https://www.alexdiones.com/teaching daily 0.75 2025-09-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61390f32eb93aa6019141535/1631647923588-DC84NVYMI0C4AF01DPDJ/novme.jpg Teaching - Courses Taught Political Violence Democratic Theory Congressional Politics Foundations of Political Theory Foundations of Modern Political Thought Marx and Marxism Enthusiasm As teaching assistant at UCLA, I taught introductory and advanced courses in political theory, American politics, history, and literature. As an educator with a normative commitment to democratic politics, I take the teaching about freedom and equality in a classroom structure where one person is in charge to be a difficult but ultimately generative dilemma for each class to face. In the classroom, I respect that imperative to equality by emphasizing a problem-first approach to the study of political texts. Students’ experiments in thinking critically about politics often begin from their own concerns about the world: beginning from their own questions enables me to respect their agency in setting the terms of their political studies. My student evaluations confirm that this starting point enables an ethos of mutual respect and makes it possible for a number of students to find their voice. As one student put it, “he really values our ideas and thoughts and allows us to guide our own discussion.” For another student, this style allows students “to reflect our own thoughts and establish what WE think rather than the TA just feeding information to us.” I make my classroom a space for the kind of egalitarian reflection where students can speak to one another as intellectual equals despite the enormous differences in knowledge that we all bring to the table. At UCLA, I’ve served as teaching assistant for introductory classes to Political Theory and American Politics, and “History of Modern Thought,” a writing-intensive year-long curriculum for first years. As part of this program, I also served as lead instructor for a class on democratic theory, and another on feminism, science, and the modern state. With ten quarters of undergraduate teaching experience, I’m prepared to offer introductory courses and advanced seminars on topics including the history of political thought; feminist, critical, and democratic theory; empire; jurisprudence; and the politics of science and literature. Image: Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, The November Meteors (1882) https://www.alexdiones.com/research daily 0.75 2025-09-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61390f32eb93aa6019141535/1631136184184-MU8V964SVFY1FPNL1FOG/eyes.png Research - 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) https://www.alexdiones.com/about daily 1.0 2025-09-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61390f32eb93aa6019141535/1631594951769-1J1IZ3OS84HLJDKNSVNZ/original_361a8453-38b8-49ef-80b5-53d3cfc43ba6_PXL_20210914_010040152.jpg https://www.alexdiones.com/contact daily 0.75 2021-09-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61390f32eb93aa6019141535/1631649075615-ZVJB4WX0M65O96KGV1QC/owls.jpg Contact - Contact Me email adiones [at] ucla.edu office Alexander Diones 4289 Bunche Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472 office phone (310) 825-4331 Image: Julie de Graag, Two Owls (1921) https://www.alexdiones.com/research-1 daily 0.75 2025-09-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61390f32eb93aa6019141535/1631136414576-HT7DN9HUT90S38CTBGDF/building.jpg Publications - books: Repetition: Stasis and Change in Modern Political Thought (under editorial review) publications: “The Critique of Global Maoism: Criticism, Self-Criticism, and the Combahee River Collective” (forthcoming at Diacritics) “Play, Work, and Marcuse’s Critique of Opposition” (Polity, 2024) “‘As It Regards Poetry.’ Review of Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate.” (Cleveland Review of Books, 2018). “On Logic and the Theory of Ensembles: Formalism and Alain Badiou’s Experience of Politics” (Theory & Event, 2017) dissertation: The Vivacity of Our Ideas: Habit in Modern Political Thought working papers: “Criticism and Self-Criticism: The Combahee River Collective’s Account of Solidarity” “Is Rudolf Carnap a Critical Theorist?” “Rawls’s Humean Socialism” “Race in Tocqueville’s Historiography of Revolution” “National Attachments: Collectivity and Agency in Martin Delany’s Political Theory” Image: Richard Serra installation at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2007)