I have known Danielle Allen since I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. During the time that I was her student, she taught me both ideas that can be found in books and ideas about how to live in the world. From her, I learned about the Declaration, Alexis de Tocqueville, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and a host of others—and, just as importantly, I learned lessons about how to be a scholar, how to be a citizen, and how to be a compassionate human being. About scholarship, I learned that texts are alive, and their livingness is evidenced by their ability to vex and fascinate us, as well as their capacity to impart lessons, give warnings, and be of use. I also learned that as those who seek to produce knowledge our rigor must not be rigid and bound by tradition but must instead be adept, agile, and capacious. I came to understand that genre is a tool, and its transformation is our right as scholars and storytellers, because what we do is not bloodless. Our work is not about adding to the tome of knowledge that sits in history for folks to flip through, but we are instead meant to help apprehend the world as it is and to draft blueprints for other possible worlds where domination is not the most common habit of society. I learned that we must facilitate citizenship at as many levels as possible. That we must both be able to perceive and also actively value the enactment of citizenship through engagement with not only politics and the social sciences but also through the humanities, arts, and civil society. Most importantly, I learned that the knowledge embedded in the practical experiences of those who are seeking change in the world outside of higher educational institutions and political halls is as essential as any syllogism or data that we glean from those who consider themselves expert.
{"title":"Danielle Allen and the Continuous Project of American Making","authors":"Deva Woodly","doi":"10.1086/726659","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726659","url":null,"abstract":"I have known Danielle Allen since I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. During the time that I was her student, she taught me both ideas that can be found in books and ideas about how to live in the world. From her, I learned about the Declaration, Alexis de Tocqueville, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and a host of others—and, just as importantly, I learned lessons about how to be a scholar, how to be a citizen, and how to be a compassionate human being. About scholarship, I learned that texts are alive, and their livingness is evidenced by their ability to vex and fascinate us, as well as their capacity to impart lessons, give warnings, and be of use. I also learned that as those who seek to produce knowledge our rigor must not be rigid and bound by tradition but must instead be adept, agile, and capacious. I came to understand that genre is a tool, and its transformation is our right as scholars and storytellers, because what we do is not bloodless. Our work is not about adding to the tome of knowledge that sits in history for folks to flip through, but we are instead meant to help apprehend the world as it is and to draft blueprints for other possible worlds where domination is not the most common habit of society. I learned that we must facilitate citizenship at as many levels as possible. That we must both be able to perceive and also actively value the enactment of citizenship through engagement with not only politics and the social sciences but also through the humanities, arts, and civil society. Most importantly, I learned that the knowledge embedded in the practical experiences of those who are seeking change in the world outside of higher educational institutions and political halls is as essential as any syllogism or data that we glean from those who consider themselves expert.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48185309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WhenI entered graduate school at Harvard in 1975 as part of a strongly felt but ill-specified quest for personal and political meaning, I had no clear sense of what constituted “academic success.” Although my family had long prized college education, no one in it had ever pursued an academic career. I soon learned that there were prevailing notions of what we grad students should dream about achieving, but they were disputed. At Harvard, the highest rank was University Professor; but some University Professors were seen as having won fame outside academia, without truly major intellectual contributions. Many in academia regarded the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Einstein ended up, as the Valhalla for truly major intellectual contributors. Some, however, disparaged it as a privileged haven for abstract thinkers choosing to disconnect from the real world. The figure who seemed to command the most universal respect on campus, bordering on worship, was John Rawls, who many saw as one of the greatest political philosophers not just of our time but all time. However, the impact of his then-recent magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, remained to be seen. Rawls was best known for proposing the difference principle, holding that all economic inequalities should benefit the least advantaged within the national community. Nearly a half-century later, few would be audacious enough to contend that his work has brought us much closer to that goal in America or the world. Danielle Allen is currently the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard, the chair that John Rawls once held, and she was formerly the UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. She directs Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, to which John Rawls was a seminal contributor. She is a member of the nation’s two oldest academic honorary societies, the American
