This paper examines the differences and affinities between Karl Popper’s critical rationalism and Theodor Adorno’s critical theory through renewed attention to the original documents of their 1961 debate. While commentaries often describe the Popper-Adorno encounter as a theoretical disappointment, I reveal a confrontation between conceptually opposed programs of social research. Though both theorists are committed to critique as a political and epistemological struggle for human freedom, their conceptions of this struggle are starkly different. In the original seminar papers, we find (...) a conflict between critique as a practice of social rationality (Popper) and a critique of social rationality itself (Adorno). The versions of critical rationalism and critical theory meeting in this debate thus emphasize opposite dimensions of a reflexive practice of immanent critique. In closing, I suggest dissolving this conceptual tension by recovering the educational orientation of critique. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Hegel calls social life “the living good,” but what this means is unclear. The idea expresses an ontological claim about the kind of being that human societies possess, but it is also normatively significant, clarifying why the category of social pathology is an appropriate tool of social critique. Social life consists in processes of life infused with ethical content. Societies are normatively and functionally constituted living beings that realize the good similarly to how organisms achieve their vital ends: via (...) specialized, coordinated functions. In distinction to living organisms, the living good realizes itself through the consciousness and will of individual social members. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 3, Page 368-378, September 2021.

This article explores objections made against ideal theorizing in political philosophy by two prominent contemporary critical theorists: Axel Honneth and Charles Mills. In Freedom’s Right, Honneth...

In what follows, I will argue that racist ideology should be understood in terms of racist social norms that constitute certain incentive structures. To this end, I will motivate my position by examining two existing accounts of ideology: those of Tommie Shelby and Sally Haslanger. First, I will begin by reconstructing Shelby’s account of racism as ideology. After analysing three dimensions of ideology (epistemic, genetic and functional), I will argue that his view is too cognitivist. In this regard, Shelby’s view (...) is doxastic in viewing that racist ideologies consist in misguided beliefs. Rather, what is essential in ideology is its functional dimension. Here, ideologies persist because they function to stabilize and reinforce the unjust status quo of subordination and oppression. Then, I will turn to Haslanger’s account of ideology as cultural technēs. Her view is more functional than Shelby’s since the former is based on the account of social practice and culture. While Haslanger is right about her critique of Shelby’s cognitivist view of ideology, I argue that what she calls nonideal moral epistemology weakens her overall insight. The problem is that without considering how to intervene in concrete social mechanisms, merely knowing certain moral truths may not practically motivate subjects under ideologies. Taken together, both Shelby and Haslanger narrowly understand ideology in terms of epistemic deficiency. Even though Shelby and Haslanger deal with the discursive superstructure of ideology, both underestimate the functional substructure of ideology such as social and psychological motives, desires and needs. Ultimately, I will argue that ideology is better understood in terms of a racist social norm. This account is explanatorily superior to Shelby and Haslanger’s views in its stress on the nonepistemic, nonmoral and functional aspects of ideology. (shrink)

To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping (...) arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. Adorno’s social theory is enjoying renewed attention, as is the debate to what extent is it Marxist. A central issue remains Adorno’s concept of social totality: capitalism as a fully integrated society in which every difference is levelled. One problem this raises is why is he still committed to the Marxist concept of class. And second, how to understand his critique of the idea of proletarian class-consciousness, which seems to leave his critical theory (...) without an addressee. The article suggests that, for Adorno, capitalist society exhibits what is termed here “differential integration.” It is predicated both on the labor/capital distinction and, at the same time, on sufficient homology between the two, such that the qualitative class divide is experienced as mere quantitative variance. This efficacious gap between social structure and social experience is at the center of his concept of ideology. Ideology-critique for Adorno is mainly the critique of symptomatic misconceptions of how ideology functions, due to lack of attention to how the class structure is in fact not experienced as such. Adorno’s alternative to proletarian class consciousness is “differential solidarity”: consciousness of social domination that is on the one hand found across class divides yet is experienced differentially between them. (shrink)

