Book Review: The Virtues of Exit: On Resistance and Quitting Politics, by Jennet Kirkpatrick

• Date: 01 August 2019
• Author: Alexander Livingston
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718797521
• Published date: 01 August 2019
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

612 Political Theory 47(4)

2. Barack Obama, “Address in Chicago Accepting Election as the 44th President

of the United States,” November 4, 2008, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/

index.php?pid=84750&st=arc+of+history&st1

3. David A. Graham, “The Wrong Side of ‘the Right Side of History,” The Atlantic,

December 21, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/

obama-right-side-of-history/420462/

4. Theodore Parker, Ten Sermons of Religion (Boston, 1853), 84–85.

5. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (London:

Macmillan, 1921), 5.

6. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library,

1996), 406.

7. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Sermon at Temple Israel of Hollywood”, http://www.

americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlktempleisraelhollywood.htm

The Virtues of Exit: On Resistance and Quitting Politics, by Jennet Kirkpatrick. Chapel

Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 176 pp.

Reviewed by: Alexander Livingston, Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718797521

Love it or leave it: it’s a familiar dilemma for troublemakers of all stripes. But

can leaving one’s polity in protest ever be a way of loving it? This is the ques-

tion Jennet Kirkpatrick poses in The Virtues of Exit. The book makes a com-

pelling case for thinking about exiting in protest, from migration to resignation

to marronage, as something nobler than opting out of political life. Leaving

“is not the end of politics or the cessation of political struggle; it is a continu-

ation of both by other means” (51). Kirkpatrick offers a dazzling survey of

how performances of exit constitute everyday acts of resistance that fall

below the hallowed heights of civil disobedience but are no less worthy of

theoretical attention. Tightly written and historically erudite, The Virtues of

Exit proposes a bold way of rethinking the meaning of egress as an expres-

sion of civic attachment that connects James Baldwin’s self-exile to Paris

with Mohamed Bouazizi’s sacrificial act of self-immolation.

In Albert O. Hirschman’s classical formulation, exit is the antithesis of

voice. Consumers choose to exit their relationship with a declining brand

when it fails to secure the loyalty to make them want to improve it by exercis-

ing voice. Similarly, citizens choose to check out of political association

rather than voice their grievances where loyalty to shared institutions is wan-

ing. Kirkpatrick counters Hirschman’s familiar “negative” account of exit

with a “positive” one that portrays leaving as collective rather than individual,

as expressing loyalty rather than signaling its exhaustion, and as responsive