Abstract
The eleven chapters collected here originated in a three-day conference held at Northwestern University in May 2014. The volume frames Critical Theory in a highly expansive manner, in keeping with the New Directions in Critical Theory series. This collection is representative of the so-called ‘fourth generation’ of Critical Theorists, evincing both the strengths of this school of thought, while remaining truly indicative of the political complicities and philosophical antinomies of contemporary Critical Theory.
Deutscher and Lafont group the chapters into five thematics. ‘The Future of Democracy’, comprises just Habermas’ ‘An Exploration of the Meaning of Transnationalization of Democracy, Using the Example of the European Union’. Writing in the tradition of liberal-democratic theorists, Habermas presents a constitutional fix of ‘double sovereignty’ as a means of achieving democratically legitimate transnational democracy, while retaining the role of nation states as ‘guarantors of their [citizens’] already achieved level[s] of justice and freedom’. The utility of a founding myth of European Citizens and European Peoples engaged in constitution-building entirely as equals is core to Habermas’ presentation. The resulting heterarchical structures of governance (presented as an equally powerful European Parliament and European Commission) offer a favourable trajectory for transnationalized democratic projects; both for the embattled EU itself, and more broadly.
While Habermas’ chapter is internally consistent, one might question the foundational value horizons within which he is operating. The continued dominance of the nation state as a justifiable, even desirable, model for the political community; and his engagement with the European Union shorn of any political-economic critique, seem at variance with the insights offered by the first generation of Critical Theorists. This is not to take sides on the Brexit debate, but simply to engage in such analysis sans any political-economy seems an almost surreal undertaking, let alone in a volume purporting to present ‘Critical Theory’ in ‘critical times’. Habermas’ chapter, then, while of real interest, seems too closely melded with the dominant political constellations of capitalist modernity to provide a penetrating critique. This chapter ultimately sits closer to Enlightenment republicanism than to Adornian philosophy.
The second section, ‘Human Rights and Sovereignty’, challenges the developing orthodoxy that an international human rights framework poses insurmountable challenges to the primacy of the (democratic) (nation) state. Benhabib’s, ‘Democratic Sovereignty and Transnational Law: On Legal Utopianism and Democratic Skepticism’ presents human rights and national sovereignty in a dialectical relationship, due to the inevitable fact of local/regional interpretation. Using this hermeneutic reality as an entry point, Benhabib distinguishes her position from theorists sceptical of legal cosmopolitanism. While she names Walzer, Moyn, Cohen and Nagel as representative of the view she opposes, her engagement with their texts is limited by the size of her contribution.
Lafont’s ‘Human Rights, Sovereignty, and the Responsibility to Protect’ critiques the framing of the recent Responsibility to Protect commitment for placing international human rights and national sovereignty in an oppositional relationship. Writing with a keen awareness of the consequences of decades of ‘structural adjustment’, Lafont forcefully argues that it is often the international community, and in particular, multinational companies, which threaten national sovereignty.
The final contribution to this section is Forst’s ‘A Critical Theory of Human Rights – Some Groundwork’. In keeping with his The Right to Justification (2012), Forst argues that human rights and national sovereignty, while having different genealogies, share a basic commitment to a foundational human right to justification. Forst argues that the alleged contradiction between international human rights and national sovereignty is entirely paradoxical: one cannot limit the human right to democracy by appealing to the principle of sovereignty, or collective self-determination. Taken together, these three chapters present a strident defence of the commensurability of international human rights frameworks with the continued sovereignty of (democratic) (nation) states.
Again, while these chapters are internally consistent, and offer intriguing reading, I would challenge their foundational normative judgements. Echoing Thompson, one might even question the extent to which these submissions constitute Critical Theory (at least in the manner practised by earlier generations). Forst’s Critical Theory of judgement has been critiqued eloquently elsewhere; for Thompson, his chapter would be irrecoverable due to its foundational neo-idealist horizons. Lafont’s chapter does deserve credit for presenting the global neoliberal order as the true threat to human rights. Yet her turn to legal-political rights as a means of ameliorating the exploitative logics inherent in global neoliberalism is problematic, and I contend, will ultimately be found wanting.
Again, these chapters fail to truly engage with the reifying impact of capitalist and patriarchal structures on the cognitive capacities of subjects in the style of earlier Critical Theory. How can a legally framed, rights-based order offer emancipation, when all those subject to it are habituated to aggressive neoliberal rationalities? Brown’s chapter, the first in the third section of the volume, deals with these questions more explicitly, and with much promise.
