Please join us for the third workshop of the Spring 2015 Term:

On the Limited Significance of Coercion in Theorizing the Nature of the State

Josh Keton, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Tuesday, March 24th, 2015, 4:30-6:00pm
Location: Room 5109 (Globalization Room)

Please see the abstract for the talk below.

On the Limited Significance of Coercion in Theorizing the Nature of the State

A central concern of political, legal and social theorists in the modern period has been to explore and ground morality and justice in terms of freedom and autonomy. One obvious threat to a person’s exercise of their freedom and autonomy is coercion—being forced by others to act contrary to one’s own will. As a result, the concept of coercion has been a central focus of many political, legal, and social theorists. . I argue that once we have analyzed coercion properly we will see that coercion is both dramatically more widespread than we had first assumed. This has the effect of making it the case that the “political” as it has been demarcated by some is much less contained than those theorists suspect, with radical implications for the need to extend principles of justice to areas of life which have normally been thought to be exempt.