This article discusses three topics that have been the subject of debate in recent scholarship on Hegel's social and political philosophy: first, the relevance of Hegel's systematic metaphysics for interpreting Hegel's social and political writings; second, the relation between recognition, social institutions, and rational agency; and third, the connection between the constellation of institutions and norms that Hegel calls “ethical life” and Hegel's theory of freedom. This article provides a critical overview of the positions in these three debates. In the (...) case of the first debate, I clarify the conceptual terrain by distinguishing between several kinds of systematicity that are at issue. In the case of the second debate, I argue that the views of two of the major participants, Axel Honneth and Robert Pippin, are in fact compatible. In the case of the third debate, I seek to clarify the connection in Hegel between two different ideas of freedom in ethical life, each of which has been emphasized by different interpreters of Hegel: the idea of freedom as non-alienation and the idea of freedom as social freedom. I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which ethical life, for Hegel, enables the freedom of individuals. (shrink)

In this dissertation I explore the conceptual relationship between equality and resistance in political philosophy. Through examination of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and Jacques Rancière, I formulate a position called Fractured Social Holism. This is a problematic that attempts to articulate core issues at stake in the debates surrounding the purposes, meanings, and possibilities for politics. Through Fractured Social Holism I articulate a theory of equality that emphasizes the communities upon which societys institutions intend to (...) distribute equality, arguing that resistance on the part of a populationgroup opposition, formal or informal, to some element of the societal status quoconceptually grounds equality and its distribution by articulating its very possibilities. My central questionHow is equality constituted?focuses on the community itself in order to shift agency from institutions that distribute equality to those who demand it. It emphasizes the active role of the people in the constitution of a community of equals, as well as the fact that the very notion of the people is what is at stake in that constitution; popular resistance challenges the very meaning and content of any given people. I understand equality in the broadest possible sense, in terms of the opportunity of each and all within society to participate in dictating the terms of their public engagement with that society and with others within it. I argue for the possibility of resistance within egalitarian community in Rousseau, the limits of what that resistance in egalitarian society looks like in Marx, how egalitarian communities can organize themselves in Dewey, and how subjectivity relates to mechanisms of resistance and political action within society in Rancière. These historical interpretations and the conceptual framework they engender provide a novel means of thinking about issues of paramount importance in contemporary political philosophy, including pluralism, oppression and domination, and the purposes and meaning of politics, remaining true to a normative vision of equality while insisting on the necessity of the peoples resistance to the status quo in the name of a re-imagined vision of social harmony. (shrink)

The present article aims at investigating the political aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, focusing mainly on the Philosophical Investigations. This theme remains rather marginal within Wittgensteinian scholarship, facing the key challenge of the sparsity of explicit discussions of political issues in Wittgenstein’s writings. Based on the broader anthropological and synecdochic character of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the main objective of the article is to make explicit the implicit political import of some of the main themes of the Philosophical Investigations. This is (...) done by correlating them with certain political concepts and issues, such as reification, mystification, emancipation, self-institution and the common. In such a way, a new light is shed on Wittgenstein’s influence on and his relevance to contemporary political theory, while at the same time the first steps are taken for the enrichment of the discussion regarding personal and social autonomy and the critique of late capit... (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the problems of cultivating a critical attitude in pedagogy given problems with accounts grounded in critical social theory, rational liberalism and pragmatic esthetic theory. I offer instead an alternative account of criticism for education in open, pluralistic, liberal, democratic societies called 'pedagogy of difference' that is grounded in the diversity liberalism of Isaiah Berlin and the dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber. In our current condition in which there is no agreement as to the proper criteria (...) for assessing attitudes and actions, for a critical attitude to gain a foothold one must learn to evaluate proposed beliefs and behaviour-based standards within a particular tradition as well as those drawn from another viewpoint. To know oneself, one must engage others who are different. But to engage others in a meaningful way one must be immersed in a tradition to which one is heir or with which one chooses to affiliate. (shrink)

