M. Christopher Sardo
PhD, Political Theory
Northwestern University
Research
Research Interests
Political thinking and action are shaped, constrained, and enabled by the political concepts, values, discourses, and ideologies by which we make sense of the political world. The ways that core political concepts - such as liberty, equality, responsibility, and even politics itself - get defined have profound impacts on political life, by defining the scope and contours of the political world itself. As the terms of political discourse are defined, the realm of acceptable political questions and plausible political answers is similarly determined. My research focuses broadly on the ways in which the meaning of political concepts becomes fixed, the effects of these settlements on political thought and action, and the value of recovering contending meanings to important political values.
Thematically, I am interested in questions of moral and political responsibility - both as theoretical concepts but also as ideological discourses in American politics - democratic theory, the nature of political reasoning and judgment, and the turn to affect and materialism in contemporary political theory. Historically my research draws heavily on the work of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, German Idealism, Martin Heidegger, and a variety of late 20th and 21st century political theorists.
More information about my research, can be found at my academia.edu page.
Book Project
From Personal to Political Responsibility: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Anticipatory Responsibility
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Responsibility is a central political concept, yet the dynamics of contemporary political life call into question commonsense accounts of individual moral responsibility; it is difficult to ascribe responsibility to individual agents when faced with political dilemmas like global climate change. In response to this dilemma, this project engages two questions. First, how do different interpretations of responsibility both emerge from different political discourses and simultaneously shape different responses to political dilemmas? Second, in contrast to ubiquitous narratives of personal responsibility, what contending interpretations could better address contemporary political dilemmas? Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings and engaging American political discourse, liberal political philosophy, and contemporary political theory, I advance three main claims. First, responsibility should be understood politically: it has an essentially contestable meaning, particular meanings are invoked to settle political disputes, and different invocations envision contending accounts of how the political world is and should be structured. Second, dominant narratives of personal responsibility generate two political pathologies. They both obscure the role of social, economic, and political institutions and structures in generating injustice and generate and direct resentful ascriptions of blame towards vulnerable people for their own suffering. Third, drawing on Nietzsche, I advance a contending interpretation of responsibility, which I call anticipatory responsibility: the obligation that political communities have to maintain the possibility of human flourishing into the future. Rather than retrospectively distributing guilt, debt, or blame, anticipatory responsibility envisions a mobilized democratic citizenry acting claiming responsibility for the structure of the political world, by working to build, reform, and maintain just political institutions. Anticipatory responsibility both can better orient political thought and action, and can only be discharged through political engagement.
Other Projects
Zarathustra in the Anthropocene: Nietzsche, Climate Change and Political Theory
Article length project - Draft available upon request
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The idea of “the Anthropocene” has captivated recent work in political theory and other humanistic disciplines. The proposal of a new epoch treating human activity as a geologic force is viewed as a way to better conceptualize humanity’s relationship to non-human nature in light of global climate change. While provocative, this concept creates two related problems for political theorists, which I call “the fatalism problem” and “the responsibility problem.” The former refers to the risk that the rhetoric of the Anthropocene may inhibit political responses to climate change by characterizing humanity’s transformation of the planet as an inexorable force. The second, relatedly, speaks to the difficulty of assigning responsibility both for the causes of climate change and the necessary steps to adapt to and mitigate its effects. These problems combine to limit the ability to theorize climate change politically.
In response to these dilemmas, I turn to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, in particular Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for resources with which to rethink action, temporality, and responsibility. Specifically, I reconstruct his teaching of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same (ERS) as Nietzsche’s own attempt to respond to the threats of fatalism and determinism in world made up of complex, interrelated causal processes. Challenging standard readings of ERS, I interpret ERS as both an aesthetic interpretation of the world and a call for a new sense of responsibility. ERS depicts the world as an ecosystem of causally interdependent finite processes that preclude arranging distinct causal moments in linear time. Such a world eternally recurs not through identical repetition, but through the constant reorganization of finite forces and processes without miraculous intervention or eschatological termination. This doctrine also serves as an attempt to ground responsibility beyond the parameters of moral ascriptions of guilt and blame. The ERS posits that it is impossible to either fully account for or break from the past. Instead, taking responsibility requires, affirming, acknowledging, and giving an account of the eternally present past rather than consigning it to the mist of history. As there is no escape from the world or transcendental moral standards to appeal to, Nietzsche places responsibility for what humanity and the earth will jointly become squarely on our shoulders.
In addition to contributing to Nietzsche scholarship with its interpretation of ERS, this paper makes broader contributions to contemporary debates over climate change and responsibility. It provides a framework for making sense of humanity’s interconnections with the natural world while without a fatalistic abdication of responsibility. As such, this paper suggests the value Nietzsche’s thought can have for motivating political action in the face of global climate change.
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“The Terrible Justice of Reality” – “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and the Dilemmas of Political Responsibility
Chapter contribution to Short Stories and Political Philosophy eds. Erin Dolgoy, Kimberly Hurd Hale, and Bruce Peabody
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” describes a utopian city, free from political, economic, or clerical oppression, where citizens live lives of perfect happiness. Their happiness, however, is made possible by the perpetual suffering of an innocent child; every citizen knowing that their lives “depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” Where many commentator read the story as critique of calculative ethics, global capitalism, or utopian ambition, I interpret the story as a profound meditation on the nature of political responsibility. Read through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s and Iris Marion Young’s theories of political responsibility, “Omelas” asks, what does it mean to be responsible in an unjust world that has preceded and will outlast one’s life? What is our responsibility for injustices generated not by our volitional action, but by the social, economic, and political structures in which we participate? Le Guin, I argue, refuses easy answers to these questions, but instead explores in “Omelas” a twofold dilemma of political responsibility. The first dilemma refers to the difficulty in ascribing responsibility for structural injustices which violate intuitive conceptions of moral responsibility, which hold that persons, or corporate persons, are accountable for the actions that they freely and directly caused. “Omelas,” which offers no creation story or explanation for the relationship between the child’s suffering and the city’s happiness, depicts a world where the citizens are implicated in injustices for which they cannot be held morally responsible. Like the injustices of our own political world, the citizens of Omelas find themselves thrown into an unjust world, necessitating a revisionary conception of responsibility. The second dilemma refers to the challenges in discharging political responsibility. “Omelas” offers an implicit trilemma: citizens could free the child and destroy their utopia, they could acknowledge the child’s suffering and live in perfect happiness, or, following the titular characters, they leave the unjust city. While it is tempting to treat the third option as Le Guin’s account of responsible conduct, I argue for a more “ambivalent” resolution that favors none of the options as unquestionably just. Instead, the lesson of “Omelas,” I conclude, is that political responsibility cannot be calculated or settled in advance, but consists in responding seriously and honestly to the dilemmas generated by life in common.