Bonnie Honig
Biographic Data
| ID | 301383 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bonnie Honig |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bonnie |
| FAMILY NAME | Honig |
| SIGNATURE | HONIG B |
| AFFILIATIONS | McMaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0563-0899 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 239 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 55 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Storytelling and political theory
Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Second Red Scare Text for our Third Red Scare Moment
Social Entrepreneurship: A Well-Being Based Approach
We systematically review social entrepreneurship literature to analyse how the notion of well-being is perceived. We found that well-being in social entrepreneurship is accounted for in two forms: self-oriented and other-oriented. Our review indicates that both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being have received significant research attention, although the latter has gained more prominence. We found that negative well-being resulting from social entr…
Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics
This book, originally published in 1993, has been called a founding text of agonism, which treats political contestation not as a regrettably necessary way to correct political imperfections but as a necessary, sometimes joyful feature of democratic life. As the author writes in the preface to this thirtieth anniversary edition, “the agonism that informs this book is democratic: it is committed to shared spaces and relational practices in which d…
Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics
Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics , originally published in 1993, has been called a founding text of agonism, which treats political contestation not as a regrettably necessary way to correct political imperfections but as a necessary, sometimes joyful feature of democratic life . As Bonnie Honig writes in the preface to this thirtieth anniversary edition, "the agonism that informs this book is democratic: it is committed to share…
The Role of Compassion in Shaping Social Entrepreneurs’ Prosocial Opportunity Recognition
Political theory and its futures
A Feminist Theory of Refusal
A Commons Strategy for Promoting Entrepreneurship and Social Capital: Implications for Community Currencies, Cryptocurrencies, and Value Exchange
Supporting entrepreneurs: A systematic review of literature and an agenda for research
Ask A Political Scientist: A Discussion with Bonnie Honig on Agonism, Disruption, and Repair
Exploring the intersection of transnational, ethnic, and migration entrepreneurship
In this essay, the importance of entrepreneurship is examined from multiple perspectives: Transnational, Ethnic, and Migration studies. Short historical perspectives are provided to illustrate both the universality of the immigrant entrepreneurship experience, and to highlight the need for multi-dimensional interdisciplinary study. A theoretical framework is suggested to facilitate this research, and discussions of future research opportunities a…
Angry Men: Care for the Agon and the Varieties of Masculine Experience
The “Agonistic Turn: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics in New Contexts
Is Man a “Sabbatical Animal”? Agamben, Rosenzweig, Heschel, Arendt
Giorgio Agamben lists the Jewish Sabbath as an example of “inoperatvity.” This essay explores both how Sabbath fits into and puts pressure on Agamben’s account, by working through readings of the Sabbath given by Agamben, A.J. Heschel, and Rosenzweig, who associate Sabbath, respectively, with Inoperativity, Eternity, and Creation. To these, I add another, called the Sabbath of Equality, building on connections among the weekly Sabbath, the septan…
Decoupling from international food safety standards: How small-scale indigenous farmers cope with conflicting institutions to ensure market participation
Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair
In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. This book asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedure…
Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics
In this book, Bonnie Honig rethinks that established relation between politics and political theory. From liberal to communitarian to republican, political theorists of opposing positions often treat political theory less as an exploration of politics than as a series of devices of its displacement. Honig characterizes Kant, Rawls, and Sandel as virtue theorists of politics, arguing that they rely on principles of right, rationality, community, a…
Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier
Lars von Trier’s intense, disturbing, and sometimes funny films have led many to condemn him as misogynist or misanthropic. The same films inspire this collection’s reflections on how our fears and desires regarding gender, power, race, finitude, family, and fate often thwart – and sometimes feed – our best democratic aspirations. The essays in this volume attend to von Trier’s role as provocateur, as well as to his films’ techniques, topics, and…
Politics, theory, and film: Critical encounters with Lars von Trier
The disturbing and intense films of Lars von Trier are often dismissed as misogynist, misanthropic, or anti-humanist. This work, however, invites us to engage with his work to found a new feminist vision and discover what might be distinctively hopeful for the future of our fragile human condition.
