Linda M G Zerilli
Biographic Data
| ID | 223777 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Linda M G Zerilli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Linda M G |
| FAMILY NAME | Zerilli |
| SIGNATURE | ZERILLI L M G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3678-4746 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 177 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Radical Imagination and Freedom-Centered Feminist Historiography
Despite decades of feminist critique, historical realism retains a powerful hold on historiography, sustained not only by disciplinary convention but by the imaginative investments that realist norms simultaneously require and disavow. This article argues that feminist historiography cannot escape this impasse by critique alone: it must embrace imagination as a necessary condition of its own practice – not as an embellishment but as the instituti…
A Democratic Theory of Truth
"Although many phrases are invoked to describe the precarity of democracy today, perhaps none resonates more than 'post-truth.' The rapid rise of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and the loss of confidence in the possibility of impartial evidence has led to a situation in which highly partisan opinions threaten to devolve into a state where no one believes anything anymore. In the face of this danger, it seems imperative to affirm the existen…
The Problem of Democratic Persuasion
What is the problem of democratic persuasion today? Looking at the complex cases of what Robert Fogelin calls “deep disagreement,” this essay brings Hannah Arendt and Ludwig Wittgenstein into a critical dialogue about the possibilities for persuasive speech. Questioning the received reading of “form of life” and “worldview” as the hard limit on such speech, it argues for a world-opening approach to persuasion where shared premises are missing. By…
A New Style of Thinking
Critical historiography and the problem of judgment
Max Tomba aims to reconstruct how historical actors reconstructed the past to open the future in ways that diverged from the trajectory of the dominant modernity. Insurgent Universality would break open the dead logic of the juridical, political, and economic trajectory of modernity that limits what is given and constrains what is possible. This essay reflects on the practice and the role of the historian. Beyond merely adopting insurgents’ persp…
Fact-Checking and Truth-Telling in an Age of Alternative Facts
In an age of alternative facts, fact-checking has become almost second nature to critical thinkers who are concerned with the consequences of post-truth for the future of democracy. Drawing primarily on the work of Hannah Arendt and secondarily on that of Michel Foucault, this essay questions fact-checking as a democratic world-building practice and argues for forms of truth-telling that do not fall prey to Western philosophical conceptions of ab…
Racial regimes, comparative politics, and the problem of judgment
This review essay examines the practice of judgment that characterized the subfield of comparative politics from its origins in openly racist ideas of the capacity for self-rule through to its twentieth-century behavioralist and positivist iterations. Though continually faced with new political phenomena that called into question its inherited criteria of judgment, comparative politics tended to practice determinative rather than reflective judgm…
A Democratic Theory of Judgment
Politics
Feminist theory is assumed to be political by definition, but this view tends to occlude the different ways in which feminists think about politics. This essay discusses competing understandings of politics and examines how it is that things come to count as political within feminism. To think of relations of subordination of political, it is argued, is not simply to discover a relation of power that was already there but to constitute that relat…
Feminist critiques of liberalism
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism
The political philosophy of liberalism was first formulated during the Enlightenment in response to the growth of the modern nation-state and its authority and power over the individuals living within its boundaries. Liberalism is now the dominant ideology in the Western world, but it covers a broad swathe of different (and sometimes rival) ideas and traditions and its essential features can be hard to define. The Cambridge Companion to Liberalis…
The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment
Linda Zerilli explores what the historian of science Ruth Leys has decried as the "nonintentionalism" of affect theory and its implications for critical feminist practices of judgment. To insist, as Leys does, on intentionalism as concept possession, argues Zerilli, does not adequately account for the fascination with nonconceptualism. Such fascination must be understood in relation to a wholly intellectualist view of conceptual rationality, acco…
A Voice of One’s Own
Embodied Knowing, Judgment, and the Limits of Neurobiology
My response to John Hibbing raises questions about the nature of judgment implied in the biology and politics agenda that he would have us adopt. Although rightly critical of overly rationalist and cognitivist models, the neurobiological turn casts action and judgment as the mere effects of already primed dispositions, for which the giving of reasons is little more than window-dressing on what was going to happen in any case. Furthermore, the red…
Value Pluralism and the Problem of Judgment
This essay examines the significantly different approaches of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt to the problem of judgment in democratic theory and practice
Symposium on Linda Zerilli's Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
Toward a Feminist Theory of Judgment
Qué tienen en común feminismo y libertad
Qué tienen en común feminismo y libertad
Truth and Politics
Reply to Flathman and Strong
Response to Reply by Terrell Carver
Truth and the Lure of Method
Dans cet article, l'A discute de l'ouvrage Remaking Modernity, consacre a la sociologie historique aux Etats-Unis
Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
Philosophy’s Gaudy Dress’
John Locke famously sets the arts of rhetoric at odds with the pursuit of knowledge. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Grassi, this article shows that Locke’s epistemological and political arguments are parasitic on the very tropes and figures he would exclude in any serious discourse. Accordingly, Locke’s attack on the divine right of kings and his famous argument for the social contract is read as exhibiting a rhetorical structure. This structure …
We Feel Our Freedom
Critics of Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy argue that Arendt fails to address the most important problem of political judgment, namely, validity. This essay shows that Arendt does indeed have an answer to the problem that preoccupies her critics, with one important caveat: she does not think that validity is the all-important problem of political judgment—the affirmation of human freedom is
