Formally trained in political science and economics departments, I work as a political theorist with a multidisciplinary approach. My research addresses the entanglement of economic ideals with modes of democratic governance and problems of human finitude. It combines historical analysis of economic theories and policies, careful exegesis of political and economic texts, and conceptual analysis of key economic and philosophical ideas.

My doctoral dissertation, Dialectic of Scarcity: Economy and Finitude in Late Capitalism, critically examines how narratives of scarcity and abundance shaped twentieth-century visions of democratic citizenship. The project explores how various dimensions of human finitude (e.g., temporality, mortality, natality, plurality, interdependence) came in the twentieth century to be interpreted as “economic” in nature and integrated into the construction of economics as a discipline concerned with identifying and overcoming the limits of human action. My investigation uncovers both the utopian core of the ideal of generalized affluence, which came to predominate across the capitalist world in the postwar era, and its constitutive exclusions: the groups, activities, and processes whose concealment served as the conditions of possibility for anchoring modern democratic citizenship in normative conceptions of the affluent society.

Rather than viewing the economy purely as a mechanism for distributing scarce resources, I read it as a site where political aspirations for abundance, autonomy, and mastery over nature and others are constantly negotiated and contested. My research traces this dynamic across key historical moments—the Great Depression, the post-World War II boom, the crises of the 1970s, and the contemporary digital age—revealing how different political-economic frameworks have responded to the problem of human limitations.

My article “The Economy as Utopia: Keynes, Bourgeois Socialism, and the Promise of Abundance,” based on chapter 1 of my dissertation, can be read in the Fall 2024 issue of Critical Historical Studies.

My second book project, Mindless Intelligence: AI as Political Technology, extends my current research by providing a political theory and history of artificial intelligence. Economists, political scientists, and philosophers have tended to treat artificial intelligence as an exogenous technological phenomenon that has social consequences and demands regulatory and redistributive political responses. In contrast, my project investigates how artificial intelligence has always been shaped, even in its most “neutral” technical aspects, by political visions concerning the place of labor in society, the relationship between social class and citizenship, and the meaning of human freedom, dignity, and the good life.