Throughout the history of Marxist theory and practice in Latin America, certain questions recur. What is the relationship between political and social revolution? How can state institutions serve as tools for political change? What is the basis for mass collective political agency? And how can intellectual work contribute to broader emancipatory political movements? Through textual and historical analysis, this dissertation examines how Latin American intellectuals and political actors have reframed and answered these questions in changing historical circumstances. Four episodes in this history are examined: debates between José Carlos Mariátegui and Raúl Haya de la Torre in the late 1920s; the trajectory of the publication Pasado y Presente in Argentina from the 1960s to the 1980s; the uneven path from nationalism to Marxism in the work of Bolivian theorist René Zavaleta Mercado between the 1950s and 1980s; and, most recently, the theoretical efforts of activist-intellectuals in the Comuna group during the last two decades of political change in Bolivia. By examining these episodes in both their theoretical content and historical context, the dissertation argues that the modern concept of constituent power plays a central if sometimes obscure role in theorists’ approaches, while the theory of hegemony, drawn from the work of Antonio Gramsci, informs their strategic perspectives. It also shows, however, how different thinkers have run up against the limitations of these frameworks; mass political events have effects that exceed the dominant conceptual understandings of constituent power and hegemony, and reach beyond the scope of the state, demanding new explanations. The resulting tensions, revealed here by extensively analyzing the case of Comuna in Bolivia during the Pink Tide, have compelled Latin American theorists to recover elided indigenous histories, to forge materialist conceptions of culture and knowledge, to explore aleatory notions of political organization, and to reimagine the political role of intellectuals as that of weaving together, rather than leading, disparate tendencies of political innovation.

This dissertation theorizes Harriet Jacobs's politics of abolitionist emancipation as a loophole in modern theories of freedom. Jacobs's narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is an immeasurably valuable critique of the sexual politics of the peculiar institution. Our return to Jacobs wonders what additional value might be gleamed from reading her contributions to the abolitionist tradition as a social critique of slavery animated by an immanent critique of the virtues of modern political emancipation. Though most studies of Jacobs's work focus on her narrative this project places Incidents in the broader context of her Civil War writings and subsequent contributions to national reconstruction. I argue that Jacobs's slave girl protocols of emancipation shift the sexual politics of slavery's domestic order from the margins of the abolitionist tradition to its epistemic center. The question of freedom at the core of Jacobs's abolitionism directed itself to both proslavery supporters and antislavery activists alike. It was a question that asked when and for whom is self-defense a crime, and when and for whom a virtue? Her philosophy of freedom challenged conventional figurations of freedom foundational to American political theory, and anticipated analytic innovations of the twentieth century wrought to repurpose them, in particular feminist of color interventions to conventional notions of national belonging, political justice and a radical ethics of freedom.

This dissertation explores the complex relationship between time, history, and judicial decision-making in the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts. I address the Court's prevailing "present-past" orientation—a tendency to anchor decisions in historical precedent without adequately considering the differentiating power of time to alter the experience of living under the Constitution. This approach, while respectful of tradition, often results in judicial outcomes that fail to resonate with the dynamic conditions of contemporary society.

I interrogate this issue from a philosophical—as opposed to political—perspective by applying Henri Bergson’s concepts of "duration" and "simultaneity" to reveal the temporal aspects of Supreme Court decision-making. Bergson’s philosophy provides a framework for critiquing the Supreme Court's static view of history. When applied, that framework suggests that legal precedents should not be seen as fixed points but as evolving constructs that must be interpreted in light of current societal contexts. The dissertation contrasts the Court's historical approach with what I call a "present-future" orientation—one where the Constitution’s founding principles are adapted to the experiences of modern Americans.

The dissertation argues that the Roberts Court's historical consciousness, with its emphasis on static interpretations of the past, often constrains the Court’s ability to engage with the Constitution as a living document that must answer to contemporary contingencies. Further, the dissertation reveals a real but often overlooked dynamic of judicial opinion writing—namely, that precedent cases self-differentiate over time and thus must constantly be checked to ensure their continuing relevance to contemporary experience. This has significant implications for the Court's role in shaping legal principles that are responsive to modern challenges.

