After years of neglect, alienation has again reached the agenda of critical thought. In my case, I recognize alienation as a challenge for education in contemporary societies. To obtain conceptual resources to overcome this challenge, I have revisited the comprehensive 20 th century discussion of alienation. Today, alienation is naturally discussed as an existential condition of human being, but still in the 1980s, there was a strong Marxist current that claimed alienation to be implied by capitalism, in particular by the (...) institution of private property and the social division of labor, and that alienation therefore should be criticized as part of the critique of capitalism and political economy and possibly overcome. Today, under the hegemony of neo-liberal capitalism, this critical and processual concept of alienation is more relevant than ever. Hence, in the present work I argue that the basic logic of Marx's idea of alienation still has critical potential. The argument forms a long engagement with mainly 20 th century literature, departing from the very idea of capitalism, considering the ideas of history, education and democracy, discussing how to distinguish and translate key terms, considering why alienation became an object of controversy among Marxists, offering an interpretation of Marx's critique relevant for contemporary society, thus considering alienation a consequence of working under conditions of private property, i.e. being a human being in a capitalist society, and finally presenting Marx's idea of communism as relevant to the contemporary educational agenda. (shrink)

A central project of Enlightenment thought is to ground claims to natural freedom and equality. This project is the foundation of Suchon’s view of freedom. But it is not the whole story. For, Suchon’s focus is not just natural freedom, but also the necessary and sufficient conditions for oppressed members of society, women, to avail themselves of this freedom. In this paper I, first, treat Suchon’s normative argument for women’s right to develop their rational minds. In Section 2, I consider (...) Suchon’s three necessary and sufficient conditions for freedom, and the manners in which women are blocked from meeting them. The normative argument together with the obstacles to women meeting the conditions for freedom raises the question of how to get women into a position where they can enjoy the freedom to which they are entitled. In Section 3, I outline Suchon’s answer: women must live a life without attachment. I argue this answer situates Suchon both chronologically and theoretically between the Béguines, a medieval women’s spiritual movement, and 20th century feminist separatism. I conclude that Suchon’s view of freedom is radical, both for its time and ours, and deserves greater attention from historians of philosophy and of feminist thought. (shrink)

The problem of the ‘mountain man’, the caricature of self-sufficiency and individualism, is not a new one for autonomy theorists. It seems plausible that there is genuine value in self-direction according to one’s deeply-held principles. If autonomy involves something like this, then anyone concerned with autonomy as a social rather than individualistic phenomenon must explain what the mountain man gets wrong when he denies that his autonomy admits of being placed under obligations to others. In particular, the mountain man challenges (...) autonomy-minded social anarchists: if his denial of legitimate non-voluntary obligations is correct, then it is not just the state we should reject, but any organising body with coercive powers. This may be consistent with individualist anarchism or right-libertarianism, but it sits ill with the social anarchist intuition that we can have genuine political obligations. My thesis addresses this problem in three stages. First, I argue for a functional analysis of authority and autonomy: the concepts are not pre-existing “immovable objects”, but rather are defined by the role that they are intended to play in our discourse. I suggest that we need a concept of political or institutional authority in order to resolve co-ordination problems and pursue collaborative social goods, and a concept of autonomy to explain when and why self-direction is valuable. Second, I defend a social-relational conception of autonomy. The autonomous agent is powerful and authoritative, where this power and authority is in large part constituted, rather than merely affected, by the social structures and relations that we stand in. We are powerful and authoritative, I argue, when we stand in relations of non-domination: we are not vulnerable to arbitrary interference in our lives, and this non-vulnerability is defended in virtue of recognition respect for us as agents. There are two important implications of this account: that autonomy comes with a built-in equality condition whereby everybody’s autonomy is threatened if anybody’s is, and that there is no principled distinction to be drawn between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ autonomy. In the last three chapters, I suggest an autonomy-justified conception of authority. I argue for autonomy as the crucial collaborative good which authoritative institutions help us to pursue, and suggest that such institutions may legitimately claim authority if they act or effect actions in ways which are likely to promote or defend autonomy-constituting relations, and act or effect actions in ways consistent with maximal equal autonomy. Finally, I return to the anarchist argument, showing that while my accounts of autonomy and authority give us a plausible picture of how autonomy is compatible with genuinely authoritative institutions, this picture still has no room for the state. (shrink)

This article is concerned with "all-or-nothing" approaches to female genital cosmetic surgeries, those that overemphasize either women's autonomy to defend total accessibility or the oppressive social context affecting women to defend the total banning of the procedures. By contrast, the author takes both phenomena into consideration. The author argues identifying patterns of false consciousness and weighing those against harm done to a patient provides a moral basis for a doctor to possibly deny their consent at face value. This also requires (...) a shift in understanding the doctor–patient relationship as a first step toward a feminist model for women's healthcare. (shrink)

There are a variety of discourses and practices that position Western feminists as people who have a moral and political obligation to concern themselves with the welfare, suffering, or empowerment of non-Western subjects, often women, and intervene to “do good” on their behalf. Conversely, there are virtually no discourses and practices that assign moral and political obligations to non-Western feminists to intervene in matters involving the welfare or suffering of Western subjects, including women. A central goal of my paper is (...) to make this asymmetry explicit and distinguish it from charges such as “essentialism” more commonly made against Western feminist representations of their Others. I explore the consequences of discourses and practices that construct Western subjects as entitled to and obligated to concern themselves with the world entire, while not extending this global scope of concern to non-Western subjects. I critically examine, among other things, the roles assigned Western-funded NGOs in enabling Western subjects to engage in practices of “doing good” and I explore alternative possibilities that are more explicitly “political.” Along the way, I examine certain blind spots in Western political theory that appear connected to the picture of Western subjects as obligated to “do good” in distant places. My analysis engages substantially with Alison Jaggar’s essay, “Saving Amina,” drawing attention to matters of agreement and possible disagreement. (shrink)

Despite the strength of arguments for veganism in the animal rights literature, alongside environmental and other anthropocentric concerns posed by industrialised animal agriculture, veganism remains only a minority standpoint. In this paper, I explore the moral motivational problem of veganism from the perspectives of moral psychology and political false consciousness. I argue that a novel interpretation of the post-Marxist notion of political false consciousness may help to make sense of the widespread refusal to shift towards veganism. Specifically, the notion of (...) false consciousness fills some explanatory gaps left by the moral psychological notion of akrasia, often understood to refer to a weakness of will. Central to my approach is the idea that animal exploitation is largely systemic and the assumption that moral motivation is inseparable from moral thinking. In this light, the primary obstacle to the adoption of veganism arises not so much from a failure to put genuine beliefs into action, but rather in a shared, distorted way of thinking about animals. Thus, common unreflective objections to veganism may be said to be manifestations of false consciousness. (shrink)