Sustainable management and managing sustainability: The continued challenges of the African continent
Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy
Eric Santner offers a radically new interpretation of Marx's labour theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. What Marx characterised as the dual character of the labour embodied in the commodity, he argues, is the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies transferred from the political theology of sovereignty to the realm of political economy. This genealogy, leading from the fetishism of the royal b…
What Kind of Thing Is Land? Hannah Arendt’s Object Relations, or: The Jewish Unconscious of Arendt’s Most “Greek” Text
Informed by D. W. Winnicott’s object relations theory, and focused on the role of Things in constituting the world that is the object of Arendtian care, this essay examines Hannah Arendt’s treatment in The Human Condition of two liminal examples, cultivated land and poetry, that hover on the borders of Labor, Work, and/or Action. Cultivated land could belong to Work because cultivation leaves a lasting mark on the land, but it is assigned to Labo…
Between Nuremberg and Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt'sTikkun Olam
Since Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1964, her stance toward the Eichmann trial in Israel has been the subject of controversy. This essay considers why Arendt, in her reporting on the trial, seems to have insisted on a criterion of "relevance" in the face of pain and focused on procedures in the face of catastrophe. The authors propose that relevance and legality are doing a certain work in Arendt's text, that they are not the only …
Public Things: Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and the Democratic Need
What if democracy postulates not just a demos and the other things on which democratic theory these days focuses (constitutions, clear territorial boundaries, proper procedures, commitment to formal or substantive equality) but also public things, shared common things, over which to argue, around which to gather? Such things require communal attention, public commitment, and collective maintenance. And they return the favor by lending to us some …
Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory
Deliberative democratic theorists (in this essay, Seyla Benhabib and Jurgen Habermas) seek to resolve, manage, or transcend paradoxes of democratic legitimation or constitutional democracy. Other democratic theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe, embrace such paradoxes and affirm their irreducibility. Deliberativists call that position "decisionism." This essay examines the promise and limits of these various efforts by way of a third paradox: Roussea…
Immigrant America? How Foreignness "Solves" Democracy's Problems
Against the background of California's Proposition 187 and new U.S. federal legislation limiting the rights and benefits of legal and illegal immigrants, Americans on both the Right and the Left have sought to recover the iconic immigrant who once helped build this nation and whose heirs might contribute to the national future. Both political theorists and activists have responded to renewed anti-immigrant sentiment by stressing the gifts that fo…
Political theory and the displacement of politics
Dead Rights, Live Futures: A Reply to Habermas's “Constitutional Democracy
In the United States this past year, the tension between constitutionalism and democracy was not an abstract theoretical problem. In the late fall of 2000, the tension became an all-out fight over who would decide the outcome of the American presidential election: the Supreme Court or the people? Would there be a new round of voting by those in Florida who misread their ballots or were wrongly barred from casting theirs? Would ballots be recounte…
The Politics of Agonism: A Critical Response to “Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action” by Dana R. Villa
Three Models of Emergency Politics
This article presents three models of emergency politics—deliberative (Elaine Scarry), promiscuous (Douglas Crimp), and legalist (Louis Freeland Post)—and assesses their promise and limits for democratic theory and practice. Emergency politics names not the friend/enemy decisionism of Carl Schmitt but rather the idea that emergency may be taken to promote a focus not just on survival but also on sur-vivance—a future-oriented practice of counterso…
Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism
Antigone's Two Laws:Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism Bonnie Honig (bio) By insisting on a 'common' corporeal vulnerability, I may seem to be positing a new basis for humanism. —Judith Butler Certain great themes such as ' humanism' can be used to any end whatsoever. —Michel Foucault Only tragedy can deal adequately with humanism on its high horse. —Laurence Michel1 Humanism is making a comeback; not the rationalist, universalist variety…
Entrepreneurship as an integrating mechanism for disadvantaged persons
This paper theorises about a specific facet of social entrepreneurship, namely, the integration of disadvantaged persons into the field of entrepreneurship. Drawing from Bourdieu's theory of practice, the authors conceive of this integration as a power-laden process that reflects normative expectations imposed by field incumbents on entrants to the field that require them to both comply with and challenge existing field arrangements. Propositions…
Public Things: Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and the Democratic Need
