Charles Mills has urged philosophers to turn their attention away from issues of class injustice and towards the deep inequalities in wealth, opportunity, and life prospects that divide racial groups in American society. Mills’s position is that philosophers on the left should make racial justice the higher priority. His argument advances two theses: first, race is a “material” structure with the same causal power Karl Marx attributed to class, and second, a reparations-oriented redistribution of wealth from all white to all black Americans is a moral imperative. Mills’s materialist understanding of race is cogently argued, but undercuts his moral argument favoring reparations. Considering (1) the extreme and growing inequality of wealth between black and white Americans and (2) pervasive white resistance to the goal of racial equality, a radical redistribution of wealth on the basis of class offers the only hope for progress towards the goal of racial justice.

The “Occupy Wall Street!” movement has stimulated a long listing of other candidates for radical “occupation.” In this paper, I suggest the occupation of liberalism itself. I argue for a constructive engagement of radicals with liberalism in order to retrieve it for a radical egalitarian agenda. My premise is that the foundational values of liberalism have a radical potential that has not historically been realized, given the way the dominant varieties of liberalism have developed. Ten reasons standardly given as to why such a retrieval cannot be carried out are examined and shown to be fallacious.

In this article, I argue that justice is necessarily inapplicable to the global scale, since there is no such thing as a global society in the proper sense. I examine why this is so, and criticize two types of arguments for global justice—maximalist conceptions (such as those of Charles Beitz and Allen Buchanan) that argue for a robust notion of redistribution on the global scale, and minimalist conceptions (such as those of Thomas Pogge and Iris Young) that argue for a notion of redress or solidarity across borders.

Derrick Darby’s book Rights, Race, and Recognition defends the seemingly startling thesis that all rights, moral as well as legal, are dependent upon social recognition. So there are no “natural” rights independent of social practices, and subordinated groups in oppressive societies (such as blacks under white supremacy) do not have rights. Darby appeals to intersubjectivist constructivism to make his meta-ethical case, but in this critique, I argue that he conflates, or at least fails to consistently distinguish, two radically different varieties of constructivism: idealized intersubjectivist constructivism, which is objectivist, and non-idealized conventionalist constructivism, which is relativist. In neither case, then, can Darby establish the shocking thesis that white supremacy objectively takes away blacks’ moral standing.

Leftist political theory remains trapped between two dominant conceptions of sovereignty: the liberal conception of popular sovereignty and the decisionist conception of sovereignty as the power to declare a state of exception. This essay offers a historical critique of the liberal and decisionist conceptions of sovereignty and develops a descriptive theory of aristocratic sovereignty, which is more suited to the history and the needs of radical political theory and praxis. By tracing the genealogy of sovereignty through early modern European political thought to the founding of the United States, this essay reveals the debilitating shortcoming of notions of sovereignty derived from both Carl Schmitt and the liberal tradition and provides a basis for a distinctively radical analysis of the sovereign aristocracy in Amerika.

This paper critically examines violence, and our shared responsibility for it. Drawing on insights from Jean-Paul Sartre, I develop the correlation between scarcity and violence, emphasizing scarcity as agential lack that results from conditions of oppression and domination. In order to develop this correlation between scarcity and violence, I examine the racial dimension of violence in the U.S. Following this analysis, I claim that we all share responsibility for the social structural processes in which we participate that produce scarcity. On these grounds, I argue for the imperative of democratic equality, i.e., conditions for the self-development and self-determination of all.

Humanism, the dominant underpinning theory of modem philosophy, has gone through significant challenges from the antihumanist critiques coming from thinkers such as Heidegger, Lacan, and Foucault. While humanism is certainly not dead, the pre-critical humanisms of thinkers such as Locke and Rawls are no longer sufficient ways to theorize the human after the anti-humanist critique. The anti-humanist critique has been sufficiently successful that we now stand in a philosophical landscape that is best understood as “posthumanist.” This does not mean that the desire to theorize the human from the human perspective, a la Husserl, is altogether dead. Rather, it is to suggest that any successful attempts at theorizing the human must take the anti-humanist critique into account. Theories that do so are best labeled “post-humanisms.” If, as Foucault suggested, Sartre and Lacan once stood as “alternate contemporaries” in the humanist/antihumanist landscape of the 1950s, then now, in this post-humanist landscape of contemporary philosophy, it is Lacan and Levinas, antihumanist and post-humanist, who stand as alternate contemporaries. Lacan’s anti-humanism is a powerful and attractive critique of the excesses of earlier humanisms that relied too heavily on transparent self-knowledge and freedom, instead placing the unconscious as the forefront of the human experience and encouraging us to dissolve “the subject who is supposed to know.“ Levinas’s post-humanism is a powerful and attractive way of attempting to rescue humanity from the totalizing forces of earlier humanisms while taking seriously the antihumanist critique, placing an an-archic responsibility to the other person at the forefront of the human experience. New possibilities await the philosopher in this new landscape, new ways of theorzing the human without falling into the pre-critical naivete of earlier humanisms. As we move philosophy deliberately into this post-humanist landscape, exciting new work has begun emerging, and will continue to emerge.

Liberation philosophy was born from radical, socialist roots. Yet recent developments by major figures in the tradition, including Enrique Dussel, would appear to position the movement unhelpfully closer to liberalism. The present article argues that this is a misconception, and that Liberation philosophy rather suggests a new ideal for conceptions of political justice, one that also helpfully avoids a number of common objections that dog traditional socialist proposals. The work of John Rawls is used as a dialogical counter point to suggest the relative merits for the new approach Liberation philosophy suggest for socialism.

One impediment facing socialists is the widespread belief among their opponents that they advance only by destroying things. Ironically, socialists often help spread this belief by declaring defeat when they are unsuccessful at destroying their targets. The thesis tested in this article is that, instead, socialism at its best hopes to transform the institutions we all inherit. It tries to transform values, culture, governance, production, and finance. Destroying that inheritance leaves no secure basis for generating a better world. The trick for the socialist realist is to find the right balance between radical destruction and timid gradualism.

The author explores the viability of rational political action - here understood as a philosophy of liberation - through an examination of practical and material, practical-discursive, strategic and instrumental, critically normative, discursive, and strategic criteria.

In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. Although I concur that same-sex couples should have the right to marry if anyone does, I argue that civil marriage is an unjust institution. By examining the claims employed in the majority opinion, I expose the Court’s romanticized, patriarchal view of marriage. I critique four central claims: (1) that marriage is central to individual autonomy and liberty; (2) that civil marriage is uniquely valuable; (3) that marriage “safeguards” children and families; and (4) that marriage is fundamental to civil society.