(Robert Sinnerbrink, Nicholas Smith) Critique Toda

Critique Today
Social and
Critical Theory
A Critical Horizons Book Series
Editorial Board
JEAN-PHILIPPE DERANTY, JOHN HEWITT,
DANIELLE PETHERBRIDGE, JOHN RUNDELL,
JEREMY SMITH, ROBERT SINNERBRINK
International Advisory Board

WILLIAM CONNOLLY, MANFRED FRANK, LEELA GANDHI,
AGNES HELLER, DICK HOWARD, MARTIN JAY,
RICHARD KEARNEY, PAUL PATTON, MICHEL WIEVIORKA
VOLUME 3
Critical Today
edited by
Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty,

Nicholas H. Smith, Peter Schmiedgen
BRILL
LEIDEN BOSTON
2006
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Social and Critical Theory A Critical Horizons Book Series provides a forum for the
critical analysis of issues and debates within critical and social theories and the traditions
through which these concerns are often voiced. The series is committed to publishing works
that offer critical and insightful analyses of contemporary societies, as well as exploring the
many dimensions of the human condition through which these critiques can be made.
Social and Critical Theory publishes works that stimulate new horizons of critical thought
by actively promoting debate across established boundaries.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Critique today / [edited by] Robert Sinnerbrink . . . [et al.].
p. cm. (Social and critical theory, ISSN 1572-459X ; v. 3)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 90-04-14911-2 (alk. paper)
1. Sociology Philosophy. 2. Critical theory. 3. Poststructuralism. 4. Social history
Philosophy.
HM585.C76 2005
301.01 22
2005058134
ISSN 1572-459X
ISBN 90 04 14911 2
Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus
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PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
Contents
Chapter 1
Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith
Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory
Chapter 2
Genevieve Lloyd
Providence Lost: September 11 and the History of Evil
23
Chapter 3
Nicholas H. Smith
Hope and Critical Theory
45
Chapter 4
Craig Browne
Hope, Critique, and Utopia
63
Chapter 5
John Grumley
Hegel, Habermas, and the Spirit of Critical Theory
87
Chapter 6
Pauline Johnson
Habermas: A Reasonable Utopian?
101
Chapter 7
Shane ONeill
Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation
119
Chapter 8
Emmanuel Renault
Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice. A Critique
of Habermas Theory of Justice
137
vi Contents
Chapter 9
Jean-Philippe Deranty
The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneths Social Philosophy. Rereading
Mead with Merleau-Ponty
153
Chapter 10
Paul Redding
Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory
183
Chapter 11
Simon Lumsden
Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative: Jean-Luc Nancys
Reading of Hegel
205
Chapter 12
Peter Schmiedgen
Polytheism, Monotheism and Public Space: Between Levinas
and Arendt
225
Chapter 13
Robert Sinnerbrink
From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower
239
Chapter 14
Paul Patton
Foucault, Critique and Rights
267
Notes on Contributors
289
Index
293
Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith

Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of
Contemporary Critical Theory
In one of the nal texts written before his

death, an essay devoted to Kants essay What
is Enlightenment?, Michel Foucault dened
the ethos of modernity as a permanent critique of ourselves. By this Foucault meant
a critical social ontology, an attitude of critical experimentation with the established limits of knowledge and social practice. Such a
model of critique, Foucault argued, must be
understood as an ethos, a historico-practical
test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus
as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.1 The later Foucaults
qualied afliation with the critical Enlightenment tradition can be fruitfully compared with
the model of philosophical and social critique
developed within the critical theory tradition.
According to the latter tradition, a critical
theory of society not only diagnoses the
pathologies of modernity, reecting upon the
experiences of injustice motivating various
social movements, but also attempts to offer
a positive alternative to prevailing forms of
social domination and political injustice. The
challenge for critical theory today, as Axel
Honneth remarks, concerns the question of
2 Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith
how we are to obtain the conceptual framework for an analysis which is capable both of coming to grips with the structure of social domination as well
as with identifying the social resources for its practical transformation.2
Such a model of critique implies a diagnosis of the present, an unmasking
of the operations of power, an exposure of the disturbing proximity between
instrumental rationality and social domination. Not only for Foucault and
Adorno, but for Honneth as well, as Jean-Philippe Deranty argues in this
volume, the point of a critique of rationality is to expose the subtle complicity between reason, power, and the iniction of violence upon the human
body.3
These aims, of course, are very demanding, particularly in light of recent historical and political events. The profound upheavals in global politics in recent
years, and burgeoning discussions of the ethical turn in contemporary social
philosophy, prompt a number of questions explored in the following collection of essays. What is the status of philosophical and social critique today?
What forms of critical dialogue are possible between French post-structuralist
and Critical Theory traditions? How can philosophy today most effectively
submit our social-historical actualityour todayto critique? The essays
collected together in this volume address these and other questions by engaging in a philosophical confrontation with different aspects of our social and
historical constellation. They are all contributions to the ongoing critical
reection on the history and the legacy, the defects and the possibilities, of
the critical Enlightenment project. At the same time, all of the essays included
here are informed by an acute sense of the challenges facing critical theory
and social philosophy today. They respond to this challenge not by retreating from the possibility of a critical theory of society, nor by nding refuge
in ethics as a substitute for social and political philosophy, but by fostering
a productive engagement with different philosophical traditions in order to
contribute to a critical ontology of ourselves.
Critique Today is an attempt to reect upon and explore these issues, to show
the pertinence of a transgured conception of philosophical and social critique for confronting some of the historical events and forms of social experience that demand our philosophical reection. A number of themes recur
throughout these essays: the ongoing dialogue between critical theory and
post-structuralism, the productive appropriation of German and French traditions of thought, the relationship between philosophy and social theory,
Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory 3
and the prospects for a critical engagement with modernity in light of global
political transformations. The latter theme is explored in Genevieve Lloyds
opening essay, which examines the fascinating Derrida/Habermas debate
over terrorism, the Enlightenment, and globalisation from the perspective of
the secularisation of the historical theme of providence and the history of
philosophical conceptions of evil. Other themes also resonate throughout the
volume: the importance of social hope for critical theory (the contributions
by Nicholas Smith, Craig Browne, and Shane ONeill); critical engagements
with Habermas social and political philosophy (John Grumley, Pauline
Johnson, and Emmanuel Renault); explorations of Hegelian theories of subjectivity and Honneths theory of recognition in connection with recent French
philosophy (Simon Lumsden, Paul Redding, Jean-Philippe Deranty); critical
interpretations of Foucaultian analyses of biopower and rights (Robert
Sinnerbrink and Paul Patton). Taken together, these essays provide a rich
cross-section of the dynamic convergences and divergences in recent social
philosophy. They reect some of the vibrant interest in critical theory outside of the more traditional locations of Germany, England, and the United
States, notably in Australia, Ireland, and France. In this respect they contribute a welcome perspective on the increasingly cosmopolitan debates within
critical social philosophy.
Critique, September 11, and Social Hope

According to a familiar model, critique involves the determination of rational standards of evaluation and the application of those standards to given
modes of thought and practice. The main task for social philosophy, on this
view, is rst to clarify and justify the standards by which societies ought to
be criticised, and then to apply these principles to the basic institutions of
society. In this way, the validity or otherwise of a particular institution, or a
basic social structure, can be subject to critique. For instance, institutionalised discrimination on the basis of race, gender or religious identity can be
critiqued for falling short of a principle of equal freedom (or equal dignity)
justied by philosophical analysis. To give another example, a basic social
structure that gives rise to massive economic inequalities can be critiqued
by appeal to a philosophically well-grounded principle of just distribution.4
In both these cases, the meaning of the object of critiquesocial discrimination and economic inequalityis relatively uncontroversial: one neednt be
a philosopher or a social theorist to understand it. For the sake of this mode
of critique at least, the empirical meaning of the objectsay, sexism, racism,
and povertyis clear, though of course the details and extent of its occurrence
are a matter for empirical investigation. What critique brings to empirical
social science, on this model, is a reexively redeemable norm (or series of
norms) against which the validity of a given social practice can be assessed.
Critique Today opens with Genevieve Lloyds essay, Providence Lost, that
articulates a complementary conception of the tasks of philosophical critique.
According to this conception, critique aims not so much at the justication
and application of norms, nor even the diagnosis of social pathologies. Rather,
as Lloyd makes clear, it takes its departure from the occurrence of a particular
historical event whose very meaning is in question, and develops a historical
reection on the meaning of the present in light of such an event. And there
are certain events whose meaning is so problematicas Lloyd discusses with
reference to Susan Neiman as well as the debate between Habermas and
Derridathat they seem to challenge the limits of our received forms of historical intelligibility.5 These are events in which the impossible happens; and
in happening, they can force observers to reconsider their most basic assumptions about themselves and the world. The terrible events of November 1,
1755, the day of the Lisbon earthquake, provoked such philosophical reection,
as did the discovery of the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz.6 According
to Lloyd, September 11 signies an event of comparable unintelligibility, in
so far as it too elicits a mind-numbing incomprehension which throws into
question fundamental, for the most part unnoticed features of our self-interpretive scheme. Drawing on Habermas and Derridas reections on the philosophical signicance of September 11, Lloyd connects these features to central
themes of Enlightenment thought, especially its notions of providence and
cosmopolitanism.
As becomes clear in his discussion with Giovanna Borradorri, Habermas
response to the event of September 11 is to emphasise that religious-political
fundamentalism must be understood as a distinctly modern phenomenon.
According to Habermas, it is a reaction against the Enlightenment ideal of a
secularised public sphere, and the unequal distribution of the benets and
the burdens brought by mass communications and economic globalisation.
As Lloyd observes, this means that the impact of terrorism, in Habermas
view, can be analysed with reference to the pathology of communicative

disorders. Religious fundamentalism is a distinctively modern disruption of
the modern ideal of the secular public sphere as a space of rational communicative interaction; it poses an external threat to the ideal of secularisation
that is intrinsic to the Enlightenment project. Hence the appropriate response
to September 11, Habermas argues, is a reafrmation of the ideal of a pluralistic
public space of reason open to communicative contestation and social transformation, and an acknowledgement of the way that social and economic
inequality generate religious-political fundamentalism as a response to
globalisation.
While Lloyd deals sympathetically with Habermas interpretation of the
symbolic content of September 11, she suggests that Derridas response
is more nely attuned to the singularity of the event and the challenge this
presents to philosophy. For this challenge, as Lloyd reads Derrida, amounts
to nothing less than a total and ongoing threat to the world, though in a
peculiarly Derridean sense, indebted to Heidegger and Benjamin, that Lloyd
strives to clarify through Derridas reections on the messianic structure of
events, and the openness to futurity signied by the to-come. In addition
to the empirical trauma of the people directly affected, September 11 is said
to signify a kind of metaphysical trauma, a sudden realisation of the obsolescence of deeply entrenched concepts, ideals, and interpretive norms. It is
as if the world not only changed that day, but in accordance with the logic
of autoimmunity, it brought about its self-destruction as a world.
As Lloyd observes, Derridas point here is hard to summarise, and we must
be careful to distinguish the philosophical content of Derridas talk of worlddisintegration from the apocalyptic political rhetoric used to justify unrestricted war on some threat without limit. According to Lloyd, Derrida points
to the way September 11 shows how fragile is the presumed invulnerability of the American new world order. It marks a threshold indicating the
ongoing destabilisation of the post-Cold War world of American global triumphalism. The Cold War threat of nuclear proliferation between states has
given way to an indeterminate threat of proliferation from anonymous and
incalculable forces. This in turn generates an autoimmune response, according to Derrida, in which Western democracies attack their own principles and
institutions (international law, civil liberties, freedom of the press), while at
the same time generating precisely the kind of indeterminate terroristic threat
that they are supposed to be suppressing in the name of freedom. Contra
Habermas, this post-September 11 condition of autoimmunity, for Derrida,
evinces the perverse logic of the global new world order, which ends up
producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm.7
Lloyds subtle discussion of Derridas interpretation of the philosophical
meaning of September 11 raises many provocative questions, among these
the question of the threat posed by global capitalism itself. Indeed, if the
event forces us to rethink further the Enlightenment ideals of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace, perhaps we should be asking how good will
between nations can be reconciled with a global economic system that makes
man wolf to man. Ernst Blochs observation, made nearly fty years ago,
seems remarkably apposite today: namely, that capitalist peace is a paradox
which spreads fear more than ever and which enjoins nations to defend the
cause of peace at the utmost.8
If Lloyds essay concludes on a sombre note, perhaps it is because the loss
of Providence that September 11 symbolises is also a loss of a ground of social
hope. As she points out, Kant could draw on the idea of Providence to sustain his hopes for a future cosmopolitan world society. We still have the hopes,
and we still tacitly rely on the idea of Providence to shore them up. If we no
longer have that idea to lean on, what else can support the hopes for cosmopolitanism and other aspects of the Enlightenment ideal? This is the central question raised in Nicholas Smiths essay, Hope and Critical Theory.
As Smith points out, the idea of Providence is by no means the only resource
we have for grounding radical social hope, and narratives of progress, which
at some level are crucial for sustaining social hope, may be providential in
a variety of ways. Nevertheless, Smith accepts that we are going through a
crisis of hope which is connected to the crisis of narratives of which Lyotard
famously spoke.9 A symptom of this crisis, Smith suggests, is an emerging
discourse of ungroundable hope. Smith discusses Rortys views in this context, but a rationally unjustiable hope of futurity has also been articulated
in Derridas writings, as Lloyd points out. While the idea of ungroundable
hope, or hope for the impossible, clearly resonates with many critical theorists and philosophers today, Smith insists that it does not supplant the need
to justify social hope philosophically.
Craig Brownes paper, Hope, Critique, and Utopia, contains a wide-ranging discussion of the recent revival of interest in the category of hope amongst
philosophers and critical social theorists. He is, however, ambivalent about
the worth of this development. On the one hand, Browne suspects that the
theological background to the category of hope undermines its theoretical
value, a view he takes to be supported by Castoriadis work. In claiming
this Browne departs from Smith, who maintains that hope and theology are
only contingentlyif, for us, powerfullyconnected. On the other hand,
Browne argues that the widespread thematisation of hope in theory as well
as in everyday life tells us something important about the current state of
capitalist society. Drawing here on Ulrich Becks analysis of the risk society,
Browne suggests that the perception that social and economic development
is out of control, or at least no longer amenable to conscious, rational steering and assessment, leaves a slack which can be taken up, however adequately, by hope. Browne also draws attention to the paradoxical processes
of inclusion and exclusion whereby capitalist development promises abundance for all, thus generating hope, whilst indenitely postponing the delivery. The changing signicance of hope in what Browne calls the capitalist
imaginary is certainly a matter that deserves much further investigation.
Another theme in Brownes paper is the utopian dimension of Habermas
critical theory. While Browne observes that Habermas reorienting of critique
around the intersubjective procedures of democratic will formation retains
utopian elements, he seems to agree with critics who regard Habermas
discourse-theoretic approach as too limited in its conception of the radical
democratic project.10 But as Pauline Johnson brings out clearly in her essay,
Habermas: A Reasonable Utopian?, Habermas faces a real dilemma here.
For in Habermas view, critique must be capable of expressing utopian aspirations for an emancipated future while at the same time undertaking reasonable, rationally justied analyses of present possibilities: without the latter,
Johnson points out, critical theory would lose its engaged character, that is,
its confrontation with actuality. It is only with this (hardly avoidable) dilemma
between radicalism and reasonableness in view, Johnson argues, that we can
appreciate the motivations behind Habermas conception of the tasks and
methods of critical theory. While this interpretive strategy enables Johnson
to present a strong defence of Habermas method, she also suggests that the
utopian vocation of critique may generate productive tensions with reasonableness that Habermas has not quite been ready to countenance.
German Critical Theory Today

The question of critique today obviously invites a reection upon the current state of critical theory understood in the narrower sense of the Frankfurt
School project of a post-Hegelian and/or post-Marxist critical theory of society. A signicant number of contributions in this volume deal with the question of how this particular theoretical project might be pursued today, what
specic conceptual, political and methodological challenges it faces and what
potentialities it still harbours. To a great extent this question of Critical Theory
today remains the question of the interpretation of Jrgen Habermas work.
Another central question emerges within these debates: it is less the interpretation and use of Marx today that is at issue, even though some articles
clearly show post-Marxist concerns, but rather the interpretation and use of
Hegelone of the pressing philosophical issues of our time.
In his article Hegel, Habermas, and the Spirit of Critical Theory, John
Grumley revisits some of the key aspects of Habermas complex relationship
with Hegel. Indeed, Habermas critique of Hegel raises problems and arguments that are still at issue in conceptualising a consistent critical approach
to the modern world. These include Habermas critique of Hegels absolute
idealism, his partial acceptance of the Hegelian critique of Kantian morality,
and Hegels comprehensive theory of modern institutions. Grumley reminds
us of Habermas scepticism towards intersubjectivistic interpretations of Hegel,
clearly the dominant current in English-speaking Hegel scholarship.11 Such
interpretations, Habermas claims, underplay the textual implausibility of a
deationary reading of absolute spirit and as a consequence they underestimate the subsequent methodological implausibility of such readings for
contemporary theoretical concerns.12 What Habermas borrows from Hegel is
the recognition that political theory must show how normative principles
correspond effectively to ethical and institutional practices that engage individual subjectivities. However, as a result of his leanings towards a Hegelian
solution to the ethical problem, Habermas also shares Hegels tendency to
strive for reconciliation with reality. Grumley thus questions the capacity
of Habermas most recent thinking to provide the proper normative and con-
ceptual tools for a thorough critical theory of the present. He remarks in conclusion that a critical theory needs more than historical and institutional
points of reference like those that issue from Habermas Hegelian reading of
immanence: it needs to grasp these values in the context of the concrete constraints and alternatives making for their practical exercise.13
With his article entitled Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation,
Shane ONeill offers an original contribution to the debate about the adequacy, and, possibly, the required corrections and developments of Habermas
latest theoretical framework.14 Drawing upon this framework, ONeill argues
that the realisation of justice is best understood in republican terms, as the
realisation of a democratic form of life in which free and equal citizens engage
one another in the collective task of autonomous self-governance.15 ONeill
insists on the social preconditions for the realisation of any such democratic
form of life: an egalitarian social structure is a precondition for the inclusion of all citizens as effective participants in the democratic process.16 Since
inequality affects individuals inasmuch as they belong to specic groups or
classes, and since the latter play a central role in the political mediation of
justice claims, contemporary critical theory needs to develop a coherent analytical and normative concept of structurally constituted social groups.
The rst part of the article proposes such a conceptual analysis, dealing
particularly with the potential pitfalls of essentialism and individual oppression. This model allows ONeill to take a critical stance on current postHabermasian models (mainly Fraser, Young, and Honneth). In the last part
of the article, ONeill shows that any discussion about institutional reform
at the level of the nation-state must be framed within a broader discussion
that takes into account the global aspects of social injustice and of struggles
against it. ONeill defends the thesis that the imperative of a necessary formation of a global public sphere should not lead to the conclusion that struggles at the national level are outdated. On the contrary, nation-states remain
important political agents in the ght against global injustice; global struggles run the risk of entrenching local forms of injustice if they consistently
bypass the national level. As ONeill argues, true democratisation, with the
challenge to social inequality that goes with it, is called for both within and
amongst nation-states, and relies upon both global and international movements. With this, the Habermasian theory of justice receives a welcome extension of its scope.
Whereas ONeill argues from within the Habermasian framework, Emmanuel

Renaults article, Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice.
A Critique of Habermas Theory of Justice, is a thorough challenge to that
framework itself.17 Renaults point of departure is informed by Axel Honneths
objections against Habermas discourse theory of law and democracy. As
Honneth has argued, the experience of social injustice is not limited to the
experience of a contradiction between a social situation and abstract legal or
moral principles; more often than not it is rather the experience of the narrowness or inadequacy of such principles.18 Secondly the demand that claims
of justice be expressed in the universal grammar of practical reason runs the
risk of misrepresenting or even ignoring the specicity of real, lived injustices.19 Renault systematises the critical perspective thus opened and focuses
on the experience of injustice to develop a thorough critique of the Habermasian
model, and through it, more generally, of liberal theories of justice.20 Against
the commonly shared assumption that political theory is the search for the
universal principles allowing a normative denition of justice, Renault suggests that justice is in fact an abolitionist concept, that its meaning is not
dened by an abstract reference to equality, or to universality, but by the
necessity to transform unjust social situations.21 As a consequence, political
theory must focus its analytical efforts on the experience which is the logical and practical context of justice, the experience of injustice.22
Renault describes this experience as relational, linked to a specic social
situation; qualitative, lived as being unbearable in a particular way; and
dynamic, as potentially triggering a practical reaction against the injuries it
causes. We can retain the properly political dimension of justice, Renault
arguesthe critical and transformative dimensions entailed in the notion
understood in an abolitionist senseonly if these three dimensions are not
sacriced in the search for universal principles that are required for the purpose of rational justication. In contrast, Habermas theory of democracy,
with its emphasis on the universalisability of claims within public deliberations, produces a decontextualisation of justice from the experience where
it is grounded as a counterfactual claim. This decontextualisation, as in liberal
theories of justice, leads to an abstract denition of the political, but also to
the relativisation of social rights against formal and political rights. For individuals suffering from degraded conditions of existence, however, it is clear
that social rights are often not relative. In a social situation that is unbearable for the individuals involved, the qualitative, relational and dynamic
aspects of the experience dene a critical perspective upon the discourses of
justication. This is why Renault argues for the specic cognitive and practical potential harboured in the experience of injustice. Finally, Habermas
reduction of politics to deliberations within the public sphere does not
sufciently acknowledge the structural exclusion of some forms of injustice,
often the most severe, from public debate. Renaults article therefore advocates a radical departure from Habermas and suggests a new, alternative
model of social and political theory grounded in the phenomenology of injustice and contemporary social movements.
The potential and limitations of Honneths model are analysed in the contribution by Jean-Philippe Deranty, The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneths
Social Philosophy. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty. Derantys critical
perspective on Honneths theory of recognition highlights a problem also
aficting Habermas critical theory, namely the lack of a full normative account
of nature, and the lack of a proper consideration of non-human beings.
Applying Honneths own method of immanent critical reconstruction, Deranty
shows that the loss of nature was not necessarily a consequence of Honneths
initial project.23 This project aimed to overcome the abstractions perceived in
Habermas model by returning to the tradition of German philosophical
anthropology (Feuerbach, Gehlen, Plessner and Heller) and to the writings
of American pragmatist, George Herbert Mead. With the help of arguments
borrowed from these authors, Honneth wanted to develop a formal anthropology of practical intersubjectivity: namely, to study the minimal anthropological, indeed biological, preconditions of human action (hence practical),
on the assumption, drawn from Feuerbach, Mead, and Habermas, that such
preconditions are essentially intersubjective. The rationale for such a programme of research was gained chiey from Honneths immanent critique
of the theory of communicative action, according to which the restriction of
the domain of normativity to linguistic practice generates major abstractions
in Habermas social and political theory. A more embodied version of the
intersubjectivistic turn was needed.
Honneth therefore saw the need to reframe the theory of social action, to
elaborate a new theory of praxis, by grounding it in an anthropological
approach captured by the motto of the humanisation of nature, meaning

the shaping of both outer and inner nature through social action. After retracing this journey, Deranty shows that Honneths mature model of the ethics
of recognition abandoned this approach, and thus left no room, conceptually
and normatively, for any being other than socialised human beings. In conclusion, Deranty suggests that a development of Honneths initial project
could correct the abstractions found in his model of interaction that result
from his interpersonalist account of intersubjectivity. The central reference
for such a continuation, Deranty argues, should be Merleau-Ponty, since his
work can be read precisely as a successful attempt to develop an embodied
theory of praxis, one which analyses in great detail the full scale of human
interactions with nature, symbolic objects and non-human beings.24 Like
Renault, but with a different emphasis, Deranty therefore advocates an informed
return of critical theory to its historical-materialist origins.
Paul Reddings Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical
Social Theory shifts the focus from the tradition of German, post-Hegelian
critical theory to the equally rich tradition of French social theory. Against
the commonplace anti-Hegelian readings of Pierre Bourdieus structuralist
and post-structuralist works, Redding highlights the deep similarities between
Bourdieus and Hegels understanding of the logic of social integration and
the origin and nature of social theory. The rst such similarity, for Redding,
is found in the parallel between Bourdieus logic of practice and Hegels
theory of immediate thought. The mediating term between both is Kants
crucial distinction between immediate representations in space and time (intuitions), and universal categories enabling any experience whatsoever (concepts). Bourdieus logic of practice, Redding argues, can be reconstructed as
a critique of the neo-Kantian elimination (that can be traced in Durkheim and
Lvi-Strauss) of Kants careful distinction between intuition and concept.
Against the intellectualisation of the spatial and temporal embodiment of categorical systems, Bourdieu attempted to reinterpret the type of binaristic
grammar to which both Durkheim and Lvi-Strauss had appealed by showing its generation from responses of the bodys dispositional habitus to the
practical demands of a socially codied everyday existence.25
The second parallel between Bourdieu and Hegel appears when the two
logics of social integration are rephrased in historical terms. The socialisation
within the family, leading to the acquisition of specic dispositions, can be

interpreted as the remainder within post-traditional societies of the type of social integration along binary, body-centred categories prevalent in pre-modern
societies. Reective, objectivistic thinking, by contrast, emerges only within
societies that have broken with mythopoetic thought. Thus Redding is able
to compare Bourdieus genealogical account of the skhole, the leisurely activity severed from habitual life which, on the ground of its apartness from
social necessity, can rst aim at objective knowledge, with Hegels parallel
theory about the emergence of modern social sciences within modern bourgeois-capitalist society. For Bourdieu, Hegel of course represented the kind
of intellectualist approach that represses its historical and social contingency
and projects its theoreticist prejudice upon its object domain, with the social
categories informing social action being transformed into the conceptual categories of a cosmic self thinking and realising itself through history. Redding,
however, as a prominent advocate of the kind of post-Kantian, intersubjectivistic reading of Hegel that Habermas rejects, proposes a quite different perspective and conclusion.26 If, in a deationary reading, spirit is interpreted
as the gradual emergence of a complex of recognitively mediated conditions
adequate to human freedom, what remains is Hegels attempt to mediate
between immediate and reexive forms of ethical life and of thought.27 This
is precisely the type of dialectic that Bourdieu used to describe the space
where his reexive sociology was to be rooted. Redding thus provides a vivid
illustration of what a Hegelian critical theory looks like, while also dening
a robust Hegelian critical perspective upon the great tradition of Durkheimian
and post-Durkheimian sociology. Given the central importance of Durkheim
for German as well as for French critical theory, one can see how fruitful an
application of such critical Hegelian perspective could be.
The French-German Connection: Negativity, Biopower, Rights

Manfred Frank once remarked that the important dialogue between German
and French philosophical traditions still remained a task for the future.28 The
essays in the nal section of Critique Today make a signicant contribution to
fostering this dialogue, opening up new perspectives for thinking critically
about reason, power, and rights. While there are many convergences between
the perspectives developed here and other articles in the volume (Simon
Lumsdens critical reading of Nancys Hegel, for example, resonating with

Paul Reddings neo-Hegelian reading of Bourdieu) there are also signicant
differences in critical orientation (Robert Sinnerbrinks genealogical critique
of Foucaults concept of biopower dialoguing with Paul Pattons Nietzschean
defence of an externalist reading of Foucault on rights). Taken together they
provide a rich sample of the productive differences shaping debates in critical
social philosophy today.
Simon Lumsdens essay, Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative,
continues the dialogue between neo-Hegelian theories of intersubjectivity and
the post-structuralist critique of reason. Long vilied by post-structuralists
as the paradigmatic thinker of totalising metaphysics, Hegel has again returned
to prominence within recent French philosophy.29 Lumsden takes up this
return to the French Hegel, presenting an illuminating discussion of Nancys
provocative interpretation in light of the inuential Anglophone non-metaphysical reading of Hegel. To this end, Lumsden contrasts Nancys approach
with the tendency among other post-structuralists to demonise Hegelian
thought for exemplifying the identitarian subsumption of difference and alterity.30 Nancy, by contrast, takes seriously Hegelian speculative thought, above
all the power of the negativethe disruptive, open, and restless aspect of
thoughtthat Nancy presents as the power of speculative thoughts own
self-transformation. Indeed, this self-transformative power of negativity, Nancy
argues, is what ultimately shapes the more familiar Hegelian concepts of
Spirit, dialectic, and speculative reason. Lumsden explores the self-surpassing
character of Hegels conception of thought, bringing this to bear on Nancys
interpretation of the negative and his reections on the notion of sense (sens)
as the unthematisable background condition of intelligibility.
For all his Heideggerian rhetoric, Nancy should be regarded, according to
Lumsden, as rejecting the crudely metaphysical reading of Hegel largely
responsible for Hegels reputation as a totalising thinker of identity. Indeed,
Lumsden shows how Nancys non-metaphysical reading complements recent
Anglophone approaches to Hegel (Pippin, Pinkard, Redding) as a radical
post-Kantian thinker concerned with the immanent development of rational
cognitive, moral, and social norms. Along with other non-metaphysical readers, Nancys Hegel also rejects the myth of the given, and proceeds to nd
a way of overcoming the concept-intuition dichotomy by thinking spirit as

a self-transforming power of negativity. Despite Nancys emphasis on the
self-transformative power of the negative, Lumsden concludes with a criticism of Nancys neglect of any developed account of the self-correcting character of reason, or indeed any sustained explication of the Hegelian conception
of freedom. In order for subjectivity to be possible, particularly in the
sense of self-determining autonomy, the power of negativity must also be a
power of constructive unity. As Lumsden points out, the negative moment
of Hegelian thought, which Nancy emphasises, must be complemented by
the positive moment: Freedom is not only the power of the negative but also
the power of autonomous reason as the capacity of freely assuming, but also
transforming, historically articulated social norms and practices.
Peter Schmiedgen continues the dialogue between French philosophy and
the German tradition with his exploration of the relationship between
Levinasian and Arendtian approaches to intersubjectivity and the constitution
of public space. Levinas phenomenological reections on dwelling, labour,
and ethical alterity can be supplemented productively by Arendts more developed theorisation of labour, work, and political action. Indeed, the limitations
of the Levinasian ethical critique of the sphere of politics, Schmiedgen argues,
can be overcome by interpreting it within an Arendtian framework of human
plurality. Schmiedgens essay thus proceeds to examine the contrast between
the pluralist polytheism of Arendtian political intersubjectivity and the
monotheism of Levinasian ethical intersubjectivity and its foregrounding of
the singular encounter with the face of the Other. Arendtian political pluralism
coupled with Levinasian ethical singularity, Schmiedgen concludes, provide
a useful framework for reecting on questions of public space, cultural difference, and democratic community.
The question of Critique Today also implies a historical reection on concepts that have come to prominence in recent social and political thought.
Robert Sinnerbrinks From Machenschaft to Biopolitics thus presents a
genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, commencing with Heideggers reections on machination [Machenschaft], analysing
Foucaults account of biopower exercised over the biological life of the population, and concluding with Agambens meditations on bare life and the
camp as paradigmatic of the biopolitical condition of modernity. Sinnerbrink
examines the preguration of Foucaults conception of biopower in Heideggers

discussion of machination or Machenschaft in his Nietzsche lectures of the late
1930s.31 For Heidegger, the concept of machination describes the manner in
which beings are disclosed in modernity as representable and manipulable
resources. Not only living beings but also human beings are reduced to
resources to be managed, optimised, enhanced, and produced. This theme is
then transformed, in ontic, socio-historical directions, through Foucaults
genealogical reections on biopower as the social power exercised upon the
biological life of populations. As has become increasingly clear, however,
Foucaults critical analyses of biopower soon gave way to his later interest
in neo-liberalism as a form of governmental rationality oriented towards the
efcient social management of populations. This turn towards analysing neoliberalism as a prevailing biopower regime, Sinnerbrink argues, provides the
backdrop for understanding the later Foucaults much vaunted ethical turn
during the early 1980s.
Finally, Sinnerbrink shows how Agambens work on the biopolitical foundations of modernity articulates a middle way between Heideggers ontologically grounded conception of machination and Foucaults historically
particularist genealogy of biopower. Indeed, Agamben presents biopolitics
the originary breach between naked biological life (zoe) and organised social
life (bios)as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality
in its historical unfolding from the Greeks to Auschwitz. The nihilism of
contemporary liberal-democratic regimes, for Agamben, is indicated by the
increasing presence of biopolitical gures, reduced to bare life, such as the
refugee and enemy combatant in so-called detention camps. Nonetheless,
Sinnerbrinks critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in Foucault
and Agamben underlines the tension they evince between ontological and
ontic dimensions: a short-circuiting of universalist and particularist dimensions resulting in a loss of concrete specicity in social and political analysis. Sinnerbrink thus questions Foucaults exploration of the ethical possibilities
of self-formation within neo-liberalism, and Agambens gesturing towards a
messianic, utopian community to come, for their adequacy as political responses
to the dangers posed by contemporary biopower regimes.
The signicance of a renewed Foucaultian sense of critique is elaborated in
Paul Pattons Foucault, Critique, Rights, an important contribution to the
philosophical and political understanding of Foucaults recently published

lectures on biopolitics and liberalism.32 Patton defends Foucault against the
commonplace charge that his later work provides no normative foundation
for social critique by presenting a Nietzschean account of Foucaults historicist and naturalistic approach to rights. For Foucault, rights must be understood as socially sanctioned degrees of power whose validity is normatively
justied according to historically available discourses of right. Patton argues
that the later Foucaults call for a non-sovereign, anti-disciplinary form of
right is compatible with externalist theories of rights discussed in recent
Anglophone political philosophy.33 According to the latter, the normative force
and justication of rights resides in historically specic forms of social practice
and institutional arrangements rather than in any putative universal property
of human beings or ahistorical conception of the good life. Patton adopts this
contemporary argument to defend the Nietzschean-Foucaultian view that
rights are historically specic, grounded in social power relations, with their
normative force being dependent upon historically available beliefs, norms,
and discourses (using indigenous rights in Australia as an historical example).
Following Nietzsches genealogical account of the origin of rights and duties,
Foucault argues that rights can be understood in terms of power relations
between individual and collective agents. As Foucault maintains, power itself
is not simply repressive but productive; power relations signify the capacity
to act in certain ways, to exercise strategic action upon the actions of others.
On this Foucaultian view, rights are acknowledgements of capacities of power
that are sanctioned and preserved for pragmatic reasons within a given social
and historical context. Such rights are historically variable, open to social and
political contestation, and subject to historical transformation given shifts in
regimes of power. Patton thereby argues that a Foucaultian account of rights
as recognised degrees of power navigates a course between an ahistorical
foundationalism, which overlooks the concrete conditions necessary for the
effective exercise of rights, and an extreme historicism that threatens to deprive
rights of their normative force altogether.
From this Foucaultian perspective, the normative force of rights can be derived
only from historically available discourses of right. These discourses took
two different forms historically: the revolutionary path of the American
Declaration of Independence, Rousseau, and the French revolutionaries,
grounded in the universal rights of man; and the path of radical liberalism,
grounded in a complex utilitarian calculus of individual and collective interests. Such historical discourses of right (roughly, revolutionary-universalist
versus utilitarian and liberalist theories of radical interests) remain for us
active and available forms of political legitimation and contestation. Foucaults
call for a non-sovereign, anti-disciplinary conception of right is thus grounded
in a descriptive account of the rights already operating within modern societies, and in a normative claim that these rights can provide an effective
counterweight to disciplinary power.34 Drawing on Foucaults 1978-79 lectures on liberalism as a form of governmental rationality, Patton argues in
conclusion that the normative bases of the critique of disciplinary power
must come from the liberal tradition of governmental reason that Foucault
analysed in his nal years.35 Here we nd the clues for understanding Foucaults
call for a non-sovereign, anti-disciplinary form of right that would provide
a way of challenging established forms of political right. In this way, Foucaults
conception of critique as experimenting with going beyond the limits of what
it is possible to say and do within a given milieu might provide, one presumes, an effective counter-discourse to the prevailing hegemony of global
neo-liberalism.
The essays in Critique Today present a rich sample of the converging, but also
competing critical voices debating the legacy of Enlightenment thought and
the prospects for critical theory. They inspire the sense that critical social philosophy, far from languishing in a condition of post-political quietism, or
retreating into ethics as a critical disavowal of the political, remains a dynamic
force concerned with confronting our contemporary historical actuality. In
bringing thinkers from the German and French traditions into productive
dialogue, they suggest the possibility of a philosophical new wave of critique capable of comprehending some of the challenges facing us within the
new global Empire. In this sense, they amply full Foucaults dictum that
the ethos of modernity must be practised as a permanent critique of ourselves.
Acknowledgement
We wish to express our sincere thanks to Danielle Petherbridge and John
Rundell for their tireless efforts in encouraging, editing and supporting the
work in this volume. Many of the articles were rst presented at the 2004
Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference at Macquarie
University, and we would like to thank Danielle and John for the opportunity to publish this work in this special issue of Critical Horizons.
Notes
1
M. Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in Ethics. Essential Works of Michel Foucault

1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow, London, Penguin, 1997, p. 316.
A. Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy,
ed. C. W. Wright, Albany, State University of New Press, 1995, p. xiii.
Ibid., p. 122.
See N. Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reections on the Post-Socialist Condition,
See S. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy,
New York, Routledge, 1997.

Melbourne, Scribe Publications, 2002.
6
As Lloyd notes, however, Neiman goes on to argue that September 11 did not
represent any fundamental shift in the history of conceptions of evil.
G. Borradorri, Philosophy in a Time or Terror: Dialogues with Jrgen Habermas and

Jacques Derrida, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 99.
E. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 2, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice & P. Knight,
Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1959/1986, p. 897.
J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington

& B. Massumi, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984.
10
See, for example, S. Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study in the Foundations
of Critical Theory, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986.
11
See, for example, R. Pippin, Hegels Idealism. The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness,

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; T. Pinkard, Hegels Dialectic: The
Explanation of Possibility, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1988; P. Redding,
Hegels Hermeneutics, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 1996.
12
See J. Habermas, From Kant to Hegel and Back Again: The Move Towards
Detranscendentalisation, in Truth and Justication, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press,
2003, pp. 175-210.
13
J. Grumley, Hegel, Habermas, and the Spirit of Critical Theory, p. 101 below.
14
As developed in Habermas Between Facts and Norms: Toward a Discourse Theory of

Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996.
15
S. ONeill, Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation, p. 120 below.

