Puritanism, Power, and the Grammar of American Politics In 1630, aboard the Arbella before it reached Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop delivered a sermon that every American president from Kennedy to Obama has cited as founding inspiration. The routine treatment of "city upon a hill" as aspirational metaphor is
On Representation, Display, and the Optic Animal There is a structural dishonesty at the centre of political theory that the discipline has managed, with considerable ingenuity, to avoid confronting. Political actors do not represent reality. They display versions of it — versions shaped by the desires, collective and structural, that produce
There is a recurring embarrassment in the literature of political theory. Its foundational texts — Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls — present themselves as analyses of power: what it is, where it comes from, how it might be justly arranged. And yet the closer one reads them, the more one notices what they
A unified framework for understanding how political authority is built, defended, and perpetuated across history I. The Question Nobody Asks Political science has spent considerable energy cataloguing the failures of democracy, the mechanics of authoritarianism, and the conditions under which regimes rise and fall. What it has spent comparatively little
The pattern is too consistent to be accidental. 1789 gives way to the Terror, then Napoleon. 1848's February revolution gives way to the June massacre, then Napoleon III. The Paris Commune of 1871 ends in the Semaine sanglante. 1917 ends in Stalin. 1949 ends in the Cultural Revolution.