At the centre of Adorno’s critical theory of society lies the problem of Bann or Bannkreis: why do individuals systematically act in ways that reinforce conditions that are obviously incompatible with their freedom and pursuit of happiness? Despite criticism of Dewey’s experimentalism by several Frankfurt School critical theorists claiming that the American pragmatist fails to account for systematic blockages to critique, Dewey does in fact formulate his approach to social critique as a response to the problem that social life might (...) be made immune to transformative claims. In Human Nature and Conduct, thirty years prior to Adorno’s Bannkreis, he conceptualizes a ‘vicious circle’ in which attempts to transform social life seem to be caught and points to a way out. This article shows that Adorno and Dewey share in a project at the heart of critical theory, the project of a disclosing critique of society. In different and mutually completing ways, the Frankfurt School critical theorist and the American pragmatist point out the extent to which their contemporary societies are caught in antagonistic and painful vicious circles and thereby point to the objective possibility of another form of social life. The article is historical, but it is animated by the intent to brush a fruitful path for disclosing critique today. From Adorno, this critical practice gains the idea that theory of society can be a disclosing gesture, which presents an important corrective to Dewey’s failure to trace the eclipse of the public. From Dewey, it gets a reminder that these theories must find ways to continue into ordinary life experience through group action for their disclosure to come full circle. (shrink)

This research paper investigates habit and temporality in G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy, in response to recent Deleuzian criticisms that Hegel has misunderstood empiricism by simplifying the nature of sensations. The paper begins with an exegesis of Deleuze’s critique of Hegel’s view of empiricism namely that Hegel neglects the importance of non-conceptual difference for understanding the nature of sense-experience. It then shows that Deleuze’s own empiricism remains incomplete without positing habit as a principle of relations, and, in turn, that habit on Hegel’s (...) account mediates difference at the organic level. This means that habit shows how something prior to the establishment of consciousness is operative in experience, and, for the purpose of this paper, this aspect of habit helps to explain how it is possible that consciousness can experience time. More broadly, I contend that this pre-conscious operation of habit is key to understanding Hegel’s views on sense-experience and empiricism, which subverts the idea that Hegel has “reduced” sensations to their conceptual articulation. (shrink)

This paper examines the theory of sustainable development presented by Jeffrey Sachs in The Age of Sustainable Development. While Sustainable Development ostensibly seeks to harmonise the conflict between ecological sustainability and human development, the paper argues this is impossible because of the conceptual frame it employs. Rather than allowing for a re-conceptualisation of the human-nature relation, Sustainable Development is simply the latest and possibly last attempt to advance the core idea of western modernity — the notion of self-determination. Drawing upon (...) Hegel's account of historical development it is argued that Sustainable Development and the notion of planetary boundaries cannot break out of a dualism of nature and self-determining agents. (shrink)

In this paper I tackle the normative re-appropriation of the legacy of Charles Taylor's expressivist understanding of Hegel's theory of action. I argue that a normative understanding of Hegel's expressivist notion of agency by interpreters such as Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Michael Quante and Robert Brandom, has been obtained at the price of losing sight of the principle of embodiment and of its relevance for our and Hegel's understanding of social action. I aim at relocating Hegel's notion of expressive embodiment (...) at the core of his explanation of action. Rather than following Taylor's hermeneutical reconstruction of the principle of embodiment, I try to reconstruct it by putting at its core the notion of habit formation with the help of conceptual tools taken from contemporary embodied cognition approaches. I first discuss theAnthropologyand argue that habit, understood as a sensorimotor embodied life form, is not only an enabling condition for agency, but in fact an ontological constitutive condition for all its levels of manifestation. According to this reading, the Hegelian approach to embodiment offers a model that not only assigns to habit a positive constitutive role in the formation of human mindedness, but also overcomes the dualism between habitual motor routine and intentional activities. If we approach Hegel's understanding of agency from this vantage point, we can gain a perspective which allows us to appreciate a naturalist strand of Hegel's expressivism about action and to free it from certain basic anti-naturalistic assumptions of contemporary normative expressivist interpretations of Hegel on social action. (shrink)

Dewey’s social ontology could be characterized as a habit ontology, an ontology of habit qua second nature that offers us an account of intentionality, social statuses, institutions, and norms in terms of habituations. Such an account offers us a promising alternative to contemporary intentionalist and deontic approaches to social ontology such as Searle’s. Furthermore, it could be the basis of a social ontology better suited to explain both the maintenance and the transformation of social reality. In the first part I (...) will characterize Dewey’s model as a social ontology based on the notion of habit, and present it as an alternative to intentionalist approaches to social reality. In the second part I will argue that habit ontology offers us an account of social norms that is based on a peculiar understanding of the notion of ‘status’, and represents an alternative to deontic accounts. In the third part I will claim that Dewey’s notion of “public” offers us a dynamic understanding of social institutions and a ‘reactive’ notion of collective intentionality as an achievement rather than as a presupposition of social practices. In the final section I will summarize some advantages of the Deweyan over the Searlean social ontology concerning our understanding of acceptance, maintenance and transformation of statuses, and of the role played by the ‘background’. (shrink)