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I teach political theory, along with other subjects I find interesting, such as  the politics of urban land use and urban design, constitutional law, contemporary legal issues, and the politics of the modern Middle East, among others.

My primary research is on the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. My current project is a study of the relationship between democratic instituions and a democtratic political culture. In particular, I am exploring the self-perpetuating culture of republican virtue that Rousseau believed was an essential supplement to democratic sovereignty.

Rousseau is still, in my view, the greatest theorist of the democracy’s constitutive conflicts. By studying his various attempts to resolve these conflicts, we can learn a lot about how we might redeem our own democracies.

“Warm and Cold Speech in Rousseau’s Political Theory”

My latest essay is now out in Political Theory: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00905917251380046

Here is the abstract:

This essay traces Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s attempt to deploy cold (discursive) language in order to evoke warm (musical or gestural) language. Rousseau associates warm speech with the eloquence of the ancients and opposes it to cold speech, the language that predominates in modern societies, especially in intellectual or philosophical discourse. Cold speech cannot be the speech of a flourishing republic, but it can describe the conditions for the creation of a space within which a republican language might emerge. Warm speech is the cultural language of republican citizens. It operates to ensure that public deliberation (the procedural general will) is guided by the common interest (the substantive general will) and that the interests citizens hold in common are privileged over any particular interests they may have independent of, or apart from, their fellow citizens. The general will is not (only) general because, in substance, it corresponds to the common good. It is not (only) general because it is the result of the active will of all citizens. It is general because it speaks the language of generality; it emerges from a special orientation or intentionality born of and communicated through warm speech. This suggests a three-dimensional theory of democratic legitimacy—procedural, substantive, and ethical—that offers significant advantages over formal approaches to democratic legitimacy grounded in public reason.

An Artful Reframing: The University of La Verne’s Heritage, Identity, and Current Context

I–along with several colleagues at the University of La Verne–am happy to announce the publication of An Artful Reframing: The University of La Verne’s Heritage, Identity, and Current Context. The University received a grant to investigate the history and heritage of the University, with goal of telling some of the largely untold stories of overlooked or marginalized members of the University community. You can find an electronic copy here.

I wrote the introduction and a summary of the results of focus group discussions. The volume includes chapters on the history of the Brethren Church, the University stone tools collection, Gladdys Muir, the relationship between the University and indigenous peoples, the history of veterans at the University, and the Palomares colonia.

My Review of Karen Pagani’s “Man or Citizen: Anger, Forgiveness, and Authenticity in Rousseau”

man-or-citizenI had the privilege of reviewing Karen Pagani’s excellent history of modern attitudes toward sentiment and emotion.

A couple of excerpts from my review:

“Pagani’s achievement…is to develop…a conceptual apparatus through which readers can trace the origin and development of modern attitudes towards anger and forgiveness. Pagani outlines what might be called a political or moral economy of anger and forgiveness.”

“Prior to Rousseau, Pagani writes, conceptions of anger and forgiveness — in the work of, for example, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Montesquieu, Butler, Diderot, D’Alembert, Holbach, Helvétius, Morelly, and Voltaire — followed a similar, essentially Christian pattern. Simply put, anger was seen as a danger to the social order and forgiveness as a moral obligation brought about by the urgency of the need to dissipate anger. Anger was a privilege of the aristocracy alone. Forgiveness, correspondingly, could be bestowed only by a superior upon an inferior. Rousseau rejected both assumptions — both the notion that anger constituted an inherent danger, and the notion that only those of a certain social status had title to anger.”