{"title":"Ask a Political Scientist Symposium on the Contributions of Danielle Allen: Introduction","authors":"Rogers M. Smith","doi":"10.1086/726440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726440","url":null,"abstract":"WhenI entered graduate school at Harvard in 1975 as part of a strongly felt but ill-specified quest for personal and political meaning, I had no clear sense of what constituted “academic success.” Although my family had long prized college education, no one in it had ever pursued an academic career. I soon learned that there were prevailing notions of what we grad students should dream about achieving, but they were disputed. At Harvard, the highest rank was University Professor; but some University Professors were seen as having won fame outside academia, without truly major intellectual contributions. Many in academia regarded the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Einstein ended up, as the Valhalla for truly major intellectual contributors. Some, however, disparaged it as a privileged haven for abstract thinkers choosing to disconnect from the real world. The figure who seemed to command the most universal respect on campus, bordering on worship, was John Rawls, who many saw as one of the greatest political philosophers not just of our time but all time. However, the impact of his then-recent magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, remained to be seen. Rawls was best known for proposing the difference principle, holding that all economic inequalities should benefit the least advantaged within the national community. Nearly a half-century later, few would be audacious enough to contend that his work has brought us much closer to that goal in America or the world. Danielle Allen is currently the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard, the chair that John Rawls once held, and she was formerly the UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. She directs Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, to which John Rawls was a seminal contributor. She is a member of the nation’s two oldest academic honorary societies, the American","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42058600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
One of the most politically radical of all cultural and literary theorists in the North-Atlantic world, Fredric Jameson’s work remains mostly terra incognita in North-Atlantic academic political theory. Aside from rare invocations of this or that essay or book, there has not been sustained treatment of Jameson’s relentlessly politicizing vocation of dialectical criticism. It has neither been mined by scholars of political theory, nor systematically reconstructed, engaged, or criticized. Yet serious engagement with Jameson could initiate a discussion that simultaneously sheds light on the political import of his form of dialectical criticism, offers an occasion to think through “the internal politics” of theoretical discourses, and how his formulations of dialectical criticism contribute to an earthly understanding of political theory. Obviously, it is impossible to do justice to the vast intellectual breath and range of Jameson’s work in one essay. This essay, accordingly, offers a brief exposition of the main tenets of his dialectical criticism, the internal politics of his defense of Theory, and how both relate to his theorization of utopia, for the sake of a rearticulation of the critical vocation of political theory. Out of and through this engagement with Jameson the essay reflects on the ways in which Jameson’s dialectical criticism offers some indications to recast his own account of utopia from the perspective of a more earthly and profane conception of political theorizing.
{"title":"Fredric Jameson: Dialectical Criticism and the Politics of Theory","authors":"Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo","doi":"10.1086/726475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726475","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most politically radical of all cultural and literary theorists in the North-Atlantic world, Fredric Jameson’s work remains mostly terra incognita in North-Atlantic academic political theory. Aside from rare invocations of this or that essay or book, there has not been sustained treatment of Jameson’s relentlessly politicizing vocation of dialectical criticism. It has neither been mined by scholars of political theory, nor systematically reconstructed, engaged, or criticized. Yet serious engagement with Jameson could initiate a discussion that simultaneously sheds light on the political import of his form of dialectical criticism, offers an occasion to think through “the internal politics” of theoretical discourses, and how his formulations of dialectical criticism contribute to an earthly understanding of political theory. Obviously, it is impossible to do justice to the vast intellectual breath and range of Jameson’s work in one essay. This essay, accordingly, offers a brief exposition of the main tenets of his dialectical criticism, the internal politics of his defense of Theory, and how both relate to his theorization of utopia, for the sake of a rearticulation of the critical vocation of political theory. Out of and through this engagement with Jameson the essay reflects on the ways in which Jameson’s dialectical criticism offers some indications to recast his own account of utopia from the perspective of a more earthly and profane conception of political theorizing.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48211772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As violent forms of border control have become increasingly diverse and prevalent, migrants and their allies have struggled to find adequate techniques for resistance. Without much notice from scholars and analysts, self-immolation has become part of this repertoire of resistance. Because migrant self-immolations take place in different countries and are committed by individuals of diverse nationalities, these events are treated as disconnected incidents: conflicts between specific migrants and the states which deny them entry. I argue that it is politically and analytically essential that we be able to “read” these events together. Towards this end, I propose one possible framework for analysis: reading these events as a form of migrant counterconduct that is produced by and responsive to specific modalities of border violence. In this article, I focus on migrant self-immolations “addressed” to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—the most visible international symbol of migrant management. Examining border violence through the politics of visibility and visuality, I show how borderwork makes it impossible to see, count, and account for the pain and death that result from violence at the border. Closely reading administrative procedures and border policing strategies, I show how self-immolation responds directly to these modes of violence and their attendant politics of visibility. Self-immolation brings migrant death into view, manifests the violence of the border, and powerfully counters state claims to “rescue” migrants.
