M Kohn
Biographic Data
| ID | 17109 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Kohn |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Kohn |
| SIGNATURE | KOHN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2309-4412 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 199 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Education as a Common Possession
This article reflects on Will Kymlicka's account of solidarity and membership through the lens of conflict over public schooling in San Francisco. It contrasts a Marshallian vision of society as a shared possession capable of sustaining democratic solidarity and welfare institutions with an anti‐Marshallian politics that sees the language of shared membership as ideological and exclusionary. Drawing on interview‐based research with local activist…
Participation beyond the assembly: Mary Parker Follett’s democratic theory
The city and ethical life
Introduction to Symposium: Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements
This introductory article summarizes some key elements of Monique Deveaux’s book Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements and situates that book in the philosophical literature on global poverty. It then provides an outline of the symposium contributions by Ashwini Vasanthakumar, Luis Cabrera, Brooke Ackerly, Catherine Lu, and Avery Kolers
Radical republicanism and solidarity
This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the…
The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
Brett Christophers. New York, NY: Verso, 2018. xviii and 362 pp., notes, index. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 9781786631589), $19.95 paper (ISBN 9781786631596), $9.99 electronic (ISBN 978178663161).Brett Chri
Public Goods and Social Justice
Why should the state provide public goods? I explore this question by focusing on the example of public parks. It examines the three most influential approaches to public goods (the market failures, the normative, and the democratic) and concludes that they fail to explain why parks should be public. I propose an alternative that I call solidarism, a social justice-based approach that provides a response to liberal arguments about the neutrality …
Globalizing Global Justice
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The theory and politics of solidarity and public goods
For over forty years, economic inequality and distributive justice have been two of the primary concerns of political philosophers. This volume addresses these issues in a novel way, by focusing on the concepts of solidarity and public goods as both descriptive and normative frameworks. Solidarity links the social, political and moral together, in a distinctively political approach that recognizes the social sources of power on the one hand and s…
Solidarity and social rights
The paper argues that the liberal approach to social rights is contradictory and provides an alternative account that draws on solidarism, a strand of nineteenth-century French Republican thought. Solidarism links together a normative theory of social obligation and a descriptive account of social value, debt and unearned increment. The theory of social property provides a distinctive foundation for social rights
The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth
The city is a paradoxical space, in theory belonging to everyone, in practice inaccessible to people who cannot afford the high price of urban real estate. Why should access to public and social goods be tied to the ability to acquire private property? When people lose access to the urban commons, they are dispossessed of something to which they have a rightful claim. What kind of right is the right to the city? Political theory has much to say a…
The Critique of Possessive Individualism: Solidarism and the City
This essay investigates a strand of left-republicanism that emerged in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The solidarists developed a distinctive theory of social property and a thorough critique of the liberal, republican, and socialist alternatives. Solidarism rests on the claim that the modern division of labor creates a social product that does not naturally belong to the individuals who control it as their private p…
Parks and refs: Community, solidarity, and public space
Worldly ethics: Democratic politics and care for the world
What is wrong with gentrification
This essay poses the question, ‘What is wrong with gentrification?’ I explore five harms that are associated with gentrification: residential displacement; exclusion; transformation of public, social and commercial space; polarization; and homogenization. Drawing on examples from Toronto, I consider whether these outcomes are associated with gentrification and if so, whether they are harmful. I conclude that there are good reasons to worry about …
Postcolonialism and global justice
This paper examines the rhetorical dimension of arguments about global justice. It draws on postcolonial theory, an approach that has explored the relationship between knowledge and power. The global justice literature has elaborated critiques of global inequality and advanced arguments about how to overcome the legacies of domination. These concerns are also shared by critics of colonialism, yet there are also epistemological differences that se…