What if democracy postulates not just a demos and the other things on which democratic theory these days focuses (constitutions, clear territorial boundaries, proper procedures, commitment to formal or substantive equality) but also public things, shared common things, over which to argue, around which to gather? Such things require communal attention, public commitment, and collective maintenance. And they return the favor by lending to us some …
Antigone's Laments, Creon's Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception
This paper reads Sophocles' Antigone contextually, as an exploration of the politics of lamentation and larger conflicts these stand for. Antigone defies Creon's sovereign decree that her brother Polynices, who attacked the city with a foreign army and died in battle, be dishonoured - left unburied. But the play is not about Polynices' treason. It explores the clash in 5th century Athens between Homeric/ elite and democratic mourning practices. T…
Exploring the intersection of transnational, ethnic, and migration entrepreneurship
In this essay, the importance of entrepreneurship is examined from multiple perspectives: Transnational, Ethnic, and Migration studies. Short historical perspectives are provided to illustrate both the universality of the immigrant entrepreneurship experience, and to highlight the need for multi-dimensional interdisciplinary study. A theoretical framework is suggested to facilitate this research, and discussions of future research opportunities a…
Ruth, the Model Emigrée: Mourning and the Symbolic Politics of Immigration
And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israelites of our time. Herman Melville
What Kind of Thing Is Land? Hannah Arendt’s Object Relations, or: The Jewish Unconscious of Arendt’s Most “Greek” Text
Informed by D. W. Winnicott’s object relations theory, and focused on the role of Things in constituting the world that is the object of Arendtian care, this essay examines Hannah Arendt’s treatment in The Human Condition of two liminal examples, cultivated land and poetry, that hover on the borders of Labor, Work, and/or Action. Cultivated land could belong to Work because cultivation leaves a lasting mark on the land, but it is assigned to Labo…
The “Agonistic Turn: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics in New Contexts
Decoupling from international food safety standards: How small-scale indigenous farmers cope with conflicting institutions to ensure market participation
Humanism from an agonistic perspective: Themes from the work of Bonnie Honig
Ask A Political Scientist: A Discussion with Bonnie Honig on Agonism, Disruption, and Repair
Is Man a “Sabbatical Animal”? Agamben, Rosenzweig, Heschel, Arendt
Giorgio Agamben lists the Jewish Sabbath as an example of “inoperatvity.” This essay explores both how Sabbath fits into and puts pressure on Agamben’s account, by working through readings of the Sabbath given by Agamben, A.J. Heschel, and Rosenzweig, who associate Sabbath, respectively, with Inoperativity, Eternity, and Creation. To these, I add another, called the Sabbath of Equality, building on connections among the weekly Sabbath, the septan…
Between Nuremberg and Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt'sTikkun Olam
Since Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1964, her stance toward the Eichmann trial in Israel has been the subject of controversy. This essay considers why Arendt, in her reporting on the trial, seems to have insisted on a criterion of "relevance" in the face of pain and focused on procedures in the face of catastrophe. The authors propose that relevance and legality are doing a certain work in Arendt's text, that they are not the only …
Arendt on the Couch
Margarethe von Trotta's film Hannah Arendt starts and ends with its protagonist on the couch. Hannah Arendt's intellectual objection to psychoanalysis notwithstanding, this framing invites us to consider the psychoanalytical symptoms Arendt's own thinking is caught up in. The essay reads the Eichmann trial episode as one telling instance of a repetition pattern that spans Arendt's intellectual life: Arendt thought and wrote provocatively, sometim…
[Un]Dazzled by the Ideal: Tully’s Politics and Humanism in Tragic Perspective
Democracy and the Foreigner
What should we do about foreigners? Should we try to make them more like us or keep them at bay to protect our democracy, our culture, our well-being? This dilemma underlies age-old debates about immigration, citizenship, and national identity that are strikingly relevant today. In Democracy and the Foreigner , Bonnie Honig reverses the question: What problems might foreigners solve for us? Hers is not a conventional approach. Instead of lauding …
Books in Review
Association Distributes Annual Awards
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Political theory and the displacement of politics
The Politics of Agonism: A Critical Response to “Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action” by Dana R. Villa
Ruth, the Model Emigrée: Mourning and the Symbolic Politics of Immigration
And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israelites of our time. Herman Melville
Immigrant America? How Foreignness "Solves" Democracy's Problems
Against the background of California's Proposition 187 and new U.S. federal legislation limiting the rights and benefits of legal and illegal immigrants, Americans on both the Right and the Left have sought to recover the iconic immigrant who once helped build this nation and whose heirs might contribute to the national future. Both political theorists and activists have responded to renewed anti-immigrant sentiment by stressing the gifts that fo…
