Peer Reviewed Publications
“We Are Free and We Wish to Be Free”: Political Thought and the Peasants’ War
History of the Present (2025) 15 (1): 93–115.
https://doi.org/10.1215/21599785-11561531
This essay explores the symptomatic absence of the German Peasants’ War (1525)—the largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution—from classical political thought. It begins with Leo Strauss’s and Sheldon Wolin’s appraisals of what united the body of literature, namely, that the role of the political theorist is to articulate and advocate visions of order. The abundant archive of peasant demands, sermons, ordinances, territorial constitutions, and prophecies were inscrutable to the order-oriented assumptions of traditional political philosophy. First, because the theory produced in the struggle was not separate from insurgent action. The uprising was led, articulated, and theorized by those who were dismissed as fanatics rather than engaged by authorities and by political thinkers like Sir Thomas More. The essential unit of organization and voice of the Peasants’ War was collective—no singular author appears to reflect on the conjuncture from a detached vantage. The political aims of this period were at once theological, existential, and economic. These aims were expressed through a “political theology of ingression” whose key gesture was to bridge separations. Peasants sought to literalize metaphor and to discern the literal as already allegorical: the material condition of serfdom was simultaneously a form of spiritual bondage; biblical images of divine common life could be actualized by sharing life, land, and goods on earth.
Unfinished Acts: Utopia, Thomas More, and the Peasants’ War
Forthcoming in Political Theory
This essay interprets Thomas More’s Utopia, not chiefly through its intended audience, an elite, international circle of Humanists and jurists, but through its intentionally excluded audience: the lower classes of Europe. Five centuries of scholarship on the critique of private property in his Utopia have generally overlooked More’s opposition to the largest popular uprising of his time, the German Peasants’ War. This essay argues that More’s polemics against proto-communist movements and thinkers, like Protestant propagandist Simon Fish, are essential to understanding Utopia in context. More’s Tudor schooling trained him in forms of legal play meant to sharpen the faculties to adroitly enforce law and social order. Challenges to law, private property, and authority were “heresies” for Sir Thomas More. The attempt to restrict Utopia’s readership mirrored More’s opposition to heretical, vulgar translations of the New Testament. He feared that the ungovernable play of a literal reading would result in disastrous misinterpretations: in acts of popular uprising that sought to put all things in common.
“Something’s Missing”: Ernst Bloch’s Utopia
Forthcoming in A Global History of Utopias
“My friend Ernst Bloch is the one mainly responsible for restoring honor to the word ‘utopia,’” Theodor Adorno observed live on German radio in 1964 (Bloch, 1988, 1). The ring of associations that haloes the term “utopian” today—futurity, hope, dream-wish, imagination, radical change—is largely due to the work of German-Jewish Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977). Bloch’s Marxism was highly idiosyncratic. It was too unorthodox for West Germany of the 1940s and 50s, but ultimately too heretical for the GDR in the twilight of Stalinism. His theorization of communism by way of a philosophy of utopia and hope blended an ontological philosophy of nature and matter, Christian and Jewish mysticism, a global history of philosophy, literature, and music. This article will introduce several key concepts for understanding the development of Bloch’s idea of utopia: the not-yet, the Real-Possible, and the distinction between abstract and concrete utopia. In his two major explorations of utopia, in Spirit of Utopia (1918) and his magnum opus, The Principle of Hope Vols 1-3 (1953), Bloch redefined the term, wresting utopia from the influence of the first literary utopias of the sixteenth century that conjure unrealizable idealist blueprints and fiction. Bloch’s Thomas Müntzer (1921) and Avicenna (1952) are two key bridge-works between Spirit of Utopia and Principle of Hope that allowed him to perform this redefinition. Bloch’s lifework was to refashion utopia into a concept that connotes a luminous human faculty that leads to the blending of inner and outer realms, of dreams and social structure, of the present and the future, and of immanence and transcendence.
Book Reviews
Apocalypse Without God by Ben Jones, Utopian Studies 36.1 (forthcoming)
“Critique of Critique of Critique,” Theory & Event 26.4 (2023)