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Philosophy & Social Criticism
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.277
Number of Followers: 22  
 
  Hybrid Journal Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
ISSN (Print) 0191-4537 - ISSN (Online) 1461-734X
Published by Sage Publications Homepage  [1176 journals]
  • Colonial lessons to learn from Habsburg: Bosnia-Herzegovina,
           1878–1918

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      Authors: Clemens Ruthner
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      In 1878, as a consequence of an international Balkan summit in Berlin, Austria–Hungary was given permission to occupy the troubled Ottoman provinces Bosnia and Hercegovina. A gory invasion campaign ensued, followed by four decades of civil administration. Finally, the territories were annexated by the Habsburg Monarchy in 1908 as an appendix of sorts, which almost caused the premature outbreak of a great war in Europe. This article will sketch the background for this last – and lethal – expansion of the empire and pursue the research questions of (a) whether this constitutes a case of colonialism within Europe and (b) what its repercussions were, critically challenging the alleged ‘civilising mission’ that would legitimise the whole undertaking.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-12-09T05:07:28Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231219912
       
  • Decentring critical theory with the help of critical theory: Ecocide and
           the challenge of anthropocentricism

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      Authors: Maeve Cooke
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Our present situation of anthropogenic ecological disaster calls on Western philosophy in general, and Frankfurt School critical theory in particular, to reconsider some long-standing, entrenched assumptions concerning what it means to be a human agent and to relate to other agents. In my article, I take up the challenge in dialogue with the idea of critical theory articulated by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s. My overall concern is to contribute to on-going efforts to decentre Frankfurt School critical theory in multiple dimensions. With the help of Horkheimer, I seek to show that this theoretical tradition has itself an important contribution to make to the endeavour. In Section 1, I argue that the methodology he advocates for critique of society offers a view of the relationship between the human mind and reality, as well as of humans with other humans, that avoids dogmatic rigidity and is hospitable towards mutual learning through engagement with other philosophical and cultural traditions. In Section 2, I consider the more specific challenge of anthropocentrism, suggesting the need for a more differentiated account of this. While critical theory is unavoidably anthropocentric in certain respects, it could avoid more pernicious forms of anthropocentrism that establish epistemic and ethical hierarchies between humans and other-than-human entities and that conceive of ethical validity as a purely human construction, with no independence of human needs and concerns.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-12-01T11:36:19Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231215681
       
  • On Populism and Civil Society: The Challenge to Constitutional Democracy
           by Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen

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      Authors: María Pía Lara
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      I will critically explore Arato and Cohen’s work on populism acknowledging areas of agreement while noting gaps in their reasoning particularly regarding the complex relations between capitalism and democracy and the recent erosion of democracy replacing it with authoritarian regimes that are better suited for neoliberal policies.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-12-01T10:05:37Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231211026
       
  • Jean Améry and the time of resentment

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      Authors: Ilit Ferber
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The article provides a close reading of Jean Améry’s essay, ‘Resentments’ from the perspective of temporality. Although firmly grounded in a specific historical and political context (Améry, a Holocaust survivor, reflects on the aftermath of his experiences during the war), I argue that this essay offers valuable insights into Améry’s philosophy of temporality. After establishing the context and structure of Améry’s ‘Resentments’, the article delves into a discussion of the temporal aspects found in the text: (1) Delay: the emergence of resentments and their connection to trauma. (2) Eternal Recurrence: Améry’s critique of Nietzsche, along with surprising interconnections between their ideas. (3) Natural Time and Forgiveness: Améry’s critique of the temporal structure of forgiveness and the morally questionable prioritization of the future over the past. (4) Moral Time and the Irreversible: the distorted temporal structure of resentments, and Améry’s thought-provoking exploration of the phantasy of time’s reversibility. (5) The Future: Améry’s direct address to the young Germans and his unexpected suggestion on how they should treat their past and history, emphasizing responsibility rather than blame, as the key their past provides for the possibility of their future.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-24T03:26:50Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231215674
       
  • From totalitarianism to populism: Claude Lefort’s overlooked legacy

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      Authors: William Selinger
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article recovers Claude Lefort’s engagement with the issue of populism, which was inspired by the emergence of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a major figure in French politics during the late 1980s. I show how Lefort developed both an analysis of populism as a pathology of modern politics and a new vision of representative democracy as the alternative to populism. In doing so, Lefort drew upon his more familiar theory of democracy and totalitarianism, his study of the history of French political thought, and his partnership with Pierre Ronsanvallon, who was also developing an analysis of populism in response to Le Pen. Lefort’s approach to populism has outlived the context in which he first expressed it. Over the last decade, a number of prominent political theorists have drawn on Lefortian themes to formulate their own accounts of populism and democracy. In many cases, their arguments are quite similar to those that Lefort was expressing in the late 1980s and 1990s. A particular version of Lefortianism, which was foreshadowed in the writings of Lefort himself, has become one of the defining democratic theories of our political moment.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-23T02:23:19Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231215725
       
  • Our reply to critics by Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen

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      Authors: Andrew Arato, Jean L. Cohen
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.

      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-22T12:26:49Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231215690
       
  • MacIntyre and Hegel on the possibility of resolving philosophical
           disagreements

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      Authors: Tony Burns
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article examines the views of Hegel and Alasdair MacIntyre regarding philosophical disagreements, whether or not they can be resolved and if so how. For both thinkers such a disagreement is thought of as taking place between the advocates of two theoretical positions which are opposed to one another. Each party subscribes to a way of thinking about the issue under discussion which appears to be logically incompatible with the views of the other. We seem therefore to have to make an either-or choice between them. In the case of all philosophical disagreements, therefore, the same questions arise. Is the contradiction in question real, or merely apparent' Can it be resolved' If so, what exactly is involved in such a resolution' Is some form of theoretical compromise, between these two extremes possible' Is there a third-way, a both-and approach, which in some way combines the strengths of each and the weaknesses of neither, or which seeks in some way to balance their respective strengths and weaknesses of each against those of the other' The article suggests that MacIntyre differentiates between two types of philosophical disagreement. In the case of the first, the ideas associated with the two opposed positions are incommensurable. We must, therefore make an either-or choice between them. In the case of disagreements of the second type, the ideas in question are not incommensurable. In these cases, therefore, it is possible for them to be combined or synthesised. The article argues that MacIntyre’s approach to this second type of philosophical disagreement has an obvious affinity with what is often thought to be that of Hegel. In the words of Richard J. Bernstein, it is ‘quasi-Hegelian’. It is therefore fruitful to compare and contrast the views of these two thinkers on this issue.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-21T12:13:36Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231215713
       
  • Political Self-Cultivation for Humane Government: Yi I’s Defense of the
           Way of the Hegemon in Neo-Confucian Korea

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      Authors: Sungmoon Kim
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      As ardent followers of Mencius and Zhu Xi, virtually all Korean Neo-Confucians during the Chosŏn dynasty rejected the Way of the Hegemon by understanding it as directly opposed to the Kingly Way, a humane government allegedly conducted by ancient sage-kings. However, Yi I 珥 (1536–1584), a prominent Neo-Confucian scholar-official in sixteenth-century Korea, endorsed the Way of the Hegemon as compatible with the Kingly Way by reconceptualizing it, otherwise predicated on strong consequentialist ethics, in a way consistent with Confucianism’s deepest concern with the well-being of the people. In Confucianizing the Way of the Hegemon through the creative re-reading of the Book of Rites from a Xunzian standpoint, Yi I proposed a new method of moral self-cultivation specifically tailored for a Confucian ruler—called political self-cultivation in this paper—that combined the traditional Neo-Confucian recovery model of self-cultivation with a strong sense of political responsibility.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-20T08:08:47Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231211031
       
  • Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and the Haiti revolt (1791–1804):
           Transatlantic print chronicles of race in an age of colonial market
           exchange

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      Authors: Jonathan Bowman
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This work contributes to recent transdisciplinary efforts to view the Haitian slave revolt (1791–1804) as the historical inspiration for Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Reconstructions offered by contemporary postcolonial scholars argue that the Haitian revolt was chronicled in Minerva as Hegel raced to finish his Phenomenology. Benhabib recently recognized the Hegel-Haiti thesis as entailing the sort of inclusive dialogical learning process necessary to validate subaltern experiences. The thesis has also drawn its share of sceptical scrutiny as Badiou claims that it risks forcing an unnecessary moral dissymmetry, neglects objectionable features of enslavement and imposes a mismatch between apolitical subject and revolutionary. In reply, we appeal to the pioneering work of Tavares to show that the asymmetrical construction of classification schemes for persons of mixed-racial statuses accords with decades of documented literary exchanges between Hegel and Gregoire. We then turn to the work of James on the role of mixed-race merchants in the testimonial accounts of late 18th century French historians to show that European literate publics were well aware of the extremely coercive forms of commodified labour found in Saint-Dominque. We then invoke the archival work of Du Bois on French, British and American parliamentary proceedings that show the provisional colonial identities ascribed to Caribbean subjects did not hinder their self-conscious exercise of political agency. Viewing Hegel in terms of the historiographic records of the racial ontologies of early modern transatlantic literary exchanges helps explain how he adapted these tropes concerning mixed-race subjects in a manner that better explains many of the anomalous features of the dialectic. However, conferring the Haitian revolution its proper world-historical warrant as inspiration for his infamous master-slave dialectic need not lead us to overlook Hegel’s complicity with many of the epistemic and ontological flaws of colonial tropes held in early modern transatlantic print.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-20T06:00:05Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231211042
       
