Volume
10: Issue 3
Volume
10: Issue 2
Volume
10: Issue 1
Volume
9: Issue 4
Volume 9:
Issue 3
Volume 9: Issue 2
Volume 9: Issue 1
Volume 8: Issue 3
Volume 8: Issue 2
Volume 8: Issue 1
Volume 7: Issue 4
Volume 7: Issue 3
Volume 7: Issue 1
Author: Ulrich K.
Preuss
Article: "The Iraq War: Critical Relfections from 'Old Europe'"
Volume 10 no. 3
This article is a translation of
the last chapter of the author’s book Krieg, Verbrechen,
Blasphemie which deals with the political, legal, and moral implications
of the attack of September 11, 2001. This last chapter –
written before the Iraq war – discusses the possible reasons
of the US for this war from a European perspective. It argues
that the US as an ‘Unwilling Empire’ has more or less
voluntarily acquired the responsibility for international order
and security, because the UN is unable to fulfill this task. Yet,
America is doing this job on her terms, and this entails a structural
tension between the universalist character of the legal system
of the UN and the ‘praticularist’ approach of a hegemonic
nation, even if this nation is a democracy. The author argues
that America’s quest for absolute security should not be
satsified through unilateralist means of superiority and military
force, but through the instruments of international law, since
“the strongest man is never strong enough to be a master
all the time, unless he transforms force into right and obedience
into duty” (J.-J. Rousseau) .
Author: Steven Lukes
Article: "The Question of Power: Europe vs. America"
Volume 10 no. 3
Kagan argues that Europe
and America exhibit contrasting perspectives on power, Europe
moving into a Kantian world of international co-operation, while
the US must exercise power in an anarchic Hobbesian world, requiring
the use of military might. He explains this contrast by the psychologies
of power and weakness: strong powers view risks, threats and security
differently than weaker powers. The factual basis for this contrast
is disputed but also its theoretical frame: both Hobbes and Kant
sought a common, legitimate authority that would afford collective
security. His ‘psychological’ explanation is shown
to be Nietzschean, proposing that the weak seek to propagate views
that bring them advantages; it assumes the ‘American’
view to be rational and realistic and the ‘European’
to be illuded and utopian; and it licenses the Bush administration
and its supporters to diagnose rather than meet its opponents’
arguments. His claim that adjusting to American hegemony is our
only realistic alternative is disputed.
Author: John D.
Huber
Article: "Sleepwalking Democrats and American public support
for
President Bush’s attack on Iraq"
Volume 10 no. 3
In the months leading up
to the war, American public opinion was more supportive of attacking
Iraq than was public opinion anywhere else. I argue that this
elevated level of support was not due to September 11, or to negative
attitudes toward President Bush elsewhere. Instead, the differences
were due to the failure of the Democrats in Congress to debate
the merits of President Bush’s security policy. This failure
to articulate a coherent security policy was a mistake for the
Democrats and a setback for American democracy. Had the Democrats
opened a debate, American public attitudes toward the Iraq issue
would have been less supportive, making it more difficult for
President Bush to proceed with a war that lacked the legitimacy
of broad international support. The Democrats should learn from
their mistake. They should stop trying to ignore security issues,
and instead should offer Americans a different pathway to physical
and economic security than the Bush administration’s emphasis
on unilateralism and suppression of suspected terrorists at any
cost.
Author: Thomas Lemke
Article: "Comment
on Nancy Fraser: Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization"
Volume 10 no. 2
According to Nancy Fraser any contemporary
reading of Foucault’s work today is confronted with two
serious problems: Foucault’s texts are characterized by
a deficit of normative critique and an empirical analysis that
remains centered on the disciplinary regime of fordism.