16
Ibid., p. 121 below.
17
This article is the rst text written in English by this prolic young French critical theorist and provides a helpful introduction to his original work. See, for example, E. Renault, LExprience de lInjustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de lInjustice,
Paris, La Dcouverte, 2004; E. Renault, Marx et lIde de Critique, Paris, PUF, 1995.
18
See A. Honneth, Moral Consciousness and Class Domination: Some Problems in

the Analysis of Hidden Morality, in The Fragmented World of the Social, Albany,
SUNY Press, 1995, pp. 205-219.
19
See A. Honneth, Die soziale Dynamik von Miachtung. Zur Ortbestimmung einer
Gesellschaftstheorie, in Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit. Aufstze zur praktischen
Philosophie, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 2000, pp. 88-109.
20
In this article, Emmanuel Renault develops some of the arguments he rst articulated in his book, LExprience de lInjustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de lInjustice,
Paris, La Dcouverte, 2004. See in particular the rst chapter (pp. 69-127), which
expounds more fully the critique of liberal theories of justice in conjunction with
the critique of Habermas.
21
E. Renault, Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice. A Critique

of Habermas Theory of Justice, p. 141 below. Renault borrows the term abolitionist
from Michael Walzers Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, New
York, Basic Books, 1983.
22
E. Renault, Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice, p. 144

below.
23
A. Honneth and H. Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. R. Meyer, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1988, and A. Honneth, The Critique of Power. Reective
Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. K. Baynes, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press,
1991.
24
See in particular Merleau-Pontys lectures on the philosophy of nature, Nature,

trans. R. Vallier, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2003.
25
P. Redding, Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory,

p. 188 below.
26
See Redding, Hegels Hermeneutics, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press,
1996.
27
P. Redding, Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory,

p. 199 below.
28
M. Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, trans. S. Wilke and R. Gray, Minneapolis,

University of Minneapolis Press, 1989, p. 4.
29
See J.-L. Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Hegels Bon Mots), trans. C. Surprenant,
Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001; J.-L. Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the

Negative, trans. J. Smith & S. Miller, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,
2002. See also C. Malabou, The Future of Hegel. Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic,
trans. L. During, London, Routledge, 2004; J. Lbre, Hegel lpreuve de la Philosophie
Contemporaine: Deleuze-Lyotard-Derrida, Paris, Ellipses, 2002.
30
Deleuzes remark is representative of an inuential current of post-structuralist

anti-Hegelianism: All these signs [Heideggers philosophy of ontological Difference,
the structuralist project, the modern novel, the power of repetition in psychoanalysis, language, and art] may be attributed to a generalised anti-Hegelianism:
difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative,
of identity and contradiction. G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton,
New York, Columbia University Press, p. xviii.
31
See M. Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume 3. The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics,
32
See M. Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au Collge de France 1978-1979,
33
See for example, D. Darby, Two Conceptions of Rights Possession, Social Theory
trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1991.
Paris, Gallimard/Seuil, 2004.
and Practice, vol. 27, no. 3, 2001, pp. 387-417; Darby, Unnatural Rights, Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 1, 2001, pp. 49-82; Darby, Rights Externalism,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 68, no. 3, 2004, pp. 34-62.
34
P. Patton, Foucault, Critique, Rights, p. 283 below.
35
Ibid., p. 284 below.
Genevieve Lloyd
Providence Lost: September 11 and
the History of Evil
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the philosophical signicance of
September 11 by relating it to attempts that have been
made throughout the history of philosophy to read particular events as symbols of conceptual change. It draws
especially on Susan Neimans Evil in Modern Thought and
Giovanna Borradoris dialogues with Derrida and
Habermas, in her Philosophy in a Time of Terror, to relate
September 11 to Kants versions of Progress, Providence
and Cosmopolitanism.
KEYWORDS: Providence, Evil, Terrorism, Kant, Derrida,
Habermas
There are some events that take on a symbolic

signicance in the thought of philosophers
a meaning that may be grounded in, but goes
beyond their place in history. Foucault has
contributed a great deal to the development
of strategies for reading historical events philosophically. But the idea is of course an older
one. It is a central theme in Kants political
essays; and Foucault in his paper What is
Enlightenment? draws on Kants famous
essay of that name in developing his ownversion of Critique. I will be discussing later
the interesting ways in which both Habermas
and Derrida have also drawn more recently
24 Genevieve Lloyd
on Kants political essays to develop philosophical responses to the event

we know as September 11. They put the Kantian texts to work to explore
themes of cosmopolitanism, tolerance and the public sphere. But I want also
to get into the picture another connected, but less familiar, theme from Kants
political essays: the idea of Providence. I want to argue that the idea of
Providencequaint though it may now have largely becomeis important
to the philosophical understanding of September 11. Providence lingers in
our contemporary thought patterns, though its presence may be barely visible at the level of our explicit beliefs. And Kants version of Providence
like so much else in the thought of the Enlightenmentconnects our thought
in turn with older ideals articulated by the Greek and Roman Stoics.
The idea of Providence is central to Kants reading of the philosophical
signicance of the crucial event of his time: the French Revolution. Ideas of
cosmopolitanism, providence and the emerging public space of reason are
interwoven in Kants reading of the signicance of the Revolution. In his
essay, The Contest of the Faculties, he says that what matters about that
event is not its success or failurenot its place in empirical history, but
rather what it arouses in the hearts and desires of its spectators. But this
philosophical signicance of the event as spectacle demands a rather special
set of observers. It is linked with Kants idea of a public space of reason,
which he invokes especially in the essay that interested Foucault: What is
Enlightenment? This is the space within which men of learning address
the entire reading publicin contrast to the private use of reason, made in
a particular civil post or ofce with which a person may be entrusted. Against
that background, Kant says in The Contest of the Faculties that what matters about the French Revolution is the attitude of the onlookers who sympathise with the exaltation of the revolutionaries though without the slightest
intention of actively participating in their affairs.1
What does all this have to do with Providence? For Kant, it was what allows
the event as spectacle to be read as a signand hence to take on philosophical
signicance. Providence is for Kant a temporal concept; it is reason unfolding
in human history. Strange though the concept may be to us, it underlies something with which we are more familiarthe modern idea of progress. The
French Revolution is for Kant a sign of moral progress. It is a historical event
occurring in a particular place at a particular time. But it is also a historical
Providence Lost: September 11 and the History of Evil 25
signrevealing a tendency towards moral improvement in the human race

as a whole. In the Contest of the Faculties he sees the discerning of such
signs as the task of what he calls a prophetic history.
In Kants earlier essay, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan
Purpose, the connections with providence are more explicit: the development
of reason in the human race is the unfolding of providence in human history. A philosophical mind, well acquainted with history, he says there, will
discern providence at work in human affairs as a whole. Providence, thus
understood, has a bearing on issues of conict and peace, which Kant explores
in the best known of his political essaysPerpetual Peace. But the connections are clearer in The Idea for a Universal History: providence is not
refuted, but on the contrary conrmed, by the eruption of conict. For conict
brings out human beings nascent capacity for reason. Without conict, all
human talents would remain hidden for ever in a dormant state, and men,
as good-natured as the sheep they tended, would scarcely render their existence more valuable than that of their animals. Man may wish concord,
but nature knowing better what is good for his species, wishes discord.2
Nature and Providence are here interchangeable. Providence, as Nature,
has ends for the human race; and these ends nd expression in the eventual emergence of what Kant calls a universal cosmopolitan existence which
will at last be realised in the great political body of the futurethe matrix
within which all the original capacities of the human race will be able to
develop. Kant discerns the rough outline of this future cosmopolitan world
body beginning to emerge in his own timesas if a feeling is beginning to
stir in its future members, each of which has an interest in maintaining the
whole. Out of the discord of war and revolution will come an eventual lasting peace, held in balance by ideals enshrined in practices and institutions
of international justice. This is Kants version of the Enlightenment dream.
Its magnetism still lingers in our own versions of cosmopolitan ideals, and
in dismay at their apparent erosion in current unilateralist foreign policies
and disregard of conventions of international justice.
It is the legacy of Kants version of the cosmopolitan dream that forms the
backdrop for Habermas and Derridas dialogues on the signicance of
September 11 in Giovanna Borradoris recent volume, Philosophy in a Time of
Terror.3 But to keep the theme of providence in view, I want, before discussing
26 Genevieve Lloyd
that, to go back further in the modern history of the idea of Providence. Im

going to look now at another twist to the reading of September 11 as event,
which has been offered in another recent bookSusan Neimans fascinating
Evil in Modern Thought.4 In the concluding sections of that book Neiman discusses the signicance of September 11 in the history of evil. Signicant
though the event is in other ways, it does not, she argues, represent any
signicant shift in the intellectual history of evil. To see why that is soand
to see what in the light of that is important in Habermas and Derridas
response to September 11we need to venture a little into Neimans history
of evil in western thoughtto see the kind of signicance which a couple of
other events have had in that history.
On November 1, 1755, the city of Lisbonone of the wealthiest, most beautiful and most cosmopolitan of citieswas struck by an earthquake, followed
by a succession of res and tidal waves. On conservative estimates, fteen
thousand lives were lost. There was also vast property damage. In addition
to all the homes destroyed there were famous paintings lost, including works
by Rubens and Titian, thousands of books and manuscripts, furniture and
tapestries from churches and palaces. By any reckoning, the Lisbon earthquake was what we would now see as a devastating natural disaster. But
it also became something more. It was a momentous event in intellectual history. As Neiman observes, the earthquake did not create out of nothing the
debate which ensued; rather the earthquake happened in the midst of a debate
that was already raging around themes of natural religionabout attempts
to explain the world in natural terms alone. That context can be difcult for
us to now recapture. For what was at stake in it was not so much a matter
of theism versus atheism. The existence of God was largely taken for granted.
What was at issue was not whether God was present or absent from the
world but, rather, how his presence should be construed. It was a dispute
conducted within the assumed frame of a concept, which has largely ceased
to be explicit in our own public discoursethe concept of Providence.
On Neimans perceptive analysis of what was at stake in the debate on Lisbon,
the important split was between two versions of Providence. On the one
hand, there was the old idea of Gods special providencethe idea that God
intervenes in the course of eventswhether to satisfy the demands of divine
justice in response to human evil doing, or in response to the placatory prayers
of the devout. On the other hand, there was, as Neiman describes it, the
vague, general providence that Enlightenment thinkers lovedthe idea that
Gods goodness was manifest in the general system of order and harmony
that could be discerned in the natural world.5 The two versions of providence
were not really inconsistentnot least because of the vagueness of general
providence. But they do reect different attitudes towards the divine and
towards the place of human beings in the natural world. To those who stressed
general providence, it seemed self-centred to suppose that our misfortunes
are sufciently important to warrant cosmic attention in the form of divine
attention. The concern with special providence was seen by thinkers of the
Enlightenment as unsophisticated and self-absorbedas lacking due respect
for the order of the whole, of which human beings are but a part.
For those who saw the world in terms of general providence, as Neiman
observes, the whole of nature was invested with meaning. The meaning
and glory of nature were so great as to make belief in a particular providence seem petty in contrast. Within this framework, nature itself was invested
with moral authority. Hence the conceptual damage wreaked by the Lisbon
earthquake. Traditional theologians faith in miracles and wonders, Neiman
says, was not what was threatened at Lisbon. What was shattered, rather,
were liberal views about the miracle and wonder of nature itself.6 The thundering theologians could of course make ready sense of the earthquake through
their idea of special providence: the almighty was punishing the conspicuous
wrongdoing of human beings. It was more difcult to make sense of the disaster in terms of the benign natural order of the world.
Even apart from the impact of Lisbon there were of course challenges from
within the framework of Enlightenment thought to the idea of general providence; and to the whole idea that the world should be understood in terms
of notions of design or purpose. Hume challenged it in his Dialogues on Natural
Religion. Voltaire famously satirised it in Candide. But Lisbon played an
important role in shaking the emotional grip of the idea of the natural world
as imbued with meaning and order.
Lisbon shocked the eighteenth century in ways that later earthquakes did
not shake the twentieth century. In our own times, in the prevailing discourse,
an earthquake remains only an earthquake; it is not something to be read
as a signnot something with meaning to be interpreted. But Lisbon became
28 Genevieve Lloyd
the focal point for controversy over the whole idea of Providence at work in
the natural world.
All this is of course a simplied version of a rich and complex strand in intellectual history. There is much more that could be said both in defence of and
in challenge to Neimans interpretations of the interconnected histories of
western ideas of evil and providence. But my main interest here is in her
strategies for reading the history of thought through the symbolic loading
acquired by particular events. The Lisbon earthquake becomes on her analysis
the symbolic marker of a conceptual shift that sees natural events stripped
of a kind of meaning that they could previously bear. Lisbon marks a divide
between a natural world imbued with meaning and a world seen as merely
naturalwith far-reaching consequences for how human beings make sense
of their own pain; for how we manage to think the initially unthinkable and
live with the initially impossible.
Neiman continues this strategy for telling the conceptual history of evil in a
discussion of Auschwitzanother conceptually shattering event, which marks
the disintegration of a way of thinking of evil of which Lisbon marks the
beginning: the understanding of evil as an explicit product of conscious human
will. Drawing on and extending the interpretations offered by Hannah Arendt
of the crimes of Eichmann, Neiman argues that Auschwitz confronted us with
a new kind of evil, which is not readily understood through categories of
direct intention. Auschwitz taught us how easily crimes are committed
through bureaucratic structures in which ordinary people can be caught up,
without acknowledging exactly what it is they are doing. The point here is
not to deny human responsibility for what happened at Auschwitz. On the
contrary, it is to shed light on what is necessary if we are to be able to take
responsibility in the face of a form of evil which undermines the conceptual
structures through which we are accustomed to make sense of human
suffering.
What then are we now to make of September 11? Clearly this is another
event that has quickly acquired a symbolic load that is difcult to unpack.
The locutionthe bare date without place, without even a specied year
demands that we recognise here a momentous chronological break. We
heard in the American election campaign the derisory description of Kerry
as having a September 10 mentality. We are encouraged to think of Sep-
tember 11 as a rupture, dividing us forever from a lost era. The world,

we are told, changed on September 11; and we are told it often. As one
American wit observed, its 9/11, 24/7. But what world was it that changed
so momentously?
On Neimans analysis, this eventshocking though it undoubtedly was in
many wayswas not conceptually damaging. In contrast with Lisbon and
Auschwitz, it did not challenge the structures through which we think evil;
indeed the evil that was unleashed on September 11 was, she suggests, really
quite old-fashioned in being awesomely intentional. Those deeds involved
massive, deliberate planning. Malice and forethought have rarely been so
well combined: the clearest use of instrumental rationality, matched by
the clearest aunting of moral consideration. With no demand put forward
for negotiation, there was not the imsiest of excuses for the destruction of
ordinary lives.
All that seems right; and yet, I think, it cant be the whole story. September
11 does seem to have stopped us in our tracks both emotionally and intellectually. We do experience in response to it something of the same intellectual shock that Neiman talks of as the response to Lisbon or Auschwitza
mind-numbing incomprehension that goes beyond difculty in taking in the
sheer scale of the disaster. Something has happened here that seems to bring
us to the limit of our capacity to think what is happening. Perhaps the shift
of tense thereour capacity to think what is happeningis a clue to the nature
of the conceptual challenge. For of course things happened fast in that gap
which supposedly opened up between us now and all that had gone before.
September 11 now carries as part of its symbolic load not only the terrible
events of that day but also the responses that came in its wake: the shifts or
intensications in already existing tendencies in American foreign policy; the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the increased unilateralism of the United
States; the increased disregardin Australia as well as in the United States
of established and emerging structures of international law; the rapid and
dramatic contractions of civil liberties and rights we had come to take for
granted. No sooner had we begun to absorb the rhetoric of western civilisation
under attack than we started to see what we had regarded as cherished
elements of our Enlightenment heritage crumbling under the impact of
measures taken in response to terrorism.
30 Genevieve Lloyd
Our world has indeed changed. But distinctions have become blurred between
what happened and the responses supposedly justied by what happened.
It is at the times when clarity is most needed that it can be hardest to nd.
And there is of course for many of us the added confusion of a shocked intelligentsia that nds itself sequestered, contained, corralled as an allegedly outof-touch special interest groupthe chattering elites, whose bewilderment
is perhaps exacerbated by an uncomfortable suspicion that there may be some
truth in the charge. In such times it is difcult not to resort to bewildered
bewailing about the fate of intellect.
How welcome it is then to nd Habermas and Derrida grappling with the
conceptual challenges of September 11 by bringing to bear on it their understanding of Enlightenment philosophy, especially those political essays of
Kants.
For Habermas the focus is on religious fundamentalism as a reaction against
the Enlightenment ideals of the secularised public space of reason. The fundamentalism we see expressed in global terrorism is, he argues, a distinctively
modern phenomenon; we miss its signicance if we see it as a simple return
to a pre-modern way of relating to religion. It is rather a specic response
against the modern way of understanding and practising religion. Although
it may be a panicked responsecasting modernity, unnecessarily, as a threat
rather than as an opportunityit is a response nonetheless which is intelligible, Habermas thinks, in a world where the benets and the damage of
mass communication and economic globalisation are so disproportionately
distributed. With developed nations, largely, getting the benets, while the
burden of destruction of traditional cultures falls on the undeveloped, it
should be no surprise that fundamentalism responds with a repudiation of
the Enlightenment ideal of secularism.
Habermas analysis is directed partly against alternative approaches that try
to interpret global terrorism in terms of Huntingtons talk of the clash of cultures. The philosophical thrust of his reections becomes clearer in his broader
discussion of what is really at stake in the Enlightenment version of secularism. Under conditions of modernity, he points out, religions had to let go
of the universally binding character and political acceptance of their doctrine
in order to coexist in a pluralistic order. Awareness of the plurality of nations
and of pluralism within nationsmakes untenable the exclusivity of absolute

claims, whatever their source and however deeply they may be held. Religious
belief is forced to reect on its nonexclusive place within a universal discourse shared with other religions and limited by scientically generated
secular knowledge.7
Habermas focus here, as throughout much of his work, is on the conditions
of belief, when beliefs are held in the public shared space of reason. His
emphasis in reconstructing Enlightenment ideals of reason is less on the content of beliefs than on their modalityon the manner in which they are held
and communicated. In this context he analyses the impact of terrorism in
terms of a pathology of communicative disorders. Distortions in communication undermine validity claims, which are at least implicitly recognised in
the public space where more or less good reasons hold sway. Habermas point
of departure is Kants ideal of an actively involved public sphere, which
Habermas sees as the denitive institution of democracy.
Against that background, the achievement of a self-reexive approach to
beliefbelief that has learned to see itself through the eyes of othershas
had important political implications. The cognitive thrust of this self-reexive
awareness has made religious tolerance possible, as well as the separation of
state and church. But Habermas thinks it is obvious that this awareness of a
relativisation of ones own position as one among others does not imply relativising ones own beliefs. As Borradori observes, the freedom of agreeing
or disagreeing on the basis of the strongest argument is for him both the formal feature of rationality and the founding principle of democracy.
Habermas sees modernity in terms of a way of thinking and acting in line
with undistorted communicative rationality. That is what allows him to see
religious fundamentalism as a distinctively modern disruption. The threat
that Islamic fundamentalism poses to liberal democracies does not come from
any assertion of a rival culture or religion. It is a threat to the ideal of secularism that is our heritage from the Enlightenmenta threat that comes from
without. But the threat and the risk are exacerbated by the distortions of
communication that are already at work within modern democracies. The
appropriate response to September 11 then is not a strengthened afrmation
of Christian values, whatever they might be, against an external rival
32 Genevieve Lloyd
system. It is rather a reafrmation and restoration of the Enlightenment ideal

of a public space of reason, within which rival beliefs can nd undistorted,
self-reective expression.
The claim of a convergence of internal and external threats is more dramatically articulated in Borradoris dialogue with Derrida. Where Habermas
metaphors are drawn from the pathology of speech disorders, Derridas striking metaphors are drawn from autoimmune disease. He exploits them to offer
a powerful picture of the convergence of external and internal threats to the
heritage of Enlightenment ideals. Where Habermas puts his faith in a restatement and renewal of the programme of Enlightenment reason, Derrida tries
rather to bring out the inner contradictions, the aporias, the self-destructive
logic lurking within the Enlightenment ideals themselves. But both are committed to a positive rethinking of the heritage of the Enlightenment.
Let us now look at Derridas reading of the symbolism of September 11. It
is not easy to summarise, for it is one of those extraordinary conjunctions of
dazzling conceptual dance and deeply engaged, politically informed analysis that we have come to expect in his later writings. The inseparability of
style and content challenge the capacity to paraphrase. Rather than try to
sum it up, Im going to try to draw out from it some themes that I can put
to work in developing my theme of providence in relation to September 11.
Derridas reections on September 11 start from the striking fact that I mentioned abovethat an event should come to be identied by a date; and an
incomplete date at that. It is a mark, he suggests, of the unthinkability of
what happened: something terrible took place on September 11, and in the
end we dont know what.8 What is terrible is that we do not know what it
is and so do not know how to describe, identify, or even name it.9 But the
unusual naming of the event also represents our attempt to interpret, to comprehend the unthinkability, to assimilate it. Even in trying to think of September
11 as a major event, he observes, there is a certain denial at work; relegating it to being just one event among others, one of the major events, if you
will, in a long chain of past and future events.10 Rather than go down that
path, Derrida tries to offer, as he says, a philosophical response. The prevailing discoursethat of the media and of the ofcial rhetoricrelies too
readily on received concepts like war or terrorism. What is demanded of
philosophers is a different kind of response that can try to articulate the singularity of September 11. For it is here that the conceptual challenge of the
event resides.
At the core of this philosophical response to the unthinkability of September
11 is the Heideggerian theme of the singularity of the event as such, which
is a familiar theme in Derridas later writings, especially in The Politics of
Friendship and Spectres of Marx. It is connected with his thoughts on temporality and with the idea of messianic structure. Derridas response to September
11 is continuous with his earlier concern with articulating a stance towards
the future as something other than future presentwith the thought of the
perhaps. The event as suchany event, when we focus on its occurrence
has something of the unthinkable about it. The event is by denition what
comes or happens. Coming at us, as it were, from nowhere, what happens
calls out for appropriation, for interpretation, for comprehension. But there
is no event worthy of its name, he says, except in so far as this appropriation falters at some border or frontier.11 There is a certain unappropriability about what comes or happens, as such. The event is what comes, and in
coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension. . . .12
So there is a basis of incomprehension, of singularity, of what is to come
about any event.
But there are other, special layers of unthinkability that belong to September
11. Derrida unfolds them through a rich but not always luminous metaphor
of aggressive processes of auto-immunity: that strange behaviour where a
living being works to destroy its own protection. In September 11 we have
an event that undermines the condition of its own intelligibility. The event
of itself renders itself unthinkable.
At the simplest level of operation of this metaphor of auto-immune disorder,
we are forced to confront some aspects of September 11 which we have perhaps been all too ready to set asidefor a start, the disturbing reality of suicide as an act of organised aggression. I mentioned earlier that Neiman sees
September 11 as a conjunction of absolute clear-mindedness and absolute
maliceshocking in its degree of evil, but not of itself conceptually disturbing. Rather than challenging any old fashioned conception of evil, September
11, on her approach, is shocking in its very simplicityits chillingly intentional,
34 Genevieve Lloyd
calculated evildoing. But I think Derridas metaphors help us to see something that is conceptually disturbing here: the distinctive kind of self-destruction that is part of the event.
Spinoza famously thought the act of suicide was so far from being a rational
act that it could not rationally be contemplated: suicide, he thought, must represent a failure of reason; to take ones own life must be weak-minded. But,
in arguing that, Spinoza was challenging a familiar, though not uncontroversial,
Stoic ideal of the noble suicide. And we are familiar from more recent historystrikingly in the case of the Kamikaze pilots of World War IIof the
patriotic suicide. (According to Outfoxed it was precisely in order to avoid
conjuring up such ideas of patriotic suicide, directed to achieving a particular national, political or military objective, that Fox media announcers were
instructed to re-describe Palestinian suicide bombers as terrorists.) We are
familiar too with the aggressive suicides of the desperately unhappy, carried
out in retaliation against those they hold responsible for making them unhappy.
It is harder though to comprehend the aggressive suicide where there seems
no specic end to be achieved, no specic demand to be met. At its simplest
level, Derridas metaphor forces us to confront what is disturbingly unfamiliar here in the September 11 conjunction of self-destruction and aggression.
Derridas analogy with autoimmune disorder forces us to confront other
things too which prevailing discourse tends to ignorethe ways in which
the US can be seen as unwittingly preparing the aggression against itself.
It is not just the suicides of the terrorists that are brought into focus, but
the self-destructive symbiosis between the aggressors and their target.
Trained and prepared for the act within the US by the US, the hijackers, as
Derrida says, incorporate, so to speak, two suicides in one: their own . . .
but also the suicide of those who welcomed, armed and trained them . . .13
But there are other, more signicant ways in which the analogy with autoimmunity illuminates the event: the ways in which the so-called war on
terrorism feeds the original aggression. There is, for example, the dependence
on media coverage, which only the victim could provide, without which the
attack on the twin towers could not have been the kind of aggressive attack
it was.
It was in the United States own interest, as well as in the interest of its enemies, to expose its vulnerabilityto give the greatest possible coverage of the
aggression against which it wished to protect itself. The victim began to ght
itself; and had to do so if it was to justify its own counter-aggressive strikes.
By declaring the so-called war on terror, it gave its enemies renewed capacity to wound. The terrorists gained a status to which they had no real claim;
rather than being criminals they became perpetrators in the cause of war. In
the process of auto-immunity logic the victims efforts strengthen its enemy.
But there are yet deeper, more philosophical aspects of Derridas use of his
analogyaspects which bear more directly on Derridas concern with temporality. I want to return now to that idea of a futurity that cannot be understood as a future present. The exploration of that theme in Derridas other
writings on the messianic structure was concerned with the hope of futurity, the hope of the to come, the perhaps. In the dialogue on September
11, that notion of futurity is now associated with dread. Derrida spells the
point out with echoes of his reections on possible and impossible mourning in the Memoires for Paul de Man. The special ordeal of September 11 as
event, he now says in the dialogue, has as its tragic correlate not what has
happened in the past but rather the precursory signs of a future, which will
perhaps be worse than anything that has already taken place. Imagine, he
says, that the Americans, and through them the entire world, had been told:
what has happened is an awful thing; but it wont happen again. Mourning
would then be possible. But this is not at all what happened. There is traumatism with no possible work of mourning when the evil comes from the
possibility to come of the worst, from the repetition to comethough worse.
Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the
worst to come rather than by an aggression that is over and done with.14
What we are traumatised by, on this analysis, is not September 11 as a past
eventa past presentbut rather an unrepresentable futurea threat without limita threat which operates on the imagination of what is to come.
It is the perhaps, the to come that bears the sense of dreadnot dread of
a particular event, which might or might not happen, but a sense of the total
disintegration of our world. What is put at risk in this terrifying autoimmunity logic, says Derrida, is nothing less than the existence of the world,
of the world-wide itself. But the sense of the world here needs to be spelled
out. Has Derridas talk of the end of our world taken us from messianic
structure to the apocalypse?
36 Genevieve Lloyd
The words can sound like apocalyptic scare mongering, not unlike the rhetoric
that often accompanies the calls for pre-emptive counter-aggression we have
come to expect as part of the war against terror. But Derrida is operating
in a different conceptual space. He is not warning of probabilitiesof what
is likely to happen in a future present. The structure of the auto-immunity
logic he is describing is such that pre-emptive aggression against terror enacts
the very catastrophe it is supposed to avoid. In talking of a threat to the very
existence of the world, he is not envisaging an apocalyptic consequence in the
future, against which we must guard. The disintegration is already with us.
The auto-immunity metaphors bring out that what wasand remainsunder
threat is the rational order of the world we have come to take for granted.
Clearly more needs to be said to give content to this large claim; and Derrida
provides it by elaborating on the more conceptual aspects of the familiar idea
of a post-Cold War new world orderthe emergence of the United States
as a sole, unrivalled superpower. What is for us the world has come to be
bound up with the strength, the presumed invulnerability, of all that is represented by America. September 11 has made visible just how fragile is
that world that had previously seemed so solid and reliable; and the threat
that September 11 conjures up is ongoing and total. For a large part of it
is the threat of uncontrollable proliferation of nuclear capabilitynow in
a form where there is no balance of terror. From now on, says Derrida,
the nuclear threat no longer comes from a state but from anonymous forces
that are absolute and incalculable.15 The threat, the dread is totalnot just
in the extension of possibilities of actual nuclear destruction, familiar from
the Cold War, but also in the threat to what is now supposed to sustain
world order, to sustain the very possibility of our worldinternational law,
a world market, communication systems. What holds it all together as a
world is under threat; and in response, we get the perverse effect of the
auto-immunitary itself, which ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm. And so many auto-immunitary
movements, which produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity they claim
to overcome.16
Let me now make some brief comments on the relevance for this sense of
a disintegrating world of the history of the idea of Providence. It has, after
all, always been connected with the idea of world order. In Kants version
of providence, as we saw earlier, that connection yields a temporalised version

of cosmopolitanismthe idea of progress towards a world order in which
institutions and practices of international justice will image the relations which
draw individual citizens into an ordered state. But the connections between
providence and cosmopolitanism go back much further. The world is so
much with us that we can forget that it is itself a conceptual construct with
a history; and the connections between providence and cosmopolitanism
are much older than the Enlightenment juxtaposition which shaped modern
western ideas of moral and political progress. Those connections can be hard
to recapture when cosmopolitanism has come to mean little more than smart
city lifestyles, while providence is conned to conventional piety. But the
connections have a long history.
Both ideasProvidence and Cosmopolitanismand the connections between
them, go back to ancient Greek thought, especially to Stoicism. It was in the
mid-fourth century BCE that Diogenes the Cynic rst described himself as a
citizen of the universe, implying that he was at home nowhere, except in
the cosmos itself. The Stoic doctrine of the cosmic city developed in explication
of that idea. It came together with the idea of providence because of that
ideas connotations of the world as an orderly whole, regulated by necessary
lawsa structured whole which serves as a model for human conduct. That
idea of structured order, imbued with purpose, fed the idea of the universe
as a cosmic polisthe common home of gods and men. The transitions in
which older religious ideals of obedience to the gods give way to the ideal
of a cosmic citywhere gods and men alike must act in accordance with a
natural order imbued with reasonare wonderfully presented in their tragedy,
their poignancy and their hilarity, by the most philosophical of the Greek
playwrights, Euripides.
Plutarch quotes the description offered in Zenos Republic of a well regulated
society: our household arrangements should not be based on cities or parishes,
each one marked out by its own legal system, but we should regard all men
as our fellow-citizens and local residents, and there should be one way of
life and order, like that of a herd grazing together and nurtured by a common law.17 The theme was taken up in Roman Stoicism. Cicero attributed
to the Stoics the view that true law is right reason, in agreement with
nature, diffused over everyone, consistent, everlasting . . .18 Whoever does
38 Genevieve Lloyd
not obey this law, he continues, is eeing from himself and treating his
human nature with contempt; by this very fact he will pay the heaviest penalties, even if he escapes all conventional punishments. The idea of the cosmic city is also invoked by Seneca. In On Leisure he talks of human beings
as belonging to two communities: the one which is great and truly common, embracing gods and men, in which we look neither to this corner nor
to that, but measure the boundaries of our state by the sun; the other, the
one to which we have been assigned by the accident of our birth.19
I think that ancient idea of the world as cosmic cityas a providentially
ordered polisis still with us. Something of it survived its transformation
into the Enlightenment idea of progress towards a cosmopolitan world order;
and something of it has survived also the erosion of the Kantian vision of
world order. Perhaps the deeper reverberations of the shock of September 11
come from a sense of the loss of the very old idea of an ordered world. What
is threatened is not just a specic current political world order. There is movement in deeper layers, in clusters of conceptsa sense of the loss of something of which we were no longer even awarethe loss of Providence.
Order, world order, the order of the worldis all this just a Derridainspired play of words? I think Derridafor all the dazzling verbal play, the
breathtaking slides between the literal and the metaphorical, the symbolic
and the politicalhas given content to the notion of the disintegrating world
that is not entirely nebulous. The world order he describes as imploding
under its own auto-immunitory logic is a conglomerate of media constructions, the apparatus and rhetoric of global corporations, of international
communications. It is a product of contemporary discourse but it resonates
also with philosophical historyconjuring up a world that prior to September
11 had seemed solid, beyond threat; and which now seems limitlessly vulnerable to forces, internal and external, that cannot even be identied in
advance.
If we see our threatened sense of world order through the lens of ancient
ideas of the cosmic polis, we might see what the terrorists did on September
11 as an even more old fashioned kind of evil than Susan Neiman suggested
as a breathtaking deance of cosmic order. But what is even more shocking
is that September 11 has exposed the fragility of what has allowed our world
to hold togetherthe fragility that was there all along. We have seen how
easily the frame can all come tumbling down.
The world order and its loss are here both literal and metaphorical. When
Derrida talks of the destabilising of our world he is talking, not primarily of
a chain of political consequences, but rather of the disintegrating content of
an intellectual construct. But that construct is nonetheless a real product
of a number of real interdependent systems. What is threatened, as he says,
is not only a great number of things that depend on the order that has been
more or less assured by the status of the United States as superpower. What
is threatened more radically, he says, is the system of interpretation, the
axiomatic, logic, rhetoric, concepts and evaluations that are supposed to allow
one to comprehend and to explain precisely something like September 11.
What is disturbed is the discoursethe prevailing system which, he says, is
a combination of public opinion, the media, the rhetoric of politicians and
the presumed authority of all those who, through various mechanisms, speak
or are allowed to speak in public space. September 11 as event is the visible
shaking of the world order presupposed in its own thinkability. Perhaps it
has made visible the stark fragility of our contemporary version of the cosmic
world of gods and men.
The shifts between metaphorical and literal in all this do, I think, amount to
something more than verbal play. But talk of conceptual damage, if it is
pushed too far, can be an offensive response to the real damage of September
11the real pain of the American survivors and bereaved; the ongoing miseries of Afghanistan and Iraq. Informed and imaginative re-readings of the
history of philosophy are nonetheless an important way of engaging with
the present and facing the futurefor those of us who have the good fortune
to be able to avail ourselves of such means.
By re-reading and re-reinterpreting Kants political essays, Habermas and
Derrida help us reconnect the inchoate residue of Enlightenment ideals in
our own thought with their purer and stranger original forms. Such exercises
can help us to re-imagine, and thus restore, something of the eroded public
space of reason. But there is room for disagreement about where such reconnections take us. For Habermas the emphasis falls on trying to bring out and
restore something of the original ideas that underlie our corrupted remnants
40 Genevieve Lloyd
of the thought of the Enlightenment. His project is to continue the interrupted

project of Enlightenment reason. The mood of Derridas philosophical response
to September 11 is more complex. For him the rationale is not so much to
continue the Enlightenment project as to confront the dislocations and
hypocrisies within our contemporary versions of Enlightenment ideals, by
bringing out their contradictions. In my concluding remarks, I want to say
just a little about how he re-works Kants cosmopolitan ideal to bring out
the limitations of our contemporaryall too self-congratulatoryversion of
tolerance.
In his essay Perpetual Peace Kant talked of a cosmopolitan right to hospitalitythe right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives
on someone elses territory. There are for Kant limits to this right to hospitality. The stranger, he says, cannot claim the right of a guest to be entertained . . . he may only claim a right of resort, for all men are entitled to present
themselves in the society of others by virtue of their right to communal possession of the earths surface.20 Such a limited right is implicit for Kant in
the very idea of cosmopolitanism.
Some aspects of that idea of hospitality survive in our contemporary version
of tolerance. But it is an ideal that, on Derridas analysis, has deeper limitations than those Kant indicated. Shows of tolerance, Derrida says, are clearly
to be preferred to shows of intolerance. But the discourse of tolerance is most
often used on the side of those with power, always as a kind of condescending
concession . . . Tolerance, he argues, is actually the opposite of hospitality.
Or at least its limit. If I think I am being hospitable because I am tolerant, it
is because I wish to limit my welcome, to retain power and maintain control
over the limits of my home, my sovereignty . . .21
Kant was of course writing in a very different context from that of current
worldwide movements of refugees and migrants. But there is much that is
relevant for us in Derridas analysis of the limitations of the Kantian version
of the rights of the stranger. Tolerance, says Derrida, is a conditional, circumspect, careful hospitality.22 Pure, unconditional hospitality, in contrast
hospitality itselfopens to someone who is neither expected nor inviteda
new arrival. Non-identiable and unforeseeable, it is a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation.23 There are echoes here of Derridas other writ-
ings on the singularity of the event, the perhaps, the to come. And, as with
those ideas, pure hospitality operates in a different conceptual space from the
consideration of probabilities, of possible future presents.
Hospitality of visitation is not meant as a recommendation on how actual
immigration procedures should work, any more than Derridas talk of to come
is about a probable future. This is not applied philosophy; it is not directed
to forming public policy. But nor are such exercises of the philosophical imagination irrelevant to real politics. They are meant as conceptual correctives
to the assumptions and the rhetoric of current policy. I well recognize, says
Derrida, that this concept of pure hospitality can have no legal or political
status. No state can write it into its laws. But without at least the thought of
this pure and unconditional hospitality, of hospitality itself, we would have
no concept of hospitality in general and would not even be able to determine
any rules for conditional hospitality (with its rituals, its legal status, its norms,
its national or international conventions).24 Derridas talk of a hospitality of
visitation is not a recommendation for the automatic acceptance of all asylum
seekers. But it is nonetheless about justice in response to the uninvited
stranger.
The exercise of imagining pure hospitality makes visible just how far removed
current policies are from the ideals often evoked in appeals to our heritage
from the Enlightenment; and opens up space for the imagining of other possibilities. Like Habermas re-imagining of Enlightenment ideals, it is a contribution to creating or restoring a viable public space within which ideas
might be generated, communicated and put to work to produce new possibilities. It goes without saying that constructive policy change demands a
great deal more than the imaginative rereading of history of philosophy. But
the rethinking of old ideals in the face of new challenges and fresh horrors
is an important task for philosophy. Considering the issue of who, today,
deserves the name of philosopher, Derrida suggests that a philosopher
or, in his preferred term, philosopher-deconstructorwould be someone
who analyses and then draws the practical and effective consequences of the
relationship between our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still
dominant juridico-political system that is so clearly undergoing mutation.25
Derrida, unsurprisingly, looks to a new gure of Europe as the locus of hope
for another discourse and another politicsa way out of the double theologico-
42 Genevieve Lloyd
political program in which current American rhetoric confronts Islamic

fundamentalism.
At the end of his essay on The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, Kant tries to imagine how we, the remote descendants of
his own age, will manage to cope with the burden of history that he and
his contemporaries are bequeathing us. No doubt, he says, they will value
the history of the oldest times, of which the original documents would long
since have vanished, only from the point of view of what interests them
that is the positive and negative achievements of nations and governments
in relation to the cosmopolitan goal.26 And so it will be in turn, he would
say, for us too. Progress in relation to the cosmopolitan goal will be the only
real consideration in which we too can be honourably remembered in future
ages. I doubt that we can really share Kants optimistic vision of the cosmopolitan goalof Providence unfolding steadily as a narrative of moral
progress in human history. But perhaps we owe it to him to at least try to
understand our heritage of Enlightenment ideals, and to try to re-imagine
some of them in response to our own dark times.
Notes
1
Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1991, p. 183.
Ibid., p. 45.
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jrgen Habermas

and Jacques Derrida, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy,

Melbourne, Scribe Publications, 2002.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 242.
Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 31.
Ibid., p. 87.
Ibid., p. 94.
10
Ibid., p. 99.
11
Ibid., p. 90.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid., p. 95.
14
Ibid., p. 97.

15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., p. 99.
17
A. A. Long & D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol. 1, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1987, p. 429.
18
Ibid., p. 432.
19
Ibid., p. 431.
20
Kant, Political Writings, p. 106.
21
Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, pp. 129-130.
22
Ibid., p. 128.
23
Ibid., p. 129.
24
Ibid., p. 129.
25
Ibid., p. 106.
26
Kant, Political Writings, p. 53.
Nicholas H. Smith
Hope and Critical Theory
ABSTRACT
In the rst part of the paper I consider the relative
neglect of hope in the tradition of critical theory. I attribute
this neglect to a low estimation of the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral value of hope, and to the strongbut,
I argue, contingentassociation that holds between hope
and religion. I then distinguish three strategies for thinking about the justication of social hope; one which
appeals to a notion of unfullled or frustrated natural
human capacities, another which invokes a providential
order, and a third which questions the very appropriateness of justication, turning instead to a notion of
ungroundable hope. Different senses of ungroundable
hope are distinguished and by way of conclusion I briey
consider their relevance for the project of critique today.
KEYWORDS: Social Hope, Social Criticism, Frankfurt
School, Humanism, Rorty, Postmodernism
I. The Aversion of Theory to Hope

For all their differences and disagreements,
critical theorists presumably have at least one
thing in common: hope for a better world.
And yet, in comparison to concepts such as
critique, rationality, justice, and even desire
and memory, the idea of hope has received
little attention. Kant, if we consider him
for the moment as a founding gure in the
tradition of critique, is exceptional in this
46 Nicholas H. Smith
respect. For Kant, the question what may I hope is as fundamental to our
cognitive predicament as the questions what can I know? and what ought
I to do?: it unies the basic interests of human reason.1 But the philosophical signicance Kant attached to hope usually goes unremarked, as much in
discussions of Kants continuing relevance for critique as elsewhere. Ernst
Bloch, of course, is another critical theorist who can hardly be accused of
neglecting to deal with hope. But Bloch is a marginal gure in the history of
the Frankfurt School and in any case his masterpiece, The Principle of Hope,
is seldom read as an exemplar of critique today.2 Erich Fromms The Revolution
of Hope, admittedly an occasional and much less substantial study, has no
contemporary presence at all.3 Looking beyond the Frankfurt School tradition, over the past couple of decades some excellent work has been done on
hopeamongst philosophers, by Ronald Aronson, Joseph J. Godfrey and John
Patrick Day especiallybut the impact of this literature has been minimal.4
Certainly, it has done nothing to shape the course of contemporary debates
in critical theory.5
Why does hope strike so many theorists as unworthy of serious consideration? Perhaps one reason is that there is something intellectually unsatisfactory about being in hope. We often express a hope in contexts where we are
hesitant, uncertain, not fully convinced, or lacking in condence about our
ability to convince others. When my editor asks me if I will submit my typescript by a certain deadline, the honest answer may be I hope so, but Id
like to give a better, more denitive response. We tell our students to avoid
using locutions like in this essay I hope to show that . . . because, however
truthful, it reads too much like I cant really say what the essay shows. In
intellectual matters, recourse to hope often reects a lack of conviction, and
in some contexts it can amount to an avowal of ignorance. To acknowledge
that one merely hopes is to concede that one doesnt really know. From the
point of view of theory, then, hope can look very much second rate. Hope
lacks the justication that self-respecting theorists demand of their convictions
and beliefs. The realm of hope is vague and imprecise, and for that reason
uninteresting.
Hopes lack of renement is objectionable not only from a cognitive point of
view, but also from an aesthetic one. There is something common, unsophisticated, amateurish about it. Think of the way expressions like hit and
Hope and Critical Theory 47
hope or the hopeful ball are used in football talk. If you kick the ball hard
enough up eld, theres a chance it will nd one of your players. The long,
hopeful ball may not be pretty but its effective, as the saying goes. The contrast here of course is with a skilful, controlled and self-possessed style, one
that leaves minimum scope for luck, and hope. The hit-and-hoper, or the
player of the hopeful ball, amateurishly leaves things to chance. Here, hope
seems to mark the threshold of ability: a player, as much as an actor, musician or writer, starts to hope as she approaches and crosses (what she believe
to be) the limits of her powers. Those who can, do, we could say, those
who cant, hope. Hope and hopefulness in these and other contexts signies
something crude, ugly and vulgar.
Aesthetic aloofness about hope easily merges with moral qualms. Hope and
hopefulness are often associated with a nave and supercial optimism, acceptable perhaps for children and women but unbecoming for a philosopher.6
From the point of view of the philosopher, whose arduously attained freedom from illusion is such a cherished source of pride, hope can seem a lowly
and demeaning form of comfort. Hope and hopefulness, from this perspective,
are regressive dispositions that allow fantasy to predominate over reality.
This is not only unedifying, it also has bad consequences for the hopeful
person. By prolonging attachment to desires that cannot be satised, hope
generates frustration, resentment, and a proneness to disappointment that
can easily result in reactive violence and destruction. This is the reason for
the Stoics negative evaluation of the hopeful disposition in ancient times,
and it stands behind Nietzsches often quoted modern indictment of hope.7
One might also question the value of hope on the grounds that it deals with
an unsatisfactory present not by practically engaging with it, but by projecting
an imaginary future in which satisfaction is miraculously secured. The problem
here is that, in functioning as a form of compensation, hope lends itself to
passivity and indifference towards instigating change. To the extent that the
hoper relates to a given desirable outcome simply by waiting for it, hope
becomes problematic not just from an ethical but also from a political point
of view.8
For these reasons amongst others, hope has been regarded as something of
a false friend by philosophers, and this not just in modern times but throughout the ages.9 It is not surprising, then, that critical theorists in our day should
feel uncomfortable with talk about hope and want to distance themselves
from it. But the most signicant reason for the general neglect of hope in critical theory is surely something more specic: namely, the close association
between hope and religion. There are too many interesting and important
aspects of this association to explore in any detail here. But briey to mention a few: there is the conceptual afnity (though of course not identity)
between hope and prayer of petition (does the expression hope and pray
refer to two states of mind or one?). Second, the hoper, like the religious
believer, acknowledges a dependence on a power beyond him. Hope features
prominently in the Christian lexicon; it is of course one of the three theological virtues identied by St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas. In articulating for
the rst time the systematic philosophical signicance of hope, Kant took
himself to be at once spelling out the rational content of religion. Besides
Bloch, the main writers on hope in the twentieth century have been the
Christian existentialists Gabriel Marcel and Josef Pieper.10 Bloch himself was
accused of crypto-Christianity on account of the philosophical signicance
he accorded to hope. The diamat philosopher Manfred Buhr denounced Bloch
for embroiling Marxism with pseudo religious problems.11 Max Scheler allegedly
accused Bloch of running amok with God, a minor offence compared with
the fornication with God of which Siegfried Kracauer found Bloch guilty.12
Now Bloch, like Kant, was certainly impressed by the capacity of religion to
frame or give form to human hope. Kant and Bloch also shared the thought
that the idea of hope was as fundamental to philosophy as it was to religion.
But it was precisely for this reason that the critique of religion was so important
to them. The centrality of the idea of hope to their thinking does not of itself
make their thinking religious or theological, at least as those terms are usually understood. But both thinkers have found the charge of regressive backdoor theism hard to shake off, so close is the association in our minds between
religion and hope.
I began by asking why critical theorists rarely attend explicitly to the idea of
hope. Ive tentatively suggested some reasons: a low estimation of the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral value of hope, together with an unwillingness to
be saddled with the disreputable baggage of religion. At the same time, however, no critical theorist would like to think of himself or herself as without
social hope. Leaving career critical theorists to one side, whats the point of
doing critical theory if theres no hope society can be better? Critical theory
must give expression at some level to at least some residue of social hope for
it to be more than an academic exercise. I now want to ask what strategies
are available for justifying this hope.
II. The Grounds of Social Hope

