David Peritz: Faculty in Political Science at Sarah Lawrence College

Research

I studied as an undergraduate at Occidental College and as a graduate at Oxford University, and have held research positions at Erasmus University (Rotterdam), Dartmouth College, and The London School of Economics. My research focuses on the question of how to understand and practice democratic cooperation in conditions of cultural diversity, social complexity, intransigent inequality, and political dispersal--what I take to be the politically salient aspects of contemporary society. I aim to defend democracy as a practical ideal, a form of governance that can be realized in contemporary social conditions despite standing in considerable tension with them. And I understand democracy to be bound up with a broader ideal of social cooperation, an aspiration to a shared social life free of domination, conducted instead on terms all concerned can accept reciprocally as free and equal persons. I worry that much current political thought fails to give satisfactory expression to the ideal of democratic cooperation, and that in practical politics, a similar failure undermines the utopian dimension of discussion and action, leading to a near collapse of the discourse of justice in many societies. In my scholarship, I seek to address these circumstances, first, by studying the main obstacles to democratic cooperation and, second, by outlining a politics that allows us to preserve the core content of the ideal of democratic cooperation and to engage in efforts to make the societies we inhabit more democratic and cooperative, while at the same time adjusting the ways we understand and defend the ideal so that it remains a realistic aspiration. This is a multifaceted project that leads me both to engage sympathetically and critically with the political thought of a number of historical and current theorists, and to develop my own approach to democratic theory. I defend the claims that democracy is best understood as supported by a common political culture but that a common culture can only be constituted by the mutual participation of diverse persons and hence must contain a plurality of competing ideas; and that a 'decentered' (as opposed to a state-centered) practice of democracy is emerging in a wide range of political arenas throughout the world and holds the potential to renew effective democratic cooperation by creating broad-based opportunities for participation in democratic deliberation and decision-making. This work will lead to a number of articles and eventually a book tentatively titled Constructions of Reason, Constructions of Power: Democratic Cooperation in an Era of Diversity and Complexity. (See the links below for a sampling of some of my recent writings.)

Papers

These files are in PDF format. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader or a similar program to view them.