03 In this book, Bonnie Honig rethinks that established relation between politics and political theory. From liberal to communitarian to republican, political theorists of opposing positions often treat political theory less as an exploration of politics than as a series of devices of its displacement. Honig characterizes Kant, Rawls, and Sandel as virtue theorists of politics, arguing that they rely on principles of right, rationality, community, and law to protect their political theories from the conflict and uncertainty of political reality. Drawing on Nietzsche and Arendt, as well as Machiavelli and Derrida, Honig explores an alternative politics of virtù, which treats the disruptions of political order as valued sites of democratic freedom and individuality.
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Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics
03 In this book, Bonnie Honig rethinks that established relation between politics and political theory. From liberal to communitarian to republican, political theorists of opposing positions often treat political theory less as an exploration of politics than as a series of devices of its displacement. Honig characterizes Kant, Rawls, and Sandel as virtue theorists of politics, arguing that they rely on principles of right, rationality, community, and law to protect their political theories from the conflict and uncertainty of political reality. Drawing on Nietzsche and Arendt, as well as Machiavelli and Derrida, Honig explores an alternative politics of virtù, which treats the disruptions of political order as valued sites of democratic freedom and individuality.
03 In this book, Bonnie Honig rethinks that established relation between politics and political theory. From liberal to communitarian to republican, political theorists of opposing positions often treat political theory less as an exploration of politics than as a series of devices of its displacement. Honig characterizes Kant, Rawls, and Sandel as virtue theorists of politics, arguing that they rely on principles of right, rationality, community, and law to protect their political theories from the conflict and uncertainty of political reality. Drawing on Nietzsche and Arendt, as well as Machiavelli and Derrida, Honig explores an alternative politics of virtù, which treats the disruptions of political order as valued sites of democratic freedom and individuality.
Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor in the departments of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University. She is the author of Antigone, Interrupted; Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy; and Democracy and the Foreigner.
Table of Contents
1. Negotiating Positions: The Politics of Virtue and Virtu 2. Kant and the Concept of Respect for Persons Beginnings Respect for the Moral Law Reverence-Respect for Persons Teleological Respect for Persons Liberal Respect for Persons Setting the Conditions for Moral Improvement Kant's Virtue Theory of Politics 3. Nietzsche and the Recovery of Responsibility Three Kinds of Recovery The Genealogical Recovery of Responsibility The Re-covery of Responsibility: Against Remorse The Re-covery of Responsibility: Eternal Recurrence Alternative Responsibilities: The Self as a Work of Art Nietzsche's Re-covery of Virtue as Virtu Nietzsche's Reverence for Institutions 4. Arendt's Accounts of Action and Authority Action, Identity, and the Self Acting through Speech: Promising and Forgiveness The Postulates of Action Stabilizing Performatives: Arendt, Austin, and Derrida Acting through Writing: Founding the New American Republic The Undecidability of the American Declaration of Independence Intervention, Augmentation, and Resistability: Arendt's Practice of Political Authority Making Space for Arendt's Virtu Theory of Politics 5. Rawls and the Remainders of Politics Reconciliation or Politicization? The Politics of Originating Positions The Practice of Punishment Irresponsible Rogues and Idiosyncratic Misfits Liberal and Other Alternatives 6. Sandel and the Proliferation of Political Subjects Two Kinds of Dispossession The Communitarian Subject of Possession Occasions for Politics Politics as Friendship Morally Deep Questions Morally Deep Answers The Rawlsian Supplement 7. Renegotiating Positions: Beyond the Virtue-Virtu Opposition
We should call this book a classic, but we should not call it timeless. Rather, the book matters today—and should be read today—because of its timely interventions into political and theoretical debates from thirty years ago, and because of its untimely contributions. These have had a reverberating series of impacts on the field of political theory over the following three decades, allowing this work from the past to speak to our present.
Cristina Beltrán
Bonnie Honig is one of our greatest political theorists; her work is pleasurable and powerful, rigorous yet always timely. This 30th-anniversary edition of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics is a call to embrace and engage with the contradictory, unstable, and indeterminate nature of the political — with all its beautiful and terrifying world-making possibilities. Three decades after its publication, Honig's first book continues to offer insights that we should never forget and that we need now more than ever.
