political theory

Political science departments in the United States are typically divided into four domains.

American politics, political theory, comparative politics, and international relations.

Yet how useful is this four subfield distinction to the study of political science? Is it possible to do research in one subfield without attention to any of the others? Today we'll be hearing from professors from the American Politics and Political Theory subfields.

With American Politics Professor Justin Phillips, we will explore the challenges of gleaning subnational data from national-level polls, the emergence of abortion politics in the U.S., and the evolution of archival research.

With Political Theory Professor Nadia Urbinati, we will discuss the role of representation in democracy, the relevance of empirical data to political theory research, and the importance of contributing to public debate as an academic.

First, we'll be hearing from David from the Chalkboard Politics team, who sat down with Professor Justin Phillips.

Professor Phillips, scholar of American state and urban politics, traces how policymaking responds to public opinion.

Professor Phillips' research is directly concerned with developments in American politics.

Okay, thank you.

Here's Alyssa Battistoni, a professor of political science at Barnard College, who has published in academic journals like the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and NOMOS, and written essays for the New Left Review, The Nation, Dissent, N Plus One, Boston Review, and Jacobin.

She's a fellow at the Climate and Community Institute and on the editorial board of Dissent.

Alyssa is a co-author of A Planet to Win, Why We Need a Green New Deal, and the author of the book that we're discussing today, Free Gifts, Capitalism and the Politics of Nature.

And yet we feel like helpless in the face of that.

And that's why I want to try to get at these dimensions of capitalist unfreedom and try to sort of break down a little bit more like how capitalism makes us unfree and how and why it produces this feeling of kind of helplessness in the face of a system that supposedly we have produced or made.

And so I try to talk about this in terms of capitalist rule to make a point, not just for sort of academic political theory, but more generally that we should be thinking about capitalism as this form of rule in the pertaining to the realm of what we often think of as political decision making, that capitalism is what's really structuring these decisions about how we live together, about how we ought to live together, about how we organize our lives and our labor and the direction that we put our social resources, all of these things that are supposedly the realm of politics, which, you know, as many scholars have argued, are actually operating in the realm of what we describe as economics, to use that stylist distinction, which we would maybe need to challenge.

But so I want to try and use the language of rule to highlight that kind of political dimension of what's often thought to be the economic, to draw out these questions of like, what kinds of power and domination and forms of social choice and action are happening.

Tune in next week for the rest.

Alyssa Battistoni is a professor of political science at Barnard College who's published in academic journals like the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and Nomos, and written essays for the New Left Review, The Nation, Dissent, N Plus One, Boston Review, and Jacobin.

She's a member of the Climate and Community Institute and on the editorial board of Dissent.

Alyssa is a co-author of A Planet to Win, Why We Need a Green New Deal, and the author of the book that we're discussing today, Free Gifts, Capitalism and the Politics of Nature.

I say this not to malign him, but just to, just to put him in his context.

He's an unusual fellow to be sticking up for pre-Enlightenment political theory.

But that is what he did.

And this is such a remarkable instance of an American exception that you can find Calhoun's great treatise, The Disquisition on Government, published by people like Hackett Press, which publish people like John Stuart Mill and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke and such.

Uh, she works broadly in the areas of, of political, in the area of political thought, uh, and particularly in the area of, uh, Greek, uh, political thought.

Um, and, uh, she holds a BA in Modern History and English Literature from Oxford, an MPhil in Political Theory and Intellectual History from Cambridge, a PhD in Political Theory from Harvard.

Um, her dissertation won Harvard's Noxon Toppen Prize for the best dissertation in political science.

Before she came to Berkeley in 2019, she was a junior fellow at Harvard Society Fellows and Assistant Professor at Yale.

He, he translated Thucydides, among other things, many other things.

Um, but that is the context he's thinking of.

And, and in a sense, the whole book is really to say, you know, no one has taken his definition of democratia seriously in the world of political theory, um, pretty much.

[laughs] Ken Chasse, like, probably Kristen has, you know, but, like, um, but is it, like, among, a- among kind of historians of political thought, um, he is, he is not, he's, he's not really, um...

How do we survive that when truth is the first victim of just about everything these days? Mark Mitchell, Dean of Academic Affairs at Patrick Henry College with me.

He also teaches political theory.

Mark, good morning.

Good morning, Steve.