Although Hegel is very critical of representative democracy, his views on political participation are in many ways richer and more sophisticated than the ones favoured today by most Western societies. The present paper aims to shed light on this apparent paradox by dispelling some of the misunderstandings still associated with Hegel’s ethical and political thought. I argue, on the one hand, that Hegel’s emphasis on the notion of freedom does not amount to an endorsement of political liberalism, but to a (...) critique of its underlying principles. On the other hand, I show that the Hegelian theory of the modern state, albeit falling short of a fully democratic constitutional solution, is by no means opposed to social justice or political pluralism. Hegel views political freedom as the result of a global web of mutual recognition, embodied by social institutions destined to bridge the gap between private and communal interests. Despite the ambiguous and outdated elements of Hegel’s description, I believe his overall solution remains uniquely relevant, and an important source for the ongoing debate about the merits and limitations of contemporary democracies. (shrink)

To understand how we have become what we are requires, following Foucault, not a theory but an `analytics' which examines how technologies of power and knowledge have, since antiquity, intertwined and developed in concrete and historical frameworks. Distilling from Foucault's oeuvre as a whole a rough periodization of western political rationalities, this article shows how the processes whereby some people discipline or govern others are frequently closely connected to procedures of identity-constitution and knowledge-production. Platonic, Stoic and Christian pursuits of self-mastery (...) and self-knowledge, often via the intervention of an external master, were initially confined to an elite, but thereafter were amplified and generalized to encompass entire populations in conjunction with the rise of the modern state. Via techniques of confession and ascetic conduct, faith and empiricism, and selfreflection and everyday reality, western political rationalities, in the form of combined totalization and individualization technologies whereby some (struggle to) discipline others even as all (are exhorted to) discipline themselves, have come to dominate the globe. (shrink)

According to Axel Honneth, Adorno's very idea of social critique is self‐defeating. It tries to account for what is wrong, deformed, or pathological without providing any positive yardstick. Honneth's idea of critique is a diagnosis of chronic dysfunctions in the relations of recognition upon which the society in question is grounded. Under such conditions of misrecognition, institutions that embody what he calls social freedom regress to negative freedom. However, such a deficit‐based notion of critique does not square with Honneth's own (...) diagnosis of our present: namely, the transformation from welfare capitalism to neoliberalism. In fact, Honneth's diagnosis is very much in line with Adorno's idea of late capitalism as a society of “total integration.” Adorno's matching conception of critique, it is argued, avoids the problems Honneth runs into. At the basis of Adorno's critical idiom are two key points: an explanation of how social relations can be functional while contradictory and an account of social domination that is diffused throughout society while being differentially experienced by different classes. Adorno's answer to Honneth's concern, regarding the lack of a positive yardstick, is that it is domination that gives meaning to our idea of freedom, rather than the other way around. (shrink)

This book series deals with religion and its interface with the state and society in Southeast Asia. It examines the multidimensional facets of politics, public policies and social change in relation to contemporary forms of religions, religious communities, thinking, praxis and ethos. All articles in this Book Series were a direct result of a policy-relevant research collaboration conducted by investigators from the participating countries from 2013–2016. The issues under examination in this Series include: state management of diversity, multicultural policies, religious (...) social activism and state-society relations. All of the analyses in this Book Series are fixed within the context of a rapidly changing society in Southeast Asia. (shrink)

Besides their skepticism about universal reason and universal morality, the Frankfurt Schools of Critical Systems Theory and Critical Theory share basic assumptions: (1) the thinking in societal-systemic, institutional concepts, which transcend simple reciprocal relations by dint of their complexity; (2) the assumption that society is based on fundamental paradoxes, antagonisms, antinomies; (3) the strategy to conceptualize justice as a contingent and transcendental formula; (4) the form of immanent (and not morality-based, external) critique as an attitude of transcendence; (5) the aim (...) of societal (and not only political) emancipation in an ‘association of free individuals’ (Marx). The article focuses on those parallels and aims to conceptualize a critical turn-around of autopoietic systems theory. (shrink)

In this article, I address the various objections raised by Simone Chambers, Stephen White and Lea Ypi concerning my version of a critical theory of politics. I explain the basic assumptions that inform my account of a critique of relations of justification, its particular method and aims.

