A Recovered Script: Political Theory in the Year 2422

• Author: Rebecca LeMoine
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128893
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128893

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 134 –145

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221128893

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Article

A Recovered Script:

Political Theory in the

Year 2422

Rebecca LeMoine1

Abstract

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory.

The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a

retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were

asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century

and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be

making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they

vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent

concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people

decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the

political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms

might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published

in response to these queries.

On January 1, 3033, archaeologists exploring sector 78-A of planet Earth

discovered a damaged memory crystal. Although most of the files were unre-

coverable, one survived largely intact: a proposed script for a political theory

class for March 15, 2422. Judging by its contents, this appears to be the script

submission for which twenty-fifth-century professor Hermanubis Autopius

was accused of heterodoxy and later executed—an astonishing discovery, as,

1Department of Political Science, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Rebecca LeMoine, Department of Political Science, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades

Road, SO 384C, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA.

Email: rlemoine@fau.edu

1128893PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221128893Political TheoryLeMoine

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