Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 1998"

The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era

Abstract: Preface and Acknowledgements. 1. Anarchy, Community and Critical International Theory. The Critique of Neo--Realism. The Problem of Community in International Relations. The Changing Context of the Modern State. Theorizing the Reconfiguration of Political Community. 2. Universality, Difference and the Emancipatory Project. Difference, Self--determination and Exclusion. The State, Citizenship and Humanity. Universalism, Domination and Otherness. 3. The Dialogic Ethic and the Transformation of Political Community. Limits on Exclusion: Membership, Citizenship and Global Responsibilities. The Dialogic Community. Dialogue and Discourse. Universalism Revisited. 4. The Modes of Exclusion and the Boundaries of Community. The Critical Sociology of Inclusion and Exclusion. Social Learning and International Relations. Inclusion and Exclusion in World Civilisations. Towards a Sociology of Bounded Communities. 5. State Power, Modernity and its Potentials. Origins of the Paradoxes of the Modern State. On the Ambiguities of State Power. On the Possibility of New State Structures. The Post--Exclusionary State: Answerability to Universal Rationales. 6. Community and Citizenship in the Post--Westphalian Era. Citizenship and its Development. The Problem of the Exclusionary Sovereign State. Beyond the Westphalian State. Citizenship in the Post--Westphalian State. Cosmopolitan Citizenship. Conclusion. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Adorno: A Critical Introduction

Abstract: Abbreviations and a Note on Translations. Introduction. 1. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. 2. A Critical Theory of Society. 3. The Culture Industry. 4. Art, Truth and Ideology. 5. Truth--Content in Music and Literature. 6. Negative Dialectic as Metacritique. 7. Constellations: Thinking the Non--identical. 8. Materialism and Metaphysics. Conclusion. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Social Theory in the Twentieth Century

Abstract: Introduction. 1. A Timeless Order and its Achievement: Structuralism and Genetic Structuralism. 2. The Biological Metaphor: Functionalism and Neo-Functionalism. 3. The Enigma of Everyday Life: Symbolic Interactionism, the Dramaturgical Approach and Ethnomethodology. 4. The Skilful Accomplishment of Social Order: Giddens's Structuration Theory. 5. The History of the Present: Foucault's Archaeology and Genealogy. 6. The Spread of Reason: Habermas's Critical Theory. 7. The Invasion of Economic Man: Rational Choice Theory. 8. Eroding Foundations: Positivism, Falsificationism and Realism. Conclusion. Notes. Index.

Ethics after Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading

Abstract: In "Ethics after Idealism", Rey Chow explores once again the issue of cultural otherness that has been central to her work since the publication of "Woman and Chinese Modernity". At a time when cultural identity has become irreversibly imbricated with the manners in which we read our many 'others', Chow argues, what demands to be examined critically is no longer identity politics per se but, more precisely, the idealism - especially in the sense of idealizing otherness - that lies at the heart of identity politics. Recognizing the necessity for a critique of idealism - the necessity to see how idealism is constructed, consolidated and perpetuated, and mobilized with disturbing consequences - constitutes for Chow an ethics in the postcolonial, postmodern age. In particular, she uses 'ethics' to refer to the act of taking decisions - in this context, decisions of reading - that may not immediately conform with prevalent social mores of idealizing our others but that, nonetheless, would enable such others to emerge in their full, albeit irrational, complexities. From theorists Slavoj Zizek and Gayatri Spivak to Frantz Fanon, from songwriter Luo Dayou to poet Leung Ping-kwan, and from the film "M. Butterfly" to the films "The Joy Luck Club", "To Live", and "Rouge", Chow discusses a collection of source materials whose affinities are as surprising as their appearances are diverse. The readings she offers involve multiple cultural forms - including fiction, film, popular music, poetry, and critical essays - as well as a range of cultural topics - including pedagogy, multiculturalism, fascism, sexuality, miscegenation, community, fantasy, governance, nostalgia, and postcoloniality. Methodologically situated in the contentious spaces between critical theory and cultural studies, and always attentive to the implications of ethnicity in contemporary cultural politics, Chow's work should be of interest to readers from many scholarly disciplines.

