Patrick D Anderson

Eldridge Cleaver's era‐defining work Soul on Ice was published nearly 60 years ago, but despite being the subject of scholarly attention in a variety of disciplines, Cleaver's life and works remain misunderstood. This critical examination of six decades of Cleaver scholarship demonstrates that our understanding of Cleaver has been impeded by the hegemony of various orthodoxies and a lack of available primary sources. Bringing together scholarship from Philosophy, History, English, and area studies, I show that Cleaver scholarship changed radically following the archival turn of the last 20 years. Although the archival turn has done much to improve the state of Cleaver scholarship, we have a long way to go before we are freed from the limitations of unwarranted orthodoxies. Until that time, Eldridge Cleaver remains unthought.

Astrobiology is a field that asks profound questions about the universe by simultaneously acquiring knowledge from multiple disciplines in order to propel us toward a better understanding of what life is, how it emerges, and if it exists beyond Earth. In this contribution, we examine the relationship between astrobiology and epistemic pluralism, a perspective developed by philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend that advocates for a worldview in which there are many valid ways of understanding a phenomenon. We appeal to epistemic pluralism to make three arguments regarding astrobiology, two that are internally facing (addressing the nature and advancement of astrobiology) and one that is externally facing (responding to critics of astrobiology). First, we show how astrobiology is a paradigmatic example of Feyerabend’s principle of proliferation, which encourages researchers to develop and seriously consider competing and incommensurable theories. The principle of proliferation is an essential driver of astrobiological progress, fueling the development of new conceptual frameworks, technologies, and methods for detecting signatures of life as we do not know it. Second, we make the case that an epistemological pluralist framework can also help expand astrobiology beyond mere scientific disciplines to encompass critical contributions from the humanities as well. Non-scientific sources of knowledge, such as ethical theory and Indigenous knowledge, can help progress astrobiological pursuits by providing additional insights and different ways of internalizing scientific results. Finally, we use epistemic pluralism to defend astrobiology’s legitimacy as a scientific field, which has been criticized in various ways: e.g., astrobiology has no proper field of study and deals with non-falsifiable hypotheses.

Leftist political theory in Amerika has struggled to understand the two most important issues facing us today: sovereignty and neoliberalism. In their efforts to understand neoliberalism, most scholars rely on either neo-Marxist or poststructuralist (Foucault) approaches, and in their efforts to understand sovereignty, scholars commonly turn to Carl Schmitt’s legalistic notion of sovereignty. Unfortunately, these approaches cannot produce a sufficiently descriptive account of sovereignty in neoliberal Amerika, which is why I turn to the sociological political theory of C. Wright Mills, articulating a power elite theory of neoliberalism that provides a ground for identifying the aristocratic structure of sovereignty in our historical period. First, I provide an empirically-supported account of the development of the Amerikan power elite from the 1950s to today. Rather than consisting of three directorates as Mills observed in the 1950s – political, economic, and military – the power elite today rules from only two directorates: the Corporate-Juridical Directorate and the Military-Juridical Directorate. Second, I turn to early modern political theory to identify two modes of sovereignty: legislative sovereignty and executive sovereignty, the latter of which consists of two principles, executive enforcement (of law) and executive prerogative. Third, I argue that, in neoliberal Amerika, the Corporate-Juridical Directorate wields legislative sovereignty and the Military-Juridical Directorate wields executive sovereignty. Ultimately, the Left should abandon its reliance on pluralistic and legalistic notions in order to understand the aristocratic sovereignty of the power elite.

