Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy

by Bonnie Honig

A more democratic response to political emergencies

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 democratic ways to respond to invocations of emergency politics? Looking at how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Bonnie Honig argues that democracies must resist emergency's pull to focus on life's necessities (food, security, and bare essentials) because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism.

Honig takes a broad approach to emergency, considering immigration politics, new rights claims, contemporary food politics and the infrastructure of consumption, and the limits of law during the Red Scare of the early twentieth century. Taking its bearings from Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish thinkers, this is a major contribution to modern thought about the challenges and risks of democratic orientation and action in response to emergency.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Bonnie Honig is a political and legal theorist specialized in democratic and feminist theory. She is Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Senior Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University.

Prior to moving to Northwestern University, Prof. Honig taught at Harvard University for several years. The 1997 decision by then-President of Harvard Neil Rudenstine not to offer Honig tenure was highly controversial, and attracted harsh criticism from a number of prominent Harvard professors as a violation of Rudenstine's stated commitment to increasing the number of tenured female professors.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are few thinkers as attuned to the everydayness of political practice as Bonnie Honig. Against those who would only ever see politics at work in the hallowed halls of law-making and rule-setting, Honig has never ceased to find political power at work in the quotidian life of everyday action - among the very 'demos' of democracy. What to make then, of those for whom not the ordinary, but the extra-ordinary now defines the state of modern political life? Those for whom, having theorized sovereignty as inextricably bound up with legal decision, have given up on locating sovereignty at work among the extra-official channels of popular activity? It's to just this subject that Emergency Politics turns, calling into question the many conceptions of politics for which the emergency and the exception have - or so the argument goes - increasingly sapped the power of the demos to rule in its own name. 

More than just pitch the 'ordinary' against it's extra-ordinary 'other' however, at stake in Honig's work is an effort to rejig the very terms of the debate in order to find nothing less than the extraordinary 'in' the ordinary, the miracle among the everyday, and the exceptional in the familiar. Drawing from a range of sources - the theology of Franz Rosenzweig, the politics of the 'Slow Food' movement, and the remarkable deeds of Louis Freeland Post during the 'first Red Scare' of the 1920s - Emergency Politics aims to demonstrate not simply the danger implicit in the emergency, but also the opportunities and the promises occasioned by its inescapable insistence in the polis. In an atmosphere where the pressures of 'emergency politics' are ever more keenly felt - in the realm of theory (cf. Agamben) no less than the realm of practice (cf. world politics right now) - Honig's work remains ray of hope and provocation for all who still believe the powers of a 21st century demos.

[Garrison Doreck]

The best work in political theory that attempts toshift emergency into a political conception against the grain over predominantly legalist debates and critiques in order to move beyond Carl Schmitt's and Agamben's huge influence in 21st century academic research agendas and objectives.

[Gregory Kaplan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written and tightly argued. Depends a lot upon Hannah Arendt's conception of natality. The reading of Jewish thought (that is, Franz Rosenzweig) is unsatisying -- unfortunately because it's the most novel aspect of the book's contribution to political theory.