I conclude by proposing a method for rethinking constitutional interpretation—one that embraces the fluidity of time and history as integral to judicial creativity. This approach would allow the Supreme Court to better fulfill its role as a guardian of constitutional values in a manner that is both historically informed and future-oriented, thereby ensuring that its decisions remain relevant to the lived experiences of the American people.

Meaningful Violence examines how journalists produce knowledge of war and the frictions – practical, ideological, and linguistic – inherent to war reportage. Based on two years of participant observation with journalists in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, this ethnography captures the lived experience of violence and its representation in the “war on terror” era. My aim is to challenge dominant conceptions of militarism by demonstrating how authority is constituted representationally. Attention to the practice of war reportage indicates that the confusions, intimacies, and distress inherent to the work of wartime journalism are displaced from the news journalists produce. While exposure to violence is professionally necessary, the effects of this experience are erased. This discursive repression shows how a normative order is imposed upon the representation of faraway conflict. Violence, I argue, is simultaneously commodified and disavowed by the practice of reporting war. The 2016-17 battle for Mosul provides a case study of the ideology of war reportage. Lauded journalism revealed US-coalition underestimates of civilian casualties from anti-Islamic State operations. Yet journalists failed to challenge the official rationale offered for this harm: an accidental exception or necessary excess to justified violence. Focusing on individuated suffering as the central problem of war – rather than the structures perpetuating suffering – journalists emphasized the morality of militarism while mystifying its political logic. I argue that war reportage, in its contemporary humanitarian mode, transforms war from the effects of policy on populations to the effects of violence on the innocent. Attending to the language of war reportage, I investigate the politics of common classifications, the symbolism of casualty counts, the byline’s elision of authorial presence, and related generic conventions. A discourse analysis of news industry “style guides” further indicates how journalistic language structures the performance of truth-telling. War reportage, I argue, is less a record of war than a result of linguistic conditions determining how war can be recorded. Finally, I explore possibilities endemic to journalism for thinking war anew. By considering the practice, ideology, and language of war reportage for what they conceal as well as what they sanction, opportunities for contesting hegemonic understandings of war can emerge.

This dissertation examines the historical roots of Federal Reserve liquidity support policies in the market for U.S. Government securities during the early years of the central bank’s existence, 1920-1961. Drawing on the Federal Reserve System’s archival records, records of congressional hearings, and historical news coverage, I trace a genealogy of the Federal Reserve’s informal mandate to maintain “orderly” conditions in the government securities market. The animating idea behind the maintenance of orderly markets was that the ostensibly self-regulating price mechanism of a “free” government securities market could only be guaranteed through Federal Reserve interventions that would stave off speculative panic and the threat of illiquidity. In other words, the free market could be established and maintained only through continuous intervention. I analyze how the influence of private bankers in the Federal Reserve System helped to ensure that the malleable discourse of orderly markets would be employed to legitimate interventions that benefited the U.S. financial sector. At the same time, it preserved the idea of bond markets as a site of truth, in which the impersonal economic logic of supply and demand—and not the political logic of price support—could be brought to bear on the fiscal state.

This dissertation seeks to develop a viable concept of justice--one limited enough to sustain the conditions of modern pluralism but strong enough to survive the encounter with political emergency. Such justice is necessarily mediated through law, which promises to reconcile the competing obligations of its subject while still producing authoritative decisions. This unifying task founders on political exceptions: expressions of difference that resist incorporation into the conceptual schema of rational order. My point of entry is John Rawls' theory of political liberalism, particularly his concept of `reasonableness.' This term in Rawls is primarily a device for depoliticizing exclusions; by demarcating reasonable and unreasonable doctrines, he permits the deployment of political violence in the name of neutrality. However, a radical possibility of recursive development is embedded in this idea, one unexplored by Rawls or any of his critics.

To situate this argument I turn to the Hart/Dworkin debate in legal philosophy over the nature of law, informed by Carl Schmitt's treatment of exceptionality. My goal is to demonstrate the terminal limits of legal restraint on political order. Law in this sense is nothing but bare formalism, a servant of decisions made in the exceptional space where indeterminacy and emergency meet. But a different concept of law is possible, one that begins from the premise of exceptionality. The rule of law cannot resolve the inherently undecidable problems of justification. But this is unimportant if law is reconceptualized as a technique of legitimacy, a mechanism for binding difference on explicitly political terms. In this account, justice provides the terms through which a political community of reasonableness constitutes itself. In affirming the mutuality of justice and legitimacy, therefore, we affirm a political concept of law--one founded on exceptions rather than norms.