  • The public sphere and democracy in transformation: Continuing the debate
           – An introduction

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      Authors: Hauke Brunkhorst, Martin Seeliger, Sebastian Sevignani
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      All the aspects and dimensions that can be rightfully identified as playing essential parts within the current tragedy of democracy do share a common reference point: the public sphere. In the absence of a public sphere, no political change can take place democratically. This introduction to the special issue, which continues the debate about the public sphere from a broadly understood critical theory perspective, tries to substantiate the two initial claims and briefly presents the line of argument inherent to this special issue and its contributions. The collected contributions intervene or elaborate on the following conceptional or practical problems within the nexus of democracy and the public sphere, such as the critical relations between cultural industry and post-truth democracy; the contested relationship between the public sphere and labour; epistemological challenges predating normative questions; the relevance and transformation of concrete constellations between speakers and listeners, fragmentation and polarization within the public sphere; communicative pathologies; the digitalization of communication; altered and threatened media system services to functioning democracies; displacement and commodification of communication; the need for new forms of techno-politics; problems and challenges of Open Access; and the potential transnationalization of the public sphere.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-20T02:34:59Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231214451
       
  • The proletarian public sphere revisited: Conceptual propositions on the
           structural transformation of publics in labour policy

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      Authors: Heiner Heiland, Martin Seeliger, Sebastian Sevignani
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      In this contribution, we argue that critical theories of the public sphere (in Habermas, but also in Negt and Kluge as well as Fraser) leave out the socially central field of labour and labour-political disputes, and that a reactualization and refocusing becomes necessary: We define the dynamics of globalization, commodification and digitalization as sequences of a renewed structural transformation of both social self-understanding and gainful employment. With the help of a multi-level model of labour-political publics and counter-publics, class mobilizations can be examined with a public-theoretical lens and important moments of labour-political disputes can also be reflected on their communicative conditions. This is exemplified by two vignettes.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-18T09:39:20Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231206463
       
  • Cultural industry in the age of post-truth democracy

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      Authors: Hauke Brunkhorst
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The truth potential of art is realized not only by great art (of educated elites) but also by the cultural industry that has become the art of the masses. Great art and cultural industry do not only contradict one another but often interpenetrate and overlap subversively. Especially in critical periods of crisis (and revolution) great art and cultural industry go together with political action. However, in more counterrevolutionary periods as nowadays post-truth democracy, Adorno's gloomiest interpretation of the cultural industry becomes topical again.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-18T09:25:12Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231215676
       
  • ‘Be your own boss’' Normative concerns of algorithmic management in
           the gig economy: reclaiming agency at work through algorithmic
           counter-tactics

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      Authors: Denise Celentano
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The article explores the normative concerns raised for gig workers by algorithmic management (AM), by embracing an ethnographically sensitive approach to philosophical inquiry approach to philosophical inquiry. Inspired by Michel de Certeau’s concept of ‘tactics’, the article suggests interpreting workers’ attempts to ‘trick the algorithm’ and escape some of AM’s constraints as ways to reclaim agency, in the absence of suitable organizational conditions for its affirmative exercise. The kind of agency specifically deployed by workers in cooperative settings is referred to as ‘contributive agency’, broadly defined as workers’ control over their contribution in multiple dimensions – epistemic, relational, participatory and protective. Contributive agentic capacities are not mere properties of agents, but organizationally mediated capacities that can be more or less enabled or constrained depending on the contributive context. It is argued that below a certain threshold, AM’s agency-constraining features are objectionable and desirable agency-enabling organizational conditions are identified in the four dimensions.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-17T08:31:00Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231215680
       
  • Book Review: A review of Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The
           Case of Puerto Rico

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      Authors: Sabrina Bungash
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.

      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-15T09:51:20Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231215720
       
  • Fascist ideas, practices and networks of ‘Empire’: Rethinking Interwar
           Italy as post-Habsburg history (1918–1938)

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      Authors: Marco Bresciani
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This chapter relates post-1918 Italy to the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the ascent of the successor states, and analyses, from the Trieste’s vantage point, fascist projects, practices and networks of ‘empire’ in the Adriatic Sea, in Mitteleuropa and in the Balkans between 1918 and 1938. It focuses on three connected aspects. Firstly, the northern Adriatic was the first setting of the ascent of squadrismo, a model of violent action against ‘enemies within’ then replicated elsewhere. Secondly, Italian nationalism and imperialism aimed to reconfigure the post-Habsburg economic space and to reconnect the Adriatic with Central and Balkan Europe. Thirdly, Italian nationalist (then Fascist) élites from Trieste played a critical role, by boosting processes of empire-building and defending Austria vis-à-vis the prospects of Anschluss. In sum, the Habsburg legacies kept on shaping the dynamics of Italianization and fascistization in northern Adriatic and on feeding the search for Italy’s informal empire in Central and Southeastern Europe.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-14T11:22:52Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231215704
       
  • Where does philosophy begin when rationality is denied' Tsenay
           Serequeberhan’s concept of a lived existence as a means of decolonizing
           philosophy

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      Authors: Justin Sands
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Tsenay Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics has been crucial to the development of African philosophy. Initially employed as a pathway through the ethno- and professional philosophical debates, scholars have engaged how Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics grapples with one’s own place within a socio-historical world in service of liberation/self-determination. However, this scholarship mainly has focused on his adaptation of Gadamer’s ‘effective-historical consciousness’ for his own concept of heritage. This consequently leaves his concept of a ‘lived existence’ – which is equally crucial – under-examined. This paper probes what a ‘lived existence’ entails and its essentiality when explicating how one even begins to authentically think, which is the groundwork to Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics. This deepens why his concept of heritage matters as a starting point for self-determination. Addressing this lacuna, this article asks, where does philosophy begin and where should it go, particularly when rationality has been historically denied' Serequeberhan’s point of departure to answer this question proposes Heidegger’s concept of thinking itself to arrive at a notion of existence; contrariwise to most African scholars who employ a Sartrean existentialism via Frantz Fanon. As such, this paper gives an in-depth exploration of Serequeberhan’s initial reading of Heidegger, and then unfolds how he appropriates Heidegger to craft his notion of ‘lived existence’. The upshot this is twofold: First, a broader understanding of Serequeberhan’s project, its non-existentialist view of existence; Second, it describes how he specifically tailors his ‘lived existence’ to undergird his hermeneutical approach to heritage as a prescriptive, activist project which dynamically addresses the postcolonial situation.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-13T09:31:29Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203552
       
  • Bringing gender and religion in: Right-wing networks and “Populism
           and Civil Society”

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      Authors: Ina Kerner
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      In this contribution, Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen’s Populism and Civil Society is confronted with current gender studies research on populism. This research mainly focuses on right-wing populism and highlights strong links between right-wing populists and the religious right, which are to a large degree organized by “anti-gender,” a stance both against social constructivist notions of gender and against basic gender rights, especially in the fields of reproduction and of LGBTIQ concerns. Against the backdrop of this literature, I argue that in Populism and Civil Society, right-wing populist anti-gender politics are not addressed in a way that takes account of their full complexity; and that these politics furthermore suggest to treat right-wing populism and left-wing populism as phenomena that do not only differ in content, but also in form.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-10T06:16:57Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231211025
       
  • Rights and the human condition of non-sovereignty: Rethinking Arendt’s
           critique of human rights with Rancière and Balibar

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      Authors: Omri Shlomov Milson
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      If the instance of human rights cannot ensure the protection of the rightless, as Arendt famously claimed, how can the rightless struggle for freedom and equality' In this essay, I attempt to answer this question by reconsidering Arendt’s influential critique of human rights in light of the two polar responses it evoked from contemporary French philosophers Jacques Rancière and Étienne Balibar. Rancière, who objects to Arendt’s delimiting of the political, finds her argument excluding and dangerous. Balibar, on the other hand, believes that it conveys an immense potential for politics to come, as it points to the dialectical political truth of equaliberty. In the following, I show the problematics of Rancière’s ingenious formulation of rights, and the answer Balibar’s original interpretation of Arendt’s thought might suggest in response. I contend that working through Rancière’s critique of Arendt’s argument and Balibar’s affirmation of it not only highlights the merits of her critical account but also points to the fundamental relation between Arendt’s work on rights and her later discussions of the human condition of non-sovereignty and the power of promises. I believe that such a reading can contribute to our interpretation of Arendt, and pave new routes of action for non-citizens (such as refugees, stateless persons and subjects of military occupation), who cannot employ the authorities’ strength for their protection.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-08T10:48:25Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231211037
       
  • The critical dimension of Brandom’s normative pragmatism

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      Authors: Santiago Rey
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      For all of Brandom’s self-professed allegiance to Hegel, there is something perplexing about his fixation on semantic and epistemological issues at the expense of the type of social and political considerations that are at the heart of Hegel’s system. However, and although Brandom himself concedes that his work is circumscribed to a number of highly specialized and technical issues in the philosophy of mind and language, the truth is that his views often radiate to other philosophical fields, if not always explicitly. My claim in this article is that at the heart of Brandom’s semantic theory, there are elements of a critical project, one that offers a normative standpoint to judge and improve our current practices. Moreover, these progressive features of Brandom’s normative pragmatics should be seen in the light of his adoption of a series of hermeneutic themes, ultimately culminating in his recollective conception of rationality and his edifying view of semantics.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-07T07:08:35Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231211036
       
