Political Theory

It is a problem that the environment is often seen and treated as a reservoir of resources awaiting human use. How did this outlook arise? This essay analyzes a formative moment in the constitution of the environment as a buffet of goods to be consumed: seventeenth-century efforts by agricultural improvers, including John Locke, to eradicate waste. Locke’s theory of property prohibits the wasteful spoilage of food and charges mankind with a responsibility to cultivate, incorporate, and thereby appropriate earth’s nonhuman eatables—what I call his “partition of the digestible.” But eating both underwrites and unhinges Lockean property rights, for all food contains materials that cannot be used by the body and must be excreted from it. Poop and pee serve as visible (and smelly) reminders that consumption is inhabited by, and thus cannot resolve, waste. Even the improvers’ ostensible solution of repurposing excrement as manure to produce more food just creates more waste: this “peristaltic circle,” as I describe it, is voracious and expansive. Circular waste-eradication projects are best understood as enabling preconditions for the wastefulness of linear, take-make-waste political economies, not their antidote.

What are we to make of the fact that world leaders, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, have, within the last few decades, offered official apologies for a whole host of past injustices? Scholars have largely dealt with this phenomenon as a moral question, seeing in these expressions of contrition a radical disruption of contemporary neoliberal individualism, a promise of a more humane world. Focusing on Canadian apology politics, this essay instead proposes a nonideal approach to state apologies, sidestepping questions of what they ought to do and focusing instead on their actual functioning as political acts. Through a sociologically informed speech act theory and Foucault’s work on power, apology is conceptualized as a speech act with an essentially relational nature. The state, through apologizing, reaffirms the norms governing its relationship to its subjects at a moment when a past transgression threatens to destabilize this relation. From a Foucauldian point of view, the state’s power inheres in the very stability of the state–citizen relation, and we should therefore see apologies as defensive moves to protect state hegemony. In the context of Western liberal democracies, such as Canada, apologies embody, rather than challenge, the logic of neoliberal governmentality by suggesting that everything, including resentment against the state, can be managed within the current status quo. Nevertheless, total cynicism about apology politics is not warranted. In many indigenous apology campaigners’ demands for contrition we see another side of apologies: their potential to bring about change by enacting counterhegemonic relations to the state.

Recent years have seen a notable surge in scholarship on the life and thought of B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956). This essay contributes to this literature by uncovering heretofore underemphasized aspects of how Ambedkar theorized the relationships between caste oppression, democracy, and state action. The essay demonstrates that, particularly in the period from 1936 to 1947, Ambedkar closely attended to the pathological imbrications between caste society and representative institutions in India; that he theorized an alternative, ambitious conception of democracy that encompassed the social and political spheres; and that he framed the state, and Dalit presence within the state, as a uniquely appealing instrument to transition from the former arrangement to the latter. In addition to filling gaps in the scholarship on Ambedkar, this interpretation offers important resources for contemporary democratic theory—in particular by countering perspectives that remain overly skeptical of the state’s capacity to move against social oppression in ways that enable, rather than inhibit, collective self-government.

Thomas Hobbes tells us that he wrote Leviathan to “absolve the divine laws” of the charge that they justify rebellion. This article interprets the argumentative strategy of the second half of Leviathan in light of this intention. Over the course of his three major political works, Hobbes develops a convergent argument to absolve God’s laws. This strategy of judicial rhetoric relies on using multiple independent claims in the hope that one’s audience finds at least one of them persuasive. This was a risky strategy for Hobbes that angered his critics. The strategy also reveals something about what sort of philosopher Hobbes was and how we ought to approach his work.

Since the publication of Between Facts and Norms, Habermas’s concept of communicative power has been the topic of significant discussion. This article contributes to this conversation by examining Habermas’s account of what makes communication powerful. I argue that Habermas’s conception of communicative power describes a nonviolent and noninstrumental mode of acting and being with others in language. This mode of engagement underwrites a conception of power that is structurally different from willing, one that builds meaningful worlds and (trans-)forms those engaging in communicative procedures. In drawing out this aspect of Habermas’s conception, I show that he is not a rationalist and proceduralist whose account of communicative procedures protects decision-making from irrational aesthetic powers. Rather, he presents communication as a mimetic achievement, a set of aesthetic practices and experiences that affectively alter its participants. With this position, Habermas makes an important contribution to and not just against the analysis of the aesthetic dimensions of political life. In casting communication as a mimetic achievement, Habermas presents an account of how communication opens worlds and forms subjects. Yet since these aspects of communication arrive in linguistic form, he can also examine affective and aesthetic experiences within discursive procedures. We can understand world-opening and aesthetic (trans-)formation as an essential part of democratic politics while also identifying the perspectives and resources by which actors can reflect on and critically evaluate whether an opinion is justified or whether a political project is worth pursuing.