In my comment I try to demonstrate that this interpretation excludes
important aspects of Foucault’s work. While the first part
of this contribution sketches out that Foucault’s critical
position does not have to rely on norms that are laid out in advance
of political struggles to guide and govern them, the following
part takes up Fraser’s reading of Foucault as a theorist
of fordist discipline. It will become clear that Foucault was
very well aware of the end of fordism. In his work we observe
a growing theoretical distancing from the disciplinary model,
while a new problematic arises that centers on the concept of
government or “governmentality”. The third part points
out that this theoretical direction might be useful for the analysis
and critique of contemporary neoliberal regimes.
Author:
Christoph Menke
Article: "Two Kinds of Practice: On the Relation between
Social Discipline and the Aesthetics of Existence"
Volume 10 no. 2
At two central passages of his work, in the determination
of disciplinary procedures and of an aesthetics of existence,
Foucault employs the concept of practice (or exercise: Übung).
This double usage indicates their common ground, which consists
in a practical conception of subjectivity. The crucial role of
practice or exercise for both disciplinary power and the aesthetics
of existence furthermore indicates the difficulties in establishing
their normative opposition. The aesthetics of existence does not
just form the other of, an alternative to, disciplinary processes
of normalization. An aesthetic form of life contradicts disciplinary
forms of normalization, but it also presupposes them and is irreducibly
exposed to the threat of falling back into a new kind of normalization.
Author: Hartmut
Rosa
Article: “Social Acceleration. Ethical and Political Consequences
of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society"
Volume 10 no. 1
What does it mean for a society
to ‘accelerate’? Although it is almost a common place
in contemporary debates about the character of late-modern societies
that they are characterized by historical, cultural, and technological
acceleration, it is very unclear what that really means. The paper
therefore sets out to develop a systematic framework for the analysis
of late-modern societies as “acceleration-societies”.
It starts off with distinguishing between three analytically separable
forms of acceleration (technological acceleration, the acceleration
of social change, and the acceleration of the pace of life). In
the next step, the driving ‘motors’ of the corresponding
processes of acceleration are identified, yielding the insight
that social acceleration has become in part a self-propelling
process. This is followed by a discussion of the diverse and complementary
processes of social deceleration. Paradoxically, notions of a
hyper-accelerated pace of social change seem to go hand in hand
with observations of an almost total historical and cultural stand-still.
In the final part of the paper, the exploration of the ethical
and political consequences of social acceleration leads to the
conclusion that our individual as well
as political autonomy is threatened by a new form of de-temporalized
‘situationalism’.
Author: Andrew Arato
Article: “The Bush Tribunals and the Specter of Dictatorship”
Volume 9 no. 4
Andrew Arato
critically examines the project of military tribunals in light
of its legal difficulties, and the evolving U.S. emergency regime.
He argues that we are facing special dangers because of the re-opening
structural weaknesses of the U.S. presidency, and the Bush government’s
new interest in crisis. He proposes that among future constitutional
changes, a full codification of emergency powers would be especially
important.
Author: William E. Scheuerman
Article: “Rethinking Crisis Government”
Volume 9 no.4
Despite important
differences in their approaches, both the Bush Administration
and Democrats in Congress have responded to the September 11 terrorist
attacks by pursuing a dramatic augmentation of discretionary executive-centered
legal authority. Unfortunately, this legal approach to September
11 relies on traditional assumptions about executive power that
are now historically and theoretically anachronistic. In particular,
the presupposition that only the executive is capable of undertaking
the rapid-fire action required by dire political crises is subject
to critical examination.
Author: Yannis
Stavrakakis
Article: “Creativity and its Limits: Encounters with Social
Constructionism and
the Political in Castoriadis and Lacan”
Volume 9 no.4
This paper
constitutes an attempt to start a dialogue between Lacanian (political)
theory and the social theory advanced by Cornelius Castoriadis.
In order to break with a long tradition of mutual suspicion between
Lacanians and Castoriadians I initially focus on the surprising
proximity between the two projects on many levels. Crucially,
they both seem to share a similar type of social constructionism.
However, they draw quite different conclusions from this constructionism:
Castoriadis stresses the importance of creativity while Lacan
highlights the alienating dimension of every social construction.
