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In the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of political theory, The Capacity Contract shows how the exclusion of disabled people has shaped democratic politics. Stacy Clifford Simplican demonstrates how disability buttresses systems of domination based on race, sex, and gender. She exposes how democratic theory and politics have long blocked from political citizenship anyone whose cognitive capacity falls below a threshold level⎯marginalization with real-world repercussions on the implementation of disability rights today. Simplican’s compelling ethnographic analysis of the self-advocacy movement describes the obstacles it faces. From the outside, the movement must confront stiff budget cuts and dwindling memberships; internally, self-advocates must find ways to demand political standing without reinforcing entrenched stigma against people with profound cognitive disabilities. And yet Simplican’s investigation also offers democratic theorists and disability activists a more emancipatory vision of democracy as it relates to disability⎯one that focuses on enabling people to engage in public and spontaneous action to disrupt exclusion and stigma. Taking seriously democratic promises of equality and inclusion, The Capacity Contract rejects conceptions of political citizenship that privilege cognitive capacity and, instead, centers such citizenship on action that is accessible to all people.

The writings of a small group of scholars known as the ilustrados are often credited for providing intellectual grounding for the Philippine Revolution of 1896. This book shows that the ilustrados’ anticolonial project of defining and constructing the “Filipino”-involved Orientalist and racialist discourses that are usually ascribed to colonial projects, not anticolonial ones. According to the text, the work of the ilustrados uncovers the surprisingly blurry boundary between nationalist and colonialist thought. By any measure, there was an extraordinary flowering of scholarly writing about the peoples and history of the Philippines in the decade or so preceding the revolution. In reexamining the works of the scholars José Rizal, Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes, Pedro Paterno, Pedro Serrano Laktaw, and Mariano Ponce, the text situates their writings in a broader account of intellectual ideas and politics migrating and transmuting across borders. She reveals how the ilustrados both drew from and refashioned the tools and concepts of Orientalist scholarship from Europe.

When leaders and citizens in the United States articulate their core political beliefs, they often do so in terms of parenthood and family. But while the motives might be admirable, the results of such thinking are often corrosive to our democratic goals. This book reveals how efforts to make the experience of parenthood inform citizenship contribute to the most persistent problems in modern democracy and democratic theory. The book explains how influential theories of democratic citizenship rely on the experience of parenthood to help individuals rise to the challenges of politics, and demonstrates that this reliance has unintended consequences. When parenthood is imagined to instill confidence in political virtue, it uncovers insecurity. When parenthood is believed to inculcate openness to change, it produces fundamentalism. The book develops this argument through original readings of four theorists of citizenship: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Rorty, and Cornel West—readings that engage the ways in which these theorists incorporated their personal history into their political thought.

Unconditional Equality explores Gandhi’s critique of liberal conceptions of freedom and equality, and his practice of another freedom and equality organized around religion. Liberal traditions affirm autonomy--the everyday sovereignty that rational beings exercise by giving themselves universal law, or law that any other rational being would freely and equally submit to (Kant). For Gandhi, autonomy is profoundly violent not only because it excludes those presumed to lack reason (such as animals or the colonized) but also because those included lose the power to love. Gandhi affirms instead a politics organized around dharma or religion; for him, there can be “no politics without religion.” Here, religion involves “self-surrender,” or a freely offered surrender of autonomy and everyday sovereignty; this “religion that stays in all religions” is satyagraha. He initially coins that word, his most famous neologism, to translate the English phrase “passive resistance,” but it quickly exceeds these origins--soon afterwards, he describes satyagraha as “popularly, but less accurately, passive resistance.” The book argues that conceptually satyagraha is oriented towards the absolute equality of all being—the equality without exception of all humans, animals and things with each other. Such equality cannot be conceived in terms of sovereignty; it must be an equality of the minor. This equality is moreover simultaneously a resistance: satyagrahis must resist all that obscures absolute equality, and do so “passively”--without sovereignty, in the spirit of absolute equality with the opponent.