Simon Choat's research while affiliated with Kingston University and other places

Publications (12)

Article
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Recent calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ are especially pertinent to the teaching of political theory, which has traditionally been dominated by a canon made up overwhelmingly of White (and male) thinkers. This article explores why and how political theory curricula might be decolonised. By mapping core political theory modules provided at UK un...
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Recent Foucauldian critiques of neoliberalism – especially those by Wendy Brown, Béatrice Hibou, and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval – have argued that the Marxist interpretation of neoliberalism as a class project is reductive and economistic, and have instead conceptualised neoliberalism as a form of governmental rationality. This article compa...
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Contesting the central tenets of mainstream economic theory, Michael Sandel’s work on markets argues that the marketization of certain goods risks corrupting the value of those goods, and that a reinvigorated public discourse is needed to establish the appropriate use of markets. This article assesses Sandel’s work on markets, arguing that although...
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In recent years, the work of a diverse range of thinkers has been grouped together under the label ‘new materialism’. This article offers a critical introduction to new materialism that challenges its understanding of historical materialism. It aims to demonstrate not that historical materialism is superior to new materialism, but rather that the l...
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This article is a review essay of Gareth Stedman Jones’s biography Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. It begins by situating the book in relation to existing biographies before outlining Stedman Jones’s approach, which is to conceive of Marx’s works as interventions within contexts which the historian of ideas must reconstruct. I argue that althoug...
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Challenging claims of a recent ‘anarchist turn’, this article argues that calls for a ‘left convergence’ between anarchism and Marxism should be treated with caution. It sets out to establish what distinguishes Marxism from anarchism today, and argues that the former contains superior resources with which to challenge the current dominance of neoli...
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Recent years have seen the development of a new form of anarchism. Under the label ‘postanarchism’, writers such as Todd May, Saul Newman and Lewis Call have sought to combine the insights of anarchism with those of recent Continental philosophy, in particular post-structuralism. A central but neglected element of postanarchist thought is its criti...
Article
Postanarchists have tended to portray Marxism as an anachronism, taking the alleged redundancy of Marxism as a starting point for their revitalization of classical anarchism via post-structuralism. Critical assessments of postanarchism have so far failed to interrogate this portrayal of Marxism. This is unfortunate, I argue, because Marxism plays a...

Citations

... Researchers point out that the ideology of students and their interests, perception of individual responsibility and attitude toward social mobility contribute to the support of redistribution and social security policy (Wong, 2020). They also point to racial inequality in the teaching of political theory and the difference in academic performance between white students and representatives of ethnic minorities (Choat, 2021). In addition, gender inequality is observed in young people's political participation and political activity, which manifests in various forms of traditional and non-traditional exercise (Grasso & Smith, 2022). ...
... While popular leftism seeks to challenge neoliberalism politically, I want to suggest, perhaps controversially, that it is more fruitful to see popular leftism as having emerged 'in and against' neoliberalism, rather than being straightforwardly 'anti-neoliberal'. Here, I understand neoliberalism to refer to an economisation and marketisation of everyday life, in which there is a widespread dissemination of an entrepreneurial mode of conduct and subjectivity throughout a whole variety of social, cultural, and political spheres Choat, 2019). As Wendy Brown argues in her most recent book, 'nothing is untouched by a neoliberal mode of reason and valuation and . . . ...
... As pointed out by several authors (e.g. Bruni & Sugden, 2013;Choat, 2018;Qizilbash, 2019;Satz, 2010;Wempe & Frooman, 2018), the idea of moral limits to markets has been developed by a number of authors before Sandel (2012a). These earlier authors include Walzer (1983), MacIntyre (1984, Radin (1986), Anderson (1993), Satz (2010) and even Sandel's (2010) earlier book on justice. ...
... Relationally self-caused objects In this perspective, matter is "fully relational and immanently self-caused" [26]. Beyond bestowing a kind of selfimplication to performative matter, this view effectively dismantles the division between ontology and ontological practice [8]. It enables examining both the phenomenon and the process of modeling that phenomenon under the same ontological (or rather, onto-epistemological ) framework. ...
... 41-42). Choat (2016) writes that the focus on mutual aid in anarchist movements is, in part, a way to practice prefigurative politics: "because [anarchists] look to a non-hierarchical and decentralised future, they support nonhierarchical and decentralised strategies in the present" (p. 97). ...
... The critical and cultural theory experienced and received by the Americans through the last decades fairly will be a good paradigm to understand the characteristic of my interviewees (Kim, 2015b;Kim, 2015c). A trace to the root of human science or philosophy in America naturally turns on the European tradition needless to mention the kind of White supremacy or its history (Choat, 2012). [1] This leads to the receptive intellectual waves across several decades in history, in which three major countries influence much to shape the paradigm of critical and cultural theories. ...
... First, it uses a post-structuralist approach. It takes into account that post-structuralists do not search for the essence of "things" but how "things" are transformed to become "beings" (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016;Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990;Choat, 2013;Foucault, 1972;Goldstein, 2012;Larsson, 2018). The authors use the post-structuralist approach to elaborate on the bureaucrats' cognitive behavior using the ratchet principle (Jackson & Carter, 2007). ...