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17Deparochializing Political Theory By Melissa S.Williams, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020Constellations. forthcoming.Constellations, EarlyView.
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15A realistic blacktopia: Why we must unite to fightContemporary Political Theory 1-4. forthcoming.
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15Tongdong Bai, Leo Strauss, and the Question of Political PhilosophyJournal of Social and Political Philosophy 1 (1): 67-70. 2022.
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21Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in Contemporary Political TheoryFordham University Press. 2022.How may progressive political theorists advance the Enlightenment after Darwin shifted the conversation about human nature in the 19th century, the Holocaust displayed barbarity at the historical center of the Enlightenment, and 9/11 showed the need to modify the ideals and strategies of the Enlightenment? Kantian Courage considers how several figures in contemporary political theory--including John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan--do just this as they continue Immanuel Kant's legacy. R…Read more
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10Deweyan experimentalism and the problem of method in political philosophyContemporary Political Theory 21 (4): 179-181. 2022.
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32War for peace: Genealogies of a violent ideal in western and Islamic political thoughtContemporary Political Theory 20 (1): 45-48. 2021.
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5What if Neoliberalism Captures the Human Rights Establishment? Sustainable Development Goal 4 and the Global Education Reform MovementHuman Rights Review 19 (3): 379-383. 2018.
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40Assemblages and the MultitudeEuropean Journal of Political Theory 8 (3): 383-400. 2009.The article enters a heated debate about the ideals and organization of the postmodern left. Hardt and Negri, two key figures in this debate, claim that their concept of the multitude — a revolutionary, proletarian body that organizes singularities — integrates the insights of Deleuze and Lenin. I argue, however, that Deleuze anticipated and resisted a Leninist appropriation of his political theory. This essay challenges the widely accepted assumption that Hardt and Negri carry forth Deleuze’s l…Read more
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2Deleuze's Political VisionRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2015.Deleuze’s Political Vision reconstructs Deleuze’s conception of political theories of pluralism, human nature, the social contract, liberalism, democracy, socialism, feminism, and comparative political theory. Translating Deleuze’s ideas into popular vernaculars to realize his political vision, author Nicholas Tampio reveals Deleuze as an essential figure in modern discussions of political theory and philosophy.
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50A defense of political constructivismContemporary Political Theory 11 (3): 305-323. 2012.In Political Liberalism, J. Rawls describes a meta-ethical procedure — political constructivism — whereby political theorists formulate political principles by assembling and reworking ideas from the public political culture. To many of his moral realist and moral constructivist critics, Rawls's procedure is simply a recent version of the “popular moral philosophy” that Kant excoriates in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. I defend the idea of political constructivism on philosophical…Read more
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59Entering Deleuze's Political VisionDeleuze and Guatarri Studies 8 (1): 1-22. 2014.How can Deleuzians make his philosophy as accessible as possible to political theorists and democratic publics? This essay provides principles to enter Deleuze's political vision, namely, to research the etymology of words, to discover the image beneath concepts, to diagram schemata using rigid lines, supple lines and lines of flight, and to construct rules that balance experimentation and caution. The essay then employs this method to explicate a fecund sentence about politics in A Thousand Pla…Read more
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27What if the Pious Don’t Want to Deliberate?Political Theory 42 (1): 106-118. 2014.What should political theorists do when they travel beyond the West and find that ordinary people do not want to reflect upon their political commitments? One option is to do rehabilitative political theory and argue that China and Egypt, say, already possess deliberative cultures. A second option is to maintain that China and Egypt favor different, and better, ideals than democratic deliberation. A third option, and the one that I endorse, is to promote Socratic ideals in universities around th…Read more
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9How may progressive political theorists advance the Enlightenment after Darwin shifted the conversation about human nature in the nineteenth century, the Holocaust displayed barbarity at the historical center of the Enlightenment, and 9/11 showed the need to modify the ideals and strategies of the Enlightenment? Kantian Courage considers how several figures in contemporary political theory--including John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan--do just this as they continue Immanuel Kant's leg…Read more
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14Two faces of political liberalism: A response to VallsContemporary Political Theory 11 (3): 331-335. 2012.A famous Kant scholar once distinguished two faces of the critical philosophy, one facing the past and less interesting and the other looking forward to the future and still fruitful (Strawson 1966). Rawls's work also has two faces and many of his readers look toward the past, wishing, for instance, that Rawls had been able to provide principles of justice that have the ontological status of categorical imperatives. I thank Andrew Valls for inviting me to clarify points where I diverge from many…Read more
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21Constructing the Space of TestimonyPolitical Theory 39 (5): 600-629. 2011.How do we conceptualize distinctions between religious —political territories in the contemporary world when old categories—such as Islam and the West, or dar al-Islam and dar al-harb—precipitate misunderstandings and conflicts? In this essay, I consider Tariq Ramadan's argument that Muslims must enact an intellectual transformation along the lines of Kant's Copernican revolution and thence create concepts—such as the space of testimony —to facilitate interreligious dialogue, cooperation, and re…Read more
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35The Politics of the Garden (pairadaeza)Theory and Event 2 (2). 2013.This essay explores how the garden (in Persian, pairadaeza) may function as an image of flourishing pluralism among theists and naturalists. Initially, the essay draws upon A Thousand Plateaus to formulate the principles of a Deleuzian comparative political theory. Next, the essay interprets and evaluates the work of the Sufi scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the al-Qaeda ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Shi'i political reformer 'Abdolkarim Soroush. The essay concludes by considering how diverse …Read more
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Fordham UniversityRegular Faculty
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |