Books by Margaret L Kohn
Routledge, 2021
In the wake of health and economic crises across the world, solidarity is emerging as both a mora... more In the wake of health and economic crises across the world, solidarity is emerging as both a moral imperative and urgent social goal. This book approaches solidarity as a political good, both a framework of power structures and grounds for moral motivation. The distinct approaches to public goods and social value demonstrate how social connectedness is intricately tied to the distribution of public goods, and the moral commitments that grow out of them.
The essays in this book explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. They offer moral justification for solidarity, grounded in the intrinsic value of social connectedness and epistemic deference; propose structural accounts of solidarity as action against racial oppression, or as an effective non-moral framework; propose to redefine property relations, so as to capture and redistribute propertys social value, and envision public goods as both an instrument of civic relations and as a condition to well-rounded, meaningful human lives. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the book reestablishes solidarity and public goods as an urgent and timely topic.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
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Oxford University Press, 2021
The city is a paradoxical space, in theory belonging to everyone, in practice inaccessible to peo... more The city is a paradoxical space, in theory belonging to everyone, in practice inaccessible to people who cannot afford the high price of urban real estate. Why should access to public and social goods be tied to the ability to acquire private property? When people lose access to the urban commons, they are dispossessed of something to which they have a rightful claim. What kind of right is the right to the city? Political theory has much to say about individual rights, equality, and redistribution, but has largely ignored the city. In order to fill this lacuna, this book draws on a largely forgotten political theory called solidarism. Solidarism’s justification of social rights is particularly relevant to conflicts about urban space. The book uses solidarism to interpret the city as a form of common-wealth, a concentration of value created by past generations and current residents. This approach helps us rethink struggles over gentrification, public housing, transit, and public space.
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Oxford University Press, 2011
Recent scholarship in political theory has focused on the treatment of colonialism in the writing... more Recent scholarship in political theory has focused on the treatment of colonialism in the writings of canonical thinkers such as Locke, Burke, Mill, Diderot, Tocqueville, Smith, and Kant, revealing the extent to which the subject of colonialism and imperialism dominated the minds of great thinkers as the colonial project took place. While such scholarship provides fascinating insight into the possible problems of enlightenment thought, it tends to ignore the voices of thinkers who spoke from the position of the colonized. This book fills a gap in postcolonial political critique by serving as an introduction to theorists who struggled with the question of how to found a new political order when the existing ideas and institutions were implicated in a history of domination. Looking at the writings of Gandhi, Ngugi, al-Afghani, and Mariategui, among several others, the book aims to explain how the work of these thinkers engage in thematic continuities—constituting “postcolonial political thought”—and add to liberal democratic understandings of political power, as well as illuminate how many of the central questions of political theory are imaginatively explored by postcolonial writers.
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Routledge , 2004
Fighting for First Amendment rights is as popular a pastime as ever, but just because you can get... more Fighting for First Amendment rights is as popular a pastime as ever, but just because you can get on your soapbox doesn't mean anyone will be there to listen. Town squares have emptied out as shoppers decamp for the megamalls; gated communities keep pesky signature gathering activists away; even most internet chatrooms are run by the major media companies. Brave New Neighborhood sconsiders what can be done to protect and revitalize our public spaces.
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Cornell University Press, 2003
Epoch-making political events are often remembered for their spatial markers: the fall of the Ber... more Epoch-making political events are often remembered for their spatial markers: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the storming of the Bastille, the occupation of Tiananmen Square. Until recently, however, political theory has overlooked the power of place. In Radical Space, Margaret Kohn puts space at the center of democratic theory. Kohn examines different sites of working-class mobilization in Europe and explains how these sites destabilized the existing patterns of social life, economic activity, and political participation. Her approach suggests new ways to understand the popular public sphere of the early twentieth century.
This book imaginatively integrates a range of sources, including critical theory, social history, and spatial analysis. Drawing on the historical record of cooperatives, houses of the people, and chambers of labor, Kohn shows how the built environment shaped people's actions, identities, and political behavior. She illustrates how the symbolic and social dimensions of these places were mobilized as resources for resisting oppressive political relations. The author shows that while many such sites of resistance were destroyed under fascism, they created geographies of popular power that endure to the present.
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Papers by Margaret L Kohn
Constellations, 2000
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On Solidarity, eds. Andrea Sangiovanni and Juri Viehoff (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming)
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Handbook of Urban Politics and Policy (Routledge, Forthcoming).
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European Journal of Political Theory , 2022
This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how i... more This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power.
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Perspectives on Politics , 2022
Why should the state provide public goods? I explore this question by focusing on the example of ... more Why should the state provide public goods? I explore this question by focusing on the example of public parks. It examines the three most influential approaches to public goods (the market failures, the normative, and the democratic) and concludes that they fail to explain why parks should be public. I propose an alternative that I call solidarism, a social justice-based approach that provides a response to liberal arguments about the neutrality of the state. Solidarism emphasizes that modernity gives rise to growing levels of interdependence that generate benefits and burdens that are not shared fairly. Public goods as such are a way of compensating for the negative externalities of urbanization and industrialization. Left libertarians argue that such compensation should exclusively take the form of individual benefits. I challenge this view and provide three reasons for building public infrastructure that is shared among people who live together in a physical space: solidarity, decommodification, and politics. Exploring the publicness of parks provides a window into the broader question about the limits of the market and the importance of public space for democracy.
