Introduction

This is a roundtable on Rainer Forst, Justification and Critique: Towards a Critical Theory of Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), which contains Forst’s efforts to take up and further articulate the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. His project focuses on the idea that this tradition should not be centered on achieving consensus but rather on accommodating the demand for justification that any actor should be able to direct toward the relevant normative context, moral or political. In this roundtable, questions are raised about Forst’s contention that this portrait of justification amounts to a ‘fundamentum inconcussum’ for critical theory (Stephen White), about whether this framework is too tied to problems in political philosophy and not enough to issues in contemporary democratic theory (Simone Chambers), and about whether his emphasis on the centrality of justice too strongly backgrounds issues of the good society and utopia (Lea Ypi). Forst then offers a reply to these critiques.