Furthermore, in order to safeguard a politics of radical imagination,
Castoriadis ultimately disavows the alienating limits of human
creation. In the concluding paragraphs of the paper it is argued
that instead of leading to political quietism or nihilism, a serious
registering of the limits of creativity – the Real in Lacan
– can be seen as a condition of possibility for transformative
politics and the radicalization of democracy.
Author: Dusan Pokorny
Article: “Property, Culture and Cultural Property”
Volume 9 no. 3
Cultural
objects are recognized to testify to the historically developed
identity of a human group. But the “group” may extend
from the community, in which the object originated, to the neighbours,
with whom the producers exchanged ideas and techniques, to strangers,
who subsequently became the object’s beholders and might
have even adopted it as “theirs,” to mankind as a
whole. At the level of morality, the strongest would be the claim
of those, of whose identity the object speaks most eloquently;
which is likely to be to the group whose members had been directly
engaged in creating the artifact. But such claims to ownership
and return, even if supported by the norms or rules of the community
or nation of origin, need not be recognized by the modern, de-moralized
property law of the country where the cultural object is currently
located. Hence the question: is the latter type of law a valid,
legitimate basis for the resolution of such disputes?
Author:
Frank Michelman
Article: "Postmodernism, Proceduralism and Constitutional
Justice: A comment on Van der Walt and Botha"
Volume 9 no.
2
Procedural liberals face the problem of negotiating
between constitutional justice -- a regime in which all legal
interpretations and applications are justifiable in terms of a
constitutional system that every reasonable and rational person
can accept -- and robust respect for obdurate but reasonable ethical
disagreement. Recently in this journal, Henk Botha and Johan der
Walt called for legal justification without justice --that is,
for severance of justification by constitutional review from claims
to justice that they believe cannot be redeemed. Their challenge
is formidable, once we see that the fact of reasonable disagreement
must extend to applications of abstract constitutional norms.
The effort of political liberals to meet the challenge with the
idea of public reason mirrors the continued commitment of the
challengers to the practice of political justification. The combined
movements bring the contending parties into conjunction at the
point where substance and procedure merge.
Author: Cecile Laborde
Article: "On Republican Toleration"
Volume 9 no. 2
Author:
Maria Pia Lara Abstract
Article: "Democracy and Cultural Rights: Is There a New Stage
of Citizenship?"
Volume 9 no. 2
This essay deals with a
critical revision of Marshall's theory of democratic citizenship
and critically recovers its main structure to develop what the
author has called a fourth stage for citizenship, namely, a new
horizon in which "cultural rights" are seen as rights of integration
in democratic societies. After revising Habermas' view, and through
the exploration of a sociological argument that the author thematizes
to show how from the point of view of an empirical example such
as the one offered by the the society of United States, it is
possible to see that the rights of immigrants have been recovered
through new ways of seeing them as critically distancing from
previous models of assimilation. Thus, the author addresses last
some feminist arguments warning against "cultural rights" because
of the idea that all cultures oppress women. The article defines
culture in a democratic sense and by doing that avoids some of
the issues that feminist have raised when thinking about multiculturalism.
Author: Meili
Steele
Article: "Arendt versus Elllison on Little Rock: The Role
of Language in Political Judgment"
Volume 9 no. 2
This essay uses the debate between
Arendt and Ellison over the desegregation of schools at Little
Rock to develop their competing conceptions of the role of language
in political judgment. The essay begins by distinguishing between
Kantian Third Critique approaches to language, narrative, and
judgment, such as Arendt's and Ricoeur's, from ontological approaches,
such as Taylor's hermeneutic one and Foucault's genealogical one.
While Ellison's notion of judgment draws on these two ontological
modes, Arendt's approach blocks out the constitutive dimension
of language and public imagination. The result is that Arendt
limits herself to a subject to subject model of judgment. Thus,
the situation at Little Rock requires only that her imagination
"go visiting" in order for Arendt to ask herself what she would
do if she "were a Negro mother in the South." Ellison, on the
other hand, thematizes the political ambiguity of the medium of
language, and the complex interpretive negotiations about the
institutions of meaning that subtend any political dialogue. Nowhere
is this more evident than the Prologue to Invisible Man, where
Ellison puts the reader on notice that the languages of intersubjectivity
are central to political judgment.
