Political Theory

H17 - Older Voices, Current Problems

Date: Jun 1 | Time: 10:30am to 12:00pm | Location: Classroom - CL 410 Room ID:15739

Chair/Président/Présidente : Catherine R. Power (University of Toronto)

Hannah Arendt and the Algorithm: Rereading The Human Condition in the Digital Age: Kiran Banerjee (Columbia University)
Abstract: This paper explores how political theory can help us appreciate the contemporary relevance and conceptual implications of algorithmic systems and big data for our understandings of politics and agency. It does so by interrogating these now ubiquitous features of the digital age against the backdrop of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) and the theoretical categories deployed by Arendt to analyze what she called the ‘Rise of the Social’ in the modern age. The increasingly wider application of algorithms has triggered recent debates regarding transparency and accountability in the deployment of data-driven approaches to public policy. However, I argue that the apparent novelty of the challenges raised by algorithmic systems and the growing prominence of ‘data science governance’ obscures how the deeper philosophical challenges these developments raise to our notions of agency, freedom, and judgment, are continuous with far earlier historical developments - specifically the modern emergence of a ‘stochastic worldview’ and the subsequent ‘discovery of society’ as a field of study and intervention. Drawing on Arendt’s account, alongside the interventions of Foucault and Polanyi, I show how this broader historical process troubles or complicates our traditional political concepts and that the growing application of algorithmic systems represents a considerable intensification of these fundamental challenges that requires our theoretical attention. The paper addresses this demand by analyzing the implications of our contemporary situation through an Arendtian framework, examining how such developments upend the notions of ‘public’ and the ‘private’, as well significantly complicate our conceptions of agency and responsibility.

Debt, Corruption and State Identity in 18th-Century Political Thought: Robert Sparling (University of Ottawa)
Abstract: The issue of odious sovereign debts—particularly those incurred by corrupt and/or despotic officials—raises difficult and quite old philosophical questions about the nature of the state as a group agent bearing collective responsibility. Aristotle canvassed the issue in a passage in the Politics in which he reflected—somewhat inconclusively—about whether a new regime is responsible for the debts incurred by previous regimes (1276a-b). This paper will consider the relationship between debt and the state as a collective agent by exploring debates over national debt, state integrity and corruption in the eighteenth century, the era in which the key institutions of the modern, perpetually-indebted financial-bureaucratic state were in their infancy. A great deal of eighteenth-century writing on the evils of public debt treated it as a product of corruption and despotism; some writers even advocated voluntary default as a manner not merely of saving national finances, but also of laying low the insidious ‘moneyed interests’ usurping political power. But if massive public debt was attacked by some as the soul of corruption, it was seen by others—not implausibly—as something that had been made possible by the greater reliability and integrity of modern fiscal administration. Debt appeared to be both a sign of state integrity and dissolution. This paper examines the issue of odious debt and corruption by way of a foray into these eighteenth-century debates. It will suggest that these controversies reveal a clash of visions of what constitutes state integrity. This same clash is very much alive in contemporary odious-debt debates.