Regenerative Politics - (New Directions in Critical Theory) by Emma Planinc

About the Book

Emma Planinc argues that liberal democracies must open themselves up to a regenerative politics that accepts all claims against political convention as self-determinative--including those that desire the rejection of rights or the overturning of liberal democracies themselves.

Book Synopsis

Critics of liberal democracy from both the left and right view rights not as protectors of freedom but as impediments to self-determination and call for radically regenerative political alternatives. Liberals respond to these challenges by reasserting that universal rights are self-evident, intentionally foreclosing the possibility of remaking the political order. Regenerative Politics makes a bold intervention into this fraught landscape, arguing that the survival of rights depends on abandoning their claims to self-evidence.

Emma Planinc argues that liberal democracies must open themselves up to a regenerative politics that accepts all claims against political convention as self-determinative--including those that desire the rejection of rights or the overturning of liberal democracies themselves. Bringing together scholarship on race, democracy, liberalism, fascism, and the far right with an intellectual history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and a novel account of human nature, Regenerative Politics offers a new political theory for the revitalization of politics. Planinc shows that liberal democracies can arm themselves against extreme challenges by remaining perpetually open to the reconstitution of rights, restoring the capacity for human beings to determine themselves in the world.

Review Quotes

Emma Planinc's book revives an Enlightenment naturalism that convinced Jean-Jacques Rousseau to call for emancipation from dependence as our most basic human entitlement. One of the boldest interventions in political theory in years, Regenerative Politics argues that no era needs Rousseau's arresting suggestion so much as our own.--Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times

Bracingly written and rigorously argued, Regenerative Politics makes a profoundly illuminating contribution to our understanding of Enlightenment political thought and to its fundamental contemporary legacies. By demonstrating the key scientific and theoretical sources of eighteenth-century conceptions of humanity's self-making, Planinc establishes the deep roots of revolutionary thinking that could fortify transformative political commitments in our own troubled times.--Sankar Muthu, author of Enlightenment Against Empire

Emma Planinc's Regenerative Politics is unsettling in the very best way. It recovers a French Enlightenment conception of human emancipation that is at once refreshing and risky. It is also that rare thing--a book that is as honest about promises as it is about perils.--Alison McQueen, author of Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times

For a generation witnessing the demise of the human in politics, Planinc offers in this penetrating account the consolation of deep historical insight regarding the risks, but also the necessary rewards, of political regeneration.--Darrin M. McMahon, author of Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea

About the Author

Emma Planinc is an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Notre Dame.