As a political theorist broadly trained in both the history of political thought and contemporary democratic theory, my research agenda is problem-driven and methodologically eclectic. Currently my research focuses on three broad political-theoretical dilemmas. First, how can political theorists and actors make sense of, attribute, and take responsibility for political challenges and injustices without single guilty agents to be held accountable? Second, how does global climate change and narratives of the Anthropocene – the proposed new epoch in geologic time that reflects humanity’s transformation of the Earth system – challenge traditional political concepts and values and what resources do the diverse traditions of political theory hold for responding to this crisis? Third, how should political theorists interpret Nietzsche’s thought – in particular his conception of responsibility, his theory of the eternal recurrence of the same, and his account of value transformation or revaluation – and what resources does his work provide for contemporary political theory?
Research Themes
The Politics of Responsibility
The first theme of my research engages a growing literature that theorizes responsibility in the context of complex socio-political structures and conditions of uncertainty that undermine the assumptions of commonsense theories of personal and moral responsibility. Drawing on these contemporary debates, in particular the thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas, liberal political philosophy, and 20th century American political discourse I both interrogate the emergence and political consequences of personal responsibility as a hegemonic political narrative and develop an alternative account of political responsibility. Instead of a means of adjudicating blame and balancing moral debts, I argue that political responsibility should be understood as the shared obligation of citizens to safeguard the political world and ensure that its structure is conducive to self-determination and flourishing. This account avoids the resentment, moralism, and buck-passing that accompany most ascriptions of responsibility in politics and is better suited for responding to political predicaments such as climate change, the enduring legacy of historical injustices like the Atlantic slave trade, and contemporary economic injustice.
Climate Change and Political Theory
My second research theme implicates both historical and contemporary political theory. The transformation of the Earth system by human activity complicates many modern political concepts and values predicated on the distinctiveness of humanity from non-human nature. Engaging both contemporary theories of new materialism, posthumanism, and related schools of thought as well as the thought of historical figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Hans Jonas, I work to recover theoretical resources for theorizing agency, responsibility, and politics in recognition of the mutual entanglement of human and non-human nature. In an article length project, I turn to Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal recurrence of the same for a means to theorize the complex temporality of the anthropocene so as to motivate and orient political action while avoiding the temptations of nihilistic resignation and technological optimism. Furthermore, while climate change is often understood as a global injustice – the global poor are the most vulnerable to climate change’s effects while being the least causally responsible for it – it’s temporal and spatial scales challenge traditional theories of justice and responsibility. In an article in progress, I draw on the thought of Iris Marion Young to argue that climate change requires moving beyond the distributive paradigm and theorizing climate change as a structural injustice that requires structural transformation of the global political and economic order over and above the fair distribution of mitigation and adaptation burdens.
Zarathustra and Dwarf is a painting from the painting cycle THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA by Lena Hades, 1997.
Friedrich Nietzsche and Political Theory
My third theme occupies interpretive debates in Nietzsche scholarship. While drawing on contextual scholarship and close readings of Nietzsche’s texts, my goal is less to identify the “true Nietzsche,” than to read him across political contexts and in conversation with contemporary political theory. My goal in such readings is to both contribute to our understanding of Nietzsche’s thought as well as elucidate the resources his thought holds for responding to contemporary political predicaments. As such, my research on his critique and revaluation of responsibility, his doctrine of the eternal recurrence, and his conception of value transformation contribute both to Nietzsche scholarship as well as my other substantive Nietzsche themes.
Publications and Working Papers
Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters
1. “Political Responsibility for Climate Justice: Political not Moral,” European Journal of Political Theory (Accepted, email me for a copy)
Editor-Reviewed Articles and Chapters
1. “Shareholders, Supervisors, and Stakeholders: Practices of Financial Responsibility and Their Limits,” with Erin K. Lockwood (UC, Irvine). In: Routledge Handbook of Responsibility in World Politics eds. Hannes Hansen-Magnussen and Antje Vetterlein. New York: Routledge, Forthcoming 2021 (email me for a copy).
4. “Cultivating Citizens: The Care of the Self in Plato’s Alcibiades.” The Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics, XI:1 (2011): 16-42
Book Reviews and Review Essays
2. “Narratives of Responsibility and Responsible Narration,” Review of Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness by Jade Larissa Schiff, Theory & Event 17, 4 (December 2014). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v017/17.4.sardo.html
Working Papers
“On Freedom and Responsibility in an Extra-Moral Sense: Nietzsche and Non-Sovereign Responsibility” (Under review; available upon request).
“Answering the Call: Taking Political Responsibility” With Erin K. Lockwood (UC, Irvine). (Under review; available upon request).
“‘An Earthly Immortality:’” Arendt on Mortality, Politics, and Political Death” In: Political Philosophies of Aging, Dying, and Death eds. Erin Dolgoy, Kimberly Hurd Hale, and Bruce Peabody, under contract with Routledge (Invited contribution; available upon request).
Book Project
"Remain Faithful to the Earth:" Resentment, Responsibility and Political Theory in the Anthropocene
These relationship between these themes can be seen in my book project, tentatively titled “Remain Faithful to the Earth:” Resentment, Responsibility, and Political Theory in the Anthropocene. Noting the similarities between contemporary discourses of the anthropocene and Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism and the “death of god” a century earlier, this project rereads Nietzsche in the context of the global environmental crisis. Drawing on and critically revising Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment that underpin moralistic ascriptions of blame, guilt, and responsibility, I argue that resentment of the anthropocene are at the root of a series of political and theoretical pathologies: the challenge of grounding agency in the context of geologic time, moralistic and resentful ascriptions of blame that generate impasses in climate change negotiations, and the desire for technological and technocratic solutions to climate change that avoid the challenges and dilemmas of politics. Through innovative readings of Nietzsche’s accounts of genealogy, the eternal recurrence, responsibility, and “great politics,” I argue that Nietzsche’s thought can valuable theoretical resources for overcoming the resentment against the passage of time, grounding an ethic of responsibility for the world, and tempering the temptations of mastery over nature or subordinating political contestation and judgment to un-democratic authority. This project makes three crucial contributions. First, to political and theoretical debates over climate change and the anthropocene, it both identifies theoretical lacunae in contemporary discourses and reorients these debates. Second, it bridges debates in political theory over the nature of responsibility to real world politics, while identifying the importance of theorizing temporality alongside responsibility. Third, it advances Nietzsche scholarship, specifically his relevance to contemporary political thought beyond narrow debates over whether his thought is proto-fascist or radically-democratic.