Works in Progress

Political realism has the resources for understanding a regime as legitimate to one group and illegitimate to another, according to the existing relations of attitudes, values, and beliefs; the historical constitution of who believes and values what, for what reasons; and how social position relates groups to one another and to the state. The conceptions of Blackness and whiteness prevailing in the 19^th Century U.S. manifest those relations, illustrating partial legitimacy. As a result, Black persons in the post-bellum South, even in the wake of Emancipation and their newly granted de jure citizenship status, were living under an illegitimate government, while white Americans were not.

This paper outlines the importance of culture and cultural resistance for notions of freedom, liberation, and decolonization that go beyond legality to penetrate the deepest recesses of sensibility and lived experience. I look to Amílcar Cabral’s Analysis of a Few Types of Resistance to frame decolonization in terms of the continual and ongoing lived freedom of emancipation through culture in addition to the more immediate overthrow of the yoke of occupation. On my reading, even the latter is underwritten by culture in specific ways. Cabral’s four-pronged blueprint for resistance – political, economic, cultural, and armed – highlights the importance of the everyday struggles and modes of living that encompass two distinct moments of decolonization and instantiate freedom.

Rousseau spends many pages throughout his writings focused on the idea of nature: what natural humanity may have looked like, how we might be our most natural selves, what sort of education is most natural to human beings, what natural language sounds like, as well as what to think about the nature that we encounter in the world. This essay argues that the different modes of silence that are operative in several of Rousseau's texts can shed special light on how he views nature and its relation to human beings. Silence understood as deception and as solitude can show us how Rousseau's conception of nature exerts influence on us as well as how we might ultimately become more attuned to our own natural selves.

Recent scholarship shows Hobbesian subjects with a set of rights, and sovereign authority constrained by a higher power. In tension with those arguments, I claim, is that Hobbes’ philosophy of language in Leviathan renders any speech against sovereign authority a fortiori irrational and legitimately punishable. Language, specifically speech, plays an integral role in grounding the authority of sovereign command. He affords speech the power to inaugurate truth and falsehood, and outlines its uses and abuses according to reason. The connection of speech to reason links speech to the laws of nature and the process of the social contract itself. As a result, sovereign commands become external manifestations of the internal powers of speech and reason shared by all human beings. Obeying the laws as a good subject, then, is parasitic on obeying the rules of language like a rational creature.