Seeing Like an Activist is a profound—and profoundly political—book. Skillfully distilling complex historical evidence into a vivid narrative and advancing a compelling theoretical argument, Pineda unsettles conventional accounts of the civil rights movement to ask what we can learn about the nature and limits of civil disobedience “by reconsidering the example we already think we know so well” (3). One of the book's key contributions is its analysis of political practices that constituted the “short civil rights movement”—the decade of southern protest bookended by the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955–56 and the Selma March in 1965. “The civil rights movement (and its multitude of activists),” Pineda observes, “operates between the lines of theory as an object lesson—a ready-made example that proves the moral purchase of the theory, rather than a live source of novel theoretical insights and political claims” (48). As object lesson, the movement is often recruited to police or criticize forms of protest that are said to fall short of the disciplined nonviolence of the past. This view of history, Pineda contends, enables theorists of civil disobedience like John Rawls to use the example of civil rights activism to affirm the liberal constitutional order. Offering incisive critiques of Rawls, Michael Walzer, and Hugo Bedau, Pineda exposes the unearned ease with which political theories that do not take racial injustice as a central concern or focus on Black theoretical practices have conscripted the civil rights movement in service of their arguments.

Between fifteen and twenty-five million Americans took to the streets in the summer of 2020 to march, mourn, occupy highways, clash with police, and be together in grief and rage. Municipal and state police forces responded with a national campaign of excessive force. Demonstrators were clubbed, tear gassed, sprayed with chemical agents, kettled and trampled, illegally detained, and mutilated by “less-than-lethal” munitions. Internal police reviews and municipal leaders blamed the violence on insufficient training but the scale and intensity of repression suggest a more profound democratic crisis surrounding the criminalization of dissent.

From the Freedom Rides to the students’ lunch counter sit-ins, the campaigns of the civil rights movement are seen as the archetypes of civil disobedience. Pineda's wonderful and brilliant book draws on rich archival and historical research to peel the layers of idealization, romanticization, and ideology that have turned the classical phase of the civil rights movement (1954–1965) into both myth and protest template. This illuminating, insightful, and beautifully written book is a must-read for anyone interested in civil disobedience.

Pineda's book is an original and imaginative reconstruction of activist strategy and political theory, upending the orthodox account of civil disobedience during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Against liberal and democratic theorists who domesticate civil disobedience in the United States, with the aim of legitimizing the nation's constitutional democracy as “nearly just,” or in need of reform rather than revolution, Pineda argues that civil rights activists “theorized and deployed” civil disobedience as “decolonizing praxis” (16). She traces the decades-long history in which Black activists in the United States crafted their strategy of civil disobedience through embodied spaces, relationships, and practices of “imaginative transit” with revolutionaries in India, South Africa, and Ghana. These networks of transit enabled activists to diagnose segregation and colonialism as sites of a “shared, global condition” (59) of white supremacy, “operating with a common, reinforcing logic” of economic, political, and psychological domination (89). As a decolonizing praxis, civil disobedience combined an “inward-facing politics” of self-emancipation with an “outward-facing politics” (16) of disruption and disclosure—aimed not at reforming aberrations in constitutional democracy, but at “transforming the psychological, structural, and relational bases of white supremacy” (59).

This article examines animals and animality in Hannah Arendt's political thought by focusing on the phenomenological approach she develops in The Life of the Mind. Building on the works of Adolf Portmann and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Arendt invites us to understand the world in terms of the plurality of all living things who appear to each other in anticipation of being perceived in their distinctness. While Arendt's phenomenology is generative for rethinking politics beyond human exclusivity, it also sits uneasily with her anthropocentric claims that risk reducing animals to reactive organisms driven by biological necessity. Mobilizing Arendt's phenomenology against her anthropocentrism, the article outlines a worldly politics in which all living things engage in multitudinous forms of intra- and interspecies encounter, reciprocity, and responsiveness. To illustrate this worldly politics, the article revisits Arendt's famous call for “a right to have rights” and engages with the debates on animal rights.

Is Hannah Arendt's political thought relevant to the contemporary planetary situation? This article draws on The Human Condition and some of Arendt's ancient and modern sources to answer this question, using a phenomenological distinction between outdoors and indoors to make sense of three likely types of artificial adaptation to a warming planet. Arendt's account of the importance of the “body-bound senses” of an “earth-bound creature” need not result in the problematic fetishization of immediate rather than mediated knowledge, or of an “earthly nature” supposedly prior to and independent of the human artifice, but can draw attention to the narrowing of human beings’ “angle of receptivity” to a surprising and unpredictable reality. This perspective, however, also discloses the limits of Arendt's work in the face of ecological transformations that are simultaneously planetary in scale and highly unequal in their consequences.

Many Machiavelli scholars emphasize his discussion of fear and neglect the important role that hope plays in his thought. I analyze Machiavelli's frequent references to hope throughout his corpus to offer an explanation of what he means by ‘hope,” examine the relation between hope and fear, and identify the benefits, dangers, and limits of these two foundational and complementary passions. Greater attention to the role of hope in Machiavelli's thought can help us understand the significance of this passion for Machiavelli's political project, particularly his view of freedom.

Many people today are concerned about the implications of climate change for their personal reproductive decisions. Some have transformed such concerns into activism by engaging in a “birth strike” and publicly announcing their decision not to procreate because of climate change. This article draws on Hannah Arendt to examine the political meaning and significance of birth strikes. It makes three basic points. First, by highlighting the human condition of being born, what Arendt called natality, birth strikes have illuminated a distinctive set of threats and possibilities for climate politics. Second, due to modern consumerism and instrumentalism, which Arendt saw as the dominance of labor and work over action, birth strikes have been misperceived as advocating a reduction in personal carbon footprints and global population growth. Third, birth strikes have clarified some of the challenges for efforts to link the individual and collective dimensions of climate responsibility.

