Last Friday, I spoke on a panel at NYU on political theorist Alyssa Battistoni’s new book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature. The room was packed, somewhat unusual for an academic book of political theory. But if you’ve read Battistoni’s book, or know of her work, you’ll understand why. The book is not only a remarkable synthesis of a variety of literatures on the environment, climate change, work, Marx, feminism, and the politics of care—if you were just looking for an excellent account of the last 50 years of political theory, plus Marx and a lot of twentieth-century economics, this would be your book—but also a brilliant intervention in these debates. It has given me all sorts of […]
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Categories
Economies, Labor/Workplace, Political Theory, The Left, The State
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Tags Alyssa Battistoni, David Ricardo, Grotius, Karl Marx, Plato, Pufendorf, Sianne Ngai
In my course this semester at the Graduate Center, “The Political Theory of Capitalism,” we’ve been exploring how some of the classics of modern political economy translate, traduce, transmit, efface, revise, and/or sublimate traditional categories of and concepts in Western political theory: consent, obedience, rule, law, and so forth. Through economic thinkers like Smith, Ricardo, Keynes, Schumpeter, Jevons, and the like, we try and read political economy as the distinctively modern idiom of political theory. In the same way that religion provided a distinctive language and vocabulary for political thought after Rome and before the Renaissance, might not economics provide modern political theory with its own distinctive idiom and form? In other words, our interest in the political moment of […]