{"title":"Sights of Violence: Self-Immolation at the Border","authors":"Archana Kaku","doi":"10.1086/726391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726391","url":null,"abstract":"As violent forms of border control have become increasingly diverse and prevalent, migrants and their allies have struggled to find adequate techniques for resistance. Without much notice from scholars and analysts, self-immolation has become part of this repertoire of resistance. Because migrant self-immolations take place in different countries and are committed by individuals of diverse nationalities, these events are treated as disconnected incidents: conflicts between specific migrants and the states which deny them entry. I argue that it is politically and analytically essential that we be able to “read” these events together. Towards this end, I propose one possible framework for analysis: reading these events as a form of migrant counterconduct that is produced by and responsive to specific modalities of border violence. In this article, I focus on migrant self-immolations “addressed” to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—the most visible international symbol of migrant management. Examining border violence through the politics of visibility and visuality, I show how borderwork makes it impossible to see, count, and account for the pain and death that result from violence at the border. Closely reading administrative procedures and border policing strategies, I show how self-immolation responds directly to these modes of violence and their attendant politics of visibility. Self-immolation brings migrant death into view, manifests the violence of the border, and powerfully counters state claims to “rescue” migrants.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47082287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Democracy is in crisis. According to a dominant view, the problem is populism. Populists, critics argue, undermine democracy through its own procedural and normative logic. This essay calls the critique of populism into question. I argue that critics misrepresent the significance of populism for democratic politics in three ways. First, by reducing populism to a single political logic, critics confound important differences between different instances of populism. Secondly, by blaming populists for the maladies of contemporary democracies, critics wrongly exonerate centrist political forces. Thirdly, critics underestimate the structural deficiencies of contemporary democracy. The main task for proponents of democracy today is not to fight populism, but to address the more fundamental sources of democratic decay: rising inequality, the decline of mass democracy, maltreatment of immigrants and ethnic minorities, and climate change.
{"title":"What’s Wrong with the Critique of Populism","authors":"T. Skadhauge","doi":"10.1086/726437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726437","url":null,"abstract":"Democracy is in crisis. According to a dominant view, the problem is populism. Populists, critics argue, undermine democracy through its own procedural and normative logic. This essay calls the critique of populism into question. I argue that critics misrepresent the significance of populism for democratic politics in three ways. First, by reducing populism to a single political logic, critics confound important differences between different instances of populism. Secondly, by blaming populists for the maladies of contemporary democracies, critics wrongly exonerate centrist political forces. Thirdly, critics underestimate the structural deficiencies of contemporary democracy. The main task for proponents of democracy today is not to fight populism, but to address the more fundamental sources of democratic decay: rising inequality, the decline of mass democracy, maltreatment of immigrants and ethnic minorities, and climate change.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42583549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay revisits Vilfredo Pareto’s attempt in his Treatise on General Sociology (1916) to classify the non-rational sentiments animating social and political life, considering implications for recent theories of affective politics. Long known for having combined an irrational psychology with a model of elite rule, Pareto has more recently been cited as a predecessor for behavioral economists. However, I show, Pareto described sentiments as sources of creativity as well as inertia and supposed they are modified by complex, reciprocal interactions with ideologies and environmental conditions. As I argue, Pareto’s dynamic account of residues jeopardized his methodological aspirations, portending challenges for those seeking to identify and manage popular sentiments today. By the same token, it prefigured theories of “affect” developed by scholars who envision sentiments not only as determinants of preferences and alignments but also as sources of their undoing and transformation. In light of Pareto’s problematic attempts to reconcile tensions in his study, I examine challenges facing those who align theories of affect with radical democratic programs. I conclude that radical democratic approaches to affective politics, like their managerial counterparts, are neither logically derived from nor precluded by human psychology per se, but instead compromised by prevailing configurations of sentiments, ideologies, and practices.
