Author Meets Critics: Emma Planinc, "Regenerative Politics"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This author-meets-critics panel will discuss Emma Planinc’s new book, Regenerative Politics, published by Columbia University Press (2024) as part of their New Directions in Critical Theory Series.

Regenerative Politics makes a bold intervention into the fraught landscape of contemporary liberal democracies, arguing that the survival of rights in the modern world will depend on losing their claims to self-evidence. Critics of liberal democracies from both the Left and Right view rights as impediments to self-determination, and want to see a new, regenerated future for human beings. Liberals respond to these challengers by reasserting the self-evidence of universal rights, intentionally foreclosing the possibility of remaking the political order. Planinc argues that liberal democracies must instead open themselves up to a regenerative politics that accepts all human claims against political convention as self-determinative—including those that desire the rejection of rights, or the overturning of liberal democracies themselves.
Bringing together contemporary scholarship on race, democracy, liberalism, fascism and the Far Right, with an intellectual history of the Enlightenment, of the French Revolution, and a novel account of human nature, Regenerative Politics offers a new political theory for the revitalization of politics. While it is not without risk, Planinc shows that liberal democracies would arm themselves against extreme challenges by remaining perpetually open to the reconstitution of rights, restoring the capacity for human beings to determine themselves in the world.

Blending the history of political thought with critical theory and normative political theory, Regenerative Politics speaks to a wide audience and invites a broad range of engagement. Involving distinguished junior and senior scholars who will approach the book from diverse critical and historical perspectives, this panel will offer the audience the chance to think through Regenerative Politics and the varied perspectives it elicits in response. The theme of APSA 2024, Democracy: Retrenchment, Renovation, and Reimagination, “focuses on the perils and promises of the democratic project over time: how to understand backsliding, defining and meeting threats, renovating institutions and practices, and imagining new ones.” By speaking to the core of these concerns, Planinc proposes that we think regeneratively, offering a daring vision of what it might mean to take seriously the challenges our liberal democracies face, inviting us to remake the world with a genuine commitment to self-determination.

The critics include Leigh Jenco (LSE), Chandran Kukathas (SMU), Alison McQueen (Stanford), and Avshalom Schwartz (Stanford). Nina Valiquette Moreau (University of Chicago) will chair the panel, and Emma Planinc (University of Notre Dame) will offer a response.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Chair

• Nina Valiquette Moreau University of Chicago

Presenters

• Leigh K. Jenco London School of Economics

• Chandran Kukathas Singapore Management University

• Alison McQueen Stanford University

• Avshalom M Schwartz Southern Methodist University

• Emma Planinc University of Notre Dame