In recent years, political theorists have come to recognize the central role of affect in social and political life. A host of scholars, coming from a number of distinct traditions, have variously drawn our attention to the importance of the emotions to the tradition of the history of political thought, as well as to normative political theory. This attentiveness to affect is often cast as a break with earlier, Enlightenment-inspired liberal approaches towards politics, approaches that marginalized the emotions, dismissing the passions as potentially dangerous, or neglected them altogether. According to the conventional liberal view, emotions are said to have no place in the public sphere, while proceduralist institutions abstract away from citizens’ affective attachments, now cast as private preferences of individuals qua citizens. In this paper we challenge this prevalent view. We argue that no less a liberal theorist than John Rawls is deeply attentive to the place of emotions in his account of liberalism. This may seem counterintuitive given that Rawls' work has been frequently criticized for epitomizing some of the deepest problems of contemporary liberal theory, as a result of the emphasis on rationalism and reasonableness in his account of liberal justice. However, against this prevalent reading, we demonstrate that Rawls is in fact highly concerned with the role of affect and presents us with an account of the embedded liberal subject. By drawing out these dimensions of Rawls' thought, we hope to contribute to upending the conventional view of liberalism as affect-blind in order to encourage a more nuanced reading of the liberal tradition.
Military attachés and wartime observers have received surprisingly little attention in international relations. Why do states exchange attachés, permitting uniformed foreigners to gather intelligence on their territory and during their wars? To explain, we adopt a broadly practice-theoretic approach, focusing on the individuals who developed the role by living it, showing how they both innovated a distinct military practice and established institutional legitimacy for attachés. We address an early historical case in which the practice proliferated: the Russo-Japanese War, throughout which observers represented multiple European states, on both sides of the conflict. Sometimes termed the first modern war, the conflict saw Japan's entry into the Eurocentric great power system. In this context, embedded attachés had a dual effect. On the one hand, a professional attaché community established itself: we show how local innovation by embedded officers, in the context of this structurally destabilising event, permitted the creation of a new institutional role that might otherwise have been impossible. On the other, the Japanese made use of the attachés as witnesses for Western governments, observing their performance of great power-hood, as they defeated Russia. The argument has implications for understanding both the military attaché system and communities of practice as such.
This paper contributes to recent debates over the place of race in liberal theory, and the work of John Rawls in particular. Controversy has centered on whether Rawls's broader philosophical approach is capable of addressing racial injustice, and if not, precisely why the Rawlsian framework remains disconcertingly blind to such issues. Pace scholars who focus on Rawls's emphasis on "ideal theory," and whether that precludes his engagement with racial domination, we show that Rawls's inability to account for, or address, racial injustice lies in his limited understanding of the kinds of "associations" or institutions that condition and perpetuate racial oppression. As studies in race and American Political Development have shown, nonstatutory institutions such as political parties, unions, and universities were key to the development and maintenance of racial hierarchical order. Fully understanding the role of these institutions in perpetuating racial injustice allows us to see that the limitations of Rawls are not his ideal theory, per se, but his preoccupation with the "basic structure" of society, which rendered such institutions outside his analysis. We conclude by drawing on thinkers in the Afro-Modern tradition who help us conceptualize how such institutions are complicit in, and can be weaponized against, racial domination.
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