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.
“From Natural Rights to the Nature of Rights: On Rousseau’s Theory of Property” (article)
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 analyze 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.
You can find a presentation and discussion of this paper here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaC5HxGpUZQ
“Marx and the Problem of Advertising” (article) (with Matthew Shafer)
Why didn’t Marx write about advertising? While not a few Marxian 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. In this essay we examine the role of advertising in Marx’s own time and his strange silence about it in his work. We demonstrate that prevailing Marxian 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.
The image on this page is the frontispiece from William Blake’s The Book of Los (1795) from The British Museum online collection.