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Solidarity and Public Goods, eds. Avigail Ferdman, Margaret Kohn (Routledge), 2021
In the wake of health and economic crises across the world, solidarity is emerging as both a mora... more In the wake of health and economic crises across the world, solidarity is emerging as both a moral imperative and urgent social goal. This book approaches solidarity as a political good, both a framework of power structures and grounds for moral motivation. The distinct approaches to public goods and social value demonstrate how social connectedness is intricately tied to the distribution of public goods, and the moral commitments that grow out of them.
The essays in this book explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. They offer moral justification for solidarity, grounded in the intrinsic value of social connectedness and epistemic deference; propose structural accounts of solidarity as action against racial oppression, or as an effective non-moral framework; propose to redefine property relations, so as to capture and redistribute propertys social value, and envision public goods as both an instrument of civic relations and as a condition to well-rounded, meaningful human lives. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the book reestablishes solidarity and public goods as an urgent and timely topic.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
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Cities vs States: Should Urban Citizenship Be Emancipated from Nationality? , 2020
Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Research Paper
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Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American, eds. Melody Barnes, Corey Walker, and Thad Williamson, (Elsevier), 2020
How can we create and sustain an America that never was, but should be? How can we build a robust... more How can we create and sustain an America that never was, but should be? How can we build a robust multiracial democracy in which everyone is valued and everyone possesses political, economic and social capital? How can democracy become a meaningful way of life, for all citizens? By critically probing these questions, the editors of Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy seize the opportunity to bridge the gap between our democratic aspirations and our current reality.
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Architecture and Political Theory, eds. Duncan Bell and Bernardo Zacka (Bloomsbury), 2020
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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , 2019
I am grateful to all the contributors to this interventions forum for their thoughtful commentari... more I am grateful to all the contributors to this interventions forum for their thoughtful commentaries on my book. While I can only briefly respond to their most challenging critiques, their reflections will enrich my own work and the broader theoretical debates about the urban commonwealth, the right to the city and social justice in cities.
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A Companion to Public Space, eds. Vikas Mehta and Danilo Palazzo (Routledge), 2010
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Empire, Race, and Global Justice, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge University Press), 2019
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Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2018
The paper argues that the liberal approach to social rights is contradictory and provides an alte... more The paper argues that the liberal approach to social rights is contradictory and provides an alternative account that draws on solidarism, a strand of nineteenth-century French Republican thought. Solidarism links together a normative theory of social obligation and a descriptive account of social value, debt and unearned increment. The theory of social property provides a distinctive foundation for social rights.
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Contemporary Political Theory , 2016
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Context Collapse, ed. Barbie Zelizer, (Routledge), 2016
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Books by Margaret L Kohn
The essays in this book explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. They offer moral justification for solidarity, grounded in the intrinsic value of social connectedness and epistemic deference; propose structural accounts of solidarity as action against racial oppression, or as an effective non-moral framework; propose to redefine property relations, so as to capture and redistribute propertys social value, and envision public goods as both an instrument of civic relations and as a condition to well-rounded, meaningful human lives. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the book reestablishes solidarity and public goods as an urgent and timely topic.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
This book imaginatively integrates a range of sources, including critical theory, social history, and spatial analysis. Drawing on the historical record of cooperatives, houses of the people, and chambers of labor, Kohn shows how the built environment shaped people's actions, identities, and political behavior. She illustrates how the symbolic and social dimensions of these places were mobilized as resources for resisting oppressive political relations. The author shows that while many such sites of resistance were destroyed under fascism, they created geographies of popular power that endure to the present.
Papers by Margaret L Kohn
The essays in this book explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. They offer moral justification for solidarity, grounded in the intrinsic value of social connectedness and epistemic deference; propose structural accounts of solidarity as action against racial oppression, or as an effective non-moral framework; propose to redefine property relations, so as to capture and redistribute propertys social value, and envision public goods as both an instrument of civic relations and as a condition to well-rounded, meaningful human lives. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the book reestablishes solidarity and public goods as an urgent and timely topic.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
The essays in this book explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. They offer moral justification for solidarity, grounded in the intrinsic value of social connectedness and epistemic deference; propose structural accounts of solidarity as action against racial oppression, or as an effective non-moral framework; propose to redefine property relations, so as to capture and redistribute propertys social value, and envision public goods as both an instrument of civic relations and as a condition to well-rounded, meaningful human lives. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the book reestablishes solidarity and public goods as an urgent and timely topic.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
This book imaginatively integrates a range of sources, including critical theory, social history, and spatial analysis. Drawing on the historical record of cooperatives, houses of the people, and chambers of labor, Kohn shows how the built environment shaped people's actions, identities, and political behavior. She illustrates how the symbolic and social dimensions of these places were mobilized as resources for resisting oppressive political relations. The author shows that while many such sites of resistance were destroyed under fascism, they created geographies of popular power that endure to the present.
The essays in this book explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. They offer moral justification for solidarity, grounded in the intrinsic value of social connectedness and epistemic deference; propose structural accounts of solidarity as action against racial oppression, or as an effective non-moral framework; propose to redefine property relations, so as to capture and redistribute propertys social value, and envision public goods as both an instrument of civic relations and as a condition to well-rounded, meaningful human lives. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the book reestablishes solidarity and public goods as an urgent and timely topic.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.