The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the “Linguistic Turn”

Abstract: History, Hayden White remarks, has no distinctively historical method, but borrows its models and methods from a variety of other disciplines. These disciplines, however, have varied over time. Latenineteenth-century German historiography looked to the rigorous procedures of the natural sciences to reconstruct the past “as it actually happened“; mid-twentieth-century historians turned to the social sciences, especially to anthropology and sociology, for their models and methods. More recently, historians' appropriation of (and experimentation with) concepts derived from literary and critical theory has occasioned much heated discussion within the field.

Social Theory and Nursing Practice

Abstract: Introduction PART 1: GETTING TO THE ROOTS Structural Functionalism and Role Theory Marxism and the Political Economy of Health Weber and Professional Closure PART 2: GETTING TO THE ACTION Symbolic Interactionism, Labelling and Stigma Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology PART 3: BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER Critical Theory and Communicative Action Structuration Theory and Critical Realism PART 4: TAKING IT ALL APART Feminisms, Caring and Women's Knowledge Postmodernism and Foucault

Critically Oriented and Postmodern Perspectives: Sorting Out the Differences and Applications for Practice

Abstract: The purpose of this article is three-fold: (a) to locate and describe several aspects of what the author terms critically oriented theories, which in addition to critical theory and feminist theory...

Writing the environment : ecocriticism and literature

Abstract: The contemporary environmental crisis asks fundamental questions about culture. This first book draws together the rich variety of environmentalist positions, from ecofeminism to deep ecology, and theorizes their contribution to critical theory, literature and popular culture. The first part of the book examines theoretical controversies in environmentalist literary criticism. Contributors explore a wide variety of issues including sexual politics and nature, the link between environmental and cultural degradation, the influence of Heidegger on environmentalism, and the degree of continuity between post-structuralist theory and ecological perspectives. Part two presents a green rereading of literary history, including chapters on the manipulation of natural phenomena as a vehicle of social control, "nature poetry" as political intervention, and erotic fiction as an expression of the colonialist's conception of "jungle country" and Otherness in general. The book concludes by looking at contemporary culture: from poetry to children's books, including an analysis of television nature programmes.

Critical leadership for education in a postmodern world: emancipation, resistance and communal action

Abstract: This article explores possibilities for critical approaches to leadership in contemporary schools. Focusing on recent critiques of so‐called traditional critical approaches by ‘postmodern’ scholars, I contrast their preferences for resistant over emancipatory (revolutionary) action with the former. In doing so I compare Marx's, Habermas’, Baudrillard's and Foucault's views of human regulation, the roles of the individual self or subject and the constitution and function of groups in their respective theories and assess their utility for critical leadership in education. I conclude that the key for a politics that will enable individuals to resist oppressive school practices rests with the ability of subjects to recognize and seek out forms of community they share with others. I conclude the article with an example of how one school employed these kinds of strategies.

Just Interpretations: Law Between Ethics and Politics

Abstract: In pluralistic societies that lack common ethical, social, and political values, legal interpretation is constantly under siege. Just interpretations - that is, interpretations that reflect a shared vision of justice - may become just interpretations in the sense of mere interpretations, rooted in the orientations and interests of different groups. Confronting this crisis in legal interpretation, "Just Interpretations" offers a critical appraisal of the principal theoretical trends in contemporary American and European jurisprudence and proposes an alternative approach.Michel Rosenfeld's critique focuses on neoformalism, pragmatism, discourse theory, and legal autopoiesis, and includes discussions of such authors as Habermas, Rorty, Posner, Luhmann, Dworkin, Fish, and Weinrib. To overcome the drawbacks of these theories, Rosenfeld elaborates a theory of "comprehensive pluralism," based on a substantive vision of pluralism. This approach, building on the insights of deconstruction, turns the fact of pluralism into a guiding normative imperative. "Just Interpretations" will attract the attention of constitutional scholars, political scientists, and critical theorists, and will also address an interdisciplinary audience interested in texts, interpretations, and postmodern concerns with justice.

Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism

Abstract: Fredric Jameson has been described as "probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today" and he is widely acknowledged as the foremost proponent for the tradition of critical theory known as Western Marxism.Yet his work has not been given the systematic review like other contemporary thinkers like Fooucault and Derrida. Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism is a thoroughly up-to-date, detailed review and analysis of the work of this influential intellectual. Covering Jameson's work and thought from his early projects of form and history to his more recent engagements with postmodernism and cultural politics, this synthesis offers a balanced assessment of his ideas, their development and their continuing influence.

Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory. The philosophy of German literary theory. Routledge, London 1997

Abstract: Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory. The philosophy of German literary theory. Routledge, London 1997

Culture and Democratic Theory: Toward a Theory of Symbolic Democracy

Abstract: Since the late 1970s, a highly productive strand of critical theory has emerged which has largely abandoned the Frankfurt School’s critique of cultural domination. Influenced by the work of Habermas, which replaces the problem of individual happiness with “a concentration on the problem of political democracy and on the analysis of institutions permitting individual autonomy and democratic interaction,” 1 this strand has turned to democratic theory and discourse ethics as a means to resuscitate the transformative potential of existing political institutions. Civil society, the public sphere, and the domain of law (as opposed to the culture industry and the critique of instrumental reason) figure centrally in reconstructive projects aimed at the articulation of institutional remedies for chronic forms of economic and political injustice. It is noteworthy, however, that in the search for post-Marxist foundations for the critique of “really existing democracy,” critical democratic theory has not adequately taken stock of the fact that the symbolic order of society, which shapes the meaning and status of social identities, is implicated in these forms of injustice. While this emergent strand of critical theory has remained distant from a critique of cultural domination, it does not stand alone in this failure to conceptualize all the significant features of modern relations of power. The constitutive force of the symbolic order of society, enacted at the macro-level through the institutions of the public sphere and at the micro-level in face-to-face interactions, is difficult to capture in the terms of existing political and social theory. Such theory, as Foucault emphasized, is capable of recognizing social injustice in only two registers: economic domination and the illegitimate exercise of sovereign authority. Consequently, the symbolic force that structures the formation and hierarchization of social identities fails to be understood as a type of political power. Because it is unequally distributed across the social order,this symbolic force is an undemocratic structural constraint on the social identity, social valuation, and symbolic practices of individuals and groups, a constraint which always already impacts the quantity and quality of individual and group participation in the political, economic, and cultural life of society. Moreover, the one-solution-fits-all approach to instances of social injustice that is favored by liberal and social democratic reform projects (legal equality and economic egalitarianism) inhibits the development of a theory which can articulate

Zygmunt Bauman's Postmodern Turn:

Abstract: Over the past decade, Zygmunt Bauman has published a series of books that sketch out a postmodern turn in society, theory, culture, ethics and politics. Changes in contemporary society and culture, Bauman argues, require new modes of thought, morality and politics to appropriately respond to the new social conditions. This requires a reconfiguration of critical social theory and new tasks for a postmodern sociology. Bauman thus poses fundamental challenges to contemporary social theory and provides an original and provocative post-modern version of the sociological imagination, developing sketches of the fundamental social and cultural changes of our time, and the ways that theory and politics must be changed to creatively map and democratically respond to these questions. Bauman's critical reflections on modern theory and society, and his postmodern turn, require serious critical responses to his challenges to conventional wisdom and practice. In my study, I sketch out what I consider to be important in ...

