise. I argue that Rousseau’s narratives collectively suggest a nuanced theory of why certain kinds of private property rights play a crucial role in allowing for the expression of the general will in commercial societies, while also developing a striking critical account of what it means for property rights to be “natural” or otherwise. Thus, to say that Rousseau rejects property as a Lockean natural right, while accurate, nonetheless threatens to obscure the complexity of what Rousseau is actually doing. I reveal how Rousseau draws on the narrative elements of the theories of property in Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke, and pushes them to more extreme conclusions, ultimately showing that the transformations which generate the right to property lie not just in the material but in the psychological, not only in reason but in imagination, and not primarily in law but in social interdependence. This results in a profound diagnosis of the dynamics of modern unfreedom and political corruption whose solution, far from calling for the rejection of property rights, instead defends property as the central right of modern politics, but one whose significance can only be properly understood through a critical reimagining of its fundamentally social nature.
The image on this page is the frontispiece from William Blake’s The Book of Los (1795) from The British Museum online collection.