Privatization and Protest: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, and the Occupation of Public Space in a Democracy
This article examines the legal and normative debates about the Occupy Toronto movement in order to illuminate the issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. It challenges the view that the occupation of parks and plazas was an illegitimate privatization of public space. In both New York City and Toronto, the courts relied on a theory that Habermas called “German Hobbesianism.” This sovereigntist theory of the public was used to justify removing the pr…
Colonialism and the State of Exception
This chapter focuses on law as one dimension of the problem of transition into the postcolonial regime. Martial law was frequently declared in the colonies, but it remained controversial since it seemed antithetical to image of colonialism as a civilizing mission that would bring the rule of law to barbaric places. Mill, Burke, and Tocqueville all debated martial law; while they were in broad agreement about the legitimacy of the colonial state, …
Political Theories of Decolonization
"Political Theories of Decolonization provides an introduction to some of the seminal texts of postcolonial political theory. The difficulty of founding a new regime is an important theme in political theory, and the intellectual history of decolonization provides a rich--albeit overlooked--opportunity to explore it. Many theorists have pointed out that the colonized subject was a divided subject. This book argues that the postcolonial state was …
The FLASH Project: Using lightning data to better understand and predict flash floods
Toronto's Distillery District: Consumption and Nostalgia in a Post-Industrial Landscape
This paper explores the adaptive reuse of the Gooderham and Worts Distillery, a 13-acre historical site located adjacent to downtown Toronto. It asks what our fascination with industrial ruins tells us about North American and European cities in the twenty-first century. The transformation of the world's largest distillery into an upscale leisure destination illustrates many of the forces that are reconfiguring cities: commodification, gentrifica…
Unblinking: Citizens and Subjects in the Age of Video Surveillance
Dreamworlds of Deindustrialization
Dreamworlds of Deindustrialization Margaret Kohn (bio) Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the images and artifacts of nineteenth century collective life. The draft of his earliest essay on the Parisian arcades (1927), however, opened with a depiction of a gleaming new arcade on the Champs-Elysées. Located between two modern hotels, the newest Parisian passage displayed luxury automobiles, leather goods, and imported kimonos that were meant to enti…
Afghānī on Empire, Islam, and Civilization
This essay provides an interpretation of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, a controversial figure in nineteenth-century Islamic political thought. One aspect of this controversy is the tension between “Refutation of the Materialists,” Afghānī's well-known defense of religious orthodoxy, and a short newspaper article entitled “Reply to Renan” that dismisses prophetic religion as dogmatic and intellectually stifling. In this essay I argue that close …
Language, Power, and Persuasion: Toward a Critique of Deliberative Democracy
Privatization and Protest: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, and the Occupation of Public Space in a Democracy
This article examines the legal and normative debates about the Occupy Toronto movement in order to illuminate the issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. It challenges the view that the occupation of parks and plazas was an illegitimate privatization of public space. In both New York City and Toronto, the courts relied on a theory that Habermas called “German Hobbesianism.” This sovereigntist theory of the public was used to justify removing the pr…
A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America
The subject of empire has emerged as a central concern in political theory. Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill have been at the center of much recent scholarship on this topic. A number of depictions of Burke as a critic and Mill as a defender of empire rely largely on their writings about India. This article focuses instead on Burke and Mill’s writings on the West Indies and America from the standpoint of both thinkers’ connection to Scottish Enl…
The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery
In this paper I argue that Tocqueville, when read in concert with the work of Beaumont, his often overlooked collaborator, provides a compelling analysis of the coexistence of liberal democracy and racism. I offer a reading that challenges the conventional wisdom that Tocqueville's fascination with bourgeois democracy blinded him to Jacksonian America's pervasive racial hierarchies. Tocqueville's claim that the extension of equality was both inev…
The Critique of Possessive Individualism: Solidarism and the City
