Publications

Journal Articles (peer-reviewed):

“Arendt’s Idea of the University.” History of European Ideas 47, no. 4 (2021): 604-634.

“Habermas on Solidarity: An Immanent Critique.” Constellations 23, no. 4 (December 2016): 507-522.

Book Reviews/Review Essays/Symposia:

“A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body Politic.” Syndicate (October 2022).

Review of A Philosopher’s Economist: David Hume and the Rise of Capitalism by Margaret Schabas & Carl Wennerlind. Contemporary Political Theory 21 (Suppl 4): 182-186 (2022).

“Rethinking Rawls and Habermas: New Paradigms of Judgment and Justification.” Political Theory 43, no. 1 (February 2015): 144-152.

“The Democratic Limits of the Ethical Turn.” Theory & Event 16, no. 3 (September 2013).

Work in Progress 

Book Manuscript:

The Conflict of the Faculties and After: Politics, Philosophy, and the University in a Post-Kantian World

• Th Conflict of the Faculties and After proposes and defends an original reading of Kant’s late treatise Der Streit der Fakultäten (The Conflict of the Faculties) by arguing that (i) it constitutes a systematically unified text containing an important teaching on the relationship between politics, philosophy, and the university, and (ii) that the problem it addresses has a rich and varied effective history in the political-theoretic works of three post-Kantians, namely G.W.F. Hegel, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. Comparing Kant’s answers to the problem at the center of The Conflict of the Faculties with those offered by Hegel, Arendt, and Habermas, my book not only reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the set of solutions on offer, but tries to also argue for a new, arguably more suitable approach that can marshal the strengths of each of these thinkers while avoiding their limitations.

Articles:

Working Papers:

“Kant’s Metapolitics and the Systematic Unity of The Conflict of the Faculties”

• Many commentators view Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties [Der Streit der Fakultäten] as a most marginal and unsystematic text. This article counters this typical reception by arguing that such a reading is not as warranted as it might seem. Challenging the conventional wisdom, we begin by taking seriously Kant’s claim for the systematic unity of the text. The article then offers a systematic reconstruction of what it takes to be the core unifying philosophical-political problem at the center of The Conflict of the Faculties. According to the argument presented here, there are three interrelated issues making up that book’s systematic core: (i) the rights and obligations of philosophy in the political public sphere, (ii) the methodological rights of philosophy as an academic discipline, and (iii) political ethics. Considered as a whole, Kant’s answers to these three problems constitute what this article goes on to call his metapolitical doctrine. While all three issues are important, the first problem is the more basic one, which is why it is the one that conditions the correlative appearance in the text of the other two. The article concludes with an evaluation of the plausibility and relevance of Kant’s metapolitical doctrine.

“Hegel’s Rejoinder to Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties: On The Comprehensively Concrete Treatise on the State”

• While Hegel never wrote one single treatise dedicated to problems treated in Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties, he not only wrote on such problems throughout his career, but was moreover highly aware of the need for a complementary text to his Philosophy of Right that would address precisely such problems. In Philosophy of Right, he refers to such a text as “the comprehensively concrete treatise on the state.” Had Hegel written it, I contend that such a treatise would essentially be the homolog in his oeuvre to Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties. However, the fact that he did not write it does not mean that its content could not be read off from his many and varied writings on its topic. Based on such evidence this article offers a reconstruction and an evaluation of Hegel’s rejoinder to Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties, focusing on the issue of the philosopher’s responsibilities in the political public sphere. It is argued here that Hegel’s The Comprehensively Concrete Treatise on the State offers an antithetical alternative to the account of the philosopher’s responsibilities as a public intellectual defended in The Conflict of the Faculties. While Kant’s teaching on this issue might well have the high moral ground, Hegel’s teaching raises some significant questions that we would do well to pay heed to. 

