the radical machiavelli

Sep 232015
 

65184 September 23, 2015: Just out! The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy, and Language, edited by Fillipo del Lucchese, Fabio Frosini, and Vittorio Morfino. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015.

So very pleased to be part of this volume, which grew out of a fabulous conference in London, two years ago. Here’s an excerpt from the blurb:

“Rather than a neutral, comprehensive, and safe interpretation, this book offers a partial and even partisan reading of Machiavelli […]”

shipwrecked sovereignty

Aug 052015
 

3.coverJune 1, 2015: Shipwrecked Sovereignty! Joshua Chambers-Letson and I have a co-authored article in the current issue of Political Theory. The piece is about a legal and political controversy concerning a Napoleonic shipwreck that was recently salvaged off the Iberian peninsula by a private corporation. On board of  the Spanish warship was the most valuable treasure ever recovered from a shipwreck—a loot of gold and silver mined and minted in the colonial Viceroyalty of Peru, valued at approximately half a billion US Dollars. The legal controversy that ensued pitted the corporate salvors against Spain and Peru, each side drawing on different logics to make their case. Our essay—“Shipwrecked Sovereignty: Neoliberalism and a Disputed Sunken Treasure”— discusses the political and theoretical dimensions of the dispute.

 

violence on the desert island… now in print

Oct 162014
 

cptOctober 15, 2014: My article Debating Violence on a Desert Island: Engels, Dühring and Robinson Crusoe [behind paywall] is now officially out in Contemporary Political Theory.  Here is the abstract:

Ever since the publication in 1719 of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the novel’s eponymous protagonist has had a pervasive presence in the modern social and cultural imaginary, giving rise to an entire literary genre known as Robinsonades. In Anti-Dühring (1877), Friedrich Engels identifies such a Robinsonade in the work of Eugen von Dühring, the target of his polemic, and draws on it for a critique of ahistorical theories of violence. The particular version of the Robinsonade Engels ascribes to Dühring is fabricated, yet a close examination of this fabrication suggests that it serves important analytic and interpretive purposes. Ironically, Engels’s critique of Robinsonades is so compelling that it ends up undermining his own tendency to economic and technological reductionism. Despite Engels’s attempts to distance himself from the Robinsonade he projects onto Dühring, the Crusoe story acts as a fraught supplement to his own theory of violence. In particular, it reveals the tensions in his work between, on the one hand, economic and technological reductionism, and on the other hand, attention to social, cultural and symbolic forces without which no plausible history of violence can be written.

debating violence on the desert island

Oct 082013
 

cptSeptember 10, 2013: My article Debating Violence on a Desert Island: Engels, Dühring and Robinson Crusoe [behind paywall] has been published by Contemporary Political Theory. While it is not yet out in print, it is available online as part of CPT’s Advance Online Publication. The article is about Friedrich Engels’s theory of violence and the use  of Robinson Crusoe as a figure in Engels’s conceptualization of violence and in his critique of Eugen Dühring.

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