We should rst distinguish the question of grounding social hope from two
related problems. First, there is the task of describing the kind of society one
hopes for. It seems proper to undertake this task before turning to the
justication of social hope, since in describing the object of the hope we are
giving the hope content, and without knowing the content of the hope it is
hard to see how we can go about justifying it. Clearly, we have to have some
idea of the kind of society we hope for before we can assess the grounds of
that hope. But for present purposes, which only concern strategies for grounding
social hope, it will sufce to work with a minimal formulation of the content
of the hope, one that just about all critical theorists could assent to. Let me
propose, following Rorty, that the object of this hope is a global, cosmopolitan,
democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society.13 More minimally still, we
can formulate it as a just and peaceful social order in which individuals are
able to realise their capacity for autonomy. It is worth noting that such general,
abstract formulations are hardly likely to activate or arouse social hope, though
this may be the effect of more richly articulated conceptions of utopia. In any
case, the imaginative articulation of the content of social hope is clearly
an important task for critical theory, though I wont say anything more about
it here.
Second, the question of grounding social hope should be distinguished from
the task of grounding social criticism. The grounds of social hope complement
but do not necessarily coincide with the grounds of social criticism, and the
task of reconstructing the latter should not be conated with the task of elucidating the former. The rational basis of social criticism has of course been
systematically examined by Habermas and a generation of critical theorists
inspired by his work.14 But it is clear from the results of those investigations
that they do not in themselves address the grounds of social hope. It
makes sense to appeal to notions like the unforced force of the better argument, or unavoidable structures of linguistic interaction oriented to reaching
understanding, or the performative contradiction involved in denying such

structures, if the justiability of basic communicative norms is at stake. It also
makes sense to appeal to such norms for justifying the moral point of view.
But it is far from clear what the reconstruction of the rationality potential of
discourseand so the justication of basic moral normstells us about the
kind of society we can hope for. There is of course a utopian dimension to
Habermas critical theory, but this is distinct from that aspect of it concerned
with the rational basis of social criticism.
Assuming that the content of the critical theorists social hope can be expressed
minimally as a classless, casteless society, one in which individuals are able
to realise their capacity for autonomy within a just and peaceful social order,
is this a hope to which we are entitled? Is hope for such a society justied?
Does it really matter if the hope is justied or not?
Let me now distinguish three broad strategies for dealing with these questions.
1. One strategy, deployed in a variety of ways in the tradition of critical social
theory, is to ground social hope in natural human capacities. We are entitled to
hope for a society radically better than the one we currently inhabit, this
mode of argument runs, because human beings are by nature capable of
creating such a society, and would create it if it were not for the existence of
powerful countervailing forces that appear beyond their control. On account
of these forces, natural human capacities for social life fail to develop and
human beings are unable to realise themselves through the exercise of those
capacities. According to this approachbrilliantly summarised by Alasdair
MacIntyre in his essay on Marxism and Christianitythe hope upon which
Marxism (and critical theory more generally) rests concerns the ability of
human beings to transform themselves, as MacIntyre puts it, once certain
barriers and frustrations are removed.15 The persuasiveness of this strategy
turns on its ability to identify precisely those barriers that prevent the development and exercise of the capacities in question: paradigmatically, of course,
the domination of capital over labour that corrodes social bonds and foreshortens human expressive powers. But the strategy also requires, as MacIntyre
points out, some sort of humanistic belief in the possibilities and resources
of human nature.16 That is to say, it rests on a conviction that human beings
would organise themselves into something like a casteless, classless society
given the chance. It is historically imposed impediments to the development

of the relevant human capacities that frustrate our social hopes. We can
legitimately hope for society to become better, according to this argumentative
strategy, because of the natural but as yet unrealised human potential for
social life organised by the principles of justice, peace and autonomous
self-realisation.
This humanist approach to grounding social hope has many attractions, but
it is currently out of favour amongst many philosophers and political theorists.
In part this is due to scepticism about the very idea of human nature. If one
rejects the notion that there is something ontologically distinct about human
beings, or if one denies the validity of the distinction between actuality and
potentiality, one will see little point in resorting to human nature to ground
social hope. Again, if it is the human capacity to put in question and move
beyond what is given to us by nature that impresses us most, we may
wonder why we need a notion of human nature to back up hopes of what
human beings may become. Other theorists, when pressed on the issue, may
not so much deny there is a human nature as reject the idea that social life
without classes or castes is within its power. Some argue that it is precisely
the social inhibition of human nature that enables us to avert dystopia, and
thats as much as we may hope for. Others maintain that social hope should
be separated from all talk of human powers and capacities, as it is the very
rapaciousness of human agency that underlies the worst social fears. According
to this line of thought, not only is the classical humanist model an inappropriate
basis of social hope, it is actually responsible for the very phenomena the
critical theorist hopes to overcome.
2. A second strategy, distinct from but related to the rst, is to ground social
hope by appealing to something like a providential order. The central feature
of this strategy is the idea that history unfolds in a way that inherently tends
towards the hoped for aim. The source of this tendency may be human nature,
but it may equally be Gods will or some invisible hand mechanism that
operates behind the back of rational agents. The crucial point is to interpret
the passage that history would have to undergo in order to realise radical
social hopes as the culmination of a process that is already underway. It is
the historical process as a totality that justies social hope. The strategy thus
involves the construction of narratives that connect present society with future
utopia in a way that at once makes intelligible the relation between present
society and its past. Radical social hope, justied in this way, could be called
historical hope. It is hope grounded in a conception of history as having a
course and being on course. As a strategy of justication, it relies on the availability of convincing narratives that reveal the underlying direction of the
historical process as a whole.
It has become a clich to say there is incredulity towards such grand narratives or meta-narratives amongst philosophers and critical theorists.17
Postmodernists typically criticise narratives of progress on account of their
supposed linearity, a feature that allegedly makes them hopelessly nave
from an epistemological point of view. Whatever the merits of that particular
objection, there is no doubt that it reects deep and widespread disenchantment
with the providentialist strategy for justifying radical social hope. And it is
just as certain that this disenchantment is fed as much by political developments
as by epistemological reection. As Jonathan Re has suggested, the crisis
of narratives of which postmodernists speak has its roots in the failure of a
certain kind of politics and a re-evaluation of what politics in general can
achieve.18 Re points out that belief in the inherent progressiveness of the
historical process provides a powerful motivation for militant political activism.
The militant could be reassured that despite the high personal costs of political action, long-term success was secured by the progressive movement of
History. The thought that history has a denite, knowable, controllable and
progressive shape is certainly an effective motivator of action, capable of overriding doubts that might otherwise debilitate the militant political agent.
Where such a model of politics seems desirable and appropriate, epistemological
and historical optimism is the order of the day. It is incredulity towards this
fusion of political activity and historical hopeas manifest in Marxism as
well as other modernist political movementswhich Re suggests is characteristic of our postmodern, post-socialist times. And rightly so, he argues,
because what progress there has been owes little to this fusion of political
action and historical hope (if it owes much to intentional action at all), and
because action motivated by historical hopewhile admirablehas, overall,
been disastrously counter-productive. Realisation of this has fractured the
whole structure of modern political hope, leaving the epistemological and
historical pessimists to pick up the pieces and mourn the end of a deluded
hope.19
On this account, then, its not so much incredulity towards meta-narratives,

disbelief in linear stories of progress, or scepticism about universal history
that dene the postmodern, post-socialist condition, as disillusionment with
the political projects that take orientation from such notions. This is an important point. It is less clear, however, why the development sketched here
amounts to a fracturing of social hope as such. The motivational structure that
seems so dubious from the postmodern or post-socialist point of view
involves the presence of an indefeasible, cast-iron certainty that the laws of
historythe existence of which the epistemologically and historically optimistic activist has no doubtare on the activists side. But such a psychic
structure hardly deserves to be called hope. The hoper, like the militant activist,
can have a desire for the ideal, and a belief that the future realisation of the
ideal is really possible. But the hoper is precisely not sure that the ideal will
come to pass. It is part of the structure of hope not to see the future as under
ones control. If it were not for the belief that the future is open, that it contains
more than one possibility, there could be no hope. The hoper sees the future
unfolding in multiple possible directions, one of which will satisfy the hopers
desire. But the militant activist powered by historical hope, in the sense Re
rightly describes as problematic for postmodern and post-socialist sensibilities,
conceives the future as already set on its pre-determined course, as bound to
unfold in a way that, in the long run, will realise the political ideals.
If historical hope is to have any meaning it has to be divorced from the historicist belief that history is on an unalterable, if zigzag course to human perfection. One doesnt hope for something one knows will happen anyway. To
be hopeful is to have a more modest, and we are all inclined now to say more
realistic, relation to a desired future than historicism allows. Hope is attuned
to the ineradicable contingency of human affairs. As such, it is a disposition
that seems well-suited to the epistemological pessimism that Re advocates.
And it points to a third strategy for dealing with the grounds of social hope,
one that deates the signicance of justication and emphasises instead the
interconnections between hope, scepticism, contingency, anti-historicism and
socialist ideals.
Before moving to this third strategy, let me quickly observe that scepticism
about historicism, or philosophy of history that relies on the notion of a selfrealising universal subject, is by no means limited to postmodernism: it features
in several strands of critique developed within the Frankfurt School, and is

a dening characteristic of the paradigm shift Habermas urges for critical
theory.20 Habermas proposals for a differentiated model of historical change,
observing a strict division between the logics and dynamics of development
and between system and lifeworld rationalisation, are aimed at undermining the teleological conception of history as pre-destined for utopia. And
more generally, the providentialist strategy for justifying social hope on the
basis of the direction of history as a whole is uncongenial to many political
theorists who see it as tending to privilege the story of the victor, or the
historical self-understanding of culturally (but also politically and militarily)
dominant groups.
III. Ungroundable Hope

Providentialism and reliance on a conception of natural human capacities
probably represent the two dominant strategies for grounding radical social
hope within critical theory. Their decline, however, has led some theorists to
reassess the whole philosophical signicance of social hope. The third strategy
for thinking about social hope I briey want to look at takes its departure
from the failure of traditional attempts to provide a philosophical foundation
for social hope; not with a view to correcting the means of justication, but
with the idea of dropping the project of justication altogether. In other words,
this third strategy denies that social hope can be grounded by appeal to
human nature, the end of history, providence, or anything else. But this lack
of justication should not be a source of concern: it is only what an epistemological and historical pessimist would expect. Far from blocking off hope,
scepticism about its rational groundability and attentiveness to the contingency of its fullment are just what we need to have hope, and it is what we
need to have a proper understanding of the relation of social hope to philosophy
and critical theory.
Richard Rorty is the most eloquent and inuential advocate of what we could
call this deationist strategy for thinking about social hope. One of the central ideas of his work is that a pragmatist philosophical vocabularyone that
emphasises human nitude, sociality, contingency, and so forthis better
suited for thinking about the liberal utopia of a classless, casteless society
than one that has recourse to so-called Platonist notions of human nature,
the inherent progressiveness of history, and so on.21 He invites us to acknowledge and embrace the contingency of liberal/socialist ideals, so as to see them
as hopes rather than as written into the nature of things. For hope, Rorty
says, doesnt require justication, cognitive status, foundations, or anything
else.22 The great merit of pragmatism, according to Rorty, is that it allows
room for unjustiable hope, and an ungroundable but vital sense of human
solidarity.23
Even though we usually think of a pessimist as someone who expects the
worst, and so as someone who lacks hope, Rortys unjustiable hope ts the
prole of the epistemological and historical pessimist well. The person with
unjustiable hope is not under the illusion that things must turn out for the
best, that history is unfolding according to some secret principle of the best,
or that the best is written into the nature of things. This kind of hope is not
supported by dubious notions of a providential order or a perfectible human
nature. Nor is such hope diminished by the realisation that history is not on
the hopers side (it is not, from a pragmatist perspective, on anyones side).
The person who grasps the philosophical ungroundability of social hope is
also less prone to disappointment than the person who bases the hope on
human nature or the inherent progressiveness of history. Rortys notion of
ungroundable hope is meant to bring out the practical irrelevance of rational
justication for social hope. Talk of grounding social hope in human nature
or a providential order is at best a diversion that, in Rortys view, barely
touches on the more important tasks of proposing concrete social ameliorations
and imagining new liberal utopias.
Rorty is not so much of a pessimist that he denies there are grounds for social
hope, though this is an impression his effort at making room for ungroundable
hope can give. His point is rather to free up the utopian imagination while
advocating meliorism over what he considers to be the misguided metaphysical notion of utopia as transgured humanity. This is why he calls his
version of pragmatism romantic utilitarianism.24 In Rorty, the romantic (or
existentialist) idea that radical social hope is in some sense hope in spite of
probability, a kind of deant resistance to what we have rational grounds to
expect, only occasionally nds expression, being for the most part secondary
to utilitarian, meliorist, liberal concerns. Other writers, however, have been
less cautious in formulating their conceptions of ungroundable hope. John
D. Caputo, for instance, taking his lead from Derrida and St. Paul, has suggested that hope is really hope only when things begin to look hopeless and
it is mad to hope.25 His paradoxical formulation that hope is hope only
when one hopes against hope is meant to capture the radical absence of
grounds that, in Caputos view, gets to the essence of hope.26 According to
this (deconstructionist) line of thought, ungroundable hope has a purity qua
hope, which is alien to hope based on likelihoods, demonstrable potentialities or historical evidence. Deconstructionist thinking about social hope shares
Rortys pessimism about the possibility of philosophical grounding, but it
departs from pragmatism in taking the impossibility itself as revelatory of the
meaning of such hope. The deconstructionist strategy in regard to social
hope is thus to afrm its ungroundability in a form which intensies our
sense of the ungroundable or the impossible. By making manifest the paradoxes and aporia attendant upon radical social hope, it seeks not to ground
it but to elucidate its meaning as transcending conceptuality and possibility.
Messianic hope for the impossible has thus assumed a prominent place in
deconstructionist discourse on social hope.27
One can grant a place for ungroundable hope without going so far as to say
that only hope without reason is really hope or that considerations of probability exclude or count against hope.28 As should already be apparent, the
notion that social hope is ungroundable can mean several things with different implications for the tasks of critique.29 First, there is a sense in which
all hope is ungroundable insofar as it involves an act or a stance that is ultimately a matter of decision. However justiable (in terms of probability) the
object of hope may be, the subject may resolve to be hopeful or to maintain
an attitude of hope if that is what seems appropriate. Perhaps critical theorists have a responsibility to sustain an attitude of social hope whatever
justication they are able to muster for the object of hope. Talk of ungroundable
hope can then serve as a reminder that what matters about social hope is a
certain attitude to the present as open to the future. To the extent that simply
keeping this openness in view has become an issue for us, it at least makes
sense to consider the justication of specic future scenarios as of secondary
signicance.
We can arrive at a sense of ungroundable hope by abstracting the subjective
aspect of hope (the willing, desiring, and deciding aspect which is not amenable
to rational grounding) from the objective aspect (the probability or rational

desirability of the hoped-for thing). But such abstraction would not be required
if there were a mode of hope which did not have an objective aspect at all.
That is to say, if there were a kind of hope that did not aim at any state of
affairs in particular, it clearly would not be justiable in terms of reasons for
believing the state of affairs would (or ought to) obtain. Being without an
object, such hope would a fortiori be without a justiable object. Now the
philosophical and theological literature on hope does contain repeated references to ungroundable hope in this sense. Marcel, for instance, distinguishes
hope that . . . which aims at particular objects and an objectless, unconditional
hope which expresses an existential orientation of the subject over and above
its particular engagements.30 The latter, which Marcel designates absolute
hope, is said to transcend every kind of representation whatever it might
be.31 Pieper articulates a similar thought when he distinguishes mundane
hopes from a fundamental hope aimed at something nameless rather than
representable, conceivable, or imaginable goals.32 This fundamental hope,
Pieper writes, is possessed by someone who holds himself in readiness for
a fullment which goes beyond every imaginable human postulate.33 The
expression fundamental hope is also a key term in Godfreys account of
hope. Drawing on the work of Marcel and others, Godfrey persuasively argues
for a distinction between hope as an untargeted openness to the future and
a refusal to despair (fundamental hope) and ultimate hopes that have various
degrees of soundness or justication.34
What is the relationship between ungroundable hope as fundamental hope
and social hope? The connection is not obvious since social hope as we have
dened it does have an object (classless, casteless society) whereas fundamental
hope does not. Nor is it clear how the idea of fundamental ungroundable
hope connects with critique. Such hope is distinct from ultimate social hope,
or hope for utopia, which is how hope typically features as a theme in critical
theory. But there may be indirect ways in which ungroundable hope as fundamental hope is relevant for the project of critique. I have already alluded
to the importance of keeping alive the very idea of social possibility, of society
seen from the standpoint of its openness to the future. In addition, the notion
of fundamental hope is suggestive of a philosophical anthropology according
to which hope is a basic human capacity for positive self-relations over time.
If, as Axel Honneth has shown, positive self-relations and a capacity for autonomy emerge through structures of mutual recognition, perhaps the ability to
relate to the future as a horizon of possibility through hope is also a formal
requirement of the good life. Perhaps objectless hope has an ontological
signicance analogous to that claimed of objectless fear (angst). These are
matters for further enquiry. It is unfortunate that till now the existential and
anthropological signicance of hope has only been considered at the margins
of critical theory.35
The emergence of a discourse of ungroundable social hope, and the greater
comfort many theorists seem to have dealing with this notion than with positive justicatory strategies, no doubt reects a reduction in the sum of social
hope circulating amongst theorists (and elsewhere).36 But it would be a mistake
to discount such discourse as empty, merely subjective, or ideological. It gives
expression to traces of social hope that might otherwise disappear. It would
be an even bigger mistake, however, to abandon the project of positively
grounding social hope, as if that project were irremediably corrupted by essentialism, foundationalism, providentialism or whatever. The task of grounding
social hope that previous generations of critical theorists tackled remains with
us today: namely, to understand the possibilities for progress inherent in the
present and to identify the barriers that frustrate humane social life.37
Notes
1
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith, London,
See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice & Paul
See Eric Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Towards a Humanized Technology, New York,
See Ronald Aronson, Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope, London, Verso, 1983
Macmillan, 1933, A805/B833.

Knight, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986.
Harper & Row, 1968.
and by the same author Hope after Hope, Social Research, vol. 66, no. 2, Summer,
1999, pp. 471-94; John Patrick Day, Hope. A Philosophical Inquiry, Acta Philosophica
Fennica, vol. 51, Helsinki, 1991; Joseph J. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope,
Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhof, 1987.
5
The situation may be changing. Ghassan Hage has outlined a sketch for a critique
of the present organised around the idea of hope that is powerful and provocative
in the current Australian context. See Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism.

Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Annandale, Pluto (London, Merlin Press),
2003. There also seems to be a renewed interest amongst sociologists and political
theorists in the utopian dimension of critical theory, as the articles by Craig Browne
and Pauline Johnson in this volume reect.
6
The association of hope with women, weakness and an anodyne nds its
archetype in the Pandora tale. For discussion see Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human
Hope, and Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1.
Hope is the worst of all evils, for it protracts the torment of man, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Human all too Human, vol. 1, trans. R. J. Holland, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1986 (1878), p. 45.
For further discussion (drawing on Blochs inuential views on this matter) see
Ruth Levitas, Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia in
Not Yet. Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, eds. Jamie Owen Daniel & Tom Moylan, London,
Verso, 1997, pp. 65-79.
9
10
See Day, Hope, p. 36.

See e.g. Joseph Pieper, Hope and History, trans. Richard and Lara Winston, London,
Herder & Herder, 1969; Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator. Introduction to a Metaphysic
of Hope, trans. Emma Crawford, London, Victor Gollancz, 1951.
11
See Manfred Buhr, A Critique of Ernst Blochs Philosophy of Hope, Philosophy

Today, vol. 14, Winter, 1970, pp. 259-71 (a translation of Der religiose Ursprung
Charackter der Hoffnungsphilosophie Ernst Bloch, Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie,
4, 1958, pp. 576-98. In a concluding endnote, Buhr writes: What remains to be
done in reference to Bloch is to prove that the philosophy of hope is a manifestation
of religious thought forms . . . and to point out the afnities and common points
between philosophy of hope and similar currents in contemporary late bourgeois
philosophy, n. 49, p. 271.
12
See Rolf Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School, trans. Michael Robertson, Cambridge,
Polity, p. 65, 69.
13
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999, p. xii.
14
See, for example, Jrgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2 Vols, trans.
Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge, Polity, 1984, 1987; Kenneth Baynes, The Normative
Basis of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, Habermas, Albany, SUNY Press, 1991; Maeve
Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermass Pragmatics, Cambridge, MA,
MIT Press, 1994; William Rehg, Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jrgen
Habermas, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994; Shane ONeill, Impartiality
in Context, Albany, SUNY Press, 1997.
15
Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity, second edition, London, Duckworth,

1995, p. 89.
16
Ibid., p. 92.
17
See Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington,

Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984.
18
See Jonathan Re, Marxism and Hope, in Post-Marxism and the Middle East, ed.
Faleh A. Jabar, London, Saqi Books, 1997, pp. 203-11.
19
Ibid., p. 211.
20
See, for example, Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans.
21
See, for example, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope.
22
R. Rorty, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 1998,
Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Polity, 1987.
p. 58.
23
R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,

1982, p. 208.
24
See Rorty, Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism, in The Revival of Pragmatism,

ed. M. Dickstein, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998, pp. 21-36. For further
analysis of Rortys romantic utilitarianism and its approach to social hope see
Nicholas H. Smith, Rorty on Religion and Hope, Inquiry, vol. 48, no. 1, February
2005, pp. 76-98.
25
See John D. Caputo, The Experience of God and the Axiology of the Impossible,
in Religion after Metaphysics, ed. M. Wrathall, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2003, pp. 123-45, 134.
26
Ibid., p. 134.
27
See e.g. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, Bloomington &
Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1997.
28
If we follow probability there is no hope, Isabelle Strengers, interview with Mary

Zournazi, in HopeNew Philosophies for Social Change, ed. M. Zournazi, Annandale,
Pluto Press, 2002, p. 245, cited by Craig Browne in his contribution to this volume.
29
I have examined the sense Rorty gives to the idea of unjustiable hope in Rorty
on Religion and Hope.
30
See Marcel, Homo Viator, p. 32f.
31
Ibid., p. 46.
32
J. Pieper, Hope and History, p. 25.
33
Ibid., p. 91.
34
See Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, esp. pp. 133-154.
35
For example, by Hinrich Fink-Eitel in Das rote Fenster. Fragen nach dem Prinzip
der Philosophe von Ernst Bloch, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 95, no. 2, 1988. I
thank Axel Honneth for alerting me to this piece.
36
As Rorty himself has remarked, philosophy is responsive to changes in amount

of political hope, and the preoccupation amongst contemporary political philo-

sophers with notions of the impossible reects a lack of social hope, and an
inability to construct a plausible narrative of progress. Rorty, Philosophy and Social
Hope, pp. 229, 232.
37
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2004 Philosophy and Human
Sciences Colloquium in Prague and the 2004 Annual Conference of the Australasian
Society for Continental Philosophy at Macquarie University. I thank everyone who
discussed the paper with me on these occasions for their helpful comments.
Craig Browne
Hope, Critique, and Utopia
ABSTRACT
This paper assesses the extent to which the category
of hope assists in preserving and redening the vestiges
of utopian thought in critical social theory. Hope has
never had a systematic position among the categories
of critical social theory, although it has sometimes acquired
considerable prominence. It will be argued that the current
philosophical and everyday interest in social hope can
be traced to the limited capacity of liberal conceptions
of freedom to articulate a vision of social transformation
apposite to contemporary suffering and indignity. The
background to these experiences is the structural changes
associated with the injustices of globalisation, the mobilisation of the capitalist imaginary and the uncertainties
of the risk society. The category of hope could assist in
sustaining the utopianism of critical theory through conjoining normative principles with a temporal orientation.
Yet, the paradoxes of the current phase of capitalist modernisation have further denuded notions of progress.
Since the theological background to the category of hope
constitutes a major limitation, the utopian orientation of
critique is claried in relation to the antinomies of the
turn to social hope and the potential of Habermas discourse theory of democracy, law and morality. Despite
Castoriadis profound critique of the category of hope,
its present usage in social analyses will be seen to have
afnities with Honneths conception of the struggle for
recognition.
KEYWORDS: Hope, Critical Theory, Utopia, Globalisation,
Capitalism, Habermas
64 Craig Browne
During the course of the last century, the leading motif of historical change
in critical social theory decisively shifted from emancipation to democracy.
It is a shift that could be understood to entail a decline in utopian projections
of alternative futures. Whilst such an interpretation underestimates the consequences of the radical democratisation of capitalist society, the very idea
of a reduction in future alternatives has sometimes suggested the centrality
of the category of hope to projects of historical change and emancipation.1
The contemporary questioning of the notions of progress and development
has undoubtedly shaped recent interest in the category of hope and reconsiderations of the politics of utopia.2 Even so, there are substantial reasons
why hope has never had a systematic position among the categories of critical
theory. Notably, the cultural background of the category of hope is primarily
theological and hope has been regarded with suspicion because these originally theological connotations may overwhelm other associations. Still, hope
has on occasions been an explicit theme in the writings of the Frankfurt School
circle and the philosophy of Ernst Bloch is obviously an exception in its
attempt to found the entire project of critique in hope.3 The following analysis
has the more modest aim of assessing the extent to which the category of
hope assists in preserving and redening the vestiges of utopian thought in
critical social theory. It will suggest that the contemporary relevance of the
idea of hope derives from the insights that it can provide into the injustices
of globalisation and that critical theory needs to rene its analysis and diagnosis
of these injustices. Similarly, it will be argued that it is not difcult to recognise
the potential symbiosis between hope and the reexive modernisation of the
risk society, but that the corresponding reliance on the category of hope is
partly due to an uncertainty about the appropriate methodological framework of critique. The risk society thesis compels revisions in the presuppositions of critique; it involves paradoxes that undermine the simple identication
of critical theory with either of the alternative projects of the transguration
or the fullment of modernity.4
The nexus between hope and utopia probably appears incontrovertible; it
nevertheless needs to be established in a manner consistent with critical theory, because each category usually implies a negation of existing social circumstances. That is, hopeful and utopian negations could be independent of
the assessment of the practical political possibilities for the transformation of
these conditions and the substantive social analysis of them. In broad terms,
Hope, Critique, and Utopia 65
critical social theory distinctively combines utopian projections with the explication of the needs of subjects that are unfullled and the empirical analysis
of the developmental tendencies of capitalist society. It does not simply juxtapose an ideal state against existing conditions of oppression and inequality,
critical theory seeks through this synthesis of normative and empirical analysis
to disclose changes in the present that pregure an emancipated or democratic
society. Further, critical theory relates its perspective to that of the subjects
that would seek to bring about this transformation. In Adornos opinion,
critical theory even involves a certain prohibition against translating social
hope into positive images of social utopia:
Those schooled in dialectical theory are reluctant to indulge in positive
images of the proper society, of its members, even of those who would
accomplish it. Past traces deter them; in retrospect, all social utopias since
Platos merge in a dismal resemblance to what they were devised against.
The leap into the future, clean over the conditions of the present, lands in
the past.5
Of course, these various methodological stipulates of critical theory have

rarely been fully satised.6 In the case of The Frankfurt School, the rupturing
of ties to political practice and the historical closure intrinsic to the idea of
the dominance of instrumental reason resulted in critical theory becoming
utopian in the negative sense of envisaging unrealisable alternatives.7 Bloch
famously contrasted the compensatory function of unrealisable abstract utopias
with the anticipatory character of concrete utopias that are grounded in the
objective possibility of the present.8 By contrast, Habermas critical theory
recties the deciency of abstract utopia, but arguably at the price of compromising or even abandoning the utopian and anticipatory dimension of
critique.9 In an acute analysis of alternatives present in his theory of communicative action, Benhabib anticipated Habermas subordinating of the
utopian moment of transguration.10 Benhabib compared a democraticparticipatory conception of public life, oriented to the utopian construction
of a community of needs and solidarity, with a legal-juridical conception that
sought the fullment of the normative promise of liberal democracy by effectively institutionalising the universalistic principles of rights and entitlements.
However, this contrast cannot be maintained in quite this way in relation to
Habermas discourse theory of law and democracy.11 It seeks to make the
66 Craig Browne
legalistic-juridical and the democratic-utopian conceptions interdependent,

but how much remains of the utopian project of a community of needs can
be gauged from the fact that the former denitively qualies the latter.
The typical historical complexion of utopian aspirations is displaced in
Habermas recent reformulating of critique in terms of the radical democratic
project of realising the normative content of the democratic constitutional
state and the system of rights that it embodies.12 In part, this reformulation
is based on his assessment of the decline of most of the socio-political movements that sought to extend the ideals of the French revolution, such as anarchism and communism.13 It derives even more from his belief that legitimacy
depends on the satisfaction of the procedural conditions of democratic discourse. For Habermas, the experience of state socialism convincingly demonstrated that processes of emancipation are conditional on democracy and that
political action presupposes public dialogue for its justication. In his opinion,
the discourse theory of deliberative democracy gives new vitality to the old
promise of a self-organizing community of free and equal citizens.14 Despite
its overestimating the capacity of law to translate communicatively generated
normative principles into administrative power, substantial changes would
no doubt ensue from institutionalising the discourse theorys model of deliberative democracy. For instance, its conception of the mutual reinforcement
of public autonomy and private autonomy implies a major alteration in the
institutional divisions that structure gender relations in the advanced capitalist nation states. Signicantly, discourse theory provides a broad justication
for greater social equality on the grounds of its facilitating higher levels of
democratic participation.
Habermas believes that the changes ensuing from the discourse theory of
democracy and law simply require the complete realisation of the established
normative principles of a constitutional state, rather than the more utopian
idea of democratic invention. He insists that the procedural paradigm of discourse does not present anything like a utopia; it only denes formal conditions. Its project of democratising society is therefore not an ideal projection
of a concrete form of life.15 This model nevertheless contains the peculiar
tension of amounting to nothing more but requiring nothing less than that
all the involved actors must form an idea of how the normative content of
the democratic state can be effectively and fully exploited within the horizon
of existing social structures and perceived developmental tendencies.16 On

the one hand, discourse theorys specication of how actors can understand
themselves to be the authors of the laws to which they are subject is probably
an unsurpassed clarication of how the normative principles of existing institutions can be best practically realised. On the other hand, it is not difcult
to recognise that its restricted conception of popular sovereignty reects
Habermas belief that the utopian ambition of giving a more holistic meaning
to the principles of discursive democracy risks undermining them. For many
sympathetic critics, restrictions of this order are actually unwarranted concessions to the systems theoretical arguments of social complexity; such deviations from radical democratic norms are neither unavoidable nor necessary
consequences of social facts.17
Utopian modes of critique have usually centred on the categories of needs
and human fullment, discourse theory substitutes for these the counterfactual
idealisations that structure communicative practices.18 Habermas considers
that due to the complexity of modern society, critique cannot be founded on
a philosophical anthropology of needs and an ethics of practical reason.
Instead, communicative reason is appropriate, particularly because it establishes the validity basis of law and democratic procedures. In fact, Habermas
claims there is a conceptual or internal relation, and not simply a historically
contingent association, between the rule of law and democracy.19 From this
standpoint, the principles of human rights and popular sovereignty, that
underpin the legitimacy of modern law, comprise the nucleus for the radical
democratisation of society. Now, this position may seem to suggest that the
category of hope is redundant, however such a conclusion would be misleading in many respects. It will be argued that Habermas discourse theory
redenition of the problem of critique obtains its relevance from historical
developments that his general social theory could not adequately explain,
especially those associated with the late-modern changes of globalisation.20
Moreover, it is necessary to account for why the critical engagement with
these changes has been articulated in terms of hope. This analysis will highlight the erosion of some of the social preconditions of the discourse theory
model and the related decline in utopian modes of social critique. In addition,
it will suggest that a connection could be forged between the philosophical
anthropology of hope and the social diagnostic framework of Honneths conception of the struggle for recognition.21
68 Craig Browne
Given the qualications of the discourse theory of law, democracy and morality,
it may appear paradoxical that the persistence of utopian aspirations was
integral to Habermas defence of the project of modernity and his earlier
attempts to uphold a notion of progressive historical change.22 Besides rejecting
its key theses, Habermas regarded postmodernism as symptomatic of a waning
of the utopian energies that were associated with the project of the transformation of the conditions of social labour and the new obscurity that arose
from the recognition of the substantial limitations of the welfare state.23 In
many respects, this analysis intersects with the suppositions that inform the
recent social scientic discussions of the category of hope; these discussions
have disclosed some further dilemmas that critique today confronts. In particular, the interest in the category of hope can likewise be traced to the limited
capacity of liberal conceptions of freedom to articulate a vision of social transformation appropriate to contemporary experiences of suffering and indignity.24 In this sense, the motives underlying much of the recent literature on
hope are similar to those that have shaped critical social theory. The category
of hope has also achieved a certain prominence against the intentions of critical social theory: hope is embraced because of the loss of utopian alternatives
and a lack of condence in the value of transformation. Yet, if the appeal of
hope derives from its apparent power to restore a belief in the prospect of
change then the appeal to hope seems to risk undermining practical capacities
for transformation. Hope, as Crapanzano suggests, has been considered the
passive counterpart to active concepts like desire; hope often seems to refer
to an agency beyond the capacities of subjects.25
From Ernst Bloch through to Richard Rorty, discussions of hope in philosophy and social theory have highlighted the signicance of anticipation and
the practical consequences of projections that simultaneously emerge in the
present but point beyond it.26 In this way, the appeal of the category of hope
derives from its seeming to conjoin normative principles with a temporal orientation. At the same time, Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History
made it abundantly clear that the temporality of hope need not converge
with the rationalised and quantied time that has structured modernist conceptions of progress and development.27 In many instances, recourse to the
category of hope can be precisely attributed to disenchantment with the
notions of development and the broader background social imaginary of
modern rationality. This partly explains why the category of hope has had a
signicant, though subordinate, place in the research of medical social sciences.28 It has been in the context of research into healing that the restorative
powers of hope have often been worked out. Notions of pathology and suffering have also inuenced the emergence of hope as a theme in recent discourses in the wider humanities and the social sciences. Hope is the counterpart
to theoretically informed social diagnoses; for instance, it frames two recent
responses to the disquieting Australian combination of national solidarity
and neo-liberalism.29 Most of these recent analyses of hope involve some
reconsideration of the notion of transformation and intimations of a different system of values. Contemporary critique need not endorse the conclusions ensuing from these reections and diagnoses, nevertheless there are
three primary reasons why it needs to situate its own standpoint in relation
to them: each is relevant to critical theorys dialectic of immanence and transcendence.30 First, there can be little dispute that the recent prominence of
the category of hope is connected to discernible pre-theoretical needs and
experiences of subjects. Second, without being explicit about it, many accounts
locate hope in the tension between the experiences of self-formation and selftranscendence. According to Joas, these experiences are the basis of the emergence of values and value commitments.31 Third, the focus on hope itself
reects attempts to rethink the temporality of social change, especially in
response to the temporal and spatial conjunctures of globalisation.
These contemporary reections on hope signal substantial changes in the
points of reference of notions of transformation and the character of anticipation. In particular, utopian thought had constituted an extension of critique
and part of its inspiration. It was through positing alternatives to existing
social heteronomy and indignity that modern forms of utopian thought gave
orientation to social actors and movements.32 By contrast, recent appeals to
hope tend to be more circumspect and refrain from depicting some version
of the good life in a social order that has transcended the conditions of alienation. In my opinion, the connection between diagnoses of the dissipating of
these utopian energies and more recent social analyses of hope can be sourced
to the experience of a paradox peculiar to contemporary capitalist societies.33
On the one hand, the condition of continued social progress seems to be
bound to the extension of social relations through the networks and mobilities
70 Craig Browne
of globalisation.34 On the other hand, the dominance of neo-liberalism as the

organising principle of these globalising processes results in a generalised
deation of expectations concerning social bonds and the limiting of the horizon of the future to the vocabulary of the present. The alternative to the present consists then in the hope that the future may be different, even though
it is difcult to precisely or substantively dene the conditions that would
mean that the future would be better. In this way, one of the paradoxes of
contemporary capitalist nation states has a certain analogy with the experiences of patients who can be healed but not necessarily cured.35
The utopian dimension of critique has regularly centred on the problem of
rectifying the lack of coincidence between the values of freedom and equality.
Critique intends to enlarge the meaning of both values through the creation
of conditions for their practical reconciliation. In these terms, the welfare state
represents a compromise between the utopian objectives of an autonomous
society that institutionalises equality and the functional demands of a complex
social system that can only indirectly ameliorate social injustice. In Habermas
opinion, this unresolved tension between capitalism and democracy shapes
the class compromise of the welfare state and the constraints on social reform
and wealth redistribution that derive from its dependence on capital accumulation, particularly for taxation revenue and sustaining full employment
in the labour market.36 The tensions intrinsic to the welfare state subsequently
receive indirect expression in the new modalities of social alienation that
result from state interventions into citizens lifeworlds that contradict their
intended goal of enhancing freedom and equality.37 Although the welfare state
never directly embodied the original utopian ideals of social labour, such as
the socialist utopias of collective ownership of property and Marxs vision of
the free association of producers, it did institutionalise some of the normative aspirations of a just and dignied life grounded in labour and its collective organisation. On this analysis, the welfare state is primarily an outcome
of the social democratic project of extending the democratic and constitutional legacy of bourgeois emancipation movements. This project has always
been qualied by structural limitations; the impasse in the contemporary
period, Habermas argued, derives from an additional uncertainty. The project of social democracy, that lent a utopian dimension to the welfare state,
was based on the notion that society could act upon itself without risk, using
the neutral means of political and administrative power.38 This notion has
been called into question, with critiques of the welfare states bureaucratic,
legal and therapeutic policies and interventions highlighting the capacity of
administrative power to distort and undermine the goals it is supposed to
serve. It led to the recognition that administrative power regularly operates
according to its own logic; the welfare state was further charged with transforming citizens into the passive clients of institutions.
These assessments of the discrepancy between the social democratic ideals
of the welfare state and the factual limitations of its organisational form are
quite different from the contemporary neo-liberal and neo-conservative assessments. In a sense, the latter critical assessments present a counter-utopia: of
unregulated markets and radical individual freedom from the state and society.39 In the context of these alternatives, Habermas argued that it was necessary to continue the welfare state project at a higher level of self-reection
and that regression would ensue from renouncing its attempt to give expression to universalistic values. The dilemma was that this reection could obviously not be undertaken by the state administrative system itself, nor did the
sphere of social labour contain the basis of continued reform. The utopian
idea of a society based on social labour had lost its persuasive power, he
argued, above all, because that utopia has lost its point of reference in reality: the power of abstract labour to create structure and to give form to society.40 This controversial thesis probably drew too heavily on interpretations
of the consequences of a shift to a post-industrial economy and the end of
work. It also too readily gave historical content to the philosophical change
Habermas proposed from the production to the communication paradigm.
A change that he believed was mirrored in the shift in utopian accents and
that was implicit in the practices, as much as the explicit themes, of new
social movements.41 I want to suggest that Habermas arguments can be read
in a complementary, but nonetheless different way, as concerning tendencies
that were to inuence a shift in critical reections on late-modernity from the
possibility of utopia to the problem of hope. It is a shift that coincides, on
the one hand, with the apparent diminishing of the conditions that enabled
the welfare state to extend the democratic rights of citizens and to raise standards of living for segments of the population. On the other hand, this experience of decline stands in a dialectical relationship to the contemporary
mobilisation of the capitalist imaginary. Probably, the novel dimension of this
deployment is the interconnection the contemporary capitalist imaginary
72 Craig Browne
establishes between the utopia of private consumption and the neo-liberal

ideology of globalisation.
The symbolic features of the capitalist imaginary disguise antinomies and
give particular meanings to technological changes and exchange relations.
One of the clearest contemporary manifestations of the power of this imaginary is the notion that globalisation necessitates a substantial change in the
balance of the relationship of the state and the market. It is easy to recognise
that this notion becomes effective through its very institution and that the
neo-liberal policies of deregulating markets intensify the structural dilemmas
of the welfare state. In his elucidation, Castoriadis suggests that a social imaginary simultaneously creates an interpretation of the institutionalised social
order and some conception of its transcendence.42 Drawing on this perspective, it is plausible to suggest that the contemporary capitalist imaginary
equally involves a projection of the factual transcendence, or the existence
within itself of the means for the transcendence, of the tensions of the former social order of capitalism. Of course, in no sense is this imaginary positing that transcendence projected in socialist utopias, nor is it representing the
instantiation of the normative content of socialism. It does not even imply
the inversion typical of ideology, because the contemporary capitalist imaginary presents an interpretation of the present capitalist social order as constituting the negation of the conditions that produced the utopian aspirations
of socialism. The fact that this fantasy is, so to speak, not merely ction can
be seen in assumptions that inform many recent critical discourses. Habermas
arguments concerning the exhaustion of utopian energies exemplify several
of them. In line with many accounts of late-capitalism, he claims that new
divisions of social exclusion are overtaking the dialectic of interdependence
and conict that had underpinned the class compromise of the welfare state.
Those disconnected from the process of production lack any leverage equivalent to the withdrawal of labour. That is, contemporary capital is not directly
or really dependent on this impoverished and disenfranchised minority for
its reproduction. In this way, a feature of the dynamics of the global capitalist economic system is replicated within individual nation states. Now, it
would be an exaggeration to consider that this tendency completely subsumes the geographical distinction between the capitalist core and periphery. However, in an analysis of a much longer historical period, Wallerstein
agrees that: the core-periphery gap will become less and less seen or dened as a clearly geographical phenomenon, and more and more as a class
phenomenon in all countries.43 Wallersteins conclusion that this change
occurs in the context of a massive historical increase in the scale of inequalities points to the paradox that has inuenced the shift from the possibility
of utopia to the question of hope:
This is the worst of all situations for those interested in the political stability of the world-system. On the one hand, the populations in the South,
who will still be the worst off and the most desperate, may be ready to contemplate more serious anti-systemic disruption. On the other hand, the bottom strata in the countries of the North will no longer enjoy some of the
amenities which they had been invited to share in the post-1945 period, and
even more importantly will no longer believe that it is certain that their children will enjoy a higher standard of living than they.44
Despite the signicance of this analysis in detailing the predicament of the

potential contradictory tendencies of globalisation, it basically remains framed
by the concepts of political economy and the system of value that the modern
social utopias of labour had sought to give expression. For this reason, it is
unable to elucidate the degree to which globalisation extends these values
and undermines them through dissolving the conditions for their determination.
Of course, the confusion this may produce concerning notions of distributive
justice does not in any real sense obscure the injustices of globalisation, nor
does it undermine the grounds of their rational critique. In fact, it is the disparity of relations that are interconnected through the tendencies of globalisation that appears to generate the problems of determination. In any event,
the capitalist imaginary has always concealed the indeterminacy of values
and how they are bound to a social-historical institution of meaning.45 The
current signicance of these difculties consists in their shaping the powerful counterfactual logic of the global order. That is, a logic founded in the
dilemma that the gains and advantages of participation in the global system
are highly uncertain, unless they are dened in terms of the neo-liberal concepts of market efciency and comparative advantage, but where the risks
of the potential consequences of the exclusion from this system appear to
necessitate participation. The contrast between these alternatives presupposes
that participation in the global order is a choice available to nation states and
74 Craig Browne
individuals; critiques of the democratic decit of globalisation have tended

to concentrate on a supposed reduction in the possibilities for effective selfdetermination. Of equal importance is the paradoxical reinforcement of this
dilemma, that is, the contrary notion that globalisation enhances options does
not necessarily alter the counterfactual logic. In a detailed analysis, Offe explicates the extent to which the systemic enhancement of options generates new
levels of constraints and how types of inexibility arise from the need to
avoid risks and the possible distortion of intentions. In light of this analysis,
Offe concludes that the real utopia today lies in the freedom of the calculated
zero option, of rational self-limitation in the face of the exponentially growing
risks of interdependence.46 Broadly similar considerations inform Giddens
contention that contemporary critique should adopt the format of utopian
realism. Political radicalism, he argues, can no longer insert itself, as socialism did, in the space between a discarded past and a humanly made future.47
These analyses raise questions about the grounds for identifying with either
of the projects of the fullment or the transguration of modernity. The anxiety
associated with this questioning is relevant to the concern with hope but the
general continuity of critical reection with modernity means that even greater
precision is required to account for contemporary applications of hope in
social diagnoses. In my opinion, the paradoxes outlined above achieve a special intensity when they take on anomalous forms and are thereby brought
into the realm of more immediate experience, rather than as mediated through
abstract systems, such as professional expertise and symbolic tokens.48 The
situation of the refugee is probably the clearest exemplar of anomaly in the
Australian context. Of course, these anomalies are still mediated in various
ways but the experience of them has a special intensity, because of the manner in which they are now mapped onto subjectivity. Michael Kearneys discussion of a transnational population movement brilliantly illustrates the
experience of the paradoxes of contemporary capitalist nation states. For
instance, the alien, he suggests:
is desired as a body, or more specically as labour power which is embodied in this person, by employers and indirectly by all who benet economically and socially from this cheaply bought foreign labour. But this
alien as a legal person who might possess rights and prerogatives of a
national, of a citizen of the nation, is the dimension of personhood that is
denied.49
This type of ambivalence concerning the alien is not dissimilar to those

uncovered in Australian race and immigration policies.50 In fact, two of the
recent Australian works on hope emerge out of this eld of research. Hages
analysis of the fantasy structure of Australian migration and multiculturalism
shapes his interest in hope.51 The distinction between the narcissism of worrying about the nation and the less defensive caring is critical to his analysis
of Australian paranoid nationalism.52 Hage argues that a reduction of hope
promoted the shift towards increased worrying about the nation. It is not so
much that those sectors of Australian society experiencing a diminution of
hope are unwilling to share it, so much as that the decline and scarcity of
hope have made them less capable of extending it to others. Hages general
thesis is that societies are mechanisms for the distribution of hope, and that
the kind of affective attachment (worrying or caring) that a society creates
among its citizens is intimately connected to its capacity to distribute hope.53
Hage is one of the interviewees of Mary Zournazis collection: HopeNew
Philosophies for Social Change.54 Zournazi offers Zeitdiagnosen framed around
the category of hope. Hope thereby becomes a collective category for all forms
of counterfactual thought about the possibilities for social change. It seems
that for Zournazi what is distinctive to the category of hope is the affective
dimension that it can contribute to images of social transformation. On her
analysis, this affective component is especially important, because it responds
to the political lefts loss of faith.55 There is not a little of Blochs belief in the
need for a theological addition to Marxism in this standpoint.56 The range of
associations Zournazi reads into hope potentially dilutes the category, however a more substantial problem is the serious discrepancy between the normative appeal and the analytical value of the category of hope. It is not
difcult to assent to the need for hope; it is rather more difcult to deploy
hope in determining the stakes of the social, political and cultural projects of
transformation. Like Hage, Zournazi appreciates that hope can be both asymmetrically appropriated and politically incapacitating. The capitalist imaginary has proven a powerful dener and distributor of hope. Hope is therefore
far from an intrinsically critical category, it should be viewed instead as an
orientation that animates critique. In Hages opinion, this orientation is not
simply reducible to a positive disposition towards change:
Spinoza importantly points out that hope (unlike wishing, for example) is
an ambivalent affect, always laced with fear. For him hope is like a
76 Craig Browne
combination of desire for and fear of the future in which the desire for the
future is more dominant.57
The category of hope has then an immediate application to the arguments

and analyses of risk society and reexive modernisation. Zournazis Hope
and Hages Against Paranoid Nationalism are replete with the cognate terms
used in the discourses over risk society. In particular, Beck argues that fear
and safety become the organising values of individual action and group formation in risk society.58 Similarly, Giddens has highlighted the relationship
between the projecting ahead that shapes risk consciousness and anxiety.59
In his work on identity in late-modernity, Giddens too draws on the psychological categories of Winnicott and object-relations to illuminate the connections between the experience of absence and the formation of identity.
Like Hages discussion of worrying and caring, Giddens analysis points to
the connection between hope and trust. Giddens original theory of structuration has been described as formulating an ontology of potentials; clearly
drawing on this perspective enables a more discriminating sociological analysis
of hope.60 Hages inquiry into the distribution of hope already implies disaggregation, consideration of hopes conjunction with other categories and
its qualication by forms of capital. Based on the perspectives of Spinoza and
Bourdieu, Hage claims that the common feature of hope is the capacity to
augment being.61 Giddens generative conception of power is likewise critical to his ontology of potentials; it underpins his notion of the discontinuity of late-modernity. Specically, Giddens presumes that the contemporary
consciousness of risk reects the dissolution of the providential understanding of social change and a corresponding decline in fate as an ordering
principle of social practices.62 Pursuing this line of analysis, Zournazis work
is probably best considered an attempt to illuminate the rudiments of a postprovidential conception of hope.
In general, the category of hope can be related to the epistemological complexion of the arguments of reexive modernisation and risk society. The perception of risk is shaped not just by the objective reality of risk but also by
the awareness of possible future risks, like nuclear contamination. In this way,
the notion of risk society bears upon the limits of rational assessment of dangers and the difculty in calculating or quantifying consequences. According to Beck, the capacity for calculation underpinned the condence in the
insurance principle of the rst phase of simple modernisation.63 Reexive

modernisation may be the unintended and unanticipated consequence of
development; however, for one perspective on hope, the problematising of
rationality need not signal an impending crisis. Stengers perceives hope to
be linked to a generalised and unpredictable creativity, that discloses a possibility for becoming. I would say that hope is the difference between probability and possibility. If we follow probability there is no hope, just a calculated
anticipation authorised by the world as it is. But to think is to create possibility against probability.64 Stengers interpretation of hope has pronounced
afnities with Castoriadis account of the limits of identity logic; the idea of
creation is central to his elucidation of the imaginary.65 At the same time, as
will be detailed later, Castoriadis develops what is probably the most penetrating critique of the category of hope from the standpoint of the project of
autonomy.
It does not require a great deal of analysis to make a connection between the
category of hope and social imaginary horizons of meaning. Crapanzano indicates this in suggesting that the
categories of social and psychological analysis can never be fully divorced,
despite the deconstructive force of the best of our ethnographies, from the
structures and values of the society in which they are elaborated. Whether
we give primacy to desire or hope, we have, in either case, to recognize the
way their objects reect as they precipitate a certain take on the world.66
Social imaginaries are especially important to the distribution of hope, they

animate and legitimise, if not legitimate, this process. The creative capacity
of the imaginary can be traced in relation to each of the three instances of
hope Crapanzano examines: Christian theology, the phenomenology of experience, and the socio-cultural determinationillustrated by way of the symbolic evocation of the consumption of objects in Cargo cults. In each of these
instances, the imaginary, as Castoriadis contends, is founded in neither real
nor rational determinations.67 It could be suggested then that hope is a dimension of the operation of social imaginaries and, if we follow Ernst Bloch, it
could be the decisive attribute. No doubt the relationship between alternative
social imaginaries and Blochs interpretation of the signicance of hope,
especially in relation to future projection and the not-yet, is worth exploring.68
78 Craig Browne
But Castoriadis position on hope is signicantly different. He claims that

Ancient Greek, or properly Athenian, democracy owes its origins to an appreciation of chaos and the denial of the theological conception of hope in myths
and drama.69 Now, this claim should also be understood in the context of
Castoriadis critique of identity thinking and the belief in a correspondence
between world image and the world itself. Indeed, this dual imaginary of
identity thinking is, he believes, the cultural infrastructure of meta-narratives,
other critiques of hope have also focussed on this feature.70 For Castoriadis,
the Athenians answered Kants third question of interest to humanity, that
is, what can we hope, with a resounding claim of we can hope for nothing.
The destruction of the strongest sense of hope enabled the Athenians to reach
a new understanding of the signicance of their practices and to institute
democracy for the rst time. It is beyond the scope of this paper to assay the
issues of cultural continuity and discontinuity, the question nevertheless poses
itself of why hope in the form of correspondence between ourselves and
world has been so rarely brought into question. Castoriadis traces the appeal
of the theological interpretation of hope to the unconscious and to the undyingbecause the possibility of its own death cannot be acknowledged
response of the unconscious to the destruction of the monadic core of the
psyche.71
However compelling Castoriadis critique of theological hope and its later
ratiocination may be, it probably does not exhaust the value for critical social
theory of the category of hope, or an equivalent for it. For a basic presupposition of critical theory is that a temporal orientation to the future is constitutive of social practices in the present. A different line of analysis then,
which nevertheless parallels the current discourse on hope, would be to extend
the sociological translation and transformation of categories of pragmatist
and phenomenological analyses into explications of the potential and limitations of social practices. After all, hope, or an equivalent animating notion,
is signicant because it bears on the loss of clarity about the purpose of critique. Putting it bluntly, critique has to presume hope, otherwise it may
become just criticism. In this sense, the category of hope has afnities with
the notions that other contemporary authors in the tradition of critical theory have sought to develop and employ; for instance, Benhabibs comments
on utopias drew attention to the orientation critical theory draws from its
perspective on change.72 Hope would be a synonym for the positive, or more

technically the anticipatory-utopian as distinct from explanatory-analytical,
content that can be give to critical theory and which in turn serves to justify
critique. Still, the limitations of assimilating hope to orientations that have
an invariantly positive disposition has already been drawn attention to and
accentuating this facet will hardly be able to account for an issue that has
recently generated the theoretical and everyday interest in hope, that is, the
indifference of the state to normative principles in the face of revelatory criticism. Of course, the state makes a claim to principles and values; only these
apply selectively to its activities that are relevant to the paradoxes of the globalising transformations outlined above, such as in the denial of the human
rights of refugees, the justication for military intervention, and the disciplining of the labour market. If this commentary has a certain degree of veracity then it points to a situation where counterfactual thinking afrms existing
social reality. Hope becomes the alternative, rather than the anticipation of a
projected change that can be put into practice.
A different approach to grounding critical theory has been taken in the work
of Honneth. He believes that critique can take its bearings from the disclosure of social and individual pathologies. A diagnosis of pathologies presupposes a normative basis and Honneth derives this from his formal
anthropology of intersubjective recognition.73 His anthropology also details
the general preconditions and structures for subjects democratic participation in the constitution of the good life. Distinctive to this ethic is the sociological claim that conicts are motivated by the suffering and injustices of
experiences of disrespect and the denial of recognition. Honneth argues that
struggles for recognition enlarge the moral grammar of society, yet the changes
they anticipate develop in response to differing experiences of disrespect.
Briey, he suggests that love, rights and solidarity constitute variant forms
of intersubjective recognition; they correspond to differing spheres of activity and involve the normatively anchored practical relations to self of selfcondence, self-respect and self-esteem.74 Struggles for recognition are, from
this perspective, the most important determinant of the distribution of hope.
In the language of moral philosophy, practical relations to self are the modes
of subjects participation in the good life, or, in Hages terms, ways of augmenting being. It appears intuitively plausible then to claim that the denial
80 Craig Browne
of hope is a violation of the patterns of recognition. In my opinion, this claim

reinforces Honneths contention that dignity and integrity are critical dimensions of the determination of justice today.75 Indeed, it has already been pointed
out that the prominence of the category of hope in recent social science is
largely due to contemporary capitalist nation states having generated and
reinvented forms of exclusion and the denial of reciprocity. Interestingly,
Honneth contends in a recent discussion that could be interpreted as reframing the question of hope, that the anthropology of recognition does more than
articulate unmet demands in the present.76 It seeks to disclose, he suggests,
a quasi-transcendental, or ever present, basis in social reality for the moral
claims that orient critical theory.
Talk of transcendence within social immanencewhich is of religious originmeans more than that unfullled, and to that extent transcending social
ideals and goals are still to be found within social reality at a particular
time. Rather, it designates a normative potential that re-emerges in every
new social reality because it is so tightly fused to the structure of human
interests.77
Despite having forsaken the quasi-transcendental perspective of his early programme of knowledge constitutive interests, there can be little doubt that
Habermas believes communicative reason to comprise a permanent potential for transcendence immanent within processes of social reproduction and
that the principles of discourse effectively frame utopian hopes in the present.78
Honneth considers that Habermas alternative grounding of critical theory
in the discourse ethic is largely limited to the normative reinforcement of
the liberal-democratic tradition.79 This estimation suggests that the discourse
ethic is necessary to the establishment of social justice, but that it is in itself
insufcient for the task of transforming the conditions of injustice. Nevertheless,
Habermas perspective on the formation of transnational civil solidarity offers
a far more elaborated conception of how the paradoxes of globalising transformations could be reoriented than that so far presented in theories of recognition. Discourse ethics makes a case for the possibility of a cosmopolitan
hope that could arise from the democratic institutionalising of human rights.80
In Habermas opinion, the universalistic perspective of discourse ethics is
neither incompatible with the pluralism of multicultural societies, nor does
the formal procedural complexion of the discourse theory of democracy and
law preclude an accommodation of the more substantive utopian demands

of new social movements. Still, the fact that democratic law channels the
utopian projections of movements for social change could be seen to amount
to a defusing of these projections potential implications. The general tendency
in this model for the translation of popular sovereignty and communicative
power into citizenship rights may not compensate for the initial distance of
Habermas critical theory from the practical-political struggles of movements.
On balance, this is probably less signicant than the way that discourse theory is able to sustain the possibility of social solidarity being realised in a
legal form that has the power to resist some of the paradoxes of globalisation and their attendant injustices. Wellmer has drawn attention to the importance of this cosmopolitan hope in commenting that social developments
associated with globalisation point to an emerging situation where what had
formerly been considered a utopian elaboration of citizenship rights may
become the minimum preconditions for the persistence of liberal democracy.81
It may seem implausible to suggest that a new version of secular hope could
be immanent in the present development of society. On the one hand, there
is the difculty of envisaging how a normative political theory of cosmopolitan solidarity can have some purchase on reality when there is, to paraphrase Hage, the need to search for hope in a shrinking society. On the other
hand, the capitalist imaginary is already an excessive producer oflargely
unfullledhope, and it has been noted how the capitalist imaginary reframes
cosmopolitanism in an ideological form. Crapanzanos reections on Cargo
cults highlight the relevance of hope to the symbolic reproduction of capitalism. In cargo, he states, the source and object of hope are collapsed into
one.82 Moreover, Castoriadis questioning of social imaginaries suggests that
the further development of the impulses associated with hope may depend
on how they are pursued through other concepts. Even so, the explanatory
value of hope is evident from the symbiotic relationship it has to the categories of the theory of the risk society and reexive modernisation. The category of hope could also endow the normative content of intersubjective
recognition with a temporal orientation to the future and thereby enhance
the practices of communicative exchange and social being. Finally, my analysis
implies that it is necessary to distinguish the appeal of social hope from the
appeal to hope in recent discussions. It is only on this basis that the category
82 Craig Browne
of hope can assist in preserving the vestiges of utopian thought in critical

social theory.
Notes
1
W. Benjamin, Illuminations, Suffolk, Fontana, 1970.
F. Jameson, The Politics of Utopia, New Left Review, 25, Jan.-Feb. 2004,
pp. 35-54.
E. Bloch, The Philosophy of Hope, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986; E. Fromm, The Revolution
of Hope, New York, Harper & Row, 1968; H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, New
York, Vintage Books, 1955; H. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, London, Allen Lane,
1970.
4
5
S. Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986.
zek, London,
T. W. Adorno, Messages in a Bottle in Mapping Ideology, ed. S. Zi
Verso, 1994, pp. 42-43, pp. 34-45.
H. Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, Cambridge,
MA, MIT Press, 1985; D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas,
London, Hutchinson, 1980.
A. Wellmer, Reason, Utopia and the Dialectic of Enlightenment, in Habermas and

Modernity, ed. R. J. Bernstein, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1985, pp. 35-66; Benhabib,
Critique, Norm and Utopia.
E. Bloch, The Philosophy of Hope, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986.
J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law

and Democracy, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996; J. Habermas, The Theory of
Communicative Action Vol. 1, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press; J. Habermas, The Theory
of Communicative Action Vol. 2, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987; Benhabib, Critique,
Norm and Utopia; J. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press,
1995.
10
Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia.
11
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms.
12
Ibid.
13
J. Habermas, Popular Sovereignty as Procedure in Between Facts and Norms,

pp. 463-490.
14
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 7.
15
Ibid., p. 444.
16
Ibid., p. 395.
17
J. Bohman, Complexity, Pluralism, and the Constitutional State: On Habermass

Faktizitat und Geltung, Law and Society Review, 28, 1994, p. 900; pp. 897-930.

18
A. Heller, A Radical Philosophy, New York, Basil Blackwell, 1984; R. Levitas, The
Concept of Utopia, London, Phillip Allan, 1990; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms.
Idealisations enable intersubjective agreement over validity claims through the
three-fold projection of a shared pragmatic orientation to rational consensus, the
existence of a semantic identity over meaning, and a commitment to the ensuing
normative obligations of mutual understanding. Signicantly, idealisations transcend
the actual context of communicative action and entail that processes of argumentative justication proceed according to standards of universal validity. These necessary underlying conditions of communicative action are far more consequential
than just their facilitation of mutual understanding.
19
20
J. Habermas, Globalism, Ideology and TraditionsInterview with Jrgen

Habermas, Thesis Eleven, no. 63, 2000, pp. 1-10.
21
A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conicts,
Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995.
22
J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Cambridge,

MA, MIT Press, 1987.
23
J. Habermas, The New Obscurity in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and
the Historians Debate, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989.
24
V. Crapanzano, Reections on Hope as a Category of Social and Psychological

Analysis, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 18, no. 1, 2003, pp. 3-32; G. Hage, Against
Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Leichhardt, Pluto
Press, 2003; M. Zournazi, ed. HopeNew Philosophies for Change, Leichhardt, Pluto
Press, 2002; D. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Berkeley, University of California Press,
2000.
25
V. Crapanzano, Reections on Hope as a Category of Social and Psychological

Analysis, pp. 3-32.
26
E. Bloch, The Philosophy of Hope; Rorty, R. Philosophy and Social Hope, London,
Penguin Books, 1999.
27
W. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, W. Benjamin,

Suffolk, Fontana, 1970, pp. 255-266.
28
C. Garrett, Sources of Hope in Chronic Illness, in TASA 2001 Conference Proceedings, eds. C. Browne, C. Edwards, V. Watson and R. van Krieken, Sydney, 2001.
29
Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism; Zournazi, HopeNew Philosophies for Change.
30
N. Fraser & A. Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical

Exchange, London, Verso, 2003; A. Honneth, The Social Dynamics of Disrespect:
On the Location of Critical Theory Today, Constellations, vol. 1, no. 2, 1994, pp.
255-269.
84 Craig Browne
31
H. Joas, The Genesis of Values, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003.
32
K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, London, Routledge, 1949.
33
J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians Debate,
Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989; C. Offe, Modernity and the State: East, West, Cambridge,
Polity Press, 1996.
34
M. Castells, The Rise of Network Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996; J. Urry, Sociology
Beyond Societies, London, Routledge, 2000.
35
36
C. Garrett, Sources of Hope in Chronic Illness.

Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2; C. Offe, Contradictions of the
Welfare State, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1984.
37
Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2.
38
Habermas, The New Conservatism.
39
R. Levitas, ed. The Ideology of the New Right, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986.
40
Habermas, The New Conservatism.
41
Ibid., p. 68.
42
C. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987.
43
I. Wallerstein, The Global Possibilities, 1990-2025 in The Age of TransitionTrajectory

of the World System, 1945-2025, eds. T. Hopkins and I. Wallerstein, Leichhardt, Pluto
Press, 1996, p. 234.
44
Ibid., p. 234.
45
C. Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1984.
46
C. Offe, Modernity and the State: East, West, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996, p. 26.
47
A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: the Future of Radical Politics, Cambridge, Polity
Press, 1994, p. 10.
48
A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990.
49
M. Kearney, Transnationalism in California and Mexico at the End of Empire,

in Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, eds. T. Wilson and
H. Donnan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 128; pp. 117-141.
50
E. Vasta, and S. Castles, eds. The Teeth are Smiling: The Persistence of Racism in
Multicultural Australia, St. Leonards, Allen and Unwin, 1996.
51
G. Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society,

Leichhardt, Pluto Press, 1998.
52
Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism.
53
Ibid., p. 3.
54
Zournazi, HopeNew Philosophies for Change.
55
Ibid., p. 64.
56
W. Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, London, Macmillan Press, 1982.
57
Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 24.

58
U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards another Modernity, London, Sage, 1992; U. Beck, What
is Globalisation, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000; U. Beck, Democracy without Enemies,
Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000.
59
A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age,
California, Stanford University Press, 1991; A. Giddens, Living in a Post-Traditional
Society, in Reexive Modernisation, eds. U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash, Cambridge,
Polity Press, 1994, pp. 56-109.
60
I. Cohen, Structuration Theory: Anthony Giddens and the Constitution of Social Life,
London, Macmillan, 1989.
61
Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism; P. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge,
62
Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity; Giddens, Beyond Left and Right.
63
U. Beck, The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reexive Moderni-
Polity Press, 2000.
sation in Reexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern

Social Order, eds. U. Beck, A. Giddens, and S. Lash, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994,
pp. 1-55; Beck, Risk Society: Towards another Modernity.
64
Stengers, A Cosmo-PoliticsRisk, Hope, Changewith Isabelle Stengers

in HopeNew Philosophies for Change, ed. M. Zournazi, Leichhardt, Pluto Press,
2002, p. 245.
65
Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society.
66
Crapanzano, Reections on Hope, p. 19.
67
Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society.
68
Bloch, The Philosophy of Hope.
69
C. Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, Oxford, Oxford University Press,

1991; C. Castoriadis, World in Fragments, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997;
P. Harrison, Power, Culture and the Interpretation of Democracy, Praxis International, vol. 11. no. 3, 1991, pp. 340-353.
70
For an overview see Crapanzano, Reections on Hope, pp. 3-32.
71
Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society; Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics,

Autonomy.
72
Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia.
73
Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.
74
Ibid.; A. Honneth, An Interview with Axel HonnethThe Role of Sociology in

the Theory of Recognition, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 5. no. 2, 2002,
pp. 265-277.
75
A. Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy,
76
Fraser & Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?
Albany, State University of New York Press, 1995.
86 Craig Browne
77
Ibid., p. 244.
78
J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 2nd Ed. London, Heinemann, 1978.
79
A. Honneth, Reply to Andreas Kalyvas, Critical Theory at the Crossroads:

Comments on Axel Honneths Theory of Recognition, European Journal of Social
Theory, vol. 2. no. 2, 1999, pp. 249-252; Fraser & Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?;
Honneth, An Interview with Axel HonnethThe Role of Sociology in the Theory
of Recognition, pp. 265-277.
80
J. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, Cambridge, MA,
MIT Press, 1998; J Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, Cambridge, Polity Press,
2001; J. Habermas, Globalism, Ideology and TraditionsInterview with Jrgen
Habermas, Thesis Eleven, 2000, no. 63, pp. 1-10; C. Browne, Civil Solidarity and
Social Struggles, in Cultural Citizenship and Globalisation, eds. W. Ommundsen,
M. Leach and A. Vandenburg, Brisbane, Hampton Press, forthcoming.
81
A. Wellmer, Endgames: the Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity: Essays and Lectures,

Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1998.
82
Crapanzano, Reections on Hope, p. 25.
John Grumley
Hegel, Habermas and the Spirit of Critical Theory
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the complex relation between Hegel
and Habermas. Centring the discussion around the key
themes of philosophy, modernity and political philosophy,
it argues for a gradual rapprochement of Habermas
towards Hegel. In the nal section on critical theory, it
takes up the question of the spirit of this theory to offer
a more trenchant critique of Habermas theoretical shortcoming from this perspective.
KEYWORDS: Hegel, Habermas, Philosophy, Modernity,
Critical Theory
Almost from the moment of his death there

has never been any shortage of claimants to
the spirit of Hegel. The dispute over his legacy
soon broke out amongst the Right and Left
factions of the Hegelian school and received
other classic formulations in the early decades
of the twentieth century with the works of
Croce and Lukcs. These attempts were driven
by a compulsion to extract the living dialectical
core from an allegedly dead metaphysicological system. Similar motives persist in contemporary Anglo-American appropriation.
The latter continues to nd great food for
thought in various implications of Hegels
sophisticated account of intersubjectivity while
displaying equal discomfort with his idea of
88 John Grumley
the Absolute that they view as an untimely metaphysical residue or prefer

to interpret away altogether.
The perennial nature of this contest over Hegels spirit is a measure of both
his philosophical richness and of his politico-cultural ambiguity. From a contemporary perspective it is hard to think of another philosopher who occupies
such a unique place in the history of philosophy. He is sufciently distant to
be numbered amongst the philosophical mighty dead with all the implicit
obsolescence this honoric generally entails. At the same time, his philosophical
innovations seem so fresh, even today, so sophisticated that he remains our
contemporary.
It is hardly surprising that the same ambivalence of critical distantiation and
enthusiastic approbation pervades the Hegel reception of Jrgen Habermas.
After all, in him the Frankfurt School resistance to the idealist gure of totality
collides with the Hegelian and Marxian aspirations to a comprehensive social
theory. Hegel has remained a permanent presence in his thinking from Theory
and Practice (1963) to Truth and Justication (1999); he has continually returned
to Hegel as both a foil in the demarcation of his own paradigm and a rich
source of substantial ideas and concepts. Yet, his initial emphatic retreat from
Hegelian historicism to a form of transcendentalism has gradually allowed
many concessions to be made to the spirit of Hegel. These concessions go far
beyond his systematic aspirations, his dialectic mode of argumentation, his
general reformist political aspirations and even his journalistic forays that
are all so reminiscent of Hegel. Shortly before retirement his last Frankfurt
students were wont to refer to him, I guess both in awe and irony, as the
contemporary Hegel. But, is this a fair judgement and if it is, what are its
implications for critical theory?
In the space of a single paper is not possible to do justice to the Hegel/
Habermas relation in all its breadth and complexity. However, in a brief and
schematic way, I will attempt to elaborate some key points of contention and
continuity under the headings of philosophy, modernity and political philosophy in an effort to evaluate Habermas Hegelian credentials. Finally, I
will consider the implications of this reconciliation with Hegel for the meaning
and project of critical theory.
Hegel, Habermas and the Spirit of Critical Theory 89
I. Philosophy
One of the most enduring aspects of Habermas critique of Hegel is his
deation of philosophical aspirations. This is the place where the critique of
totality he inherited from Adorno and Horkheimers denunciation of idealist
abstraction and desire for an interdisciplinary exchange between philosophy
and the special sciences reveals itself most forcefully. Hegel is viewed as the
perpetrator of an illusory philosophical absolutism. His critique of Kantian
transcendental reection from the standpoint of historical dynamism issued
in a phenomenology of historical forms of consciousness. But in Hegels hands
this attempt to turn away from a subjectivist philosophy of reection and its
timeless structures of consciousness produces a dialectic of forms of consciousness that in the end only secured objective knowledge by the instantiation
of another higher, absolute level of spiritual reection. The necessity of the
successive forms of consciousness is obtained when philosophy effects a grand
conceptual synthesis in which the diverse contents of the other sciences are
ushered to their appropriate logical place in the edice of absolute spirit.1
Habermas response to this dialectical solution is twofold. Positively, he maintained that Hegels Jena writings with their emphasis on prior structures of
language, labour and interaction tentatively demonstrated the way beyond
transcendentalism. Yet, negatively, he contends the mature Hegel relapsed
back into the philosophy of the subject when he incorporated the processes
of natural evolution and world history into an absolute philosophical synthesis.
As he puts it in Theory and Practice:
The philosophic God, who, in spite of all appearances, did not surrender
Himself entirely to history, is restored to himself in the philosophical reection
of absolute spirit, which, unaffected by the crisis and superior to it, therefore does not have to comprehend itself as critique . . . Instead, philosophy
forms itself into its own totality; it is not critique but synthesis.2
Habermas has persisted with this view of the metaphysical Hegel despite
a chorus of dissenting views coming from recent Anglo-American Hegel
scholarship.3 He acknowledges that an exclusively inter-subjective reading of
Hegels notion of Absolute spirit has the obvious afnity with the milieu of
a disenchanted world and allows a seamless connection to post-Hegelian
philosophical streams like pragmatism, hermeneutics and philosophy of
90 John Grumley
language.4 However, he maintains that by Hegels own standards this interpretation is decient in a double respect. The inter-subjectivist reading of
spirit expunges the difference between a social world of inter-subjectively
shared meanings and the objective world, as well as the tension between our
contestable view of what is rationally acceptable for us and what is unconditionally valid in and for itself. For Habermas, this structural difference
between intersubjectivity and objectivity/unconditionally rational constitutes
a cultural gulf that separates Objective Idealism from post-metaphysical thinking. This is his major objection to the deationary reading of Absolute spirit.
For him, the learning process described for Hegels audience is not just of a
series of transformations now behind them. The perspective of in and for
itself supposes a decisive step beyond modern consciousness where it become
aware, as through a form of conversion, of the power of spirit.5 This spirit is
no longer dened by its historical origins but by its ontological priority over
nature.6
Our cultural distance from objective idealism signies more than the difculty
in accessing Hegels worldview. In an increasingly secular culture, post-metaphysical philosophy has renounced even the aspiration to divine absolutism.
In the wake of cultural rationalisation, philosophy can neither dominate nor
operate alone but must work in harness with the sciences. While the idea of
a division of labour between philosophy and science is not foreign to Hegel,
he could assert the claims of philosophy to a higher form of rationality. By
contrast, Habermas adopts the metaphor of the translator for a new relationship between the two where philosophical claims are tempered by the
rigorous epistemic demands of science while the results of the latter require
philosophical reconstruction in order to render explicit their implications for
the lifeworld of the modern everyday.
The Habermasian reform of philosophical aspirations clearly represents a real
deation of the speculative and system demands of Hegels philosophy. He
recognised that the emancipatory claims of the theory must be rigorously
severed from teleology and ontology. Against the idealist fusion of progress
and history in the philosophy of history, he posits a general anthropological
vision grounded in the philosophy of language. This is the idea of cultural
learning processes now underwritten by the quasi-empirical reconstructive
sciences like cognitive psychology and linguistics that purport to tap into the
deep underlying structures of social evolution.7 Habermas has effectively substituted humanity as the universal agent of moral evolution for the Geist of
the idealist tradition and the proletariat of the Marxian. However, this remains
only a weak substitute insofar as without teleological support it relies only
on the scientic status of its claim. Despite these amendments astute commentators still hear idealist echoes of the philosophy of the subject lurking
in the background.8
However this may be, it cannot be denied that Habermas vision of philosophy sustains the vital cultural role connected to the Hegelian desire that
philosophy be the principle agent for collective rational self-reection. For
Habermas, philosophy has a vital role to play in the processes of our own
cultural self-formation, in binding together cultural achievement and the
quest for ethical self-understanding and clarication of identity. If we concede
the essential historicity of spirit, this stance appears very much in the spirit
of Hegel. Whether this is also sufcient to sustain a claim to legitimacy as
the bearer of contemporary critical theory is a more difcult question to which
I shall return in the concluding section of the paper.
II. Modernity
We have already seen that Hegels early critique of transcendental reection
opened up what appears in retrospect to be an unusually rich vein in the
project to introduce history and inter-subjectivity into the philosophical universe.9 Again departing from Kants differentiation of reason into the corresponding cultural spheres of science, morality and art, Hegel argued that
these discursive differentiations were experienced in the traditional ethically
integrated lifeworld as diremption.10 Rational understanding does produce
subjective freedom, reection and the power to demolish religious tradition
but this abstract principle of subjectivity is also the bearer of its own instrumental violence. It allows fractured organic wholes to collapse into their discrete parts and is incapable of regenerating unied ethical worlds.11 But Hegels
commitment to a more comprehensive mode of reection could not be realised
unassisted. Only after the dust settled from the French Revolution and the
revolutionary wars that followed was he nally able in his mature political
philosophy to reconceptualise the antagonistic forms of modern social disintegration in a new way. They now become comprehensible as the mechanisms
92 John Grumley
of a historically unprecedented modern form of the realisation of reason and

freedom. Here Habermas nds both inspiration and conceptual resources that
will energise his own distinctive theory of modernity.
As we have seen, Habermas reads Hegels Jena writings on the philosophy
of spirit as a valiant effort to transcend the philosophy of the subject. His detailed analyses of both work and recognition in the context of intersubjectivity
now provided the framework for truly profound insights into the dynamics
of modern social evolution. Inected in the light of Marx and Weber, these
elements become the core of Habermas own theory of rationalisation with
its distinction between societal and cultural rationalisation, system and lifeworld.12 It would be going too far to reduce his concept of cultural rationalisation to the processes of recognition. However, it is more than likely that
he took from the latter the idea that the communicative interaction involves
a process of moral learning and ethical self-understanding that is just as
important as the instrumental/technical advances achieved by purposive
rational action and functional reason. Here Habermas seems to reach back
beyond his two great predecessors in the theory of rationalisation (Marx and
Weber) to nd in Hegel resources that will allow him to correct some of their
most vitiating shortcomings and incorporate their insights into a more dialectical
and comprehensive theory of modernity. The views of Marx and Weber are
viewed as too one-sided focusing respectively on labour and purposiverational action.
Moreover, Habermas reads Hegels replacement of the obsolete distinction
between oikos and polis with the tripartite division between family, civil society
and the state as more than just a decisive conceptual breakthrough in the
history of modern political philosophy. The take-off of the social sphere
civil societyas the new engine of modernity and the bearer of profoundly
ambiguous tendencies in need of specialised treatment requires a new
sciencepolitical economy and later social theory. While Hegel could still
aspire to integrate these disciplines into his total philosophical vision, Habermas
has the benet of hindsight. He sees in the methodological independence of
these new sciences from philosophy the implicit collapse of philosophical
hegemony. With this his own move towards a more interdisciplinary synthesis
is provided with a historical precedent.
III. Political Philosophy

At rst sight Habermas venture into the domain of systematic political and
legal philosophy appears more inuenced by Kant. Habermas says as much
in the Preface to Between Facts and Norms (1992) where, returning to the interdisciplinary theme already mentioned, he repudiates the Hegelian model that
set unattainable standards in favour of a pluralistic approach combining
the perspective of diverse disciplines.13 Pursuing this tack, he structurally
separates reconstruction of the normative core of liberal democracy from
empirical questions of its sociological operation. Nevertheless, beneath this
curt repudiation lies a deep afnity with Hegel that, to my mind, renders
Between Fact and Norms his most Hegelian work. To justify this opinion a few
words about Hegels revolution in normative philosophy are necessary.
The basis of Hegels innovation here lay in a fundamental reconsideration of
the normative stance of traditional political philosophy. It is already evident
from his critique of Kants transcendental reection that he was especially
sensitive to the context dependence of morality and other norms. The problem
with unconditional norms is that they make no concessions to the conditions
of practical success. For a norm to be successful and orient real practical
conduct it must in some way imply the conditions and limits of its applicability.
While Hegel does not abandon the normative role of political theory, he does
modify its standards. If norms cannot be divorced from their background
conditions of applicability, political philosophy must comprehend the total
structure of conditions and institutions and specify the historically concrete
structures that are inseparable from the meaningfulness and realisation of the
norms. Hegels account of modern society as an integral whole composed of
objective ethical powers and their corresponding subjective roles conforms
to this demand.14
This revolution in normative political theory is especially pertinent in the
light of Habermas own linguistic turn and the subsequent claim to ground
his theory in the illocutionary validity claims of everyday language. The most
obvious criticism of this controversial move was that the model of ideal speech
extracted from these illocutionary claims was an unrealisable utopia bearing
little relation to real everyday linguistic practice permeated by power relations.
Despite Habermas own constant clarications pointing out that ideal speech
94 John Grumley
was a counterfactual rather than a concrete utopia, the abstract character of

the reconstructive attempt to reveal the deep linguistic structures of action
and cognition raised objections to the universality claims of communicative
rationality. Here the Hegelian solution appeared an attractive option combating post-modern scepticism and also demarcating his theory from the
purely normative kind like Rawls. On this view, participation in the political life and constitutional practices of the contemporary liberal democratic
state presupposes we have already tacitly assumed the normative validity of
these arrangements.15 In this instance, normativity is no impotent ideal or
unattainable utopia. On the contrary, the learning processes that collectively
constitute cultural rationalisation vitalise institutions, attitudes and normative
self-understandings that, despite transgressions, still play a vital role in established liberal democratic culture to orient our struggles and determine goals.16
While there is no doubt that this manoeuvre puts Habermas on rmer grounds
against the claim of utopianism, it does not render his transcendent credentials immune from criticism. That communicative reason and democratic institutions have become binding for the denizens of western modernity is not
in doubt. What is at issue is whether this is the result of trans-historical,
logical or cultural and contingent rationality. The claims of other cultures less
inclined to reexivity and argumentation, which rarely gure in Habermas
justication, seem to suggest the latter.17
IV. Critical Theory

Objections to Habermas universality claim is not the only concern raised by
his resuscitation of critical theory. Even sympathetic commentators have also
questioned the uncritical character of his reading of liberal democratic institutional arrangements in Between Facts and Norms. This representative complaint is expressed well by William Scheuerman. He maintains that this at
times surprisingly moderate and even conciliatory picture fails to give
adequate expression to legitimate unease and anxiety about really existing
democracy.18 Of course, this charge would come as no surprise to those familiar with the historical reception of Hegels political philosophy. Habermas
here commits crimes that radical critics like Marx and the other Left Hegelians
long ago placed at Hegels door. The remarkable neglect of Hegel as a political
philosopher especially in the Anglo-American world can at least in part be
put down to his conservative reputation.19 Fukuyama was not right about
the end of history but he did at least go someway towards rehabilitating
Hegels credentials to political contemporaneity. Yet, there can be no question
that Hegels own reconciliation with reality was ultimately bought at
signicant political and philosophical cost. His doubts regarding democracy
and his philosophical retreat to a retrospective contemplation that paints its
grey in grey and cannot change the world are only too well known. Habermas
has learnt this Hegelian lesson well. While he acknowledges the importance
of utopian images and the energies that motivate social movements,20 he
agrees with Hegel that a responsible philosophy cannot be reduced to mere
subjective fancy. What Habermas provides in the middle chapters of Between
Facts and Norms is a philosophical reconstruction of the main normative
elements of liberal democratic constitutionalism. Philosophy still has a vital
contemporary critical task to perform, of translation between modern cultural
and institutional achievement and the everyday, of critical self-reection. The
spirit of modernity has already set before us a challenging task that is still
incomplete. The constitutional principles of liberal democracy demand a
synthesis of private and public autonomy that takes us to a democratic horizon
that is still to be realised and may ultimately never be attained. Yet, for him,
this is the contemporary rationality of the real that we abandon only at our
peril. Here is a combination of philosophical restraint and cultural optimism,
of ambition and limitation that, while it may stray from the letter is very
much in accord with the spirit of Hegel.
It is not surprising, however, that those in tune with the legacy of critical
theory remain discontent with this reconciliation with reality. Marx accused
Hegel of a positivism that reproduced the bourgeois world exactly as it was.21
While it would be unfair and too crude to accuse Habermas in similar terms,
it is easy to see the sources of his radical critics discontent. From the standpoint of critical theory, Habermas reformulation of critical theory has gone
in two directions.
Confronting the problems associated with the overt politicisation of the
theory, Habermas most decisive move has been to take the proceduralist
option of divorcing procedures from substantial issues and outcomes. Against
the twin dangers of teleology and relativism, Habermas decided to defend
rationalism by procedural means. The whole conceptual instrumentarium of
96 John Grumley
communication rationality rests on this dualist distinction between communicative and strategic action, life-world and system. However, it is doubtful
that this move is ultimately tenable. Numerous critics have pointed to the
fact that in concrete contexts the categories of communicative and strategic
action are so imbricated and fused that the distinction itself it undermined.22
Communicative relations like those of the family are hardly bereft of power
and strategy while bureaucracy and the economy could not survive on instrumental functionality alone. However, from a critical theory perspective, more
telling than conceptual fuzziness, is that rigidly divorcing procedures from
outcomes allows real relations of power to become invisible. Without reference
to questions of interest, imbalances of institutional power and economic
inequality, the real external pressures on discourse disappear. The commitment
to universals like law and discourse too easily forgets that their instantiation
is always connected to particular forms of practice and particular interests.
While Habermas is acutely aware of the economic pressures that have led to
the dismantling of the welfare state in many contemporary liberal democratic
societies, these nowhere receive philosophical expression in his version of
critical theory. This lacuna is reected in the abstract generality of phases like
colonisation of the lifeworld with little in the way of concrete analysis of its
contemporary erosion.23 Moreover, subsequent retraction of the notion of
colonisation with its linkages to the conceptual world of reication in favour
of a more dialectical account of the relation between system and lifeworld
seem like another concession to the ideology of liberal democracy without
closer empirical scrutiny of its real dynamics.24
The second element of Habermas rehabilitation of critical theory has been his
embrace of the category of universalisability. This is the concomitant of a
theory that has placed abstract humanity in the position once occupied by
the proletariat. However, the category of universalisability does not provide
criteria for moving from this description of the whole of society to a critique
of its oppressive parts.25 It is incapable of dealing with intractable material
interests. The category of universalisability works effectively when the issue
is grounding specic rationalities. However it is incapable of specifying priorities amongst competing general concerns, material interest and confronting organisation questions.26 Stephen Bronner insists that choosing amongst
generalisable interests is a substantive and political question. This is especially
the case when the issues are economic inequality and intractable power
differentials. Furthermore, the social effectivity of discourse ethics depends

not on insight into the rules of linguistic competence but on a commitment
to put them into practice. The problem of the free loader familiar to proponents
of rational choice theory here raises its ugly countenance as an issue that
remains un-addressed by Habermas assurances of the counterfactual status
of the ethics of communicative action. We are well aware that the constitutional
machinery of the liberal democratic state regularly produces real inequalities
of outcome despite the existence of formally equal treatment before the courts
and other arenas of political and social compromise. This fact suggests that
an immanently critical theory must aspire to go beyond the formalism of the
general values of our society and track the substance of their realisation. A
critical theory needs more than historical and institutional points of reference
like those that issue from Habermas Hegelian reading of immanence: it needs
to grasp these values in the context of the concrete constraints and alternatives
making for their practical exercise.27
Habermas theoretical achievement is unquestionable. He has relentlessly
pursued the quest to grasp contemporary society as an integral and dynamic
totality with potentials both of emancipation and threat. Against the strictures
of the post-modernists, he has never lost sight of the necessity of compelling
cultural meta-narratives. His theory of communicative action is a towering
attempt to bring this practical cultural necessity into accord with an interdisciplinary program of philosophy and the human sciences and preserve a
utopian moment duly constrained by immanence and political responsibility. Not even his harshest critics have been able to offer an alternative to his
prerequisites for communicative action. This makes him a worthy successor
in the tradition of Hegel, Marx and critical theory. Yet, it is questionable
whether a conceptual instrumentarium drawn primarily from linguistic philosophy and functional sociology has all the equipment needed to address
the problems mentioned above, preserve a critical edge and comfortably wear
the mantle of contemporary critical theory. This requires all the means of conceptualising not just the general dynamics of cultural learning processes and
their instantiated validity claims but also the concrete dynamics of contemporary social reality and the historically determinant quality of events. The
magnitude of Habermas own contribution towards such a theory cannot disguise the fact that a great deal more needs to be done. Nevertheless, it is very
much in accord with his spirit to acknowledge that while critical theory itself
98 John Grumley
remains essential, it is also another aspect of the ongoing and perennially

incomplete project of modernity.
Notes
1
J. Habermas, Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter, Moral Consciousness and

Communicative Action, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1990, p. 5.
J. Habermas, Theory and Practice, Boston, Beacon Press, 1973, p. 216.
See works by Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard and Paul Redding.
J. Habermas, Truth and Justication, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003, p. 201.
Ibid., p. 202.
Ibid., p. 203.
J. M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 146.
S. E. Bronner, Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, p. 301.
See Habermas, Theory and Practice.
10
J. Habermas, Conceptions of Modernity: A Look Back at Two Traditions, Postnational Constellations, Oxford, Polity Press, 2001, p. 135.
11
Ibid., p. 136.
12
This point is well understood by William E. Scheuerman Between Radicalism

and Resignation in Discourse and Democracy: Essays on Habermass Between Facts
and Norms, eds. Rene Von Schomberg & Kenneth Baynes, Albany, State University
of New York Press, 2002, p. 77.
13
J. Habermas, Preface, Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge MA, MIT Press,
1996, p. x.
14
On Hegels critique of traditional normativity, see Gyrgy Mrkus marvellous

essay Political Philosophy as Phenomenology: On the Method of Hegels Philosophy
of Right, Thesis Eleven, no. 48, Feb. 1997.
15
J. Habermas, Questions of Political Theory, A Berlin Republic, Oxford, Polity,

1998, p. 132.
16
Ibid., p. 133.
17
Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, p. 141.
18
Scheuerman, Between Radicalism and Resignation, p. 63.
19
For a more general analysis of the neglect of Hegels political philosophy, see Axel
Honneths Suffering From Indeterminacy: An Attempt at the Reactualisation of Hegels
Philosophy of Right, Assen, The Netherlands, Van Gorcum, 2000.
20
Habermas, Questions of Political Theory, p. 134.
21
K. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right: Introduction, The Marx/Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert Tucker, New York,
Norton, 1978.

