This paper explores the reception of Gellner’s historical sociology among students of pre-modern societies and the Greco-Roman world in particular and asks how his thought is still relevant to the field. This involves discussion of recent trends in world history as well as new comparative work on ancient state and elite formation. A main contention of the paper is that Gellner’s sociological reading of Plato and his politics may be one of the most interesting modern interpretations of the ancient Greek (...) thinker on offer and one which can serve as a fruitful framework for the comparative study of complex, pre-industrial societies. (shrink)

This paper analyzes how the figure of the childhas been used to authorize a series ofboundaries that have constituted thelimit-points of educational theories orphilosophies. Limit-points are the conceptualboundaries that educational theories produce,move within, respond to, and make use ofbecause the perception is that they cannot beargued away or around at the time. A method ofcomparative historico-philosophy is used tocontrast limit-points in Platonic figurationsof the child and education with childcenteredand eugenic theories of the late nineteenth andtwentieth century West. The figuration of (...) thechild in both periods is imbricated in formingboundaries around a power-motion-reason nexusand in delineating what necessity and justicemean. The meaning-space that the child canoccupy in relation to such concepts has shiftedwith them and has been important to depictingUtopian and cosmological imaginings atdifferent historical moments and forauthorizing in turn what counts as anappropriate and/or realistic educationalphilosophy. (shrink)

Feminist theory needs both explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory-diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory-utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory-utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation (...) is compatible with a complex explanatory-diagnostic analysis of contemporary gender domination as it is intertwined and entangled with race, class, sexuality, and empire. I explore this question through an analysis of two specific debates in which the paradoxical relationship between power and emancipation emerges in particularly salient and seemingly intractable forms: debates over subjection and modernity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that a negativistic conception of emancipation offers the best way for feminist critical theory to transform the paradox of power and emancipation into a productive tension that can fuel critique. (shrink)