Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics

by Bonnie Honig

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.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1993

About the author

Bonnie Honig is a political and legal theorist specialized in democratic and feminist theory. She is Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Senior Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University.

Prior to moving to Northwestern University, Prof. Honig taught at Harvard University for several years. The 1997 decision by then-President of Harvard Neil Rudenstine not to offer Honig tenure was highly controversial, and attracted harsh criticism from a number of prominent Harvard professors as a violation of Rudenstine's stated commitment to increasing the number of tenured female professors.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something’s awry in the state of political theory, and it involves - of all things - a strange and pervasive aversion to, well... politics. That is, not the celebration of contest and the political ‘agon’, but its minimisation, bureaucratisation and ‘management’ have now become the name of the game, each working to ‘displace’ politics, forcing it into a no-man’s land of theoretical abyss, unacknowledged and under-cherished. Such, at any rate, is the argument of Bonnie Honig in this classic of political reckoning which, in 2017, has lost nothing of it’s more-than-two-decade-old force of reason and insight. Taking on, as emblematic, the work of John Rawls and Michael Sandel, Honig shows how each ends up closing down and walling off sites of political contestation, appealing instead to particular versions of the 'well-ordered society’ that, far from instantiating a vision of politics, instead disperses and displants it in ways that are, in fact, more ‘anti-political’ than not.

More than just a ‘local’ diagnosis of the contemporary winds however (and even then, not that contemporary anymore!), the lasting takeaway of Honig’s book lies instead in it’s ability to rethink and revitalise our very understanding of what politics 'is’ to begin with. Inspired principally by the work of Hannah Arendt, for whom politics was always crucially distinguished from the ‘administration of things’, it’s precisely this Arendtian insight that is taken up and reworked for the sake of establishing a more robust and ‘open’ politics than has largely been available. Distinguishing, then, between a politics of 'virtue' and a politics of 'virtù' (roughly, a politics of 'closure' and a politics of 'openness' respectively), it's to charting these by turns competing and complimentary approaches to political theory that properly defines the project of this book.

Hence too the engagements with say, Kant, Nietzsche, Derrida and Machiavelli, each of whom are also wielded as weapons in Honig's intellectual arsenal of political refinement. While scholarly in its approach and academic in its orientation, it's ultimately Honig's vision of what politics can be - its dangers and its promises, its contingencies and its necessities - that provides the driving force of this wonderful book. If anything, Honig somewhat underplays the very radically that lies at the heart of her tract, keeping her eye almost a little too closely on the subjects of her readings, relaxing rather than intensifying the political energies she otherwise works so hard to circumscribe. Harnessed by a perspicuous reader however, one can still think of the many fires yet to burn among the kindling that remains political theory today.