Sharon R. Krause

Bodies in Action: Corporeal Agency and Democratic Politics

A better appreciation of the material, distributed quality of human agency can illuminate subtle dynamics of domination and oppression and reveal resources for potentially liberatory political action. Materialist accounts of agency nevertheless pose challenges to the notion of personal responsibility that is so crucial to political obligation and democratic citizenship. To guard against this danger, we need to sustain the close connection between agency and a sense of selfhood that is individuated, reflexive, and responsive to norms. Yet we should acknowledge that reflexive selfhood is not the whole of individual agency for the sources of agency extend beyond the individual herself. We also need to recognize the ways that both reflexivity and norm-responsiveness are themselves embodied capacities. When properly conceived, a materialist view of agency can increase awareness of our often-unwitting contributions to systematic inequalities of power and extend our political responsibilities in emancipatory directions, thus holding great promise for democratic life.

Beyond non-domination: Agency, inequality and the meaning of freedom

The concept of non-domination is an important contribution to the study of freedom but it does not comprehend the whole of freedom. Insofar as domination requires a conscious capacity for control on the part of the dominant party, it fails to capture important threats to individual freedom that permeate many contemporary liberal democracies today. Much of the racism, sexism and other cultural biases that currently constrain the life-chances of members of subordinate groups in the USA are largely unconscious and unintentional, and they do not always involve control. Although they constitute real barriers to freedom, these forms of influence are not accurately characterized as domination, and they will require different mechanisms to overcome them. To achieve the more capacious freedoms that liberal democracy promises, we will need to go beyond non-domination and to come to terms with the non-sovereign, socially distributed character of human agency.

Freedom beyond sovereignty : reconstructing liberal individualism

What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over ones actions. In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.

Hume and the (False) Luster of Justice

The close connection between norms and motives that is characteristic of Hume’s moral theory threatens to break down when it comes to the political matter of justice. Here a gap arises between the moral approval of justice, which is based on its utility, and the desires that motivate just action, which utility cannot fully explain. Therefore the obligation to justice may seem to be motivationally unsupported. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that, for Hume, no obligation can arise unless a normally effective motivation exists for it. In addition to disabling just action, then, the motivational deficit threatens to undercut the normative status of justice as a virtue. A solution to this dilemma lies in what Hume calls the “immediately agreeable” condition of “integrity” or “character.” The agreeableness of integrity indirectly confers upon justice a luster that makes it attractive and obligatory even when it does not actually serve the interests of individual or society, and when self-interest and sympathy fall short in sustaining compliance.

The Spirit of Separate Powers in Montesquieu

Montesquieus theory of separate powers is elaborated in a discussion of the constitution of England in Book XI, chapter 6 of The Spirit of the Laws , which is by far the most discussed section of that work. Many commentators have interpreted the English system straightforwardly as Montesquieus ideal regime. But while he greatly admires the legal separation of powers in the English constitution, he worries that the spirit of “extreme” liberty among the English could undercut the constitutional separation of powers that protects their liberty. Montesquieus ambivalence thus raises questions as to what sort of “spirit” a regime must have to sustain a constitution of separate powers and so to preserve individual liberty. His reservations about England are important for understanding his philosophy of liberalism and have broad significance for any polity that seeks to protect individual liberty through a constitution of separate powers

Contested Questions, Current Trajectories: Feminism in Political Theory Today

I once mentioned to a prominent feminist scholar that I was using one of her books in my course on feminism and political theory. She looked at me blankly for a moment and then replied, “Feminism and political theory? I thought feminism is political theory.” She was right of course; in some sense, everything that is feminist theory is also political theory. Feminism illuminates gendered relations of power in politics and social life, after all, and it contributes (however indirectly) to the larger project of transforming them. Moreover, since the rise of “second wave” feminism in the 1970s, feminist theorists have significantly reshaped political theory as a discipline, moving crucial questions from the margins of the field to its center, questions about gender equity and justice, the constitution of the political subject, the demands of difference, the intersecting dynamics of domination, the differential effects of globalization, and the conditions of freedom, among other things. As a result, much of what we think of as “mainstream” political theory is now also feminist theory. This is often true even of work that does not make women or gender its sole subject matter, as the leading voices in the field increasingly are scholars whose work has been shaped by literatures central to feminism and who think about politics in ways that are informed by a critical consciousness of the gendered quality of power relations.

