Showing papers in "Constellations in 2014"

Crisis? Capitalism is Doing Very Well. How is Critical Theory?

Abstract: There is no crisis of capitalism, only a crisis of critique. I claim that Critical Social Theory of Frankfurt School origins does stand guilty of a failure to develop a body of valiant critique of the political economy of neoliberal capitalism in the course of the latter’s ascent in the 1980s and 1990s. The first part of my analysis addresses the crisis of capitalism as a distinct object of critique, in order to identify the direction a critique of contemporary capitalism is to take. The second part examines the analytical equipment at Critical Theory’s disposal for undertaking such an endeavor. Within an inventory of some of the key achievements of the tradition both in terms of its object and method of critique, some conceptual deficiencies are identified – namely, the reduced attention to what I describe as “systemic domination,” and the diminished reliance on a critique of the political economy of capitalism. The third part adumbrates a proposal for recasting Critical Theory by way of (a) redefining the normative content of emancipation; (b) effecting a realist-pragmatic turn within the communicative turn; (c) bringing the critique of political economy back into critical social theory.

“The People Must Be Extracted from Within the People”: Reflections on Populism

Abstract: 1 The only meaning I can see in the word \" people \" is \" mixture \" ; if you substitute for the word \" people \" the words \" number \" and \" mixture \" , you will gets some very odd terms… \" the sovereign mixture \" , \" the will of the mixture \" , etc. the IWM Lectures in Vienna in November 2013 for discussions that helped to clarify my understanding of populism. I am particularly indebted to Andrew Arato, Dick Howard, and Alexander de la Paz for constructive comments.

History, Critique, Social Change and Democracy An Interview with Charles Taylor

Abstract: In your works, you make a strong claim about the usefulness – if not inevitability – of historical approaches to the social sciences and philosophy. Before we go into more detail – do you think there is a central reason of why to make use of history in general? There is a central reason: the inevitability of the narrative as a way of self-understanding. You could put it this way: as a theory of natural science, the inverse-square law is completely timeless; it does not just apply here and now. You don’t need to talk about development. So it may look as though a, let’s call it, ‘human’ way of understanding is sub-scientific and you should get rid of it. Why I am so and so? Why do I act the way I do? The ideal seems to be to come up with timeless statements of what you believe or what motivates you. But this turns out not to be so. Alasdair MacIntyre says that understanding is narrative and that seems plainly true; but why? It has to do with the manner in which we actually understand things, which is in the order in which we grasp them, moving from an early state of confusion or disorientation, until you get the point. So the issue is: can that understanding be separable from the process of getting at it? In very many cases in life it can’t be, because we understand what we now see as a truth as a result of an error-correction in relation to an earlier view. When people say in the modern secular age: “human beings stand on their own feet,” this idea is what I would call a ‘transitional understanding,’ an understanding based on a transition from the old days when we were under the thrall of traditions. Descartes really does this: ordinarily what we believe is what we were told by your preceptors, but I must take a step back and ask “what do I know now?.” I get a sense of my own orientation as coming about through that radical shift, and here I discover a method. But the method itself only makes sense in terms of that transition: I’m understanding myself in opposition to a supposed past. There is an inescapable narrative dimension to this. So much so that you upset somebody’s view of their history by upsetting their views of the past, which is why ‘history wars’ are so central to political and intellectual life. So you’re saying that just as individual lives and identities are narrative-like, the understanding required in social sciences is narrative-like as well? Yes, there is an element of narrativity that can’t be entirely cancelled out. Of course you do have also things like supposedly general laws and they are part of the understanding in the social sciences, but narratives are nevertheless essential. Take economics: the modern centrality of markets arose in history at a certain time, it didn’t exist before. Furthermore, the markets themselves are differently embedded in a different society, and all that is understood in terms of transitions from earlier situations. Karl Polanyi re-writes the history of the modern market in a way that was not what the classic economists understood, and this new story upsets the whole previous understanding.1 In opposition to the prevailing dictum of ‘historical objectivity,’ Nietzsche sets the following task for the historian in his second Untimely Meditations2: to go beyond the passive observation of the flux of ‘events’ (Ereignisse) and grasp the ‘forces’ (Kräfte) that animated the past, assuming what were the ‘instincts’ of previous generations.

