Letter From the Editors

• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221099535

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221099535

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(4) 551 –552

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221099535

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Editorial

Letter From the Editors

Dear Readers, Contributors, and Reviewers;

As we slowly emerge from our pandemic isolations and attempt to recollect

our individual and collective lives, we would like to take the occasion of this

issue to invite all of you once again to submit your political theory research

to our journal. As Co-Editors we launched our first issue a few weeks after

the storming of the Capitol building in Washington D.C., having begun work-

ing on the journal at a moment in time when the entire human population was

negotiating its withdrawal from the world.

As we begin to travel anew, leaving our homes and reconnecting with one

another in office hallways, conference venues, classrooms, cafes, and cele-

bratory spaces of various kinds we are, once again, confronted with a world

replete with political violence, economic instability, and human suffering. In

the face of this, it can be difficult to imagine that our individual contributions

to political theory research matter. But matter they do, now more than ever.

The urgency to discover new ways of thinking about the world, its events,

and the new and old formations of power that make themselves manifest is

pressing. We, the Co-Editors of Political Theory, wish to announce once

again our original vision that remains, for us, an ambition we hope you will

share with us by participating in it:

If there is a particular sort of political theory that the new team will be eager to

encourage in our time as editors, we might describe it as being the sort that

engages with twenty-first century problems. Du Bois and Arendt called our

attention to racism and totalitarianism as the signature issues of the twentieth

century, and much writing in our field to this day is concerned with these

topics. But in addition to these, and the long list of traditional subjects to which

they were added and which remain as salient as ever, we must recognize the

novel political questions presented by, for example, the Anthropocene, artificial

intelligence, and post-humanism, as well as the resurgence of authoritarianism

and the loss of legitimacy in representative democracies. We hope to use the

book review pages to further these questions by reviewing leading scholarship

1099535PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221099535Political Theory

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