Response to Anna Marie Smith's review of America's New Working Class

Abstract

Anna Marie Smith and I have similar concerns about the poor, racism and sexism. Yet we view political theory in different ways. Smith has focused on one set of programs and gives the reader a richly detailed view of recent welfare laws. In contrast, I have tried to do something very different. First, I use Giorgio Agamben's ideas as a foil, drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault to supplement this reading, and I investigate the ideas of John Locke (rather than Thomas Hobbes) to understand sovereignty today. By looking at Locke, we can understand how representative government based on the rule of law and equality can coexist with prerogative power used systematically and domestically. Instead of a top-down view of power, I argue that modern power is characterized by the dispersal of sovereignty and, importantly, prerogative power (the legal suspension of the law). Thus, even as national borders have become more open (both with economic globalization and post-Clausewitzean forms of war), state sovereignty has not necessarily declined. In fact, the use of prerogative power increasingly characterizes late-modern power even as neoliberal rhetoric gives the opposite impression.