Small‐State Nostalgia? The Currency Union, Germany, and Europe: A Reply to Jürgen Habermas

Abstract: With this chance afforded me by the editors to respond to Jürgen Habermas, I would like to persuade my readers and maybe even my critical reviewer to jettison once and for all the association (so staggeringly entrenched in Germany) that equates the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) with “Europe” and even the “European idea.”1 To this end, I start with the by now trivial observation that the currency union, contrary to what was envisaged when it was established, has in actual practice been anything but a vehicle for an “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.” As point of fact, “United Europe” has never been so disunited in the last half-century as it is today. The accusations leveled at one another by states and governments are coming alongside renewed and often distressingly emotional hostility toward each other’s citizens. At the state level, the accession process has collapsed, the U.K. is working to loosen if not end its membership, and Denmark and Sweden are now certain to keep out of the currency union. At the level of the lifeworlds of citizens, nationalistic clichés and national identifications have returned with a vengeance, boiling down again as before to dissociation and mutual disdain and threatening to put an end to the harmonization of European ways of life that we have enjoyed for so long. It cannot be denied that this is vexing above all to Germans, who are realizing to their dismay that this same currency union, which was once touted as the keystone of their “Westernization” by governments of all stripes, is now threatening to isolate them from their neighbors.2 How much more astonishing must it seem that, in Germany, both government and opposition, in complete accord with industry and labor, continue to extol and fanatically strive to preserve the currency union as a sacrosanct national interest. Any thought of abolishing the Euro—by the Left or by the Right—is to be banished from the range of legitimate political discourse. This is accompanied by more or less explicit promises that the new German isolation will come to an end as soon as “we” will have rescued the others— with “growth programs,” Eurobonds, measures sponsored by “us” against youth unemployment, and so on— from what is allegedly no more than a one-time, temporary “crisis” occasioned by a confluence of unlucky circumstances. In fact, however, this will prove illusory, for as I explained in Gekaufte Zeit and elsewhere, the present conflicts are rooted in powerful differences in the structures and the ways of functioning of the national economies that technocratic hubris is trying to wedge together into a currency union. These differences are not just technical in nature; they trace back to long-standing national peculiarities in social structures, lines of class conflict, and collective ways of life which can only within narrow limits and for brief moments be politically manipulated.3 The European currency union, as I am certainly not the only one to claim, has superimposed on the neighboring yet different forms of national economic organization as they exist in Europe a unitary monetary order with which they cannot live equally well.4 That they could and would so, if not right away then in a few years, was and is the grand delusion of the EMU that is today breaking down, with unforeseeable damage to the peaceful and amicable common life of European peoples. Here, now, we must inevitably contend with a couple of technical considerations, even if they essentially just repeat what I have already written in my book. Pace Merkel, Steinbrück and Habermas, the European currency union is not “Europe;” it is a multilateral agreement about a common currency and its administration. Insofar as it does “unify” Europe, it does so by depriving participating states of the possibility of pursuing their own monetary policy fitted to their specific needs. In particular, it hinders the revaluation and devaluation of their currencies against one another. In this respect, the internal organization of the currency union amounts to a return to the international gold standard that existed (at least on paper) between more or less industrialized countries up through the early 1930s. Problems with an international gold standard or a currency union develop when the participating countries differ in their “competitiveness.” In a common market, a less competitive country can find itself in danger of falling farther and farther behind the leading countries, since it is denied the possibility of improving its position through such emergency measures as devaluing its national currency. If such a country is to avoid progressive impoverishment, it must instead increase its economic performance through cost reduction—e.g., with respect

Latin American Populism: Some Conceptual and Normative Lessons

Abstract: Populism seems to be a pervasive phenomenon in the contemporary world Many intellectuals are asking themselves whether the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements in the US or the indignados in Spain are examples of populist uprisings Answering this question is not straightforward, since there is an ongoing debate about how to define populism and study its impact on democracy This article sheds light on this discussion by undertaking a critical revision of the Latin American debate on populism Two key arguments are developed First, populism should be conceived of as a set of ideas characterized by a moral understanding of the world, according to which the people form a homogenous and virtuous community, and the elite a pathological entity Second, populism is not necessarily an authoritarian force, but rather an ideology that takes for granted the existence of a unified popular will, and that is at odds with deliberative and liberal conceptions of democracy

