Research
My research asks a fundamental question: how do we become who we are? I investigate the power of habit: the routines, customs, shared ways of thinking and acting that form the invisible foundation of our political and social lives. We often think of politics as a series of conscious decisions with a lot at stake: voting, passing a law, or going to a protest. But what about the vast majority of our lives that we live on autopilot?
Habit is the architecture of our social world. It’s an undramatic force, but what makes it so powerful is precisely the fact that it operates in the background, making our own actions and the world around us feel natural and neutral.
While it’s possible to approach these political phenomena from a psychological or neuroscientific perspective, and these fields have made groundbreaking insights, they often treat habit as a timeless feature of the human brain. The history of political thought reveals something different: the very idea of habit has a history of its own, and it has always been a site of political struggle.
The way we think about habit today—often as a matter of individual productivity or self-help—is a very recent invention. For centuries, political thinkers understood habit not as a private quirk, but as the very foundation of public life. It was seen as the source of our shared sense of justice, the basis of law and custom, and the social glue that held entire communities together. They saw it as the engine of both social stability and revolutionary change.
For visitors interested in a more detailed academic overview, my research specifically examines the challenge that the concept of behavior and the behavioralist revolution poses to our dominant theories of agency and social transformation. In 1969, Sheldon Wolin spoke of “regular and predictable behavior” as the downfall of a genuinely democratic society. Although his diagnosis has been influential for the subsequent study of political theory, we live today in a time of transition marked by crises of faith in the traditional markers of political stability, circumstances in which behavior has once again become a central question for the possibility of democratic politics. Inattention to this domain of political action by postwar Anglophone political theory, I argue, has meant an avoidance of the problem of agency in a world of tradition, custom, and behavior. While it’s necessary to act collectively to effect meaningful social transformation, there is a difficult and increasingly demanding tension within political theory between group attachment and transformative agency. In the absence of a theory of behavior, we lose an important tool for understanding and resolving that tension. Hence my research question: how does political theory engage and understand behavior as a site of both group attachment and social transformation? To address this question, my book manuscript builds on recent research that explores the 18th century traditions of moral sentimentalism and their contributions to theorizing the motivations for collective action.
My current research focuses on the dynamics of habit, power, and collective action in the 20th century, particularly as regards feminist political thought, “Third Worldism,” and other intellectual formations that arise in response to Mao Zedong’s widely-read political works.
Image: Carol Rama, L’Isola degli occhi (1966)