Presented at the American Political Science Association, September 2010. Full paper.

For almost 30 years, political theorists on the left have been warning of a crisis of the political. The political, we are told, is being effaced by liberal consensus and neoliberal technocracy. For many of the theorists of the crisis of the political, this crisis necessitates a move from Marxism to post-Marxism, as Marxism was held to have failed to theorize the political, and so to be incapable of understanding the contemporary forces which might resist the crisis. I want to locate some of these theorists more specifically, to show how the theme of the crisis of the political did not arise solely in response to the political situation of the past 30 years, nor in response to the weaknesses of Marxism as such, but rather in response to certain impasses faced by Althusserian Marxism in the 1970s. The purpose of this exercize is partly to effect a mild deflation of the theme of the “crisis of the political,” to move from the idea that we face a post-political epoch to a more naunced characterization of the particular political challenges we face today. This in turn is, I believe, useful in considering what we can learn from the theorists of the crisis of the political in a period defined by a rather different crisis, the economic crisis we have been experiencing for the past three years. Economic crisis surely demands a political response, but it remains to be seen how useful attempts to reinvigorate the political can be in thinking about the demands placed on left-wing politics today.