Machiavelli's Sisters
If one is a woman, one is often surprised by a sudden splitting of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Virginia Woolf
Doing Without Knowing
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. Wittgenstein
Value Pluralism and the Problem of Judgment
This essay examines the significantly different approaches of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt to the problem of judgment in democratic theory and practice
The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment
Linda Zerilli explores what the historian of science Ruth Leys has decried as the "nonintentionalism" of affect theory and its implications for critical feminist practices of judgment. To insist, as Leys does, on intentionalism as concept possession, argues Zerilli, does not adequately account for the fascination with nonconceptualism. Such fascination must be understood in relation to a wholly intellectualist view of conceptual rationality, acco…
Toward a Feminist Theory of Judgment
Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
Castoriadis, Arendt, and the Problem of the New
A New Style of Thinking
Response to Thiele
The most difficult but also important task involved in responding critique of one's work is trying understand what disturbs the critic most. Three aspects of my reading of Arendt on judgment seem disturb Leslie Paul Thiele: (1) I do not pay attention the role of encounters in the formation of judgments, (2) I treat the whole practice of judgment as a fickle product of imaginative fancy, and (3) I deprive judgment of any moral import. I will try r…
Refiguring Rights through the Political Practice of Sexual Difference
linda m. g. zerilli is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is the author of Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Cornell University Press, 1994),Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago University Press,forthcoming 2004), and articles on feminist theory and democratic theory
Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
Truth and the Lure of Method
Dans cet article, l'A discute de l'ouvrage Remaking Modernity, consacre a la sociologie historique aux Etats-Unis
Books in Review
I am a Woman
No abstract available for this article
I am a woman
The Trojan Horse of Universalism
One must understand that men are not born with a faculty for the universal and that women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen by magic, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics. Monique Wittig
I am a Woman
No abstract available for this article
I am a woman
Machiavelli's Sisters
If one is a woman, one is often surprised by a sudden splitting of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Virginia Woolf
Rememoration or War? French Feminist Narrative and the Politics of Self-Representation
Research Article| April 01 1991 Rememoration or War? French Feminist Narrative and the Politics of Self-Representation Linda M. G. Zerilli Linda M. G. Zerilli Linda M. G. Zerilli teaches feminist theory and historical political theory at Rutgers University. She is the author of “Images of Women in Political Theory: Agents of Culture and Chaos” (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, forthcoming 1991) and several articles on French feminist theory. She is cur…
Gender and citizenship
A Process without a Subject
Signifying Woman
Woman has been defined in classic political theory as elusive yet dangerous, by her nature fundamentally destructive to public life. In the view of Linda M. G. Zerilli, however, gender relations shape the very grammar of citizenship. In deeply textured interpretations of Rousseau, Burke, and Mill, Zerilli recasts our understanding of woman as the agent of social chaos and makes a major advance for feminist political theory
No Thrust, No Swell, No Subject
Books in Review
Between materialism and utopianism
Doing Without Knowing
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. Wittgenstein
La science politique américaine face aux défis du féminisme
La science politique américaine face aux défis du féminisme. Susan J. Carroll, Linda M. G. Zerilli [33-81]. Bénéficiant d'un développement fulgurant, le sous-champ des recherches consacrées aux femmes et à la politique a profondément remis en question au cours des années quatre-vingt et quatre-vingt-dix les postulats, les définitions et les méthodologies de la science politique américaine traditionnelle. Les auteurs du présent article nous donnen…
Response to Jon Simons
Books in Review
Castoriadis, Arendt, and the Problem of the New
Refiguring Rights through the Political Practice of Sexual Difference
linda m. g. zerilli is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is the author of Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Cornell University Press, 1994),Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago University Press,forthcoming 2004), and articles on feminist theory and democratic theory
Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
Philosophy’s Gaudy Dress’
John Locke famously sets the arts of rhetoric at odds with the pursuit of knowledge. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Grassi, this article shows that Locke’s epistemological and political arguments are parasitic on the very tropes and figures he would exclude in any serious discourse. Accordingly, Locke’s attack on the divine right of kings and his famous argument for the social contract is read as exhibiting a rhetorical structure. This structure …
Response to Thiele
The most difficult but also important task involved in responding critique of one's work is trying understand what disturbs the critic most. Three aspects of my reading of Arendt on judgment seem disturb Leslie Paul Thiele: (1) I do not pay attention the role of encounters in the formation of judgments, (2) I treat the whole practice of judgment as a fickle product of imaginative fancy, and (3) I deprive judgment of any moral import. I will try r…
We Feel Our Freedom
Critics of Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy argue that Arendt fails to address the most important problem of political judgment, namely, validity. This essay shows that Arendt does indeed have an answer to the problem that preoccupies her critics, with one important caveat: she does not think that validity is the all-important problem of political judgment—the affirmation of human freedom is
Truth and Politics
Reply to Flathman and Strong
Response to Reply by Terrell Carver
Truth and the Lure of Method
Dans cet article, l'A discute de l'ouvrage Remaking Modernity, consacre a la sociologie historique aux Etats-Unis
Political science (30 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (21 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Democracy (8 works)