“My Culture Made Me Do It”
Foreignness, Democracy, and the Law
Democracy and the Foreigner
What should we do about foreigners? Should we try to make them more like us or keep them at bay to protect our democracy, our culture, our well-being? This dilemma underlies age-old debates about immigration, citizenship, and national identity that are strikingly relevant today. In Democracy and the Foreigner , Bonnie Honig reverses the question: What problems might foreigners solve for us? Hers is not a conventional approach. Instead of lauding …
Culture, Citizenship, and Community Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness . By Joseph H. Carens
Dead Rights, Live Futures: A Reply to Habermas's “Constitutional Democracy
In the United States this past year, the tension between constitutionalism and democracy was not an abstract theoretical problem. In the late fall of 2000, the tension became an all-out fight over who would decide the outcome of the American presidential election: the Supreme Court or the people? Would there be a new round of voting by those in Florida who misread their ballots or were wrongly barred from casting theirs? Would ballots be recounte…
The role of social and human capital among nascent entrepreneurs
From The Review Editor
Towards a theory of indigenous entrepreneurship
Indigenous populations throughout the world suffer from chronic poverty, lower education levels, and poor health. The "second wave" of indigenous development, after direct economic assistance from outside, lies in indigenous efforts to rebuild their "nations" and improve their lot through entrepreneurial enterprise. This paper suggests that there is a distinguishable kind of activity appropriately called "indigenous entrepreneurship". We begin by…
The Oxford handbook of political theory
Social Capital and the Linkages of High-Tech Companies to the Military Defense System: Is there a Signaling Mechanism
The Miracle of Metaphor: Rethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig and Schmitt
The Miracle of MetaphorRethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig and Schmitt Bonnie Honig (bio) For the word is mere inception until it finds reception in an ear and response in a mouth. —Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption The legal anthropologist Carol Greenhouse opens her book on time, A Moment's Notice, with a story recorded by Goethe, who, when traveling through Italy, observed a trial and took note of its peculiar timekeeping p…
Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory
Deliberative democratic theorists (in this essay, Seyla Benhabib and Jurgen Habermas) seek to resolve, manage, or transcend paradoxes of democratic legitimation or constitutional democracy. Other democratic theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe, embrace such paradoxes and affirm their irreducibility. Deliberativists call that position "decisionism." This essay examines the promise and limits of these various efforts by way of a third paradox: Roussea…
The Oxford handbook of political theory
Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy
This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more de…
Emergency politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy
This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more de…
Antigone's Laments, Creon's Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception
This paper reads Sophocles' Antigone contextually, as an exploration of the politics of lamentation and larger conflicts these stand for. Antigone defies Creon's sovereign decree that her brother Polynices, who attacked the city with a foreign army and died in battle, be dishonoured - left unburied. But the play is not about Polynices' treason. It explores the clash in 5th century Athens between Homeric/ elite and democratic mourning practices. T…
Transnational & Immigrant Entrepreneurship in a Globalized World
Transnational and Immigrant Entrepreneurship in a Globalized World brings together leading international scholars from a cross-disciplinary basis to examine the economic, social, regulatory, technological, and theoretical issues related to the impact of transnational entrepreneurs on business and economic development
Rut, migrante ejemplar. El duelo y las políticas simbólicas de la inmigración
La autora emplea el Libro de Rut para repensar la política simbólica de la inmigración. Expone y critica dos recientes lecturas de la historia de Rut, la de Cynthia Ozick y la de Julia Kristeva, para luego ofrecer la propia, en la cual invierte las preguntas habituales sobre los inmigrantes: en vez de preguntarse cómo resolver el problema de los inmigrantes, se pregunta qué problemas pueden ellos resolver y cómo las políticas simbólicas de la inm…
Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism
Antigone's Two Laws:Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism Bonnie Honig (bio) By insisting on a 'common' corporeal vulnerability, I may seem to be positing a new basis for humanism. —Judith Butler Certain great themes such as ' humanism' can be used to any end whatsoever. —Michel Foucault Only tragedy can deal adequately with humanism on its high horse. —Laurence Michel1 Humanism is making a comeback; not the rationalist, universalist variety…
Political science (39 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Law (29 works) · Politics (27 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Democracy (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works)