The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature brings to light the deep sense of crisis within the profession of academic philosophy which is similar to the paralyzing pluralism in contemporary theology and the inveterate indeterminacy of literary criticism. Richard Rorty's provocative and profound meditations impel philosophers to examine the problematic status of their discipline— only to discover that modern European philosophy has come to an end. Rorty strikes a deathblow to modern European philosophy by telling a story about the emergence, development and decline of its primary props: the correspondence theory of truth, the notion of privileged representations and the idea of a self-reflective transcendental subject. Rorty's fascinating tale—his-story —is regulated by three fundamental shifts which he delineates in detail and promotes in principle: the move toward anti-realism or conventionalism in ontology, the move toward the demythologizing of the Myth of the Given or anti-foundationalism in epistemology, and the move toward detranscendentalizing the subject or dismissing the mind as a sphere of inquiry. The chief importance of Rorty's book is that it brings together in an original and intelligible narrative the major insights of the patriarchs of postmodern American philosophy—W. V. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and Nelson Goodman— and persuasively presents the radical consequences of their views for contemporary philosophy. Rorty credits Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey for having "brought us into a period of 'revolutionary' philosophy" by undermining the prevailing Cartesian and Kantian paradigms and advancing new conceptions of philosophy. And these monumental figures surely inspire Rorty. Yet, Rorty's philosophical debts—the actual sources of his particular anti-Cartesian and antiKantian arguments—are Quine's holism, Sellars' anti-foundationalism, and Goodman's pluralism. In short, despite his adamant attack on analytical philosophy—the last stage of modern European philosophy—Rorty feels most comfortable with the analytical form of philosophical argumentation (shunned by Wittgenstein and Heidegger). From the disparate figures of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey, Rorty gets a historicist directive: to eschew the quest for certainty and the search for foundations.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Conclusions and Recommendations, are particularly interesting in view of the controversies aroused by the Warnock Report. Many of the recommendations contained here are similar to Warnock's (for example, concerning the legitimacy of AID children, the need for a licensing authority to supervise the work ofAID and IVF centres, etc), but others are at odds with the corresponding Warnock recommendations. In general, the authors place higher value on the family as an institution than did the Warnock Committee and display a much livelier awareness of the possible social dangers of the new techniques. One weakness of the book is that since its authors are approaching these topics from the standpoint of social scientists, their recommendations for legislative action which surely must be based on properly ethical considerations, not merely sociological ones seem devoid of any satisfactory rational support. For example, they concede that experimentation on human embryos is an objectionable practice, since 'the material acting as the subject of the experimentation is a human being at the beginning of its individual development' (p 178); but the practical recommendation which they make concerning this practice is disappointingly feeble:

https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/12/3/165.full.pdf

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

more impressive with each exposure to it. Everything has changed and nothing has changed since Democracy in America was published in the 1830’s. Its author grasped with remarkable perception both the mutable and the immutable qualities of man. There could be nothing more salutary for us today than to assimilate his fine sense of what was permanent in a world which, like ours, was undergoing deep convulsions. Committed to the classical economics of Adam Smith, Tocqueville did not share Smith’s illusions about the eternal nature of the market. On the contrary, as Albert Salomon has emphasized, his point of view

Democracy in America: An Appreciation On the Occasion of the Centennial of Tocqueville's Death

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences by George E. Marcus; Michael M. J. Fischer

