Loren Reinoso
Bio:
Welcome! My name is Loren Reinoso. I am a political theorist specializing in the intersection of historical and normative political thought. Specifically, my dissertation/book project (“Politics in the First-Person Plural: Representative Authority and Political Agency”) theorizes political representation as the means by which we act collectively through our government.
Few governments today claim sui generis authority. Rather, most governments allege a distinctly representative authority: they allege that when they act, the people act through them. Or so modern governments say. How do we evaluate our government’s claim to represent us? How do we tell whether our government represents us well, badly, or not at all?
Pitkin offered the most famous answer in The Concept of Representation: our government represents us to the extent it responds on balance to public interest and opinion. I argue in contrast that government representation is principally about self-determination: our government represents us when it exercises our shared moral “powers” (to use Pufendorf’s phrase), when we customarily ascribe certain government actions to the community as a whole, and when institutional constraints for the government to largely comply with our customs of ascription. My theory draws principally on what I call the “ascriptivist tradition in representation theory: the traditional position – held by figures ranging from Aquinas in the medieval period; Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke in early modernity; and Weber and Pitkin as recently as last century – that political representation is principally about the conditions under which we can ascribe government actions to the polity. After developing my ascriptivist theory, I apply it to explain our legal and political obligations, as well as citizens’ representative authority to resist, to protest, and even (in extreme cases) to revolt against government injustices.
Before coming to Yale, I studied at the University of Chicago, where I received an MA in social sciences, and at Princeton University, where I received an AB in social sciences and a certificate in values and public life. My MA thesis contemplated Schmitt’s treatment of Hobbes and Descartes and its importance to Schmitt’s late-Weimar political theory.
Contact:
Education:
- MA, University of Chicago, Program in the Social Sciences (specialization in political theory)
- AB, Princeton University, Department of Politics (Honors); Certificate in Values and Public Life
Interests:
- Political Theory