Abstract
I started participating in the Prague conference in 1999 following an invitation by Alessandro Ferrara. To me, it felt like a wonderful possibility to access what in my view were the most prominent international debates and ongoing research in critical theory and the philosophy of social science. In this respect, a few words must be spent about the role Sandro played in connecting the relatively small Italian community of critical theorists with a broader international context. Critical theory was never mainstream in Italy, in spite of the fact that the Frankfurt School had been slowly assimilated both by the academic culture and the political culture of the left, though with some significant caution. Only in the 1990s, however, a group of scholars started meeting in a workshop on a regular basis in Gallarate, near Milan. The group was academically scattered, yet deeply committed to critical theory and kept together by a shared feeling of genuine enthusiasm and intellectual integrity. All this would have been confined to the local level, however, unless some work had been done to connect it with a broader context. The Prague conference, the journal Philosophy & Social Criticism and of course the personal connections and intellectual exchanges involved made it possible for a generation to grow out of the most obvious limitations and parochial routines affecting national academic cultures.
At the time when I joined the Prague conference I had just finished my PhD at the University of Venice and was about to start a Marie Curie fellowship in Leuven. I cannot help remember that I used to share an apartment in Prague with Massimo Rosati, at that time a very young yet astonishingly mature scholar. We were both excited and intimidated by the impressive record of the participants in the conference and by the idea that its history went back to the years when critical theory took the shape we had become familiar with during our graduate and postgraduate studies. This feeling in a sense appeared to be in contrast with the friendly atmosphere and relaxed, unhierarchical mood dominating in the conference. I have the impression that this atmosphere has been preserved despite the conference’s growing bigger and its format having deeply changed over time.
There always were plenty of discussions, both formal and informal, which left more than some traces in my way of looking at critical theory and more generally at social science and political philosophy. I will here mention two in particular. The first such discussion took place at what I think was a crucial time for the development of critical theory. In 2002 a panel was devoted to a discussion of Negri and Hardt’s Empire. The book may not look impressive in retrospect, but in the early 2000s it looked like the new thing to many and its influence was just starting to put some new spirit into the otherwise rapidly ageing chords of French post-structuralism. The recipe was in a sense intriguing, as it gave the impression of being a new wave of radical social critique merging an activist reading of Marx that originated in the Italian leftist heterodoxy with the farewell to modernity we were all familiar with from college. The details of course go beyond the scope of this contribution and would involve a discussion of the theological background that surfaces in the last part of the book, but it is noteworthy that, although the project could be easily seen as groundbreaking, it was received with mixed feelings and ultimately failed to get a grip on the participants. A plain explanation is that in the Frankfurt tradition a commitment to modernity is part of what Lakatos calls the hard core of a research program. In this respect, the discussion was a turning point precisely in marking no turn. Since then the story of critical theory has gone far and we seem now to be faced with two very different kinds of things called critical theory around the world, of a postmodernist and a modernist variety respectively. I am happy to associate with the latter.
The second discussion I want to mention took place during the 2016 conference, in a session devoted to Rainer Forst’s paper on noumenal power. Technicalities aside, I think it shed light on an important issue, namely how power relations can be analysed within the framework of a cognitivist normative approach – which requires accounting for how reasons can possibly play a causal, motivating role in individual and collective agency, as well as for how social structures both operate on and are affected by reasons. This is clearly crucial to understand the nature of domination and the working of immanent critique. I grew persuaded that in this respect a lot of stimulating work can be done at the interface between social theory, political philosophy and the present form of what Habermas used to call ‘reconstructive social sciences’. Prague is to my best knowledge a unique place where these discourses come together, which may well be the main reason for its success. Surely it was and still is a reason for me to join in.