Authors:
Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson
Article: "Toward
a Democracy of the Emotions"
Volume 9 no. 1
Proponents of deliberative
democracy claim that it can provide a fair, efficient and creative
method of group decision-making. But in practice all groups, including
public forums for deliberation, are characterized in part by emotional
forces which threaten to undermine such deliberation. For this
reason, it is necessary to understand the emotional dynamics of
groups and to apply this understanding to the design of the public
spaces of deliberative democracy. Only by so doing will democratic
theory be able to deal with the affective forces that pervade
social and political life. In order to defend this thesis, we
set out to formulate and defend what we (following Anthony Giddens)
call a 'democracy of the emotions'. This is a form of deliberative
democracy that incorporates an understanding of affectivity in
order to harness emotional forces in furtherance of its aims.
In such a democratic society individuals do not have to leave
their emotions behind when they enter public spaces for deliberation
as free and equal citizens. In these deliberative spaces, citizens
can reveal their needs and express their emotions in a process
of coming to what might be thought of as 'good enough' understanding
of their fellows. Our belief is that, since such a political system
could contain the highly charged emotional states that characterize
individuals and groups in contemporary, highly divisive societies,
it would be of greater practical import and moral legitimacy than
other models of democracy offer today.
Author:
Gregory W. Streich
Article: "Constructing
Multiracial Democracy: To Deliberate or Not to Deliberate?"
Volume 9 no. 1
Deliberative democracy has recently been
invoked by Robert Gooding-Williams as the democratic model that
will enable the construction of multiracial democracy. However,
Lynn Sanders argues that the call for deliberative democracy is
both ineffective and premature given the deep racial inequalities
that exist in the United States. Both theorists are concerned
with building multiracial democracy in the United States, but
the question is whether we can build it through deliberative politics.
In this article, I defend a modified version of deliberative democratic
theory as the preferred mode of creating multiracial democracy.
In so doing, I modify Sanders' claim that deliberative democracy
inherently presupposes a consensus and that it presupposes a detached,
impassioned mode of interaction. Furthermore, I argue that the
spaces in which deliberative democracy can unfold must include
the informal political spaces that comprise a vibrant civil society
which have been overlooked by deliberative democratic theorists
in favor of formal political institutions. Lastly, I discuss some
groups within civil society (what I call " mediating groups")
which exemplify an important mode of what Gooding-Williams calls
race-conscious multicultural democracy in which Saders' notion
of open-ended testimony can occur. The power and limitations of
various forms of democratic talk are brought to light through
such an examination.
Author:
Fiona Jenkins
Article: "The
Heeding of Differences: On Foreclosure and Openness in a Politics
of the Performative"
Volume 8 no. 3
This paper is a response to Judith Butler's critique of Catherine
MacKinnon's position on pornography. The differences between MacKinnon's
and Butler's politics might appear to turn upon differences in
their conceptions of how identity is discursively constructed
and the character of agency. Yet trenchant though Butler's criticisms
of MacKinnon are, these may be less decisive for the political
disagreement between them than their differing evaluations of
risks and strategies of resistance within the discursive field.
Butler offers a highly determinate reading of MacKinnon's rhetorically
charged text, which, I argue, positions MacKinnon's 'moral' voice
as the 'other' to a politics of the performative. Having thus
broken open a structure of foreclosure in MacKinnon's politics
(residing primarily in the overriding of all contingent questions
concerning the reception and hence effects of speech) Butler then
moves too quickly to derive strong conclusions about the effects
of MacKinnon's form of advocacy, thereby herself foreclosing the
difficult political tasks of estimation and evaluation of risks
and opportunities. These would be opened up by recognizing aspects
of MacKinnon's approach as offering a rival view of the structure,
operation and effects of appeals to the state's juridical frame.
