The prison contract and abolition democracy

Radical Philosophy Today 5:209-217 (2007)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This article discusses the fortuitous genesis of the book of my conversations with Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy and traces some of the intellectual and philosophical sources that informed the specific questions and approaches that inform the dialogue. Davis’ relationships to Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, as well as to Foucault, are discussed. Similarly, Davis’ place within a critical black American political-philosophical tradition is analyzed. The essay focuses mainly, however, on the way in which Davis’ work on the prison industrial complex profiles an unsuspected contribution to political philosophy that links up the disciplinary origins of American democracy with its racial contract to give rise to the prison contract. In the tradition of Charles Mills, Davis’ radical theory of penality unmasks and denounces the over-determined relationship between surplus punishment and the racial character of the US polity in terms of theproductivity of the prison system

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,601

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
123 (#178,207)

6 months
9 (#531,592)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Eduardo Mendieta
Pennsylvania State University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references