The Uncertain Inevitability of Decline in Montesquieu

T he decline of regimes—its causes and direction—has been a subject of interest to political scientists at least since the birth of the discipline in fifthand fourth-century Athens. In recent years, the tools of contemporary political science have been engaged to explain the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the fracture of Yugoslavia, and the instability of postcolonial states in Africa, among other things. Diverse as they are in many respects, contemporary treatments of regimedeclinearealike in regarding thephenomenonasan exception rather than the rule of political life. Theyare theprogenyof the revolution in modern political thought that introduced the possibility of permanent states based on universal rules of human nature, natural right, and reason. By contrast, the ancients denied the possibility of permanent states and considered regimedeclineand revolution to be intractable aspects of political life. Themodern change ofmind on thismatter was accomplished in the sev enteenth and eighteenth centuries byHobbes, Locke, andKant and reached a kind of peak in the nineteenth century with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right . Montesquieu occupies an unusual position in this history of ideas because he was a modern thinker (and a liberal one) who believed in the inevitable ten dency of every regime to decline. Yet his agreement with the ancients on this point was not complete either. He differed from them in his understanding of the ultimate causes of political decline and its moral meaning. And while he

Laws, passion, and the attractions of right action in Montesquieu

This article examines Montesquieus concept of natural law and treatment of legal customs in conjunction with his theory of moral psychology. It explores his effort to entwine the rational procedural quality of laws with the substantive principles that sustain them. Montesquieu grounds natural law in the desires of the human being as ‘a feeling creature’, thus establishing the normative force of desire and making right action attractive by engaging the passions rather than subordinating them to reason. As a result, natural law generates both political norms and the motivations that drive political actions. It provides a standard for assessing the ostensibly jumbled multiplicity of legal customs in human societies. And it reminds us that there is more to political theory than the rational justifi-cation of norms, that central to any account of liberal constitutionalism must be an effort to show the attractions – and not only the justice or the rationality – of right action.

Lady Liberty's allure : Political agency, citizenship and The Second Sex

Conceiving political agency in terms of an interaction between the categories that Simone de Beauvoir called ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ illuminates the role that attachments and desires play in supporting commitments to abstract principles of political right, and so clarifies the structure and sources of political agency. Communitarians and feminist theorists have shown in recent years that attachments to particular others can support a strong sense of individual efficacy. This analysis goes beyond those prior studies by showing the importance for political agency of partial attachments not to particular others but to abstract principles such as justice, liberty and equality. Motivating principled political action is a fundamental concern for constitutional liberal democracies such as the USA, in which citizens are to rule themselves on the basis of a constitutionally established set of abstract principles, rather than simply on the basis of attachments to particular persons or communities.

The Politics of Distinction and Disobedience: Honor and the Defense of Liberty in Montesquieu

Elaborating Montesquieus concept of honor illuminates a dimension of his liberalism that has been neglected by prior commentary, and calls attention to a form of political motivation that has been overlooked in contemporary political theory. While honor avoids the anti-liberal tendencies of civic virtue, it can motivate, better than self-interest does, the extraordinary acts of courage and sacrifice sometimes needed to sustain individual liberties. Following a brief account of how it fits into Montesquieus typology of regimes, three features of honor are elaborated: its high ambitions; its mix of reverence and reflexivity; and its partiality. The final section addresses the relationship between honor and liberal democracy, arguing that despite the tensions between them, liberal democracy needs honor in some form if it is to sustain itself over time.