22
A. Honneth, The Critique of Power. Reective Stages in a Critical Theory of Society,

Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 1991, p. 298.
23
Bronner, Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, p. 309.
24
See Habermas Preface to the third German edition of Theorie des Konnunikativen
Handelns, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1985.
25
Bronner, Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, p. 303.
26
Ibid., p. 306.
27
Ibid., p. 330.
Pauline Johnson
Habermas: A Reasonable Utopian?
ABSTRACT
Already by the mid-1980s, Habermas supposed that our
utopian energies had been used up. Today, when a neoliberal realism seems to be a virtually dominant ideology,
the climate appears, if anything, yet more hostile to radical hopes. Even while he recognises the obstacles and
is clear that we might never succeed in breaking through
the Gordian knot, Habermas is not prepared to surrender
to a proclaimed end of politics. This paper traces some
of the ways in which his recent works theorise and
attempt to balance twin legacies of a critical theory
tradition. Habermas wants to mediate the radicalness of
vision required by a critical theory with the perceived
reasonableness of its standpoint that is also necessary if
theory is to engage concrete actors. Many of his critics
suppose that Habermas has not achieved the right balance
and that his interest in the self-reforming potentials of
liberal democracies weights reasonableness too highly.
The following paper sets out to defend Habermas from
some of these charges. However, ultimately it nds that
his theory has identied the needs for autonomy that it
seeks to critically connect up with too narrowly. This
means that, to some extent, Habermas critical theory
continues to miss its mark.
KEYWORDS: Habermas, Critical Theory, Utopianism,
Enlightenment, Romanticism
A few years back Habermas wrote the following: The list of problems that confront
anybody who reads a newspaper these days
102 Pauline Johnson
can, of course, only change into a political agenda for a public which maintains a degree of trust in the possibility of a conscious transformation of societyand which in turn can be entrusted with it.1 This statement identies
the frame within which his engaged theory works. Habermas critical theory
attempts to turn our problems into political agendas by helping us to reect
on the sense in which the present is able to act upon itself in terms of chosen values. This is a hybrid project that seeks to cross the exuberance of
utopian thinking, which tries to open up alternatives for action, with historical thinking, whose saturation with actual experience seems destined to criticise utopian schemes. The fusion of future directed utopianism with a legacy
of conscious historical thinking is not a mutual betrayal but an acknowledgement that, in an age that sees itself as dependent exclusively on itself,
utopianism needs to be rehabilitated as a legitimate medium for depicting
alternative life possibilities seen to be inherent in the historical process itself.2
Modern utopianism holds out hope not by spinning out fantasies3 and not
by offering us a mere dream without a method4 but by its ability to help
us interpret how a better future might be built from the ambiguous potentials of the present.
Habermas does not minimise the extent of global problems, the deprivation
and misery of whole regions come to mind,5 and he is only too aware that
capitalist states oversee a structural violence within their own borders.6 He
is, moreover, convinced that in an epoch dominated by neo-liberal ideologies,
the vitality and focus of the new social movements has been lost to a mood
somewhat depressed, somewhat clueless the whole thing washed over by
technopop.7 Despite all this he continues to describe his theory as informed
by remnants of utopianism. This is not a matter of a wilful optimism. Indeed,
Habermas considers that optimism and pessimism are not really relevant
categories.8 What is at stake is an interpretation of the appropriate role of
critical theory. The older Adorno famously described critical theorys loss of
any hope that emancipatory potentials might have lodged themselves with
modern public and institutional structures and its growing reliance on the
unredeemed promise of art, culture and philosophy as equivalent to throwing
out a message in a bottle.9 This is not a metaphor that Habermas can be
comfortable with. It doesnt suit him because he thinks that critical theory
must engage. It has the task of connecting up critically with what particles
of reason it can uncover in the everyday praxis of modern democratic societies.
Habermas: A Reasonable Utopian? 103
The theorist cant be assured that these potentials will be taken up and developed. All that theory can do is to help concrete actors reect on the choices
that can be made. For Habermas, critical theory needs to extend our reections
on our capacity to make our own histories by clarifying the ambiguities in
an Enlightenment commitment to the production of rationally self-legislating
futures.
A trade off seems to be built into a contemporary project of forging a utopian
and engaged theory. If the hope for a future that is better than the past is to
pass itself off as a reasonable aspiration, as one that we can do something
with, it has to appeal to motivations that are recognisable within the conditions
of a present in which a culture of reconciliation and accommodation seems
to have seized the upper hand. As Maria Mrkus has pointed out, if the
horizon of the utopian perspective is removed too far from the actuality of
a given society, its mobilizing action-orienting effect might easily be lost.10
At the same time, if it is to offer its perspective on the possibilities for a
conscious transformation of society as a utopian hope, critical theory must
help us to reect upon futures that are sufciently different from the present
to be worth making the effort for. An engaged critical theory appears to be
caught up in a zero sum game played out between the radicalism of its hopes
and their reasonableness.
Many of his critics are persuaded that Habermas critical theory has not
managed to strike the right balance. They are convinced that he has given
away too much and that his hopes are too moderate, too joyless to be able
to help us to develop a political response to our list of problems. Jeffrey
Alexander, for example, thinks that the rationalist bias of Habermas standpoint is too bound up with the search for continuities to effectively contest
the fatalism of the age.11 Joel Whitebook12 and Martin Morris13 nd more inspiration in Herbert Marcuses unreasonable transformative hopes than in
Habermas sober attempt to reconstruct the neglected potentials of ambiguous
Enlightenment legacies. The general complaint is that Habermas critical
theory suggests an interpretation of ambiguous modernising potentials that
is too blinkered and that fails to recognise the range of radical, emancipatory
needs that have been unleashed. The following paper will explore some different formulations of this critique and weigh up their justice. The rst part
will elaborate aspects of Habermas recent formulation of his on-going interest
104 Pauline Johnson
in the prospects of liberal democratic societies for substantial self-reform. This

is a project that seeks to reconstitute the misunderstood normativity of such
societies as the grounds of largely untapped critical motivations. In the last
few years, Habermas has re-set the terms of his immanent critique to include
an account of the prospects for translating neglected liberal democratic normativities into terms able to guide the creation of a globalised public sphere.
Next I will weigh up two distinct critical assessments of Habermas capacity to adequately recognise and respond to the diverse character of emancipatory needs loosened by ambiguous modernisation processes.
Immanently Critical Potentials of Liberal Democracies

First published in 1992, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse
Theory of Law and Democracy has been targeted as betraying a comfortable
reconciliation with liberal democratic realities.14 Critics of the book suppose
that Habermas upholds the attitude of a safe democratic reformist whose critical impulses have been eroded by the many concessions he has made to the
real-existing political order of liberal democratic states. Habermas considers
his own project as an attempt to unblock the radical implications of expectations that are counterfactually presupposed by the incompletely theorised
normativity of liberal democratic politico-legal-institutions (the law and the
constitutional state). The unblocking of these signicances requires, in the
rst instance, a challenge to the adequacy of competing dominant interpretations of the foundations of legitimate political and legal power in liberal
democracies. A liberal model appeals to already achieved rights invested in
private subjects, the republicans suppose that political legitimacy refers to
the already established will of a self-sovereign public. Against both, Habermas
maintains that a comprehensive interpretation of the normativity that underpins politico-legal institutions in liberal democracies refers to their function
as the formal, decision-making end of a public sphere that has its other axis
in the informal processes of will and opinion formation in an active civil society. There is, he insists, an internal, not just contingent, relation between the
rule of law and democracy. Habermas is not pretending that the normal operations of politico-legal institutions in liberal democratic states are exclusively
or primarily governed by the task of responding to communicative ows of
a modern public sphere. However, the point is that, while the liberals and
the republicans refer the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions back to

descriptions of supposed already achieved private or public rights, a comprehensive, dialectical interpretation of this normativity refers to the procedures through which a public will forms itself via the argumentative interactions
between private subjects.
Habermas builds his synthetic account of the potentials of the liberal and the
republican models of democracy into an analysis of a complex set of interdependencies that govern the relations between informal processes of collective opinion and will formation and the administrative and decision-making
functions of the political centre. He refers to this as a two track model of
representative democracy. The informal or unorganised public sphere does
not appear in the rst instance as a set of institutions but as a network for
communicating information and points of view.15 It describes processes
whereby problems, formerly encountered privately, are attached to reasons
through which their generalising signicance can be recognised. In pursuit
of their ambition to facilitate the shift of expressions of private dissatisfaction
into the terms of effective claims, public spheres must then be anchored in
the voluntary association of civil society and embedded liberal patterns of
political culture and socialisation.16 Habermas account of the genesis and
the reproduction of the informal public sphere describes the democratising
potentials of the exercise of an interactive rationality in which legitimacy
is generated via processes of argumentation. These nally appeal, not to
the authority of tradition or power, but to a set of consensually elaborated
principles.
While discourse theory represents itself as a paradigm that has emerged
from a reection on the limits and a selective appropriation of the insights
of rival theoretical reections on liberal democratic normativity, Habermas
also claims that his theory offers a conceptual elaboration of learning processes
whose results are felt elsewhere: in the complex and ambiguous lived histories of post-War democracies. Reformist practices evident in the functioning of the constitutional state and legal order suggest that each has learnt
in the course of the twentieth century from inadequate, one-sided, descriptions of their normativity. For Habermas, the internal relation between the
rule of law and democracy has been practically grasped by self-reforming
constitutional states and legal institutions within liberal democracies in the
106 Pauline Johnson
wake of the manifest failures of alternative descriptions of the sources of the

legitimacy of the law.
The disintegration in post-traditional societies of collectively binding ethics
and world-views allows socially integrative functions not picked up by the
steering mechanisms of money and bureaucratic power to be, partly, taken
up by the law and constitutionally organised political systems.17 In such
societies, the law stabilises behavioural expectations and simultaneously
secures symmetrical relationships of reciprocal recognition between abstract
bearers of individual rights.18 Between Facts and Norms suggests that the
nature of the demands that this role of social integration places on the rule
of law nally exposes the inadequacy of one-sided descriptions of its sources
of legitimacy and fosters the practical recognition of its internal relation with
democracy. In the post-War period the politico-legal systems of liberal democracies have been forced to respond to the empirical criticisms of marginalised
populations at the exclusionary practices built into their legitimating selfdescriptions. These criticisms led to reformist practices that were based, not
on a change in the normative premises of the state and the law, but only on
the hidden presumptions of a more abstract reading of them. The post-war
welfare state compromise was just such a self-reforming response to the
constitutional state. Under conditions of organised capitalism dependent on
the governments provision of public infrastructure and planning, the idea
that the legal order and the constitutional state could draw their legitimacy
from their protection of a universally available capacity for self-determination
was disclosed as a ction. It became evident that, just as the socialist critique
of liberal ideology had long protested, the universal right to equal individual
liberties could no longer be guaranteed through the negative status of the
legal subject. The constitutional state responded to this crisis by introducing
the new category of basic rights which recognised that legal permission to
do as one pleases is worthless without real freedom, the actual possibility of
choosing between alternatives.
This newly acquired responsibility of the welfare state in the distribution
and protection of basic, not merely formal, rights did not complete the selfreforming tendencies of the post-War politico-legal systems in liberal
democracies. The golden age of the welfare project was to see a contradiction
emerging between the goals and the methods of key liberal democratic
institutions. The self-described ambition of these institutions was to open up

the ideals of individual self-realisation and the pursuit of private autonomy
via the establishment of forms of life that are structured in an egalitarian way.
But evidently the paternalism that clings to the welfare project also compromises the pursuit of this goal that cannot be reached via the direct route
of putting political programs into legal and administrative form. The contradiction that is inherent in the post-War welfare state compromise has provided an excuse for winding back these reforms. Yet it can also provoke
pressure towards a democratising reinterpretation of the welfare project in
which private individuals seek practical and institutional support for their
claim to be recognised as the legitimate interpreters of the rationality of their
own need claims.
Habermas by no means predicts that learning capacities unleashed within
liberal democratic societies will engineer a victory for their potentials for
rationality. Indeed, the nal chapter of Between Facts and Norms seems to suggest not much hope that the tensions between the facts and norms that are
necessary to the self-critique of liberal democracies can survive powerful
counter-ideologies. Habermas discusses the extent to which a normative
defeatism aggressively promoted by market ideologies seems to dominate
the landscape of the future.19 The tension between normativity and facticity
has all but collapsed and the habitual functioning of the system appears as
the unavoidable result of structural changes in state and society;20 for all
that, in a complex society developmental trends remain ambiguous.
The discourse theory of democracy explores the challenges facing a critical
politics aimed at investing the democratic potentials of really existing liberal
democracies with effective, agenda-setting, power. Habermas insists that the
pathway of double-sided communicative ows between informal, probleminterpreting negotiations operating within civil societies and formal problemsolving functions of a political centre need to be unblocked. This is not a task
for a totalising, transformative politics but is a matter of making the most of
the self-reforming potentials of liberal democratic institutions. Habermas
considers that some of the self-reforms that have occurred within liberal
democratic constitutional and legal systems clearly show that the internal
relation between democracy and the rule of law can be seized as a radical,
emancipatory potential. He is, for example, impressed by the way in which
108 Pauline Johnson
Western feminist politics has exploited the self-critical capacities of institutional structures within liberal democracies.21 Empirical criticisms directed
both at ascribed legal denitions of equality and at the paternalism of an
undemocratised welfare state project has seen marginalised populations occasionally achieving practical recognition by liberal democratic institutions that
those who are affected can best clarify the relevant aspects that dene equality
and inequality in a given matter.22
Habermas attempt to make liberal democracies accountable to the democratic
possibilities they sustain has been seen by some of its critics as too accommodating, as too uncritical of deep structural problems within these societies.
The objectors fall into two major camps. On one side, there are those like
William E. Scheuerman and John Sitton who suggest that Habermas has not
broken sufciently from liberal attempts to justify liberal democratic arrangements by an appeal to a constitutionally supported ideal of private right. The
argument is that he does not acknowledge the extent to which the capacities
and dispositions required to effectively participate in processes of democratic
will formation have been eroded by the dominance of money and bureaucratic
power in capitalist democracies. Habermas needs to offer a more searching
account of how capitalist domination undermines democratic deliberation
and to suggest how some alternative to existing capitalism alone can allow
deliberative democracy to ourish.23 Others maintain that Habermas is too
much the republican; they insist that the rationalist bias of his efforts to retheorise the normativity of liberal democratic societies means that he is too
engaged with the search for the terms of consensual understandings to recognise the diversity of radical needs that might energise a critical politics with
utopian motivations. In both cases, Habermas is accused of failing to get right
the balance between the radicalism of hopes for a better future, required by
the utopian motivations of critical theory, and their reasonableness, necessary to its engaged character.
Reconciliation with Liberal-Democratic Realities?

Habermas has never been inclined towards a totalising politics devoted to
the cause of the revolutionary transformation of capitalist democracies. His
hopes lie with a project of radical democratic reform that seeks

a new balance between the forces of societal integration so that the socialintegrative power of solidaritythe communicative force of production
can prevail over the powers of the other two control resources, i.e. money
and administrative power, and therewith successfully assert the practically
oriented demands of the lifeworld.24
This agenda in no way contests the claim that radically unequal life chances
distributed systematically by the market undermine the capacities of whole
populations to operate as effective participants in democratic processes. This
much even the post-War welfare compromise had acknowledged. The
Keynesian project recognised that the market could not be relied upon to universalise the conditions of autonomy and had attempted to intervene, paternalistically, to make good this deciency. While Habermas endorses the general
ambitions of a welfare project that makes public authority responsible for
securing the conditions of private autonomy, he stresses that we need to cease
reproducing the contradictory logic that helped to erode the legitimacy of
welfare states. The rst point is, then, that Scheuerman and others overlook
the extent to which Habermas attempt to rescue the democratic processes of
a modern public offers itself as a critique of, and as a response to, the unequal
life chances distributed by the logics of capitalism. Habermas makes quite
clear his view that: [f]rom the viewpoint of representation and qualication
for citizenship, it is already important to secure the factual preconditions for
equal opportunity to exercise formally equal rights.25 The task of securing
the factual preconditions for equal opportunity may, he believes, in some
contexts require a basic guaranteed income which would permit the material
basis for citizens self-respect and political autonomy to be made independent
of the more or less contingent success of the private individual on the labor
market.26 Habermas asserts that the radical potentials of the question posed
by the welfare project: how much strain can the economic system be made
to take in directions that might benet social needs, to which the logic of corporate investment is indifferent, remain substantially untapped.27 The underdeveloped and embattled project of a democratised welfare system holds out
the hope that democratic citizenship might pay off, not simply in terms of
liberal individual rights and rights of political participation, but also in terms
of the enjoyment of social and cultural rights.28 Habermas makes the point
that: [d]emocratic citizenship can only realize its integrative potentialthat
110 Pauline Johnson
is, it can only nd solidarity between strangersif it proves itself as a

mechanism that actually realizes the material conditions of preferred forms
of life.29
Is this commitment to the democratisation and extension of the welfare project
radical enough to effectively counter the force of Scheuermans objection?
Scheurerman and Sitton are convinced that there can be no accommodation
between the imperatives of capitalism and the expectations of democracy.
The steering capacities of the former will always trump the practical conditions
needed to realise the latter. Sitton stresses that the compromise agenda
embraced by Habermas betrays the essentially revolutionary character of a
project aimed at realising the conditions of a properly democratic state against
the legacies of capitalism. Habermas fails to grasp the point that the authenticity and effectiveness of the public sphere requires that we recognize that
reason without revolution is not possible.30 Yet Habermas has no time for a
Jacobin politics in which a professed utopianism abandons the attempt to
locate itself as a concrete potential of the present. For him, the history of the
twentieth century has demonstrated the real dangers of any attempt to eradicate
achieved structural differentiations within modern societies in the name of
usurpation by politics of all steering functions.
Scheuermans more moderate version of the critique is that Habermas proposal
to offer his critical theory as a reconstruction of the neglected and misunderstood potentials of really existing liberal democracies fails to suggest any
galvanising images of a radically transformed, better, future. He specically
objects to the seeming political timidity of Habermas proposition that social change responsive to new needs must be tempered by an attitude of
cautious experimentation. Scheuerman thinks that a politics that responds
to oughts that are framed within terms set by liberal democratic institutions
cannot stir the imaginative leap, the free deed, of emancipatory political
action. He is particularly at a loss because, as he sees it, Habermas fails to
provide any specic illustrations of what might count as an imaginative
refunctioning of existing institutional arrangements within liberal democracies.
However, Between Facts and Norms does contain some, admittedly quite limited,
imagery of the kinds of political actions that might count as an exemplary
exploitation of tensions between the facts and the norms of within liberal
democracies. As previously mentioned, Habermas counts the partial success
of feminist attempts to get legal recognition for newly established needs and
rights as an illustration of how the interface between the layers of a modern
public sphere can be negotiated in the direction of a democratic reform of
the welfare project. Perhaps, then, it is not so hard to suggest examples of
the imaginative refunctioning of liberal democratic institutions that might
conrm the radical potentials of the internal relation between law and democracy referred to by Habermas. When in 1992 the High Court of Australia
responded to a civil action and granted legal recognition of native title claims
to traditional lands it seemingly claried the Courts capacity to function, not
simply as protector to already achieved rights, but as, in the words of Axel
Honneth, a mechanism for the distribution of depersonalised social respect.31
Scheuerman is not alone, though, in his misgivings about the lack of
creative political imagery in Habermas account of the potentials of liberal
democracies for self-reform. While Stephen Bronner acknowledges that
Habermas is a brilliant theorist of liberal democracy, he insists that the
time for defensiveness has passed. A certain boldness is becoming increasingly necessary.32 This type of assessment of the hesitant politics of Between
Facts and Norms would, perhaps, now accept that Habermas recent contributions to the debate over the prospects for a trans-nationalisation of the
public sphere do suggest that his critical theory is capable of a certain boldness.
His proposal for an internationalisation of a democratic welfare project charged
with the mission of politically taming an increasing globalised economy might
well be described as a courageous vision. Habermas insists that it is now
time to recognise that Keynesianism in ones own country just wont work
anymore and that political institutions on the supranational level that are
able to deal with the problems unleashed by the globalisation of commerce
and communication, of economic production and nance need to be developed.33 The challenge is to try and translate the complex two tracks of
an informal opinion-forming sector of the public sphere and the problemsolving functions of a formal-legal centre into terms adequate to the new
international scope of the democratic project in a globalising world. This project would require a radical refunctioning of existing international political
institutions.
Yet even this daring proposal for a globalised public sphere is anchored in
Habermas conviction that the horizons of desired futures must be set by our
112 Pauline Johnson
reections upon the ambiguous potentials of our histories. Unlike Ulrich Beck
and others, Habermas thinks that the task of building a global public needs
to be guided, not by new normative commitments that seek to break with
the idealisations that sustained the democratic politics of the nation states,
but by a learning process that reects upon the achievements, as well as the
real limitations, of liberal democratic institutions. Habermas suggests that the
emergent political structures of a globalised public do not face tasks that are
different in kind from the difculties that were confronted by democratic
nation states in forging rational solidarities of citizens across diverse and
unequal populations. We can learn from the successes as well as the mistakes
of the nation states about how best to mobilise allegiances and set up structures
adequate to the project of building a trans-national democratic politics. More
is required of such an undertaking than the, in any case enormously difcult,
task of building democratically constituted political-legal institutions at an
international level. As already noted, Habermas insists that the project of
globalising modern democracy requires nothing less that efforts to build a
trans-nationalised welfare project.
Yet are the critics correct that Habermas fails to nally get the balance right
between the future oriented utopian commitments of critical theory and its
ambitions to practically connect up with the present? We seem to be engaged
here in a controversy in which subjective political taste will always want to
have the last word. However, we can take the discussion somewhat further
as an immanently critical analysis of Habermas attempt to reconcile two
dimensions of a critical theory legacy via a project aimed at determining the
potentials of liberal democracies for radical self-reform. It can again be emphasised that, for Habermas, the critical theorist is not in the business of providing blue prints. Indeed, nothing, he has said, makes him more nervous
than the suggestion that critical theory proposes an ideal of a rational society
towards which we are to proceed.34 Communicatively acting subjects are the
legitimate interpreters of their own needs and aspirations and all that theory
can do is to help clarify the signicance and implications of choices they
make about the potentials of the present. Yet, even though Habermas abjures
the role of legislator, his diagnosis of ambiguous modernisation processes
might well be seen as providing a restrictive grid through which only particular constructions of our needs for autonomy can hope to pass and achieve
recognition for their general political signicance. Only those needs that are
able to establish their generaliseable signicance, hence the reasonableness

of their claims, can be embraced by the utopian agendas of Habermas critical
theory. It seems that Habermas commitment to an expanded account of an
incomplete Enlightenment project leaves his critical theory unable to respond
to Romantic interests in autonomy that also claim recognition as radical needs
that have been loosened by ambiguous modernisation processes.
Tensions Between Romantic and Enlightenment Legacies

Habermas supposes that, in contrast to the one-sidedness of the dialectic of
Enlightenment thesis, his own description of modernitys unnished project
of democratic Enlightenment indicates a real appreciation of diverse modernising trajectories. He seeks to expand our comprehension of the complexity
of Enlightenment rationalising potentials and to promote the normativity of
an interactive rationality that underpins the legitimacy of democratic power
against the hegemonic tendencies of an instrumentalising reason. Yet some
of his critics point out that this attempt to widen the interpretation of its rationality potentials fails to capture the full extent of Enlightenments impact on
the scope of modern motivations and needs. They stress that a Romantic consciousness that is resistant to rationalising Enlightenment demands is also a
powerful modernising legacy. A Romantic interest in autonomy signals a
determination to interrupt, not complete, the rationalising project of modernity.
It craves recognition for the beautiful uniqueness of sovereign particularity
and discovers an intolerable authoritarianism in the Enlightenments insatiable
demand for reasons.
To be sure, Habermas himself has insisted that the reproduction of utopian
energies requires the mutual integration of distinct types of emancipatory
needs.35 He made this point quite clearly in his early discussion of the need
to incorporate two separate types of transformative energies in the radical
reform agendas set by the German student movements in the post-1968 period.
While the utopianism of his own post-War generation wanted to redeem and
to critically re-appropriate liberal democratic principles that had been shattered in Nazi Germany, Habermas recognised that these idealising investments in the potentials of democratic procedures found an important ally in
the transformative motivations of a new generation that was calling for recognition of unconventional identities and their novel priorities. Habermas advised
114 Pauline Johnson
that the meeting place for these two sets of radical needs could be found in
a shared rejection of any complacent appropriation of the signicance of the
German past. Yet Martin Beck Matustk is not persuaded that the utopianism
of Habermas critical theory does adequately integrate distinct emancipatory
needs. Habermas fails, in Matustks view, to speak to the transformative
hopes of the new social movements in terms that correspond to their own
understanding of their utopian energies.36 Habermas brings himself to endorse
the creative impulses of new social movements, bearers of novel identity
needs, only insofar as, these transformative longings are nally willing to
become pacied by democratic procedures, law and civil order.37
Matustk is, in my view, right to point out a problem in Habermas attempt
at a synthesising integration of double-sided utopian potentials. Habermas
considers the signicance of transformative longings in terms of the critical
motivations they can contribute to a revitalisation of the ideal of the selfreforming society; he interprets the lasting signicance of these energies
in terms of the contributions they can make to a creative appropriation of
neglected liberal democratic potentials. However, this attempt to synthesise
a utopianism committed to the self-reform of liberal democracies with Romantic
transformative interests in the liberation of new identities from all normalising
conventions seems to supply the latter with an alienating telos. It is an imposed
perspective on the signicance of self-interpreted needs that have, in many
cases, shaped themselves through resistance to the limiting construction of
the ideal of autonomy suggested by liberal democratic normativity. Modern
feminisms misgivings about the adequacy of an immanently critical appropriation of liberal democratic traditions to the full range of the needs and
hopes the movement carries are manifested in the enduring ties it has forged
with some unreasonable variants of post-modern theories.
The danger is that if critical theory offers itself as a site of integration between
emancipatory interests that are experienced by social actors as irreducibly
distinct kinds of goals, then alienation between the theory and its addressees
might take hold. This would not only deplete the relevance of the theory but
also cut short a necessary dialogue between two types of emancipatory needs
that could vitalise contemporary utopian energies. Habermas totalising purposes sees his critical theory slide from a merely interpretative role to one
that ascribes an alienating end-goal to supposedly undeveloped or immature
self-interpretations of emancipatory needs. A symmetrical danger also needs

to be acknowledged. Theory that simply surrenders to the demand that it
connects up with the already-achieved self-understandings of the everyday
risks sacricing any analytic and critical power. Yet perhaps we need to allow
rather more here to the capacity of separate interpretations of the need for
autonomy to develop insight into their mutual dependencies. Defensiveness
about the distinctiveness of emancipatory needs does not entail blindness
about the conditional character of their goals. As Jeffrey Alexander comments,
it is quite possible that specic transgressive needs and identity claims are
able to keep the exhilarating novelty of their identity claims in view while
recognising the dependence of such claims on institutionally embedded
pluralistic and egalitarian principles.38 While the energies of movements
concerned with issues of, for example, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality
draw substantially on the transformative needs of evolving particularistic
identity descriptions, Alexander nevertheless thinks it would also be strange
if the energies of the sphere-specic idealizing movements did not inform,
and were not periodically sustained by, some reference to a broader and more
unifying ideal.
Perhaps it is its capacity to help foster awareness of this strange afnity,
co-dependence even, of two irreducibly distinct interpretations of the idea of
an autonomous self-determining life that sets the main challenge for an
engaged critical theory today. Habermas account of the role of critical theory
as interpreter to the neglected ambiguous legacies and radical potentials of
Enlightenment reason ultimately narrows the range of radical needs that the
theory can effectively engage with. His supposition that the self-expressive,
Romantic impulses of transformative politics offers a useful training ground
for a politics bent on the creative re-appropriation of liberal democratic normativity can only alienate utopian energies that have also played a signicant
role in the ambiguous cultural and political histories of post-Enlightenment
societies. If critical theory relinquishes a synthesising mission and conceives
itself instead as a sounding board for an exploration into the afnities and
dependencies of quite distinct types of utopian motivations, it can place itself
as a timely commentary on the dangers of the unchecked development of
each and as an interpretive framework through which each might recognise
the benets of creative collaborations in terms consistent with the integrity
of separate determinations of the meaning of autonomy.
116 Pauline Johnson
We have seen that Habermas suggests that a sceptical, reforming interest in

the re-appropriation of a liberal democratic normativity can be promoted and
vitalised by drawing upon the critical energies supplied by transformative
emancipatory needs. It is also clear that he is persuaded that the bearers of
transformative needs must be willing to respond to the requirement that the
reasonableness of their claims upon shared and scarce resources, including
the resource of tolerance, be justied. In the end, the expression of transformative longings requires protection from principles of plurality and equality
just as their claims upon these principles promises to rework them, describing
them with new and complex meanings. So Habermas does suggest some persuasive reasons why distinct interpretations of emancipatory interests need
to take into account claims raised by alternative constructions of the meaning
of autonomy. Yet these reasons remain inadequately exploited as reasons that
are capable of shaping the developmental path adopted by each as long as
a Romantic interest in the untrammelled self-expression of concrete particularity
is simply represented as an episode within the rationalising trajectories of
the developed utopian ambitions of democratic Enlightenment.
Lesek Kolakowski makes the point that if contemporary utopian energies are
to be revitalised we need to encourage a productive interchange between two
relatively distinct types of motivations. As he sees it, open and decent modern societies need both digger utopians that dream of a world of unfettered
self-realisation, and healers, sceptics interested in a reective appropriation
of chosen continuities. It is the latter who attempt to: keep us vigilant . . .
not to let us be carried away by wishful thinking.39 Unlike Habermas,
Kolakowski does not encourage us to try and harmonise these diverse impulses
within modern utopian thinking. We need to bear their differences in mind
and to seek, not the subordination of one to the other, but an attitude mindful of their tensions and of their complementary commitments. As Kolakowski
has said, We need them both.
Notes
1
J. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,

The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001, pp. 58113, p. 59.

2
J. Habermas, The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Exhaustion
of Utopian Energies, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians
Debate, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1989, pp. 48-70, pp. 48-50.
Ibid., p. 54.
Ibid., p. 50.
J. Habermas, A Dialogue With Jrgen Habermas, in Philosophy in a Time of

Terror: Dialogues with Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori,
Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 25-43, p. 35.
Ibid.
Habermas Learning from Catastrophe/A Look Back at the Short Twentieth

Century, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, Cambridge, MA, The MIT
Press, 2000, pp. 38-58, p. 48.
J. Habermas, Europes Second Chance, in The Past as Future; Jrgen Habermas

Interviews by Michael Haller, ed. P. Hohendahl, Lincoln & London, The University
of Nebraska Press, 1994, pp. 73-99, p. 97.
L. Lowenthal The Utopian Motif in Suspension: A Conversation with Leo

Lowenthal, An interview with W. Martin Luddke, in An Unmastered Past: The
Autobiographical Reections of Leo Lowenthal, ed. Martin Jay, Berkley, University of
California Press, 1987, p. 237.
10
M. R. Mrkus, Decent Society and/or Civil Society? Social Research, vol. 68,
no. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 1011-1029, p. 1024.
11
J. Alexander, Robust Utopias and Civil Repairs, International Sociology, December

2001, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 579-591.
12
J. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory,
13
M. Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas and the Problem of
Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1995.

Communicative Freedom, New York, State University of New York Press, 2001.
14
J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law

and Democracy, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1996.
15
Ibid., p. 360.
16
Ibid., p. 366.
17
Ibid., p. 448.
18
Ibid., p. 449.
19
Ibid., pp. 429-30.
20
Ibid., p. 430.
21
Ibid., p. 374.
22
Ibid., p. 420.
23
W. E. Scheuerman, Between Radicalism and Resignation: Democratic Theory in
118 Pauline Johnson

Habermass Between Facts and Norms, in Discourse and Democracy: Essays on
Habemass Between Facts and Norms, eds. von Schomberg and Baynes, Albany, State
University of New York Press, 2002, p. 69.
24
J. Habermas, Further Reections on the Public Sphere, in Habermas and the Public
Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1992, pp. 421-462,
p. 444.
25
J. Habermas, A Conversation about Questions of Political Theory, in Jrgen

Habermas: A Berlin Republic Writings on Germany, ed. P. Hohendahl, Cambridge
UK, Polity Press, 1998, pp. 131-158, p. 150.
26
Ibid., p. 142.
27
J. Habermas, What Does Socialism Mean Today?, After the Fall: The Failure
of Communism and the Future of Socialism, ed. Blackburn, London, Verso, 1991, pp.
25-47, p. 39.
28
J. Habermas, The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty

and Citizenship, in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, eds. Cronin
and de Greiff, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1998, pp. 105-129, pp. 118-119.
29
Ibid.
30
J. Sitton, Habermas and Contemporary Society, New York & England, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003, p. 156.
31
A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conicts,
Cambridge, Polity, 1992.
32
S. E. Bonner, Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, p. 285.
33
J. Habermas, Learning from Catastrophe? A Look Back at the Short Twentieth

Century, p. 51.
34
J. Habermas, A Reply to My Critics, in Habermas: Critical Debates, eds. J. Thompson

& D. Held, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1982, p. 235.
35
See for example, M. Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from
Lukcs to Habermas, UK, Polity, 1984, p. 467.
36
M. B. Matustk, Jrgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Prole, Lanham, New York

& Oxford, Rowman & Littleeld, 2001, p. 184.
37
Ibid., p. 128.
38
J. C. Alexander, Robust Utopian and Civil Repairs, p. 586.
39
L. Kolakowski, The Death of Utopia Reconsidered, Modernity on Endless Trial,

Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 131-146, p. 136.
Shane ONeill
Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and
Globalisation
ABSTRACT
One way of providing a focus for critical theory today
is to articulate those substantive and robust norms of
egalitarian justice that would appear to be presupposed
by the idea of a republican and democratic constitutional
order. It is suggested here that democratic justice requires
the equalisation of effective communicative freedom
among all structurally constituted social groups (SCSGs)
and that this will have far-reaching implications that
entail the deconstruction of all social hierarchies in both
domestic and global orders. This argument is presented
in three sections. The rst defends the focus on groups
rather than individuals in theorising democratic justice.
The second intervenes critically in contemporary debates
surrounding the theoretical relation between various
aspects of justice including the demands of redistribution,
recognition and political empowerment. The third turns
to the challenges for critical theory presented by a complex and multifaceted process of globalisation and it
defends a qualied form of cosmopolitanism and highlights the need for a radical democratisation of the international order.
KEYWORDS: Critical Theory, Equality, Democracy, Justice,
Social Groups, Globalisation
Critical theory is concerned with human

emancipation. But what can emancipation
mean in this increasingly complex world of
late modernity? As always, it means liberating
120 Shane ONeill
people from whatever causes them to suffer unnecessarily. The main causes
of unnecessary suffering are the ways in which social, political and economic
structures create, reproduce or exacerbate inequalities between groups of people, whereby some enjoy greater and more effective liberties than others in
seeking to realise their full human potential. One way of providing a focus
for critical theory, therefore, is to ask what might be involved in creating and
maintaining a set of structures that could deliver equal and effective liberties
for all. Given the continuing signicance of the constitutional state in late
modernity, this project is best understood in republican terms, as the realisation of a democratic form of life in which free and equal citizens engage
one another in the collective task of autonomous self-governance.
I want to begin by drawing attention to four basic features of democratic selfrule that have been explored recently by critical theorists, particularly in the
model of democracy that has been elaborated by Jrgen Habermas.1 1) Inclusive
public discourse releases communicative power as citizens engage one another
in the open and unrestrained practice of discursive will-formation. 2) Constitutionally grounded decision-making procedures should be sensitive and responsive to the public sphere by ensuring that this communicative power can be
effectively transformed into legitimate law. 3) The legitimacy of any formally
generated outcomes will depend on the quality of the process of democratic
will-formation. 4) The relevant standard of evaluation should be that the
process is driven by reasons that free and equal citizens can come to share
through public deliberation, and not by structural conditions that deny some
social groups equal and effective opportunities to exert political inuence.
The effectiveness of our democratic procedures depends on the realisation of
conditions of maximal social inclusion by securing equal and effective political
liberties for all citizens in our constitutional arrangements. I will argue that
this republican account of democratic legitimacy presupposes a substantive
and robust conception of egalitarian justice. We can refer to the key principle
of justice involved to require the
equalisation of effective communicative freedom for all structurally constituted
social groups in any constitutional state.
I will refer here to a structurally constituted social group as an SCSG. If an

inclusive and vibrant form of democratic self-rule is to be achieved in modern
Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation 121
societies then it will depend on the creation of a social structure that allows
all SCSGs to exercise their equal rights and liberties to good effect. This means
that all SCSGs should have equal access, relative to the size of the group, to
the informal ow of communication that lters through to the formal legislative process. An egalitarian social structure is, therefore, a precondition
for the inclusion of all citizens as effective participants in the democratic
process. Justice, as the equalisation of effective communicative freedom,
requires the deconstruction of all hierarchical relations between SCSGs, a
project that has radical implications for all modern states in terms of political
empowerment, fair distribution and due recognition of particular group identities. No structural inequalities can be tolerated in such a democratic order
since all SCSGs should be free to articulate their own perspectives on matters
that affect them. Furthermore, they should be capable of articulating their
distinctive perspectives with equal effectiveness. All SCSGs should, in other
words, have equal voice, relative to their size, in public discussions about
matters of shared concern.
In this essay I will rst ask why it is appropriate to focus on SCSGs rather
than individuals in assessing the demands of democratic justice. Then I will
outline briey some key aspects of the demands of justice that are presupposed
by the idea of inclusive self-government, and I will comment on some recent
debates on such matters within contemporary critical theory. I will then turn
to one of the main challenges facing any form of emancipatory politics today.
This is the complex and multifaceted process of globalisation.2 The assumption
that sovereignty resides in nation-states has been a distinguishing feature
of the modern era but it has been clear for some time that the golden age of
the nation-state as the lynchpin of political life has now passed. Stories of
the demise of the nation-state remain, however, for now at least, fanciful
exaggerations. Yet it is clear that the opposition between domestic and
international politics is constantly being deconstructed in practice. The structures of the global order impinge ever more forcefully on local structures as
all boundaries between the state and the global order in economic, cultural
and political senses have become increasingly porous. If we are to take the
republican project of radical democratisation as a normative guide to an emancipated form of life, then we need to conceive of it in a way that acknowledges the global transformations that have been experienced throughout the
world in the later modern era.
122 Shane ONeill
A Non-Essentialist Conception of the Structurally Constituted

Social Group
John Rawls took the basic structure of society to be the primary subject of
justice since the effects of this on the life-chances of any individual are so
profound and present from the start.3 Rawls did not deliver an adequate
account of social structures.4 Nor did he free himself sufciently from liberal
individualistic commitments that prevented him from getting to grips with
the vital role that SCSGs play in democratic life.5 While social groups seem
to appear in his version of political liberalism as those who share reasonable
comprehensive doctrines, there is little appreciation of the non-discursive
origins of many groups, or of their identity-forming power and the dynamics
involved in democratic interaction between them.6 Nonetheless Rawls had,
from the early stages of his career, correctly identied social structures, rather
than say individual entitlements,7 or cultural traditions,8 to be the appropriate
focus for theorists of justice. Individuals clearly stand in relations of relative
advantage or disadvantage to other individuals as a result of their social
location within the basic structure. This consists of the main political, economic,
social and ethno-cultural institutions and arrangements in society, even if
Rawls never considered directly issues or cultural or ethno-national justice.
These various aspects of the basic structure intersect one another and impact
on one another in complex ways that require, as we will see, sophisticated
and analytically differentiated forms of critical exploration.
The main point here is that each of us occupies a specic location within this
basic structure from the start of our lives and while we grow and develop a
clear view of our strengths and weaknesses, goals and aspirations, our social
location can change quite considerably during the course of our lifetime. So
too can the structures themselves change over time. While it is clear that
many social structures are, within one generation at least, relatively stable
(examples might be relations constituted by class, gender or racial differences),
all can potentially be disrupted and modied though changing patterns of
individual activity. Social groups are structurally constituted if members are
differentiated from one another by a social relation that impacts profoundly,
and from the start of their lives, on the chances they have of realising their
full potential. From the perspective of an account of justice, then, the key
focus must be on the fact that the basic structure of all modern societies creates
and produces inequalities that result in the historical formation of relatively

stable hierarchical group relations. SCSGs emerge historically, therefore, as
a result of the inegalitarian consequences of particular aspects of the basic
structure.9
So while golfers and tennis players could be referred to loosely as social
groups, they are not SCSGs since they are not structurally differentiated from
one another. It is hardly questionable to suggest that the impact of the basic
structure on the lives of golfers and tennis players, as collectivities, has in
most contexts been broadly similar. The same could not be said of relations
between children born into families at opposite ends of the income spectrum,
or between men and women, or gay and straight citizens. All members of
any one SCSG (X) have had their life-chances affected in a similar way as a
result of the operation of some aspect of the basic structure. Other citizens,
who have been affected in very different or opposing ways by that same
aspect of the basic structure, will also form an SCSG (Y), one that stands in
a hierarchical relation to X. For this reason citizens who are members of X
will share a common interest, one that will be opposed to the interest shared
by members of Y, at least with respect to whatever particular aspect of the
basic structure is the source of the differentiation of X and Y. Each member
of X, and the same will go for Y, is also likely to see the commonality they
share as a signicant identity-forming bond, an afliation that feeds into each
ones sense of self. Apart from class, gender, race and sexual orientation X
could be differentiated from Y on the basis of religion, membership or immigration status, age, or ability/disability, amongst other things.
It should be clear by now why we should seek to equalise effective communicative freedom among SCSGs rather than individuals. In democratic politics SCSGs play a vital role in mediating between the individual and the
political community as a whole. We are focusing here on structural relations
between groups rather than individuals, because it is these hierarchical relations
that are the primary obstacles to the achievement of justice. Since individuals
are always situated in a network of group afliations, group memberships are
unavoidable features of each individuals identity-forming context. Furthermore,
the structure of these afliations is often the source of social antagonism and
of conicting political demands. These afliations motivate citizens to engage
in political activity and they help to shape the political agenda by engendering
124 Shane ONeill
particular struggles for justice. The sparks that keep the motor of democratic politics running are generated by SCSG relations and not by individuals
as such. Individuals suffer social injustice (as opposed to say criminal injustice) not as individual people per se but rather as members of particular SCSGs.
This is not to deny, however, that there are serious dangers attached to any
normative analysis that relies on groups rather than individuals.10 Each of us
has multiple SCSG afliations and it is up to us individually to work out
what kind of priority the various afliations that are constitutive of our
individual identities should be given at any particular time. No self-styled
group-leader can dictate to other group members that the source of that
particular afliation must take priority in their lives whether that is asserted
as a necessity for a certain historical period, or indeed forever. Marxists,
feminists, gay activists, leaders of black liberation movements, and of religious,
national or ethnic groupseach have provided examples of how this kind
of group essentialism can become oppressive of group members. It is dogmatic
and oppressive to insist that national liberation must take priority over the
demand for gender justice, or that resistance to religious or racial discrimination
must be subsumed into class struggle, or that gays and lesbians who do not
put rst the struggle to end all forms of discrimination on the grounds of
sexual orientation are somehow disloyal to their group. Not only should it
be left to each individual group member to work out how high a political
priority to give to that particular afliation, there must also be scope to distance
oneself completely from the group. This potential is always present since
individuals may nd themselves drawn to a place where their priorities
change and their identities shift. This might be due to new inuences in personal relations with non-group members, or with a new awareness of a different group afliation that cuts across that which had hitherto seemed most
signicant, or through a sense of no longer belonging in the same way as
before due to some perspective altering encounter with others that allows
one to see things differently. All of these experiences lead us to relativise the
importance of any specic SCSG afliation. In certain circumstances such
identity development could lead to an individual exiting a particular SCSG
although this is more likely for groups structured by class, membership
status or religious differences than gender, race, sexual orientation, age or
ability.
The upshot of this is that we can only make adequate space for individual
autonomy in this normative analysis of the requirements of justice if we
operate with an anti-essentialist conception of the SCSG. It must be acknowledged that SCSG memberships are constituted by basic social structures, that
they motivate political activity and shape the environment in which politics
operates. In this way SCSGs, as noted earlier, play a crucial mediating role
in the project of realising democratic justice. Yet SCSG memberships, if conceived of rigidly, dogmatically or in an essentialist manner, are potentially
oppressive. For this reason, justice requires that ways be found to ensure that
those who seek to represent group interests politically are accountable to all
SCSG members. The equalisation of communicative freedom among SCSGs
must be accompanied, therefore, by strong provisions for individual rights
and by measures that ensure substantive equality of opportunity for all
individuals. These civil rights should secure for each citizen adequate protections from discrimination and from all forms of identity-based oppression,
whether they come from members of other groups or from internal elites
within their own group. We should not make the mistake of allowing the
pursuit of equality to lead to a bolstering of internal group relations that are
oppressive of some SCSG members.11
Having guarded against the dangers of essentialism by reiterating the central
role that individual rights and equality of opportunity play in this account
of democratic self-rule, it does, nonetheless, make sense to keep the focus of
justice on SCSGs. We should seek to ensure that those groups, and not each
individual citizen, enjoy equal and effective communicative freedom in democratic discourse. SCSGs will be made up of a range of diverse individuals
with a wide range of talents, abilities and interests. Only some of these people
will want to spend much of their time engaging in political activity and only
some will have the leadership qualities and talents required to be effective
in pursuit of the groups political objectives. And while it is vital that individual
group members are empowered to call their leaders and representatives to
account, it is the group perspectives that will contribute to those forms of
public discourse that feed into the legislative process. The important point is
that if we are to achieve an effectively vibrant democracy then the perspective
of each SCSG must be articulated clearly and effectively by some of that
groups own representatives on any issue that matters importantly to them.
126 Shane ONeill
We should eliminate any structural or systematic advantage that makes it

more likely that members of one group will have the reasons and arguments
put forward by their representative accepted or taken up by others. The
reasons and arguments must speak for themselves if the outcome is to be
democratically just.
Recognition, Redistribution and Basic Democratic Capabilities

