Address

Rhetoric Department
7315 Dwinelle Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
510.642.2172
E-mail: dwbates@berkeley.edu

Areas of Interest

European intellectual history, 18th-20th century, Enlightenment thought and culture, Political and Revolutionary Discourse, History of Cognition, & Philosophy of History

Current Research

I am currently working on two book projects. The first, entitled Human Insight from Descartes to Artificial Intelligence, is a study in the history of epistemology in the rationalist tradition, investigating theories of novelty and discovery in the context of material conceptions of mind and body. The second book, Constitutional Violence, will use close readings of Natural Law theory and Enlightenment political theory and contextual analysis of war and violence in Europe to argue for the invention of a new "concept of the political" in the Enlightenment, one that helps prepare the way for revoliutionary ideas and new practices of war in the revolutionary era. I also hope to prepare a collection of essays on twentieth-century political thought and legal thought, centered on the work of Carl Schmitt.

Selected Publications

Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Cornell University Press, 2002), xiii, 262 pp.

Reviews:            H-France (2002): http://www3.uakron.edu/hfrance/reviews/williams2.html

American Historical Review 108 (2003): 266-7

Political Theory 31 (2003): 295-301

Canadian Journal of History 38 (2003): 109-11

Journal of Modern History 75 (2003): 956-8

French Review 78 (2004): 386-7

French History 19 (2005): 277-8

Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 52 (2005): 215-7

Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (2006): 555-60

Articles

“Creating Insight: Gestalt Theory and the Early Computer,” in Jessica Riskin, ed., Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Theory of Artificial Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

“Constitutional Violence,” in Stewart Motha, ed., Democracy’s Empire: Sovereignty, Law and Violence(London: Blackwell, 2007). Also published in a special issue of the Journal of Law and Society 34: 1 (March 2007): 14-30. [refereed]

“Political Theology and the Nazi State: Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Institution,” Modern Intellectual History 3: 3 (Nov. 2006): 415-442. [refereed]

“On Revolutions in the Nuclear Age: The Eighteenth Century and the Postwar Global Imagination,” qui parle 15 (Fall 2005): 171-195.

“Crisis between the Wars: Derrida and the Origins of Undecidability,” Representations 91 (Summer 2005): 1-27.

“Political Unity and the Spirit of Law: Juridical Concepts of the State in the late Third Republic,” French Historical Studies 28: 1 (Winter 2005): 69-101. [refereed]

“Legitimität and Légalité: Political Theology and Democratic Thought in an Age of World War,” in Religion und Nation / Nationund Religion: Beiträge zu einer unbewältigten Geschichte, ed. Michael Geyer and Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen, 2004)

“Cartographic Aberrations: Epistemology and Order in the Encyclopedic Map,” in Daniel Brewer and Julie C. Hayes, eds., Using the “Encyclopédie”: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading (Oxford, 2002).

“Idols and Insight: An Enlightenment Topography of Knowledge,” Representations 73 (Winter 2001): 1-23.           

Creative Negations: Defining the Space of Politics in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, CA.: Doe Library, University of California, 2000) (published Morrison Inaugural Lecture), 31 pp.

“Rediscovering Collingwood’s Spiritual History (In and Out of Context),” History and Theory 35:1 (February 1996): 29-55. [refereed]

Book Reviews

Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Journal of Modern History (Forthcoming)

Claude Blanckaert et Michel Porret, L'Éncyclopédie méthodique (1782-1832): des Lumières au positivisme (Droz, 2006), Isis (Forthcoming)

Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Belknap, Harvard University Press, 2005), The International History Review 29 (March 2007).

David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Journal of Modern History 78 (December 2006): 957-8.

Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Eighteenth-Century Thought 2 (2004): 352-6.

Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 2001), Journal of Modern History 75: 3 (September 2003): 688-90.

Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2001), The Canadian Journal of History 38: 2 (August 2003): 373-4.Owen Bradley, A Modern Maistre: the Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre (University of Nebraska Press, 1999),Journal of Modern History 73: 1 (March 2001): 171-173.

Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought, ed. Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood (Stanford University Press, 1998), The Canadian Journal of History 34: 3 (December 1999): 452-3.           

Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford University Press, 1997), The Canadian Journal of History34: 1 (April 1999): 102-4.

Recent Papers

“Emergent States,” 21st-Century Enlightenment: New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, conference, UC Berkeley, Mar. 16-17, 2007.

“Machine Thinking: Humans, Animals, and Robots, after Descartes,” What’s Left of Life? Conference, UC Berkeley, Feb. 17-18, 2007.

“Constitutional Violence,” Lines of Amity, Lines of Enmity: War and Peace in the Eighteenth Century, 6th Annual Bloomington 18th-Century Studies Workshop, Indiana University, Bloomington, May 10-13, 2006.

“The Führer and the Pope: Nazi Political Theology,” Carl Schmitt: New Concepts of the Political, interdisciplinary symposium, Institute for European Sciences and Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley, April 7, 2006.

“Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Institution: Legal Order and the Nazi State,” Legal Theory Workshop, Faculty of Law, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, March 30, 2006.

“Enemies into Friends: Arendt on the Perils of Republican Empire,” Hannah Arendt on Judgment and Responsibility, invited speaker, conference sponsored by the Institute for German Studies and Department of Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, March 25, 2006.

“Global Enmity and the Nuclear Revolution,” invited speaker, Zone3: The Enemy, international conference, New York University, May 1-3, 2003.

“Human Analogy and Enlightenment Thought,” invited lecture, Theorizing Early Modern Studies Workshop, Humanities Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, March 10, 2003.

“Norm, Decision, and the Nazi State: Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Institution,” American Political Science Association, annual meeting, Boston, August 29, 2002.

“The Unknown God: A Political Theology of Crisis Between the Wars,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, annual meeting, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, March 8, 2002.