“Arendt’s Political Hermeneutics: Billy Budd and Arendtian Political Humanism”

• This article considers Jacques Rancière’s criticism of Hannah Arendt as an “ethical thinker” and finds that it is misguided. Indeed, not only is Arendt not an “ethical thinker” in Rancière’s understanding of that term, but she would be just as fundamentally opposed to the “ethical turn” of contemporary political theory as Rancière himself is.  To show why this is so the article turns to Arendt’s original reading of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, putting it in conversation with three other important modern and contemporary readings of the novel, namely, the ethical reading, the metaphysical reading, and the post-metaphysical reading. As we make the case here, Arendt’s intervention in this rich history of reception makes a critical difference in three important ways: (i) by offering a political reading of the novel that directly rejects the ethical framework of such ethical readers such as Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, (ii) by overcoming the deadlock of metaphysical readers stuck in the acceptance-resistance binary, and (iii) by critically foreshadowing the Nietzschean reading of Richard Weisberg (without being seduced into his new metaphysical binaries) and the deconstructive reading of Barbara Johnson (without taking on board the methodological commitments of Derridean deconstruction). The conclusion contends that Arendt’s reading of Billy Budd exemplifies a distinct political humanism that can offer meaningful resistance to the ethical predicament described by Rancière.

“Horkheimer’s Critique of Pragmatism: A Deweyite Rejoinder”

• One of the key theoretical documents of the Frankfurt School, namely, Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, offers a strong criticism of American Pragmatism, focusing in particular on John Dewey’s thought. After carefully considering Horkheimer’s critique, this article goes back to Dewey’s work—especially The Quest For Certainty—to show that his conception of Pragmatism is not only defensible in light of Horkheimer’s critique of it, but that it is moreover a fruitful resource for seriously addressing some of the maladies of modernity that Horkheimer and other Frankfurt School thinkers have identified in many of their studies. The conclusion explores the wider consequences of the miscommunication between these two significant twentieth-century traditions of social and political thought.

Work in Progress:

“On the Misclassification of Gig Workers: A Kantian Perspective”

• In addition to children and women, Kant is infamous for having denied the right to vote to day laborers and a list of other occupations (woodcutters, barbers, traveling blacksmiths, shop clerks, private tutors, etc.). In his view, people in these trades lacked the standing of self-determining persons and as such could not be "active citizens." By contrast, Kant deemed practitioners of some other closely related trades, such as wigmakers, school teachers, non-traveling carpenters or blacksmiths, and tailors, as possessing the requisite civic independence needed to qualify as a voting member of a republican commonwealth. Whatever we might think about its moral basis, this paper argues that such a distinction is not so puzzling or implausible if we read it as an attempt to elucidate the distinction between an independent contractor and a dependent one (i.e., an employee). The making of such a distinction is an important concern of labor laws in most countries, as has recently come to public attention because of legal battles over the status of gig workers. This article puts forth two theses. First, Kant's philosophical account of such a distinction can offer useful guidance for adjudicating contemporary legal disputes over the misclassification of gig workers. Second, Kant's denial of the right to vote to dependent contractors does not undermine his democratic theory; to the contrary, because of the implicit demand that a democratic republic abolish all contracts of civil subordination, it makes it even more normatively robust.

“From Critical Realism to Sociolinguistic Constructivism: A Critical Appraisal of Habermas’s Paradigm Shift”

• Beginning with his Christian Gauss lecture on the linguistic foundations of sociology delivered at Princeton University in 1971, Habermas enacts the most consequential shift in his methodological outlook. He has described this as a shift from the paradigm of “knowledge and human interests” to that of “society and communicative rationality.” While there has been some critical discussion of this shift, the secondary literature has mostly failed to provide a comprehensive evaluation of its nature and consequences. This article seeks to reevaluate Habermas’s paradigm shift on both purely philosophical and ethical-political grounds. Three main theses are put forth here. First, from a purely philosophical viewpoint, it is argued here that the conception of language that underpins the foundations of Habermas's sociology following the paradigm shift is hardly credible given what we have learned from linguistic research conducted over the past sixty years. Second, and from an ethical-political viewpoint, I contend that the consequences of this methodological shift, contrary to widespread belief, are actually antithetical to some key commitments of the Enlightenment humanism that Habermas endorses. Finally, the article argues that the critical realism of the first paradigm is a much more plausible foundation for Enlightenment humanism than the sociolinguistic constructivism underpinning the second paradigm.