Bureaucrats have feelings too. Saying so is no platitude: within political science, scholarly work on bureaucracies has largely portrayed low-level bureaucrats as indifferent public servants sitting behind a desk, stubbornly adhering to arbitrary technicalities. In particular, political scientists have often assumed that street-level bureaucrats wield little legal discretionary power, and, thus, pose at best a principal–agent problem of disobedience and at worst the threat of petty corruption and abuse of authority. Bernardo Zacka’s When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency meticulously dismantles those assumptions, providing a refreshing and illuminating look into the everyday work of street-level agents of the state. Zacka persuasively argues that street-level bureaucrats are, in fact, moral agents ‘vested with a considerable margin of discretion’ (p. 11). More importantly, he makes a compelling case for the normative desirability of that discretionary power – not when unbounded, but when carefully curated to benefit the workings of a democratic state. The book neither focuses on corruption nor other abuses of power, but on the moral agency that bureaucrats (should) enjoy while abiding by the rules of their organization. Zacka’s insights build on fieldwork conducted as a receptionist of the Norville Community Development Initiative, a non-profit antipoverty agency contracted by the state, in a large city in the United States. Additionally, the book draws on a broad array of literatures, from other qualitative work on bureaucracies to psychology, sociology, and normative political philosophy, providing Zacka with an astounding and productive array of interlocutors. The first two chapters of the book are diagnostic, while the following three have a more normative aim. In the first part of the book, Zacka shows that no matter how refined, policies and laws are imperfect and cannot address all conceivable situations (nor should they, lest they become too rigid). Recognizing those shortcomings is a lesson in ‘epistemic humility’ (p. 58), making a margin of discretionary power not only inescapable but desirable. Street-level bureaucrats

When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency

This article makes a positive case for an ethnographic sensibility in political theory. Drawing on published ethnographies and original fieldwork, it argues that an ethnographic sensibility can contribute to normative reflection in five distinct ways. It can help uncover the nature of situated normative demands (epistemic argument); diagnose obstacles encountered when responding to these demands (diagnostic argument); evaluate practices and institutions against a given set of values (evaluative argument); probe, question and refine our understanding of values (valuational argument); and uncover underlying social ontologies (ontological argument). The contribution of ethnography to normative theory is distinguished from that of other forms of empirical research, and the dangers of perspectival absorption, bias and particularism are addressed.

Fieldwork in Political Theory : Five Arguments for an Ethnographic Sensibility

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Every twelve seconds: Industrialized slaughter and the politics of sight

Should political theorists engage in ethnography? In this letter, we assess a recent wave of interest in ethnography among political theorists and explain why it is a good thing. We focus, in particular, on how ethnographic research generates what Ian Shapiro calls “problematizing redescriptions”—accounts of political phenomena that destabilize the lens through which we traditionally study them, engendering novel questions and exposing new avenues of moral concern. We argue that (1) by revealing new levels of variation and contingency within familiar political phenomena, ethnography can uncover topics ripe for normative inquiry; (2) by shedding light on what meanings people associate with political values, it can advance our reflection on concepts; and (3) by capturing the experience of individuals at grips with the social world, it can attune us to forms of harm that would otherwise remain hidden. The purchase for political theory is considerable. By thickening our understanding of institutions, ethnography serves as an antidote to analytic specialization and broadens the range of questions political theorists can ask, reinvigorating debates in the subfield and forging connections with the discipline writ large.

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Political Theory in an Ethnographic Key

The critical discourse on U.S. military detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison has been dominated by Weberian-style arguments (a bureaucracy gone wrong, insufficient or badly applied administrative rules, or individuals acting as cogs in a machine). We argue that Michel Foucault's “security apparatus” provides a more insightful model for understanding the Abu Ghraib phenomenon. According to this model, the prison becomes a nodal point in an information-gathering nexus confronting unforeseen, emergent, and unclear events, a place where power is less disciplinary than improvisational, exercised through practical judgments about uncertain situations. The performance of such power at Abu Ghraib included the use of photography and acts that, we claim, resemble M. M. Bahktin's negative carnivalesque. [Abu Ghraib, security apparatus, improvisational power, photography, carnivalesque]

Bernardo Zacka

Papers

When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency

Fieldwork in Political Theory : Five Arguments for an Ethnographic Sensibility

Every twelve seconds: Industrialized slaughter and the politics of sight

Political Theory in an Ethnographic Key

Abu Ghraib, the security apparatus, and the performativity of power