Joseph M. Schwartz

A Peculiar Blind Spot: Why did Radical Political Theory Ignore the Rampant Rise in Inequality Over the Past Thirty Years?

This article explores why over the past thirty years political theorists largely failed to address the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and the debilitating effects of growing inequality on the lives of ordinary people and on the nature of democracy. The article argues that the predominant focus of political theory from the 1980s onwards on the role of group identity in political action and on epistemological questions of the nature of the self, while having the positive effect of helping theorists to interrogate forms of domination that cannot be reduced to class, also led many “radical” political theorists to downplay how the macro-structural workings of late capitalism—and the neoliberal erosion of social rights—limit the possibilities for human freedom. The article concludes by arguing that if radical political theory is to inform political practice it must revitalize a theoretical understanding of social solidarity and of democratic equality.

Being Postmodern While Late Modernity Burned: On the Apolitical Nature of Contemporary Self-Defined “Radical” Political Theory

In 1995, political theorist Jeffrey Isaac, in an article entitled “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,” posed the following question: “given the historical, political, and seemingly theoretical significance of the Eastern European revolution against Soviet communism, why have American political theorists failed to hardly address the topic?”1 In 2015, one might pose a simiiarquestion: given the historical, political, and seemingly theoretical significance of the radical increase in inequality over the past 30 years in the United States, why have American political theorists failed to hardly address the topic? This essay explores how and why mainstream political theory has largely failed to conceive of the rise of neoliberal capitalism as a major threat to democracy in the United States and the world. Over the past 30 years, the predominant form of work in self-identified “radical” political theory has focused on the ontological and epistemo-logical issues of “difference” and “the fiction of the coherent self.”2