Jordan Ecker

I am a political theorist who uses resources from the history of political thought to try to clarify problems in contemporary political theory. My dissertation, “The Politics of Natural Society,” which I am currently transforming into a book manuscript, investigates how Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke’s adoption and transformation of the 18th century concept of ‘natural society’ led them to reinterpret the relationship between the political theorist and the society they wrote about. Building on existing scholarship on the emergence of commercial society in the 18th century, I argue that the conceptual language of natural society played a key role in cementing the foundations of a political ideology which we today know as liberalism. Following radical democratic theory, I argue that this way of thinking about society led Paine, Smith, and Burke to each, in different ways, subordinate politics to society by imagining politics as the facilitation of society’s nature. The dissertation argues that this created serious aporias for how we imagine the relationship between politics and society today.

The chapter on Paine has recently been published in American Political Thought: https://doi.org/10.1086/736328.

I teach seminars on the political thought of the American and French Revolutions, American political thought, and political theory and economics.

My public writing on literature and politics has appeared in venues like Dissent Magazine, The American Prospect, and The Cleveland Review of Books.