Selected publications

The Bureaucratic Origins of Political Theory: Administrative Labor in the "Other Half" of the History of Political Thought, Perspectives on Politics, 2024. 

Abstract: 

The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. Beginning then and there opens a new vista on the history of political thought by restoring questions of public administration to the foreground of the field. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their bureaucrats and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of wonder and enchantment. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas. Understanding public administration as an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic claims in contemporary democracies that bureaucracy is a recent alien imposition. 

Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724001087

This article explains the motivation and scope of my second book project, tentatively titled Bureaucracy and Public Goods: A New Global History of Human Political Thought. 

Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America, Political Theory, 2024. 

Abstract: 

One of Tocqueville’s best-known empirical claims in Democracy in America is that there is no national-level public administration in the United States. He asserts definitively and repeatedly that “administrative centralization does not exist” there. However, in scattered passages throughout the text, Tocqueville points to multiple federal agencies that contemporary historians and APD scholars characterize as instances of a growing national administrative system, such as the Post Office Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I reevaluate Tocqueville’s treatment of bureaucracy in America in light of this evidence. I contend that Tocqueville, perhaps in spite of himself, reveals even the most paradigmatic examples of active, democratic self-government in Democracy in America—townships and other voluntary associations—to be embedded in and causally supported by a network of interrelated, centralized public administrative institutions. Crucially, Tocqueville never resolves the tension between his acknowledgment of the causal power of these institutions and his claims that they do not exist. This new picture of the empirical and normative complexity of Tocqueville’s treatment of bureaucratic institutions offers a rich set of conceptual resources for contesting, among other claims, the political construction of nostalgia for a lost age of do-it-yourself White settler democracy in a time before bureaucracy in America. 

Link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231199279

This article is part of my second book project, tentatively titled Bureaucracy and Public Goods: A New Global History of Human Political Thought. 

Construire un avenir commun en période de conflit: Les conseils politiques de Montaigne, in Montaigne: Penser en temps de guerres de religion, edited by Thierry Gontier, Emiliano Ferrari, and Nicola Panichi, Classiques Garnier, 2022. 

Link: https://classiques-garnier.com/montaigne-penser-en-temps-de-guerres-de-religion-en.html#tabmat_link

This chapter presents key features of the argument of my first book, Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics (Oxford, 2018). 

La découverte moderne de la partisanerie: La psychologie politique dans les Essais, in Montaigne et le social, edited by Philippe Desan, Éditions Hermann, 2022.  

Link: https://www.editions-hermann.fr/livre/montaigne-et-le-social-philippe-desan

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of partisanship in a time before political parties. The essay puts historical research in conversation with contemporary social scientific study of political psychology to show the historical depth of challenges of partisan psychology in conflictual politics. 

An Ill-Fitting Coat: Reforming US Political Boundaries for Metropolitan Age, Journal of Politics, 2019. 

Abstract: 

Nearly all US residents live in metropolitan areas of various sizes and densities. Even most of “rural America” lives within “metropolitan America,” in close relationships of daily social and economic interchange with adjacent urban areas. The spatial distribution of these metropolitan nodes of settlement and activity does not correspond to the territorial boundaries that organize the US system of political representation. I argue that this mismatch poses two problems for the legitimacy of related US institutions: a form of malapportionment in which residents of different metropolitan areas arbitrarily receive different kinds of representation and a form of political fragmentation that frustrates local self-government and perpetuates distributive injustice on a national scale. I contend that these problems justify consideration of constitutional reform that would establish metropolitan regions as a principal unit of territorial constituency formation for purposes of political representation and democratic self-rule.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1086/700272

This article is part of a wider project that envisions new institutional forms for organizing urban and metropolitan life democratically. 

To "Philosophize upon Realities": Montaignian Political Education in Melville’s Billy Budd, Montaigne Studies, 2019. 

Link: https://classiques-garnier.com/montaigne-studies-2019-an-interdisciplinary-forum-n-31-montaigne-in-america-to-philosophize-upon-realities-montaignian-political-education-in-melville-s-billy-budd-en.html

Herman Melville was an enthusastic reader of Montaigne's Essais. This article traces Melville's reception of the Essais throughout his entire œuvre, with a special focus on Billy Budd. Relatedly, one of my cats is named Melville because he knocked Billy Budd from a bookshelf while my family were deciding what to call him. 

For a list of other publications and working papers in progress, see my CV page.