Political Concepts

J. M. Bernstein, Adi Ophir, Ann Laura Stoler

Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what grounds; to what ends- these seem like properly political questions themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of reimagining them differently. Political Concepts seeks to revive our common political vocabulary - both everyday and academic -and to do so critically. Its entries take the form of essays in which each contributor presents her or his own original reflection on a concept posed in the traditional Socratic question format “What is X?” and asks what sort of work a rethinking of that concept can do for us now. The explicitness of a radical questioning of this kind gives authors both the freedom and the...