Anna Marie Smith and I have similar concerns about the poor, racism and sexism. Yet we view political theory in different ways. Smith has focused on one set of programs and gives the reader a richly detailed view of recent welfare laws. In contrast, I have tried to do something very different. First, I use Giorgio Agamben's ideas as a foil, drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault to supplement this reading, and I investigate the ideas of John Locke (rather than Thomas Hobbes) to understand sovereignty today. By looking at Locke, we can understand how representative government based on the rule of law and equality can coexist with prerogative power used systematically and domestically. Instead of a top-down view of power, I argue that modern power is characterized by the dispersal of sovereignty and, importantly, prerogative power (the legal suspension of the law). Thus, even as national borders have become more open (both with economic globalization and post-Clausewitzean forms of war), state sovereignty has not necessarily declined. In fact, the use of prerogative power increasingly characterizes late-modern power even as neoliberal rhetoric gives the opposite impression.

This dynamic is not just true in obvious cases such as Guantánamo Bay, but also in homeless policy and the wars on terror and drugs. I do not suggest that all of the examples proceeding from these categories are identical, but I want to show how prerogative power can operate domestically and not just internationally; is wielded by a range of political agents and not just government elites; and is deployed regularly and systematically rather than during clear-cut states of emergency. Ascetic ideas legitimate this treatment, creating discursive divisions and obfuscating how some individuals are effectively disenfranchised. In arguing these things, I investigate how older racialized and gendered discourses are being redeployed as forms of bio-power (both in Foucault and Agamben's understandings of this term).

Smith's disagreement with my approach is rooted in a methodological difference regarding how political theorists approach empirical issues. One approach is to narrow the intellectual focus and, through scholarly investigation, apply a theory to a real-life situation to see if it fits or not. The theory itself is viewed in static terms and is either used or discarded. The other method is to test the bounds of theory, asking ourselves how real-life situations challenge more established understandings of power, equality, race, and gender (and so on). This broader technique of theorizing does not have to be totalizing, as Smith contends, but can help us to understand the connections between what Foucault would call “local truths.” In proceeding in this way, theories are not viewed statically but as constantly being interrogated and reread. For this reason, I see connections between Marx (his early work) and Agamben that Smith does not. I also connect Agamben's work to Simone de Beauvoir's in my conclusion, to examine notions of resistance and agency given a very new set of problems we face today in the United States.

As Smith notes in her introduction, we must expand disciplinary boundaries to understand complex political problems. A more panoramic approach does this while also testing and expanding the limits of political theory itself.