Editor's Introduction

Abstract

I write this note on the twenty-year anniversary of 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. I was a graduate student then, and I remember the solemnity of acknowledging that I was witnessing a history unfurl that I never imagined. The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 will always bookend the beginning of the twenty-first century. Since that day, we have witnessed exponential development in technology, including the invention of the smart phone and social media platforms. Together, they revolutionized on a global scale the way we communicate with one another and became a vehicle for social justice movements including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and MeToo. We witnessed rapid climate change and environmental disasters that revealed startling global wealth disparities. In the U.S., Hurricane Katrina overpowered the levees in New Orleans' Ninth Ward and uncovered the failures of our infrastructure and of racist policies at the local and federal levels. We have witnessed global economic crises, significant shifts in the geopolitical landscape, and an increased popularity of neofascist and authoritarian political ideologies. As I write this, we are in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic during which over 4.5 million people have died.Even though these events are specific to the first twenty-one years of the twenty-first century, the vast changes in technology, medicine, communication, and transportation reflect similar changes at the turn into the twentieth century and even the nineteenth century. The articles in this issue of Soundings weave threads that connect this contemporary moment to the historical past. Further, each of the essays in this issue take up the question of authority and accountability in some way. The contents speak to the past and present: from Aristotelian ethics to the Enlightenment to early twentieth-century structuralism to 1980s era economics to the present day.Manuel Cervera-Marzal's essay “Hegemony: A Useful Concept in Times of Crisis” takes as its central question the mobilization of hegemony in the work of Antonio Gramsci and its transformations in the work of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Pablo Iglesias. Cervera-Marzal maps the development of Gramscian hegemony to its deployment in contemporary ideology and argues that hegemony as a concept should be present in political theory and not just theories of the New Left and Marxist theory. By way of example, Cervera-Marzal concludes with an examination of the practical application of hegemony in the political leadership of Pablo Iglesias.In “Equality Lost: John Locke and the United States 1986 Tax Reform,” John D. Feldmann explores the ethics of tax reform by situating his analysis in the arguments in favor of the 1986 Tax Reform Act. Feldmann carefully details the ways in which the neoconservative economists misinterpreted Locke's equality ideals in order to pass unequal tax laws that ultimately displaced progressive taxation from the U.S. tax code. This 1980s tax reform marks a touchstone moment in the exponential growth of current income and wealth disparities.Daniel Smith in “Ethics without the Will: Vernant, Heidegger, and Agamben on the Relation Between Praxis and Phronesis” explores the concept of “free will” in a freewheeling discussion of ethics. Smith writes that “free will” is a contemporary invention not found in the writings of Aristotle. Instead, Aristotle describes Phronesis, a form of action that complements and challenges the binary oppositions fundamental to Western thought. Smith argues that this often-ignored Aristotelian concept may offer a way out of the nihilistic turn of the contemporary moment. Instead, Phronesis, Smith explains, functions as “a special species of thinking that has the remarkable ability to move things, and so to change the world.”Rebekkah Stuteville offers a prescient analysis of scientific accountability in her essay “Competing Accountability Frameworks and the Role of Interdisciplinary Practice for Publicly Funded Scientists and Scientists within Government.” As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the globe, the current pressure on public health officials and scientists has become even more significant. Stuteville offers a compelling discussion of the history and complexity of scientific accountability in relation to various stakeholders. Stuteville notes two common themes in discussions of accountability: the distrust in scientists' ability to hold their community accountable and a lack of scientific knowledge from public officials. In her conclusion, Stuteville calls for interdisciplinary research, practice, and education for public scientists, public officials, and community stakeholders to improve the processes of accountability for public scientists.Finally, this issue of Soundings concludes with Aihua Chen's review of Susan Watkins' book Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (2020). Watkins' book offers a sweeping exploration of the interventions women writers make in the popular literary genre. In her review, Chen identifies several important points of innovation discussed in Watkins' book where women writers imagine radical possibilities in the apocalyptic aftermath. Chen notes Watkins' claim that “contemporary women writing post-apocalyptic fictions suggest positive futures.” And this is the important message for today—positive futures, possibility, and hope.