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The Subject of Politics

David Roberts writes in his introduction

The question common to the papers in the present issue is that of the subject of politics, more exactly, the revolutionary subject, the counter-revolutionary subject, and the political subject as such. The theorists are European and the focus, with the exception of one paper on the contemporary French philosopher Ranciėre, is the European political crisis from the early twentieth century through to the interwar years.

What constitutes the modern political subject, and how can this postulated individual participate in, be determined by, and rebel against, political regimes? This collection of essays approaches these questions from different perspectives and locales. They engage with the traditions of emancipatory politics and critical theory as well as contemporary theoretical forms of understanding. David Roberts’ lucid introduction is highly recommended for the browsing reader.

Table of Contents

Introduction
David Roberts

Reading Polish peripheral Marxism politically

The new journal, Sociological Science, is now up and running. The goal:

• Open access: Accepted works are freely available, and authors retain copyright
• Timely: Sociological Science will make editorial decisions within 30 days; accepted works appear online immediately upon receipt of final version
• Evaluative, not developmental: Rather than focus on identifying potential areas for improvement in a submission, editors focus on judging whether the submission as written makes a rigorous and thoughtful contribution to sociological knowledge
• Concise: Sociological Science encourages a high ratio of novel ideas and insights to written words
• A community: The journal’s online presence is intended as a forum for commentary and debate aimed at advancing sociological knowledge and bringing into the open conversations that usually occur behind the scenes between authors and reviewers

I congratulate them for doing this. This takes some courage to do. We need many different types of journals. And, sadly, we are lacking…

The American Society for Civil Engineering has created a nifty interactive website about the state of infrastructure in America at http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/.

The website is appealing to look at and intuitive to use if you’re curious about, in this case, how poor American infrastructure really is in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Bottom-line: America gets a failing grade, but only-just-failing at a D+.

For STS scholars, this might be one of those great cases in the rough that could bring the “assessment” or “accounting” literature together with infrastructure studies given that the infrastructures must be defined in order to be counted and compared, and, as such, provides a right backdrop upon with some solid STS-oriented research could start from … and STSers will no doubt love this “grading rubric” available at the sight to legitimize and justify the grading standards. Also, of particular interest to scholars…