Law and politics in Europe’s crisis : on the history of the impact of an unfortunate configuration

Abstract: European Integration was constructed as a primarily economic project. In its formative phase ordoliberal scholars started to promote the understanding of the ensemble of European economic freedoms togther with a system of undistorted competition as the legal framework and normative core of the EEC, i.e. as Europe’s ‘economic’ constitution. Economic and Monetary Union as institutionalized by the Maastricht Treaty were expected to complete this project. However, the whole edifice started to erode immediately after its establishment. Following the financial and the sovereign debt crises, EMU with its commitments to price stability and its focus on monetary politics is by now widely perceived as a failed construction precisely because of its reliance on inflexible rules. The European crisis management seeks to compensate these failures by regime which disregards the European order of competences, des-empowers national institutions and burdens in particular Southern Europe with austerity measures. This new mode of economic governance establishes pan-European commitments to budgetary discipline and macroeconomic balancing. The ideal of an ordering of the European economy ‘through law’ is thereby abolished while the economic and social prospects of these efforts seem gloomy and the Union’s political legitimacy is eroding.

Social Freedom and the Demands of Justice. A Study of Axel Honneth's Recht der Freiheit

Abstract: In his most recent voluminous work Das Recht der Freiheit (2011) Axel Honneth brings his version of the recognition paradigm to full fruition. Criticizing Kantian theories of justice, he develops a Hegelian alternative which has at its core a different conception of freedom. In this paper, I will scrutinize Honneths latest work to see whether he offers a promising alternative to mainstream liberal theories of justice. I will focus on two key differences with Kantian theories of justice. Substantively, Honneth criticizes the Kantian concept of ‘reflexive freedom’ and proposes instead as the core of his own theory the concept of ‘social freedom’. Methodologically, he proposes a method of ‘normative reconstruction’, and explicitly develops this in contrast to Kantian constructivism. I investigate the robustness of these shifts by seeing how they are actually used in Honneth’s reconstruction of the market sphere. I conclude that his method of normative reconstruction does not provide the kind of guidance Honneth thinks it does. His conception of social freedom fares slightly better but can either be reduced to the mainstream’s idea of reflexive freedom, or else faces some serious challenges.

Solidarity in Europe after the Crisis

Abstract: The nation-based welfare state (NBWS) and the European Union (EU) are two precious legacies of the 20th century. Their mutual relationship is however fraught by unresolved tensions (and a potential “clash”), which the recent crisis has been markedly exacerbating. When, how and why did the original “elective affinity” between the WS and the EU spheres start to weaken? Is “reconciliation” possible and how? These questions lie at the centre of current academic and public debates. The WS serves essential economic, social and political functions. But the financing of its programmes strains public budgets and raises sustainability challenges, especially in the wake of growing demographic ageing. The EU (EMU in particular) is in its turn essential for growth, jobs and macro-economic stability, but tends to undermine the WS’s very institutional foundation: the sovereign right of the state to determine the boundaries, forms and extent of national solidarity, including tax and spending levels. The aim of this article is to cast new light on such issues by focusing on the “intellectual” logic which has guided WS-building, on the one hand, and EU-building, on the other, and by highlighting the responsibility of this logic in generating the clash. Drawing on Weber’s insights on the relationship between ideas, values and politics, I will try to reconnect these three elements for interpreting the current predicament and for putting forward some suggestions on how to overcome it. The article is organised as follows. The next section presents the topic and the approach. The second section illustrates the ideational logics which have guided, respectively, the development of the welfare state at the national level and the process of economic integration at the supranational level. The third and fourth sections will in turn summarize my diagnosis and outline an agenda for intellectual “work” on both the epistemic and axiological fronts, which I see as a prerequisite for responsible and effective political choices. The conclusion wraps up.