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96Whose Realism? Which Legitimacy? Ideologies of Domination and Post-Rawlsian Political TheoryAnalyse & Kritik 44 (1): 41-60. 2022.There is something amiss about post-Rawlsian efforts to bring political theory down to earth by insisting upon the political primacy of the question of legitimacy, peace, or order. The intuition driving much realism seems to be that we must first agree to get along, and only then can we get down to the business of pursuing justice. I argue that the ideological narratives of the powerful pose a political problem for this primacy of legitimacy thesis. To prioritize the achievement of democratic le…Read more
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125Marx’s Social Republic: Political not MetaphysicalHistorical Materialism 27 (2): 41-58. 2019.When Marx dissected the capitalist economy and intervened in the international workers’ movement, he did so in the service of freeing people from alien, uncontrolled power. His political project was the realisation of what he called the social republic, and his theoretical project was to identify the forces that promote or retard this political project. In order to bring out the specificity and cogency of the social-republican Marx, this essay uproots the positive-freedom reading that has overgr…Read more
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19Book Review: Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism, by Onur Ulas Ince (review)Political Theory 50 (2): 362-367. 2022.
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38Centralism is a Dangerous ToolCLR James Journal 26 (1): 219-240. 2020.This essay seeks to bring into focus the latent political theory of CLR James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936, and to show, on this basis, how World Revolution explains certain difficult aspects of The Black Jacobins. The core of James’s theory is the thesis that social classes are organically and internally identified, and that each has a preformed and unitary interest, which can be articulated as a set of political principles. A class is called to act by the voice that expresses the class’s inte…Read more
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37Centralism is a Dangerous Tool Leadership in C.L.R. James’s History of PrinciplesCLR James Journal 26 (1): 219-240. 2020.This essay seeks to bring into focus the latent political theory of CLR James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936, and to show, on this basis, how World Revolution explains certain difficult aspects of The Black Jacobins. The core of James’s theory is the thesis that social classes are organically and internally identified, and that each has a preformed and unitary interest, which can be articulated as a set of political principles. A class is called to act by the voice that expresses the class’s inte…Read more
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19Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of CapitalPrinceton University Press. 2016.Marx’s Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was …Read more
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54Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and Political TheoryContemporary Political Theory 18 (3): 448-476. 2019.
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23Book Review: Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought, by Robert S. Taylor (review)Political Theory 46 (1): 147-151. 2018.
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20Portfolio society: On the capitalist mode of predictionContemporary Political Theory 17 (4): 232-235. 2016.
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103What was primitive accumulation? Reconstructing the origin of a critical conceptEuropean Journal of Political Theory 19 (4): 532-552. 2017.The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capit...
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65The reconstitution of marxism's production paradigm: The cases of Benjamin, Althusser, and MarxPhilosophical Forum 41 (4): 413-440. 2010.
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Abstraction and Productivity: Structures of Intentionality and Action in Marx's CapitalIn Andrew Chitty & Martin McIvor (eds.), Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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25Philosophy and Freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault (review)Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (4): 330-332. 2004.
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16The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (review)Symposium 11 (1): 213-219. 2007.
Montréal, Quebec, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
19th Century Philosophy |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |