Works in Progress

Projects

A second major book-length project, provisionally entitled Democracy’s Debts, offers a historically informed theoretical exploration of the politics of debt in the United States since the eighteenth century. The work examines how debt discourse has been mobilized both to entrench hierarchy and and imagine struggles for equality across four key arenas: public and state debt politics, slavery and reparations demands, (re)distribution, and personal and ethical debt.

The first paper from this project, “Hamilton’s Debt: On the Ideological Origins of Public Debt and Private Credit Markets,” currently in preparation for journal submission, investigates Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 “First Report on Public Credit” to argue that it operated as a deeply influential site for the development of the idea of a “public debt” that all citizens must organize their economic activity to manage. This idea, I argue, helped to secure the nascent United States’ role as an important agent in the international economy while laying the groundwork, morally and politically, for a domestic economic system that favored private economic power and underwrote later developments like the modern rise of public debt and private credit markets.

Articles

“Hamilton’s Debt: On the Ideological Origins of Public Credit and Private Credit Markets”

Katzenstein, Peter J., and Jacob Swanson. “Para-humanism and Uncertainty: Anthropocene and Artificial Intelligence.” Diacritics (under review).

“Being Wealthy: Liberality, Ousia, and Democratic Participation”

“‘We Are Part of the Nature We Seek to Understand’: Karen Barad and the Politics of Self-Observation”