Author: Orville Lee
Article: "Classifying
Acts: State Speech, Race, and Democracy"
Volume 8 no. 2
Recent legal efforts to blunt the impact
of "racial hate speech" in America have foundered on the rocky
shores of First Amendment jurisprudence. In this essay, I will
focus on one problematic feature of the policy debate over the
legal regulation of racial hate speech: the absence of a discussion
of the discursive force that is realized through the classifying
acts of the State. Neither the First Amendment "absolutists" nor
the "revisionists" offer an adequate account of the conditions
that are constitutive of what I will call the force of State speech.
My critical remarks focus primarily on revisionist arguments made
by critical race theorists, who propose a new tort for racial
hate speech. I use this critical engagement as the springboard
for conceptualizing the social risk of State speech that is imposed
unequally on socially disadvantaged individuals. After presenting
potential remedies to attenuate this risk, which emphasize deliberative
choice rather than the proscription of words and images, I illustrate
the relation of State speech, race, and communicative inequality
via a reconstruction of the legal features the 1896 Supreme Court
decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Author:
Jeffrey Hoover
Article: "Do
the Politics of Difference Need to be Freed of a Liberalism?"
Volume
8 no. 2
The
critique of liberal theory that is grounded in the experience
of marginalized groups is engaged sympathetically, yet found to
include a partial embrace of an inadequate liberal conception
of the polity. The argument is made that even though the politics
of difference, especially as it has been articulated by Iris Young,
has addressed important concerns raised by a group-based approach
to political recognition, there is still the need to extend this
group-based approach beyond its applicability to marginalized
members of the polity. While the politics of difference aims to
refashion political recognition for members of marginalized groups,
it retains a form of recognition for the broad spectrum of the
population that relies on a traditional liberal conception, and
which is, according to the politics of difference itself, an inadequate
one.
Author: Anne Phillips
Article:
"Feminism and Liberalism Revisited:
Has Martha Nussbaum Got It Right?"
Volume 8 no. 2
This article takes issue with Martha Nussbaum's
argument that liberal individualism, consistently carried through,
entails a radical feminist programme. It agrees with Nussbaum
that the conflict between feminism and liberalism has been exaggerated
and is ready for reassessment, but queries the understanding of
autonomy that underpins her argument. In combining a classically
liberal emphasis on choice with a feminist understanding of unjust
social power, Nussbaum is driven into a curiously illiberal liberalism.
The article argues for an alternative understanding of the relationship
between autonomy and equality that reinstates equality as the
central feminist concern.
Author: Joel Olson
Article:
"The
Democratic Problem of the White Citizen"
Volume 8 no. 2
The invention of race and white supremacy
in the colonial era and the interdependent relationship between
slavery and citizenship in the Jacksonian era show that the development
of American citizenship was inextricably racialized: to be enslaved
or enslavable was to be "black", to not be enslavable was to be
"white"- and a (potential) citizen. Political standing defined
one's race, not the converse. The political consequence of white
citizenship is a limited democratic imagination that defines freedom
and equality narrowly and that rejects social equality because
it represents "falling" to the level of Black people. For this
reason, theories developed to expand or deepen democracy cannot
just demand the full inclusion of people of color into citizenship
but must seek to undermine the white citizen as well.
Author: Morris
Kaplan
Article:
"Constructing Queer Communities:
Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Fantasies"
Volume 8 no. 1
This essay interrogates the conceptions
of "lesbian", "gay" or "queer" community and challenges the linkage
between the advocacy of same-sex marriage or civic unions and
the acceptance of a conservative moral and political agenda. I
want to drive a wedge between the demand for such arrangements
and the abandonment of a commitment to sexual freedom to pursue
one's erotic associations in a variety of forms and venues. My
conclusion is to acknowledge both the power and the danger of
appeals to "community" in democratic politics, especially within
those movements devoted to advancing the equality of sexual minorities.
