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Great writing by Matt Zoller Seitz!

Federalism is regarded as one of the signal American contributions to modern politics. Its origins are typically traced to the drafting of the Constitution, but the story began decades before the delegates met in Philadelphia.

In this groundbreaking book, Alison LaCroix traces the history of American federal thought from its colonial beginnings in scattered provincial responses to British assertions of authority, to its emergence in the late eighteenth century as a normative theory of multilayered government. The core of this new federal ideology was a belief that multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect but a virtue. This belief became a foundational principle and aspiration of the American political enterprise. LaCroix thus challenges the traditional account of republican ideology as the single dominant framework for eighteenth-century American political thought. Understanding the emerging federal ideology returns constitutional thought to the central place that it occupied for the founders. Federalism was not a necessary adaptation to make an already designed system work; it was the system.

Connecting the colonial, revolutionary, founding, and early national periods in one story reveals the fundamental reconfigurations of legal and political power that accompanied the formation of the United States. The emergence of American federalism should be understood as a critical ideological development of the period, and this book is essential reading for everyone interested in the American story.

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March 30, 2011

A trio of Ranciere titles

I am pleased to be able to announce the publication of not one, not two by three new studies of the work of Jacques Rancière, one of the most influential French thinkers writing today. Firstly, and slightly belatedly as this was in fact published last year, Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation, by Charles Bingham (Simon Fraser) and Gert Biesta (Stirling), a book that demonstrates the importance of Rancière’s educational thought and how educational theory needs to be informed by his philosophical project. It includes a new essay by Rancière himself and is a must-read for scholars of social theory and all who profess to educate.

Secondly, a book that represents the first comprehensive introduction to Rancière aimed at a student audience – Jacques Rancière: An Introduction by Joseph J. Tanke (California College of Arts). The book explores Rancière’s ideas on philosophy, aesthetics and politics and provides readers new to Rancière with a clear overview of his enormous intellectual output. Engaging with many un-translated and unpublished sources, the book will also be of interest to Rancière’s long-time readers.

Finally, Reading Rancière, edited by Paul Bowman (Cardiff) and Richard Stamp (Bath Spa), brings together leading international scholars in the first sustained critical exploration of Rancière’s work on politics, aesthetics and philosophy in English. The book offers a critically balanced response to the work of this major contemporary theorist, as well as a new interview and a key text published here for the first time.

And watch this space for translations of Rancière’s Althusser’s Lesson and Mallarmé, forthcoming this summer from Continuum.

Sarah 

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