  • Social norms and social practices

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      Authors: John Lawless
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Theories of social norms frequently define social norms in terms of individuals’ beliefs and preferences, and so afford individual beliefs and preferences conceptual priority over social norms. I argue that this treatment of social norms is unsustainable. Taking Bicchieri’s theory as an exemplar of this approach, I argue, first, that Bicchieri’s framework bears important structural similarities with the command theory of law; and second, that Hart’s arguments against the command theory of law, suitably recast, reveal the fundamental problems with Bicchieri’s framework. I then draw on Hart’s critique to develop and defend an alternative approach, arguing that we should conceive of social norms as the norms internal to a “socially sanctioned representational practice.” This approach makes social norms conceptually independent of individuals’ beliefs and preferences by locating them within social practices that transcend their individual participants, structuring the social landscape even before individuals form their own beliefs and preferences.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-04T06:25:15Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231211033
       
  • Realist legitimacy: What kind of internalism'

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      Authors: Ben Cross
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Most realist theories of legitimacy are internalist theories, meaning that they regard legitimacy as a function of how subjects view their own rulers. However, some realists seek to qualify their internalism by holding that legitimacy is not simply a matter of whether subjects accept their rulers’ exercise of power. According to one such view, legitimacy requires that rulers’ power be ‘acceptable’ to subjects, in the sense that it can be justified on the basis of values that they accept. Call this acceptability internalism. In this article, I argue that realists should reject acceptability internalism. I first argue that acceptability internalism has the disadvantage of separating the concept of legitimacy from the interests of rulers. I then consider two arguments in favour of acceptability internalism, and argue that both should be rejected.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-04T01:10:35Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231211030
       
  • Moses and Aron: Reconsidering holistic politics

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      Authors: Kolja Möller
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Drawing on Arnold Schönberg’s seminal opera “Moses and Aron”, the comment focuses on the role of holistic politics in Andrew Arato’s and Jean L. Cohen’s “Populism and Civil Society”. It argues that their anti-populist stance is too quick in dismissing a politics which is driven by representing and re-constituting the whole of the social order. Against this backdrop, a rejuvenation of the political left may not consist in a rejection of holism as such but in a popular politics which relies on functional equivalences.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-11-03T11:37:59Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231211038
       
  • Two sorts of philosophical therapy: Ordinary language philosophy, social
           criticism and the Frankfurt school

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      Authors: Tom Whyman
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      In a recent article, Fabian Freyenhagen argues that we should understand first-generation Frankfurt School critical theory (in particular, the work of Adorno and Horkheimer) as being defined by a kind of ‘linguistic turn’ analogous to one present in the later Wittgenstein. Here, I elaborate on this hypothesis – initially by calling it into question, by detailing Herbert Marcuse’s extensive criticisms of Wittgenstein (and other analytic philosophers of language) in One-Dimensional Man. While Marcuse is harshly critical of analytic ordinary language philosophy, he is much more sympathetic to a different sort of ordinary language philosophy, which he unpacks with reference to Karl Kraus. I show how, by getting Marcuse’s criticisms of Wittgenstein and other analytic philosophers, and lauding of Kraus, into view, we can better understand the first generation of the Frankfurt School as having practised a sort of ‘non-quietistic’ philosophical therapy (that may or may not have been the sort of thing that Wittgenstein himself had in mind).
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-10-23T10:19:40Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203525
       
  • The structural transformation of the scientific public sphere:
           Constitution and consequences of the path towards open access

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      Authors: Leonhard Dobusch, Maximilian Heimstädt
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      We are currently witnessing a fundamental structural transformation of the scientific public sphere, characterized by processes of specialization, metrification, internationalization, platformization and visibilization. In contrast to explanations of this structural transformation that invoke a technological determinism, we demonstrate its historical contingency by drawing on analytic concepts from organization theory and the case of the Open Access transformation in Germany. The digitization of academic journals has not broadened access to scientific output but narrowed it down even further in the course of the ‘serials crisis’. For a long time, research institutions were not able to convince large academic publishers to adopt less restrictive forms of access to academic journals. It was only through the emergence of new and in part illegal actors (shadow libraries and preprint servers) that the existing path could be broken, and an Open Access path constituted. Following this analysis, we discuss consequences of the Open Access transformation for the public spheres of science and democracy. We conclude that Open Access publishing can only help to transform both communicative spaces towards the normative ideal of a public sphere when complemented by systematic support for non-profit publication infrastructures.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-10-12T09:02:14Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203558
       
  • Balancing the digital universe: Power and patterns in the new public
           sphere

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      Authors: Claudia Ritzi
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      From the viewpoint of Political Theory, digital technology presents both risks and opportunities for the democratic public sphere. Public discourse is now more complex and fragmented than ever before. Against this background, this paper uses the metaphor of a “communicative universe” to analyze the latest structural change of the public sphere. It emphasizes the significance of achieving a balance between different actors and powers in contemporary political discourse. Patterns in media communication can not only be identified but also influenced and constructed in ways that support the democratic functionality of political discourses.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-10-09T04:05:33Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203540
       
  • Populism and critical theory: On Arato and Cohen

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      Authors: Patrick O’Mahony
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The book contains an extraordinary condensation of important themes regarding populism. It brings social and political science together with normative philosophy, something badly needed today in critical theory to advance its theoretical-empirical approach. But it is precisely the kind of interpretation of critical theory presented in the book that is the focus of these brief comments. In particular, I mainly ask about the relation to second-generation critical theory. In this context, the comments particularly address kinds and levels of cultural structure that make possible the form of normative reconstruction offered by critical theory, and examines how these appear – or do not appear – in the book, together with outlining the implications for the approach. Specifically, I will address three main dimensions arising in the book. These are (a) Immanent Critique; (b) The counterfactual status of ideals; (c) The methodology of ideal type analysis. The general conclusion is show in what ways the line of inquiry present in the book can be further elaborated within critical theory.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-10-07T06:55:35Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203554
       
  • Gnosticism, political theory and apocalypse: Jacob Taubes and Günther
           Anders, Tracy Strong and Carl Schmitt

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      Authors: Babette Babich
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Beginning with Jacob Taubes and Günther Anders on eschatology, apocalypse and political theology, including Saint Paul and Frankfurt School critical theory along with bombs and power plants (energy/climate), this essay parallels a re-reading of Tracy B. Strong’s political reading of Nietzsche on Jesus (and love) with Taubes, Anders and Carl Schmitt on politics (and technology). Highlighted throughout is the politically charged (and inherently esoteric) context of Gnosticism for philosophy and theory for Taubes but also for Anders.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-10-07T05:41:26Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203551
       
  • Public sphere and global governance

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      Authors: Michael Zürn
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This paper is about the effects of the absence and the possibility of the emergence of a normatively meaningful political public sphere. The effects of the lack of a global public sphere are far-reaching. Namely, the current crisis of global governance and the global political system can be traced back to the absence of a normatively meaningful public sphere that can mediate between global society and the authoritative institutions of global governance. At the same time, I argue that the absence of the public sphere is not primarily due to the population’s attitudes trapped in national horizons but must be primarily attributed to the deficient institutional structure of the global political system.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-10-04T04:03:31Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203547
       
  • Imagined publics – On the structural transformation of higher education
           and science. A post-Habermas perspective

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      Authors: Georg Krücken
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Referring to Habermas’ groundbreaking book ‘The structural transformation of the public sphere’, the article discusses contemporary transformations of higher education and science. In order to do so, in a first step a post-Habermas perspective will be developed, which implies two changes to the theoretical foundations guiding Habermas’ analysis: On the one hand, we are in the midst of a social transformation that has led to a pluralization of the understandings of the public – that is, publics. The representation of society in society no longer finds a homogeneous form; it takes place only within the framework of different partial publics. These publics gain importance for different types of organizations (companies, public administrations, NGOs, etc.). This is where the second change to Habermas’ concept comes in because, on the other hand, from the perspective taken in this paper, such publics are constructs of the organizations themselves, that is, imagined publics. The fruitfulness of such a post-Habermas perspective on the public sphere will be illustrated by focusing on higher education and science. Universities as the organizational embodiment of higher education and science, not only represent a discursive space in the public sphere, but they are also increasingly transformed into strategically acting organizations that imagine and actively shape the publics that are relevant to them. Four examples will be used to present empirical observations that emerge from the theoretical perspective proposed here. These examples, however, require more in-depth investigations and only serve as illustrations for a new research agenda on ‘imagined publics’. In the end of this contribution, it is asked how far-reaching the discussed change processes towards universities as strategic organizations are, and what consequences result concerning a discursive and communicative understanding of universities.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-10-03T03:43:57Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203544
       
  • Hegemonic listening and doing memory on right-wing violence: Negotiating
           German political culture in public spheres

