Burdens of Political Responsibility
Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness

Burdens of Political Responsibility discusses experiences of political responsibility through a variety of disciplines, including political theory, phenomenology, sociology, and literary criticism.

Jade Larissa Schiff (Author)

9781107614284, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 March 2016

228 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.3 cm, 0.33 kg

'In contemporary political theory, responsibility is becoming a key concept. In this fine book, Jade Schiff reconceives some barriers to responsiveness - thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition - and shows us how, using narrative and story, the power of responsiveness to the suffering of others can help to produce new political thinking.' Joan Tronto, University of Minnesota

How can human beings acknowledge and experience the burdens of political responsibility? Why are we tempted to flee them, and how might we come to affirm them? Jade Larissa Schiff calls this experience of responsibility 'the cultivation of responsiveness'. In Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness, she identifies three dispositions that inhibit responsiveness - thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition - and turns to storytelling in its manifold forms as a practice that might facilitate and frustrate it. Through critical engagements with an unusual cast of characters (from Bourdieu to Sartre) hailing from a variety of disciplines (political theory, phenomenology, sociology, and literary criticism), she argues that how we represent our world and ourselves in the stories we share, and how we receive those stories, can facilitate and frustrate the cultivation of responsiveness.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The problem of responsiveness
2. Thoughtlessness
3. Bad faith
4. Misrecognition
5. Mimesis and responsiveness
6. Ambivalent confessions
Conclusion: toward a politics of responsiveness.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Social & political philosophy [HPS]