Anticolonial Amerika: Resisting the Zone of Nonbeing in an Anglo-Saxon Empire revives the anticolonial tradition of Black radical philosophy, drawing upon its unique understandings of race and empire, citizenship and sovereignty, gender and sexuality to contribute an original interpretation of contemporary American society. Following Charles W. Mills, I contend that Black political theory ought to move away from ideal theory toward an empirical, historically grounded approach to understanding the Black experience in modern North America. Unlike Mills, however, I argue that Black political theory ought to abandon the language of liberalism and the social contract in favor of philosophical concepts indigenous to the history of Black philosophy: the colonizer-colonized relation. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, I argue that the colonial relation constitutes the fundamental social ontology of the modern global system – what I call the colonial ontology of Empire. Offering an anticolonial conceptual apparatus as an alternative to Mills’s conceptions of racial contract and whiteness, I begin with an exegesis of Du Bois and Fanon and develop a language for an anticolonial conception of social ontology. This colonial ontology of Empire understands the modern world as divided into the human (colonizer) and the non-human (colonized), a relation that is grounded in a global political economy. Next, I engage critical whiteness studies and argues that the struggle between Anglo-Saxons and white ethnics produced two different conceptions of whiteness. Building upon these foundations, I develop some central anticolonial concepts through critical exegeses of the works of Martin R. Delany and Eldridge Cleaver. Exploring Delany’s political and legal thought, which captures the dehumanization of the colonized an expresses the colonial relation through a political theory of sovereignty, I establish the relationship between race and sovereignty in the U.S. To challenge feminist and intersectional accounts of race and gender, I demonstrate the power of white womanhood over Black manhood in the colonial relation by connecting Cleaver’s anticolonial understanding of the white female/Black male relation in America to anticolonial social ontology. Using Robert L. Allen’s internal (neo)colonialism model as a framework for connecting the colonial ontology of Empire to contemporary social scientific studies of white supremacy in America, I interpret two historical trends through a neocolonial lens: the emergence of the Black middle class as the agent of indirect rule and the development of the contemporary police state as a mode of social control for the Black internal colony. Following Fanon’s rejection of European philosophy, I call for a return to anticolonial political theory among Black political theorists.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been studied as a hacker, a journalist and an activist, but scholars have not given sufficient attention to his broader ethical theory. Assange’s cypherpunk ethics emphasises justice while advocating the widespread use of digital cryptography to defend individual privacy and promote institutional transparency. This paper places Assange’s cypherpunk ethics into conversation with contemporary global media ethics through a comparative study with the ethical theory of Clifford Christians. Christians and Assange offer different foundations for metaethics, and these differences give shape to their respective conceptions of cosmopolitanism, their divergent critiques of professional journalism and advocacy for convivial tools. By bringing a non-academic like Assange into the conversation, this paper practices ethical listening as a part of open media ethics, establishes a descriptive account of Assange’s ethical theory and introduces a justice-centred ethical paradigm into the field of global media ethics.

In recent decades, it has become popular to read the later work of W. E. B. Du Bois through a Marxist lens. Not only is Du Bois often considered a participant in the Marxist tradition, his historiographical masterpiece Black Reconstruction is often offered up as evidence for such arguments. Here, I challenge those who have attempted to interpret Du Bois as a Marxist by situating his work in relation to the Pan-African tradition to which he dedicated decades of his life. Du Bois’s views on Reconstruction and economics are shaped by Pan-African ideas, not Marxist theory, and his theoretical and practical confrontations with both his White and Black Marxist contemporaries reveals the distance between his Pan-Africanism and their Marxism. Contrary to the prevailing interpretations, Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction is not a Marxist text but a Pan-Africanist argument against Marxism’s inability to account for the structure of modern European Empire.

During the last two decades, there has been a surge of interdisciplinary interest in the writings of the radical twentieth-century sociologist C. Wright Mills, and one of the central issues in this wave of scholarship has been the Mills’ relationship to feminism and the place of sex and gender in his social theory. Contemporary scholars assert that Mills was largely ignorant about feminism or even hostile to it and that his social theory basically ignores issues of sex and gender. As this essay shows, the existing consensus is fundamentally mistaken. Mills’ social theory of sex and gender and his emerging critique of patriarchy were heavily influenced by the ‘silent feminists,’ Shira Tarrant's name for the leading women social scientists and philosophers of the 1930s and 40s. Though an analysis of Mills’ Character and Social Structure and White Collar, I show that Mills’ anti-essentialist conception of gender was inspired by the work of anthropologist Margaret Mead, sociologist Viola Klein, and psychoanalyst Karen Horney. Likewise, through an analysis of Mills’ review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, I show that not only is his critique of Beauvoir rooted in his readings of the silent feminists but also that Beauvoir’s influence on Mills’ thought can be traced through his most popular works, The Power Elite and The Sociological Imagination.

For three decades, the cypherpunk movement has fought for the right of individuals and publics to use digital cryptography—or crypto—to defend their individual privacy and promote institutional transparency and accountability. The cypherpunks have also fought for institutional transparency through various strategies of sousveillance. Yet the movement’s contribution to theories of surveillance and the praxis of resistance have been largely overlooked by scholars. This essay bridges the gap between the movement and the academy by outlining the normative and epistemological aspects of cypherpunk philosophy. Cypherpunk ethics is captured by the normative cypherpunk slogan “privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful.” Cypherpunk epistemology is a form of data activism that calls for a hands-on response to the datafication of surveillance and relies upon both pro-active (transparency) and ­re-active (privacy) strategies. While the cypherpunks are famously concerned about privacy, because cypherpunk philosophy also calls for “transparency for the powerful,” cypherpunks have practiced a distinctive form of cypherpunk sousveillance. By understanding that cypherpunk theory and practice each consist of two complementary dynamics—privacy/transparency, pro-active/re-active—it becomes possible to understand that the cypherpunk movement provides the basis for activists and citizens to resist large surveillance institutions like the National Security Agency and Google by altering information fluxes at the systemic level. The cypherpunk movement provides an intelligible, viable, and effective model of data activism and strategic agency, and this essay contributes to the pluralistic, multidisciplinary understanding of resistance to surveillance and practice of sousveillance by outlining the basic normative, epistemic, and pragmatic aspects of cypherpunk theory and practice.