This essay investigates a strand of left-republicanism that emerged in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The solidarists developed a distinctive theory of social property and a thorough critique of the liberal, republican, and socialist alternatives. Solidarism rests on the claim that the modern division of labor creates a social product that does not naturally belong to the individuals who control it as their private p…
Toronto's Distillery District: Consumption and Nostalgia in a Post-Industrial Landscape
This paper explores the adaptive reuse of the Gooderham and Worts Distillery, a 13-acre historical site located adjacent to downtown Toronto. It asks what our fascination with industrial ruins tells us about North American and European cities in the twenty-first century. The transformation of the world's largest distillery into an upscale leisure destination illustrates many of the forces that are reconfiguring cities: commodification, gentrifica…
Frederick Douglass's Master-Slave Dialectic
This article explores the issues of violence, recognition, and freedom in the work of Frederick Douglass. It analyzes the contradiction between Douglass's defense of pacifism in his speeches and articles (before 1847) and his celebration of the redemptive effects of violence in his autobiographies, most notably in his account of his fight with the slave breaker Edward Covey. One thing that distinguishes this article from other interpretations of …
Empire's Law: Alexis de Tocqueville on Colonialism and the State of Exception
In recent years there has been a debate about how to evaluate Alexis de Tocqueville's defense of colonialism. Some scholars have argued that there is a tension between the key doctrines of Tocqueville's political theory and his enthusiastic promotion of the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. Others have concluded that the apparent contradiction can be explained by paying careful attention to the nuances of his work or the logic of liber…
Worldly ethics: Democratic politics and care for the world
Afghānī on Empire, Islam, and Civilization
This essay provides an interpretation of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, a controversial figure in nineteenth-century Islamic political thought. One aspect of this controversy is the tension between “Refutation of the Materialists,” Afghānī's well-known defense of religious orthodoxy, and a short newspaper article entitled “Reply to Renan” that dismisses prophetic religion as dogmatic and intellectually stifling. In this essay I argue that close …
Homo spectator: Public space in the age of the spectacle
This article develops a novel approach to the relationship between public space and democracy. It employs the concept of the spectacle to show how public space can serve to destroy or weaken solidarity just as easily as it can foster a democratic ethos of equality. A close reading of Rousseau's Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre helps illuminate the political implications of modern public life, which increasingly takes the form of passive ind…
Postcolonialism and global justice
This paper examines the rhetorical dimension of arguments about global justice. It draws on postcolonial theory, an approach that has explored the relationship between knowledge and power. The global justice literature has elaborated critiques of global inequality and advanced arguments about how to overcome the legacies of domination. These concerns are also shared by critics of colonialism, yet there are also epistemological differences that se…
Panacea or Privilege: New Approaches to Democracy and Association
Unblinking: Citizens and Subjects in the Age of Video Surveillance
Radical republicanism and solidarity
This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the…
The Power of Place: The House of the People as Counterpublic
This paper argues that the power of place comes from its ability to link the social, phenomenal, and symbolic dimensions of experience. In order to illustrate this contention, I trace how the houses of the people became nodal points of a subculture that challenged the social and political domination of traditional elites in Europe. The houses of the people were radical community centers that brought together heterogeneous workers' initiatives lik…
Public Goods and Social Justice
Why should the state provide public goods? I explore this question by focusing on the example of public parks. It examines the three most influential approaches to public goods (the market failures, the normative, and the democratic) and concludes that they fail to explain why parks should be public. I propose an alternative that I call solidarism, a social justice-based approach that provides a response to liberal arguments about the neutrality …
Solidarity and social rights
The paper argues that the liberal approach to social rights is contradictory and provides an alternative account that draws on solidarism, a strand of nineteenth-century French Republican thought. Solidarism links together a normative theory of social obligation and a descriptive account of social value, debt and unearned increment. The theory of social property provides a distinctive foundation for social rights
Parks and refs: Community, solidarity, and public space
Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space