Liberal views of civil disobedience that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s can only be properly interpreted with recourse to the complicated history of the early civil rights movement's selective appropriation of the labor sit-downs of the 1930s. This essay addresses the messy but basically successful effort by civil rights sit-inners and the lawyers who defended them to circumvent the repressive state and legal response—especially the US Supreme Court ruling in National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation (1939)—that the 1930s sit-downers garnered. My reexamination of the sit-ins places influential liberal ideas about civil disobedience in a fresh light. In his influential theory of civil disobedience, John Rawls mirrored key features of the politically and legally savvy strategy of delinking the lunch counter sit-ins from the workplace sit-downs. The result was a somewhat restrictive view of civil disobedience that sidelined matters of economic justice.

The eighteenth century is often thought of as an important era for the secularization of British philosophy. One dimension of this secularization involves philosophers developing theories that, while not explicitly rejecting God, are less reliant on claims about God for their intelligibility and plausibility. A comparison of Adam Smith with his teacher, Francis Hutcheson, reveals an underappreciated facet of this process. Hutcheson portrayed God as an impartial legislator and used this metaphor to clarify contested moral rules in a way that would make little sense if God did not exist. In contrast, Smith's impartial spectator does not require belief in a God who is the author of the moral law in order to determine the correct interpretation of contested moral principles. By pursuing this alternative conception of impartiality, Smith developed a theory that was, in this respect, less reliant on religious premises than Hutcheson's had been.

Michel Foucault once wrote, “Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.”1 This affect of revolutionary force stems from the joyful militancy of bringing into existence the already possibly present worlds that are assumed to be impossible.2

In the wake of the Trump presidency—with its endemic corruption, norm-breaking, and open subversion of the rule of law culminating in an attempted insurrection and ongoing false claims of election fraud—an overdue national conversation about the health of US democracy is taking place. For many, this was their first conscious experience of US democracy as imperiled or in crisis, and it raised pressing questions about whether there was cause to hope rather than despair, and of what the sources of such democratic faith might be. Black political thought has long grappled with the foundational deficits of US democracy; even as Black activists have worked tirelessly to bring about such alternative futures the persistence of white supremacy has made it difficult to hope in the possibility of radical transformation. Reckoning provides rigorous, complex answers to the question of how to practice democratic hope and refuse despair without trafficking in easy answers or simple prescriptions. According to Woodly, social movements:

A “reckoning” is an opportunity to settle a score. It is a moment of collision between what is and what is due. Woodly's excellent book not only espouses the formation and political organization of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) coalition, but it also describes how social movements challenge the status quo and demand transformation in light of systems that work only for the powerful few. This transformation, Woodly shows, is brought about by the grassroots theorizing and political praxis of social movement organizers. Reckoning models the development of these new ideas, demonstrating both their intellectual and practical legacies. In this essay, I consider Woodly's theoretical formulation of the M4BL's philosophy of “radical Black feminist pragmatism” and what I see are (1) its promise for centering the reorienting practices of radical Black feminist politics and (2) the ways “pragmatism” as a frame stands in tension with those radical elements of the movement.

Can and should judges refer to the natural law? I address these questions from the point of view of James Wilson, paying specific attention to a question the scholarship does not address: Why does Wilson believe judges can (and must), in certain instances, refer to natural law? I develop a new taxonomy of Wilson's conception of judgment that answers this question. Wilson's definition of judgment as including the moral sense and reason, and his division of reasoning into demonstrative, moral, and legal reasoning, indicate why he countenances judicial recourse to natural law in certain cases yet remains committed to popular sovereignty and judicial restraint. Wilson describes “judgments of nature” as intuitive judgments based on self-evident truths and articulates how judges might be called upon to make certain judgments based on a manifest repugnancy to the natural law. His judicial decisions confirm this commitment to natural law and judicial restraint.

In his encyclopedic masterwork Li livres dou Tresor (The Books of Treasure), the mid-thirteenth-century Florentine civil servant and rhetorician Brunetto Latini proclaimed “the very wise Marcus Tullius Cicero” to be “the finest orator in the world and the master of rhetoric.”1 How might this remark by a medieval professional civic administrator (even one with pronounced Ciceronian proclivities) pertain to Goodman's book? I take as my inspiration for the ensuing comments Latini's phrase in Tresor—“The very wise Marcus Tullius Cicero”—in relation to the final word of Goodman's subtitle: “Conditions.” As I began to peruse Words on Fire, I expected to encounter discussion of “wisdom” and of related ideas such as “reason,” “natural law,” and “justice” rather often. After all, these factors constitute indispensable features of Cicero's political theory. I was thus greatly surprised to discover that Goodman mentions them only belatedly and briefly (65–66).

Goodman defends that most maligned aspect of the rhetorical tradition: eloquence. Surely, one would think that eloquence, by its very nature, speaks for itself and quite effectively so, with all the pleasing and persuasive effects of a grand style. Perhaps popular audiences are easily carried along by decorous speech, but Goodman addresses his defense to theorists of politics who tend to greet obvious rhetorical flourish with a deep suspicion of manipulation and deception, or at least of frivolity. On this view, the best thing that can be said about eloquence in its classical form is that it poses no serious threat since the modern advent of mass society and large-scale democracy marks its demise. Goodman forces readers to reconsider the story of the rhetorical tradition's elitist, manipulative, and obsolete character through an engaging, nuanced, and unexpected retelling of Ciceronean eloquence as a tradition that spans the ancient and modern world, one that survives and responds to the challenges of democratic judgment in large polities. Goodman's compelling and insightful book poses an important challenge to theorists of democracy, both contemporary and historical, to take eloquence seriously as an invitation to democratic judgment.