Effective communicative freedom can be understood in terms of the basic
capabilities that are required if SCSGs are to engage constructively in public
discourse. The idea of basic capabilities is central to the perspective on equality
and justice that has been developed by both Amartya Sen and Martha
Nussbaum, but here we need to focus directly on democratic capabilities.12
If we are to equalise effective communicative freedom then we need to identify what basic capabilities are required that will empower SCSGs to articulate
their perspectives on matters of mutual concern. Citizens who seek to articulate
and represent their SCSG perspective, while engaging constructively in democratic debate, require at least three basic capabilities associated with political
agency. We can refer to these as agenda-setting, assumption-questioning, and
claim-evaluating capabilities. First, it is important that citizens from each
SCSG in society should be able to contribute to the democratic agenda by
introducing new themes into political discourse and by raising public awareness
about issues that affect them, particularly those that impact on them in a disproportional way. Secondly, they should be able to question effectively any
unwarranted assumptions or prejudices that dominate current discourse and
that result in them, or other SCSGs, suffering a decit of due respect. Thirdly,
they should have the necessary cognitive skills that allow them to evaluate
critically a variety of competing claims, including the ability to adopt a selfcritical perspective toward their own claims.13
As was noted earlier, inclusive justice requires not only that all SCSG
perspectives must be taken into account, but also that they are articulated
with equality of effectiveness. Only equality of effectiveness can ensure that
outcomes will be just, as just outcomes should be driven by the weight of
reasons put forward in discourse and not by the systematic advantages that
one group may have over others.14 A focus on capabilities encourages critically
minded social scientists to design research projects that assess the relative
effectiveness of various SCSGs with respect to the basic citizen capabilities

of setting agendas, questioning widely held assumptions and participating
in the critical evaluation of competing claims. From a normative-theoretical
perspective, the priority is to help set such a critical research agenda by identifying the major structural inequalities that disadvantage some SCSGs by
denying under current arrangements equal opportunities to inuence the
political process.
Clearly the social structures that require critical attention include political,
economic, cultural and other relations that differentiate SCSGs. There have
been a number of important debates among inuential critical theorists in
recent years exploring various ways of analysing the requirements of justice.
These have focused in particular on the relative merits of redistribution and
the recognition of collective identities. Iris Young includes normative claims
with economic and cultural dimensions in her account of ve faces of oppression: exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and
violence.15 Yet Nancy Fraser accuses Young of failing in her account of
justice as the politics of difference to integrate adequately recognition and
redistribution, and of giving undue weight to the cultural recognition of group
identities at the expense of the politics of redistribution.16 Fraser identies
potential tensions between the demands of recognition and redistribution
and she puts forward the idea of participatory parity as capturing more
effectively the notion that economic distribution and cultural recognition are
two irreducible aspects of justice.17 While many injustices will have both distributive and recognition related dimensions to them, Fraser believes that
each can ultimately be traced back to either the economic structure or to the
status order. Participatory parity requires that all citizens can interact with
one another as peers and this provides a critical standard that can help us to
order these claims. According to Fraser, just patterns of economic distribution
provide the objective preconditions for participatory parity, while the intersubjective preconditions are provided by a just status order of cultural values.
Young responds to this critique by suggesting that Frasers model exaggerates
the tension between cultural and economic struggles for justice and that she
relies on an implausibly sharp distinction between the demands of recognition
and those of redistribution. Young perceives an unhelpful dualism in Frasers
approach, and she suggests that too many different forms of injustice are
128 Shane ONeill
thrown together into the categories of the economic and the cultural and
that this overlooks other forms of injustice to do with law or citizenship for
example, that might be better described as being political.18 At the same time,
in her more recent work, Young herself acknowledges that there is a danger
that an over-emphasis on cultural differences may distract theorists of justice
from their focus on those deep structural cleavages that are the source of
entrenched political conict.19 On the other hand Fraser has also engaged in
recent debate with Axel Honneth, with the latter claiming that the concept
of recognition, if properly differentiated, provides normative grounds for the
critique of all forms of injustice including those associated with economics
and distribution. Against this claim, Fraser insists that recognition is only one
aspect of a larger social and systemic complex.20
What are we to make of these disagreements? It seems that all the participants
in the recognition/redistribution debates share the aspiration to articulate
and defend a substantively egalitarian account of justice that would be appropriate to a radically inclusive communicative democracy. All acknowledge
there are various different forms of structural injustice and that these include
material inequalities arising from the economic sphere as well as inequalities
of status among identity-groups that arise from the cultural realm. Fraser is
right to argue that the demands of recognition and of redistribution are not
always in harmony and that to focus only on one would be to undermine
some important struggles for justice. Furthermore, it is important to see that
most signicant injustices have, among other features, distributive and recognition-related aspects to them. There, does, however, seem to be little gained
by insisting that we theorise the demands of justice only in terms of those
two analytical perspectives that the categories of redistribution and recognition
provide. Young is right, therefore, to suggest that a multi-faceted critical
analysis is required. This allows us to tease out the various different aspects
of structural injustice that could all be loosely connected to the economic
realm: exploitation, deprivation, marginalisation and powerlessness for example.
It also facilitates the critical analysis of structural injustices that seem to require
say political empowerment as opposed to either redistribution or recognition
as a primary remedy. Structural inequalities that concern decision-making
processes, the operation of legal procedures or access to communication
networks come to mind. It is clear that we need to maintain a exible and
context-sensitive approach to the critical analysis of the multiple and complex

forms of injustice in modern societies.
By arguing for the equalisation of effective communicative freedom for all
SCSGs I am hoping to provide an overarching conception of justice that is
specically directed to the achievement of a ourishing discursive democracy.
Frasers notion of parity of participation and Honneths idea of a just recognition order also seek to provide some such overarching perspective on
justice. The emphasis I place on equalising communicative freedom for
SCSGs gives a shaper focus, however, to the necessary connection between
democracy and justice, and to the central mediating role that SCSGs play
in democratic politics. Furthermore, and in this I follow Young, my account
should not be taken to imply that there is a determinate set of analytical
perspectives that can help us to interrogate current injustices. For Honneth
mutual recognition is all while Fraser argues for the perspectival dualism of
recognition and redistribution. Such categories may constrain critical analysis
unnecessarily by distracting us into tracing all injustices back to the recognition
order or by assessing them all through economic or cultural lenses. If we
focus our efforts on assessing how communicative freedom is to be equalised
for all SCSGs by assessing the basic capabilities of political agency outlined
above, we neednt restrict ourselves in this way to these potentially limiting
explanatory matrices. We should rather remain open to the possibility
that most injustices will have multiple aspects and that each must be interrogated critically in context-sensitive ways that avoid reducing the complexity
of the issue under consideration. Regardless then of the analytical perspective
we adopt, it seems clear that the effort to equalise communicative freedom
for all SCSGs will initiate a program of radical social transformation. The task
of critical social science is to detail how such a program might be achieved.
Meeting the Challenge of Globalisation: Toward a Just

International Order
We now need to turn to the challenge of globalisation. I will assess briey
how the account of democratic justice Ive defended here might apply at the
global level. It is now impossible to theorise justice or democracy without
attending to this multifaceted process of globalisation and to the complex
130 Shane ONeill
problems it generates. These include poverty, hunger and malnutrition and

their relation to international trade, debt and North-South inequalities, war,
systematic human rights abuses, international terrorism, cultural/national/
religious/ethnic conicts, environmental degradation, gender inequality and
HIV/Aids. From the perspective of critical theory, the challenge ahead is to
democratise the process of globalisation by allowing all those affected by the
transnational economic, cultural and political order to participate fully in
managing these processes. But how are we to conceive of the equalisation of
effective communicative freedom as a demand of justice, if the domestic and
the international can no longer be distinguished from one another in ways
that most assumed possible for much of the modern era? Must the project of
radical democratisation we have been considering now be presented as a
strongly universalist, cosmopolitan vision for a post-national era, or does the
constitutional nation-state still have a signicant role to play in achieving just
democratic structures at a global level?21 I suggest that we should not think
of this question in either/or terms but rather we should give partially afrmative answers to both of its parts.
In order for the project of democratising complex processes of global transformation to get off the ground, progress is needed on two levels. First, we
require a stronger global public sphere, a forum that can, by mobilising citizens across national boundaries, take some aspects of politics into a postnational realm.22 This global public sphere, which came alive for example
in the protests across the world during the build-up to the 2003 war in Iraq,
plays at the transnational level a similar role to that of the national public
sphere within the constitutional state.23 Transnational groups and non-governmental organisations mobilise around issues of common concern and they
mount protests and make demands on behalf of the worlds most vulnerable
people. While activists and leaders of these transnational groups must remain
accountable to all those they represent, their effectiveness depends on their
developing the basic citizen capabilities required to set political agendas,
question widely held assumptions and engage constructively in the critical
evaluation of competing claims. But if this process of transnational deliberation
and opinion formation is to be transformed into an effective system of just
global governance, then we also need progress at a second level, that of the
nation-state and the international political and legal order.
There is a tendency in the work of cosmopolitan theorists of a global civil

society, to overlook the signicance of institutional agencies of political transformation.24 Yet institutional networks of political and legal equality at both
national and international levels are essential to the project of radical democratisation. We need to be wary of the danger that some demands for equality
within the constitutional state could be undermined if the nation-state itself
is bypassed as a site of political struggle. An exclusively post-national focus
for protest might deprive disadvantaged SCSGs within states of some important
opportunities to achieve justice. This occurs whenever talk of globalisation
is allowed to obfuscate certain domestic hierarchies, thus rendering them
more difcult to challenge and dismantle. Furthermore, since most transnational
activists are based in relatively privileged Western societies, there is also a
danger that new hierarchies will be introduced at global level and that these
will further weaken and marginalise citizens of less privileged states by
making them vulnerable to intervention from richer states.25 The governments
of many enlightened Western societies are more than happy to ride roughshod
over the democratic will of less developed countries when it is in their interests
to do so and they can use cosmopolitan arguments that undermine the sovereignty of these weaker states to rationalise such neo-imperialistic intervention.
It would seem, therefore, that the international legal order, with its formal
assumption of equality between self-determining states, may in some respects,
offer better protection to the worlds least privileged people than would a
complete abandonment of state sovereignty in favour of a Western dominated
form of transnational politics. This is not to say that key international organisations such as the United Nations are not in need of radical reform, but
rather to point out that vulnerable peoples may nd a more effective voice
through international as opposed to global networks of communication. So
while it is vital that transnational organisations enjoy effective communicative
freedom in articulating their perspectives, it is perhaps even more urgent that
we attend to the current global structure of inequality between states. It is
clear that national governments, and some supranational institutions like the
European Union, remain the dominant actors in world politics. In fact, under
current circumstances, only they can respond effectively as agents to the issues
and problems that are brought to our attention through deliberation within
global civil society. It is states that wage war on one another and states that
132 Shane ONeill
intervene militarily in other sovereign jurisdictions, sometimes on humanitarian

grounds but often not. States negotiate treaties, or obstruct negotiations, on
trade and international debt, the environment, global health concerns, gender
inequalities and human rights. Without a constructively co-operative dialogue
among nation-states and between them and non-governmental organisations,
then little progress is likely on the agendas that are most pressing for many
transnational groups and the people they represent. Only some such inclusive
system of international co-operation can get to grips with the key challenges
of the global era.
The main obstacle to the emergence of this system of international co-operation
is the current global basic structure. Just as SCSGs stand in relations of relative
advantage or disadvantage to one another within the basic structure of a constitutional state, so nation-states stand in such relations to one another within
the global basic structure. States can be considered, therefore, in the context
of the structure of the global order, to be analogous to SCSGs within one constitutional state. So long as they remain accountable to their people, state representatives will play an essential role in the task of managing the process
of global transformation and in establishing a just system of global governance. Indeed the identity-forming power of nation-states as legally constituted communities is such that on most issues of global signicance they
satisfy the demand for inclusion that forms the basis of legitimate democratic
politics much more effectively than Western dominated transnational groups
could do. States play a vital role in mediating between their domestic SCSGs
and the global political community. We should, therefore, seek to equalise
effective communicative freedom among constitutional nation-states in order
to set in place an inclusive international dialogue that can begin to bring
processes of global transformation under democratic control.
Structural inequalities among nation-states are, however, so stark at present
that this system of co-operation, with its promise of just global governance,
has little or no chance of being established. When the outcome of international
negotiations is driven by the systematic advantages that one participant enjoys
over others as opposed to the force of reason, then we see the subversion of
democratic procedures by illegitimate power. This is precisely the way the
existing system of international co-operation is subverted at present. Particularly
since 9/11, although things were hardly much different before that, the USA
asserts its might to act unilaterally as it sees t in military, economic and

political affairs as the one and only world superpower. It seeks support from
a selected group of allies so as to increase the apparent legitimacy of its actions
but has shown its willingness to go it alone if no such support is forthcoming.
Organisations such as the United Nations, as currently constituted, remain
hopelessly vulnerable, therefore, to the destabilising impact of power politics,
and so the stronger states rule because they have the economic and military
power to impose their will on others. In such a context, the warnings that
might be generated by the global public sphere on a whole range of crucial
issues will go unheeded. A more integrated Europe could, perhaps, develop
into a normative counterweight to the dominance of the USA. This is the
hope that Habermas, Derrida and several other leading European philosophers,
expressed in a newspaper campaign launched at the time of the invasion of
Iraq and at a delicate stage of negotiation concerning the EU Constitution.26
That counterweight to American dominance, while it would clearly represent
a step in the right direction, hardly amounts to the kind of inclusive international order that justice requires. But should such a counterweight not
emerge, and there is no sign of it doing so at present, then there is virtually
no hope of the USA taking seriously any multilateral forms of international
co-operation, at least for the foreseeable future.
In spite of the apparently bleak state of affairs at present, it remains the case
that the best way to meet the challenge of globalisation is to encourage the
emergence of a vibrant global public sphere, and to complement it with the
construction of a maximally inclusive global community of states. Each state
should in the institutional context of such a global community, have equal
and effective communicative freedom, relative to size of population, for its
representatives to articulate its perspective on questions as to how various
aspect of the globalisation process that impact upon its people should best
be managed. This equalisation of effective communicative freedom represents
the demands of inclusive justice at the global level and it should ensure that
the outcomes of international democratic co-operation are themselves just.
This then is the normative perspective that should guide any future reform
of the United Nations. As well as dealing with the task of achieving this
form of equality between states, while taking due account of the complex
matter of differing population sizes, such reform will also have to connect
this task of achieving international equality with an assessment of the quality
134 Shane ONeill
of democracy within each member state. Only those states that have in place
effective measures to ensure equal voice for all domestic SCSGs can expect
equal status in the global community of states. This is the only way to ensure
that state representatives at global level are really accountable to all groups
of citizens at home. Furthermore, equality in the international order will also
depend on the effectiveness with which a state ensures for each of its individual
citizens human rights and substantive equality of opportunity. This account
of justice presents a challenge to all states, therefore, not only to those who
are privileged by the political, economic and cultural structures of the current
global order. The strengthening of domestic democracy and human rights
provisions within each constitutional state should be thought of as a project
that runs in parallel with the achievement of an egalitarian global order and
a just system of international co-operation. Within such an international system
the representatives of each state will be free to exercise those basic capabilities
of political agency that allow them to participate fully as equals in this global
dialogue.
All of this requires radical transformation of the global basic structure and
the next question to ask is how we are to identify what needs to be done in
order to direct this process of transformation so that this normative vision
can become a more realistic utopia. That will involve the kind of multifaceted
critical analysis of globalisation processes that I advocated in the previous
section for domestic basic structures when discussing the recognition/redistribution debates. While the injustices of the global basic structure will involve
even more radically comprehensive strategies of transformation with regard
to political structures of representation, the logic of economic distribution
and the cultural order of recognition, we need not seek to impose any rigid
set of analytical categories on this vast critical project. We should rather remain
open to the multiplicity and interrelated nature of the various causes of global
inequality, to the structure of any hierarchical relations between nation-states,
and to the complexity of the many different remedies that might be required
in order to address these injustices.
Notes
1
Jrgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of

Law and Democracy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996.

2
See David Held and Anthony McGrew, eds. The Global Transformations Reader: An
Introduction to the Globalisation Debate, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 7.
See Roberto Alejandro, The Limits of Rawlsian Justice, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002.
See Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, Princeton
See Shane ONeill, Impartiality in Context: Grounding Justice in a Pluralist World,
See Robert Nozick, Anarchy State and Utopia, New York, Basic Books, 1974, and
Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997.

Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994.
8
See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, Oxford,
Blackwell, 1983, and Alasdair MacIntrye, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, London,
Duckworth, 1988.
Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
pp. 92-99.
10
Anne Phillips, Which Equalities Matter?, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999, pp. 38-9.
See also Susan Moller Okin et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1999.
11
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford,
12
Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,
Oxford University Press, 1995.

1992, and Development as Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999; Martha
Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
13
See also Jack Knight and James Johnson, What Sort of Political Equality Does
Deliberative Democracy Require? in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and
Politics, eds. J. Bohman and W. Rehg, London, The MIT Press, 1997, 279, pp. 2989. See also in the same volume James Bohman, Deliberative Democracy and
Effective Social Freedom: Capabilities, Resources and Opportunities, p. 321.
14
Ibid., pp. 302-304.
15
Young, Inclusion and Democracy.
16
N. Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reections on the Post-Socialist Condition,

London, Routledge, 1997, pp. 189-205.
17
N. Fraser, Social Justice in an Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition

and Participation, Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Salt Lake City, University of
Utah Press, 1998; Recognition without Ethics?, Theory, Culture and Society, no.
18, 2001, p. 21.
136 Shane ONeill

18
I. M. Young, Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Frasers Dual Systems

Theory, New Left Review, no. 222, 1997, p. 147.
19
Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. 82.
20
Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Philosophical

Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, London, Verso, 2003.
21
See Simon Caney, International Distributive Justice, no. 49, Political Studies, 2001,
p. 974.
22
Jrgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy

in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky, Cambridge,
Polity Press, 2001, p. 58. See also Pablo de Greiff and Ciaran Cronin, eds., Global
Justice and Transnational Politics, London, The MIT Press, 2002.
23
See Daniele Archibugi, David Held & Martin Kohler, eds., Reimagining Political
Community, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998; Andrew Linklater, The Transformation
of Political Community, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998; Mary Kaldor, Global Civil
Society: An Answer to War, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003.
24
David Chandler, New Rights for Old? Cosmopolitan Citizenship and the Critique
of State Sovereignty, no. 51, Political Studies, 2003, p. 332.
25
Ibid., pp. 344-7. See also Gideon Baker, Problems in the Theorisation of Global
Civil Society, no. 50 Political Studies, 2002, pp. 928, 934-7.
26
Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Pldoyer zu einer Wiedergeburt Europas,

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 May 2003.
Emmanuel Renault
Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist
Concept of Justice. A Critique of Habermas
Theory of Justice1
ABSTRACT
This paper asks whether or not normative political philosophy can face the challenge of the critique of the
political.This question is addressed to theories of justice
in general, but this paper considers Habermas position
in particular. It advances the thesis that the main theoretical and political problem of theories of justice is that
they have not really taken the abolitionist dimension of
the concept of justice into account. As a consequence,
they run the risk of reproducing in themselves the political abstraction that they should criticise.
KEYWORDS: Rawls, Habermas, Justice, Democracy,
Critique of the Political
Rawls and Habermas have played a great role

in the rebirth of political philosophy in the
last thirty years. After it was disregarded
as a typical ideological discourse, political
philosophy has led to the development of
normative theories dealing with justice and
democracy, and understanding justice principles as the presuppositions of democratic
institutions. At the same time, Western democracies have experienced a growing lack of
interest in politics. For Rancire this paradoxical conjunction between the development
138 Emmanuel Renault
of political philosophy and the withdrawal of politics is nothing more than

a particular expression of the incompatibility of politics and philosophy.2 But
it might also be possible to argue that normative philosophy can be a means
to struggle against this withdrawal. The lack of interest in the political can
be understood as a consequence of the reduction of the political to merely
technical questions. Rawls and Habermas provide exactly the sort of theoretical endeavours that aim to struggle against this kind of reduction in order
to restore the political in its full right. But are their theories of justice truly
able to develop a critique of such a withdrawal and of the social and institutional processes leading to such a disinterest in the political?
There are surely many ways of explaining the disaffection towards the political.
It results from a complex interplay where the globalisation of the political
and of economic exchanges, the crisis of the welfare State and the growth of
unemployment, as well as the pacication of public political space are at
stake. But for many individuals, one result of this interplay has been the
feeling of an increasing alienation from the institutionalised political sphere.
In old Western democracies as well as in the new democracies of Eastern
Europe, many individuals feel that the social problems that matter to them
are not taken into account by political parties and parliamentary debates, so
that what is labelled as political lacks a relationship with real social life; it
seems difcult to consider this feeling as a mere illusion. For political philosophy, the question at stake is whether or not it is possible to develop a
critique of this reduction of the political to abstraction.
A philosopher like Habermas tries to ght against this reduction when he
highlights the fact that democratic life is closely interconnected with collective deliberation on social justice and injustice, and when he tries to ground
the project of a radical democracy in a relation between parliamentary deliberations and the deliberative networks constitutive of civil society. But is this
model of democracy able to take into account the point of view of those who
feel themselves excluded from the political sphere because their claims are
not taken into account? This question can be understood in a strong and in
a weak sense. In a weak sense, it simply asks if the various types of existing
social injustices, both those which are represented and those which are not
represented in the political sphere, are taken into account by political
theory. In a strong sense, it also asks whether or not the way the dominated
Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice 139
and the disadvantaged express their claims about justice and injustice is also
taken into account, in other words, whether or not philosophical descriptions
of injustice, contrary to those of institutionalised politics, t in with the way
the victims of social injustice feel about and express their own experiences
of injustice. In this article, both of these questions are addressed to Habermas,
but they could be addressed to theories of justice in general.
In a rst step, I show how Habermas provides indirect answers to these questions. In a second step, I advance the thesis that the abolitionist dimension
of the concept of justice implies that social justice should be dened from the
point of view of the experience of injustice. In a third step, I describe the
problems that result from the fact that in Habermas, justice is not dened
from the point of view of the experience of injustice.
I. The Critique of the Political as a Challenge

It is worth noting that both Habermas and Rawls have tried to tackle the two
parts of this problem. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas points out that
a social theory claiming to be critical cannot restrict itself to describing the
relation between norms and reality from the perspective of an observer.3
And it appears as a twofold justication of a political theory of democratic
law. On the one hand, most declarations of fundamental rights are to be
conceived of as reactions to experiences of injustice: most articles in a bill
of rights resonate with a suffered injustice that is negated word for word.4
On the other hand, democratic deliberations can be understood as the process
whereby individuals try to struggle against conicts between normative expectations and social facticity: if one conceives socialism as the set of necessary conditions for emancipated forms of life about which the participants
themselves must rst reach an understanding, then one will recognize that
the democratic self-organisation of a legal community constitutes the normative core of this project.5 In this respect, Habermas approach is far from
being equivalent with that of philosophical republicanism. If social injustices
are criticised by the latter, it is either as an obstacle to political participation
or as a possible cause of development of the social domination that political
participation is supposed to struggle against. However, in experiences of
injustice, unjust social situations are felt to be unbearable neither because
they impede political participation, nor give room for the development of
social domination. Rather, they are felt to be unbearable as social situations

and not as political inequalities. They are felt to be unbearable as present
injustices and not as future domination. In philosophical republicanism, the
social problems suffered by the dominated and the disadvantaged are criticised
from a point of view that is external to their concerns. In this respect, a theory
that tries to combine a theory of democracy and a theory of justice has a real
advantage. This is what Habermas theory offers.
Nevertheless, when Habermas states that a critical theory has to take into
account the problems that participants reach an understanding about, instead
of describing the philosophical language in which the principles of justice
are to be dened, he is only introducing a methodological rule used for
dening the point of view from which principles of justice are to be dened.
For in his philosophy the denition of these principles rests on the theory of
practical reason and not on a theory of the interests of the dominated and
the disadvantaged. For Habermas, the moral use of practical reason denes the
principles of democratic debates as well as the content of legitimate rights.
The whole architecture of basic rights is reconstructed with regard to the
moral capacity of citizens to adopt a universal point of view.6 But it is simply
a fact that political claims emerging from the experience of injustice are not
primarily expressed in the language of moral practical reason. Many experiences of injustice are only constituted by a feeling that a social situation is
unbearable, and not by any consciousness that these situations are in contradiction with legal or moral principles. And even when such a consciousness arises, it is not necessarily within discourses or reasoning about what
can be justied in respect to universality. As Honneth puts it, the social experiences that give rise to social conicts are not the result of a limitation of
speech abilities, but construct themselves in the damaging of social expectations that are linked with identity.7
It follows that Habermas theory of democracy cannot produce a critique of
the abstraction of the political sphere in the strong sense. Is it able to develop
a critique of political abstraction in its weak sense? Indeed, Habermas is
striving to formulate in the language of practical reason claims that are
about to be excluded from political space by the colonisation of market and
administration.8 And, the fact that some social ills are not experienced
as social irrationalities by individuals does not mean that they cannot be
described as contradictions between social situations and rational principles.

Furthermore, the fact that social ills are experienced as injustices seems to
legitimate Habermas attempt to dene social criticism from the perspective
of discussions about justice and injustice. Nevertheless, his approach to
justice is undermined by the general problem of theories of justice (that is
also the problem of theories of law). Since they assume that the issue of the
denition of justice has priority over the characterisation of injustice, these
theories have difculties taking into account the features of the experience of
injustice that are dening the very political meaning of justice, as well as the
variety of claims emerging from the experience of injustice. However, there
are good reasons to consider that, being intrinsically coupled to one another,
the very notion of justice cannot be separated from that of injustice.
II. An Abolitionist Denition of Justice

As with all main political concepts, justice is an abolitionist concept.9 Its
meaning is not dened by an abstract reference to equality, or to universality, but by the necessity to transform unjust social situations. Since Habermas
theory understands justice as the set of principles capable of giving a solution
to conicts between individuals or social groups, it seems able to take this
abolitionist dimension into account. But in fact, such an approach reduces
claims arising from the experience of injustice to claims oriented toward the
enforcement of the principles that already coordinate social action.10 As a
result, the experience of injustice is described as the experience of a contradiction
with a principle of justication. Described in this way it loses its specic
practical dimension as well as its critical potential.
It is worth noting that the practical dimension of the political concept of
justice is not determined only by the fact that it intersects with social justication
and practical decisions, but also by the fact that justice claims emerge from
the experience of unjust situations that individuals want to struggle against.
As an abolitionist concept, justice deals not just with judgements on social
situations contradicting principles, but also with specic practices oriented
toward social transformation. These practices might be conceived of as the
specic practical dimension of the political notion of justice in contrast with
justication practices and decisions that are common to political, juridical
and moral notions of justice. But theories of justice seem quite reluctant to
bring this practical dimension to the fore, and Habermas too gives more
emphasis to collective justications and decisions than to social practices of
transformation.
If justice is essentially an abolitionist concept, it is moreover because the very
notion of justice is nothing else than an attempt to make explicit what is at
stake in claims arising out of experiences of injustice. Outside of the specialised legal sphere, references to justice are always linked with attempts to
formulate the fact that a social situation is felt to be unbearable and to explain
the reason why it has to be transformed. Indeed, these attempts are political
in so far as social groups differ in their evaluation of such situations. However,
it is because justice is rst of all a claim arising from experiences of unbearable social situations that it also can become, in a second step, a matter of
political conict. In other words, the experience of injustice has its own specic
practical and cognitive resources, and the abolitionist dimension of justice
should be conceived of through this specic productive dimension.
This understanding of the experience of injustice leads to a particular understanding of the abolitionist dimension of the concept of justice. In theories of
justice, it is only in a weak sense that justice is understood as an abolitionist
concept: either because the motivations for references to justice are conditioned
by unjust situations or because the uses of the notion of justice are oriented
towards denunciation. Here, justice is understood as an abolitionist concept
in a stronger sense: the reference to justice is nothing else but an expression
of the practical reaction to lived injustice and an expression of the cognitive
dynamics of claims. Not only the motivation and the nature of its uses,
but the very meaning of the notion of justice depends on the experience of
injustice.
For a better understanding of the abolitionist dimension of the notion of
justice, it might be useful to describe the role played by the feeling of injustice.
The experience of injustice provides a good example of the principle according
to which what matters to us is not always what we are able to describe in
normative institutionalised language. It is not always possible to articulate
our feelings of injustice and to explain why our problems belong to the domain
of injustice. But the feeling of injustice as such strives to such articulations
and explanations. In this respect, it can be considered as having cognitive
resources, or as being a claim in itself. The reference to the specic cognitive

resources of feelings of injustice means that they cannot be reduced to some
kind of internalisation of institutionalised principles of justice. For there is
no reason to assume that feelings of justice can always be made explicit
through socially valid principles of injustice, and there are situations where
feelings of injustice lead to a critique of these principles and to the requirement
of other denitions of justice.11 As a matter of fact, the feeling of injustice has
a critical potential not only in regard to social situations, but also in regard
to institutionalised denitions of the just. But for Habermas as well as for
theories of justice in general, the feeling of injustice is either a sensibilisation
of a principle of justice, or an inchoate matter that has to be rationally informed.
In both cases, claims specic to the experience of injustice as such have to be
made explicit by principles of justice elaborated independently, and the feeling
of injustice has no positive contribution to such principles.
Theories of justice do not take this fundamental role of experience into account,
nor do they describe the specic nature of experiences of injustice. It is worth
noting again that the experience of injustice is not always the experience of
a contradiction with a principle of justice, but is always the experience of an
unbearable situation. It follows that the experience of injustice has three components, the rst of which is its qualitative aspect. A situation can t more or
less with a general principle, but it can never be felt to be more or less unjust:
it is or it is not felt to be unjust. A second component is the relational aspect:
individuals always relate their feelings of injustice to particular social situations.
From the point of view of a general principle of justice, it is possible to speak
of justice abstractly, or in relation to the society as a whole, but it is always
in a particular social situation that a feeling of injustice emerges. It is only in
a second step, that a consciousness of the structural causes of this particular
injustice can occur and that a judgement on the whole society can be formulated.
A third component results from the rst two: it is the dynamic aspect of such
an experience. The situation felt as unbearable is not only perceived as unjust,
the experience of injustice is also the place of a practical reaction against injustice and offers the possibility for new understandings of the social normative
principles that are associated with this situation.
The very meaning of the political notion of justice rests upon these qualitative, relational and dynamic components of the experience of injustice. It
implies that the political meaning of justice is coupled not only to a denition
of the political as a critique of social situations and of their justications, but
also to the political as social transformation. I have already pointed out that
it is a common feature of theories of justice to dene justice independently
of the experience of injustice, and that they understand the abolitionist dimension of justice only in a weak sense. Hence, it appears that they also run the
risk of losing the political meaning of the idea of justice, attributing to it
another conception of the political. Understood as a contradiction with a principle, unjust social situations could no longer be understood as unbearable,
but as more or less compatible with the principle (quantitative versus qualitative
approach). Understood from the point of view of the universality of a legitimate
social justication, the solution to conicts about social justice would no
longer rest on the diagnosis of a given social situation, but on the general
validity of the principle (global versus relational approach). And instead of
being involved in attempts at transforming institutions and social relations,
this solution could be conceived of as a comparison between several institutional arrangements (comparative versus dynamic approach).12 Habermas conception of justice gives an example of such distortions. Starting with universality,
he is led to understand justice as a compromise (when consensus is not possible)13 rather than as a refusal. On the other hand, instead of starting from
the relational and dynamic dimensions of injustice, he approaches the issue
of particular social situations from a consequentialist perspective,14 so that he
replaces the issue of transformation with that of the comparison between possible institutional arrangements.
Experiences of injustice dene the logical as well as the practical context of
justice and theories of justice proceed to a de-contextualisation that seems
problematic. This decontextualisation is theoretically problematic rstly because
such theories run the risk of losing that part of the practical meaning of the
concept that is linked with the practical context of effective injustices, and of
confusing it with the practical aspect specic to juridical or moral concepts,
and secondly, because they run the risk of underestimating the critical potential
of justice claims. This decontextualisation is practically problematic since such
theories lose the polemical meaning we usually give to this essential concept
of political language. These problems are related to meta-political questions,
that is, questions that concern the way we philosophically describe the content
of political discourse. However, the decontextualisation that is specic to

theories of justice also has direct political consequences, that is, consequences
that concern the content of political discourse. It leads to alter not only the
form of political claims emerging from experiences of injustice, but also the
content of these claims, in so far as this content is dened by particular qualitative reactions to particular social situations. If so, might it not be difcult
for theories of justice to help these claims be taken into account in the public political sphere? Might it not be suspected that these political theories suffer from the same abstraction that characterises the institutional political
sphere, so that politics and political philosophy could be submitted to the
same critique of the political? Might it not be suspected that the rebirth of
normative political philosophy should be submitted to a critique of the political and of political philosophy carried in the same move, as for example in
the critique of the young Marx?15 Philosophers like Rawls and Habermas
assert that political philosophy has to make explicit the normative presuppositions of modern democracies and to conceive of philosophy itself through
a democratic model. But if philosophy solely reproduces the logic of democracy, might it not run the risk of underestimating the injustices and pathologies that are compatible with this logic? Shouldnt philosophy conceive of
itself not only through a democratic model, but also through a model of critique of the political abstraction characteristic of contemporary democracies?
Here again, Habermas theory of radical democracy provides a good illustration of these problems.
III. Procedural Approach of Justice versus Experience of Injustice

Habermas understands justice to mean the application of the rule of universalisation in public deliberations. For him, the rule of universalisation denes
an evaluative procedure rather than a method for deducing the content of
principles of justice. Nevertheless, this rule enables one to deduce a system
of basic rights that contains three types of rights: the rights of private autonomy
(those linked with the freedom of individual action), the rights of public
autonomy (connected to the process of the formation of political will), and
the social rights which are understood as rights required as conditions for
exerting the rst two types of rights, so that they can be justied only in
relative terms.16
This denition of social rights constitutes a rst political problem for the
Habermasian theory of justice. What is meant by Habermas when he advances
that these rights can be justied only in relative terms? At the time of their
historical emergence, the interconnected ideas of social rights and social justice
had the political meaning of a critique of political liberalism. What appeared
in the middle of the nineteenth century as the social question was nothing
but the fact that the respect of individual formal rights (rights of negative
freedom) was not sufcient to dene justice. The idea of social rights had a
polemical meaning since it was associated with claims that justied the transformation of society once justied by formal rights. At rst glance, it seems
that Habermas captures this polemical meaning. He denes social rights as
the claims to social conditions that are necessary for the realisation of formal
rights. Hence, he argues that a society cannot be justied only by formal
rights, but also by a commitment to social rights understood as materialisation
of formal rights. But the political problem initially raised by the notion of
social rights was that formal rights could not provide the highest form of
legitimation. The polemical meaning of the very notion of formal rights was
linked to the fact that capitalist societies produce a structural conict between
formal and social rights, and that claims connected to social rights can be
justied even when they seem to contradict formal rights. Since the middle
of the nineteenth century, political liberalism has constantly tried to refute
this socialist thesis arguing either that social rights do not properly belong
to the scope of rights, or that they must always be subordinated to formal
rights since they can be dened as rights only in relation to the conditions
for exercising formal rights. It can also be that, from the point of view of a
normative theory of law which is adopted by Habermas when he deals with
this problem, social rights cannot be described other than as materialisation
of rights.17 Nevertheless, the socialist understanding of the social question
was that social rights not only refer to the social conditions necessary for
exercising formal rights, but also to the basic social pre-conditions for a good
life (employment, decent wages, healthy working and housing conditions,
education, and so on); the socialist notion of a right to existence gives a
good example of the irreducibility of such claims. Understood in this way,
social rights are not derived from formal rights, they are dened by a set of
basic goods which are the precondition for the idea of justice (in its restricted
liberal meaning) and for the idea of a good life (in its broad meaning as well
as in its liberal sense in which the good is conceived of as the other of justice).
Understood in this way, there is no longer any reason to state that social
rights are justied only when they are compatible with formal rights.
Rawls theory of justice is certainly the most convincing contemporary attempt
to sustain the liberal subordination of social rights to formal rights, a subordination that denes the relation of his two principles of justice. Habermas
strategy is quite different since it tries to subordinate social rights not only
to liberal rights but also to political rights (with his theory of the interconnection of private and collective autonomy).18 However, by proceeding in this
way, he only gives a new form to the liberal relativisation of social rights,
which continues to be one of the main arguments for the exclusion of demands
for social rights from the political sphere. For people who lack jobs, proper
housing, or healthcare, the legitimacy of social rights is not just relative, and
these rights imply demands for a transformation of social situations whose
injustice is not only relative. Indeed, all demands for social rights are not
justied, but they can be justied even if they contradict some formal rights.
This is at least what is highlighted by those Argentinean and Brazilian peasants
(Piqueteros) who claim their right to appropriate properties that belong to
others, or the French social movement (Droit au logement) who argue that the
homeless have a right to appropriate unoccupied houses. To decide whether
these claims are justied or not is a political issue that cannot be resolved by
the single principle of the priority of the just over the good, or of formal
rights over social rights. Such political issues need a broadened denition of
justice that plainly recognises as justied the kind of claims connected to
social rights. And it is precisely because the liberal denition of the domain
of justice is too narrow to achieve this goal that the liberal criteria of justice
cannot be used to decide whether or not a claim of this kind is just.19
Another political problem concerns the content of what Habermas denes as
the conformity to justice. According to him, it is the dynamic of dialogue that
is capable of overcoming the boundaries of private interest, of moving towards
consensus.20 However, in order to reach a real universality, it is required that
all individuals take part in the public deliberation: All members of the political community have to be able to take part in discourses, though not necessarily in the same way.21 This requirement provides a theoretical argument
for the struggle against all restrictions of public space, and against all the
social structures that produce such restrictions.22 However, if the public space
is effectively restricted, public deliberation can no longer be considered as a
political means to struggle against this restriction, and Habermas is far from
considering the various aspects of this very contemporary problem.23 Moreover,
it might be suspected that when a thing is subject to social contempt, the
language is usually lacking to describe it adequately and also, following a
feminist critique,24 that the institutionalised normative vocabulary usually
expresses a structural devalorisation of subaltern activities.25 In such conditions, it is the structure of the public deliberation itself, and not only a social
or institutional restriction of its dialogical dynamic, that produces the exclusion
of particular claims from the political space. Here, Habermas political theory
might be misleading since it gives a denition of justice that seems compatible
with the exclusion of various claims from the political sphere. Pointing out
that it is the public sphere itself that has to dene the content of justice,
Habermas practically excludes the claims that are contesting the normative
structures which frame the debate in the institutionalised public sphere, as
well as in various public spheres of civil society. Since this normative structure
is tied to the general justications of our society and of the structure producing social injustice, it might be suspected that Habermas practically excludes
the claims that are politically the most radical. In this case, he would restrict
the social project of radical democracy to the struggle against residual injustices, in conformity with his general interpretation of modernity as rationalisation progress.
It is the logical framework itself in which theories of justice are developed
that is responsible for these kinds of political problems. Habermas takes for
granted that a theory of justice has to dene justice from a theoretical point
of view external to the experience of injustice, so that he adopts a sideways
view, that of legal theory, on the political claims emerging from it. As a consequence, he reproduces in his own political philosophy the very feature he
is striving to struggle against, namely the abstraction of the political sphere.
Indeed, Habermas refuses to adopt the point of view of the experience of
injustice because he assumes that claims have a political legitimacy only when
they pass the test of public justication.26 This assumption that is fundamental
for a procedural theory of justice rests upon two main theses: the rst is that
an experience of injustice always presupposes a principle of public justication,
the second is that principles of public justication cannot prevent the expression
of political claims. Both of these theses are questionable. It is certainly a fact
that experiences of injustice are always conditioned by principles of public
justication. But if the feeling of injustice is socially constructed, it also has
the capacity to give rise to the critique of socially valid representations of
justice. And if the feeling of injustice can sometimes lead to such a cognitive
dynamic of critique, it is precisely because socially valid representations of
justice, as such, can sometimes be obstacles to the expression of given claims
against injustice.
Basically, there are three types of experience of injustice. In the rst, a situation
is considered as unjust because it is in contradiction with an instituted principle
of justice. In this case, the experience of injustice cannot be reduced to a mere
contradiction with a principle, because the situation might also be felt as an
unbearable situation. But the injustice can nevertheless be expressed with the
help of this principle of justice either in a public space internal to an institution,
or in the political public sphere.
In the second type of experience of injustice, a socially valid principle of
justice can help express the injustice of one situation only if its meaning is
modied. This is the case when a principle of justice is socially institutionalised
in a sense which is considered as restrictive by the victims of injustice, for
instance with the various historical restrictions of the right to vote (exclusion
of workers, women, foreigners), and in all situations where groups claim to
have a right to rights that are supposed to be universal (right to juridical protection, to work, and so on). Here, the experience of injustice leads to a critique
of this restriction and to the demand for a broadening of the meaning of the
principle. The political conict takes place within the language of the public
sphere itself, so that the form of public justication becomes part of the political problem instead of being solely a means for its solution.27
But the experience of injustice can also emerge in situations whose injustice
is absolutely un-representable by public justication principles. It is the case
with social activities that are subject to social devalorisation (for instance,
care activities), in the situation of populations facing social contempt (for
instance, minorities, unqualied workers, the unemployed, the homeless), or
in social situations linked with the structural inequalities upon which the
whole of society relies (in modernity, work as exploited activity and not only
as employment contract). Here, the very content of public justication is at
stake in the injustice itself, because the un-representability of the injustice of
the situation is part of its injustice. Here, the experience of injustice demands
a transformation of the principles of justice and not only their broadening.28
Theories of justice are able to take the rst kind of experience of injustice into
account. In the other cases, it is only at the end of a dynamic process of a)
reaction to injustice, b) individual and collective expression (inside the internal
public space of a social or political movement), and c) struggle against other
public justications, that normative expectations (left unsatised in the experience of injustice) will be able to nd a possible expression in the institutionalised public political sphere. In this dynamic process, principles of public
justication could provide tools (in the second case), but they could also
constitute obstacles (in the third case). This is the reason why it might be useful to adopt the point of view of the experience of injustice: on the one hand,
it enables us to take into account the qualitative, relational and dynamic
dimensions of political claims; on the other hand, it also enables us to develop
a critique of the principles of justication that are obstacles for an expression
of political claims raised by the dominated and the disadvantaged.
For the philosophical understanding of justice there is only one way to face
the challenge of the critique of the political and of political philosophy: it is
to transform theories of justice into the theory of the experience of injustice.
Notes
1
I wish to record my gratitude to the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at

Macquarie University (Sydney) where I was invited as a Visiting Scholar (JulyAugust 2004); to the Humboldt foundation who nanced my stay for one year at
the Institut fr Sozialforschung at Frankfurt (September 2004-August 2005), and to
Jean-Philippe Deranty and Peter Schmiedgen who discussed previous versions of
this paper.
J. Rancire, La Msentente, Paris, Galile, 1995.
J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 1996, p. 82.
Ibid., p. 389.
See also his critique of the sociological approach of Law, p. 43.

