Capital & Class

http://cnc.sagepub.com/ Rethinking the Normative Content of Critical Theory: Marx, Habermas and Beyond
Capital & Class 2003 27: 175 DOI: 10.1177/030981680307900111 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/27/1/175.citation

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signicant features or not, it provides a framework for discussion. 3. This leads us to the question: Who is it for? The reading is quite demanding and requires some background knowledge of Marxist theories, if not a certain acquaintance with regulation theory. This is especially true for Jessops introductions which, although they are obviously intended to provide the reader with a general orientation, tend to be theoretically dense. 4. Jessops enthusiasm for the subject and involvement in the discussion leads him, at times, to oer too much guidance. Judgements as to whether contributions are simplistic, die-hard Marxist, overly polemic or one-sided

or, on the contrary, highly innovative or ground-clearing, could have been left to the reader. Some of the introductions are uneven and there are times when Bob Jessop as contributor to regulationist theory supplants Bob Jessop as editor. But these are minor reservations about a major contribution to our understanding of regulation theory.

References: Boyer, R () La Thorie de la rgulation. Une analyse critique, Paris Boyer, R and Saillard, Y (eds.) () La Thorie de la rgulation. Ltat des savoirs, Paris

Bob Cannon

Rethinking the Normative Content of Critical Theory: Marx, Habermas and Beyond
Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001, pp. xiv+211. ISBN 0-333-91809-6 (hbk) 45.00
Reviewed by Gideon Calder It is in the nature of the theory business that it is hard to nd fresh interventions which are not advertised as groundbreaking. As strap-lines, Challenging the foundational categories of x and Calling into question the boundaries between a and b have numbingly overfamiliar rings to them. Going by backcover blurbs, social theorys ground has been turned over so much in the past years or so that by now it must be mushy pulp. It is a wonder that there is anything left to overturn. Sure enough, this book is billed as incorporating a groundbreaking analysis of the normative content of Marxs critical strategy. Oddly, this is exactly what it does. It is a penetrating and provocative work, which both sheds light on existing problems in welltrodden areas and raises new, indeed challenging, points of contention. Cannons prose is mercifully masturbation-free. He weaves thoughtful takes on the German philosophical canon from Kant, chte and Hegel downinto an overall narrative of the right and wrong turnings of modern critical theor y. His agenda is timely, wellarticulated, andbecause of its depth and nuancedi cult to sum up in a review.

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A selective account, then, will have to suce. Cannon argues that Marx is insuciently historicist in his conception of labour, and as a result neglects its normative dimension. He makes labour itself the transcendental source of value, at the neglect of the moral perspectives of participants in modern social life. This squeezes out consideration of the way the labour movement allows for the expansion of ways in which modern subjects might constitute themselves in active struggle against the imperatives of the capitalist system. It squeezes out, in other words, the normative importance of intersubjectivity. Moreover, this move is rehearsed, rather than overcome, in subsequent developments of critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition. By relying on an objectied sense of social order, and a transcendental model of ethical life, both Jrgen Habermas and Axel Honneth maintain an unfortunate wedge between the world of social interaction and struggle and the means by which we might criticize it. Crucially, this splitting is at odds with the distinctively modern ethos of self-constitution that underlies constructive explorations of the possibility for progressive change. Cannon sees a nagging ethical decit in all this, since it neglects the ways in which workers play a role in remoralizing the economic system by keeping vivid and adaptive their sense of moral priorities. Eschewing the external standpoint of a purportedly objective observer, his self-proclaimed aim is twofold: to rethink social struggles in terms of the expansion of intersubjectivity, and to extend the scope of intersubjectivity to embrace Marxs labour-theoretic account of self-constitution (p. ). The stakes here might best be explained

by way of an example. Marx is deemed to seek to circumvent the norms and values of participants (whether capitalists or workers) by laying claim to a deeper truth. Thus when he, unavoidably, resorts to moral critique of capitalism, he appeals to the self-objectifying proper ties of labour. The irony, for Cannon, is that by making self-constitution an ontological property of labour rather than an intersubjective property of the labour movement, Marx betrays the very principle of self-constitution by which he seeks to criticize capitalism. Cannon insists that labour, rather than being a matter of an instrumental relation between individuated subjects and nature, acquires its instrumental character from the way it is socially organized and applied under capitalism. The trick is to combine due attention to intersubjectivity with (a decit in Habermas) due attention to labour. Much of the book is devoted to teasing out such perceived missed opportunities in Marxs work and since. In so doing, Cannons case is subtler and deeper than there is space here to convey. It culminates in cashings-out of his meta-analysis in terms of concrete political agendas. New Right ideology is treated as epitomizing the de-normatization of sociality, and the re-naturalization of the economy (such that it is removed from the sphere of public discourse) of which Left theorists, despite themselves, have been guilty in dierent ways. In particular, it seeks to replace social networks (in which individuals are constituted as students, passengers, patients, and so on) with market networks in which people are constituted as customers, relating to their own private objects rather than to collective projects and solutions. Meanwhile, of course, much of the theoretical Left has thrown

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up its hands, abandoned grand narratives and extolled the virtues, for its own sake, of the local and particular. In fact, for Cannon, the task of the Left lies in forging new forms of intersubjectivity, which might full the promise of modernity. Exactly how this promise might be redeemedor (more seriously) what, indeed, we should understand by doing justice to self-constitution are questions left dangling in a critique whose labour is primarily negative and interpretative. Simply historicizing this question at a stroke, and conceiving self-constitution in terms of historically relative intersubjective congurations, begs the sorts of questions towards which Marxs early anthropology was directed: put bluntly, what do human nature, and relations between self and world, have to be like in order for labour to have the values it does? Cannons is an armedly Hegelian case, rejecting a deep disjunction between subject and object, and objecting to the residual positivism of aspects of Marxs analysis. That he wants to pay due attention to labours role in self-

constitution, and that he avoids the empty luxuries of discourse analysis, are points very much to his credit. But in the end, the case against realismin this sense, the claim that nature, world, and indeed economic structures might in any way exist independently of their intersubjective constitutiongoes only halfmade. There are ways, explored in critical realism and elsewhere, of avoiding positivism and atomism while retaining the analytic power of a nuanced approach to the possibility of structures beyond given epistemic horizonsand avoiding the relativism in the direction of which much of Cannons case seems to point. But within his adopted paradigm, and in his aim of rethinking the normative content of critical theory, Cannon makes an impressive contribution, bringing key themes and questions into tighter focus. Mushy pulp they certainly arent. Still, theyre very much ripe for the sort of further interrogation that should follow if the book gets the wide readership it deserves.

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
Verso, London and New York, 2000, pp. 433 ISBN 1-85984-798-6 (hbk) 19:00
Reviewed by John Michael Roberts In Penguin published a book called The London Hanged. Documenting the changing nature of public executions in eighteenth century London, a central theme of the book was to explain why more and more people were being hanged during this period for crimes against private property: many of these crimes had earlier been deemed customary rights. Drawing upon a wealth of primary documentary evidence the book rediscovered the lost voices of