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      Authors: Tanja Thomas, Fabian Virchow
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The first section of this chapter illustrates that the pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992 has not been categorized sufficiently as a substantial milestone of right-wing violence in postwar Germany. This pogrom led to historically significant limitations in the right to asylum, ultimately resulting in a change to the German constitution. We propose to look at Rostock-Lichtenhagen as an example to explain that practices of remembering right-wing violence, a process that we describe with the term ‘Doing Memory on right-wing violence’, is a central part of creating a society’s basic story. This basic story, in turn, contributes to how a society understands itself. In this chapter’s second section, we argue first that analyzing practices of memory of right-wing violence, be they acknowledging, forgetting or suppressing those practices, actually make it possible to even expose the persistence of the basic story as a central element of political culture. Second, we want to uncover how potential and publicly effective interventions of and changes to the basic story might look like. Here, we build on Habermas’ model of democracy, utilize Susan Bickford’s work on listening as an important element in her political philosophy and refer to Benjamin Barber, who articulates that a participatory democracy requires political listening. As a result, our chapter’s third section demonstrates how listening can be conceptualized from a supra-individual perspective and how questions that are critical of existing hegemonic structures can prioritize a focus on hegemonic (non)listening. Lastly, we will sketch out strategies to intervene in hegemonic (non)listening. These strategies connect theoretically with concepts of ‘counter publics’ and ‘opinion forming publics’ and reference, among others, the work of Seyla Benhabib and Iris Marion Young, thus enabling the creation and execution of resistance practices of Doing Memory on right-wing violence.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-09-29T09:35:57Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203534
       
  • The theory of the public sphere as a cognitive theory of modern society

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      Authors: Hans-Jörg Trenz
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is a key contribution to political philosophy, media history, democratic theory and political economy – published almost 60 years ago – that left a deep imprint on the process of democratic consolidation of the Federal Republic of Germany. At the same time, the Habermasian model of the public sphere was used to test out the possibilities of democratisation beyond the nation-state. The theory of the public sphere was, however, mainly discussed as a contribution to normative political theory and, as such, the applicability of its normative standards remained contested. In this article, I focus instead on a second sociological reading of Habermas’ theory of the public sphere as an exploration of the cognitive foundations of modern society. The relevance of this approach can be shown in an exemplary way by discussing the functioning of publicity, which, by creating social visibility and facilitating public opinion formation, on the one hand, provides the knowledge base of a shared social world and, on the other hand, becomes the main driver of social change through critical self-reflection. The article goes on to take a look at recent public sphere transformations in the context of digitalisation and globalisation, and argues that public sphere principles are both undermined and gain new relevance when facing the challenges of new and digital media.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-09-29T08:24:09Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203905
       
  • Capitalism and contested publicity. A conversation with Nancy Fraser

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      Authors: Victor Kempf, Sebastian Sevignani
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Following a workshop on ‘Wildening the public sphere’ with Nancy Fraser at the Berlin Centre for Social Critique in June 2022, we had the chance to continue the discussion via Zoom in November 2022. We start by illuminating the relation between ‘subaltern counterpublics’ and the public-at-large, the rise of right-wing counterpublics and the impact of so-called ‘social media’ on the public sphere. That brings us to the question how publics are situated within capitalism, and how they are able to politicize issues that are traditionally considered private in capitalist societies. This is particularly interesting in regard to the pressing political task of forming an extended and non-essentialist working class identity that is able to mediate different ‘faces of labour’, as Fraser puts it in her recent Benjamin Lecture (2022a).
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-09-29T07:54:16Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203555
       
  • When Twitter blocked Trump: The paradox, ambivalence and dialectic of
           digitalized publics

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      Authors: Martin Seeliger, Markus Baum
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      In our text, we follow the traces of a (1) paradox, (2) an ambivalence and (3) a dialectic that constitute digitalized public spheres and discuss the resulting tensions in discourse-ethical and political-theoretical perspectives using the blocking of Donald J. Trump’s Twitter account as an example. Starting from this, we determine the conditions of constitution of the digital public sphere and locate the dynamics of its development in the dialectical tension between private and public: The fact that the two other relations of autonomy and heteronomy, intensification and polarization come to such a head is based on an insufficient socialization of all those means of production that produce the current digital public sphere. Using the example of Donald J. Trump’s recently suspended Twitter account and with a view to Habermas’s discourse ethics, we illustrate the extent to which Trump’s partly racist and conspiracy-theoretical post violates discourse ethics standards and is also highly problematic with regard to the political; however, banishment from a part of the digital public sphere is certainly not an act that should be incumbent on a private company. From this, we conclude that the normative potentials of digital public spheres can only be vol.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-09-29T06:02:37Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203921
       
  • The public sphere in the mode of systematically distorted communication

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      Authors: Victor Kempf
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The contemporary proliferation of “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” seems to render obsolete the notion of a public sphere in the singular. In my article, I would like to argue against this view: Following Jürgen Habermas, “the public sphere” can be understood as the concomitant horizon of communicative action, while the latter permeates society as a whole. On the basis of this socio-philosophical approach, the omnipresent tendencies toward fragmentation appear as reactive attempts to ward off this socially established and context-transcending context of discussion. Habermas himself, however, has never adopted this perspective. Instead, he interprets the various symptoms of the decline of the public sphere—including its fragmentation—as the result of a “colonization of the lifeworld” by economic, bureaucratic, and technological system logics. However, on the basis of the concept of “systematically distorted communication,” which was still crucial for Habermas’s early work, it is possible to reconstruct how the lifeworld context of communicative action, out of which the public sphere emerges, is not only corroded and cut through from the outside by system logics but also exhibits its own dialectic of the refusal of discourse and the overcoming of this refusal. The fragmentation of the public sphere that we are confronted with today can be theoretically interpreted and politically addressed as a precarious standstill of this dialectic.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-09-28T04:51:24Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203553
       
  • The platform economy’s infrastructural transformation of the public
           sphere: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica revisited

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      Authors: Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Felix Maschewski
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      From a socio-theoretical and media-theoretical perspective, this article analyses exemplary practices and structural characteristics of contemporary digital political campaigning to illustrate a transformation of the public sphere through the platform economy. The article first examines Cambridge Analytica and reconstructs its operational procedure, which, far from involving exceptionally new digital campaign practices, turns out to be quite standard. It then evaluates the role of Facebook as an enabling ‘affective infrastructure’, technologically orchestrating processes of political opinion-formation. Of special concern are various tactics of ‘feedback propaganda’ and algorithmic-based user engagement that reflect, at a more theoretical level, the merging of surveillance-capitalist commercialization with a cybernetic logic of communication. The article proposes that this techno-economic dynamic reflects a continuation of the structural transformation of the public sphere. What Jürgen Habermas had analysed in terms of an economic fabrication of the public sphere in the 1960s is now advancing in a more radical form, and on a more programmatic basis, through the algorithmic architecture of social media. As the authors argue, this process will eventually lead to a new form of ‘infrastructural power’.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-09-26T01:55:23Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203536
       
  • The platformization of the public sphere and its challenge to democracy

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      Authors: Renate Fischer, Otfried Jarren
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Democracy depends on a vivid public sphere, where ideas disseminate into the public and can be discussed – and challenged - by everyone. Journalism has contributed significantly to this social mediation by reducing complexity, providing information on salient topics and (planned) political solutions. The digital transformation of the public sphere leads to new forms of media provision, distribution, and use. Journalism has struggled to adapt to the new conditions. Journalistic news values, relevant to democracy, are being replaced by ones relevant to social media platforms’ attention seeking business model. We plead for a broad public debate about the ongoing platformization and about possible policies to ensure a media system that serves and strengthens democracy.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-09-26T01:46:02Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203535
       
  • The politics of drama: How Hegel’s aesthetics inform contemporary
           theories of radical democracy

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      Authors: Leonie Hunter
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The history of political philosophy is marked by a conception of politics as inherently tragic. As such, it has hardly ever been systematically contrasted with the other model of dramatic art, comedy. In this article, I explore the relation between Hegel's twofold notion of drama as an ordered genre of disorder – what he considers to be the highest form of self-reflective art – and the post-foundational concept of radical democracy. After outlining the interplay between order and disorder in post-foundationalist theories of political difference, I summarize the way in which the steps of Hegel's poetics consecutively build on each other and elaborate the role of the dramatic genres. By means of a genealogical reconstruction of the respective concepts of democracy and drama, I demonstrate the extent to which these two methodologies correspond to poetic and political order formation in a structural homology. This conceptualization concludes with the assertion of a constitutive dramatization of political modernity which does not, however, culminate in the concept of political tragedy but points towards a still-to-be-realized, comically ordered democracy.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-09-23T01:11:26Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231203519
       
  • Politics and aesthetics: Jacques Rancière and Louis-Gabriel Gauny

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      Authors: Stuart Blaney
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This paper argues that much of Jacques Rancière’s redefinition of emancipation owes a lot to one key character from his archival research on nineteenth-century worker-poets, Louis-Gabriel Gauny, the self-proclaimed plebeian philosopher. This is especially the case in regard to Rancière’s understanding of subjectivation forming a double of the self and a double of social reality as worlds within worlds. The paper puts forward that Gauny’s form of emancipation is valid today as an aesthetic revolution that reveals Rancière’s practices of equality to be an emancipatory way of life. In doing so, it will engage with Gauny’s connection with the contemporary precariat.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-08-17T07:34:33Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231197447
       
  • Book Review: The ruthless critique of everything existing: Nature and
           revolution in Marcuse’s philosophy of praxis

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      Authors: Carl Cassegård
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.