5
Ibid., p. xli.
Ibid., p. 118.
A. Honneth, Die soziale Dynamik von Missachtung. Zur Ortbestimmung einer

Gesellschaftstheorie, in Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit. Aufstze zur praktischen
Philosophie, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 2000, p. 98: moralische Erfahrungen sich
nicht an der Einschrnkung von Sprachkompetenzen entznden, sondern sich mit der
Verletzung von sozialisatorisch erworbenen Identitt bilden.
Although Habermas seems to oscillate between two models, the rst which gives
to public deliberation the capacity to rule bureaucratic and market mechanism,
whereas in the second one, democratic institutions exercise at best a limited check
on market and administrative constraints; see W. E. Scheuerman, Between Radicalism
and Resignation: Democratic Theory in Habermas Between Facts and Norms, in
Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. P. Dews, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
In the Introduction to Spheres of Justice, M. Walzer explained that the political

concept of equality is an abolitionist concept but he does not give a systematic
function to this thesis in his study of justice. See Spheres of Justice. A Defence of
Pluralism and Equality, Oxford, Blackwell, 1982.
10
Implicitly or explicitly, in so far as the communicative constraints dene the

normative presuppositions of social life.
11
In other words, the study of the experience of injustice doesnt only have sceptical
consequences. For a sceptical opposition to theories of justice and the study of the
experience of injustice, see J. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1990. A. Honneth highlights the critical power of the negative experiences
of denial of recognition as experiences of injustice in chapter 6 of The Struggle for
Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conicts, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996,
but he considers the study of the experience of injustice neither as a theoretical
means nor as a principle for a critique of theories of justice.
12
This last point has been made by I. M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference,
13
14
Ibid., p. 107.
15
The rebirth of normative political philosophy can justify itself through the critique
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990, chap. 1.
of the lack of normative foundations in the late Marx. But the theory of the late
Marx is rooted in the critique of the political and of political philosophy that was
developed by the young Marx. This latter critique can be addressed to this rebirth
itself. For a distinction between various model of critique in Marx, see E. Renault,
Marx et lIde de Critique, Paris, PUF, 1995.
16
Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 123; see also p. 403: From a normative

point of view, both the materialisation of private law and the new category of
social entitlements are justied in a relative sense, namely, in relation to an absolutely
justied equal distribution of individual liberties.
17
Ibid., p. 401.
18
Ibid., p. 84.
19
See E. Renault, LExprience de lInjustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de lInjustice,

Paris, La Dcouverte, 2004.
20
J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 17.
21
Ibid., p. 182.
22
Ibid., pp. 175, 308.
23
See Scheuerman, Between Radicalism and Resignation, p. 160.
24
A critique that is not really taken into account by Habermas discussion of the
feminist critique of liberal and welfare democracies, see Between Facts and Norms,
p. 418.
25
C. Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Womens Development,

Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1982.
26
N. Fraser s rejection of Honneths theory of recognition rests also on this

Habermasian principle; see N. Fraser, A. Honneth, Anerkennung oder Umverteilung,
Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 233-237.
27
J. Rancire tried to develop the theory of these situations in La Msentente.
28
J. Lyotard tried to study this kind of experience of injustice in Le Diffrend, Paris,

Minuit, 1984, without taking its cognitive resources into account.
Jean-Philippe Deranty
The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneths Social
Philosophy. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty
ABSTRACT
This paper analyses the model of interaction at the heart
of Axel Honneths social philosophy. It argues that interaction in his mature ethics of recognition has been
reduced to intercourse between human persons and
that the role of nature is now missing from it.The ethics
of recognition takes into account neither the material
dimensions of individual and social action, nor the normative meaning of non-human persons and natural environments. The loss of nature in the mature ethics of
recognition is made visible through a comparison with
Honneths initial formulation of his project. As an anthropology of intersubjectivity combining the teaching of the
German philosophical anthropologists and G.H. Mead,
his rst model sought to ground social theory in the
natural preconditions of human action. The last part
of the article argues that a return to Meads theory of
practical intersubjectivity informed by Merleau-Pontys
germane theory of intercorporeity provides essential
conceptual tools to enable the integration of the natural and the material within the theory of recognition.
KEYWORDS: Honneth, Habermas, Mead, Merleau-Ponty,
Praxis, Philosophical Anthropology, Intersubjectivity
This paper aims to contribute to the question

of critique today by conducting a critical discussion of Axel Honneths theory of recognition, one of the most sophisticated models of
critical social theory available today. The
154 Jean-Philippe Deranty
papers basic question for the ethics of recognition is whether the embrace
of Habermas radical intersubjectivistic turn has led to the loss of nature in
his accounts of socialisation, social integration, and social reproduction, a loss
with seriously detrimental political implications.
Honneths theory of recognition arose from the attempt to overcome immanently some of the perceived conceptual and political abstractions in Habermas
theory of communicative action. As this paper will argue, prominent in
this immanent critique was the diagnosis of the absence of the dimension
of nature, indeed a naturalistic account of intersubjectivity, in Habermas
theory. Honneths diagnosis pointed rstly to the specic problem of the disembodied aspect of a communicative action, and was further developed
into the major attempt at a comprehensive shift in the grounding of critical
theory, from the theory of language to a philosophical anthropology along
the lines of a modernised philosophy of nature with natural-scientic credentials. The political, ecological, aspect of Honneths shift was presented in
these early studies as not just an implication, but also a central inspiration
for his regrounding of critical theory. Paradoxically, however, the autonomous
model that arose from Honneths early critical studies appears to have reproduced the loss of nature it was supposed to correct.
The paper starts by following the path that led to Honneths theory of
recognition from its beginnings as an immanent critique of Habermas social
theory (section I). The paradoxical omissions in Honneths own model are
then highlighted (section II). Section III suggests that a return to MerleauPonty would allow for a more substantive model in which these omissions
could be corrected, whilst maintaining Honneths initial programme. This
recourse to the French phenomenologist can be justied, I argue, from within
Honneths own theoretical impetus, by a comparison between Merleau-Pontys
late work and the social psychology of Mead, the crucial reference in the early
development of the ethics of recognition.
I. Anthropology of Social Action

An interesting way to reconstruct the stages that led Honneth to his theory
of recognition is by reading retrospectively his rst two books, namely Social
Action and Human Nature, written with Hans Joas, and The Critique of Power,
The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneths Social Philosophy 155
published in 1985. An impressive aspect of Axel Honneths thinking is the

consistency with which he has been able to maintain the fundamental intuitions inspiring his thought. Despite important corrections and shifts over the
twenty-ve years since his rst publications, these fundamental inspirations
behind his work are still operative today. This reconstruction of Honneths
journey towards the ethics of recognition aims to demonstrate how prominent
the place of nature was in his initial project.
Social Action and Human Nature offers a historical-conceptual reconstruction
of the tradition of philosophical anthropology, from Feuerbach to Habermas.
Anthropology is here understood in the sense of the twentieth-century German
tradition, with the works of Arnold Gehlen, Helmut Plessner and Agnes
Heller being the most famous references in the English-speaking world. It
designates the study of anthropos in comparison with other forms of life, especially animals, as opposed to the diachronic-synchronic comparative study
of the different ways of being human. The interest behind the reconstruction
of this tradition of thought was anything but mere historical scholarship.
Rather, applying the programme of critical theory, the two young authors
justied their undertaking through the intertwinement of theory and practice, with the practical exigencies of the time providing the driving impetus
for the theoretical work, the latter in turn having the task of guiding the practical: Today, it is hardly necessary to give lengthy justications for concerning
oneself with anthropology in the German sense within the framework of the
social and cultural sciences. The themes of various social movements lead all
too clearly in this direction.1
The theoretical contribution that is expected to arise from the reconstruction
of German philosophical anthropology is the re-elaboration of a substantive
notion of praxis, signifying both individual and social action. The key parameters
guiding the reading of the philosophical anthropologists are more or less
entailed in the notion of praxis that was bequeathed by the tradition of Western
Marxism, the approach to reading Marx that made praxis its central concept.
The latter entails the ideas that individuals and groups are actively engaged
in the reproduction and transformation of society, that society is reproduced
by agents and groups struggling over the meaning of social norms, and that
history is therefore an open context of action. Praxis Marxism places the accent
on the agency of social groups and individuals, on the normativity inherent
in processes of social integration, on the openness of the historical eld, and,

as a consequence, the constitutive role played by social struggles. A reader
familiar with Honneths later work, notably Struggle for Recognition, can easily
see how much the rst work published by the young scholar had already
identied with amazing perspicacity and maturity the guiding threads of his
later thought.
The attempt at rethinking praxis implies a revision of historical materialism
to identify the mistakes and illusions that hampered both previous interpretations of Marx and indeed Marxs own thinking. The very last section of the
book follows the early attempts by Habermas at a reconstruction of historical
materialism. It is from Habermas social theory that the authors expect this
successful revision of historical materialism and the redemption of praxis. In
Habermas, they nd the most developed current model of social theory
defending a substantial notion of praxis, a defence both of the validity of the
concept as such as well as of a practically oriented social theory. Habermas
theory is premised upon the critique of the reductionism to be found in Marxs
mature writings, with his reduction of social action to the forces of production
at the cost of a separate analysis of the social and cultural spheres, the sphere
of the relations of production. Beyond Habermas critical readings of Marx,
the young scholars also adopt Habermas conceptual framework. The call for
an intersubjectivistic turn in philosophy, the concept of communicative action,
and the adjunct notion of social evolution as gradual emancipation from domination, are interpreted as indispensable conceptual advances in social theory.
Honneth and Joas also borrow from Habermas the thought that the correction
of historical materialism, the unlocking of the transformative potential of
social and historical praxis, requires recourse to anthropological arguments,
a type of argument that was rejected by orthodox Marxism. In the Critique of
Power, Honneth retraces in great detail the continuous line of anthropological
arguments used by Habermas, from his very early attempts at a reconstruction
of historical materialism inuenced by his reading of Arnold Gehlen and an
anthropologically-minded interpretation of Heideggers analysis of Dasein,
to the famous 1965 inaugural address in Frankfurt, where,2 following the
ground-breaking advances made in Knowledge and Human Interests, the transcendental-anthropological starting point of the rst writings is transformed
into the study of knowledge-constitutive interests.3
In Social Action and Human Nature, the authors focus critically on a different
continuity in Habermas thought, one, however, that is linked directly with
his use of anthropological arguments: his dualistic vision of society, split
between the spheres of labour and interaction. Famously, in the limited context
of the positivism debate, Habermas attempted to root the different types of
scientic inquiry in fundamental human interests. On the one hand, the
natural sciences follow the cognition-directing interest in instrumental disposition over nature, while on the other hand, the social sciences allow
themselves to be guided by interests in the preservation and expansion of
intersubjective communication and agreement, an interest which became a
matter of necessity for the survival of the species with its dependence on
language.4 Habermas generalised these epistemological considerations to
make them the guiding thread of his theory of rationality and society. The
cognition-directed interest in instrumental disposition over nature gives
rise to the techniques and the natural sciences, but it also designates a dimension
of rationality, the instrumental, or purposive one, and is linked to the material
side of social reproduction. The other fundamental interest, the interest in
the preservation and expansion of intersubjective communication and agreement, explains not just the emergence of social and cultural sciences, but,
more profoundly, is the root of communicative reason; it is linked with the
aspect of society that is best viewed in terms of interaction, or communicative
understanding.
Later on, the founding of social theory in an anthropology of knowledge is
replaced by a grounding in universal pragmatics. But the quotation above
already indicates that universal pragmatics is to some extent another form
of anthropological foundation. If the interest in a communication free from
domination became a matter of necessity for the survival of the species with
its dependence on language, it is clear that the development of a theory of
communicative action through the pragmatics of speech acts was already prepared by the rst anthropological speculations. In his later philosophy,
Habermas thinks of his theory of speech acts as delivering the structural
invariants of all forms of human interaction. The theory of communicative
reason is thus a kind of philosophical anthropology after the linguistic turn;
it performs a linguistication of philosophical anthropology.5 This linguistic
turn to philosophical anthropology, however, continues to underpin a dualistic
vision of society since the linguistic operations of communicative action are

said to take place in lifeworlds that are opposed to the functional systems
attending to the material side of social reproduction.6 The theory of the
linguistic constitution of lifeworlds leads directly to the dualism of system and
lifeworld, a dualism that reproduces the old dualism of labour and interaction.
The second feature of Habermas theory of society critically highlighted by
the authors is the fact that it is embedded in a conceptual reconstruction of
the logic of social evolution. The interest in the developmental potentials
inscribed in the structure of instrumental and communicative rationality,
potentials that are, once again, conceived on the basis of anthropologically
deep-seated systems of rules,7 led Habermas to his distinction between an
evolution of society understood, on the one hand, as the norm-free and suprasubjective process of systemic complexication, and on the other, the evolution of society as rationalisation of the lifeworld. What the authors bemoan
is the reconstructive method, which identies formal levels of cognitive (instrumental-cognitive and moral-cognitive) learning, completely detached from
historical events and social movements.
The fundamental critical insight explaining the course of Honneths own
model, is that both the dualism of system and lifeworld and the logic of social
evolution, and worse still their combination, rob Habermas reconstructions
of historical materialism of the very gift that was supposed to be delivered
by them: namely, a rejuvenated, substantive, practically oriented theory of
praxis, a theory of social action cured of historical and conceptual reductionisms
and made practically relevant through its focus on communication. In the
Critique of Power, one of the main critical threads followed by Honneth throughout the last two chapters is the dualism of system and lifeworld. Theoretically,
it leads to the untenable ctions of conceiving of the economy and the political
institutions as norm-free, and of the lifeworld as power-free domains of social
reproduction. This reduces the critique of political economy and institutions
to the diagnosis of encroachments of systemic logic upon the lifeworld, and
subsequently to a skewed interpretation of contemporary political movements
aiming at social transformation. With this, the practical relevance of social
theory becomes problematic. Social Action and Human Nature emphasised more
the social evolution aspect of the critique, but the same negative outcomes
were identied:

If it were conceived as an evolutionary theory in this fashion, historical
materialism would have relinquished every possibility of providing explanatory interpretations of history that intervene instructively in a present-day
situation of social confrontations.8
Honneths project arises from the attempt to develop a social theory centred
around the notions of normative interaction and social and historical agency,
a reinvigorated historical materialism centred on praxis, which avoids the
theoretical abstraction and practical shortcomings identied in Habermas
social theory. With Joas, he hoped to full that programme by the development
of an alternative philosophical anthropology drawing on the German tradition.
This tradition recommended itself because it provides a substantial eshing
out of the intersubjectivistic premise, and a full characterisation of praxis.
The work of Arnold Gehlen is the rst fundamental reference point. His
thesis about the evolutionary underspecialisation and lack of determination
of the human organism compared to its animal counterpart accounts in
powerful naturalistic terms for the specicity of human action and the
biological root of culture. Human beings organic deciency is compensated
for by the capacity/necessity to act. With the rise of the capacity for autonomous action detached from instinctual predetermination, the triangle of inner
impulse-perception-motility which characterises the instinctual response of
animal organisms to external stimuli is broken. This means that through
action, human beings shape their own structures of instincts, perception and
motility. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, human beings always need to
cultivate their natural endowments in order to survive, or to say it differently,
their relatively underdetermined rst nature forces them to survive through
the development of a second nature.
But Gehlen, despite his emphasis on the symbolic dimension of even the most
basic human capacities, continues to use a solipsistic paradigm. The second
crucial reference point is therefore the work of George Herbert Mead whose
central contention is that all processes of self-shaping that compensate for
organic deciency are structured socially. Like Gehlen, Mead defends a pragmatic premise, the idea that human capacities, from perception to conceptual
thinking and life in institutions, arise from the exigencies of action. But his
pragmatism is combined with a most thorough defence of the intersubjectivistic
premise: that the human capacity for action, down to the simple perception
of the external world, depends structurally upon a capacity to take different
perspectives upon the world, a capacity which is developed only during the
constitution of the self in socialisation.
Whilst the gesture of grounding social theory in anthropological arguments
follows Habermas example, the tradition that Honneth and Joas reconstruct
helps to overcome the abstractions found in his social theory. It can do this
because it undercuts all structural dualisms by pointing to a unique, biological
precondition for all types of social action, namely the specic constitution of
the human organism and the specic types of action that it enables and requires.
An essential aspect of the rejection of Habermas social theory will therefore
target the linguistication of anthropology. A signicant passage of Critique
of Power, summarises this quite well:
Habermas theory leaves behind the framework in which it had originally
been grounded as anthropology of knowledge. The investigation of the basic
structures of intersubjectivity is directed exclusively to an analysis of the
rules of speech so that the bodily and physical dimension of social action
no longer comes into view.9
Feuerbachs sensualism already gives an indication of a more fully embodied

and unied account of social interaction. Before Mead, it is in Feuerbachs
anthropological materialism, viewed now as the initiator of philosophical
anthropology, that one nds a powerful, alternative way of writing an anthropology of intersubjectivity that nds its roots in the sensuous aspect of
anthropogenesis, and not in language: Feuerbach, they write, rehabilitates
sensuous pre-philosophical experience of the world not only as the foundation,
but also as the medium and end of thought, but he also complements the
idea of a sensuousness rooted in the human organism with the notion of an
a priori intersubjectivity of the human being. He was the rst to take into consideration both epistemologically and substantially the signicance of the
specically human structure of intersubjectivity.10 Feuerbach is viewed as
the initiator of a line of inquiry that leads to Mead and Winnicott, a tradition
that is seen by Honneth and Joas as the best way to defend the communicative
turn in social theory without reproducing the abstractions of Habermas
models.
In later texts, Honneth draws out other deleterious consequences of Habermas

exclusive focus on language, notably the decit in critical-theoretical potential
that ows on from this: subjects do not engage primarily to defend their
participation in communication, but react to experiences of injustice that are
often caused by non-linguistic social phenomena, and are often experienced
extra-linguistically. The turn towards the paradigm of recognition arises from
the necessity to retain the full hermeneutic depth of experiences of injustice.
This is, however, only the critical side to a positive, alternative account of
ontogenesis. The recognition model arises from the necessity to be true to the
pre- or extra-linguistic dimensions of social experience. The fundamental idea
is that intersubjectivity has pre-linguistic and extra-linguistic origins and is
sustained not just through linguistic means but all kinds of material phenomena, notably in and through the esh of bodies.11 For example, in primary
socialisation, the recognition model points to constitutive and normative
moments that occur before language. In social life, the focus on recognition
takes into account all those egregious social gestures and institutional effects
that harm subjects before or beyond language.
Another passage in Social Action and Human Nature which gives a good characterisation, within a specic context, of the shift from a linguistic anthropology to an anthropology grounded in the biology of the human organism
is a passage in which Honneth and Joas review Helmut Plessners anthropological account of the human capacity to express needs and emotions. The
crux of Plessners model is the distinction between being a body, the idea
that the human being is its own esh, as opposed to having a body, the idea
that the human being is able to relate to her own body instrumentally, for
instance in language and in expressive gestures. This is the distinction that
Husserl drew between the body as Leib, esh, and the body as Krper, the
objectual-instrumental body. Honneth and Joas quote Habermas critique of
Plessner and his own version of the twofold nature of the human body:
would it be more plausible to derive the structure of the mirror-I directly
from the structure of linguistic communicationand the formation of the self
from the acquisition of linguistic competence, in particular from the practical
acquisition of an understanding of the system of personal pronouns?12 The
rejection of this linguistic approach to the human body provides one of the
dening negative arguments in Honneths later project:

Habermas is mistaken when he too hastily identies the fundamental structure
of intersubjectivity with speech. It is, ontogenetically speaking, beyond
all doubt that the acquisition of the ability to identify ones objectualinstrumental body [Krper] as properly ones own clearly precedes the
practical acquisition of an understanding of the system of personal pronouns. Similarly, it cannot be maintained that the demarcation from each
other of communicative and propositional content of utterances is prerequisite
for the human beings consciousness of his bodiliness under the twofold
aspect of his organismal bodiliness [Leib] and his objectual-instrumental
bodiliness [Krper]. A critique of Plessners anthropology from the standpoint of the theory of intersubjectivity must avoid narrowing a theory
directed at the basic structures of intersubjectivity down to a theory of
language and must develop its critique ontogenetically . . .13
Finally, this turn towards the biological preconditions of human interaction

is not solely necessitated by the immanent progress of social theory, but more
generally by the political situation. In the introduction to Social Action and
Human Nature, as we saw, the two young scholars noted that the new political
movements that had emerged and transformed the political situation, the
ecological, counter-cultural and feminist struggles, are all linked to the
fundamental question of nature and humans relationship to it, nature and
human nature: The legitimacy of the question of the relationship of the
human being to nature and of nature in the human being is today beyond
all doubt.14 The political imperative commands the theoretical programme:
to think afresh the relationship between human and nature. The return to the
bodily roots of interaction is therefore framed by the more general question
of the place of the human being in nature:
Our approach to anthropology regards itself as self-reection of the social
and cultural sciences on their biological foundations and on the normative
content of their bodies of knowledge, considered in relation to determinate
historical and political problems, and its viewpoint is that of a humanisation of nature. This is to be understood in three ways. First, the human
being humanises nature; that is, he transforms it into what is life-serving
for himself and thereby creates (. . .) the cultural shapings of his nature.
Second, the human being humanises nature within himself in the course of
the long civilisation process that has been engaged in by the human species.

Lastly, the human being himself is a humanisation of nature, being an upstart
out of the animal kingdom; in the human being, nature becomes humane.15
The anthropological basis of social philosophy has been implicitly maintained

in later developments. The ethics of recognition has been attacked for its
reliance on strong anthropological arguments,16 and Honneth has accepted
some of this criticism by distinguishing more sharply between the properly
anthropological grounding of recognition and the historical variability of
the forms of recognition.17 But if Mead is now no longer the central reference,
Honneth continues to view German philosophical anthropology as an important
contribution and regularly makes passing reference to it. The later developments, however, have lost the broad character of that tradition. Honneth
today uses arguments drawn from genetic psychology, not just in the specic
area of the theory of the subject, but as a genetic ground for the theory of
normativity, and hence for the account of social integration in general. The
anthropological programme has not been abandoned, but it is reduced to a
social psychology that takes into consideration only human society and human
communication.
II. The Loss of Nature

Despite the continuing reliance upon arguments that are anthropological in
nature, the shift from the programme of a strong anthropology of intersubjectivity to the ethics of recognition is thus characterised by the abandonment
of most of the natural dimensions that gave the impetus to the programme
developed in the rst critical study. The ethics of recognition, whether in the
shape that it took in Struggle for Recognition, or in its current version, draws
its normative conclusions from a theory of ontogenesis restricted to human
society (the family and the community at large). The original anthropological
theory of intersubjectivity was conducted within the general framework of a
philosophy of nature made relevant by the recourse to current research in
the natural sciences. This framework has now been totally abandoned: it has
been replaced by the perspective of genetic psychology and social psychology, narrowly understood, for the constitutive aspects of the theory, and moral
psychology and moral epistemology for the normative aspects. Animals, plants,
Nature, and even to some extent the human body, have lost their place in
the theory, both in genetic-constitutive and in normative terms. We need to
study these two aspects separately. A third dimension of the loss of nature
linked to the rst two will then emerge.
1. The shift from anthropology to social psychology narrowly conceived has
been noted. In working towards the alternative solution that will be presented
in the third section, it is worth our while seeing how the shift could in fact
already be detected in the different readings of Mead. This will illuminate
the fundamental claim made in this article: that the model of interaction that
has gradually emerged as the fundamental structure upon which the ethics
of recognition is built, is restricted to intersubjectivity narrowly interpreted as
inter-human interpersonality.
In Mead, as we saw, Honneth found, much like Habermas, the fundamental prerequisite for an anthropology of social action.18 This is because of
Meads insistence on the social dependency of ego in its constitution, not just
in respect of moral and epistemic learning, but also including perceptual
experience. Mead offered a sophisticated, naturalistic defence of the intersubjectivistic turn. The key argument underpinning his symbolic interactionism is well known: it states that the decisive difference between animal
and human behaviour lies in the fact that with human beings and their
relative lack of instinctual determination, the capacity for individual and
social actions emerges, actions that are not regulated through instinct. Mead
explains both modes of behaviour through the capacity to take the role of
the other. This is the capacity to evoke in oneself the reaction of the other
to ones own behaviour. With this capacity, the human self is able to look at
his own behaviour from the perspective of the other participant in action. It
is easy to see how this argument accounts for the possibility of social action
understood as communication. By being able to see within himself the reaction of the other to his own behaviour, the individual is able to understand
the others reaction and to coordinate purposefully his action to the others
action. One can also see the normative implication of the taking the role of
the other since the self is able to judge his own actions from the perspective
of the internalised Other.
Even more profoundly, Mead makes this decentring of the human agent the
condition for the perception of objects in the world as permanent things. It
is worth dwelling briey on this aspect of Meads interactionism as it pro-
vides important arguments for the direction suggested below. How did Mead
propose to justify the apparently extreme thesis that, as Honneth and Joas
summarised: knowledge gained from social experience is the precondition
for the synthesis of things out of the chaos of sense perception?19
The rst element of the answer is that the contact experience that constitutes the reality of the thing comes from the inside of the thing, and it comes
from an inside that can never be reached by subdividing the thing. This
reveals simply new surfaces. Mead argues that the thing is constructed as
permanent and self-identical, as having an inside, through the resistance that
it opposes to handling. The resistance that the object presents to contact or
action is construed as the objects own capacity to act, behind which a quasisubject, with its self-identity, must be assumed. Mead gives the following
example: We are seeking the sort of resistance that we ourselves offer in
grasping and manipulating things. (. . .) It is the sort of resistance which one
hand offers to the other.20 These experiences are illuminating because in them
we can directly feel, from the inside so to speak, the power to resist an external pressure. These examples, however, are also misleading because, in Meads
behaviouristic framework, there is no privilege accorded to inner experience,
no pre-given self-acquaintance. In fact, the rule that objects are constituted
as one and permanent only as a result of their power of resistance applies
just as well to the organisms themselves: The inside of the thing is the same
stuff as the inside of the organism. It would, however, be a mistake to assume
that the organism projects this content into the object (. . .), for, in the rst
place, the organism is but another perceptual object.21 Organisms become
reectively aware of their having an inside, a self-identical unity, from the
resistance that objects present to their actions upon them, in exactly the same
manner that objects do: It is the attitude of pressure appearing as an inside
of the object and as the reaction to this object that constitutes the possibility
of there being objects and physical selves over against the objects, and which constitutes the necessity of their reciprocal character.22
The anticipation of a power to resist on the part of an external object cannot
be explained in terms of the projection of an inner experience in the external
world. Mead argues that it is explained by the role-taking capacity, the capacity
to take the attitude of the other which is at the heart of the social constitution
of selves: by evoking in me the potential resistance to my action of the external
object, I constitute its identity, just as my ego gradually constituted itself by

integrating the expected reactions of others to my actions.
Importantly, since the anticipation of resistance is an anticipation of contact
(the counterpressure to my own pressure), the distance senses elicit in the
organism the very esh of the objects, their qualitative, material sensuousness.
It is as if my eyes were touching the object. Honneth and Joas describe elegantly this mechanism and its implications: the distance senses can of
themselves trigger in the human organism the reaction of the sensation of
resistance corresponding to the manipulation of things (. . .) The object is then
perceived as an anticipated datum of contact sensation: we see the heaviness, the hardness, or the warmth of an object from its appearance.23
Such a social theory of perception is clearly a powerful vindication of the
intersubjectivistic paradigm since even the experience that is most obviously
structured as the encounter of subject and object is shown to be structurally
conditioned by capacities acquired through social experience. However,
this great progress made by his theory of perception also led, I now want to
suggest, to a partial, purely interactionist reading of Mead that left out of
consideration the natural sides of sociality. It is as though Meads social
theory of perception had been taken as denitive proof of the intersubjectivistic turn without its material dimensions being retained.
The restriction to Meads naturalism occurs in the different readings of Mead
offered after Honneth and Joas 1980 book, notably in The Struggle for Recognition.
Chapter Four of the latter aims to provide a naturalistic reinterpretation of
Hegels Jena theory of intersubjectivity via recourse to Mead. However, the
account now focuses solely on the question of human individuation and
socialisation. Interaction and the social, which in Mead designate rstly the
eld of proto-symbolic interaction amongst animals,24 have been reduced to
the different types of interactions amongst human subjects. Interactionism
now designates purely social, human relations. Meads constant comparison
of human and animal forms of action emphasises the fact that human capacities,
and in particular human sociality, are naturally conditioned, that is, made possible by natural endowments and required by the exigencies of survival in
nature. Despite the qualitative, evolutionary discontinuity that Mead indeed
constantly highlights, such discontinuity is also predicated upon a more pro-
found shared condition: the naturalistic character of organisms, which to a

partial yet crucial extent, is shared by humans and other organisms. In many
passages of his Philosophy of the Act, for example, Mead voluntarily uses nonspecic language that can apply to both animals and humans. By contrast,
the implications of the tendency to read Mead anthropocentrically become
especially clear if one reects upon the place of the body in Struggle for
Recognition.
Contrary to Habermas, as we saw, Honneth wants to ground social action
pre-linguistically. However, it can be argued that the body, in Struggle for
Recognition and in the texts following, no longer occupies the same substantial
place that it had in the earlier critical study. In this study, Honneth and Joas
followed Mead whose naturalism was crystal-clear: while minds and selves
are essentially social products, products or phenomena of the social side of
human experience, the physiological mechanism underlying experience is far
from irrelevantindeed is indispensableto their genesis and existence.25 In
the mature model of recognition, by contrast, the body plays no constitutive
role in the processes of social interaction. The body is integrated solely as a
material dimension that can be constituted by recognition, in other words
express social recognition or suffer from misrecognition. The organism is no
longer the root of social action, but one of its modes of expression. The constitutive dimension of organicity seems to disappear in Honneths later work.
With its organicity, however, the human being betrays its natural origin, the
fact that, if indeed she lives mainly in second nature, this is on the basis of
having a rst nature that is totally in and of nature in general, however
underdetermined and plastic it might be. The natural aspect of human nature
makes it always closer to animal nature than anthropocentric humanisms are
willing to admit.
2. The normative implications of this exclusion of nature from the theory of
social action might be serious. If the ethical is dened as the series of conditions that are necessary for the self-realisation of socialised individuals, then
there seems to be little room for any ethical duties towards non-human beings,
except only indirectly. The preservation of a natural environment, the protection
of non-human persons from pain and death, can only feature indirectly in
such a model of ethics, as duties that are called for only for the fullment of
human beings. This is obviously important, but it seems difcult to use the
ethics of recognition to account for the feelings of wrong and even injustice
that human beings feel on the part of desecrated natural sites, tortured, massacred or industrially exploited animals.26
Of course, these remarks would be made completely irrelevant by the simple
rejoinder that the ethics of recognition, unlike the theory of communicative
action, is self-consciously limited in scope. It does not try to offer a phylogenetic counterpart to the ontogenetic narrative; its normative parts are
voluntarily limited to human interaction, without prejudging other aspects
of normativity. It is clearly conceived as a localised study in social theory
restricted to social action understood as human action, with no claim to generalisation about norms, and no attempt at a systematic treatment of the
classical Spirit-Nature problem as found in Hegel.
Such a rejoinder, however, appears rather weak when compared with the
arguments presented in the rst part of this article. The revival of the tradition
of German philosophical anthropology was deemed necessary for reasons
immanent to the development of social theory, to overcome the inherent
limitations of Habermas communicative theory of society, and also, and more
pressingly, because of the active questioning stemming from contemporary
social movements. From both directions, the programme of a renewed study
of the relationship of the human to nature, both inner and external nature,
was presented as a theoretical-practical imperative. In particular, if the ethics
of recognition sets for itself as a criterion the capacity to be practically relevant for contemporary political debates, then the failure of its theory of normativity to frame meaningfully a discussion about the challenges of large-scale,
expanding, ecological destruction, or the industrial treatment of animals, presents a signicant problem. The necessity to develop a political response to
the ecological crisis has clearly not diminished since 1980, and therefore neither has the necessity for normative philosophy to reject anthropocentric
forms of humanism and to include in its scope the question of the animal,
the elements, and the environment.
Honneths response to this criticism was formulated in advance at the very
end of Struggle for Recognition, with the reference to an ecologically based
asceticism as one of the possible political applications of the ethics of recognition.27 The same phrase was already used in the introduction to Social Action
and Human Nature.28 In both texts, Honneth rejects the idea that normative
theory can directly guide political struggles. Whilst theory, as we saw, has an
irreducible practical dimension, its application can only be indirect. It is up
to the social and political struggles of the day, in a particular situation, to
take hold of the theorys concepts and give them their precise social and political content. The problem with this response is that, whilst the possible link
between an ecological asceticism and the theory of social action was straightforward in the 1980 book, the same cannot be said about Struggle for Recognition.
The 1980 book developed the programme of a substantive anthropology of
intersubjectivity understood as the study of the humanisation of nature, in
which the human being was therefore understood to be immanent to nature.
The ecological perspective derived directly from this viewpoint. With Struggle
for Recognition, the link is severed. How the necessity to develop a post-traditional solidarity leads to an ecological programme is far from clear. In any
case, it seems to imply that nature, the animal, have ethical relevance only
indirectly, for the sole purpose of human self-realisation, and the upholding of individual and collective difference.29 The ability of the ethics of
recognition to account for the intrinsic normativity of nature and natural entities remains questionable.
3. Regardless of whether this critique does injustice to the ethics of recognition
by blaming it for not answering questions it does not intend to consider, the
restriction of interaction to human inter-personality has other detrimental
implications. Our focus shifts from the place of nature in social action to the
nature of interaction. By following the thread of the place of nature, it has
appeared that the model of interaction that is used in the ethics of recognition
has been to a large extent reduced to a form of intersubjective interactionism.
The type of communication between two agents that Habermas takes as the
ideal case for his studies on speech acts, and which derives from Meads
denition of communication, provides the basic structure in which all modes
of interaction are conceptualised in Honneths ethics of recognition. In the
words of the early Honneth, it is this social action (. . .) conceived of as a
communicative process in which at least two subjects co-ordinate their purposive actions with each other through agreement upon a shared denition
of their situation, effected by means of symbols.30 As a result of this fundamental denition, recognition is conceived of purely as relation between one
agent and other agents, or in fact paradigmatically as the relation between
one agent and another agent. Interaction in the ethics of recognition is reduced
not just to interaction amongst human subjects, but also to interaction between
human person and human person. Even in the second and third spheres of
recognition, the model of interaction linking the individual with society at
large is interpersonal, the relation of one person to all other persons. Society
is conceived of not as social fact, but as an aggregate of socialised individuals.31
Strikingly, the early anthropology of intersubjectivity had identied this reduction of Meads interactionism. In recounting the reception of Mead in Germany,
Honneth and Joas wrote that his association with symbolic interactionism
gave the impression that (he) shared symbolic interactionisms restriction of
action to interaction, that he too considered the natural foundations of action
to be only of trivial importance, whether these were the human beings bodily
endowment with needs, or an environment necessary to life.32 In fact, it is
precisely because Mead offers a substantial theory of human action, one where
the natural foundations of action are fully integrated, that he was used as
a primary reference. As the authors remarked: Mead does not at all accord
central importance to the form of action termed interaction, but rather to
human beings manipulation of physical objects. (. . .) Meads goal is, then,
not a theory of interaction, or of instrumental action, but the linking together
of both of these theories.33 We can only agree with this. The intersubjectivistic turn should not lead to the loss of the object.34 There might be social
preconditions to the constitution of the subject, but these are combined with
a direct confrontation of the subject with a world of objectivity, and with the
subject herself taking the position of the object. To identify the dangers of the
subject-object paradigm, of the reduction of rationality to instrumentality,
should not lead to the other extreme of an abandonment of instrumentality.
Indeed, another of the abstractions in Habermas that the recourse to Mead
could have corrected is the dualism of the forms of rationality. In Honneths
mature ethics of recognition, however, instrumental reason, the interest in
objective, material mediations, seems to have all but disappeared.
This is not the place to attempt an extensive study of all the implications of
this tendency of intersubjectivism. We can restrict ourselves to indicating the
type of considerations that arise from it, and thus the type of account that is
currently missing in the restricted version of interactionism upon which the
current ethics of recognition is based. Nature here will no longer mean the
common ground of all living beings, it is no longer considered as natura

naturans, but more simply and more broadly, as natura naturata, dynamic
reality as a whole when it confronts human subjectivity. This includes
matter, but also formed matter, things, objects, natural and man-made, tools
and machines for instance, and even organisms viewed from an external
perspective.
We can use as a guide the earlier summary of Meads theory of perception.
According to Mead, as stated, the unity of the human organism arises as the
unitary reaction opposed to the pressure coming from external objects. This
focus on the role of objectivity in the constitution of the subject opens a wide
eld of investigation to complement the existing account of ontogenesis in
the rst sphere of recognition. Following this indication, the study of the constitution of personal identity would also study the interactions of the young
child with the world of objects: objects to manipulate, objects that hurt, objects
that provide pleasure, objects to climb, and so on. This immediately draws
attention to the fact that the world of objects, by contrast with the world of
intersubjectivity ideally conceived as reassuring (for example, the being held
stage in Winnicott), is a world of pleasure and pain, but more fundamentally
a world of challenges, where the infant gradually gains the consciousness of
her self through the constant experience of her limits and vulnerability, her
inability to control and overcome, or even simply to defend herself. This
surely plays an important structural role in cognitive-moral learning, and not
just cognitive-epistemic learning. Consequently, there might well be important objectual35 dimensions to the need of young infants, and later still of
adults, to momentarily reproduce the fusion with the signicant Other: the
need to escape from a world that is a constant challenge and threat, a world
of scarcity and oppositionality.36 More profoundly, the role of the objective
world in subject-constitution might not just be limited to being the negative
origin of the need for fusion, since fusion itself is structured around objective qualities. The reassurance an infant gains from suckling the mothers
breast is made possible by sensuous qualities, a taste, a smell, a touch. This
might be an important insight given the importance in Honneths thinking
of the early experiences of symbiosis to explain the irreducible asociality of
socialised individuals.37 The periodical moments of fusion are not purely
intersubjective, they are also moments of sensuous fusion. The crucial thought
is that fusion can actually occur only via the mediation of objects. The object
is the material condition of intersubjectivity. Without the materiality of an
object, be it a body or body part, there can be no reality to the intersubjective
unity. The aim of fusion, even of pure intersubjective fusion, therefore always
implies the search for a paradoxical Object that no longer objects; an object
that is no longer an affront and a threat to the self, but an object that can
materially carry or perform fusion. This leads us to ask speculatively if there
might be ontogenetic origins to the myth of the reconciliation with Nature:
namely, the ight from an obtrusive world and the experiences of happy
reconciliation with privileged objects?38
If we turn towards the third sphere of recognition, it is striking how abstract
the social conception of labour has become in the mature theory of recognition.
The normative dimension of labour is interpreted by Honneth through the
achievement principle: work matters to individuals because it is the way in
which they can be recognised by the community, not for their general and
abstract status as subjects of rights, but for their particular competence, as
contributors to the social division of labour. Again, retaining the focus on the
objectual, or material, side of work might be crucial to account for the full
depth of its constitutive and normative importance to subjects. This would
require for instance that attention be given to the object as a product of work,
and to the interaction with tools, instruments and machines, and even with
matter. Recognition in the third sphere is not just recognition of skills and
abilities; it is effected to a large extent via the mediation of the recognition,
or lack thereof, of the product of work. To point to an important sociological
fact: even when workers rights are formally secured, the compromising of
quality and safety standards that workers are forced to accept under productivity constraints can have the same damaging psychological effects as
the direct misrecognition of their skills and identity. Again, as in the rst
sphere, the material aspect of work, the interaction with matter, also has constitutive importance. Work as a privileged form of praxis involves a direct
encounter with matter, objects, machines. These dimensions carry their own
specic normative weight and create particular forms of recognition underneath the general framework of society as a whole.39 Here, we can content
ourselves with the mention of the rich tradition of properly materialist accounts
of praxis in the early Marx, in the post-Marxist tradition, and also in Hegel.
The loss of nature is also the loss of materiality and instrumentality. An
immense eld opens before the ethics of recognition if it decides to be faithful

to the tradition from which it grew and to focus more strongly on the expressive
and instrumental dimensions of labour.40
III. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty

In the current version of the ethics of recognition, Mead no longer gures as
the central reference. However, he was not abandoned for his naturalistic or
behaviouristic methodologies, but on the basis of Honneths further elaboration of his moral epistemology, and because of some of the normative implications of his social psychology. In the mechanism of role-taking, Honneth
now argues, recognition is not tied to the specic quality of the agents behaviour, which makes it impossible to precisely identify the normativity that
occurs in recognitive relations.41 The immanent critique that I have developed
in this article suggests that a rekindling of Meads inspiration would be
benecial, but as can be seen, this suggestion does not directly contradict
Honneths new concerns with the normative implications of Meads social
psychology. Rather, Meads naturalistic approach to interaction is taken here
as an exemplary attempt to retain the focus on organicity and on the role of
the object within the intersubjectivistic turn. I argue that attention must also
be given to the materiality of recognition, which entails a broadening of the
focus, from recognition as purely intersubjective to other forms of interaction, including interaction of the subject with the object. This shift in focus,
I now want to briey argue in conclusion, would be most benecially complemented if the ethics of recognition confronted itself once more with Maurice
Merleau-Pontys own philosophy of praxis.42
A rst justication for the return to Merleau-Ponty in the context of this discussion lies in the fact that his theory of social and historical praxis defends
precisely the fundamental anthropological assumptions that were presented
in the rst section of this article. Moreover, these assumptions also shape the
theoretical specicity of praxis post-Marxism, the tradition that Honneth
believes is the most fruitful for a theoretically and practically relevant social
theory. Merleau-Pontys writings on history and politics point to a conception
of history as an open eld of potentialities against the reductionism of the
Marxist orthodoxy of the time, and to a conception of social action guaranteeing
the normative agency of social subjects.43 This concept of historical and social
action relies on a theory of intersubjectivity that was already centred on the

notion of communication, a communication that is pre-linguistically rooted but
nds its full expression in language and symbolic realms.44
The substantial overlaps in background theoretical premises, methodology
and conclusions between Mead and Merleau-Ponty have now been well
established.45 Both engage in a philosophical critique of the reductionism of
modern science from the premise of lived experience. This premise, however,
is not developed through recourse to Erlebnis philosophy or hermeneutics,
but through a pragmatic programme based on the idea of a structure of
behaviour that is not reducible to material, causal processes, yet remains
dependent on the constraints of action in a given environment. As a result,
they both give genetic accounts of the symbolic realms, language, culture and
history, through comparative studies of animal and human forms of action
and interaction.46 In line with their critique of radical empiricism, they reject
strict mechanistic models of animal behaviour by emphasising the feedback
aspect of instinctual reaction, which implies that, as Mead puts it, organic
processes or responses in a sense constitute the objects to which they are
responses.47 Moreover, both view animal interaction as displaying the rst
traits of symbolic interaction.48
Most importantly, as a result of their grounding symbolic capacities in behaviour, they both make the body symbolic of the world, as Merleau-Ponty
says. Meads naturalistic methodology foreshadowed the rise of cognitive
science with the rooting of behaviour and psychological phenomena in their
neurological basis.49 The combination of naturalistic and pragmatist arguments
directing the study of the emergence and construction of the moments of
action in the nervous system eventually leads to the idea that all forms of
human dealing with the world have a bodily equivalent, that the corporal
schema replicates the world. This was well illustrated in the theory of perception: seeing an object is seeing its heaviness and roughness, and since
contact perception is rooted in organic responses, the anticipated contact experiences triggered by vision also trigger specic postures in the organism. This
is true of course of animal perception, and more importantly, there is conversely a whole animal aspect to human perception. The specicity of the
human organism that enables its superior mode of perception is that it is
reexive and open: it can see itself as an organism in the world,50 and on the
basis of the circuit (Merleau-Ponty) that it thus opens up, it can pick out
elements in the environment.
The idea that the corporal scheme replicates the world, that the world is
echoed in our bodys attitudes, is obviously one of the most important results
of Merleau-Pontys theory of perception.51 Much of Merleau-Pontys late work
is dedicated to working out all the implications of this central thought. The
fundamental conclusion is captured in the notion of intercorporeity: on the
basis of its reexivity and openness, the body as touching-touched, as seeingseen,52 is the locus of a sort of reection and is thus able to relate to something that is not its own mass, to close its circuit upon the visible.53
This is the aspect of Merleau-Pontys late work that yields its most fruitful
contribution in the context of this discussion. The rst advance that the notion
of intercorporeity allows concerns the problem of the animal, as it helps overcome anthropocentric humanism: We study the human being in his/her
body in order to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by addition
of reason, in brief in the Ineinander with the animal (strange anticipations or
caricatures of the human being in the animal).54 Merleau-Ponty makes explicit
the idea that is the basis of Meads naturalistic inquiries: the primordial commonality of human and animal forms of action and interaction on the basis
of their shared organicity, the fact that my body is made of their corporeity.55
Merleau-Ponty eloquently emphasises the capacity of empathy, or Einfhlung,
that this common organicity gives rise to: the capacity for human beings to
feel an equivalent in their esh of what happens to the esh of other living
beings, notably of animals.56 The normative implications of this are obvious.
We return to the idea of an organic grounding of interaction. With this organic
grounding, the recognition of the other as a being with particular interests
that I must respect is no longer limited to beings of my species. It becomes
the primitive recognition, felt before it can be expressed in consciousness or
language, of the other beings interest in continuing to live and in avoiding
pain, and indeed the shared pleasure of its feeling pleasure and fullment.
In fact, Merleau-Pontys formulations apply particularly well to the negative
experiences that make the human-animal intercorporeity so overbearing: the
ability of our esh to feel from within the fear and suffering of non-human
beings.
But the capacity of the human body to empathise is not limited to living
beings, to animals in particular.57 More generally, given that the circuit of
the human body closes it upon itself via the mediation of the whole perceived
world, Merleau-Ponty can conclude that the esh of the body makes us
understand the esh of the world.58 We saw that Meads theory of perception
could be taken in that direction. Merleau-Ponty came amazingly close to
Meads theory of the organic response to visual perception through the anticipation of a contact experience. He put it in terms of an essential libidinality of human perception, the fact that perception, by dealing with the inside
of things, is always a form of introjection and projection of the things in us
and of us in them. He thus describes perception as penetration, at a distance,
of the sensible things by my body, a good, condensed formulation of Meads
theory of perception.59 The conclusion is once again eloquently put by MerleauPonty: Einfhlung with the world, with the things, with animals, with other
bodies.60 The openness and reexivity of the human bodys corporal schema
enables it to feel in its esh the weight and specic quality not just of other
living beings, but of all sensible entities, landscapes and environment, plants,
and even inert objects. Beyond the immediate normative gain that is made
with the inclusion of other living beings and natural entities in the model of
interaction, the fruitfulness of a model demonstrating our Einfhlung with
things is only too clear in the context of a reappraisal of the role of the object.
Merleau-Pontys theory of intercorporeity provides the conceptual framework
that is needed for re-centring the theory of praxis on its properly material
dimensions. It shows why things matter to human beings, not just as symbols of social relations, but also for themselves, in their very materiality, why
human beings depend on them as necessary tools and means (mediations)
for the constitution of their identity and why they even have some normative importance, one that is not (or should not be) as great as that of living
beings, of course, but one that is not null either. Merleau-Pontys theory of
intercorporeity, complementing Meads theory of practical intersubjectivity, gives
a crucial indication as to the way in which the paradigm of recognition can
overcome its self-imposed limits and include in its analyses rst of all those
beings and natural entities that have (or should have) intrinsic value, but also
the overbearing, material weight of the world, an aspect of reality that classical philosophers, and amongst them the great theorists of praxis, never let
out of their sight.
Notes
1
Axel Honneth & Hans Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, trans. R. Meyer,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 1.
Reprinted at the end of Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. Shapiro, Oxford,
Polity Press, 1987, pp. 301-350.
Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power, trans. K. Baynes, Cambridge, MA, & London,
MIT, 1991, chapter 7, pp. 203-239, and the beginning of chapter 8, pp. 240-247.
Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 154. This analysis refers
specically to Theory and Practice, Boston, Beacon Press, 1973.
This explains the fact that Habermas continues to use anthropological arguments
in his latest books, for example in The Future of Human Nature.
See in particular the second series of Intermediate reections in the Theory of

Communicative Action, chapter VI, trans. T. McCarthy, Cambridge, Polity, vol. 1,
1984, vol. 2, 1987.
Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, p. 161.
Ibid., p. 166.
Honneth, The Critique of Power, p. 281.
10
11
The most explicit discussion of this shift by Honneth, from a linguistic understanding of intersubjectivity to a broader anthropological analysis, can be found
in Anerkennungsbeziehungen und Moral. Eine Diskussionsbemerkung zur anthropologischen Erweiterung der Diskursethik, in Anthropologie, Ethik und Gesellschaft,
eds. R. Brunner & P. Kelbel, Frankfurt & New York, Campus Verlag, 2000, pp.
101-111.
12
The quote is taken from the German volume Kultur und Kritik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,
13
14
Ibid., p. 3.
15
Ibid., pp. 9-10.
16
Christopher Zurn, Anthropology and Normativity: A Critique of Axel Honneths
1973, p. 234.
Formal Conception of the Ethical Life, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 26,
no. 1, 2000, pp. 115-24.
17
Axel Honneth, Grounding Recognition: A Rejoinder to Critical Questions, Inquiry,

45, 2002, pp. 500-503.
18
19
Ibid.
20
George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act, Chicago & London, University of
Chicago Press, 1938, pp. 143-144.

