Jodi Dean
American political theorist (born 1962)
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Through Political science, Political philosophy and Communism
Career
Dean received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1984. She received a M.A. and a PhD from Columbia University.
In 1993, Dean joined the faculty of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. From 2013 to 2018, she held the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professorship of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Dean has taught courses on feminist theory, political theory, critical studies, and communism. Dean is also the Erasmus Professor in Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Dean was formerly a co-editor of the journal Theory and Event. Dean has additionally held fellowships at Birkbeck (University of London), Cardiff University, Cornell University, McGill University, and the Institute for Human Sciences.
On April 13, 2024, Hobart and William Smith Colleges president Mark Gearan issued a statement announcing that Dean had been "relieved of classroom duties" following an essay she wrote for Verso Books, in which "she spoke about feeling exhilarated and energized by the paragliders on October 7" and called the attacks "acts of bravery and defiance". In a posting to the social media website X, Dean confirmed she had been relieved of teaching responsibilities. The suspension was lifted in July 2024.
Dean is a member of the American Political Science Association, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and the Law and Society Association. She is on the council of Progressive International.
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Work
Emphasizing the use of Leninism, psychoanalysis, and certain postmodernist theories, Dean has made contributions to political theory, media studies and third-wave feminism, most notably with her theory of communicative capitalism—the online merging of democracy and capitalism into a single neoliberal formation that subverts the democratic impulses of the masses by valuing emotional expression over logical discourse.
The Communist Horizon
In the first few chapters of her 2012 book The Communist Horizon, Dean surveys the contemporary political landscape, noting the persistence of anti-communist rhetoric more than twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She says that capitalists, conservatives, liberals, and social democrats all agree that 20th-century communist regimes were unqualified failures, thereby limiting the scope of discussion around political alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets, a fusion of which constitutes Dean's conception of neoliberalism. She asserts that when people think of capitalism they do not consider what she believes are its worst results (unemployment, economic inequality, hyperinflation, climate change, robber barons, the Great Depression, and the Great Recession) because the history of capitalism is viewed as dynamic and nuanced. By contrast, Dean writes that the history of communism is not considered dynamic or nuanced. Instead, there is a fixed historical narrative of communism that emphasizes authoritarianism, the gulag, starvation, and violence.
First, Dean holds that communism is widely viewed as interchangeable with the Soviet Union, an association that fails to acknowledge the diversity of communist experiments in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, or Latin America are often given little attention. Second, Dean asserts that the seventy-year history of the Soviet Union is condensed to the twenty-six years of Joseph Stalin's rule. Third, Dean critiques the reduction of communism to Stalinist violence and repression, highlighting the modernization and industrialization of the Soviet economy, the successes of the Soviet space program, and improving overall standards of living in the formerly agrarian economy. Fourth, Dean holds that public discourse on the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 oversimplify communism as a failed authoritarian project, reinforcing Cold War binaries and stifling discussions of communism as a viable alternative to capitalism. Lastly, Dean contends that the association of communism with Stalinism and authoritarianism is used to dismiss the possibility of communism working in practice by implying that any challenge to the political status quo will inevitably result in purges and violence.