According to a broad historical and contemporary consensus, ideology resides in the mind, as a sort of belief system gone wrong. Recently, however, a minority view has challenged this cognitivist consensus by highlighting ideology’s social function. This group of authors, including Rahel Jaeggi, Karen Ng, Robin Celikates, and Sally Haslanger, underline the importance of analyzing ideology through the lens of our social practices. We think these challengers move the conversation about ideology in the right direction, but their views still suffer (...) from some weaknesses – weaknesses that we think an existential-phenomenological account of ideology can overcome. We develop such an account here. We conceive of ideology as a set of modes of being-with that attack our normative competence by placing us under unwarranted normative pressure, changing our normative stance to benefit some political group. We offer a four-fold account of normative competence and illustrate how ideology, understood in our terms, attacks it. Finally, we show that our approach shares the strengths but not the weaknesses of the minority view. (shrink)

I begin by identifying an ambiguity in the post-Hegelian literature on Immanent Critique, distinguishing two possible definitions: judging an object against its ‘internal’ norms; and accounting for one’s own standpoint with reference to the object. I then claim that both definitions are represented in Hegel’s Phenomenology, and develop extended interpretations of material from the Introduction in order to clarify and substantiate this thesis. This yields revisionist readings of the famous ‘internal criteria’ and ‘self examination’ tropes. My discussion builds towards elucidating (...) the relation between the two definitions of Immanent Critique I have distinguished, as it is developed in the Phenomenology. (shrink)

Since its 2007 publication, Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice has sparked a vigorous conversation in analytic philosophy about how social power corrodes individual’s epistemic capacities and distorts collective meaning-making in unjust ways. Yet for all its normative insights into social silencing, I argue that Fricker’s theorization of epistemic dysfunction remains too individualized, cognitivist, and dematerialized to account for racialized imaginaries. Rather than view racisms as normal and normative in racist cultures, Fricker frames identity-driven prejudice as a troubling aberration from otherwise unblemished (...) epistemic and moral norms. This leads her into adopting an overly voluntarist and idealist theory of social change that centres training better knowers rather than unmaking racialized worlds. Ultimately, I contend that we should return to a materialist theory of ideology, following the work of Stuart Hall. Doing so jettisons the narrow focus on individual epistemic failures and instead problematizes how certain social ideas consolidate and reproduce racial hierarchies. (shrink)

This article expands upon the notion of ideology as a material phenomenon, usually in the form of institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices. It draws on Herbert Marcuse and related thinkers to conceptualize technological solutions to environmental problems as materialized ideological responses to social-ecological contradictions, which, by concealing these contradictions, reproduce existing social conditions. This article outlines a method of technology assessment as ideology critique that draws attention to: (1) the social determinants of the given technology; (2) whether the technology conceals or masks (...) social-ecological contradictions; (3) whether the technology reproduces existing social conditions; and (4) whether the technology may be used for more rational or emancipatory ends in different social conditions. The examples of solar geoengineering and agricultural biotechnology are examined and it is found that, in each case, these technological solutions conceal social-ecological contradictions and support the current economic system and those benefiting from it, while precluding other alternatives. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo reconstruye los principales motivos que impulsaron la más reciente renovación de las bases epistemológicas de la teoría crítica, esto es, el desplazamiento desde su fundamentación en una teoría de la “acción comunicativa” hacia el concepto de “reconocimiento”. Se muestra que esta renovación, así como el “giro intersubjetivo” emprendido décadas antes por Habermas en relación con el programa originario de “crítica de la ideología”, puede ser entendido a partir de una de las tareas distintivas que la teoría (...) crítica asume a partir de su posicionamiento epistemológico: comprender sus formas de conocimiento como un momento de autorreflexión de un interés emancipador socialmente existente. Esto supone conectar de alguna manera su crítica de las injusticias con las experiencias vividas de injusticia. En suma, los distintos modos de abordar esta tarea autorreflexiva pueden ser entendidos como un hilo conductor entre las sucesivas renovaciones epistemológicas de esta tradición de la crítica social.: This article reconstructs the main motives that led to the most recent renewal of the epistemological foundations of critical theory. It analyses the move from a theory based on the notion of “communicative action” to one centred on “recognition”. The article argues that both this renewal and the “inter-subjective turn”, proposed decades ago by Habermas as response to the original agenda focused on the “critique of ideology”, can be understood by looking at one of the distinctive goals critical theory seeks to meet from its epistemological positioning: to conceive its forms of knowledge as a moment of self-reflection of a socially existing emancipatory interest. This implies connecting in some way its critiques of injustice to the lived experiences of injustice. In sum, the different ways of addressing this self-reflective goal can be understood as the guideline between consecutive epistemological renewals of this tradition of social criticism. (shrink)