I suggest the possibility of an analysis of "community" that maps
a domain of social interaction and practice not so much by shared
values and beliefs, but rather by forms of life that embrace the
vicissitudes of the human lifecycle. Crucial to my analysis is
the contention that articulating the boundaries of communities,
the relations between individuals and larger groups, and the intersections
of private lives with public histories is best understood as a
mode of fantasy, both personal and social.
Author: Paul Apostolidis
Article:
"Homosexuality and “Compassionate”
Conservatism in the Discourse of the Post-Reaganite Right"
Volume 8 no. 1
This essay pursues and modifies the "post-socialist"
project of integrating a politics of cultural recognition with
a politics of socioeconomic redistribution. Critically developing
certain arguments by Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler, it explores
the interaction between the new right discourses of "healing love"
toward homosexuals and "compassion" for the poor. The Christian
right's "ex-gay" discourse and institutions furnish scenes for
the performative articulation of heterosexual Christian subjectivity
through the "abjection" of "gay" traits, in a manner mediated
by a "homosexual" "not yet subject" precariously situated on the
edges of the normal. In turn, not only does "ex-gay" discourse
execute the same strategies for defining deviancy and its rehabilitation
as do new conservative discourses on poverty; in addition, the
two discourses together furnish ideological terms normalizing
a formidable parastate apparatus of human service institutions
whose recent emergence poses the central challenge to the future
of the democratic welfare state.
Author:
Keith Topper
Article:
"Not So Trifling Nuances: Pierre
Bourdieu, Symbolic Violence, and the Perversions of Democracy"
Volume 8 no. 1
This paper focuses on the issue of how
Bourdieu's mode of socioanalysis might advance political theorists'
understanding of particularly urgent and nettelsome political
problems. To do so, I begin by briefly positioning his writings
in a threefold context: political, intellectual, and theoretical.
By sketching the cluster of problems that initially prompt Bourdieu's
rethinking of classical debates in social theory, as well as the
conceptual architecture he develops in response to them, I hope
to open a clearing for examining Bourdieu's contributions to two
areas of political inquiry, specifically, the politics of language
and speech and the study of power relations. More generally, I
argue that Bourdieu provides unmined resources for investigating
vexing problems of democratic theory and practice, and particularly
for combating perversions of those political values inextricably
linked to democratic forms of life: freedom, equality, and social
justice. By joining the phenomenological account of embodied content
with a depiction of social fields and institutions as both materially
and symbolically stratified, Bourdieu articulates a sociology
of power that productively explores both the micro-politics of
everyday life and the macro-politics of institutional silencing
and exclusion. Furthermore, through his analyses of the unperceived
ways that symbolic forms become instruments for constituting and
sustaining structured inequalities, Bourdieu brings together the
often sequestered issues and domains of democracy, culture, civil
society, and institutional justice. Finally, by directing the
sociological and historical gaze back on the disciplinary habitus
itself, Bourdieu not only fashions a lens for seeing what is passed
over, for bringing "the undiscussed into discussion", but also
for understanding and overcoming the disabling (as opposed to
enabling) constraints and soft censorships which social fields
place on those who labor within them. In sum, I contend that Bourdieu's
defiance of long-standing inter- and intra-disciplinary boundaries,
as well as the specific way that he defies them, is one of the
things that makes his work instructive.
Author: Simon Critchley
Article: "Remarks
on Derrida and Habermas"
Volume 7 no. 4
In this paper, which was originally conceived
as a way of opening a meeting in Frankfurt between Derrida and
Habermas, I explore the similarities and some of the differences
between their approaches. After trying to show that both Derrida
and Habermas share a concern for the pragmatics of communicative
action or the relation to the other, I show how they differ in
their pictures of intersubjectivity, based on symmetry in Habermas,
and asymmetry in Derrida. I try and show how these two approaches
can be seen to supplement each other. I then go on to explore
the relation of ethics to politics in Derrida and conclude by
clarifying Derrida's notion of democracy-to-come, by comparing
it to Habermas' procedural notion of deliberative democracy.
