Kennan Ferguson

I♡My Dog:

Virtually all political theory and ethical systems presuppose the primacy of human beings. Abstract human beings have rights, privileges, legal standing, and—it is said—claims to our sympathy. Many political debates, therefore, center on questions of where these lines are to be drawn. But many humans do not behave this way. People, for example, may expend far more love, time, money, and energy on their pets’ well-being than on abstract humans. If the choice is between an operation to save their dog’s life, or saving a human life through the United Nations, for example, most will choose the former, even if put in such stark terms. This essay argues that people’s love for their dogs transcends the human/animal barrier, that this love overturns assumptions about the role of abstraction in our lives, and that such attunement can be understood only via new formulations of the roles of ethics and philosophy.

Intensifying Taste, Intensifying Identity: Collectivity through Community Cookbooks

Community cookbooks have long served as organizational locations for women’s associations, church groups, and charity organizations in the United States. In creating communities, these textual associations implicitly rebuke a social order that devalues women’s work, authorize forms of communication and knowledge that have been ignored and suppressed, and bring into being collective forms of social, economic, and political identity. But understanding these communities as undermining norms of gender, as protesting domesticity and obeisance, or, alternatively, as liberating women from gender norms is to mistake world creation for resistance. Community cookbooks operate through the senses and the body as judgments about belonging; by creating and reprinting the socially gustative in book formats, they encourage a reading of communal political identities as more a matter of intensification of identity than defiance or domination.

Why Does Political Science Hate American Indians

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.

What Was Politics to the Denisovan

What does it mean that humans were not the only hominin? Or, more importantly, what does it mean that other hominins held cultural, biological, and perhaps even linguistic equivalence to human beings? Drawing on mitochondrial DNA analyses, theories of deep history, and attention to the inhuman, this essay argues that such equivalence entails not only the reality of human/nonhuman genetic compatibility but the existence of politics in places and times without humans. Such a politics of non-humans would entail political and social forms playing a central role in the development of humanity. If politico-social experiences in the prehuman and non-human hominin communities actually affected behavior and practices, then the development of humanity is an effect of politics rather than a precondition for it.

The Deep Biology of Politics A Reminder

Although Connolly appears to be introducing Darwin and biological history into political science, he has instead returned to the roots of the discipline, working and reworking the foundations of politics as a disciplinary locus. Biological thought underpins the history of political science, a fact too easily forgotten by contemporary practitioners.

Subfield Hockey: A Reaction to Matthew Moore's National Survey of Political Theorists

This surveys importance comes not from what it informs us about political theory as a field, but rather from the function it serves within debates over the component areas of the field of political science. Rather than answering whether political theory “belongs” within political science (an unanswerable question), the survey uses quantification of qualitative experience and data collection to consolidate political theory as a subfield. Thus success of this project relies upon and reinforces disciplinary norms, operating as a process that attempts to bring a normative political theory into existence. The rank ordering of departments, journals, and individual theorists proves appealing not only for the competitive, horse-race valuation of those people and institutions, but also for how they ultimately resist this project by showing the anti-normative heart of political theory: an important and useful survey indeed.

Naming Evil, Judging Evil

Naming Evil, Judging Evil. Edited by Ruth W. Grant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 232p.

The End of Resistance

35.00. Interdisciplinarity is much praised and rarely practiced. Too often, it boils down to a sociologist adding a few anthropological works to a bibliography, or a geographer applying for a political science grant. The ideal of learning from and engaging with other intellectual traditions and conceptualizations is easily lost.

The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. By Jane Bennett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 213p.

Political resistance has been proclaimed as a unitary process for centuries. Even those who reject teleological models of history still retain the belief that progress, justice, and morality all ultimately coordinate and cooperate. All who strive for justice struggle together, even if they do not recognize their project in the simultaneous efforts of others. Humans, it is hoped, will see their common cause in the service of liberty, democracy, and fairness. Though this liberal model of resistance can lead to hopefulness and even efficacious action, it also ignores its own antiliberal bias. It tends to discount the class, racial, and gender underpinnings of representational democracy, the racist motivations internal to class solidarity, the privilege from which feminist activism arose, the homophobia insinuated into many cultural norms and practices. Worst of all, such thinking idealizes a model of political solidarity based upon moral purity and exclusionary piety. Who, involved in left (or right) political action, has not seen an organization fray when members charge one another with ethical lapses? An insufficiently robust commitment to the cause, an inadequate critique of disability discourse, a taste for meat or expensive shoes—the overt charge is less important than the underlying tendency toward perfectionism. Those who fall short, at least in ways that are considered politically significant, face marginalization from the sphere of political identity. Nor does exclusionism exempt those whose commitments are deemed too strong: those who declaim the gendered basis of oppression, or point out others’ complicity with factory farming, or refuse to ride in oil-fueled vehicles, can also find themselves blackballed. Is the era of big resistance over? It may be: utopias do not hold the same normative appeal as they once did. Neither the proper application of logic nor the promises of positivism seem to have solved humanity’s major problems;

55.00 cloth,

At first, it may seem that Jane Bennett is attacking Max Weber. Against his famous assertion that modernity has disenchanted the world, rendering it potentially understandable and thus devoid of the power of transcendent meaning, Bennett engages in a traditionally theoretical explication and critique. She traces those thinkers who arise from this tradition, whether or not acknowledged, and addresses (and celebrates) those whose philosophies of the modern world provide alternative readings, most notably Kant and Deleuze.