Insight, Oversight, and Incitement, in Cites: On Sloppy References in Political Thought

My research focuses on modern political thought, with emphasis on German Idealism, Hegelianism, Western Marxism, and American Pragmatism. I’m especially interested in notions of progress, the nature of hope, and how post-Enlightenment (and some self-consciously “post-metaphysical”) thinkers wrestle with the idea of history and our status as beings within history. My book The Principle of Political Hope (Oxford University Press, 2023) presents an account of hope as an indispensable aspect of much German and American political thought, and I am now working on a book on the idea of political generations. I have written articles and/or chapters on John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Immanuel Kant, Ernst Bloch, William James, Wendy Brown, political hope, the idea of the future, modern classical music, the appearance/reality distinction, ontological materialism, ChatGPT, and Mad Men, among other topics, in venues including Political Theory, Theory & Event, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Analyse & Kritik, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, The Journal of the Philosophy of History, Praktyka Teoretyczna, Perspectives of New Music, New Political Science, European Journal of Social Theory, The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, and William James Studies, a journal for which I was book review editor from 2013-2018. I co-translated, annotated, and introduced the first English edition of Ernst Bloch’s Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left (Columbia University Press, 2019). With Max Tomba, I’m editing a special issue of the journal History of the Present on the legacy of Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants’ War, to appear on its 500th anniversary in 2025. Another work in progress is an edited volume chapter on the French “Icarians” who sought to establish various utopian communities in Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa in the late 19th century. I am also an associate editor of the journal New Political Science.