William Clare Roberts
Biographic Data
| ID | 146853 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William Clare Roberts |
| GIVEN NAMES | William Clare |
| FAMILY NAME | Roberts |
| SIGNATURE | ROBERTS W C |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1892-1273 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Out of time
Critical dissections of neoliberalism’s de-democratizing effects are ubiquitous today, both in the academy and in para-academic popular venues. Inès Valdez’s Democracy and Empire (2023) is a bracing rejoinder to this tendency and a welcome respite from its propensity to ‘mourn a form of popular politics that both lacked a radical critique of capitalism and related despotically to racial others’ (p. 58). My aim in these comments is to further radi…
The Currency of Crisis
According to Eich, “the history of political thinking about money” accumulates in “layers of crisis,” since crises provoke “an openness to new ideas” that interrupts the calm reproduction of meaning (xiii–xiv). Couldn’t we apply this insight to the history of critical democratic theory? Running through and beneath its explicit excavation of the political thought attending and provoked by monetary crises of the past, Eich’s book also turns up trac…
Capital
Marx for the twenty-first century The first new English translation in fifty years—and the only one based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself Featuring extensive original commentary, including a foreword by acclaimed political theorist Wendy Brown “An astounding achievement.”—China Miéville, author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, …
Whose Realism? Which Legitimacy? Ideologies of Domination and Post-Rawlsian Political Theory
There is something amiss about post-Rawlsian efforts to bring political theory down to earth by insisting upon the political primacy of the question of legitimacy, peace, or order. The intuition driving much realism seems to be that we must first agree to get along, and only then can we get down to the business of pursuing justice. I argue that the ideological narratives of the powerful pose a political problem for this primacy of legitimacy thes…
The Last Years of Karl Marx
Do We Live in a Society
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
This essay seeks to bring into focus the latent political theory of CLR James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936, and to show, on this basis, how World Revolution explains certain difficult aspects of The Black Jacobins. The core of James’s theory is the thesis that social classes are organically and internally identified, and that each has a preformed and unitary interest, which can be articulated as a set of political principles. A class is called t…
What was primitive accumulation? Reconstructing the origin of a critical concept
The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capitalism. Second, Marx is supposed to have teleologically justified primitive accumulation as a necessary precondition for socialist development. This article argues that reading Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in the context of contemporaneous de…
Marx’s Social Republic
When Marx dissected the capitalist economy and intervened in the international workers’ movement, he did so in the service of freeing people from alien, uncontrolled power. His political project was the realisation of what he called the social republic, and his theoretical project was to identify the forces that promote or retard this political project. In order to bring out the specificity and cogency of the social-republican Marx, this essay up…
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and Political Theory
Marx's Inferno
This book reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx's Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, the book argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers' movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century soc…
Marx's Inferno
Marx's Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx's Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers' movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth…
The Idea of Emancipation After Postcolonial Theory
Via a critical reading of Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, this essay argues the traditions of “history from below”, subaltern studies, and postcolonial feminist studies have issued in a series of conceptual difficulties around the idea of emancipation. Mahmood rightly criticizes the tendency of these traditions to conflate agency and resistance. Her own effort to decouple agency and desire from emancipatory politics, however, undercuts theory’s…
Portfolio society
All Natural Right Is Changeable
In his recent book on Strauss, Steven B. Smith has called attention to “a curiously neglected passage from the very center ofNatural Right and History,” a passage in which Strauss “acknowledges the way political decisions grow out of concrete situations and cannot be deduced from a priori rules.” The passage reads:Let us call an extreme situation a situation in which the very existence or independence of a society is at stake. In extreme situatio…
Marx in Hell
This paper examines one of the many Judeo-Christian allusions in Marx's corpus, his citations of Dante in the '1859 Preface' and the preface to the first edition of Capital. It demonstrates that Marx borrowed key features of Dante's Inferno for his own critique of political economy, and that Marx thereby situated his critical journey through economics as the heir to the Western tradition of the katabasis, the formative descent into the underworld…
Marx Contra the Democrats
What was primitive accumulation? Reconstructing the origin of a critical concept
The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capitalism. Second, Marx is supposed to have teleologically justified primitive accumulation as a necessary precondition for socialist development. This article argues that reading Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in the context of contemporaneous de…
Do We Live in a Society
Whose Realism? Which Legitimacy? Ideologies of Domination and Post-Rawlsian Political Theory
There is something amiss about post-Rawlsian efforts to bring political theory down to earth by insisting upon the political primacy of the question of legitimacy, peace, or order. The intuition driving much realism seems to be that we must first agree to get along, and only then can we get down to the business of pursuing justice. I argue that the ideological narratives of the powerful pose a political problem for this primacy of legitimacy thes…
All Natural Right Is Changeable
In his recent book on Strauss, Steven B. Smith has called attention to “a curiously neglected passage from the very center ofNatural Right and History,” a passage in which Strauss “acknowledges the way political decisions grow out of concrete situations and cannot be deduced from a priori rules.” The passage reads:Let us call an extreme situation a situation in which the very existence or independence of a society is at stake. In extreme situatio…
