Political Theory

In 2007, a private corporation specializing in deep-sea salvage retrieved a treasure-laden shipwreck in international waters southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. The wreck was that of a Spanish warship that sunk during the Napoleonic wars. Following the discovery, a legal dispute arose in U.S. federal courts, between the corporate salvors, the Kingdom of Spain, and other litigants. At issue in the legal proceedings was the status of the shipwreck and whether it was protected by sovereign immunity. At the heart of this case are differing political imaginations concerning the authority of states and the role of corporations in the contemporary global order. Through a close reading of court documents and the narratives in which the courts’ rulings are embedded, we demonstrate that the case is symptomatic of the tension in neoliberal sovereignty between two overlapping and at times competing political rationalities: the neoliberal logic of capital and commerce and the logic of sovereign prerogative.

Nineteenth-century American political thinkers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman advocated for and sought to exemplify a life of self-direction and critical self-reflection, or personal autonomy, as a means of contesting entrenched routines of democratic-capitalist normalization and as a way of resisting a host of institutional disciplinary pressures. Today, the ideal of personal autonomy within a diverse liberal society is branded by many as a form of “comprehensive” disciplinary normalization in its own right. In this essay I offer a reconsideration of this reversal in the appraisal of the value of autonomy within pluralistic democratic societies and argue that the abandonment of autonomy is a symptom of a mistaken understanding of the personal-ethical qualities upon which a democratic culture depends and a maladaptive concession to neoliberal norms. To confront these challenges, I draw upon a range of Emerson’s writings to offer some ideas about how a reconstructed ideal of aspirational autonomy might inform contemporary politics without unduly constraining moral pluralism or undermining toleration.

This essay traces the evocations of the Chinese practice of foot-binding in Western political thought. I examine the changing deployments of the image: as a contrast to European freedom or as a mirror reflecting its own limitations. The bound feet not merely illustrate a lack of freedom through an image of disabled mobility. They also situate freedom within global (imperial) and gendered frameworks. Via a reading of the image and its contexts, we see that European freedom-as-movement emerged on the backdrop of two imperial contrasts: (1) images of nomadism (in the contexts of America, and later Africa and the Middle East), which are only marginally considered in this paper, and (2) an assumed stagnation, that presumably prevailed in the East. Yet surprisingly, the image was often evoked to say something about Europe itself, rather than about its “others.” Therefore, it also reveals the corporeal dimensions of a concept of freedom that has underlaid a long liberal tradition. The crushed and squeezed feet of girls in China thus marked both a gendered and an imperial divide between those who can move freely, and therefore rule, and those who cannot rule because of their lack of mobility; yet at the same time, it undid this division by allowing the East and its stationariness to permeate Europe through a multiply foreign body: feminized, racially alien, and geographically distanced.

A prevailing theme of the scholarship on Plato’s Crito has been civil disobedience, with many scholars agreeing that the Athenian Laws do not demand a slavish, authoritarian kind of obedience. While this focus on civil disobedience has yielded consensus, it has left another issue in the text relatively unexplored—that is, the challenges and attractions of leaving one’s homeland or of “exit.” Reading for exit reveals two fundamental, yet contradictory, desires in the Crito: a yearning to escape the injustice of the homeland for self-preservation and freedom (voiced by Crito) and a deep-seated need to honor one’s obligations and attachments to the homeland (voiced by the Laws). By exposing the conflicted nature of leaving one’s native land, Plato’s Crito enriches an understanding of the meaning and consequences of an exit for the individual.