Critical Evaluation for Education Reform

Abstract: The school reform movement has done little to provide an accurate analysis of the production of inequality or the reproduction of social injustice in the public schools or the larger social order. The ideology that influences this movement has often prevented the realization of any notion of an egalitarian ideal, the elimination of inequality, or the improvement of those who are least well-off. I ask educators and evaluators of education reform efforts to reconsider critically their roles in social science research, to reclaim the battleground of public school reform by focusing on the democratic purpose of public schooling, and the institutional problems in educational programs and practice that often inhibit action toward this ideal. The first part of this article includes an extensive argument explaining the "why" of critical evaluation. The theoretical literature on inquiry in science and social science, the ideology of critical theory, critical social psychology, and Freirean pedagogy are consulted as additional tools for augmenting the practice, policies, and responsibilities of evaluators in education. I review three contemporary perspectives of evaluation in order to begin rethinking the purposes and functions that evaluation serves in education. It also demonstrates how mainstream and contemporary evaluations can be used to serve a particular set of social and political values. The second part of this article begins a preliminary journey toward describing the "how" of critical evaluation. Critical evaluators can fight for social justice by combining the merit criteria of state and federal public education law, and the methods of an adversary oriented evaluation in order to transform educational environments that serve the future potentials of all children. Therefore education involves the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world (Freire, 1985).

The Ambivalent Worker: Max Weber, Critical Theory and the Antinomies of Authority

Abstract: It is seldom noticed that the concept of the authoritarian personality sprang from research - above all by Max Weber and Erich Fromm - on the ambivalence of the German working class. Unlike earlier social critics and theorists, Weber and Fromm did not simply assume that workers are naturally anti-authoritarian: nor, unlike many later theorists, did they assume the reverse. The working class, they found, is complex divided - indeed, contradictory. Some workers are anti-authoritarian, others worship authority, and many others have deeply mixed feelings. Hence the inadequacy of what Weber called a priori class theories, which, without evidence, deduce consciousness from status, thus finding whatever they presuppose. The alternative, a la Fromm's Critical Theory, is to probe not only the antipodes on the continuum from authoritarianism to anti-authoritarianism, but also the contradictory cases in between. Only in this way can the genuinely contradictory character of class feeling and thinking be understood

Finding Freedom in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction to Critical Theory. Counterpoints, Volume 24.

Abstract: Since its introduction in 1998, Finding Freedom in the Classroom has impacted countless educators and preservice teachers by providing provocative questions about taken-for-granted educational routines as well as an alternative, imaginative view of what classrooms might become. This revised edition brings the conversation to the present day with contemporary examples and references to the best current thinking and writing on relevant issues. By defining terms in everyday language and demonstrating their relevance to everyday life in and out of the classroom, the book demystifies such formidable concepts as hegemony, epistemology, and praxis for readers with little or no background in educational philosophy. Each chapter in this edition ends with several thought-provoking discussion questions and an annotated list of suggestions for further reading, which together provide a sturdy bridge between the theoretical and the practical. Finding Freedom in the Classroom can help teachers both imagine and build new classroom worlds, empowering students and teachers alike to actively shape - rather than passively accept - their fates.