Brown’s ‘Neoliberalism and the Economization of Rights’ is one of the high points of this volume. This chapter artfully interrogates whether states can ensure popular sovereignty in today’s neoliberal order. Extending the themes of The Birth of Biopolitics, Brown develops Foucault’s insights: it is not merely capitalist structures which are shaped and ‘given form’ through juridical processes; law itself is shaped by neoliberal rationalities. The pervasive rationality of neoliberalism thus challenges the extent to which the juridical register can provide a counterpoint to capitalist exploitation. Brown focuses on the Citizens United ruling, articulating how free-market rationalities have come to dominate juridical decision-making processes.
Menke’s ‘Law and Domination’ also turns to Foucault to complement Marxian insights. For Menke, Marx underplayed the true import of ‘social rights’, essential for citizens’ full, equitable participation in the broader functioning of the polity. Menke points towards a new critical theory of law, bringing with it a new mode of engagement with ‘social rights’ and reconceptualizations of ‘law’, ‘domination’, and the interface between the politico-economic and the juridical. I shall leave it to those more versed in Marxist legal theory to comment further here.
The fourth section of the volume, ‘Criticizing Capitalism’, commences with Fraser’s ‘Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode’, which first appeared in the New Left Review 2014 (86). Fraser’s chapter commences with an exploration of the foundational conditions required for capitalist society. For Fraser, the four primary conditions presented by Marx as essential to capitalism are: private ownership of the means of production; a free labour market; ever expanding amounts of capital; markets as the primary medium of exchange.
These primary conditions require three pre-existing conditions: a system of unwaged social reproduction (care work); an approach to nature as an infinite and exploitable resource (anthropocentricism); the political conditions for the enforcement of capitalist logics: (i.e. a racist, patriarchal state).
Fraser suggests that ‘to understand capitalism…we need to relate its front story to these three backstories. We must connect the Marxian perspective to feminist, ecological, and political-theoretical perspectives.’ For Fraser, these background conditions represent a ‘plurality of distinct but interrelated social ontologies’, each housing distinct normativities ‘at divergence from the values associated with capitalism’s foreground’. For Fraser, this hidden abode contains a normative ‘reservoir’ though which one can seek resources to further Kapitalkritik. Fraser’s engagement thus seeks to further our understanding of capitalism in a period of ‘social amnesia, [where] whole generations…have been sophisticated practitioners of discourse analysis while remaining utterly innocent of the traditions of Kapitalkritik’. Connecting Kapitalkritik to the critique of anthropocentricism, patriarchy and the inequitable distribution of political power, Fraser presents a means of uniting progressive thinkers under a broad banner.
While Fraser’s text is one of the most compelling in the collection, it raises several critical responses. One might ask whether she jettisons the reifying impacts of capitalism too readily in her analysis. Perhaps more seriously, one might question the extent to which the background conditions Fraser identifies retain the progressive, normative ‘reservoir’ she imputes. Approaching her work with an Adornian lens, one might question whether such reservoirs have been polluted by the effluent of capitalist rationality. Looking at the Citarum River, for instance, one may question the extent to which her pure pool of progressive normativity could ever challenge rabid anthropocentricism.
Jaeggi’s ‘A Wide Concept of Economy: Economy as a Social Practice and the Critique of Capitalism’ completes the fourth section of this volume. Like Fraser’s preceding contribution, Jaeggi seeks to expand the traditional conception of capitalism. In keeping with her broader scholarship, Jaeggi presents capitalist society as ‘a form of life’. This chapter sees Jaeggi extend her engagement: she presents a clear and concise argument for viewing capitalist economic practices to be as norm-laden as the pre-capitalist forms they displaced. Jaeggi’s injunction ‘not to be fooled by capitalism’s tendency to make the normative and the dense ethical character of economic institutions invisible’ is of merit, and her analysis helps uncover the undergirding normative figurations within the current ‘form of life’. Fraser’s and Jaeggi’s chapters make ‘Criticizing Capitalism’ a strong, highly readable, penultimate section of this volume.
