Towards a Critical Neuroscience of Political Theory

In the current academic climate, there is no shortage of discourses proclaiming a veritable neurorevolution: that new insights into the functioning of the human brain will lead not only to novel possibilities of technoscientific intervention, but also to a radical transformation of our sense of what it is to be human in general. More striking still is the enthusiastic appropriation of this new neuroscientific wisdom by formerly somewhat anti-scientific disciplines, from art history and theology to literary studies (Vidal 2009; Ortega 2009). Political theory would seem no exception; here too one begins to wonder whether in this moment of neuroscientific progress one should not “go neurobiological”: the lure of a shiny new neuro-prefixed discipline to accompany those already out there – neuro-economics, neuro-education, neuro-law, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-literary-criticism, and so on. Will political theory become neuropolitics?