Alexander Livingston
Alexander Livingston is a political theorist specializing in the areas of American political thought, democratic theory, and political ethics. His recent book, Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), examines William James’s role in debates about U.S. imperialism at the turn of the century to show how pragmatism developed as a political response to the crises of authority and sovereignty driving the expansion of American power. He is currently writing a book on the genealogy of civil disobedience and the politics of nonviolence in the civil rights and antiwar movements.
His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, Theory & Event, Humanity, Contemporary Pragmatism, and Philosophy and Rhetoric, edited volumes including A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as venues such as Jacobin Magazine. Livingston teaches courses in the areas of American political thought and philosophy, activism and disobedience, theories of nonviolence, contemporary critical theory, and the history of political thought. Before coming to Cornell, he was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University (2011-2013). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.
www.alexander-livingston.com
His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, Theory & Event, Humanity, Contemporary Pragmatism, and Philosophy and Rhetoric, edited volumes including A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as venues such as Jacobin Magazine. Livingston teaches courses in the areas of American political thought and philosophy, activism and disobedience, theories of nonviolence, contemporary critical theory, and the history of political thought. Before coming to Cornell, he was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University (2011-2013). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.
www.alexander-livingston.com
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Books by Alexander Livingston
Against the common view of James as a thinker who remained silent on questions of politics, this book places him in dialogue with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as a transatlantic critique of modernity, in order to excavate James's anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy.
Papers by Alexander Livingston
Against the common view of James as a thinker who remained silent on questions of politics, this book places him in dialogue with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as a transatlantic critique of modernity, in order to excavate James's anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy.
How should we think about the Anthropocene as something that is actualized as a means of control, where new forms of data capture and analytics are bent toward the dream of total environmental management through total environmental awareness? Connolly’s engagement with the concept of swarming in Facing the Planetary (2017) has influenced some of my own recent work in the Gulf, and how to think about the ways in which its totalitarian futures inhabit the spaces between unrestrained desires for mastery over the environment, and the realization that contemporary modes of living and consumption are unsustainable to human life. In this project, I use the concept of substrate to describe a form of post-essence political and social engineering, where more purposeful forms of surveillance blend with new aspirational forms of ‘catch-all’ surveillance exemplified in the term ‘big data.’ Here, the data-driven terraforming of the desert, and ultimately Mars, as well as new visions of automated security and policing in Abu Dhabi and Dubai reveal experimental hyper-modern projects that dream of an interplanetary system of control built on the total saturation of surveillance and total plasticity of life as substrate. Connolly’s work has enabled me to more deeply engage this research as a ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Eben and Helmreich, 2010), to look for new modes of intransigence when these forms of control fail, as well as how to be attuned to unexpected opportunities for new articulations of politics.