Milo Ward

Biography

He specializes in political theory and American politics with a focus on democratic theory, critical theory, and conservatism. His work explores the popular support for right-wing politics in the US, like the politics of law and order. It has appeared in disciplinary journals such as Perspectives on Politics and New Political Science. 

His current book project, Problems with Authority: The Political Theory of Neoconservative Political Science, challenges the prevailing critical narrative that anti-democratic politics principally animate the modern Right in the US. Instead, it argues that neoconservativism in particular offered the Right a counter-theory of democracy to challenge welfare liberalism’s and reasons to remake and even expand the state to serve conservative purposes. Fusing theories of authority and democracy, neoconservative interpretations of rule remain central to conservative approaches to governance today. 

His second book project, Beyond Repression: Theories of Police Power, considers the symptomatic silence on the popular appeal of policing in contemporary theories of police power and the liberal state. Returning to classical 20th-century debates within Marxism and critical theory on repression, ideology, authoritarianism, and the state, the manuscript offers a political theory of the politics of law and order in the era of broken windows policing.