The concept of practice is thematically central to modern conservative thought, as evident in Edmund Burke’s writings on the aesthetic and his diatribe against the French Revolution. It is also the main organizing thread in the framework in the human sciences known as practice theory, which extends back at least to Karl Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. This article historicizes ‘practice’ in conservative thought and practice theory, accounts for the family resemblance between the two, and takes apart that family resemblance to (...) reveal differences. The ingredients of practice theory (historical inheritance, embodiment, cognitive limits, loose coupling between conscious thought and action) are in many cases also distinctive traits of conservative thought. But the similarity is deceptive. Practice theory and conservative thought constitute two distinct interpretations of practice, two disparate endeavours for connecting human science with political strategy, and two different formulas for opposing theory and practice. The present study will argue that this is primarily a political opposition for conservative thought, while it is a human-scientific opposition for practice theory. Conservative thought is initially political and then human-scientific; practice theory is initially human-scientific and then political. This article advocates for practice theory against conservative thought as differently amended versions of a politics that recognizes human finitude. (shrink)

This article traces certain rhetorics of knowledge-change as well as a few models of such change. In particular, it focuses on models that emphasize novelty and sudden transformation. To this end, the works of Thomas Kuhn, and the debates surrounding his celebrated modeling of the paradigm, are explored. Having established – at least in an illustrative fashion – the role of novelty in Kuhn’s philosophy of science, we then look more briefly at the mid-career work of Michel Foucault (his Order (...) of Things and the Archaeology of Knowledge ), and the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard to find (in Foucault’s case) analogies with the earlier models and debates surrounding Popper and Kuhn, and then (in the Habermas/Lyotard discussion), to see how revolutionary and reactionary status count in assigning value to models of knowledge. In all these inquiries, we seek less to criticize particular theorists (that has already been done) than to understand a dominant strand of understanding of knowledge and knowledge-change in the contemporary academy. (shrink)

In various European countries, the relation between `the left' and `the right' presents itself today in paradoxical form: the attenuation of the differences at the level of policy making is accompanied by the persistence, if not even strengthening, of the polarisation in terms of verbal position taking and of partisan self-description. To understand this situation, one needs to return to that which constitutes the ideological core of the opposition between left and right. The left remains marked, though not necessarily in (...) an explicit fashion, by the heritage of the quest for `total revolution'. Such quest presupposes a radical critique of the world in the form in which it presents itself, namely as an obstacle to the full realisation of humanity. In this sense, the left is intrinsically connected to critique, and left and right stand opposed to each other in the same way that critique is opposed to celebration. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, the critique of the left was elaborated in particular in the form of a social critique of capitalism. Since the 1970s and 1980s, and since the end of communism in particular, the theme of total revolution, however, dissociates itself more and more from the idea of social revolution to focus instead on the idea of sexual revolution. Certain problems that the left encounters today stem from the fact that it amalgamates two highly different kinds of expectation and of critiques. On the one hand, there are the social concerns and the critiques of capitalism, which, however, are no longer oriented towards total revolution. On the other hand, there are expectations that are still turned towards total revolution, but have been shifted towards the exigency of a revolution in the order of reproduction and of sexuality and, thus, have dissociated themselves from the critique of capitalism. (shrink)