The fifth and final section, ‘The End of Progress in Postcolonial Times’, features three chapters: Allen’s ‘Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress: Critical Theory in Postcolonial Times’, and responses thereto. Invested in decolonizing the Critical Theory tradition, Allen identifies implicit imperialist and developmentalist ‘progress’ narratives in the Frankfurt School’s canonical texts. Using Foucault and Adorno, Allen charts an alternate current in left-Hegelianism, contra to the progress narratives that have been drawn out of/in Hegelian thought. In contrast, Allen seeks to articulate the historicizing power of Hegel, to, in ‘good dialectical fashion’, historicize the very conception of history itself. Allen’s critique of Hegelian teleology, and its implicit normativity, bears similarities with the indictment forwarded more broadly by Critical Racial Theory. For Allen, the discursive construction of ‘progress’, as manifest in today’s dominant constellations, is best discarded. Such an approach is in direct opposition to Pinker’s recently released Enlightenment Now. It would be of interest to read Allen’s thoughts on this much-anticipated work.
Allen’s ‘decolonizing’ efforts extend beyond a critique of ‘progress’ narratives, and of epistemes implicit with such ‘colonizing’ dynamics. Her turn to Adorno and Foucault brings with it a heightened awareness of the relationship between reason and power, between conceptualization and domination. Further, through her reading of both theorists, Allen presents a means of tracing the relationship between freedom and subjection. These are noble goals, and Allen’s prose is both persuasive and engaging.
Yet, one may be tempted to pour scorn on the ‘whiteness’ of Allen’s endeavour, and even my position reviewing it: these are the words of a white Englishman, critiquing a white American’s argument that by better reading two European men we can decolonize Critical Theory. In response to such a charge, Allen points to Mignolo. For the Argentine semiotician, while the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentric complicity is insufficient, it is far from unnecessary. Echoing Rorty, Allen comments that ‘we must start somewhere’. Perhaps the very fact that Allen sees herself as this ‘somewhere’ is indicative of the necessity for her project. Allen’s chapter will undoubtedly provoke a strong critical reaction. Indeed, her recent book, The End of Progress has received some savage online reviews, with Critical Race scholars decrying a lack of engagement with, and a lack of acknowledgement of, the literature and contributions made by their field. Critical Theorists more attuned to the insights of the ‘First Generation’ have attacked Allen from another quarter, accusing her of a misreading of Hegel. The two chapters that follow in this volume, while engaging more sympathetically with Allen’s submissions, foreground some of the critiques levelled at her later monograph.
Deutscher’s ‘Post-Foucault’ is in part a direct response to Allen. In contrast to the various theorists who argue Foucault’s theoretical infrastructure is less applicable today (even Brown in this volume), Deutscher presents a strong defence of Foucault’s conception of temporality. Further arguing for the continued relevance of Foucault’s insights for social research today, Deutscher outlines how Foucault’s conceptions of ‘rights’ and ‘freedom’ (as imbricated within discourse) provide insightful foundations for decolonial projects. Deutscher’s account is thus in broad sympathy with Allen’s chapter.
Mills is less complimentary, stating that a Critical Theory seeking to decolonize itself must engage with non-white, non-Western authors, and must explicitly dialogue with Critical Race Theory. Such a critique has been levelled with greater fervour at Allen’s latest monograph. Mills’ concerns stretch further, critiquing the inability of contemporary Critical Theoretical approaches (presumably including those derived from Adorno and Foucault) to engage with the problems of slavery. Echoes of Fanon are clear in this analysis. Mills warns that decolonizing Critical Theory without attention to race is a fool’s errand. In keeping with contemporary Critical Race Theory, Mills argues that the foundations of modernity themselves are inflected with the dynamics of race. Decoloniality thus requires substantially more than changed demographics, changed dramatic personae.
While broadly sympathetic to Mills’ critique, I find Allen’s approach thought-provoking and worthy of engagement. It is refreshing to engage with a Critical Theory volume which places due importance on the need to reflect on the discipline’s origins. The extent to which such a project is best done in the manner Allen advocates, and, indeed, with Allen at the helm, will most definitely be further debated with her latest publication.
Critical Theory in Critical Times offers an accessible and indicative collection of contemporary ‘fourth-generation’ Critical Theory. While some of the chapters compiled here are symptomatic of an increasingly ‘domesticated’ Critical Theoretical horizon, I consider the volume to be a worthy read. For the passing author, flicking through, I particularly commend the chapters by Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser and Amy Allen.