Research
Dissertation: Coerced Beginnings: Founding a Democracy After Defeat
My dissertation problematizes “revolutionary” models of democratic founding by foregrounding the experience of defeat. By examining constitutional debates in post–World War II Japan, where a radically pacifist constitution was drafted by its American victors, I ask:
- Can an imposed constitution be legitimate?
- What explains the remarkable longevity of Japan’s postwar constitution, despite its foreign-authored origin?
- What are the psychological, phenomenological, and discursive effects of defeat?
- Why do we remain attached to narratives of revolutionary beginnings?
- Is a universal standpoint on war and peace universally available?
- What does it mean to embrace a radically pacifist constitution initially imposed by a former enemy? How can such an embrace be performative rather than mere pretense?
Guided by these questions, I place the political thought of prominent postwar Japanese intellectuals—including Maruyama Masao, Etō Jun, Oda Makoto, and Katō Norihiro—into conversation with reflections on democratic (republican) subjectivity by J. J. Rousseau, I. Kant, H. Arendt, and J. Derrida, as well as contemporary theorists of radical democracy. The claim I draw from the Japanese experience is, simply put, that popular power may manifest not only through the people’s revolutionary power to make—and continually remake—law according to their will, but also through their capacity to be made by law: to find value in, and give meaning to, political principles and ideals that are not their own creation. My argument aligns with recent efforts in comparative political theory to rethink constituent moments through the lens of the “non-West.”
Chapters from the dissertation have appeared in political theory journals.
“Rousseau’s Lawgiver and Nascent Societies: Rethinking ‘Contingency’ in Agonistic Democracy”
Polity, Volume 57, Number 3 July 2025 (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/736051)
“From Universalism to Situated Universality: Reconfiguring Kantian Pacifism” Contemporary Political Theory, forthcoming.
“Foreign-authored Democracy: Rethinking Constitutional Authorship through Post-defeat Japan”
Political Theory, revision submitted.
