This article argues that Hannah Arendt’s controversial essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” when situated within her analysis of Jewish assimilation, has an astute insight: racial integration and the decrease of the racial gaps in material inequality, without taking seriously the political project of building a world in common, only intensify racism in racist polities. This occurs because attempts to extend formal equality to the racially dominated give rise to the rule of racial common sense, a result of a clash between (...) the political structures of equality and the racial inequality practiced in quotidian interracial exchanges occurring in civil society. Though Arendt’s work on racism echoes criticisms of racial integration leveled by racial realist and pessimistic accounts of the Civil Rights struggle, her work points to a more expansive practice of “the political” that calls for the institutional design of formal politics as an important strategy against racism. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)