Out of time
Critical dissections of neoliberalism’s de-democratizing effects are ubiquitous today, both in the academy and in para-academic popular venues. Inès Valdez’s Democracy and Empire (2023) is a bracing rejoinder to this tendency and a welcome respite from its propensity to ‘mourn a form of popular politics that both lacked a radical critique of capitalism and related despotically to racial others’ (p. 58). My aim in these comments is to further radi…
Marx’s Social Republic
When Marx dissected the capitalist economy and intervened in the international workers’ movement, he did so in the service of freeing people from alien, uncontrolled power. His political project was the realisation of what he called the social republic, and his theoretical project was to identify the forces that promote or retard this political project. In order to bring out the specificity and cogency of the social-republican Marx, this essay up…
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and Political Theory
Marx in Hell
This paper examines one of the many Judeo-Christian allusions in Marx's corpus, his citations of Dante in the '1859 Preface' and the preface to the first edition of Capital. It demonstrates that Marx borrowed key features of Dante's Inferno for his own critique of political economy, and that Marx thereby situated his critical journey through economics as the heir to the Western tradition of the katabasis, the formative descent into the underworld…
Marx Contra the Democrats
Marx in Hell
This paper examines one of the many Judeo-Christian allusions in Marx's corpus, his citations of Dante in the '1859 Preface' and the preface to the first edition of Capital. It demonstrates that Marx borrowed key features of Dante's Inferno for his own critique of political economy, and that Marx thereby situated his critical journey through economics as the heir to the Western tradition of the katabasis, the formative descent into the underworld…
All Natural Right Is Changeable
In his recent book on Strauss, Steven B. Smith has called attention to “a curiously neglected passage from the very center ofNatural Right and History,” a passage in which Strauss “acknowledges the way political decisions grow out of concrete situations and cannot be deduced from a priori rules.” The passage reads:Let us call an extreme situation a situation in which the very existence or independence of a society is at stake. In extreme situatio…
Marx's Inferno
Marx's Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx's Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers' movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth…
The Idea of Emancipation After Postcolonial Theory
Via a critical reading of Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, this essay argues the traditions of “history from below”, subaltern studies, and postcolonial feminist studies have issued in a series of conceptual difficulties around the idea of emancipation. Mahmood rightly criticizes the tendency of these traditions to conflate agency and resistance. Her own effort to decouple agency and desire from emancipatory politics, however, undercuts theory’s…
Portfolio society
Marx's Inferno
This book reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx's Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, the book argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers' movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century soc…
Marx’s Social Republic
When Marx dissected the capitalist economy and intervened in the international workers’ movement, he did so in the service of freeing people from alien, uncontrolled power. His political project was the realisation of what he called the social republic, and his theoretical project was to identify the forces that promote or retard this political project. In order to bring out the specificity and cogency of the social-republican Marx, this essay up…
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and Political Theory
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
This essay seeks to bring into focus the latent political theory of CLR James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936, and to show, on this basis, how World Revolution explains certain difficult aspects of The Black Jacobins. The core of James’s theory is the thesis that social classes are organically and internally identified, and that each has a preformed and unitary interest, which can be articulated as a set of political principles. A class is called t…
What was primitive accumulation? Reconstructing the origin of a critical concept
The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capitalism. Second, Marx is supposed to have teleologically justified primitive accumulation as a necessary precondition for socialist development. This article argues that reading Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in the context of contemporaneous de…
Do We Live in a Society
Whose Realism? Which Legitimacy? Ideologies of Domination and Post-Rawlsian Political Theory
There is something amiss about post-Rawlsian efforts to bring political theory down to earth by insisting upon the political primacy of the question of legitimacy, peace, or order. The intuition driving much realism seems to be that we must first agree to get along, and only then can we get down to the business of pursuing justice. I argue that the ideological narratives of the powerful pose a political problem for this primacy of legitimacy thes…
The Last Years of Karl Marx
Capital
Marx for the twenty-first century The first new English translation in fifty years—and the only one based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself Featuring extensive original commentary, including a foreword by acclaimed political theorist Wendy Brown “An astounding achievement.”—China Miéville, author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, …
The Currency of Crisis
According to Eich, “the history of political thinking about money” accumulates in “layers of crisis,” since crises provoke “an openness to new ideas” that interrupts the calm reproduction of meaning (xiii–xiv). Couldn’t we apply this insight to the history of critical democratic theory? Running through and beneath its explicit excavation of the political thought attending and provoked by monetary crises of the past, Eich’s book also turns up trac…
Out of time
Critical dissections of neoliberalism’s de-democratizing effects are ubiquitous today, both in the academy and in para-academic popular venues. Inès Valdez’s Democracy and Empire (2023) is a bracing rejoinder to this tendency and a welcome respite from its propensity to ‘mourn a form of popular politics that both lacked a radical critique of capitalism and related despotically to racial others’ (p. 58). My aim in these comments is to further radi…
Political science (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · History (7 works)