Research

See also my SSRN page and my Google Scholar page.

Books

The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property: Regulating Innovation and Personhood in the Information Age (Cambridge University Press, 201)

Intellectual property is power, but what kind of power is it, and what does it do?  Building on the work of Michel Foucault, this study examines different ways of understanding power in copyright, trademark and patent policy: as law, as promotion of public welfare, and as promotion of neoliberal privatization.  It argues that intellectual property policy is moving toward neoliberalism, even as that move is broadly contested in everything from resistance movements to Supreme Court decisions.  The struggle to conceptualize IP matters, because different regimes of power imagine different kinds of subjects, from the rights-bearing citizen to the economic agent of neoliberalism.  As a central part of the regulation of contemporary economies, IP is central to all aspects of our lives.  It matters for the works we create, the brands we identify and the medicines we consume. The kind of subjects it imagines are the kinds of subjects we become.

Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought (Continuum, 2009)

In this book, I offer a new interpretation of the claim that Hobbes is the first ‘modern’ political philosopher, guided by the thought that, for Hobbes (as for other self-declared moderns), thought is to be considered as “constructive” of its objects.  In Hobbes’s version we find the combination of an anomalous and anachronistic view of geometry with a radical, almost post-modern understanding of language. After situating Hobbes against the late scholastic and Machiavellian traditions against which he wrote, I study Hobbes’s neglected writings on mathematics and language. That analysis then motivates a rereading of his famous pronouncements about the state of nature and the absolutist state that is supposed to be its remedy.

The book concludes by showing the relevance of Hobbes to contemporary debates around the radically democratic potential of the ‘multitude.’ Hobbesian thought is the opposition point in these debates; what emerges here is that Hobbes is very much still with us. As a theorist who is interested in managing and channeling the productive energies of the population, Hobbes emerges as the first theorist of what we now call biopolitics.

Articles