Abstract
William Sokoloff’s book is well timed; in the current political moment, confrontational citizenship seems to be precisely what is required and the book captures the zeitgeist in reference to the political engagement now necessary for even a minimal defense of civil liberties and conditions of equal dignity. Deference to the authority of the state, the status quo, and the ideals of consensus make very little sense today and the liberalism of the late 20th century seems like a flaccid response to the crises of the republic. Confrontational Citizenship begins by leaving those liberal sentiments aside in order to paint a picture of what such citizenship has looked like in the past and might look like today. Sokoloff writes, “By flagging the militant aspects of the citizen my point is that there is no political life without a fight, and the word citizen is the locus of the confrontation between the ‘part that has no part’ and vested interests intent on subjugating, policing and destroying the people” (xv). To this end, Sokoloff is successful in his portraits of revolutionary thinkers and activists, including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Gloria Anzaldúa, who are each the subject of a chapter, as are Machiavelli, Kant, and Arendt. Each chapter is focused on an affective orientation that accompanies his conception of the militant citizen, drawing out moments in the texts that cultivate the spirit of disruption Sokoloff argues have been largely overlooked in political theory.
At times, he seems to be calling for political action solely outside of established institutions as evident in his critique of agonistic thinkers (who would appear to be sympathetic interlocutors) for relying on “liberal institutions or an existing understanding of pluralism […] as opposed to rethinking identity claims and institutions that could perpetuate productive forms of political conflict indefinitely” (xx). Yet later he dedicates much of the chapter on Arendt to commending her ability to “fuse contradictory political imperatives,” including the desire to both shun and adhere to institutional expectations for the sake of political stability. For an institution, including a constitution, to be democratically legitimate, it must not “enclose its revolutionary beginning in hierarchical differentiations” (92). The opportunity for action and dissent must be ever present, and Sokoloff praises this “double concept” of political resistance beyond the dichotomies of consent/dissent, order/anarchy, and freedom/obedience in a way that feels fresh and highly relevant for the political action he promotes. I would have liked to see this double concept woven throughout the book, because without it Sokoloff is often left fighting the straw men of Rawlsian incrementalism and Foucauldian aesthetic escape. These two poles recur throughout the book as ways for the author to posit himself as forging a different path, but they struck me as somewhat discordant because so much of the scholarship in the field these days is occurring between the poles. There has been substantial movement away from liberalism and we see this in the types of books getting published, dissertations written, and APSA panels accepted, and this book should find a sympathetic audience with scholars writing on social movements, race and identity, and resistance in its many forms.
Sokoloff marshals the vivid anecdotal style of Machiavelli to argue for the value of hatred to confrontational citizenship. Acknowledging that hatred can be easily manipulated to turn groups against each other, Sokoloff narrows his focus to the hatred of political elites as a galvanizing force for the citizenry. Thus, one of Machiavelli’s key insights for him is the boomerang effect of a powerful leader going too far in his acts of cruelty. Although a performance of dominance is necessary for effective rule, excessive force will have the contrary effect, and Sokoloff takes from Machiavelli a lesson for the popolo to cultivate and express their hatred. He uses the following anecdote from the Discourses to demonstrate the potential of hatred to be moderately expressed and the corresponding satisfaction experienced by the people when elites are humiliated: Camillus was invading the city and an enterprising schoolmaster thought he might help him by turning over the children of the nobles to the advancing general. Carrying out the plot, the schoolmaster led his students to the countryside for physical exercise. Camillus, however, refused to take them and instead had the teacher stripped and his hands tied behind his back. The general then gave the boys a rod with which to beat the teacher, which they proceeded to do. When the citizens saw what happened, Machiavelli recounts that they were so “pleased with the humanity and integrity of Camillus that they no longer wanted to go on with the defense, but decided to hand over the town” (23). In Sokoloff’s interpretation, this is a parable about the humiliation of a conniving elite who got the punishment he deserved in an appropriate manner that did not lead to mass bloodshed. The role reversal between teacher and student and the nakedness of the teacher lends a comedic dimension to the incident that furthers its appeal. It is, for him, an example of hatred rightly deployed. Although Camillus would ideally want hatred to emerge organically from the people as a way to build support for himself, the fact that he gave the order for violence did not entirely diminish the value of hatred experienced by the citizens and its manifestation in the public humiliation of the teacher.