{"title":"Residues and Derivations: Vilfredo Pareto and Affective Politics","authors":"Kam Shapiro","doi":"10.1086/726280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726280","url":null,"abstract":"This essay revisits Vilfredo Pareto’s attempt in his Treatise on General Sociology (1916) to classify the non-rational sentiments animating social and political life, considering implications for recent theories of affective politics. Long known for having combined an irrational psychology with a model of elite rule, Pareto has more recently been cited as a predecessor for behavioral economists. However, I show, Pareto described sentiments as sources of creativity as well as inertia and supposed they are modified by complex, reciprocal interactions with ideologies and environmental conditions. As I argue, Pareto’s dynamic account of residues jeopardized his methodological aspirations, portending challenges for those seeking to identify and manage popular sentiments today. By the same token, it prefigured theories of “affect” developed by scholars who envision sentiments not only as determinants of preferences and alignments but also as sources of their undoing and transformation. In light of Pareto’s problematic attempts to reconcile tensions in his study, I examine challenges facing those who align theories of affect with radical democratic programs. I conclude that radical democratic approaches to affective politics, like their managerial counterparts, are neither logically derived from nor precluded by human psychology per se, but instead compromised by prevailing configurations of sentiments, ideologies, and practices.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44912834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Accomplished populists are researched from distant quarters, long after their populist turn. Yet, populism—the attempt to represent the people through being the people—is not an overnight decision; it results from a gradual self-fashioning welded to the political trajectory of its bearer. This article proposes to explore populism diachronically as a political career. It builds on a seven-year ethnography of Indian student activism and political entry. Through combining qualitative longitudinal interviews, participant observation in North India, and discourse analysis, the article aims at contributing to three adjoining fields of inquiry: the sociology of political professionalization, the political theory of populism, and the anthropology of political becoming and subject-formation. First, I show how the embrace of populism is motivated by aspirations to gain leverage vis-à-vis political parties and group-based affiliations driving co-ethnic voting. Contra ideationalists, this case study reconsiders populism as a para-ideological attempt to become politically autonomous. Second, I argue that the claim of representative sameness at the core of any successful populist is inseparable from the one of hierarchical distinctiveness, embodied in the authoritative figure of the neta (leader). Third, I suggest that entering politics as a populist is not only about ad-hoc learning, but also about strategic unlearning.
{"title":"Populist Careers as Autonomy-Making: A Longitudinal Ethnography of Political Entry in North India","authors":"Jean‐Thomas Martelli","doi":"10.1086/726339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726339","url":null,"abstract":"Accomplished populists are researched from distant quarters, long after their populist turn. Yet, populism—the attempt to represent the people through being the people—is not an overnight decision; it results from a gradual self-fashioning welded to the political trajectory of its bearer. This article proposes to explore populism diachronically as a political career. It builds on a seven-year ethnography of Indian student activism and political entry. Through combining qualitative longitudinal interviews, participant observation in North India, and discourse analysis, the article aims at contributing to three adjoining fields of inquiry: the sociology of political professionalization, the political theory of populism, and the anthropology of political becoming and subject-formation. First, I show how the embrace of populism is motivated by aspirations to gain leverage vis-à-vis political parties and group-based affiliations driving co-ethnic voting. Contra ideationalists, this case study reconsiders populism as a para-ideological attempt to become politically autonomous. Second, I argue that the claim of representative sameness at the core of any successful populist is inseparable from the one of hierarchical distinctiveness, embodied in the authoritative figure of the neta (leader). Third, I suggest that entering politics as a populist is not only about ad-hoc learning, but also about strategic unlearning.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41733553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spring 2020’s resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests crystallized longstanding organizing against policing and punishment. While these uprisings were neither new nor novel, throughout 2020 calls to defund the police gained greater political traction. Ongoing co-resistance organized across movements for Indigenous and Black lives and against settler nation borders contested the legitimacy of the U.S. as a colonial and racial state, while more mainstream media began to ask if carceral “abolition” could be a desirable, if not entirely practical, goal. While the resultant partial counter-hegemonies were viewed somewhat skeptically by those in existing abolitionist work, many also saw potential in the widening circulation of “abolition” as a concept. Activists and scholars seeking to dismantle often taken-for-granted systems of criminalization and punishment have drawn on W.E.B. Du Bois’s framing of “abolition democracy” in Black Reconstruction in America to connect struggles against racialized chattel slavery and its unreconstructed aftermath to later twentieth and early twenty-first century struggles against the “prison industrial complex” or “carceral state.” Even if curiosity, or skepticism, fueled some purchasers of Mariame Kaba’sWe Do This ‘Til We Free Us, its status as a New York Times bestseller held out hope that actual readers of the volume—along with other books soon to be published by influential abolitionists— might grapple seriously with calls to radically reconstruct existing systems toward a more just and equitable world.
