Collective Actors, Common Desires

• Date: 01 September 2015
• Published date: 01 September 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912915594254
• Author: Jason Frank
• Subject Matter: Mini-Symposium: Public Things (The 2014 Maxwell Lecture)Guest Editor: Steven Johnston

594254PRQXXX10.1177/1065912915594254Political Research QuarterlyFrank
research-article2015
Mini-Symposium
Political Research Quarterly
2015, Vol. 68(3) 637 –641
Collective Actors, Common Desires
© 2015 University of Utah
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DOI: 10.1177/1065912915594254
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Jason Frank1
Abstract
Honig’s essay emphasizes neoliberalism’s destruction of a world of public things and addresses how we might respond
to the catastrophe of their loss. However, to adequately confront the political dilemmas posed by neoliberalism, we
must attend to the simultaneous disappearance of both common desires and collective actors. Honig’s examples risk
obscuring the political importance of this question.
Keywords
neoliberalism, collective action, Honig, Tocqueville, radical hope
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville offered a

interests, or when a civic concern for the public good is
now-famous example of the nineteenth-century American
economically converted into the aggregate effects of
orientation toward public things—what Bonnie Honig
rational self-seeking utility maximizers. Employing a
describes as “the pursuing in common of the objects of
provocative combination of Donald Winnicott’s object
common desires” (Honig, 2015). Tocqueville’s (2003,
relations theory and Hannah Arendt’s political phenome-
220) example is mundane, lacking in drama or grandeur,
nology, Honig argues that the danger we are confronted
but like many other examples from his great book, its
with today is nothing less than the disappearance of a
quotidian quality gleams with political insight:
world of common things, a world that sustains our shared
orientation as citizens united, or at least gathered, in the
Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and . . .
collective caring for, responding to, and engaging with
traffic be halted . . . neighbors at once form a group to
that common world. Honig’s intervention is, in other
consider the matter; from this improvised assembly an
words, at the level of ontology—with what is, or more
executive authority appears to remedy the common
appropriately with what threatens to disappear. Without
inconvenience before anyone has thought of the possibility
an affectively imbued orientation to common things,
of some other authority already in existence before the one
Honig argues, we risk losing a sense of a shared common
they have just formed . . . There is nothing the human will
despairs of obtaining through the free use of the combined
world for which we are collectively responsible. Although
power of individuals.
it is not the language Honig uses in her essay, we could
say that the catastrophe that she diagnoses is the disap-
These lines have been frequently cited. They have
pearance of the political itself, in the broad but decep-
been invoked to authorize very different political pro-
tively simple sense suggested by Tocqueville’s famous
grams: from the critique of the welfare state on the liber-
example: the capacity of ordinary people to respond col-
tarian right to the radical egalitarianism of the participatory
lectively to challenges they commonly face. The loss of
democratic left. We are all by now familiar with neo-
this collective capacity will make it difficult if not impos-
Tocquevillean reflections on the poverty of political and
sible for us to confront the other more directly material
associational life in the contemporary United States, and
catastrophe that quietly looms over Honig’s essay as it
with the accompanying nostalgia for a more robustly
does over our public life—the shared crisis of world and
civic political culture.
of earth posed by the human-made climate disaster of the
On first glance, Honig’s meditations on the contempo-
Anthropocene.
rary “fight for public things” resonate with familiar con-
cerns with the civic costs of a political culture too wholly
enthralled by narrowing individualism and the with-
1Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
drawal from public life . . . but only at first glance. The
Corresponding Author:
danger Honig identifies and explores in her essay is not
Jason Frank, Department of Government, Cornell University, 307
primarily one of political psychology—the consequences
White Hall, Ithaca, NY 10014, USA.
for politics when citizens consider only their private
Email: jf273@cornell.edu

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Political Research Quarterly 68(3)
Honig’s essay is focused primarily on the loss of com-
experienced inconveniences. The private firm capable of
mon things. I am interested in exploring further the
removing the obstacle most...