      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-07-25T07:30:20Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231191559
       
  • The ‘mystical’ foundation of democratic society, mythmaking and truth
           in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford 1962)

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      Authors: Camil Ungureanu
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      In this article, I combine political philosophy and film to examine the problematic of the ‘mystical’ foundation of authority and democracy as represented in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Ford’s filmic vision is interpretable as a parable of the passage from the state of nature to the modern republic and the deconstruction of American democratic progressivism. To analyse it, I proceed in two steps: first, I defend a middle-way critical Enlightenment perspective between the democratic-progressivist and the deconstructive approach to the question of foundations. Second, in dialogue with this critical Enlightenment perspective, I argue that Ford’s cinematic vision of the foundation remains ambivalent, given that its deconstruction of the mythology of American democratic progressivism is premised on the nostalgic mythologizing of the pre-democratic age. Moreover, I take issue with Robert Pippin’s interpretation of the movie as a cautionary tale against Enlightenment rationalism, and which poses at its center the key psychological role of myths in politics (2011). In contrast, I argue that Ford’s cinematic vision cautions against decoupling the socio-political and personal life from the vital connection to truth and acting upon truth. From this standpoint, a “politics of truth” is, against Pippin’s interpretation of Ford’s vision, compatible with taking into account the constitutive role of narratives in building political legitimacy and authority.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-07-22T03:57:04Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231187557
       
  • Demobilized democracy: Plebiscitarianism as political theology

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      Authors: Ian Zuckerman
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Drawing from Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and the work of Carl Schmitt, this article proposes a framework that critically diagnoses the plebiscitary, executive-centered conception of democratic representation as a species of political theology. I reconstruct Marx’s comments on plebiscitarianism in The 18th Brumaire through his earlier critique of political theology in ‘On the Jewish Question’, in order to contrast two modes of representation. The first, ‘theological’ representation, is a symbolic incarnation of the unity of the people in the person of the executive. The second, ‘agonistic’ representation, develops only in the legislative assembly as a forum for translating social antagonisms and divisions into political ones. Turning from Marx to the writings of Carl Schmitt on plebiscitarianism, and to more recent analyses of populism, I show how these logics of political-theological versus antagonistic representation can function in different political contexts than the one Marx diagnosed. In conclusion, I argue that plebiscitarian democracy is neither an innocuous feature of institutions, nor a decisionist democratic alternative to liberal parliamentarism. Rather, it is a contemporary expression of political theology, premised upon depoliticization and the exclusion of social antagonisms from the sphere of democratic representation.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-07-10T01:27:51Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231187547
       
  • Political existentiality in Carl Schmitt; reenchanting the political

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      Authors: Ben Van de Wall
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Carl Schmitt described the political in existential terms. The political consists in the distinction between friend and enemy, a distinction between collectivities that are existentially different. This led Richard Wolin to label Schmitt a “political existentialist” whose work relies on a specific cultural and philosophical climate of “vitalism.” Consequently, Schmitt’s thought is treated as ideology by Wolin. Instead of focusing on Schmitt’s underlying ideological affinity with a particular cultural climate, this paper attempts to conceptualize the notion of “political existentiality” as a crucial element in Schmitt’s understanding of the political and defend it as a notion that reveals something about the political condition itself. In order to understand the meaning of existentiality, we will conceptualize it against the background of Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis and conclude that through the notion of political existentiality Schmitt conceptualizes the political sphere as a locus of meaning and values and thus reenchants the political.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-07-03T06:53:35Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231184496
       
  • Fugitive freedom and radical care: Towards a standpoint theory of
           normativity

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      Authors: Daniel Loick
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Epistemic standpoint theories have elaborated the effects of social situatedness on epistemic competence: Dominant groups are regularly subject to epistemic blockages that limit the possibility of cognition and knowledge production. Oppressed groups, on the other hand, have access to perceptions and insights that dominant groups lack. This diagnosis can be generalized: Not only our epistemic, but also our normative relation to the world is socially situated, that is, our values, virtues, moral sentiments are shaped by relations of domination. In this article, my goal is to sketch the general outlines of a standpoint theory of normativity. I do so by engaging with two lines of tradition. First, I review conceptions of fugitive freedom in the Black Radical Tradition, before I recapitulate the feminist debate around the concept of care work. The counter-hegemonic norms theorized in these traditions can be brought into dialogue because they are both based on similar presuppositions, namely, political struggle provoked by social contradictions.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-29T06:55:36Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231185954
       
  • Whose idea of socialism' Conflicting conceptions of the family and
           women’s subordination

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      Authors: Lois McNay
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article compares Honneth’s attempt to revise socialist thinking on women’s subordination in the family with feminist work on the topic. Both identify economism as the reason why socialism has historically failed to come up with an adequate account of women’s oppression in the family. However, their attempts to overcome economism proceed in different directions. Feminists overcome economism by expanding and enriching ideas of the economic and value producing activity and applying these reworked categories to women’s reproductive labour. Honneth overcomes economism by suspending materialist explanation and focussing on emancipatory ethical dynamics implicit in the family. In comparison to feminist work, Honneth’s ethicised account of gender and family is as reductive as the economism it aims to surmount. First, his progressive historiography engenders a Whiggish narrative of the steady expansion of women’s social freedom in the family that downplays ambiguous and negative historical developments related to the changing nature of patriarchy. Second, his reified archetype of the family obscures the systemic causes of persistent gendered asymmetries within households. Finally, his Hegelian endorsement of institutionally expressed normativity leads in a reformist political direction and away from the radical, deep-democratic options that socialist feminists deem necessary to counteract women’s subordination.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-27T07:40:19Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231184488
       
  • Designing for epistemic justice: Epistemic apprenticeship as an
           institutional commitment

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      Authors: Millicent Churcher
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This paper develops the concept of epistemic apprenticeship as a response to failures among privileged social actors to perceive the knowledge bases of unjustly marginalised groups as sources of valuable insight. Inspired by Elizabeth Spelman’s reflections on apprenticeship and intersectional feminism, an epistemic apprenticeship represents an obverse form of apprenticeship; one in which socially privileged knowers become apprentices to those who do not enjoy equivalent power and privilege. This paper critiques and extends Spelman’s account of apprenticeship by focussing on how the institutional sedimentation of dominant social imaginaries works against the volitional and virtuous practice of apprenticeship, and by exploring what a commitment to epistemic apprenticeship demands at the level of institutional practice. As part of this discussion, I scrutinise the conditions under which institutionalised apprenticeships may fall short of their meliorative potential, and may obstruct rather than aid efforts to achieve greater epistemic justice.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-27T05:05:38Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231184493
       
  • Multiaccentual coalitions, dialogic grief and carnivalesque assemblies:
           Judith Butler and Mikhail Bakhtin meet in the world of ethics

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      Authors: John M. Roberts
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article for the first time seeks to bring together theoretical insights from Judith Butler and Mikhail Bakhtin in order to strengthen their respective understanding of ethics. First, the article suggests that Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic events and the ‘multiaccentuality’ and thematic nature of everyday utterances can help Butler address criticisms that suggest her work concentrates too heavily on invariant meanings in utterances. Second, Butler’s theory of coalitions can usefully politicise Bakhtin’s ideas on utterances, while her ethics of grief is a crucial way to think about how we forge bonds with the ‘Other’. Correspondingly, Bakhtin’s theory of the ethical ‘I’ adds an important moment of ‘empathy’ to Butler’s account of grief and the ‘Other’. Third, Butler’s theory of state hegemony and counter-hegemonic assemblies can provide an important addition to Bakhtin’s theory, while Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalesque democracy strengthens Butler’s insights on equality in assemblies and occupying a liveable life.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-26T09:20:57Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231184495
       
  • Foucault’s anarchaeology of Christianity: Understanding confession as a
           basic form of obedience

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      Authors: Chris Barker
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      In his later lectures, Foucault analyzes confession as a key exercise of the Christian pastoral power. The pastoral power’s creation of a lifelong obligation to speak the truth of oneself is a ‘prelude’ to modern practices of government, and a key facet of modernity. There has been some confusion regarding the scope of Foucault’s study. Is it medieval Christian confessional practices or Christian obedience itself that is his theme' In this article, I revisit all of the later lectures touching on confession and avowal in order to clarify Foucault’s ambivalence about Christian proto-governmentality. Foucault exposes two regimes of truth, belief and confession, and offer a practice-based, confession-centred history of the pre-modern self. Connecting his lectures to his method of anarchaeology clarifies how the force of truth (the ‘you have to’) is, for Foucault, a fundamental if ambivalent historical-cultural problem of government.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-23T07:56:01Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231184489
       
  • The carceral appropriation of communications technology through the
           imaginal

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      Authors: Harrison S Jackson
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article explores the effect that communications technology has on hegemonic power. The first section establishes a theoretical framework combining Foucault’s carceral archipelago theory with Chiara Bottici’s concept of the social imaginal describing the medium through which inter- and trans-subjective imagination occurs. The remainder employs this framework to examine how four technological innovations (print media, radio, television and Internet) impact the (re)production of discursive hegemonic ideology, integrating a variety of historical and contemporary theories on public discourse and ideological dominance. I conclude by arguing that each case demonstrates a dialectic pattern that explains the techno-social evolution of the carceral archipelago.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-23T06:56:26Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231184485
       
  • The disappointment of Rosa Luxemburg: Rethinking revolutionary commitment
           in the face of failure