{"title":"Sexual Harm Beyond Policing","authors":"Gillian Harkins","doi":"10.1086/726480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726480","url":null,"abstract":"Spring 2020’s resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests crystallized longstanding organizing against policing and punishment. While these uprisings were neither new nor novel, throughout 2020 calls to defund the police gained greater political traction. Ongoing co-resistance organized across movements for Indigenous and Black lives and against settler nation borders contested the legitimacy of the U.S. as a colonial and racial state, while more mainstream media began to ask if carceral “abolition” could be a desirable, if not entirely practical, goal. While the resultant partial counter-hegemonies were viewed somewhat skeptically by those in existing abolitionist work, many also saw potential in the widening circulation of “abolition” as a concept. Activists and scholars seeking to dismantle often taken-for-granted systems of criminalization and punishment have drawn on W.E.B. Du Bois’s framing of “abolition democracy” in Black Reconstruction in America to connect struggles against racialized chattel slavery and its unreconstructed aftermath to later twentieth and early twenty-first century struggles against the “prison industrial complex” or “carceral state.” Even if curiosity, or skepticism, fueled some purchasers of Mariame Kaba’sWe Do This ‘Til We Free Us, its status as a New York Times bestseller held out hope that actual readers of the volume—along with other books soon to be published by influential abolitionists— might grapple seriously with calls to radically reconstruct existing systems toward a more just and equitable world.","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42524051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What does it mean to abolish the police? 1 Narrowly defined, the police are the state institution authorized to use violence against citizens, residents, and anyone else present in a given territory, to maintain public order and enforce the law. But by and large, contemporary abolitionists in the United States resist defining police in this narrow sense. Instead, they define the police expansively, to include not only private security forces and citizens who act as informal police deputies but also broader practices and institutions that surveil and control Black people and other marginalized groups. This expansive definition locates the police on a continuum with prisons and the carceral, and abolitionist scholars and activists have called for the abolition of the child welfare system, social work, and residential institutions for people with disabilities, among other demands. In part, this expansive definition of policing reflects the punitive nature of the contemporary U.S. state, in which racialized policing and punishment have either become entangled with or overtaken other state functions, such as the provision of basic
{"title":"The Revolutionary Politics of Abolition","authors":"Anna Terwiel","doi":"10.1086/726388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726388","url":null,"abstract":"What does it mean to abolish the police? 1 Narrowly defined, the police are the state institution authorized to use violence against citizens, residents, and anyone else present in a given territory, to maintain public order and enforce the law. But by and large, contemporary abolitionists in the United States resist defining police in this narrow sense. Instead, they define the police expansively, to include not only private security forces and citizens who act as informal police deputies but also broader practices and institutions that surveil and control Black people and other marginalized groups. This expansive definition locates the police on a continuum with prisons and the carceral, and abolitionist scholars and activists have called for the abolition of the child welfare system, social work, and residential institutions for people with disabilities, among other demands. In part, this expansive definition of policing reflects the punitive nature of the contemporary U.S. state, in which racialized policing and punishment have either become entangled with or overtaken other state functions, such as the provision of basic","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44757194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This symposium grew from an observation. As advocacy of police abolition became increasingly prominent in the national press and in daily discourse following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, a latent tension within abolitionism became clear. On the one hand, public advocates of abolitionism drew a sharp distinction between abolition of police and withdrawal from social regulation, in order to counter those critics who cast police abolition as a step toward anarchy. In her widely read call for abolition, published in The New York Times in June 2020, Mariame Kaba makes the defense this way: “But don’t get me wrong. We are not just abandoning our communities to violence.We don’t want to just close police departments . . .We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society.” Or consider Angela Davis, in an interview on abolitionism given that same month: “Abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of—but it’s about re-envisioning, building anew.” On police defunding in particular, Davis clarified, “Defunding the police is not simply withdrawing funding for law enforcement and doing nothing else . . . It’s about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions,” to “mental health . . . to housing, to education, to recreation.” On the other hand, as abolitionism gained momentum in the course of 2020, no longer just the police but a whole range of institutions and agencies responsible for social regulation were cast as targets for abolition, as these were found to resemble
{"title":"Visions of Police Power: A Symposium on Abolition Politics","authors":"Jaeyoon Park","doi":"10.1086/726390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726390","url":null,"abstract":"This symposium grew from an observation. As advocacy of police abolition became increasingly prominent in the national press and in daily discourse following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, a latent tension within abolitionism became clear. On the one hand, public advocates of abolitionism drew a sharp distinction between abolition of police and withdrawal from social regulation, in order to counter those critics who cast police abolition as a step toward anarchy. In her widely read call for abolition, published in The New York Times in June 2020, Mariame Kaba makes the defense this way: “But don’t get me wrong. We are not just abandoning our communities to violence.We don’t want to just close police departments . . .We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society.” Or consider Angela Davis, in an interview on abolitionism given that same month: “Abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of—but it’s about re-envisioning, building anew.” On police defunding in particular, Davis clarified, “Defunding the police is not simply withdrawing funding for law enforcement and doing nothing else . . . It’s about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions,” to “mental health . . . to housing, to education, to recreation.” On the other hand, as abolitionism gained momentum in the course of 2020, no longer just the police but a whole range of institutions and agencies responsible for social regulation were cast as targets for abolition, as these were found to resemble","PeriodicalId":46912,"journal":{"name":"Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44215862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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