Nicholas PoolePhD Candidate, York University
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I am a PhD Candidate in the Program for Social and Political Thought at York University. My research interests lie in democratic theory, political aesthetics, the history of political thought, and participatory politics. I am currently completing a dissertation that interprets the work of Hannah Arendt from the perspective of her appeal to exempla as the appropriate kinds of ‘standards’ for political judgment in pluralistic societies. I am also preparing a book project that develops the core insights of my dissertation in conversation with ongoing debates in democratic theory.
My research has been generously supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (CGS-D), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program, and the Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University.
I am based in Victoria, B.C.
Traditional Territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples.
In every era and every culture, there are exemplary persons and events that show us the scope of human capability. We internalize exemplars over the course of our lives, whether by exposure to the cultural artifacts that represent them, or by directly witnessing and reflecting upon the exceptional actions of those around us. It is clear, however, that in democratic societies perceptions of exemplary value rely on little more than our own judgments. We do not today have an unambiguously authoritative pantheon of heroes, sages, and saints available to us as models for our norms and principles, and the politics of pluralism everywhere demonstrates that even those persons and events that do enjoy some measure of normative authority are by no means immune to deep public contestation. Recent challenges to monuments across Canada and around the world have not only demonstrated in vivid fashion how important it is for publicly memorialized figures to reflect the values of citizens, but they have also raised difficult questions about what it means to live with exemplars in contexts of democratic contestation. Evidently, we are still living in what Friedrich Nietzsche called the ‘twilight of idols’. But whether this twilight dims to a prelapsarian longing for lost traditions or a cynical disavowal of the pasts we invariably inherit will depend on our ability to reconcile the inevitability of the exemplary in our lives with the fact that we share the world with others whose standpoints differ from our own. It will depend, in other words, on embracing a democratic politics of the exemplary.
My research addresses a host of questions that appear when we place exemplarity at the heart of democratic practice. How, for instance, can our inclinations toward imitation, which often practically link us to the norms of our communities, be adjusted to situations where sources of admiration are diverse and authoritative exemplars are publicly challenged? What responsibilities do these practices place upon us, and how can our relation to exemplars promote, not hinder, our capacity to act by our own lights and speak in our own voices? On what grounds can our choices of exemplars affirm the world as a space between free and equal persons? And how might autonomous persons with different exemplars, or different understandings of the same exemplar, possibly arrive at shared visions for how the world should look?
Recent work :
Article: ‘Politics Without Measure? Reading Exemplarity in The Human Condition.’
Forthcoming Article: ‘The Company We Choose to Keep: Towards an Exemplarist Theory of Political Autonomy.’
Interview and Activity Sheet: ‘How do Role Models Shape Moral Frameworks in Democratic Society?’