The three major myths of the Republic share a parallel plot structure and a common concern regarding the effects of the city’s educational curriculum on the nature of its citizens. As such, the ‘mythic project’ sustained across the myths coincides with the central political-philosophical project of Plato’s foremost work of political philosophy. I argue that this common inquiry on the effects of education provides a particularly compelling framework for understanding the Myth of Er, which has often struck readers as an inscrutable, if not disappointing, conclusion to the Republic. Furthermore, the mutual entwinement of the Republic’s mythic and philosophical projects cannot be read, as is often said of Plato’s myths, as merely two articulations in different modes, of the same philosophical principles. Rather, the myths of the Republic demonstrate how myth can create spaces for taking certain concepts for granted in ways that are critical to Plato’s conception of what it means to be a philosopher.

presentations:

• Northeastern Political Science Association Annual Meeting - Boston, November 2014
• Graduate Workshop, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics - Harvard University, December 2013*
• Graduate Workshop in Political Theory - Harvard University Department of Government, October 2013

... Read more about The Mythic Project of Plato's Republic

This chapter examines "the Petite Fable," the eschatological myth concluding Leibniz’s Theodicy, written within and against the height of the Enlightenment movement to liberate reason from the shadow of unreason.  Leibniz’s myth can be read as part of an early and self-conscious diagnosis of the intellectual trends of his time, and an attempt to identify what is lost in philosophy when reason is purified into only its critical function.  The myth is not, therefore, the product of a naive faith in an arch-rational metaphysics, but that of a critical insight concerning the boundaries of reason.  Second, it also owes its content, form and themes to a tradition of myth-writing closely entwined with the pre-modern reception of Plato, of which the most notable example is the Dream of Scipio concluding Cicero’s own Republic.  Both eschatological myths are homages to Plato’s Myth of Er, and both explore the themes of political duty in the temporal world against the eternal and infinite, and the consolation that only a mythic philosophy can provide to bridge that gap.

presentations:

• X. Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress - Hannover, July 2016
• Center for European Studies Dissertation Workshop - Harvard University, November 2015
• Graduate Workshop in Political Theory - Harvard University Department of Government, February 2015

... Read more about Leibniz and the boundaries of reason: An Enlightenment Fable

(with Charles Lesch)

Juche (roughly translated as “self-reliance”) is the official state ideology of North Korea, used both in shaping propaganda and for publicly justifying all matters of North Korean policy. Yet while Juche functions as North Korea’s public philosophy, there have been few studies of its conceptual origins. We aim to fill this lacuna by examining the works of Hwang Jang-Yop, a longtime advisor to North Korea’s founding leaders and Juche’s most important architect and rhetorician. We argue that through Hwang, Juche was shaped not, as might be expected, by the Marxist ideologies of North Korea's immediate political allies, but instead by a modified Hegelianism. The Hegelian influence on the formation of Juche, in turn, carried important implications for the shape of North Korea’s social structure and political culture. 

Despite the nation’s perception of itself as realizing a Marxist vision, Hwang’s attempt to inaugurate a genuinely “human-centric” philosophy represents a conservative turn against Marx and back to Hegel. Hegel was perhaps the most important intellectual influence on Hwang during his formative years as a philosopher. We show that the body of Hwang’s work arises from a particular reading of Hegel’s philosophy of history, one that aims to remove from it all traces of mysticism. In place of Hegel’s Geist, Hwang substitutes an idealized conception of the human being. The resulting vision is a celebration of history without end, a conception of humanity that has no limits, in principle, to its potential progress. While such a worldview appears optimistic, the consequence is ultimately one in which there is a constant disjuncture between reality and imagined human potential. What therefore begins as an attempt at demystifying history ends with a novel mythology of the human being. This analysis, we conclude, sheds light on some of the more puzzling features of North Korean state ideology, and offers broader theoretical insights into what happens when politics itself serves as a religion.

presentations:

• upcoming: Association for Political Theory annual conference - Boulder, CO, October 2015

Each of the societies represented in the Republic, Utopia, and Bacon’s New Atlantis maintain some version of a myth told in relation to its founding. These founding myths capture what is fundamentally utopian about the enterprises of the kallipolis, Utopia and Bensalem: the desire for a single, coherent beginning of a society in which all its governing principles are laid down at once, and which guarantee its perpetual survival. They articulate a dream for an artificial founding, as opposed to an organic evolution toward the utopian state.

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