Making Marx Effective

The Politics of Responsibility

Responsibility is not only a mainstay in political thought, it is also one of the field's most contentious concepts. Because it enables us to identify causes of events and to punish or reward actors for their behaviors, the concept seems indispensable to any practical ordering of human activity. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine representative politics or legal liability functioning without the ability to hold actors responsible for their actions. Discussing both popular and academic approaches to contemporary issues, The Politics of Responsibility demonstrates how hegemonic approaches to responsibility mediate our experience of political life, leading to an overemphasis on singular events with identifiable authors (e.g., police brutality) to the neglect of more commonplace abuse of state and economic power and more routine instances of victimization (through, e.g., the unavailability of affordable housing, health care, decent schools, and clean air). What I call postliberal responsibility allows us to thematize a greater range of issues by providing a language with which to talk about events and conditions that cannot be said to arise from the willed actions of individuals.

The crucial role that responsibility plays in allowing us to organize our world explains why structural and poststructural analysis remain today of such disputed political value: as these approaches disrupt the integrity of the individuated and autonomous subject, they simultaneously unsettle the very foundations for conventional notions of responsibility. Clearly, the these criticisms suggest the need for either an abandonment or a refashioning of the concept. The Politics of Responsibility explores possibilities for reconciling political responsibility with a critique of the liberal subject. In particular, I argue that while marxists and poststructuralists each take issue with the liberal model of the individual subject, their overlapping trajectories are simultaneously attentive to the necessity of sustained political engagement. That is, by accounting for both the indispensability and the inadequacy of the concept of responsibility, I show how the postliberal subject is also a responsible subject.

The book makes two unique contributions to this enduring, interdisciplinary debate about possibilities and necessities for political agency. First, it aligns political thought of the past two centuries around this debate and establishes the trends as various responses to the waning and waxing of political and philosophical liberalisms. In other words, the books first contribution is theoretical and academic, organizing the literature on agency and explaining how recent literature recommends a transformation rather than abandonment of the liberal concept of responsibility.

The second main contribution of the book is practical. The reader of The Politics of Responsibility is rewarded not only with textual exegeses and intellectual clarity, but with examinations of particular social and political concerns. The book offers extensive postliberal analysis of globalization, police brutality, and abortion as approaches to understanding, respectively, economic, state, and moral approaches to responsibility. The book thereby engages the raging debate over the political value of postliberal theory by applying its insights to issues of pressing political concern.

This project is of a particular urgency because, as mentioned, the viability of the contemporary institutions of electoral politics and legal liability depend upon a coherent theory of responsibility. The liberal model of individual agency is very seductive for its ability to articulate clear lines of responsibility; though it has been subject to any number of critiques for obstructing our view of the larger forces and conditions within which actors and actions become possible, it seems nevertheless clear that abandoning it threatens our ability to challenge institutions of economic injustice, state brutality, or medical persecution. Indeed, a defensible theory of responsibility seems essential to avoiding a world of political quietism and structural apologias for avoidable harms. It is with this in mind that postliberals seek a reconstruction of the term that avoids the pitfalls of liberalism.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One: Theories of Response

Chapter 1. Responsible Subjects

Chapter 2. Making Marx Effective: Postliberal Agency in the Brumaire

Chapter 3. Judith Butler's Responsible Performance

Part Two: Responses of Theory

Chapter 4. Who Responds to Global Capital?

Chapter 5. Postliberal Responsibility and the Death of Amadou Diallo

Chapter 6. Conceptions of Responsibility: On Health as a Choice

Conclusion. Forgetting to Forgive