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      Authors: Maša Mrovlje
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Despite the recent revival of revolutionary commitment in response to left melancholia, I suggest that the contemporary academic left has not adequately addressed the difficulty of responding to failure as an inevitable aspect of revolutionary politics. The dominant tendency has been to try to offset the risk of failure by managing revolutionary action in line with a pre-given model of revolutionary change – only to limit the range of possibilities for revolutionary engagement. To address this problem, I draw on Rosa Luxemburg, a foremost revolutionary thinker, whose experiences of disappointment led her to rethink the notion of revolutionary commitment as a practice of learning from failure. This rethinking of commitment suggests a different way of engaging with failure – one that expands our imagination of political possibilities beyond the confines of the dominant contemporary responses to left melancholia and enriches their visions of revolutionary change.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-19T02:57:10Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231184406
       
  • Work of art in the Age of Its AI Reproduction

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      Authors: Ignas Kalpokas
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      From a Benjaminian point of view, AI-generated art is distinct from both ‘traditional’ art and technologically enabled reproduction, for example, photography and film. Instead of mere mechanical representation of the world as it is presented to a device, AI-generated art involves identification and inventive representation of data patterns. This specific mode of data-based generation exceeds mere surface-level mimicry and enables deeper meaning, namely, an insight into the collective unconscious of the society. In this way, AI-generated art is never detached from society and the predominant social conditions while also reflecting the technology-induced transformations that today’s societies are undergoing. Thus, AI-generated art can be seen as capable of partly reversing the loss of auratic capacities that hand ensued with mechanical reproduction. Still, as a matter of continuity, AI-generated works enable the maximisation of exhibition value and capacity for audience enjoyment, rendering AI-generated art perfect for the age of increasing distraction.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-19T02:10:10Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231184490
       
  • The anatomo-politics of affect: An investigation of affective
           governmentality

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      Authors: Jonathan Harmat
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The present inquiry concerns ‘affective governmentality’ and is guided by the following question: How did affects become intelligible objects of knowledge and what enabled a scientific conception of affect to turn into a distinctive government of affect' In answering this question, the article first outlines how a lineage of thinkers used the speculative tools of geometry to conceptualize and deduce human affects. Through an analysis of Spinoza’s Political Treatise, the article then investigates how this geometric conception of affect enabled a productive and indirect government of affect. The article’s contribution to the study of affective governmentality is twofold: First, it advances the methodological claim that the proper register to study affects in governmentality is anatomo-political rather than biopolitical. Second, the analysis of the Political Treatise exemplifies, nuances and substantiates our understanding of how desires and affects were reconceptualized geometrically to conceive a government of bodies and souls.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-19T01:47:04Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231184494
       
  • Afropessimism and the Specter of Black Nihilism

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      Authors: Orlando Hawkins
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      In arguing that slavery is not a relic of the past, but a relational dynamic undergirded by an ontology of anti-Blackness that prevents Blacks from ever being considered human beings, the self-described Afropessimist, Frank Wilderson III, argues that Black people occupy the position of social death in the present. Due to this anti-Black condition, Wilderson concludes that no form of redress is possible to assuage, liberate, and redeem Black people from this anti-Black condition other than the “End of the World.” Drawing upon Fredrich Nietzsche’s understanding of the problem of nihilism and its existential consequences, I argue that while Afropessimism is useful for articulating the problem of anti-Blackness, it makes a nihilistic turn through Wilderson’s “End of the World” since there is no world where Blackness is experienced as anything other than social death. As a response to Wilderson, I conclude that the philosopher Jacqueline Scott’s life-affirming Nietzschean philosophy and her anti-racist activism in “Racial Nihilism as Racial Courage” is one adequate response to the nihilistic threat to Black America if Black people are condemned to a life of social death because of the enduring nature of anti-Black racism.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-17T08:57:11Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231184486
       
  • Incompatible sovereigns: Populism, democracy and the two peoples

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      Authors: Leonardo Fiorespino
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The article aims to investigate the problematic relationship between populism and democracy by comparing the conceptions of ‘the people’ and popular sovereignty which they presuppose. In the first two sections, the populist and the democratic ‘peoples’ are reconstructed, and the unbridgeable gap dividing them is highlighted. The discussion of the democratic people requires a concise analysis of the main contemporary democratic frameworks, including deliberative democracy, ‘neo-Roman’ republicanism, agonistic democracy. The article works out the implications of the incompatibility between the two ‘sovereign peoples’ identified, and concludes that such an incompatibility undercuts the kinship of populism and democracy. While, populism is often said to intertwine with democracy in some way, the article argues that it significantly departs from democratic theory and practice, and belongs to a distinct conceptual space. It cannot be made to overlap with ‘illiberal democracy’, a ‘democratic myth’, a crude electoral majoritarianism, nor does it amount to hiding undemocratic policies into properly democratic justifications. The boundary dividing populism and democracy, therefore, starts unfolding at the level of the conception of the people. While, democratic theory invariably assumes a people intended as simultaneously heterogeneous and united, populism conceives of the people as a moral whole, internally undifferentiated, whose homogeneity and intrinsic righteousness preclude the task of specifying what popular sovereignty ultimately means. Such specification, on the other hand, is inescapable for any democrat assuming the people as a composite unity. The last section addresses four possible objections to the argument, variously formulated by Ernesto Laclau and by scholars approaching populism from a post-Laclauian or discursive-performative perspective.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-06-12T03:51:43Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231182912
       
  • For a Negative Hermeneutics: Adorno, Gadamer and Critical Consciousness

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      Authors: Vangelis Giannakakis
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The present social-historical moment is marked by a sharp divide, a harrowing ‘communication breakdown’ between subject and object, between humanity and nature, between humanity and itself. This state of affairs pleads for the (re-)elaboration of a consciousness that resonates critically with the social, political and cultural realities of its time. This paper studies the lessons that can be drawn in this regard from the intersection between, on the one hand, Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ and his idea of an historically adequate consciousness, and, on the other, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ and his conception of the historically effected consciousness. The paper opens with a concise reconstruction of Adorno’s ‘philosophical interpretation’ as a critical response to instrumental rationality that borrows insights from radical historicism. The focus then shifts to Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ which is read as a similar type of protest against instrumental reason that privileges dialogical forms of enculturation. Finally, the paper closes with some suggestive yet inconclusive reflections on some important elements of convergence/divergence between the two thinkers, notably, their theorisations of immanent and transcended critique, the role they ascribe to tradition and language vis-à-vis experience, and the special place of ‘mimesis’ in it. Overall, the argument is made that a ‘negative hermeneutics’ may be what is needed to fashion new interpretations of the world, to foster alternative ways of thinking about and being in it, which, pace Marx, go hand in hand with its transformation – or, perhaps more aptly nowadays, the mere feat of sparing it.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-05-24T11:24:33Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231176460
       
  • The owl of Minerva and the dialectic of human freedom: A heterodox reading

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      Authors: Bernardo Ferro
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      In the preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel compares the philosopher’s work to the flight of the owl of Minerva: just as the latter begins only with the fall of dusk, so too is philosophy bound to ‘come on the scene’ too late to teach ‘what the world ought to be’. This well-known passage has been read in many quarters as a heavy, if not fatal blow to philosophy’s critical role. While some interpreters regard Hegel’s metaphor as an outright rejection of critical theory, others see it as a restriction of philosophy’s normative dimension. In this article, I argue against both of these interpretations. In my view, Hegel’s methodological indications are not incompatible with a critical outlook on received reality. What is more, they do not preclude the possibility of a radical critique of received reality. To show why, I argue that the Philosophy of Right is primarily aimed at a normative reconstruction of existing social and political arrangements, which entails both a retrospective and a prospective dimension. Moreover, I claim that this duality is one of the most original features of Hegel’s practical thought, and the key to its enduring political relevance.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-05-06T11:02:32Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231171418
       
  • A Marxist reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein: Making the case for social and
           political change

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      Authors: Marc James Deegan
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article offers a Marxist reading of Wittgenstein and juxtaposes his famous dictum that philosophy ‘leaves everything as it is’ with the idea of transformative action. I seek to align the later philosophy of Wittgenstein with Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach. I advance an unorthodox view interpreting Wittgenstein as an advocate for social and political reform. Wittgenstein’s philosophy encourages us to imagine alternatives and contemplate concrete possibilities for changing the world. The debate operates within the philosophy of education and draws inspiration from related inquiries in political thought and, more specifically, from Marxist connections with Wittgenstein.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-05-03T11:15:44Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231170907
       
  • Three theories of separation: Kelsen, Schmitt and Pashukanis and the
           historical development of the legal form

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      Authors: Matthew Bolton
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article examines the different approaches to the relation between law, state and economy in the works of Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt and Evgeny Pashukanis. It begins with Kelsen’s depiction of law as a dynamic and ‘self-regulating’ system of norms, founded on his rejection of ‘dualist’ separations of state and law, before turning to Schmitt and Pashukanis’s respective critiques. For all their differences, both agree Kelsen ignores the historical basis of the law – for Schmitt, the sovereign power of ‘the political’, for Pashukanis, the social relations of commodity exchange. The article responds to these criticisms in a most un-Kelsenian manner, drawing upon historical sociological literature on early modern state formation to cast doubt on both Schmitt and Pashukanis’s historical accounts. It argues that the forms of political power and commodity exchange upon which Schmitt and Pashukanis’s theories rely were historically specific possibilities opened up by the same process of generalisation and depersonalisation of power relations that allowed for an autonomous ‘public’ system of legal norms. Thus, rather than the fixed causal ground for the development of modern law, ‘the political’ and exchange between equals exist in a relation of ‘difference-in-unity’ with the law. The article concludes that Kelsen’s notion of the Grundnorm is best explained as an attempt to capture the new possibilities and responsibilities opened up a normative system whose ultimate justification now lies only within itself.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-04-28T09:56:51Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231170908
       
