I attended the annual conference of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco last week. I presented a paper about how contemporary international development literature conceptualizes politics, and what that means for radical political theory. More importantly, I saw a lot of really interesting papers.
Perhaps my favourite panel was one on Iris Marion Young. The occasion of the panel was the 25th anniversary of the publication of Justice and the Politics of Difference, but most of the speakers considered Young’s career more widely. This was particularly true of Michaele Ferguson’s paper, which showed how Young’s later work on the different modalities of difference developed out of her early engagement with socialist feminism, and particularly her criticisms of “dual-systems theories.” Linda Zerilli’s paper also addressed the whole breadth of Young’s career, in this case Young’s relationship to critical theory. Zerilli distinguished between the earlier tradition of critical theory which was in some general sense gained its orientation from action, and post-Habermasian critical theory which is much more concerned with the epistemological justification of critique. Zerilli connected Young primarily with the first tradition, but, if I understood her correctly, suggested that Young had perhaps given up more ground than she needed to to the epistemological approach.
Zerilli also spoke on an excellent panel on Wittgenstein, arguing against interpretations of Wittgenstein that equate a form of life with a conceptual scheme. A conceptual scheme is a kind of linguistic normativity, restricting what can and can’t be said, but Zerilli argued, drawing on Cavell, that Wittgenstein rejects this kind of normativity. This panel also included a paper by Andrius Galisanka arguing for the importance of Wittgenstein’s rejection of the fact-value distinction to the revival of normative political theory in the 50s. Galisanka particularly emphasized that Wittgenstein was a direct influence on Rawls, with the implication that this should affect how we read Rawls and, perhaps, the whole post-Rawlsian tradition in political philosophy.
Changing directions slightly, there was a panel with the excellent title “Machiavelli Out of Context,” organised around the theme of reading Machiavelli either in terms of modern questions, or in relation to theoretical traditions other than his own. Robyn Marasco’s paper was an example of the latter approach, using anthropological and theoretical discussions of play to explore how Machiavelli construes politics in terms of play. Marasco construes play widely, including games of chance, performance or role play, and flirtation. I’m really excited by the expansion of our understanding of politics this allows, away from a narrow idea of strategic rationality, towards an idea of politics as an expenditure of passion. I also enjoyed Yves Winter’s paper on cruelty in Machiavelli, emphasizing that Machiavelli is part of a tradition in which cruelty is defined by its attack on the dignitas, that is, the status, of the powerful.