ABSTRACT
Michael Rogin’s scholarship altered the scope and content of political theory by opening the field to an array of texts, performances, and methods not previously considered legitimate. His work metabolized two primary contexts: first, the post–World War II crisis in both liberal and Marxist theories of politics, whose rationalist approaches to material interest could not explain European fascism or its meaning; second, the demonization of the civil rights movement and the disaster of the Vietnam War in the United States, which posed a similar impasse for behavioral social science and liberal-pluralist models of interest-group politics. In response, Rogin drew on psychoanalytic theory to put individual and collective subjectivity at the center of politics, by focusing on motivation and fantasy, on what people desire, how they symbolize it, and why. In doing so, he was recalling Plato’s foundational connection between the soul and city (or psyche and society) to propose how political and libidinal economies are inseparably entwined, at once material and symbolic, racialized and gendered, personal and political (1992, Book Two). Digesting emerging feminist theories of the family, gender, and sexuality, Rogin took the idea of “the personal is political” in unexpected and fruitful directions. Perhaps most importantly, he exposed the dynamics by which political opposition is delegitimized, difference suppressed, and the political itself displaced. While his work theorized the significant events in post–World War II American politics – McCarthyism, black insurgency, the Vietnam War, racial backlash, the New Right, Reagan’s presidency, and the conflicts of the Clinton era – his texts have become only more politically germane since his untimely death in November 2001. By tracing Rogin’s enduring themes and generative insights, this opening essay introduces selections of his work, and suggests the salience that we will elaborate in the concluding chapter.
