Publications
2020. "Observed Without Sympathy: Adam Smith on Inequality and Spectatorship." American Journal of Political Science 64 (4): 1034-1046.
Responding to socioeconomic inequality and the decline of political participation, theorists of “audience democracy” emphasize citizens’ spectatorship of political leaders but neglect how citizens experience being watched themselves. I turn to Adam Smith's arguments about the effects of inequality on spectatorship, highlighting his criticisms of the public's disdain for people living in poverty. By comparing Smith's arguments about misperceptions of people living in poverty to his discussions of an innocent man accused of a crime, I show how mistaken spectators demoralize even morally judicious individuals. I also expand on an example of unjust censure that Smith suggests but does not discuss in detail: the social shame directed at a survivor of rape. I conclude by using Smith's insights to reflect on the social and interpersonal dynamics of surveillance that render contemporary welfare programs degrading for many participants and help transform socioeconomic inequality into political inequality.
Responding to socioeconomic inequality and the decline of political participation, theorists of “audience democracy” emphasize citizens’ spectatorship of political leaders but neglect how citizens experience being watched themselves. I turn to Adam Smith's arguments about the effects of inequality on spectatorship, highlighting his criticisms of the public's disdain for people living in poverty. By comparing Smith's arguments about misperceptions of people living in poverty to his discussions of an innocent man accused of a crime, I show how mistaken spectators demoralize even morally judicious individuals. I also expand on an example of unjust censure that Smith suggests but does not discuss in detail: the social shame directed at a survivor of rape. I conclude by using Smith's insights to reflect on the social and interpersonal dynamics of surveillance that render contemporary welfare programs degrading for many participants and help transform socioeconomic inequality into political inequality.
Current Book Project
Seeing and Being Seen: Toward a Liberal Democratic Theory of Spectatorship
In 2018, America learned that the electoral campaign of the first reality-TV star President had microtargeted potential voters with personalized ads using vast troves of data improperly collected from social media. The scandal revealed the hidden infrastructure of today’s digital media environment: using social media, we watch and contribute to democratic politics while simultaneously being subject to surveillance – from each other, from companies, and from political actors. In turn, the data collected about us determines what we see. To capture the centrality of spectatorship in our politics, democratic theorists have advanced the notion of “audience democracy”; some even propose that the public can harness the power of their collective gaze to influence political leaders. Can the people exert power over political leaders by watching them, or are spectators subject to the power of those they watch? How does the ubiquity of surveillance affect the people’s experiences as political spectators and participants?
In my book manuscript, I show how these questions, though made newly urgent by contemporary technology, can be answered by examining the philosophical foundations of liberal democracy. By retrieving approaches to the politics of spectatorship in the works of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, I conceptualize spectatorship as a socially embedded, multidirectional process that includes experiences of surveillance. Whereas many theorists of audience democracy emphasize the visual and affective dimensions of spectatorship, engaging with these thinkers draws our attention to the political actors and social factors, like different forms of inequality, that shape experiences of seeing and being seen. The politically and socioeconomically eminent often benefit from a particularly attentive and admiring public audience, while unjust public scrutiny is easily directed toward more vulnerable members of the community. Democratic freedom requires not only opportunities of observing, judging, and electing political leadership but also protections of the individual’s ability to control the terms of her own publicity.
In 2018, America learned that the electoral campaign of the first reality-TV star President had microtargeted potential voters with personalized ads using vast troves of data improperly collected from social media. The scandal revealed the hidden infrastructure of today’s digital media environment: using social media, we watch and contribute to democratic politics while simultaneously being subject to surveillance – from each other, from companies, and from political actors. In turn, the data collected about us determines what we see. To capture the centrality of spectatorship in our politics, democratic theorists have advanced the notion of “audience democracy”; some even propose that the public can harness the power of their collective gaze to influence political leaders. Can the people exert power over political leaders by watching them, or are spectators subject to the power of those they watch? How does the ubiquity of surveillance affect the people’s experiences as political spectators and participants?
In my book manuscript, I show how these questions, though made newly urgent by contemporary technology, can be answered by examining the philosophical foundations of liberal democracy. By retrieving approaches to the politics of spectatorship in the works of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, I conceptualize spectatorship as a socially embedded, multidirectional process that includes experiences of surveillance. Whereas many theorists of audience democracy emphasize the visual and affective dimensions of spectatorship, engaging with these thinkers draws our attention to the political actors and social factors, like different forms of inequality, that shape experiences of seeing and being seen. The politically and socioeconomically eminent often benefit from a particularly attentive and admiring public audience, while unjust public scrutiny is easily directed toward more vulnerable members of the community. Democratic freedom requires not only opportunities of observing, judging, and electing political leadership but also protections of the individual’s ability to control the terms of her own publicity.