# Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean (born 1962) is an American political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. She held the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professorship of the Humanities and Social Sciences from 2013 to 2018. Dean has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the author and editor of thirteen books, including Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso 2019).

## Biography

Dean received her B.A. in History from Princeton University in 1984. She received her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University in 1992. Before joining the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has held visiting research appointments at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna, McGill University in Montreal, and Cardiff University in Wales.
Dean is an active member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
On 13 April 2024, Hobart and William Smith Colleges President Mark Gearan issued a statement announcing that Dean had been "relieved of classroom duties" following an essay she wrote for Verso Books, in which "she spoke about feeling exhilarated and energized by the paragliders on October 7". In a posting to the social media website X, Dean confirmed she had been relieved of teaching responsibilities. The suspension was lifted in July 2024.

## Work

Emphasizing the use of Leninism, psychoanalysis, and certain postmodernist theories, Dean has made contributions to political theory, media studies and third-wave feminism, most notably with her theory of communicative capitalism—the online merging of democracy and capitalism into a single neoliberal formation that subverts the democratic impulses of the masses by valuing emotional expression over logical discourse. She was formerly co-editor of the political theory journal Theory & Event.

## The Communist Horizon

In the first few chapters of her 2012 book The Communist Horizon, Dean surveys the contemporary political landscape, noting the persistence of anti-communist rhetoric more than twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She says that capitalists, conservatives, liberals, and social democrats all agree that 20th-century communist regimes were unqualified failures, thereby limiting the scope of discussion around political alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets, a fusion of which constitutes Dean's conception of neoliberalism. She asserts that when people think of capitalism they do not consider what she believes are its worst results (unemployment, economic inequality, hyperinflation, climate change, robber barons, the Great Depression, and the Great Recession) because the history of capitalism is viewed as dynamic and nuanced. By contrast, Dean writes that the history of communism is not considered dynamic or nuanced. Instead, there is a fixed historical narrative of communism that emphasizes authoritarianism, the gulag, starvation, and violence.
First, Dean holds that communism is widely viewed as interchangeable with the Soviet Union, an association that fails to acknowledge the diversity of communist experiments in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, or Latin America are often given little attention. Second, Dean asserts that the seventy-year history of the Soviet Union is condensed to the twenty-six years of Joseph Stalin's rule. Third, Dean critiques the reduction of communism to Stalinist violence and repression, highlighting the modernization and industrialization of the Soviet economy, the successes of the Soviet space program, and improving overall standards of living in the formerly agrarian economy. Fourth, Dean holds that public discourse on the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 oversimplify communism as a failed authoritarian project, reinforcing Cold War binaries and stifling discussions of communism as a viable alternative to capitalism. Lastly, Dean contends that the association of communism with Stalinism and authoritarianism is used to dismiss the possibility of communism working in practice by implying that any challenge to the political status quo will inevitably result in purges and violence.