Political Philosophy, the journal created by an editorial team consisting largely of former editors at the currently-in-limbo Journal of Political Philosophy, has published its first article.

The Journal of Political Philosophy collapsed last year after the decision by its publisher, Wiley, to fire founding editor Robert Goodin (ANU) was followed by the resignation of the rest of the journal’s editors and a profession-wide pledge of non-cooperation with the journal.

Political Philosophy was launched earlier this year as a diamond open-access journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.

The first article published in the new journal is “The Phenomenal Public” by Susanna Siegel (Harvard). Here’s the article abstract:

With what modes of mentality can we build a visceral, subjective sense of being in some specific mass-political society? Theorists and political cultivators standardly call upon the imagination – the kind prompted by symbols and rituals, for example. Could perception ever play such a role? I argue that it can, but that perceptions of mass-political publics come with costs of cruelty and illusion that neither democratic theorists nor participants should be willing to pay. The clearest examples of such perceptions are found in fascist political culture. My discussion aims to illuminate what it is about publics, perception, and democracy that makes this so.

You can read the whole piece here.