Author: Erhard Denninger
Article: "Security,
Diversity, Solidarity' Instead of 'Freedom, Equality, Fraternity"
Volume 7 no. 4
Like many other European constitutions the German Basic Law is
based on the ideal of the French Revolution: Freedom, equality
(and less) fraternity. The essay shows the emergence of a new
type of more programmatic oriented constitutions, committed to
the ideals of security, diversity and solidarity, and their impact
on the traditional bourgeois-liberal legal system.
Author: Patchen Markell
Article: "The
Recognition of Politics: A Comment on Emcke and Tully"
Volume 7 no. 4
This critical response reads Carolin Emcke's and James Tully's
essays as responses to an important tension between "cognitive"
and "constructive" perspectives on recognition and identity. Neither
author acknowledges the ways in which the pursuit of recognition
is shadowed by misrecognition - not the misrecognition of identities,
but the "ontological" misrecognition of its own constructive power.
Author: Michel Rosenfeld
Article: "American
Constitutionalism Confronts Denninger's New Constitutional Paradigm"
Volume 7 no. 4
Denninger's new paradigm will not convince
Americans ideologically committed to material security as infra-constitutional.
Denninger's proposals, however, are not necessarily more progressive.
He speaks of "diversity", but promotes protecting differences
in ways already accomplished by American constitutional equality
and jurisprudence. Denninger's "solidarity" raises issues of multiculturalism
versus globalism that challenge both American and German constitutionalism.
Author: James Tully
Article: "Struggles
over Recognition and Distribution"
Volume 7 no. 4
The major thesis is that struggles over the way citizens should
be recognized in constitutional democracies are not amenable to
definitive solutions. Struggles over recognition should thus be
seen as one relatively enduring type of political activity among
others. As a result, the primary concern should not be theories
of justice (the just form of recognition) but practices of freedom
- the freedom to engage in this type of struggle with the minimum
amount of domination. The minor thesis is that struggles over
recognition and struggles over distribution should be seen as
two, interrelated aspects of political struggles. Struggles over
distribution often spill over into how the participants are recognized
and struggles over recognition involve the redistribution of symbolic,
political, social and economic power.
Author: Margaret Kohn
Article: "Language,
Power, and Persuasion: Toward a Critique of Deliberative Democracy"
Volume 7 no. 3
The past twenty years have witnessed the
consolidation of deliberation as the normative basis of democratic
theory. In this paper I challenge deliberation as a normative
ideal for democratic politics. First, I analyze Habermas' original
formulation of "universal pragmatics" in order to show that it
is based on unconvincing assumptions about the transparency of
language and neutrality of communication. Next, I argue that recent
political theories based on communicative ethics are incoherent
when they attempt to strengthen the legitimacy of discursive democratic
institutions without interrogating the necessary underlying philosophical
assumptions. Finally, I conclude that democratic theory needs
to do more than adjudicate between competing claims by appealing
to reasonable arguments, since reasonableness is itself a social
construction which usually benefits those already in power. Realizing
abstractions such as reciprocity, equality, and opportunity is
usually a process of historical struggle rather than theoretical
consensus. His struggle does not take place primarily on the abstract
terrain of language but at the concrete sites of resistance, the
literal, symbolic, and imaginary barricades, forums, and fortresses
at which the people mount challenges to currently hegemonic visions
of collective life.
Author:
Dieter Freudlieb
Article: "The
Future of Critical Theory"
Volume 7 no. 1
In this paper it is argued that the Critical
Theory of Juergen Habermas suffers from a number of fundamental
weaknesses that need to be overcome if Critical Theory is to survive.
The changes made in Axel Honneth's attempt at a renewal of Critical
Theory do not go far enough. What is needed is a different conception
of philosophy that the one underlying both Habermas' and Honneth'
s work. A new conception of philosophy is adumbrated. It draws
on the work of Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank and advocates
a return to a philosophy of subjectivity prematurely abandoned
by Habermas and Honneth.
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