Abstract
In 1995, political theorist Jeffrey Isaac, in an article entitled “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,” posed the following question: “given the historical, political, and seemingly theoretical significance of the Eastern European revolution against Soviet communism, why have American political theorists failed to hardly address the topic?”1 In 2015, one might pose a simiiarquestion: given the historical, political, and seemingly theoretical significance of the radical increase in inequality over the past 30 years in the United States, why have American political theorists failed to hardly address the topic? This essay explores how and why mainstream political theory has largely failed to conceive of the rise of neoliberal capitalism as a major threat to democracy in the United States and the world. Over the past 30 years, the predominant form of work in self-identified “radical” political theory has focused on the ontological and epistemo-logical issues of “difference” and “the fiction of the coherent self.”2
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Notes
Jeffrey Isaac, “The Srrangc Silence of Political Theory.” Political Theory 23:4 (November 1995): 636–652.
During this period, two of the most cited and influential works that influenced political theorists were Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton university Press, 1992).
A notable exception to the journal Political Theory avoiding the publication of articles about inequality, politics, and political economy is Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoiiberaiism, NeoConservatisn and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34:6 (December 2006): 690–714.
For paradigmatic examples, see Todd Gitlin, Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Henry Holt, 1995)
Richard Rorty Achieving Our Country: leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)
Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
Among the classic critiques were Peter Bachrach and Morion Baratz, “The Two Faces or Power,” American Political Science Review LVII (December 1962): 947–952
William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1974).
See, in passim, Michael Sandel. Liberalism and the Limits of justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
John Rawls. “Justice as Fairness: Political. Nor Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14:3 (Summer 1985): 223–252.
See Amy Gutmann, “Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14:3 (Summer 1985): 308–22.
On deliberative democracy see Amy Gutmarm and Dennis Thompson. Why Deliberative Democracy: (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
See Lynn M. Sanders, “Against Ddiberative Democracy,” Political Theory 25:6 (November 1997): 347–376.
Karl Marx, The Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition (New York: W. W Norton, 1978), 530.
Joan W. Scott. “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference, Or the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Feminist Studies 14:1 (Spring 1988): 33–50.
See Anne Phillips. Democracy and Difference (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 1993).
See Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference and Inclusion and. Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Susan Jeckman, Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics (State College. PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005).
For Young’s conception of group identity, see Justice and the Politics of Difference. 42–47. For “Young’s use of Sartre’s concept of “serially,” see Iris Marion Young, “Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective,” Signs 19:3 (Spring 1994): 713–738.
On the struggle against homophobia within the African American church, see Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
Cornel West and bell hooks. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
See Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 139–150.
See Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 167–172 and Nancy Fraser, “Re-chinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Bruce Robbins. ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 14.
See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957)
T. H. Marshall. “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge: England. Cambridge University Press, 1950).
Joseph M. Schwartz, The Future of Democratic Equality: Rebuilding Social Solidarity in a Fragmented America (New York: Routlege, 2009).
See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism.’” in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge. 1995)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993)
William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
On “performativiiy,” see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge Press, 1990), 88–89
Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 10
See my comments on Roberto Ungar’s similar celebration (with his endorsement of a radical “politics of plasticity”) of the protean nature of human identity in Joseph M. Schwartz, The Permanence of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 18–19.
On Spivak’s concept of “strategic essentialism,” see Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
The concept of equality of standing or democratic equality advanced here is. in some ways, a more political and policy-oriented version of Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaums human capabilities approach to theorizing about justice. See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2011).
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© 2015 Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson
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Schwartz, J.M. (2015). Being Postmodern While Late Modernity Burned: On the Apolitical Nature of Contemporary Self-Defined “Radical” Political Theory. In: Smulewicz-Zucker, G., Thompson, M.J. (eds) Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381606_8
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