Fighting for First Amendment rights is as popular a pastime as ever, but just because you can get on your soapbox doesn't mean anyone will be there to listen. Town squares have emptied out as shoppers decamp for the megamalls; gated communities keep pesky signature gathering activists away; even most internet chatrooms are run by the major media companies. Brave New Neighborhood sconsiders what can be done to protect and revitalize our public spa…
Dope girls 1918-1995 and other stories
Language, Power, and Persuasion: Toward a Critique of Deliberative Democracy
The Power of Place: The House of the People as Counterpublic
This paper argues that the power of place comes from its ability to link the social, phenomenal, and symbolic dimensions of experience. In order to illustrate this contention, I trace how the houses of the people became nodal points of a subculture that challenged the social and political domination of traditional elites in Europe. The houses of the people were radical community centers that brought together heterogeneous workers' initiatives lik…
The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery
In this paper I argue that Tocqueville, when read in concert with the work of Beaumont, his often overlooked collaborator, provides a compelling analysis of the coexistence of liberal democracy and racism. I offer a reading that challenges the conventional wisdom that Tocqueville's fascination with bourgeois democracy blinded him to Jacksonian America's pervasive racial hierarchies. Tocqueville's claim that the extension of equality was both inev…
Panacea or Privilege: New Approaches to Democracy and Association
Radical Space: Building the House of the People
Epoch-making political events are often remembered for their spatial markers: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the storming of the Bastille, the occupation of Tiananmen Square:. Until recently, however, political theory has overlooked the power of place. In Radical Space, Margaret Kohn puts space at the center of democratic theory. Kohn examines different sites of working-class mobilization in Europe and explains how these sites destabilized the exis…
Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space
Fighting for First Amendment rights is as popular a pastime as ever, but just because you can get on your soapbox doesn't mean anyone will be there to listen. Town squares have emptied out as shoppers decamp for the megamalls; gated communities keep pesky signature gathering activists away; even most internet chatrooms are run by the major media companies. Brave New Neighborhood sconsiders what can be done to protect and revitalize our public spa…
Frederick Douglass's Master-Slave Dialectic
This article explores the issues of violence, recognition, and freedom in the work of Frederick Douglass. It analyzes the contradiction between Douglass's defense of pacifism in his speeches and articles (before 1847) and his celebration of the redemptive effects of violence in his autobiographies, most notably in his account of his fight with the slave breaker Edward Covey. One thing that distinguishes this article from other interpretations of …
Health
Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, resulting in massive destruction from wind damage and storm surge. In Mississippi, the storm surge was an estimated 27 feet high at the Hancock County Emergency Operations Center and extended inland for 6-12 miles, causing extensive flooding in Biloxi and Gulfport and rendering approximately 80% of buildings in Waveland uninhabitable (1). The devastation was greatest in th…
Bare Life and the Limits of the Law
Bare Life and the Limits of the Law Margaret Kohn (bio) Giorgio Agamben. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 104 pp. $12.00 (pbk). $30.00 (hc). 0226009254. Giorgio Agamben is best known for his provocative suggestion that the concentration camp – the spatial form of the state of exception - is not exceptional but rather the paradigmatic political space of modernity itself. When Agamben first made this claim in Homo Sac…
On Populist Reason and Populism and the Mirror of Democracy
On Populist Reason. By Ernesto Laclau. New York: Verso, 2005. 224p. $26.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. Edited by Francisco Panizza. New York: Verso, 2005. 288p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. In the wake of Thomas Frank's bestselling book What's the Matter With Kansas (2004), scholars and citizens are turning to the concept of populism as a way to make sense of the strength and popularity of the far Right in the United…
A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America
The subject of empire has emerged as a central concern in political theory. Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill have been at the center of much recent scholarship on this topic. A number of depictions of Burke as a critic and Mill as a defender of empire rely largely on their writings about India. This article focuses instead on Burke and Mill’s writings on the West Indies and America from the standpoint of both thinkers’ connection to Scottish Enl…
The Passion of Liberalism
Homo spectator: Public space in the age of the spectacle
