Theoria

This article demonstrates that David Hume's politics should be understood as both moderate and pluralistic. Commentators often describe Hume as a ‘sceptical Whig’ who advocates moderation. Yet this interpretation insufficiently reflects both the destructive and constructive sides of his scepticism. Hume's sceptical style and dispersed political writings make it difficult to systematically characterise his political thought, resulting in an absence of a distinctively Humean tradition in contemporary political theory. This article indicates that a pluralist framework better reflects Hume's sceptical politics by illuminating structural affinities between Humean scepticism and Berlinian pluralism in their arguments against dogmatism and relativism. I argue that Humean scepticism exerts stabilising effects on society and politics by encouraging a pluralist political culture. This includes maintaining diverse opinions and judgements, facilitating intersubjective understanding through sympathy, and establishing a dynamic equilibrium of competing opinions. These measures to accommodate disagreement are essential for the stability of opinion-based government.

Current scholarship examines the normative value, character and internal commitments of solidarity groups but pays less attention to how they remain democratically answerable to those beyond their boundaries and how such encounters reshape solidarity itself. This article asks how partial solidarities can support inclusive and egalitarian relations under conditions of unequal power and profound disagreement. It develops a non-ideal theoretical account of reflexive interchange by engaging with debates on solidarity, democratic equality and intergroup responsiveness, and argues that solidaristic action can trigger social learning across group boundaries through perspective-taking, disagreement and dialogue with outsiders. Historical examples are used to illustrate how this mechanism can operate in practice. Where institutional and material conditions sustain expectations of democratic equality and support the democratic mediation of conflict, this process can revise solidaristic commitments, broaden understandings of democratic equality, and keep the boundaries of the solidaristic ‘we’ open to ongoing negotiation and contestation.

This article asks how sociology has theorised the persistence of violence under democracy in post-apartheid South Africa and what the limits of those explanations reveal about the discipline itself. Focusing on Karl von Holdt's concept of violent democracy, it situates his work within a genealogy of South African sociology shaped by labour studies, transition theory, and debates on the contradictory location of White scholars within Black struggle. Through a conceptual analysis of violent democracy, the article argues that while the concept explains how violence circulates through democratic institutions, it remains constrained by sociology's commitment to the social as a domain of mediation and repair. Bringing von Holdt into dialogue with Frank Wilderson, Achille Mbembe, and Tendayi Sithole, the article reframes post-apartheid violence as a condition of democratic order and argues that sociology's attachment to the category of the Human marks the metaphysical limit of its critique.

The far right and its reactionary allies are waging a retaliatory culture war. These reactionaries are in a state of recoil, undoing the recognition gains of the marginalised in liberal societies through a structural reificatory reassertion of cisheteropatriarchy and ethnonationalism. In this article, I argue that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit offers illuminating insights into the onto-phenomenology of reactionary culture wars, particularly regarding the subjects who wage them. I focus on Hegel's articulation of self-consciousness's desire to achieve self-certainty and actuality, the possibility of encountering semblances of the Concept's manifestation in the process of attaining actuality; and the relationship between uncertainty, failure, and sublation. I read the reactionary subject's retaliation as rooted in the breakdown of ‘actuality’ into semblance, as well as a resistance to sublation, which, in my view, explains both the intractability of culture wars and why subjects opt for self-reassertion over self-reimagination.

Thaddeus Metz, A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent. Oxford University Press, 2022, 280 pp. ISBN: 9780198748960, (Hardcover)

Robert T. Tally, Jr. The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse. New York: Bloomsbury, 2024, 170 pp. IBSN 9781501375842 (pbk)