This dissertation is concerned to rethink the relation between money and the state in a way that challenges both Marxist and chartalist stories about the history and nature of money and monetary phenomena. In doing so, it examines the problem of liquidity, or the question of whether or not there exists a market in money, as a problem of constitutional order and class struggle, and argues that this problem can be illuminated by means of a study of tragic drama. It traces a genealogy of “modern money” created through the monetization of public liabilities through the first emergence of a permanent peacetime deficit state in early modern England, and asks what we might learn about this genealogy through an attention to the works of William Shakespeare as a sensitive observer of the social and political fault lines out of which the system of modern money emerged. In doing so, it follows his historical gaze backwards through history, to medieval England and the earliest coinage societies of Mediterranean antiquity. Out of this discussion is generated a new theory of money that challenges all currently existing orthodox and heterodox theories, and which sees money as constituted not by an identity or equivalence but rather by a difference or a spread, in terms of which options can be created and priced.

This work illustrates how a renewed right has emerged against the backdrop of a “progressive” mode of neoliberal capitalism. An intensifying strain between political economy and ideology has unsettled key constructs traditionally used to produce political legitimacy. To understand this, attention is paid to neoliberalism’s legitimizing ideology, which I argue is conditioned by humanitarian reason and ethics. This ideological destabilization has opened space for new emergent reactionary politicization. Contemporary reactionary politics take aim at neoliberalism’s legitimizing ideology rather than its political economy. This conjunctural dynamic has also brought about serious changes in areas typically understood as static in their support of reactionary politics, like whiteness and masculinity. This dissertation contours these changes and argues for a new analysis of reactionary politics in the US.

Destroyer of Worlds is an interdisciplinary study of the nuclear epoch, emphasizing its theological and philosophical origins and implications. Its core argument is that the purpose of the Manhattan Project was to end war in general, not hasten the end of a particular war. The scientists and politicians who collaborated on the atomic bomb's creation believed that its war-time detonation would be a form of revelatory annihilation, triggering a miraculous chain-reaction which would convert humanity to pacifism. Though they successfully invented and deployed the new superweapon, they failed to engineer their miracle. The dissertation goes on to ask why, examining how the world and humanity were forever changed by the burning of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and also the ways in which they remained the same by closely reading primary historical documents, philosophical and political commentaries, and an array of art objects, both literary and visual.

This dissertation studies selections of intellectual production on settler colonialism as it concerns the theory and history of capitalism. Part I engages the consolidation of an intellectual paradigm in the post-Cold War period, which I call, “settler colonial reason.” This critical orientation to the history and present of society combines a schematic theory of settler colonialism with the remarkable salience of Marx’s notion of so-called primitive accumulation in the same decades. In the paradigm, the passage of history, particularly the history of capitalism, is principally intelligible as a repetition of origins. Whatever might happen in history, it is always and ultimately an expression of its foundational and structural “logics”—so many new forms or rounds of enclosure, dispossession, and elimination. I elaborate a critique of this paradigm across two chapters: one treating it directly and the other assessing its recent application to the history of Palestine.

Part II seeks alternatives in a longer intellectual history of colonization and the uneven historical development of capitalism, beginning with classical political economy. The combined colonial and commercial policy of specific heterodox thinkers provided a conceptual solution to impasses in industrial capitalism’s early stages. I argue that “systematic colonization” in theory and Anglo settler colonialism in practice facilitated the co-existence, in metropole and colony, of high wages and high profits—in a word, “economic development.” This assigns paramount significance to the unprecedented and unrepeatable mass migration of working people from an industrializing center to an agrarian settlement for absolutely high wages, and the trade and investment relations between these regions. The final chapter tracks these themes into twentieth-century thought on economic development, including mainstream postwar development theorists, economic historians, and their critics. Through this investigation, I formalize the role of wage spreads to global patterns of economic development and underdevelopment, especially those opened by the non-replicable history of Anglo settlement.

Altogether, the dissertation advocates for an approach to settler colonialism that is not typological (differentiated by internal “logics” at the national level). It pursues instead the intellectual means for determining settler colonialism concretely within and as part of the uneven historical development of capitalism.