Articles by Chad Kautzer

Chad Kautzer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lehigh University. He is the author of Radical Philosophy: An Introduction (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor of Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community in the Age of Empire (Indiana University Press, 2009)

The Self-Defeating Notion of the Sovereign Subject in US Gun Culture

Walter Spangenberg practicing with a rifle at Woodrow Wilson High School, 1943. Photo by Esther Bubley, courtesy of Library of Congress.
By Chad Kautzer

The politicization of U.S. gun culture since the 1970s has popularized the idea that individual freedom and security is dependent upon the reclamation of traditionally defined sovereign powers. In this article, I outline how the exercise of popular sovereignty is a social relation of rule often involving extra-legal forms of violence, which regularizes unequal levels of vulnerability and security among various groups. I then address how the so-called sovereign subject, thought to be at the root of popular sovereignty, is conceptually contradictory and practically self-defeating. In practice, attempts to return to a supposed pre-political condition of personal sovereignty in order to secure individual freedom involves dismantling the very social conditions that enable such freedom in the first place.