Daniel Judt

I am a PhD candidate in modern U.S. history, with a focus on social theory and the history of capitalism in the late twentieth century. My dissertation, Past Time: Capitalism and Social Theory in Postindustrial America, explores the rise of “contingency” as a key concept in late-twentieth century leftwing social thought. In declaring history to be without structure, logic, or order, social theorists in the 1980s and 1990s aimed to show that society was open to our remaking. Why did this shift away from a more deterministic idea of History occur? How has it reshaped our understanding of historical time? And what is the relationship between this shift in the way we understand the past and the much-lamented “loss of futurity” that haunts leftwing social theory in our time?

 

Through close readings of several key intellectual figures—including Richard Rorty, Roberto Unger, Wendy Brown, and Moishe Postone—Past Time argues that the embrace of “contingency” is best understood as an expression of the vast transformations that have reshaped global capitalism since the 1970s. In particular, the embrace of contingency in social theory arose in tandem with the rise of “contingent” work and the “flexibility” of post-industrial production. For theorists of contingency, these transformations testified to an absence of historical logic or direction—even, perhaps, to the end of “capitalism” as a concept. But the irony is that in studying their own accounts of how contingency became thinkable, we can discern the presence of the very sort of historical logic they so fervently disavowed.

 

At once a history of social thought and a contribution to social theory, Past Time elaborates a theory of history for the capitalist epoch that is at once rigorously post-foundationalist and self-reflexive. Along the way, I engage with a number of central themes in the study of the recent past. These include neoliberalism, de-industrialization, and the rise of service work, as well as postmodern theory, neo-pragmatism, memory studies, and post-Marxist thought.

 

I maintain broad interests across modern US history (especially labor history and the history of capitalism), critical social theory, and contemporary politics. My academic work has appeared in Critical Historical Studies, The American Journal of Legal History, and Southern Cultures; my public writing has been featured in the Nation and the Point Magazine, among others. With Tatiana Llaguno, I am currently co-editing a collection of essays on the concept of “dependence” in history and social theory, to be published with Verso in 2027.

 

I received a BA in history from Yale in 2018 and an MPhil in political theory from Oxford in 2020. Prior to beginning my PhD, I worked as a political organizer with UNITE HERE Local 11, a hospitality-workers union in California and Arizona, where I helped to develop workers’ education programs for union members. I remain committed to teaching history and social theory in non-traditional settings.