This paper draws attention to Foucault’s genealogy of critique. In a series of inquiries, Foucault traced the origins and trajectories of critical practices from the ancient tradition of parrhesia to the enlightenment and the (neo)liberal critique of the state. The paper will elucidate the insights of this history and argue that Foucault’s turn to the genealogy of critique also changed the valence of his theoretical assumptions. Foucault developed a more affirmative practice of genealogy that not only discredits truth claims by (...) tracing them back to their inglorious origins. Rather, he presents a politics of truth as a complex interaction of (governmental) power-knowledge and critique that questions the power effects of truth and rationality. This genealogy of critique contributes to current problematizations of critique by thinkers like Boltanski, Latour and Rancière in highlighting the role of epistemological and technical critique of social rationalization and political reason. (shrink)

The paper encircles the subjectivity of drug taking as one form of contemporary practice in which fundamental theoretical issues are dealt with. In particular, following Mariana Valverde's genealogy of alcohol regulation (Valverde, 1998), the question of the free will, and the paradox of the simultaneous being and non-being of the autonomous subject, are viewed as present in various approaches to drugs. The current neo-pragmatist wave substitutes low-key practical notions of habits for a dichotomy of free will or determinism. The concept (...) of objectification promises to overcome that dichotomy by externalizing it; in terms of this concept, we can distinguish the abstract-imagined 'fix' from a genuinely transforming realization, and suggest that ours is the age of the fix, of instrumental commodities that change us in ways we do not intend. But, it is claimed, an inescapable issue of the self-dissolution of the subject remains; perhaps in the definitive shape of a suicide, or in the minor shapes of fixes such as a tactics of feigned surrender, New Age Higher Powers, or imagined communities. Determined to realize the idea of a benevolent surrender of the subject, the paper ends in an attempt to contribute to the coming to an understanding of herself and with herself of a person who finds herself at the troublesome intersection of Narcotics Anonymous and a social work development network of Copenhagen City called Wild Learning. (shrink)

This paper is the first part of an enquiry taking an initial, provisional step toward the construction of a theoretical matrix called speculative jurisprudence. Toward that end, it recruits the thought of Louis Althusser, whose work has taken on new significance thanks in part to the availability of many formerly unpublished texts, the contemporary critical scrutiny of numerous commentators, and the independent emergence of several philosophical currents sharing some of his work’s key concerns. The paper offers a unique characterization of (...) Althusser’s aleatory materialism as at once a novel expression of Althusser’s ‘jurisprudential problematic’, a problematic that I argue shapes his thought as a whole, and as a means of posing the core problem of dialectical materialism. The engagement with Althusser that I propose thus intervenes in current debates about aleatory materialism, but this is subsidiary with respect to the elaboration of speculative jurisprudence as a distinct approach in philosophy and law. That mode of thought begins to acquire a degree of reality by taking Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism as a point of departure for the articulation of a non-humanist conception of legality, in a broad sense that conjoins the territories of both traditional philosophy and legal theory. The paper concludes with a reference to the open questions that Part Two, which will appear in Althusser and Law, will take up. (shrink)

In its first part the article examines visions of the family during 1968 and the succeeding years. It concentrates in particular on alternative visions of the family, both at a theoretical level (as with David Cooper's Death of the Family), and at the level of social history, with the rise and fall of the commune movement. It does so with reference to a methodology which concentrates on relationships, principally those between the individual and the family, between family and between the (...) family and the state. In the second part it surveys the widespread changes that have beset family relations and family life in the advanced capitalist societies since 1968: the lowering of fertility rates, the gradual decline of marriage, the significant changes in the position of women in the family, the increase in individualisation, as manifested in the growth of single-member households. The article then seeks to explore the relationship, if any, between the movement of 1968 and these transformations in the family. It examines both conservative and progressive interpretations, and suggests that paradoxically the movement left few sediments in the relationship between family and civil society but rather more in that between the state and the family. (shrink)

This essay takes issue with Critchley's diagnosis of the motivation crisis at the core of our supposedly nihilist political present, and with its pejorative characterization of a vanguardist or Leninist Left. Against the reliance of Infinitely Demanding on an anarchic metapolitics of responsibility, it proposes that we rethink the concept of solidarity and develop an intra-political ethics of egalitarianism, an ethics of unconditional rather than infinite demands that is happy to embrace the accusation of "Prometheanism".

