This research project, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, seeks to understand nonreciprocity as both a constitutive and ethically neutral force in social and political life. By conceptualizing everyday acts of nonreciprocity – not responding to a message, not showing equal or proportional care – as both ordinary and not necessarily destructive to the social, the project challenges the dualist framing of human moral agency as either self-interested and self-centered or as altruistic, communitarian and oriented towards the common good. Arguing that most people act in everyday situations like ‘imperfect Kantians’ – that is, they apply moral rules and evaluations inconsistently, often invoking contradictory principles – the project asks if it is possible to chart a social and political theory that would allow for the emergence of social justice and a relational ethics based on this kind of fallibility.
The project examines these questions in three, highly charged and contested, domains: the politics of public health; free speech and the right to platform; and interpersonal, including sexual and intimate, relationships. Uncovering the reasons why people fail to reciprocate in these contexts, it challenges the centrality of reciprocity for our understanding of what constitutes just and morally preferable social arrangements.
The project has three major components:
(1) Intellectual-historical: this component traces the emergence of reciprocity as the core concept of Western economic anthropology, in particular through the writing of Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss. While Malinowski and Mauss were dedicated to charting different non-Western practices of exchange, their work served to affirm reciprocity as the key element of relationality, and thus as a key component of the social. Tracking the evolution of this element in the writing of later structuralists and post-structuralists, including Derrida, Ricoeur and Bataille, I show the indexicality of reciprocity for our ideas of commensuration, equality, and justice.
(2) Political-theoretical: this component examines the concept of nonreciprocity through the focus on three areas of contestation – public health, free speech, and interpersonal relations. I show that all three domains feature strong arguments for nonreciprocity that do not necessarily challenge commitments to social justice, and consider their political implications.
(3) Moral-philosophical & ethical: this component considers the implications of the reframing of nonreciprocity for contemporary problems, including questions of transgenerational justice, reparations and climate change, and interpersonal relations. It asks whether it is possible to plant the seeds of a progressive social and political theory that does not rest on principles of equivalence, and suggests a few models of how this could work.
Selected further reading (mind you, there is a lot):
Mine:
Bacevic, J. (2024). No Such Thing as Free Speech? Performativity, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in the UK. Law and Critique, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-023-09373-2
Bacevic, J. & McGoey, L. (2024). Liberal fatalism, COVID 19 and the politics of impossibility, Economy and Society, 53(1), 163-182, DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2024.2312710
Bacevic, J. (2021a). Epistemic autonomy and the Free Nose Guy problem. The Philosopher (Spring 2021), https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/essay-bacevic
Bacevic, J. (2021b). No such thing as sociological excuses? Performativity, rationality and social scientific expertise in late liberalism. European Journal of Social Theory, 24(3), 394-410. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310211018939
Bacevic, J., & Muellerleile, C. (2018). The moral economy of open access. European Journal of Social Theory, 21(2), 169-188. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431017717368
Other authors’:
Bataille, G. 1991. The Accursed Share. London: Zone Books.
Kant, I. 2012 [1785]. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge University Press.
Kropotkin, P. 1976 [1902]. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Manchester, NH: Extending Horizon.
Mookherjee, N. 2022. Introduction: On irreconciliation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 28: 11-33. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13751
Rawls, J. 1999 [1971]. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Srinivasan, A. 2018. The Right to Sex. London: Bloomsbury.
Táíwò, O.O. 2022. Reconsidering Reparations. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Jana Bacevic 