Continental philosophy : an anthology

Abstract: Introduction. Part I: The Age of the Systems: Kant and German Idealism 1. Critique of Pure Reason (Immanuel Kant) 2. An Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre (Johann Gottlieb Fichte) 3. Judgemant and Being (Friedrich Holderlin) 4. The Oldest Program Towards a System in German Idealism) 5. Systems of Transcendental Idealism (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling)6. Phenomenology of Spirit (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) Part II: Subjectivity in Question: Existentialism, Phenomenology, and Hermeneutics 1. The World as Will and Representation (Arthur Schopenhauer) 2. Either/or (Soren Kierkegaard) 3. The Gay Science Twilight of the Idols The Will to Power (Friedrich Nietsche) 4. The Perception of Change (Henri Bergson) 5. Cartesian Mediatations (Edmund Husserl) 6. Being and Time (Martin Heidegger) 7. Man's Place in Nature (Max Scheler) 8. Philosophy of Existence (Karl Jaspers) 9. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Alexandre Kojeve) 10. Being and Nothingness (Jean-Paul Sartre) 11. The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir) 12. The Visible and the Invisible (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) 13. The Trace of the Other (Emmanuel Levinas) 14. The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem (Hans-Georg Gadamer) 15. Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics (Paul Ricoeur) Part III: Political Thought: Marxism and Critical Theory. 1. The Philosophy of Right (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) 2. Alienated Labor: The German Ideology (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) 3. Democracy and Dictatorship (Rosa Luxembourg) 4. History and Class Consciousness (Georg Lukacs) 5. What is a Man (Antonio Gramsci) 6. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Walter Benjamin) 7. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) 8. The Human Condition (Hannah Arendt) 9. For Marx (Louis Althusser) 10. One-Dimensional Man (Herbert Marcuse) 11. Knowledge and Human Interests (Jurgen Habermas) Part VI: Structuralism and Psychoanalysis. 1. Course in General Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure) 2. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Claude Levi-Strauss) 3. The Structuralist Activity (Roland Barthes) 4. Beyond the Pleasure Principle Femininity (Sigmund Freud) 5. The Mirror Stage The Significance of the Phallus (Jacques Lacan) Part V: Deconstruction, Feminism, and Postmodernism. 1. The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade (Georges Bataille) 2. The Space of Literature (Maurice Blanchot) 3. Of Grammatology (Jacques Derrida) 4. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) 5. Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/ Ways Out/ Forays (Helene Cixous) 6. The History of Sexuality (Michel Foucault) 7. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Jean-Francois Lyotard) 8. Women's Time (Julia Kristeva) 9. The Enigma of Woman (Sarah Kofman) 10. Sexual Difference (Luce Irigaray) 11. The Inoperative Community (Jean-Luc Nancy) 12. The Ecstasy of Communication (Jean Baudrillard) 13. The Nation-Thing (Slavoj Zizek) Index.

Hermeneutics and Religious Understanding Part Two: towards a critical theory for religious education

Abstract: The previous article offered an account of the hermeneutics implicit in religious education from 1960 to the present. It was suggested that an uncritical reliance on the traditions of romanticism and postmodernism serves to impair the emergence of religious literacy. Here an attempt is made to plot the contours of a critical hermeneutical theory for religious education, drawing on the resources of linguistic hermeneutical theory provided by the critical realism of Gadamer and Habermas.

'Like a tangled mobile': Reason and reification in the quasi-dialectical theory of Jürgen Habermas

Abstract: Habermas' claim to provide a critique of reification by means other than marxian ones requires him to transpose not only meaningful freedom, but also a dialectical view of social becoming, into terms com patible with linguistically mediated intersubjectivity. In order to remain critical of reification as colonization, he thus finds himself committed to the view that colonization is the outcome of the development of two perma nent and competing principles of sociation. Compelled to draw upon the resources both of the dialectical tradition and of transcendental pragmat ics, the theory of communicative action is thereby constrained to remain both quasi-dialectical and quasi-transcendental. This founding gesture generates, in turn, at least two unavoidable aporias. The first can be under stood as a radical and structural deficit for critical judgement concerning the interplay among the decentered cognitive value spheres. The second is an inversion of the apparent claim of accessing a 'reason beyond reason' of...

Claiming Inversion Lesbian Constructions of Female Identity as Claims for Authority

Abstract: Folklorists do not often use critical theory to help them in their analysis of folk culture(s). This article seeks to demonstrate one way that grounded folkloric research, ethnography, interviewing, and analysis can be enhanced by the application of current theoretical concepts. Primarily, this critique of lesbian identities and cultural configurations has been expanded by the application of critical theory, feminist theory, and cultural studies. These theories certainly do not provide us with absolute answers to our inquiries, but they do allow for a different kind of analysis, a new angle, a provocative framework that can, hopefully, bring folklore studies into dialogue with other disciplines concerned with the myriad cultural complexities we all face daily.

Post-apartheid reason: Critical Theory in South Africa

Abstract: (1998). Post‐apartheid reason: Critical theory in South Africa. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 3-18.