William Clare Roberts

Via a critical reading of Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety, this essay argues that the traditions of " history from below, " Subaltern Studies, and postcolonial feminist studies have issued in a series of conceptual difficulties around the idea of emancipation. Mahmood rightly criticizes the tendency of these traditions to conflate agency and resistance. Her own effort to decouple agency and desire from emancipatory politics, however, undercuts theory's capacity to diagnose domination and ties theory too closely to the self-understandings of its subjects. Distinguishing appropriately between agency and freedom and between desire and interests can revivify the idea of emancipation. A universal interest in freedom from domination can be defended on this basis without discounting the self-understandings and actual desires of people. This argument points the way to a division of labor between emancipatory political theory, which analyzes public institutions in the name of the universal interest in freedom, and emancipatory politics, which begins from people's actual desires in order to build support for institutional change.

Abstract: This essay argues that Marx's understanding of exploitation is profoundly rooted in a distinctly pre-modern understanding of natural right. Marx attempts, in Capital, to graft the existing socialist discourse about exploitation onto a much older view of wrong, according to which acts contrary to nature constitute the wrong of violence. In this way, Marx's account of exploitation, widely considered to be the canonical statement, is actually an extreme outlier in relation to all other theories.

This essay develops something of a paradox. Gilbert Simondon’s thinking about processes of individuation explicitly sets itself in opposition to both atomism and hylomorphism because these traditions presuppose that the individual as such is what must be explained, and thereby set aside without argument the possibility that individuation includes necessary and necessarily non-individual correlatives. Yet, in his critical extension of Simondon’s thinking into political philosophy, Paolo Virno repeatedly borrows from Aristotle – the original philosopher of hylomorphism – the terms by which he elaborates Simondon. It seems incredible that Virno, one of the most astute and clear-minded exponents of Simondon’s thought, would be so naïve as to erase the division between Simondon’s reflections on individuation and the hylomorphic paradigm. Therefore, rather than lend credence to the incredible, I want to propose a hermeneutical operation by means of which we can see Aristotle as a predecessor of Simondon (and of Virno), a thinker of preindividuality, individuation, and transindividuality. This hermeneutical operation is not plucked from the sky, nor made to order for this occasion, but is, instead, Simondon’s own theory of individuation treated as an account and technique of reading, a possibility anticipated by Simondon in his concept of transduction. Aristotle and Aristotelianism, after all, are themselves individuals, and are therefore the outcomes of necessarily incomplete processes of individuation resolving preindividual textual fields into figures. By way of Virno, then, I want to activate Simondon’s thinking as a mode of production of philosophical lineages and alliances.

The aim of this essay is to defend two minority positions respecting the proper interpretation of Marx’s critical theory of capitalism, and in such a way, hopefully, as to make Marx’s theory more interesting to non-Marxists.  The first position defended is that Marx is better read as an heir to the pre-modern tradition of objective natural right than as a proponent of the radical Enlightenment claims on behalf of the rights of man, as an Aristotelian rather than as a Jacobin.  The second position defended is that, despite its Aristotelian heritage, Marx’s critical theory does not rest upon a metaphysically suspicious account of the telos of human being.  Threading this needle – Marx’s position is Aristotelian, but does not rely upon claimed insight into the purpose of human existence – will also give rise to some novel side-claims: that capitalist exploitation is a violation of the nature of the labour process; that Marx criticizes only capitalist exploitation, not exploitation in general; and that Marx is so idiosyncratic a socialist as to make his assimilation to that party more misleading than enlightening.  The hope is that this combination of minority and novelty will be intriguing enough to sustain the reader through a return to the crags, thickets, and arid stretches of Marx’s Capital.  The upshot is a renovated Marx, neither an economist whose insights were constrained by the industrial capitalism of his day, nor a prophet who saw into the future, but a moral and political theorist who attempted to get to the bottom of what is wrong with capital.

Political, social, and economic theory presents us again and again with a choice between the state and the market. Given a small set of reasonable and widely-agreed-upon presuppositions about human rationality, however, the risk of opportunism makes any easy recourse to markets or to states equally problematic. The theory of the firm, as it has developed within the new institutional economics, provides resources for thinking beyond this impasse. But the same risk of opportunism that motivates a turn to institutionalism also militates against any globally unified theory of institutions. Institutions are necessarily plural, with different structures, rules, and rationales.

Abstract: In this paper I investigate the relations between politics and intellect in the works of Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Paolo Virno. Each thinker articulates a fundamentally critical engagement with modern liberal political theory, which is simultaneously an ambivalent encounter with the political philosophy of Aristotle.

Abstract This paper examines one of the many Judeo-Christian allusions in Marx's corpus, his citations of Dante in the “1859 Preface” and the preface to the first edition of Capital. It demonstrates that Marx borrowed key features of Dante's Inferno for his own critique of political economy, and that Marx thereby situated his critical journey through economics as the heir to the Western tradition of the katabasis, the formative descent into the underworld. This undermines the dichotomization of religion and science prevalent in Marxology, and ...

... Learn more... ProQuest, The labors of Karl Marx: Tekhne, valorization, revolution. by Roberts, William Clare, Ph.D., THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, 2005, 292 pages; 3173821. Abstract: ... I demonstrate that Marx in fact extensively modeled Capital on Dante's Inferno . ...

Thankfully, this is not the sort of audience before whom one must labor to justify re-reading The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.1 However, the acceptability of reading the Brumaire, or any work of Marx, does not automatically carry with it any guidelines for how to read it. How to read? This has been one of the premiere questions of 20th century philosophy, and I think Althusser has shown that it is also a central concern of Marx's own texts (regardless of how much one might agree or disagree with Althusser's own reading).2 Therefore, if we ...

The introduction to Philosophy and Freedomsummarizes the main themes of McCumber's Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason (1989) and Metaphysics and Oppression: Heidegger's Challenge to Western Philosophy (1999), and casts the narrative of the present book as an extension of these earlier projects. From Metaphysics and Oppression he takes his account of ousia, from which moderns and postmoderns have—inchoately, partially, and unconsciously—sought freedom. If there is a villain in McCumber's tale, it is undoubtably ...