A Conversation with Joan Tronto about Making Good Care a Central Concern of Political Life | Polity: Vol 58, No 2

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Deportation by Design: How Political Entrepreneurs Engineered Crime-Based Deportation in the United States | Polity: Vol 58, No 2

Abstract Starting in the 1980s, the U.S. federal government considerably expanded criminal grounds for deportation, laying the foundation for today’s enforcement regime. Yet, the policymaking dynamics...

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Post-Politics, Climate Movements, and the Problem of Radical Status-Quoism | Polity: Vol 58, No 2

This paper critiques what I conceptualize as radical status-quoism in left-leaning debates on the climate crisis. In particular, it pursues a critical analysis of the post-political critique of climat...

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The Invisible Farmworker: Racial Political Economy, Policy Development, and the Second Dimension of Power | Polity: Vol 58, No 2

The US agriculture industry has long been reliant on inequalities that intersect race and political economy. Farm policy further accentuates these inequalities as most farmworkers were excluded from N...

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Alienation and Political Action, Revisited | Polity: Vol 58, No 2

In this paper, I challenge our thinking about affect, and its relationship to politics, agency, and action, through a close reading of the concept of alienation in the fiction of Harlem Renaissance th...

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John Rawls and Liberal Guilt | Polity: Vol 58, No 2

In contemporary political commentary, “liberal guilt” represents a cynical attempt to express moral concern without engaging in genuine and transformative action. This critique, however, overlooks a reading of “liberal guilt” as an expression of a conflict that cannot be worked through, namely a commitment to a suffering other to whom one feels indebted, and an attachment to a specific political arrangement from which one extracts benefits. This ambivalence, I suggest, produces forms of “moral paralysis” or the production of gestures that do not disturb the terms of liberal consensus. My aim is to explore how this contradiction is expressed in liberal thought through a psychoanalytic reading of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. The paper proceeds as follows: first, I will show how Rawls productively uses the work of Melanie Klein to ground guilt-feelings on terms other than those offered by Freud. Here, guilt is an expression of value that begets reparative gestures towards another. However, for Rawls, guilt can be expressed only in compressed and exchange-based terms that permit a return to political equilibrium and consensus. This means Rawls’s subject is endowed with a paranoid attachment to order, which dictates how guilt can be felt and enacted politically in relation to others. I show how this narration of guilt in Rawls’s thought gives theorists leverage to rethink “liberal guilt” as an expression of a contradiction between both paranoid and solidaristic attachments. Last, I show how “liberal guilt” may present itself as a site of political possibility.

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Backlash Blues: Assessing How Political Scientists Conceptualize (or Don’t) Reactionary Force1 | Polity: Vol 58, No 2

This study references 1,211 articles that mention “backlash” in sixteen political science journals to investigate how the term is understood and used in political science. We find that while backlash ...

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Triplicates | Polity: Vol 58, No 2

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“If It’s a Lie, It Must Be Important”: An Interview with Anne Norton on Identity, Property, and the Study of Politics | Polity: Vol 58, No 1

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A Race and Capitalism Framework to Study Financial Access | Polity: Vol 58, No 1

Racialized economic inequality remains a central concern across the social sciences, yet the role of financial access in reproducing inequality has been comparatively underexplored. Existing scholarsh...

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Logics of Race and Capitalism in the Political Economy of Time: The Case of Military Naturalizations | Polity: Vol 58, No 1

When the US exchanges citizenship rights for military service it is working within a political economy of time, where time is the medium of exchange. This paper argues that military naturalizations in...

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Betting on Black: Emergency Management Hedges on the Marginalized | Polity: Vol 58, No 1

Over the last three decades, urban cities and their residents have faced precarity. In the face of late capitalism, several metropolitan cities across the nation but particularly in Michigan, namely D...

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Mapping Theories of Racial Capitalism: From Necessity to Entanglement | Polity: Vol 58, No 1

The concept of “racial capitalism” has re-emerged in recent scholarly and political debates to theorize the role of racism in shaping capitalist social orders. It has been widely taken up by scholars ...

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Equality, Modernity, and Inclusion in Judith Drake’s Essay in Defence of the Female Sex | Polity: Vol 58, No 1

Judith Drake’s Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696) is a unique contribution to early English feminist thought. Both scathingly funny and remarkably erudite, the work wades into a variety of phil...

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Which Iphigenia is Sacrificeable? Jean Racine and the Gendered Politics of Desire | Polity: Vol 58, No 1

While it has become both legitimate and commonplace for political theorists to examine plays as texts of political theory, as texts that offer theoretical reflections on political concepts and ideolog...

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Ruled by Women: Gynocratic Disorder in Aristotle’s Sparta | Polity: Vol 58, No 1

Recent years have witnessed the rise of right-wing rhetoric asserting that contemporary liberal democracies have allowed women to control and rule over men. Scholarship has made sense of these anxieti...

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Blue Moon | Polity: Vol 58, No 1

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Polity | Vol 58, No 1

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Forty Years Later | Polity: Vol 57, No 4

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Forty Years Later | Polity: Vol 57, No 4

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The Class Constraints on Social Democracy | Polity: Vol 57, No 4

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The Thesis of the Inevitability of Reformism: Fiction and Occlusion | Polity: Vol 57, No 4

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The Minimalist Marxist: How Adam Przeworski United Political Science with Democracy as Free and Fair Election | Polity: Vol 57, No 4

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