This article develops a novel approach to the relationship between public space and democracy. It employs the concept of the spectacle to show how public space can serve to destroy or weaken solidarity just as easily as it can foster a democratic ethos of equality. A close reading of Rousseau's Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre helps illuminate the political implications of modern public life, which increasingly takes the form of passive ind…
Empire's Law: Alexis de Tocqueville on Colonialism and the State of Exception
In recent years there has been a debate about how to evaluate Alexis de Tocqueville's defense of colonialism. Some scholars have argued that there is a tension between the key doctrines of Tocqueville's political theory and his enthusiastic promotion of the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. Others have concluded that the apparent contradiction can be explained by paying careful attention to the nuances of his work or the logic of liber…
Dreamworlds of Deindustrialization
Dreamworlds of Deindustrialization Margaret Kohn (bio) Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the images and artifacts of nineteenth century collective life. The draft of his earliest essay on the Parisian arcades (1927), however, opened with a depiction of a gleaming new arcade on the Champs-Elysées. Located between two modern hotels, the newest Parisian passage displayed luxury automobiles, leather goods, and imported kimonos that were meant to enti…
Afghānī on Empire, Islam, and Civilization
This essay provides an interpretation of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, a controversial figure in nineteenth-century Islamic political thought. One aspect of this controversy is the tension between “Refutation of the Materialists,” Afghānī's well-known defense of religious orthodoxy, and a short newspaper article entitled “Reply to Renan” that dismisses prophetic religion as dogmatic and intellectually stifling. In this essay I argue that close …
Toronto's Distillery District: Consumption and Nostalgia in a Post-Industrial Landscape
This paper explores the adaptive reuse of the Gooderham and Worts Distillery, a 13-acre historical site located adjacent to downtown Toronto. It asks what our fascination with industrial ruins tells us about North American and European cities in the twenty-first century. The transformation of the world's largest distillery into an upscale leisure destination illustrates many of the forces that are reconfiguring cities: commodification, gentrifica…
Unblinking: Citizens and Subjects in the Age of Video Surveillance
Colonialism and the State of Exception
This chapter focuses on law as one dimension of the problem of transition into the postcolonial regime. Martial law was frequently declared in the colonies, but it remained controversial since it seemed antithetical to image of colonialism as a civilizing mission that would bring the rule of law to barbaric places. Mill, Burke, and Tocqueville all debated martial law; while they were in broad agreement about the legitimacy of the colonial state, …
Political Theories of Decolonization
"Political Theories of Decolonization provides an introduction to some of the seminal texts of postcolonial political theory. The difficulty of founding a new regime is an important theme in political theory, and the intellectual history of decolonization provides a rich--albeit overlooked--opportunity to explore it. Many theorists have pointed out that the colonized subject was a divided subject. This book argues that the postcolonial state was …
The FLASH Project: Using lightning data to better understand and predict flash floods
What is wrong with gentrification
This essay poses the question, ‘What is wrong with gentrification?’ I explore five harms that are associated with gentrification: residential displacement; exclusion; transformation of public, social and commercial space; polarization; and homogenization. Drawing on examples from Toronto, I consider whether these outcomes are associated with gentrification and if so, whether they are harmful. I conclude that there are good reasons to worry about …
Postcolonialism and global justice
This paper examines the rhetorical dimension of arguments about global justice. It draws on postcolonial theory, an approach that has explored the relationship between knowledge and power. The global justice literature has elaborated critiques of global inequality and advanced arguments about how to overcome the legacies of domination. These concerns are also shared by critics of colonialism, yet there are also epistemological differences that se…
Privatization and Protest: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Toronto, and the Occupation of Public Space in a Democracy
This article examines the legal and normative debates about the Occupy Toronto movement in order to illuminate the issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. It challenges the view that the occupation of parks and plazas was an illegitimate privatization of public space. In both New York City and Toronto, the courts relied on a theory that Habermas called “German Hobbesianism.” This sovereigntist theory of the public was used to justify removing the pr…
Political science (29 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Law (28 works) · Law (24 works) · Politics (23 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Democracy (9 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works)