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Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy

Author: Bonnie Honig

This project is a book that examines what opportunities might exist within the frame of emergency politics for democratic action. How is executive branch power dependent, even in emergency situations, on popular support? This work in political and legal theory finds resources with which to limit the most expansive executive branch claims on behalf of emergency in the example of Louis Post, Assistant Secertary of Labor during the First Red Scare and the food politics group, Slow Food, as well as in the theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, a post-war political theorist, and Franz Rosenzweig, a contemporary of Carl Schmitt, the legal theorist whose work on the state of exception (emergency declaration) so influences legal and political theorists today.

The book will appear with Princeton University Press in 2009.


Summaries and findings

Antigone’s Lament, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership and the Institution of Exception
Sep 10, 2008

All summaries and findings »