Since its birth in the mid-nineteenth century, Marxism has had a contentious relationship with religion and Christianity. From the Marxist critique of religion as the “opium of the people” to the secularism of the Soviet Union to the Catholic Church’s “Decree Against Communism, ” the two schools of thought have widely been considered incompatible. Despite this tension, many of the critiques leveled by both sides do not attack the real substance of their opponents’ ideas. As such, this paper sets out (...) to answer two questions: first, whether Christian morality and Marxist thought can be made consistent on the basis of their ideological foundations, and second, what a Christianity consistent with Marxism would look like. It finds that on the level of ideological foundation, there are important consistencies between Christian morality and Marxism. Given these consistencies, a Christianity aligned with Marxist thought is possible, and this paper will conclude by exploring Liberation Theology as a possible avenue for the actualization of that consistency. (shrink)

Humans often seek to improve themselves, whether through self-discipline or through the use of science and technology. At some point in the future, techniques might become available that will change humans to such a degree that they might have to be regarded as something other than human: posthuman. This essay tries to define the point at which such a human-to-posthuman metamorphosis may occur. This is achieved by discerning what is it that makes human substance distinct, i.e. what is the human (...) essence. This is accomplished by examining the features of the human body, looking at the mode of human existence in society and trying to grasp the importance of the body–soul relationship. Throughout the process, humans are compared to animals as well as entities from literature, film, and the gaming world. These are used as case studies to shape and test the ideas developed throughout the essay. This essay's conclusions might become useful when decisions will have to be made as to the legal status of posthumans,... (shrink)

Studies of Europe and European identity today are dominated by the methods of the social sciences. Europe is understood as a geographical region of a global totality, and treated in political-economic terms; and European identity is largely investigated through social surveys. This paper explores the possibility of a philosophical contribution to understanding Europe: an understanding based on the idea that Europe is itself a distinctively philosophical phenomenon, and that its modern geopolitical condition has an irreducibly geophilosophical significance.

ABSTRACTIn this essay I agree with Nicholas Burbules that ‘Phronesis’ is an ethical and political category that grounds the possibility of intercultural communication in translation from one particular context to another rather than in the presumption of one or another account of universalism. After a brief review of the development of this idea in key milestones of Western philosophy, I argue that it requires an education in dialogue across difference that can foster hope for peaceful coexistence among diverse traditions and (...) perspectives in diverse democratic societies. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue that Foucault's dispersive historiography is a deepening rather than a purifying of historical existence. This emphasis upon dispersion as a critical principle is contrasted with, and delimited by the possibility of the narrative comprehension of historical existence exemplified by the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. Insofar as the responsibility to act is an important field where tfphis deepening takes place it cannot be subordinated to the responsibility to otherness which aims at dismantling the action orientated frameworks (...) of traditional ethics and politics. Ricoeur's promotion of narrative refiguration as a response to the aporias of time is thus, a timely rejoinder to dispersive genealogy. I argue further that Foucault's historiography exhibits the productive tension of history as both difference and meaning and that the ethical thrust of such writing is to address the concerns of the present in a way that metamorphosizes rather than challenges the narrative function. Insofar as it connects with the struggles of disenfranchised and marginalized groups, and discourses, it also echoes a powerful element In traditional emancipatory historiography which attempts to fully embrace the slaughtered possibilities of the past The emancipatory potential of dispersive historiography is examined further by comparison with the aims and values of traditional critical theory. Two positions are delineated: Complementarity, in which genealogy produces valuable insights into hitherto unacknowledged power structures; Delimitation, in which Foucault's work is seen to be an important limitation on the epistemological and ontological interventions of critical theory. This JOIns the philosophical hermeneutical critique of critical theory In its delimitation of the finite horizon of all emancipatory discourse. Finally I argue that Foucault's work is itself limited by its refusal to countenance the utopian dimension of social reproduction in which the social imaginary is to be considered not as a delusory projection of desire, but as a driving force behind the projection of freedom. Dispersive freedom sees the formation of political, cultural, and social identities as always constraints upon the real practice of freedom. It is this marginalisation of liberation as a process with ends that I seek to dispute. I conclude that Foucault's dispersive principles are belied by the important contribution his work has made to the necessarily ceaseless task of the refiguration of the concepts of history, freedom, power and truth. (shrink)