  • Does contemporary recognition theory rest on a mistake'

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      Authors: Paul Giladi
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      My aim in this paper is to argue, contra Axel Honneth, that ‘the summons’ (Aufforderung), the central pillar of Fichte’s transcendentalist account of recognition, is best made sense of not as an ‘invitation’, but rather as a second-personal demand, whose illocutionary content draws attention to the demandingness of responsibilities towards vulnerable agents. Because of this, the summons has good explanatory force in terms of disclosing the phenomenological dynamics of psychosocially and politically significant reactive attitudes. Under my reading, then, Fichte’s position, contra Honneth’s ‘negative’ treatment of it, is anything but an empty formalism that ‘fails to refer to subjects of flesh and blood’.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-04-21T11:26:10Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231170905
       
  • The humanism of critical theory: The Frankfurt School’s
           ‘realer humanismus’

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      Authors: Alice Nilsson
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Theodor Adorno has been quoted as responding to the Humanist Union stating ‘I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls itself “humanist”’. Adorno’s opposition to forms of humanism (both liberal and Marxist) which posit the existence of our humanity is reflected in readings of The Frankfurt Institute’s history such as that produced by Martin Jay. While this is the case, one of Adorno’s highly admired students, Alfred Schmidt, commemorated his teacher by proclaiming him a ‘philosopher of Real Humanism’. In categorising Adorno’s work as embodying a ‘Real Humanism’, Schmidt points towards an understanding and orientation towards the human (and our understanding of it) which cannot be accurately characterised through the philosophies of Humanism and Anti-Humanism as oppositional viewpoints. Rather, the Real Humanism of Adorno (as well as some of his fellow travellers) understands the human as the negative image of our currently existing society’s inhumanity, and urges us to take an ethical orientation towards the constitution of the human through the abolition of our inhumanity. If we, like Adorno, are to believe in the new categorical imperative that we must make sure ‘that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen[s] again’, then we must fundamentally orient ourselves towards the goal of ‘real humanism’ – a society free from the domination of ourselves and the other.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-04-20T10:45:57Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231170904
       
  • Against insular liberalism: Sayyid Qutb, illiberal Islam and the forceless
           force of the better argument

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      Authors: Marilie Coetsee
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Political liberals claim that liberal polities may legitimately dismiss the objections of ‘unreasonable’ citizens who resist political liberals’ favored principles of justice and political justification. A growing number of other political philosophers, including post-colonialist theorists, have objected to the resulting insularity of political liberalism. However, political liberals’ insularity also often presents them from being sensitive or responsive to these critics’ complaints. In this article, I develop a more efficacious internal critique of political liberalism: I show that political liberals’ own core principles of liberal legitimacy sometimes require liberal polities to engage with the objections of those who hold ‘unreasonable’, and even illiberal, views. First, I draw on the work of Sayyid Qutb, an illiberal Islamic political thinker, to argue that – contrary to what political liberals often imply – even ‘unreasonable’, illiberal citizens may be fair-minded: that is, they may be actively concerned to cooperate with others on fair and mutually endorsable terms. Second, I contend that a liberal state’s own core commitment to treating citizens as free and equal requires it to offer fair-minded illiberal citizens like Qutb deep reasons – that don’t presuppose agreement on liberal principles of justice and so can speak to them in the dialectical position they start from – for why they should accept the liberal laws with which the state coerces them to comply. By showing how political liberals’ own commitments oblige them to address even ‘unreasonable’ political perspectives, I open the door to their more robust engagement with their critics, including not only comparative political theorists but also the growing number of illiberal citizens who challenge democratic regimes.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-03-31T06:50:32Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537221109904
       
  • Book Review: A glitch in the matrix: Vivek Chibber and the cltural turn

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      Authors: Katie Ebner-Landy
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Chibber’s The Class Matrix and Confronting Capitalism aim to rescue class from the cultural turn. Rather than thinking that mass media mollified the working class, he suggests we re-investigate capitalism itself. We can then see how hard capitalism makes it to take risks for the collective. Chibber’s solution is to shift people from ‘individualistic to solidaristic’ ways of thinking through lived practices, rather than the arts. This review argues, however, that by excluding the culture industry from encouraging solidaristic ways of thinking, Chibber removes a crucial tool in the socialist armory: the way in which artistic representations can help us see ourselves and the world differently.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-03-18T07:31:27Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231160798
       
  • Supplication as violence: The provision of institutionalized care and the
           essence of giving

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      Authors: Prashan Ranasinghe
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article casts its attention on acts of supplication in institutional settings. The article focuses upon institutions geared towards the provision of care, that is, sites that are designed to provide services to those in need. The article claims that every act of supplication is an act of violence deployed upon the supplicant by his/her interlocutor and the institution more broadly. This is not violence of an overt type; it is tacit and subtle and takes root at the very essence of the supplicant, that is, his/her being. The article draws on Jacques Derrida’s provocative reading of the impossibility of the gift, an analysis that is indebted to Marcel Mauss’ exposition of the gift as obligatory and, thus, an existential nullity. Drawing upon both theorists, the article theorizes the violence of the gift and proceeds to read the violence in/of care/caring. The article explicates the grounding of this violence and how it is written into each request for care.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-02-23T09:54:05Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231157381
       
  • History, critique, experience: On the dialectical relationship between art
           and philosophy in Adorno’s aesthetic theory

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      Authors: Justin Neville Kaushall
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that, in modernity, art and philosophy are reciprocally dependent upon each other for legitimation and critical force. This claim has puzzled scholars and provoked controversy. I argue that Adorno’s thesis may be comprehended in the following manner: art requires philosophy because, without the latter, art would lack the power to critique social and historical reality (in particular, the ideological elements that often remain invisible as second nature), and to rationally interpret the material particularity expressed by such reality; and, conversely, philosophy requires art because the latter expresses historical experience to reason. Such material historical experience is necessary in order to prevent philosophy from falling into ideological convention; idle speculation; or abstract and reified instrumentality. Thus, the constellation of history, art, and philosophy is essential to Adorno’s aesthetics.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-02-23T01:12:27Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231158150
       
  • The symbolic work of political discourse. Populist reason and its
           foundational myth

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      Authors: Javier Toscano
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article locates Ernesto Laclau’s populist reason as a point of departure to understand the contemporary democratic logic and its so-called ‘excesses’. It argues that, even if resourceful, Laclau’s findings can be supplemented with a theory of the imaginary as developed by Cornelius Castoriadis, as well as with key remarks from a discussion of the theologico-political as this was characterized by Claude Lefort. The aim is to construct an understanding on the political as it is structured by language and the symbolic, presenting thus democracy and populism as two opposing sides of a foundational political myth.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-02-20T01:54:22Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231157375
       
  • Embedded agency: A critique of negative liberty and free markets

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      Authors: Senem Saner
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      The concept of negative liberty as non-interference is operative in the concept of a free market and stipulates that market relations remain outside the purview of social control. As a purported self-regulating system, however, the market functions as a system of necessity that facilitates and rules social life. I argue that Isaiah Berlin’s defense of negative liberty leads to a paradox as it entails subjection to the external necessity of a self-regulating market. The argument for the self-defeating nature of negative liberty relies on two philosophical insights that have their roots in G. W. F. Hegel’s theory of self-determination. First, negative liberty fails to account for the inner and outer conditions of freedom and thus reduces to mere whim or arbitrariness, subject to heteronomous forces but masquerading as license. Second, individual freedom is intersubjectively mediated in its deliberative process and framed by social and political institutions in its exercise; thus, free agency must be theorized as embedded agency. I challenge the association of freedom and the market and the automatic and unchallenged implication of deregulation and freedom. Deregulation, rather, leaves the community’s future development to the whims of economic players using a rhetoric of freedom as both lure and principle.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-02-17T12:42:15Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231157439
       
  • From agonistic to insurgent democracy

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      Authors: Lorenzo Buti
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article uncovers an internal tension within theories of agonistic democracy. On the one hand, as radical pluralists, agonistic democrats want to institute a ‘symmetrical’ political scene where different identities can struggle on an equally legitimate basis. On the other hand, they often normatively prioritize the struggles of oppressed groups against domination. In response, this article proposes to collapse any strict distinction between pluralism and social relations of domination. The result is a move from agonistic to insurgent democracy, where insurgent struggles against domination give the central impetus to any democracy. To do so, it turns to the writings of Étienne Balibar, who argues that most, if not all, symmetrical political conflict is built on asymmetrical forms of domination or oppression. This leads us to develop an account of democratic conflict that is incessantly asymmetrical. Finally, this article suggests an alternative way of rescuing the political principle of pluralism cherished by agonistic democrats. Balibar’s writings on the ‘ideology of the dominated’ show that every insurgent struggle expresses itself ideologically, which harbours the risk of obscuring other forms of domination. Therefore, democracy is not only kept alive by insurgent movements, it requires that the latter democratize themselves by maintaining a permanent openness to alternative calls against domination or oppression.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-02-15T11:17:52Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231157383
       
