LUCIEN FERGUSON

Research

Drawing on political theory, American politics, and law, my work brings together African American political thought, jurisprudence, legal and intellectual history, and political economy to explore the development of civil rights in relation to capitalism, racial slavery, colonization and empire, and, especially, caste, in the Atlantic world since the eighteenth century. The unifying aim of this research is to diagnose sources of racial and intersectional injustice—both past and present—and to provide theoretical frameworks for realizing a more just society today.

Dissertation

The Spirit of Caste: Recasting the History of Civil Rights

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My dissertation offers the first, monograph-length history of the public meaning of civil rights. Today, scholars and activists alike despair that civil rights failed to achieve social justice. In doing so, however, they tend to elide the ways that historically marginalized groups constructed their meaning. By contrast, my dissertation recovers the original meaning of civil rights from the political thought of African American leaders in the abolitionist, women's suffrage, and long civil rights movements. I argue that, in the minds of the ordinary citizens and non-citizens in these movements, civil rights were legal protections against caste, which they understood as a ban on social mobility. By reconstructing civil rights to protect citizens from caste, I contend, we can reclaim their lost promise as tools for the advancement of racial and intersectional justice.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

1. Ferguson, Lucien. “From Love to Care: Arendt’s Amor Mundi in the Ethical Turn.” Political Theory, (July 2022).

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This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the “Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it? The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid— and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the world, it must take the form of care. Following this analysis, this article contends that the contribution of amor mundi to the ethical turn is best understood, not as the ethos needed to guide action in the political realm, but as a key pre- or nonpolitical ethos needed to conserve the world where politics takes place—and thus the very possibility of politics.