I read the incident differently and suggest that Sokoloff’s interpretation overlooks the point that being commanded to be violent against another human is its own form of degradation, perhaps in one of its most chilling forms. The teacher was not the only one who was humiliated. The fact that students were asked to beat their teacher, the person who was entrusted with their development of knowledge, heightens this aspect of loss and embarrassment. Even if the teacher forsook his title when he planned to sacrifice the students for his own gain, that students would be asked to diminish him in the way they did has implications for their humanity and the possibility of education altogether. Furthermore, the fealty to Camillus that came from an act of scapegoating seems like a dangerous precedent as a strategy for achieving solidarity or political change. These questions can be categorized as inquiries into the psychosocial costs of manifesting hatred, particularly through violent acts, that Sokoloff might consider. To make hatred more central to political life is an intriguing and provocative claim, but it must also include an account of the circulation of hatred and its likely consequences for all involved. What are the different ways in which hatred may move through a society? What are the symptoms of it overpowering the ends it is meant to achieve?
In another chapter, Sokoloff chronicles the dynamic intellectual and political life of the Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa; he shows how her practice of self-craft, fashioning an identity beyond stereotypes and projections, effectively created a bridge to new collective identities where others were also encouraged to express the particularities of their experience. He writes, “Anzaldúa sings the song of herself not in a vacuum but as an impassioned cry to others to reclaim their dignity, write their own counternarrative, and to live alongside others with a gentle and loving spirit,” and he has done a service for those of us who may not have included Anzaldúa as a key political voice in the late 20th century (107). Sokoloff commends Anzaldúa in large part for her affective tone—the combination of strident opposition and candid vulnerability—as well as for having the aesthetic and political advantage of seamlessly moving between two or three languages. Sokoloff sees much potential for others to conceive their freedom as stemming from such personal accounts. He disagrees with Cristina Beltrán’s critique that the mestiza identity Anzaldúa supports ends up not only reifying dichotomies (white/Latino, indigenous/Mexica, straight/queer, etc.) but also attributing a type of stasis to identities deemed to be oppressive. His reading of Anzaldúa presents a thinker who was more attuned to the dangers of such rigid definitions of identity, particularly for the creation of political alliances that she valued across differences of identity.
At the risk of committing the cardinal sin of reviewers—asking for a different book—I found myself wishing for different stakes in each of the chapters. Sokoloff grounds his argument about the value of disruptive affects in the biographies of noted figures and, although differences of biographical interpretation must be addressed in a manuscript like this, they seem to prematurely cut the discussion short by focusing on differences in emphasis. He ends up defending his reading about how much one should emphasize the concept of revolt in Du Bois’s life, for example, or fluidity in Anzaldúa’s, but it would have been even more elucidating to connect this disagreement over emphasis to its implications for political praxis, perhaps in unexpected ways. He gestures to how others may be inspired by these lives, but he seems like the perfect scholar to explicitly offer more. He is knowledgeable, passionate, and rightly demands more attention to pedagogy within the profession. He wants professors of political science to do much more to make the discipline relevant to the lived experiences of a diverse group of students. As he writes: “The teaching style and specific examples used in the classroom for the project of literacy must confront the structures of power that shape the life chances and intellectual horizons of impoverished people, not hide these power relationships behind myths about the slow but inevitable spread of democracy” (123–124). The exemplars described lay the foundation for this in a powerful way, but more connections to contemporary action could be drawn.
A moment of immanent critique in the book comes in Sokoloff’s discussion of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educational activist, who saw the classroom as both the crucible for and precursor to radical democracy. Freire notes the influence of power on all aspects of education, especially the methods believed to be conducive to learning and hierarchies of status that are replicated in the classroom, particularly through the diminished expectations of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. For Freire, accepting that the classroom is not a neutral space does not mean that it should become one where a single political ideology reigns supreme, a temptation for the Left just as much as for the Right. Sokoloff writes, “The Left’s mistake, for Freire, has always been their absolute conviction of their certainties, which makes them sectarian, authoritarian and religious” (121). However, I wonder how this concern might resonate with the framework put forth in the book. If we give central importance to hatred, rage, and revolt without more discussion of how and when they might be most useful and their relationship to other normative concerns, is there not a danger of their reification and the emergence of a new ideology?
Emotional and affective states are not synonymous with modes of thinking, even if they are highly influential in the process, and it seems like one of the aspirations of the book was a transformed mode of thinking regarding citizenship. Starting with the recognition of hatred and rage as motivating forces, Sokoloff’s self-described utopian vision includes components of a clearly identified political and economic enemy, coalitions emerging from political identity claims, and a responsive political sphere, among others. Yet the book presents these within a structure of parataxis, articulating a series of observations rather than asserting causal or dependent relationships between them. Such a structure makes it difficult to understand what is necessary to achieve the mandate of confrontational citizenship Sokoloff desires.