  • On militant democracy’s institutional conservatism

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      Authors: Patrick Nitzschner
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article critically reconstructs militant democracy’s ‘institutional conservatism’, a theoretical preference for institutions that restrain transformation. It offers two arguments, one historical and one normative. Firstly, it traces a historical development from a substantive to a procedural version of institutional conservatism from the traditional militant democratic thought of Schmitt, Loewenstein and Popper to the contemporary militant democratic theories of Kirshner and Rijpkema. Substantive institutional conservatisms theorize institutions that hinder transformation of the existing order; procedural conservatisms encourage transformation but contain and limit it within the boundaries of existing institutions. Secondly, the article uses resources internal to this historical reconstruction to make the normative case that even the procedural version of institutional conservatism, which characterizes contemporary theories of militant democracy, is problematic from a democratic perspective. The reason for this is that it unjustifiably restricts fundamental democratic change to existing institutions. In conclusion, the article calls for further engagement with modes of democratic defence that do not limit the possibility of radical democratic change but nevertheless enable the protection of democratic institutions against authoritarian regression.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-02-09T10:11:47Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537221150462
       
  • Understanding and evaluating populist strategy

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      Authors: David Jenkins
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Populism describes those strategies which actors endorsing populist ideas must use in order to be considered populist. Typical populist strategies include the hijacking of state institutions; the development of clientelistic relationships with constituencies labelled the people, or employing certain rhetorical moves in which enmity between the people and a corrupt elite looms large. In this paper, I argue against tendencies to define populism according to a specific set of tactics that are supposed to flow directly from populist ideas. Instead, populism should be understood in terms of a particular orientation, which grounds and justifies a range of strategies, all of which – nefarious or otherwise – should be considered populist. This orientation posits that enmity between ‘the people’ and an elite is a defining feature of political life, in part because it is responsible for serious failures in a country’s ostensibly democratic institutions. These failures create a degree of ambivalence with respect to these institutions’ claims to authority and obedience, and generate the perception that political actors thereby enjoy an expanded set of moral permissions. Finally, populists argue that elites prosecute revanchist projects aimed at resisting populist pathways to power and undermining them once in office. Populist strategies then are simply whatever range of tactics political actors use who accept the validity of that above orientation.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-02-07T06:03:09Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537231155171
       
  • Power and normativity: Rainer Forst on noumenal power

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      Authors: Tim Heyssse
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      According to Rainer Forst, a critical theory of power must break with the tendency of political theorists to conceive of power in opposition to normativity. Appropriately, Forst proposes a noumenal definition according to which power is normative: It works through recognition of reasons and is thereby open to critical assessment. In this discussion note, I first clarify the normativity of power in Forst’s noumenal theory by means of Donald Davidson’s theory of action and then explain how theory of action leads to a different understanding of force and violence from Forst’s noumenal theory. In doing this, I find reason to endorse a non-normative definition of power on the lines proposed by Robert Dahl and endorsed by most authors in analytical political theory. This definition nevertheless remains faithful to Forst’s methodological guideline that a theory of power must keep in view the relations between power and normativity.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-01-18T07:17:25Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537221150460
       
  • Brothers in arms: Adorno and Foucault on resistance

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      Authors: Giovanni Maria Mascaretti
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article offers a comparative exploration of the practices of resistance Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault champion against the structures of modern power their enquiries have the merit to illuminate and contest. After a preliminary examination of their views about the relationship between theory and praxis, I shall pursue two goals: first, I shall illustrate the limitations of Adorno’s negativist portrait of an ethics of resistance and contrast it with Foucault’s more promising notion of resistance as strategic counter-conduct, which in his late ethico-political writings becomes the heart of a distinctive politics of the governed. Second, despite their dissimilarities, I shall argue that their ideas can be brought together to elaborate a ‘compounded’ account of resistance, where Adorno’s politics of suffering figures as the necessary pre-condition for the creative practices of freedom Foucault seeks to encourage.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-01-13T12:49:33Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537221150497
       
  • Whose time is it' Rancière on taking time, unproductive doing and
           democratic emancipation

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      Authors: Michael Räber
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This essay argues that an alternative conception of time to that underlying the ideology of productivism and growth is not only possible, but desirable. The creation of this time requires what I refer to as the practice of refusal via taking time: the self-determined arrangement of the nexus of time, action and utility that begins with the a-synchronous insertion of unproductive time into the synchronous horizontal time of productivism. The essay is divided into three sections. The first offers the reader a discussion of Jacques Rancière’s notion of time as a social and political medium that partitions and distributes actions and utility. The subsequent section of the essay elaborates in aesthetic terms an account of unproductive time that is indifferent to the time of productivism. In the final section, I discuss examples that show how taking time to do ‘nothing’ can elicit an emancipatory politics that seeks to liberate us from the hegemony of productivism. I conclude that political theory should attend to time as a political medium and to the possibilities of its occupation, and that picturing the taking of time in terms of stopping the force of productivism’s normalized horizontal time by entering the unproductive time of reverie and aesthetic experience, provides a promising perspective from which to apprehend a time for thriftless refusals, deliberate dis-identifications, and the forging of cooperation among people(s) and with nature.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-01-13T12:43:13Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537221150457
       
  • Reconsidering the ethics of cosmopolitan memory: In the name of difference
           and memories to-come

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      Authors: Zlatan Filipovic
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Departing from what Levey and Sznaider (2002) in their seminal work ‘Memory Unbound’ refer to as ‘cosmopolitan memory’ that emerges as one of the fundamental forms ‘collective memories take in the age of globalization’, this article will consider the underlying ethical implications of global memory formation that have yet to be adequately theorized. Since global disseminations of local memory cultures and the implicit canonization of its traumas are intimately related to the concept of archive, I will first focus on what Derrida (1996) in Archive Fever calls ‘archival violence’ and will show its inherent relation to the formation of cosmopolitan memory. Another related concept that I will use and that will problematize the transformation of living, embodied memory into archival, cultural memory upon which the formation of cosmopolitan memory depends is the witness. Using Agamben’s writing (2002) in this context that in Remnants of Auschwitz focuses on the foundational (im)possibilities of bearing witness, I will show that this transformation that determines the very possibility of cosmopolitan memory is far from unproblematic and readily accessible as Levy and Sznaider seem to assume. What will emerge as the most distinctive concern of global memory formation is the ethical material of difference as that which both makes its imperatives historically and politically exigent and that which signifies the difficulties of its unified articulation. Solidarity with the suffering of the other that mobilizes the very formation of cosmopolitan memory is also what should solicit vigilance against the universalistic ritualizations of its prerogatives.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-01-13T11:06:04Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537221150519
       
  • Beyond emergency politics: Carl Schmitt’s substantive
           constitutionalism

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      Authors: Mariano Croce, Andrea Salvatore
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      This article problematizes the recent comeback of the exceptionalist jargon as it is conjured by both critics and sympathizers. While in the last decades governments across the globe had recourse to emergency measures to cope with far-reaching emergencies, from terrorism to the COVID-19 pandemic, the received view has it that political power takes advantage of states of emergency as they put themselves in the position to circumvent constitutional limitations. Carl Schmitt is claimed to be the major advocate of this conception of emergency politics in that he elaborated on the concept of the state of exception as the heart of the state political power. This article contends that the received view is doubly wrong. First, soon after his espousal of exceptionalism, Schmitt realized that emergency legislation is an ineffective and costly governmental device that should be transitory and is as unstable as the crisis it is meant to overcome. Second, the received view neglects how Schmitt came to his model of ultraconservative substantive constitutionalism as he maintained that the main task of politics is to protect the normative life of a limited set of state-sponsored institutions as well as the substantive contents they produce.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-01-12T10:00:03Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537221150459
       
  • ‘Taking politics seriously: A prudential justification of political
           realism’

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      Authors: Greta Favara
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Political realists have devoted much effort to clarifying the methodological specificity of realist theorising and defending its consistency as an approach to political reasoning. Yet the question of how to justify the realist approach has not received the same attention. In this article, I offer a prudential justification of political realism. To do so, I first characterise realism as anti-moralism. I then outline three possible arguments for the realist approach by availing myself of recent inquiries into the metatheoretical basis of realism: The metaethical, the ethical and the prudential arguments. I explain that the prudential argument offers the most solid basis for political realism because it relies on the least controversial premises. Still, I delve into the metaethical and ethical arguments for two reasons: The prudential argument takes advantage of the theses defended by the rival arguments and elaborating the other arguments shows the comparative strengths of the prudential argument.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-01-10T09:28:37Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537221145547
       
  • Understanding the democratic promise of the city

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      Authors: Verena Frick
      Abstract: Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print.
      Looking at current theoretical approaches to democracy and the city, this article deepens our understanding of the democratic relevance of cities. It suggests four ideals of the democratic city which are labelled the city as a school of democracy, the urban cosmopolis, the city as a commons and the sustainable city. Tracing commonalities between the ideals, while avoiding their pitfalls, the article develops an argument for understanding the democratic promise of the city by linking John Dewey’s concept of democratic action as experimental problem-solving to the spatiality of the city. Building on Dewey, the article introduces the concept of urban experimentalism and points out prospects for a spatialized understanding of democracy and pathways for democratizing urban space.
      Citation: Philosophy & Social Criticism
      PubDate: 2023-01-07T08:04:33Z
      DOI: 10.1177/01914537221150456
       
 
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