Research
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Representing Desire: Sexual Liberation and the Shaping of the British Left
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the relationship between sexuality and democracy. Queer theorists have begun to challenge their field’s resistance to engaging with formal political institutions, and its ambivalence towards democracy. Yet it has been unclear what democratic theory can gain from engaging with queer theory and other, related projects of sexual liberation. Equally, the ambivalence of many queer theorists towards democratic theory suggests that what democracy can achieve for queer people remains uncertain.
Democratic theory and sexual liberation may, then, seem to be an unusual pairing to political theorists and queer theorists alike. This book seeks to challenge that assumption in order to help structure more definite and positive thinking about the relationship between sexuality and democracy and the challenges posed by this juxtaposition. It does so by examining the largely forgotten efflorescence in Britain, around the turn of the 20th century, of accounts of homoeroticism as a source of, and a model for, democracy and social change.
Starting in the 1870’s, and running through the end of the First World War, a small but culturally influential group of gay men, whom I refer to as ‘gay socialists,’ elaborated a series of arguments for the view that democratic citizenship relied on forms of sociality that were cultivated in homoerotic relationships, but could be exported to society at large, and on public institutions that recognized and cultivated this politically valuable homoeroticism. They elaborated a moral psychology of desire as the foundation of democratic citizenship and social equality, broadly understood. Originally intended as a description of how we should act as citizens to bring about the social change required to realize socialism (and thereby create a just society), these arguments expanded in the 1890’s to encompass a theory of representation and partisanship. Although these arguments came from a small group of people, they had an outsized impact on the political and intellectual development of the British left. On the political side, they were important for the development of the Labour Party, whose first Prime Minster, Ramsay MacDonald, drew on these ideas for his own understanding of the role of a socialist party in bringing about social change and for his ideas about the substance of political representation, that is to say, what politicians should actually be representing. On the intellectual front, the gay socialists inspired some of the most original and significant work by British leftists, most notably Bertrand Russell and R.H. Tawney. Specifically, they supplied Russell with his distinctive account of what a liberal political theory should be about – namely, impulses and self-development rather than interests and justice; and to Tawney his account of the relationship between freedom and equality.
This book teases out three political-theoretical contributions made by the gay socialists as they elaborated what we might call a queer democratic theory:
(i) They developed a moral psychology of desire as the driving force behind democratic life, and as ultimately more important for politics than reasons and interests. They argued that democratic societies needed to be able to deliberate about, and cooperate in realizing, desires. It was through this that practical interests could be pursued and political competition made socially useful.
(ii) They developed a theory of alienation as the outcome of failed compromises between individuals’ desires and social norms and expectations. Alienation warps and tortures desire into potentially grotesque manifestations, and the task of politics is to undo this alienation to restore the healthy version of our desires.
(iii) They explained how particular forms of political representation and cooperative labor would make the ideal of democracy as a way of life, pioneered by Rousseau and taken up by Whitman and the American Romantics, feasible in a mass society. This could be done by representing desires, rather than opinions or interests, in particular ways.
“Officers Without Soldiers:” Henry Sidgwick on Representative Government in the Shadow of Liberal Unionism
This paper provides an account of the core features of Henry Sidgwick’s theory of representative government as presented in his political magnum opus, The Elements of Politics (EP). It explains the relationship of many of his substantive commitments on the topic to his support for Liberal Unionism, the political movement of liberals committed to keeping Ireland under the rule of the Westminster Parliament. I argue that Sidgwick’s theory of representative government was profoundly influenced by what he saw as the main challenge to the Liberal Unionist Party (LUP): the need for the intellectual and economic elites that dominated its ranks when it was created to find a sizable and lasting constituency amongst the mass of British voters.
R&R at Modern Intellectual History.
Do Children Have Distinct Political Interests?
This paper argues that children constitute a political group with a set of distinct interests that are not given fair consideration in democratic societies. The distinct interests that children have in receiving certain kinds of education, healthcare, nutrition and leisure cannot be made up for later in life if they are not satisfied during childhood. The paper then considers whether enfranchising children would improve their ability to satisfy these interests, and suggests that it might not. The wave of recent literature on enfranchising children tends to treat children merely as small adults, rather than as a distinct group with weighty interests of their own. Paradoxically, taking children’s interests seriously does not give us strong reasons to think that they ought to be enfranchised, and the best reasons to enfranchise all adults do not apply to children. The paper aims to show that childhood poses a fundamental problem for democratic politics, one which has yet to be resolved and which common democratic institutions are ill-suited to address.
Hostage Taking in Theory and Practice: The Case of French Algeria
With Esther Robinson
Forms and theorized causes of violence against civilians in conflict vary. Many studies of strategic violence against civilians emphasize the purely coercive logic of such practices. This paper seeks to challenge this focus by studying one ubiquitous form of non-lethal violence, captive-taking, through the case of French Algeria during the mid-1800s. We argue that French captive-taking in Algeria did not follow a single, purely coercive logic, but that it was tied to multiple strategic and normative justifications: as a means to control nomadic populations in Algeria, for the “anthropological” purpose of allowing the French to study their colonized subjects, and for its effects on the French themselves. In showing this, the paper aims to reinterpret the literature in political theory on liberal justifications of colonial violence. We show how understanding the logics of civilian captive-taking in Algeria allows us to better understand how a specific violent practice could gain widespread approval among liberals without there being any agreement on its justification or its instrumental purpose.