Philosophers tend to conceive of whiteness as having only one modality, treating it as a single social, political, and historical phenomenon. Philosophers ought to abandon this habit and instead recognize that there are many whitenesses, that whiteness has a plurality of modalities. Drawing upon Charles Mills’ non-ideal theory, Michael James’s political ontology, and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s cultural history, this study develops a non-ideal political ontology of whiteness that demonstrates various modes of whiteness and the roles they play in the different political claims of various groups of Europeans-descended people in the United States. While an exhaustive account of whiteness’ various modalities is beyond the scope of one essay, this article presents a case study of multimodal whiteness the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tracing out four modalities of American whiteness: Anglo-Saxon whiteness, Plantation whiteness, Frontier whiteness, and Urban whiteness. By freeing philosophy of race from monolithic conceptions of whiteness, we can better understand and diagnose how reigns of white supremacy are passed from one group of whites to another, and we can see how prevailing political ontologies of whiteness at specific historical times and places shape the resulting white supremacist structures.

Leftist political theory remains trapped between two dominant conceptions of sovereignty: the liberal conception of popular sovereignty and the decisionist conception of sovereignty as the power to declare a state of exception. This essay offers a historical critique of the liberal and decisionist conceptions of sovereignty and develops a descriptive theory of aristocratic sovereignty, which is more suited to the history and the needs of radical political theory and praxis. By tracing the genealogy of sovereignty through early modern European political thought to the founding of the United States, this essay reveals the debilitating shortcoming of notions of sovereignty derived from both Carl Schmitt and the liberal tradition and provides a basis for a distinctively radical analysis of the sovereign aristocracy in Amerika.

Cypherpunk Ethics explores the moral worldview of the cypherpunks, a movement that advocates the use of strong digital cryptography—or crypto, for short—to defend individual privacy and promote institutional transparency in the digital age. Focusing on the writings of Timothy May and Julian Assange, two of the most prolific and influential cypherpunks, the book examines two competing paradigms of cypherpunk philosophy—crypto anarchy and crypto justice—and examines the implications of cypherpunk ethics for a range of contemporary moral issues, including surveillance, privacy, whistleblowing, cryptocurrencies, journalism, democracy, censorship, intellectual property, and power. Rooted in theory but with very real applications, this volume will appeal not only to students and scholars of digital media, communication, journalism, philosophy, political science, critical data studies, sociology, and the history of technology but also to technologists and activists around the world.

WikiLeaks is among the most controversial institutions of the last decade, and this essay contributes to an understanding of WikiLeaks by revealing the philosophical paradigm at the foundation of Julian Assange’s worldview: cypherpunk ethics. The cypherpunk movement emerged in the early-1990s, advocating the widespread use of strong cryptography as the best means for defending individual privacy and resisting authoritarian governments in the digital age. For the cypherpunks, censorship and surveillance were the twin evils of the computer age, but they viewed encryption as a means to circumvent both. As a cypherpunk, Assange advocates for the use of cryptography in the fight for individual privacy as well as the fight for global justice. His cosmopolitan disposition is informed by his hacker background, antiwar principles, and Enlightenment outlook. This essay places Assange’s philosophical idea in historical context, exploring his views on censorship, surveillance, and the right to communicate. It also connects his cypherpunk principles to WikiLeaks, showing that the strategy of encouraging data leaks from powerful political and economic organizations is classic cypherpunk political praxis.

Over the last two decades, the various attempts to “radicalize” Levinas have resulted in two interesting and often separated debates: one the one hand, there is the debate regarding the relationship between Levinas and colonialism and racism, and on the other hand, there is the debate regarding the relationship between Levinas and Judaism. Whether scholars interested in issues of colonialism disregard Levinas's Judaism or use his "subaltern" identity to challenge European hegemony, they do not take seriously the Jewish content of Levinas's thought. In this essay, I challenge the prevailing postcolonial orinetation of the Levinas-colonialism conversation, approaching Levinas's phenomenology from an anticolonial perspective. I will use Frantz Fanon’s dualistic understanding of the colonial world to evaluate the adequacy of Levinas’s phenomenology in describing the ontological structure of the colony and the historical experience of the colonized within it. Levinas’s incomplete understanding of the Holocaust as colonialism contributes to his failure to recognize the dividing line of colonial ontology, the zone of nonbeing, the non-human status of the colonized, and ultimately contributes to the insufficiency of his phenomenology to describe the colony. Because my purpose is not to reject Levinas’s thought in general but to encourage a new approach to his work, in the conclusion I will gesture toward the need for an anticolonial reading of Levinas’s project for Jewish education.