Johns Hopkins University

Post-Doc, Political Science

Thesis Title: William James and the Force of Habit

About

Alex Livington is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canda postdoctoral fellow in the department of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University. His research interests lie in the fields of democratic theory, American political thought, pragmatism, and politics and emotion.

He is currently working on two research projects. The first is a manuscript project based on his doctoral dissertation tentatively titled "William James and the New Gilded Age". This project examines how James's moral psychology shaped his distinctive view of democratic individualism. The central claim of the book is that James offers a novel perspective to the foreclosure of political agency. Focusing in on his sociological analysis of complexity, docility, and cynicism, the book argues that James's account of the democratic predicaments of the Gilded Age continue to resonate within the contemporary neoliberal political context of the 'New' Gilded Age. The study makes this case by looking at three episodes of the foreclosure and recovery of agency in James's thinking: his engagement with Darwinian science and his nervous breakdown in the 1870's and 80's; his critique of democratic docility and debate on civic action with Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American war; and the cynical adaptation of James's psychology by the democratic realism of Walter Lippmann in the 1920's. Drawing links between the cultural, scientific, and political predicaments of the late 19th and early 21st century, the book argues that rather than resignation, political theory can learn from James attempt to recover political agency in terms of a novel view of democratic conviction.

The second project concerns the relationship between affect and power in the public sphere. Recently political scientists have been eager to embrace the positive role of emotions in politics, but they have largely turned a blind eye to concerns about emotional manipulation. This project deploys James's radical empiricism as a lens for studying political manipulation. While scholars in media and cultural-studies have made major strides in explaining the how of manipulation, normative and conceptual research on what constitutes manipulation or why manipulation ought to be criticized as a threat to democracy have not kept up. Funded by a fellowship from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2010-2012) this project brings together political science, neuroscience, and media studies to explore how the distinction between persuasion and manipulation can be sustained within the heavily media-saturated environment of the 21st century. This research asks how a radical empiricist account of the public sphere as a space not only of communication but also of shared and contagious feelings both complicates the ideal of democratic deliberation and provides a critical lens for understanding the varieties of political persuasion beyond reasoned deliberation.

Alex recently spent the academic year 2009-2010 as a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. His scholarly work has appeared in the journals Political Theory and Philosophy and Rhetoric. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Univeristy of Toronto.

His guiding lights are William James and Michel Foucault

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