21
Ibid.
22
Mead, The Philosophy of the Act, p. 442 (my emphasis).
23
24
Although he is obviously interested in human communication, Mead nds the

basic structure of social acts already in the interactions between higher animals
(the famous dog-ght example at the beginning of Mind, Self and Society).
25
George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1934, Introduction, p. 2 (my emphasis).
26
I am particularly indebted to Stphane Habers enlightening discussion of the

ecological in Habermasian ethics. See Ethique de la Discussion et Rconciliation
avec la Nature, in O en est la Thorie Critique? eds. E. Renault and Y. Sintomer,
Paris, La Dcouverte, 2003, pp. 219-234.
27
Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conicts,
trans. J. Anderson, Cambridge, Polity, 1995, p. 179.
28
Honneth & Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, pp. 2-3.
29
Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, p. 179.
30
31
This has been well highlighted and rectied by Emmanuel Renault, see LExprience
de lIinjustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de lInjustice, Paris, La Dcouverte, 2003,
especially chapter 3, pp. 179-246. The retrieval of material mediations in the model
of interaction used by the ethics of recognition is the pendant to Renaults attempt
to give more weight to institutional mediations.
32
33
Ibid.
34
The critical perspective presented here therefore differs greatly from those
critiques, most famously expressed by Manfred Frank and Dieter Henrich, which
attack a priori intersubjectivism on the basis of the irreducibility of subjectivity.
35
This is the term used by the translator of Social Action and Human Nature to render
gegenstndlich as opposed to objektiv.
36
To recall, these aspects of the objective world which praxis has to confront have
been particularly well analysed by Sartre in the rst book of the Critique of Dialectical
Reason.
37
See Honneths contribution in the polemic with Joel Whitebook, Facetten des vorsozialen Selbst. Eine Erwiderung auf Joel Whitebook, Psyche, 55, 2001, pp. 790802; and also Postmodern Identity and Object-relations Theory: On the Supposed
Obsolence of Psychoanalysis, Philosophical Explorations, 2, 1999, pp. 225-242; and
Das Werk der Negativitt. Eine psychoanalytische Revision der Anerkennungstheorie, in Die Gegenwart der PsychoanalyseDie Psychoanalyse der Gegenwart, eds.

Bohleber & Sibylle Dews, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 2001, pp. 238-245.
38
I obviously refer to Habermas famous early characterisation, and rejection, of the

centrality of Nature in rst generation Critical Theory: In several passages Marcuse
is tempted to pursue this idea of a New Science in connection with the promise,
familiar in Jewish and Protestant mysticism, of the resurrection of fallen nature.
This theme, well known for having penetrated into Schellings (and Baaders) philosophy via Schwabian Pietism, returns in Marxs Paris Manuscripts, constitutes
today the central thought of Blochs philosophy, and, in reected forms, also directs
the more secret hopes of Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W.
Adorno, Technology and Science as Ideology in Toward a Rational Society, trans.
J. Shapiro, Boston, Beacon Press, 1970, p. 85. Since Thomas McCarthys thorough
review of Habermas early work, the place of nature is a well-known crux of
Habermas thought. See T. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jrgen Habermas, London,
Hutchinson, 1978, pp. 110-126. See also the article by Joel Whitebook, The problem
of Nature in Habermas, Telos, Summer 79, pp. 41-69. See also the revisiting of
these problems from the point of view of recent Schelling scholarship in Peter
Douglas, Habermas, Schelling and Nature, in Critical Theory after Habermas, eds.
D. Freundlieb, Wayne Hudson & John Rundell, Leiden & Boston, Brill, 2004, pp.
155-180.
39
Particularly enlightening on both dimensions is the work of French sociologist

Christophe Dejours, for example Le Facteur Humain, Paris, PUF, 2002.
40
An important contribution was Gyrgy Mrkus reconstruction of Marxs anthropology, Marxism and Anthropology: The Concept of Human Essence in the Philosophy
of Marx, Assen, Van Gorcum, 1978. Social Action and Human Nature suggests that
Mrkus classical study provides the type of solution that Honneth is himself
attempting to devise.
41
Honneth, Grounding Recognition, pp. 502-503. Importantly, Honneth does not

want to abandon the focus and resources provided by philosophical anthropology.
42
Honneth and Joas recognised the value of Merleau-Pontys theory of perception

but Honneth has not pursued this line further. See Social Action and Human Nature,
pp. 114-115.
43
In fact the Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith, London, Routledge, 1962

(rst edition), pp. 442-456) nished with a normative theory of praxis. More topically
dedicated to these questions was of course the Adventures of the Dialectic.
44
Obviously the chapter on intersubjectivity in the Phenomenology of Perception

(pp. 346-368) is the central text to nd the explicit exposition of Merleau-Pontys
theory of communication. In it, Merleau-Ponty sets philosophy the following task:
we must learn to nd the communication between one consciousness and another

in one and the same world, p. 353. More broadly, however, given that for him
communication is not restricted to linguistic exchange but is another word for the
fundamental sharing of the world by the embodied subjects, the thematic of communication, encapsulated in the co- words (coexistence, commonality, communion,
consubstantiation, con-naissance as co-birth, etc.) runs through the whole book
and in fact through all of Merleau-Pontys writings.
45
See Sandra B. Rosenthal and Patrick L. Bourgeois, Mead and Merleau-Ponty. Toward
a Common Vision, New York, State University of New York Press, 1991.
46
This is obviously Merleau-Pontys methodology in The Structure of Behaviour, but

also in his lectures at the Collge de France, which we will now refer to more
specically. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Nature, trans. R. Vallier, Evanston, Northwestern
University Press, 2003. See also the working notes at the end of The Visible and
the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp.
165-276. I focus especially on these lectures rather than The Visible and the Invisible
because they illustrate perfectly the grounding of Merleau-Pontys theory of intercorporeity in contemporary natural sciences.
47
Mead, Mind, Self and Society, p. 77.
48
Merleau-Ponty follows Lorenzs studies of the rituals amongst animals, and, like
Mead who described animal conversations through gestures as social acts,
argues that one can talk of an animal culture and of animal institutions (Nature,
p. 198).
49
We have to take into account (. . .) what goes on in the central nervous system
as the beginning of the individuals act and as the organisation of the act, Mind,
Self and Society, p. 11.
50
Only the external world can teach the I-body to see itself as an object-body. MerleauPonty argues in exactly the same way; see for example Phenomenology of Perception,
p. 322.
51
Through a close reading of von Uexkll, he actually sees the emergence of this in
the superior animals, see Nature, pp. 170-173.
52
Recall the example of the hand touching the other hand in Mead.
53
Merleau-Ponty, Nature, p. 209.
54
Ibid., p. 214.
55
Ibid., p. 218. One working note even uses the term interanimality, The Visible and
the Invisible, p. 172. A vivid illustration can be found in one of Meads smaller
articles, see G. H. Mead, Concerning Animal Perception, in Selected Writings,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964, pp. 73-81.
56
However, Merleau-Ponty is at pains to stress that this empathy is not to be equated

with a fusional reconciliation with nature. Especially clear on this: The Visible and
the Invisible, p. 127.

57
We should not forget that ethnobotanics has described extensively the companionship that has evolved between human beings and the plants surrounding them.
See Pierre Lieutaghi, La Plante Compagne, Arles, Actes Sud, 1999.
58
Merleau-Ponty, Nature, p. 218. Logically, the relationship is reciprocal: it is already

the esh of the things that speaks to us of our own esh, and that speaks to us of
the esh of the other, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 193. Once again, it is important
to stress the rigorous scientic underpinning of Merleau-Pontys arguments and not
to be fooled by their literary quality. On the scientic origin and aims of the theory
of intercorporeity, see the working note of February 1959, The Visible and the Invisible,
p. 182.
59
60
Paul Redding
Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian
Critical Social Theory
ABSTRACT
This paper challenges the commonly made claim that
the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian
in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development
of Bourdieus work from its earliest structuralist through
its later post-structuralist phase is better described in
terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neoKantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In
his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based logic of practice to explain the binaristic logic
of Lvi-Strauss structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively
working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach
to symbolic classication, Lvi-Strauss had inherited
Durkheims distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the
role of categories in experience and actionan account
that conated two forms of representationintuitions
and conceptsthat Kant himself had held distinct.
Bourdieus appeal to the role of the bodys dispositional
habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegels earlier
quite different reworking of Kants intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct logics with different forms
of negation. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but
opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel
had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lvi-Strauss,
he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had broken
with it.This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that has been rejected by
184 Paul Redding

many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the
gap separating Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically.
KEYWORDS: Bourdieu, Hegel, Durkheim, Structuralism,
Post-Structuralism, Neo-Kantianism
Initially, the idea of linking the work of French ethnologist-sociologist Pierre

Bourdieu to Hegel may seem surprising. Having emerged from the generation
of structuralist thinkers in the 1960s, Bourdieu can thereby be regarded to
have come from an intellectual movement that virtually dened itself in opposition to an Hegelian humanism exemplied by Sartre. For Bourdieu, as for
contemporaries like Foucault or Althusser, approaches to the history of the
sciences found in epistemological thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard and
George Canguilhem1 replaced that humanistic variant of the Hegelian story
of the teleological emergence of the essentially universal human subject.
Moreover, in ethnography itself, Lvi-Strauss had explicitly opposed his structuralist thought to Sartres version of Hegelian humanism,2 and identied his
approach as a type of Kantianism without a transcendental subject.3
Indeed, along with Lvi-Strauss, Bourdieu can be thought of as continuing
some of the features of late nineteenth-century French neo-Kantianism, thereby
establishing a route back to Kant which largely bypassed Hegel and other
German idealists. Crucially, both Lvi-Strauss and Bourdieu were inuenced
by mile Durkheim whose work showed strong neo-Kantian inuences.4 And
while Bourdieus structuralism might have been relatively short lived,5 his
post-structuralist work looks no friendlier to Hegelianism.6 What we might
regard as the rst recognisably Bourdieuan work, Esquisse dune Thorie de
la Pratique, published in 1972,7 had been conceived as a critique of LviStrauss, but with this Bourdieu seemed to deepen his earlier critique of the
academic aristocratism of any totalising philosophy, drawing upon further
types of philosophical anti-philosophersordinary language philosophers
such as Wittgenstein and Austin, for examplewho seem equally distant
from Hegels systematising. Even the Marxist elements in Bourdieus work
are commonly said to have a strikingly anti-Hegelian nature.8
After his turn away from structuralism, Bourdieu criticised Lvi-Strauss
approach as suffering from a tendency to intellectualise the objects of its own
eld of studythe eld of mythopoeic thought. Indeed, structuralism was seen
Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory 185
as suffering from a form of logicism akin to Hegels, Bourdieu comparing LviStrauss inquiry into the universal laws which govern the unconscious
activities of the mind to Hegels account of the universal spirit that thinks
itself.9 While Lvi-Strauss had looked to the structure of myth and ritual
to disclose the universal structures of human thought, from Bourdieus
post-structuralist perspective, an examination of the context within which
mythopoeic thought was enacted revealed its logic to be generated not from
some underlying formal structure, nor from any mythopoeic version of transcendental consciousness, but from an ensemble of unconscious practically
oriented bodily dispositionswhat Bourdieu termed habitusresponsive
to the demands of varying and particular circumstances within a socially
encoded environment.10
Bourdieus move beyond structuralism can easily be seen as strengthening
and deepening certain Kantian dimensions of his thought, as he was now
concerned with criticising the hypostatisation of a form of thoughtthat of the
scientic ethnologistbeyond the conditions of its own functioning. Like the
pre-Copernican cosmologist, the scholastic ethnologist appeared to project
the conditions of his own experience onto the object of inquiry. Bourdieus
response was thus to extend Kants critique of pure reason into what he called
a critique of scholastic reason. And yet this familiar anti-Hegelian reading of
Bourdieu, I suggest, is confounded by the remarkable points of convergence
one nds within Bourdieus workoften signalled by Bourdieu himself
with the thought of Hegel. It is such points of convergence that I want to
broach here, rst, that between Bourdieus logic of practice and Hegels
account of the structure of what can be termed immediate thought, and
next, that between the respective accounts each give of the conditions under
which systematic reective thought can break with the socially conditioned
logic of practice. This is done not for the purpose of reducing Bourdieus
remarkably innovative work to the status of repetition of a thinker regarded
as having brought intellectual history to a close, but more to question the
degree to which Hegel himself can be reduced to the image of that philosopher
against which Bourdieu and his generation had reacted.
186 Paul Redding
I. Practical versus Theoretical Logic and the Critique of Scholastic

Reason
After his break with structuralist formalism, Bourdieu came to regard LviStrauss intellectualising analyses of mythopoeic thought as exemplifying a
danger implicit in the very move which liberates scientic thought from the
constraints of everyday life: the danger of a scholastic forgetting of the historical specicity of those conditions allowing the reexively epistemic
orientation to the world characteristic of scholarship itself. While still maintaining his earlier positive Bachelardian stance towards the establishment
of the sciences in their break with the schemas of everyday life, Bourdieus
attitude was now tempered by a sensitivity to the ambiguity of such epistemological breaks: The fundamental ambiguity of the scholastic universes and
of all their productions . . . lies in the fact that their apartness from the world
of production is both a liberatory break and a disconnection, a potentially
crippling separation.11
In order to capture the peculiarity of the theoretical attitude and the conditions
that underlie its emergence in various realms, as well as its inherent ambiguity,
Bourdieu employed the notion of the skhol. Exploiting the etymological
connection between scholarship and leisure, Bourdieu used this concept to
refer to those historically created social contexts, which liberated from practical
occupations and preoccupations, were able to provide the cultural spaces
for the development of the type of scholarly/scholastic linguistic practice. For
example, within the school it is studious leisure which becomes the precondition for scholastic exercises and activities removed from immediate
necessity, such as sport, play, the production and contemplation of works of
art and all forms of gratuitous speculation with no other end than themselves.
These historically specic contexts liberating an activity from the immediate
demands of economic and social necessity in turn foster the scholastic disposition which inclines it possessors to suspend the demands of the situation,
the constraints of economic and social necessity, and the urgencies it imposes
or the ends it proposes to meet the demands of detached and disinterested
inquiry.12
More specically concerned with the emergence of objective thought about
the social eld, Bourdieus telling of the story of the epistemological rupture
is further marked by the details of his own ethnographically derived account

of the form of thought with which the scholarly language game breaks and
with which it is to be contrastedmythopoeic thought. Following Durkheim
and Mauss,13 Bourdieu understands human practices as needing the articulation
provided by socially generated symbolic systems that, in pre-modern societies,
are objectied and transmitted in ritual and myth. Such mythopoeic thought
thus reects and reproduces just those types of primitive classication structuring social activity within pre-modern communitiesthose systems of
inseparably cognitive and evaluative structures that organise perception of
the world and action in the world in accordance with the objective structures
of a given state of the social world.14 But going beyond Durkheims neoKantian formalism and in the direction of Marx, Bourdieu draws attention
to the role played by such classications in the articulation of relations of
domination. It is in virtue of the evaluative dimension of such differences instituted in the world that they thereby articulate a type of social domination
via a symbolic violence which constrains by neither overt force nor reason,
but by something in between.15
The emergence of philosophy in classical Greece, which provides the skhol
with its ideal type, exemplies such a break with systems of mythopoeic
thought. There myths and rites ceased to be practical acts of belief . . . and
became instead matter for theoretical astonishment and questioning, or objects
of hermeneutic rivalry.16 But as an ethnologist Bourdieu was interested in the
break from mythical thought in the context of the inquiry into myth itselfa
break, he claimed, which was not achieved until the work of Durkheim and
Mauss, and, importantly, Lvi-Strauss. It was Lvi-Strauss achievement,
Bourdieu tells us, to have provided the means of completing the abandonment
of recourse to the mythological mode of thought in the science of mythologies . . . by resolutely taking this mode of thought as his object instead of
setting it to work, as native mythologists always do, in order to provide a
mythological solution to mythological problems.17 And yet, as we have
seen, in his structuralist search for some universal grammar or logic underlying the outputs of mythical thought, Lvi-Strauss had projected onto his
subjects the disengaged dispositions of his own scholastic contextforgetting, and thereby universalising, the historical specicity of his own intellectual practice.
188 Paul Redding
Following his break with structuralism, in works like Esquisse dune Thorie
de la Pratique and Le sens Pratique, Bourdieu attempted to reinterpret the type
of binaristic grammar to which both Durkheim and Lvi-Strauss had appealed
by showing its generation from responses of the bodys dispositional habitus
to the practical demands of a socially codied everyday existence. These are
the demands from which the scholastic disposition had itself abstracted, and
which in so doing had become prey to a type of forgetting or repression of the
peculiarities of its own conditions, projecting its own theoretical rather than
practical orientation back onto the objectsin this case, the agentsit studies.
This logic of mythopoeic thought is fundamentally a logic of practice rather
than thought. Reconstructed by the analyst as a structure holding among representations, it is effectively reconstructed as a form of thought, but this must
not obscure the point that the primary eld within which it seeks coherencies
is one of actions, not representations.18 The practical logic of these systems, therefore, need not have the sort of coherence demanded of sets of concepts functioning in purely discursive theoretical domains.
This practical logic . . . is able to organize all thoughts, perceptions and
actions by means of a few generative principles, which are closely interrelated and constitute a practically integrated whole, only because its whole
economy, based on the principle of the economy of logic, presupposes a
sacrice of rigor for the sake of simplicity and generality and because it
nds in polythesis the conditions required for successful use of polysemy.19
Moreover, the illogicality of practice is not simply quantitative but qualitative

as well. When one regards its reconstruction in terms of its structures and
processes informing it, practical logic has a distinctly illogical form, as it is
effectively marked by principles of contrariety or polarity on the one hand,
and analogical projection on the other. Furthermore, this is a logic that is
reected in the Pythagorean columns of contraries20 which, as Geoffrey
Lloyd has pointed out,21 are at work in the thought of the pre-Socratics more
generally.
Within such systems, based on a fundamental principle of division which
distributes all the things of the world into two complementary classes,22
judgements about objects are usually expressed analogically by the use of
vehicles drawn from a limited number of recurring contrary pairssun :
moon, dry : wet, hot : cold, and so on, which are mapped onto the fundamental social distinction, male : female.23 Easily learned, exible and readily
applied, such predicates work on the principle of overall resemblance: exactly
which aspect of the metaphorical vehicle is relevant to the analogyits principleis neither explicit nor constant across different uses of the vehicle, rendering such thought redolent with contradictions when considered from a
logical point of view:
Ritual practice performs an uncertain abstraction that brings the same
symbol into different relationships by apprehending it through different
aspects, or different aspects of the same referent into the same relationship
of opposition. In other words, it excludes the Socratic question of the respect
in which the referent is apprehended (shape, colour, function, etc.), thereby
obviating the need to dene in each case the criterion governing the choice
of the aspect selected and, a fortiori, the need to keep to that criterion at all
times.24
Bourdieus insistent focus here is on the way that the primary products of
such structures and processesactionsare generated from habitus, that
is, from systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures
predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which
generate and organise practices and representations that can be objectively
adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends
or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.25
It is this that gives his approach its radically anti-subjective, anti-Cartesian
thrust. Thus practical belief, he stresses, is not a state of mind, still less a
kind of arbitrary adherence to a set of instituted dogmas and doctrines
(beliefs), but rather a state of the body.26 This means, of course, that even
the language of overall resemblance and uncertain abstraction is still too
intellectualist to be able to express a logic that is performed directly in bodily
gymnastics, without passing through explicit apprehension of the aspects
chosen or rejected.27 Thus we are to think of Durkheimian primitive classication as primarily working not at the level of the mind, but at that of
the body constituted as an analogical operator establishing all kinds of
practical equivalences among the different divisions of the social world by
virtue of its postures, its reactions, and gymnastics.28
190 Paul Redding
II. The Elements of Practical Logic in Bourdieu and Hegel

Bourdieu acknowledges that the notion of habitus is familiar from the work
of authors as different as Hegel, Husserl, Weber, Durkheim and Mauss.29
In particular Hegel employed the notion in an attempt to break with Kantian
dualism and to reintroduce the permanent dispositions that are constitutive
of realized morality (Sittlichkeit), as opposed to the moralism of duty.30 Indeed,
Bourdieu draws attention to the relevance of Hegels analyses for his own
analyses of the life forms of pre-modern societies articulated by a logic of
practice. For example, Hegel, he notes, had a very acute intuition of the
concrete liberty as being at home (bei sich sein) in what is characterising
those stable and relatively undifferentiated societies, a liberty arising from
the quasi-perfect coincidence between habitus and habitat, between the schemes
of the mythic vision of the world and the structure of domestic space, for
example, organised according to the same oppositions, or between expectations
and the objective chances of realizing them.31 On examination, Bourdieus
binaried and body-centred logic of practice bears striking similarities to the
categorial structure of the logic that Hegel takes as structuring immediate
or non-reective cognition. At issue here is Hegels distinctive approach to
what he called determinate negation, an idea that had its origins in elements
of Kants thought, which did not survive the neo-Kantian interpretation.
Like Kant, Durkheim had thought of categories as concepts that somehow
contributed to the pre-structuring of experience, but it is clear that what he
had understood by this notion was not what Kant had intended. The most
obvious difference here concerned Durkheims belief that a cultures categorical
structure derived from its social structure: the classication of things he
claimed, reproduces the classication of men,32 while Kant (somewhat like
Lvi-Strauss) held the categories to be universal.33 In this sense Durkheims
thought was, in being more culturalist and historicist, more Hegelian than
Kantian. But equally importantly, Durkheim ignored Kants crucial distinction
between structurally different forms of representation. For Kant, the categories
were concepts that were so basic to cognition that they were presupposed by
all meaningful experience and therefore could not be acquired from experience.
But Kant distinguished concepts, qua general representations applied in judgements, from intuitions, which were singular and immediate representations,
providing particular experiential contents to which concepts were applied. In
Kants taxonomy, space and time were a priori (or pure) intuitions, not
concepts, in contrast to categories such as causality. Durkheim, however,
counted space and time together with causality as among the categories. In
conating Kants intuition-concept distinction in this way, Durkheim was
here simply following his neo-Kantian contemporaries who had abandoned
this distinction, by eliminating intuition and identifying all representations
as conceptual.
Like other post-Kantians in the decades following the appearance of Kants
critical philosophy, Hegel too had been critical of Kants intuition-concept
distinction, but his transformation of Kant here had been very different to
that of the late nineteenth-century neo-Kantian elimination of intuition. For
Kant, the a priori synthetic truths of geometry and arithmetic were grounded
in the form of pure intuition of space and time, but Hegel describes the space
of geometry so conceived as the existence in which the Concept [Begriff ]
inscribes its differences as in an empty lifeless element, in which they are just
as inert and lifeless.34 For Kant, what is peculiar about the structure of space
and time qua form of intuition concerns their singularity and immediacy, but
from Hegels point of view, this Kantian approach to geometry abstracts
from the fact that it is the Concept which divides space into its dimensions
and determines the connections between and within them.35
There is another way of thinking of the Kantian structures of space and time,
however, as both exhibit ego-centric polar oppositions: I understand space
as organised around me in terms of the three sets of polar opposites frontback, up-down, and left-right, and I similarly understand time as organised
around me in terms of the opposition future and past. Moreover, in some late
pre-critical writings before his postulation of the intuition-concept distinction,
Kant had thought of spatial and temporal representations in just this way
and characterised them in terms of the peculiar type of negation existing
between their concepts. This negation or opposition he called real negation,
and he contrasted it with the negation that resulted from the denial of a
concepts applicability to an object, logical negation.36 That is, Kant there
seemed to conceive of space in terms of the egocentric polarly opposed concepts.
In his account of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason the same
distinction between these two different senses of negation is manifest in
the three judgement forms corresponding to the three categories of quality:
192 Paul Redding
afrmative, negative, and innite,37 and it is this third judgement form

that gives the clue to the origin of Kants concept of real negation: the notion
of the indenite form of judgement found in Aristotelian and medieval
logic.38 While in the tradition of propositional logic originating with the Stoics,
negation was an operation applying to a complete sentence or proposition,
Aristotelian logic being a term logic, employed two different forms of negation: one could deny rather than afrm some predicate of a subjectdeny,
rather than afrm, say, that Socrates is beautifulor one could negate the term
predicated of a subject with its contraryafrm, say, that Socrates is ugly.39
Effectively, Hegel had adopted this taxonomy for representations, interpreting Kants real negation, the negation of innite judgement, as rst negation
and which works within the opposed conceptual determinations of being
logic.40 In contrast, logical negation was expressed in determinate negations
of the reective thought of what he called essence logic. In short, Kants
intuition-concept distinction became for Hegel a distinction within the order
of concepts, effectively between two different but interacting conceptual
systems. This in turn gave Hegels account greater exibility as these two
differently structured conceptual systems could interact in complex ways
allowing for historical change and development within representational
systems. It is just these determinate negations of Hegels being-logic that
turn up in the classicatory systems structured by polar oppositions that
Bourdieu inherited from Durkheim and Levi-Strauss and that he nds encodable in the spatial arrangements of the lived habitat.41
Bourdieus earliest ethnographic work had been concerned with the signicance
of the structuring of domestic spaces in the Berber culture of North Africa,
and he commonly commented on the parallelism between habitus and habitat
in such pre-modern cultures.42 That is, in pre-modern relatively undifferentiated
societies one nds a type of rough isomorphism between the structures of
Durkheimian social categories on the one hand and the organisation of physical
space on the other. For his part, Hegel in the Philosophy of History had commented on the principle of beautiful individuality structuring the world of
the Greek polis. As Kant had regarded beauty as brought about by the harmony of the spatio-temporal unities of the imagination and the conceptual
unities of the understanding, that is, the harmony of the faculties that Hegel
regarded as the immediate and reective functions of cognition, Hegels idea
seems to point to a similar feature of pre-modern societies. It was this harmony

that made the members of such community feel at home in the world, but
the same harmony was, he thought, disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of reection:
Anaxagoras himself had taught that Thought itself was the absolute Essence
of the World. And it was in Socrates, that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian
War, the principle of subjectivityof the absolute inherent independence of
thoughtattained free expression. . . . The Greeks had a customary morality;
but Socrates undertook to teach them what moral virtues, duties, etc. were.
The moral man is not he who merely wills and does that which is right
not the merely innocent manbut he who has the consciousness of what
he is doing. . . . The rise of the inner world of Subjectivity was the rupture
with the existing Reality. Though Socrates himself continued to perform his
duties as a citizen, it was not the actual State and its religion, but the world
of Thought that was his true home.43
Socratic thought, which inquires into reasons underlying all claims, draws
thought contents into a differently structured realm of relations, and utilises
the resources of essence logic. On Hegels account, it was not until the modern
world, with the development of market-based relations of civil society, that
stable social practices and institutions emerged that were capable of sustaining this abstractly universal form of subjectivity pre-gured in the character of the reective, questioning Socrates, and integrating it into social life.
Civil society had differentiated out of the immediately family-based practices
and institutions that structured the pre-modern world, resulting in two opposed
forms of modern Sittlichkeit, the modern private family, on the one hand, with
its immediate, affect-involving social bonds, and the mediated relations holding between abstractly individuated individuals recognised as bearers of universal rights on the other. For Hegel, these two opposed modes of ethical life,
or Sittlichkeit, operated as contexts for distinct cognitive and moral styles,
again marked by immediacy and mediation or reection respectively.44 In
turn these two forms of Sittlichkeit and the cognitive styles accompanying
them were meant to be integrated (aufgehoben) by a process of mediation in
the unifying institutions of the state.
Although it did not come to nd adequate institutional support for millennia,
Hegel had effectively regarded the development of reective thought as an
194 Paul Redding
invention of the Greeks, and his account here is close to Bourdieus appeal
to the skhol. The development of the practice of Socratic asking after grounds
was clearly closely related that of dialectic, and Hegel relates reective forms
of thought back to the argumentative practices of the Sophists.45 Thus we
might think of the practice of dialectic as a Bourdieuan scholastic language
game in which each player tries to catch out their opponent in contradictions,
each game requiring the players to keep track of what Robert Brandom refers
to as the inferential commitments of their opponents.46 In turn, the development of logic starting with Aristotle can be regarded as the attempt to nd
the underlying universal patterns within such inferential relations. This type
of reective turn made possible by the Bourdieuan skhol opened the possibility
for unprecedented degrees of critical reection upon the existing structures
of belief and practiceeffectively creating the possibility of enlightened
public life that later started to emerge in eighteenth-century Europe. Beliefs
and practices that had played a functional role in the reproduction of everyday
life could now be made to answer the question of their justication, and to
the logic of practice was now added an opposed logic of propositional coherence.
III. Spheres of Sittlichkeit as Cognitive Contexts

As spheres of modern Sittlichkeit, the family and civil society are educative
realms within which agents culturally transmitted second natures are
acquired. For Hegel, as for Durkheim, social relations require that agents
recognise each other in terms of the social categories articulating society. And
just as Durkheim distinguished between the mechanical and organic forms
of social cohesion distinguishing traditional from modern societies,47 Hegel
utilised the idea of differently structured realms of recognitive interaction to
account for qualitative differences between these educative processes and their
productsthe types of knowing and acting subjects produced. Hegels suggestions in the Philosophy of Right as to the difference in cognitive styles,
although brief, are consistent with his systematic approach to cognitive function
in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Logic. The family is the context in
which agents are inducted into the processes of immediate cognition. It is a
realm continuous with pre-modern society, a realm into which the Durkheimian
world of mechanical solidarity has shrunk. Modern civil society, in contrast,
is that in which they are inducted into the practices of reective cognition.
Within the context of the family, education (Bildung) raises the child out of
the singularity of its immediately givenhere naturalstate into an immediate
and concrete realm of objective spirit structured by its recognitive interactions.
Here substantial unity prevails over subjective differences, and the educative
process is focused on the transmission of an immediate and substantial content:
parents, says Hegel, constitute (ausmachen) the universal and essential elements
of things for their children,48 and the ethical is to be given to the children in
the form of feeling and without opposition.49 We might say that by being
born into a family the child becomes the inheritor of certain common ways
of making sense of and living in the worldsome set of criteria, transmitted
by the parents by both word and, crucially, deed, for governing the childs
behaviour towards those things.
In discussing feeling as that which mediates the relations within the family
Hegel clearly regards it as the vehicle of a type of intentional orientation to
the world in which the subjects orientation towards things and others has a
non-reective and immediate character. Such an intentional analysis of feeling
brings out the element of implicit conceptuality involved in the determination
of that intentional contentone loves ones father as a father, ones sister as
a sister, and so on. Such categories are clearly not simply descriptive but also
action-guiding: there are denite conventionally encoded ways to treat
fathers, sisters and so on. And added to the generally asymmetrical bipolarity
of these categories (wife-husband, sister-brother, mother-daughter, and so on)
is their egocentricity: my father exists for me immediately just as father
not a father (an instance of an abstract universal who also happens to be mine).
While clearly there is an element of conceptuality involved (my father behaves
and is behaved towards as a father) it does not, Hegel says, subsume the
individual as mere instance of that category. This is the world of the articulated
particularity of Durkheimian categories of primitive classication and Kantian
real oppositionthe world articulated by Hegels being-logic, and it is the
world to which the modern public world, civil-society, stands opposed.
Civil society, says Hegel, provides a second context for the education of individuals from out of the immediacy and natural simplicity characterising
the identity received in the family,50 and Bourdieu too notes how the acquisition
of the specic dispositions demanded by a eld depends on how new
entrants bring in dispositions previously constituted within a socially situated
196 Paul Redding
family group.51 Essentially this form of education means that their theoretical
and practical intentionality is developed in the direction of an objective
movement away from the local, perspectival and immediately evaluative
culture and thought. Because agents here have to take into consideration a
range of others who do not share their perspectives, satisfaction of their own
ends will be achieved only in so far as they themselves determine their
knowledge, volition, and action in a universal way and make themselves
members in this articulated sequence.52 This is the world of formal equality
and material disparity. Here, structural inequalities of power can become
invisible because the ubiquity of parallel habitus and habitat has been broken.
Modern civil society is the material condition for the existence of science.
While simple qualitative perception grasps the singular thing as an immediate
instantiation of some familiar universal, in the type of judgement that exists
within the new discursive space of justication, the object is determined in
terms of some underlying, essential and initially non-apparent universal.
Such properties are dispositional ones that require the mediation of a third
object for their manifestation. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes how
the arableness of land is expressed only in the context of our planting of crops,53
while in the Encyclopaedia Logic he gives as an example the property of being
curative predicated of certain plants.54 It is this same appeal to some mediating
third object which likewise is what characterises the structure of the sorts of
recognitive interactions at the heart of the realm of civil societythe mutually equilibrating commodities of free market exchange.
With its distinctive outlook, then, it is not surprising that modern civil society should give rise to a scientic account of its own functioningAdam
Smiths science of political economy, one of the sciences which have originated in the modern age and for which the modern age supplies the foundation or ground [Boden].55 Hegel is in no way dismissive of such empirical
social science, noting that political economys capacity to discover the necessity at work in the eld of economically interacting individuals does credit
to thought. What he objects to is its hypostatisation beyond the reective form
of modern life found in civil society, to other spheres such as the family and
the state itself. Hegels attitude to Smith thus effectively anticipates that of
Bourdieu to Lvi-Strauss, and Hegels epistemic contextualising of science
within civil society anticipates Bourdieus idea of a reexive sociology.
IV. Bourdieu Contra Hegel

Bourdieus move beyond the neo-Kantianism of structuralism involved a
Hegel-like appeal to the historical conditions of the skhol allowing the constitution of the social scientists own eld as a true object of scientic inquiry.
It is this that allows the social scientist to be reectively critical of her own
tendency to universalise her own reective form of subjectivity, and this
would appear to give a further decidedly Hegelian twist to Bourdieus peculiarly inected Kantianism. Kantian transcendental self-consciousness, one
might say, needs to become historical self-consciousness, and yet Bourdieu
resists the familiar historical relativism that often appears here. Social science, along with other sciences, is not just another discourse that has arisen
it is a form of rationality. Historical consciousness cannot, then, be seen to
terminate in what Hegel would regard as a formally universal point of view
which locates its own society as just one more instance of society abstractly
conceived, thereby relativising and so de-normativising its claims to knowledge. In our historical consciousness we must somehow return, from out of
our reected point of view, to ourselves. But such a return to self out of otherness is a familiar Hegelian image of what is called for. What then is it that
separates Bourdieus outlook from that of Hegel?
The most obvious reply here is the one that follows from Bourdieus claim
that Durkheim, Mauss and Lvi-Strauss, in instituting the science of the eld
of mythology, thereby broke with mythological thought itself. Lvi-Strauss,
it will be remembered, takes this mythological mode of thought as an object
instead of setting it to work, as native mythologists always do, in order to
provide a mythological solution to mythological problems.56 Hegel thought
of philosophy as consisting of the scientic (conceptual) treatment of the same
content that was otherwise given in mythologyreligion. From Bourdieus
perspective, then, Hegels philosophy will look like a setting to work of
myth rather than a breaking with ita diagnosis that largely repeats that of
Marx for whom Hegels philosophy, like all philosophy, was really an instance
of religious thought rather than a scientic break with it.
Regarded as mythology philosophy would thereby do the work of all mythologies of grounding in reason the arbitrary divisions of the social world, and
especially of the division of labour, and thus of providing a logical or
198 Paul Redding
cosmological solution to the problem of the classication of humans.57 Hegel,

then, is surely the exemplication of that philosopher-king who, by assigning
them an essence, claims to enjoin them to be and to do what it behooves
them by dint of such denition.58 We might think, for example, of Hegels
generation, from out of the resources of his logic, of the various social divisions
proper to the modern state. What Bourdieu calls for is a study of the historical
and social conditions underlying the epistemological breaks allowing the
irruptions of reason, but while Hegel appears to historicise philosophy, what
we get is philosophy rather than history, that is, a mythology of thought rather
than thought about thought:
Philosophy is identied with its history not in order to reduce it to the historical history of philosophy, less to history as such, but so as to annex history to philosophy, making the course of history an immense course in
philosophy . . . The philosophical history of philosophy is a re-appropriation
that is performed in and through a selective, unicatory awakening of
consciousness which supersedes and conserves the principles of all the
philosophies of the past. As an Erinnerung it is a theoretical redemption, a
theodicy, which saves the past by integrating it into the ultimate and therefore
eternal present of absolute knowledge.59
Read in this way, history as the process of development and the realization
of Spirit is, as Hegel states at the conclusion of his lectures on the Philosophy
of History, the true Theodica,60 because it is an account of Gods selfactualisation. Hegels dehistoricisation of history is thus a consequence of the
globally enframing subjectivism of his approach: all of Hegels social and psychological insights (which Bourdieu clearly appreciates as insights) are ultimately contextualised, he thinks, within a theocentric metaphysical monism
telling the story of the development of a cosmic self-consciousness distributed
over the consciousnesses of individuals and groups regarded as its vehicle.
On this view of Hegels philosophy, the categorial structures studied by
Durkheim and Lvi-Strauss or those more reective structures found in the
elds of science constituted after Bachelardian breaks, are not merely the categories within which the experiences and judgements of particular embodied
subjects are shaped, they are the categories for the thought processes of a
divine thought thinking itself.61 Thus Bourdieu notes of Hegel that the
necessary sequence of philosophies, which is that of Mind developing accord-
ing to its own law, has primacy over the secondary relationship between the
various philosophies and the societies from which they arose.62
Recently, however, readings of Hegel have become available which refuse the
traditional understanding presupposed here.63 While diverse, such readings
share a common commitment to a view of Hegel as a post-Kantian. That is,
they see Hegel as a thinker who radicalised Kants own critique of dogmatic
metaphysics but moving Kantianism beyond a set of residual dogmatically
metaphysical, and so essentially mythological, binaries constituting its
eldin particular, Kants distinction between appearance and thing-initself. My suggestion here is that the shape of Hegelianism so understood
does indeed bear remarkable similarities to Bourdieus own way beyond the
limitations of neo-Kantianism.
On this non-metaphysical, post-Kantian reading of Hegel, the categorical
structures found in non-differentiated pre-modern societies on the one hand,
and modern societies on the other, should not be thought of as stages in the
development of some single subjectneither the God of traditional rightHegelian theological interpretation, nor the universalised human subject of
left-Hegelian anthropological or humanist interpretation. From the perspective of a non-metaphysical conception of spirit, what is actualised in
history is the complex of recognitively mediated conditions adequate to human
freedom. While all social existence is for Hegel founded on recognitive relations,
not all forms of society allow freedom to the same extent. The Greek enlightenment introduced the type of reective orientation to life allowing the
progressive rationalisation of social existence, but it was only with the
differentiation from the immediate structures of social life of the reective
and reciprocal forms of recognition of modern social institutions that such
rationalising processes could be universalised. But it is not as if the abstractly
universalised aspect of human subjectivity developed in modernity represents
the owering of some human essence.
Hegel recognised that these structures cannot be effectively lived in isolation
from the more immediate forms of recognition, and so in his account of the
structure of the modern state he attempted to mediate the reective structures of civil society with the more immediate ones of the family. What the
principle of subjectivity allows is, rather, a continuing critical transformation
200 Paul Redding
of the elements shaping lived immediacy such that pre-reective life can
become compatible with a social existence in which all rather than some
or one can be free. It is within these structures of modernity that a place
emerges for the Bourdieuan reexive sociologist who provides empirical
social existence with the conceptual rather than mythical description that
makes possible what Frederick Neuhouser has referred to as an immanent
yet substantive critical transformation of the institutions of modern society.64
On the other hand, this all only makes sense for Hegel against the background of the demand that history be interpreted philosophically as the realm
in which the essence of spiritphilosophys successor notion to religions
notion of godis actualised. Without that Bourdieu, from Hegels point of
view, could only resist the relativism that threatens post-structuralism with
a dogmatic afrmation of the rationality of science. The real difference
between Bourdieu and Hegel would seem come down to the relation between
historical and philosophical modes of explanation.65
Notes
1
See, for example G. Bachelard, pistmologie; textes choisis par Dominique Lecourt,
2e d. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1974, and G. Canguilhem, tudes
dHistoire et de Philosophie des Sciences, Paris, Vrin, 1979.
C. Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966, chap. 9.
C. Lvi-Strauss, Rponses quelques questions, Esprit, no. 322, Nov. 1963,

p. 663.
Durkheim is generally thought to have been most inuenced by the neo-Kantianism

of Charles Renouvier and mile Boutroux. See S. Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life
and Work, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1973, pp. 54-7. For an interpretation
which stresses the neo-Kantian aspects of Bourdieus approach see the introduction
to Derek Robbins, Pierre Bourdieu, London, Sage, 2000, vol. 1.
Bourdieu refers to his article on the Kabyle house written in 1963 (The Berber
House or the World Reversed, Social Science Information, IX, vol. 2, 1970) as perhaps
his last work written as a blissful structuralist. P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice,
trans. R. Nice, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990, p. 9.
Bourdieus approach shows features in common with the work of Foucault and
other post-structuralists, but it is distinguished by maintaining the more positive
orientation to science characteristic of the work of the earlier structuralists.

7
Translated as Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge, Cambridge

For example, in Robbins, Pierre Bourdieu, p. xiv.
Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 37.
10
Ibid., p. 94.
11
P. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000,

p. 15.
12
Ibid., p. 12.
13
E. Durkheim and M. Mauss, Essai sur quelques formes Primitives de Classication,

LAnne Sociologique, vol. 6, 1903, pp. 1-72.
14
15
Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, ch. 5.
16
Ibid., p. 18.
17
Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 5.
18
Thus the degree of coherence demanded of those symbolic systems expressed in

mythical products and required for practice need then be no greater than that of
the practices they inform. If ritual practices and representations are practically
coherent, this is because they arise from the combinatorial functioning of a small
number of generative schemes that are linked by relations of practical substitutability, this is, capable of producing results that are equivalent in terms of the
logical requirements of practice. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 94.
19
20
Ibid., p. 210.
21
G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek

Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1966.
22
23
For the signicance of such polarities in the perpetuation of sexual inequality see
P. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. R. Nice, Stanford, Stanford University
Press, 2001.
24
Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, pp. 87-88.
25
Ibid., p. 53.
26
Ibid., p. 68.
27
Ibid., p. 89.
28
Thus, for example, Bourdieu speaks of bodily dispositions as political mythology

realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing,
speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking. The opposition between
male and female is realized in posture, in the gestures and movements of the body,
in the form of the opposition between the straight and the bent, between rmness,
202 Paul Redding

uprightness and directness (a man faces forward, looking and striking directly at
his adversary), and restraint, reserve and exibility. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice,
pp. 69-70.
29
P. Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reexive Sociology, Cambridge, Polity

Press, 1990, p. 12.
30
Ibid.
31
Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 147.
32
Durkheim, Essai sur quelques formes Primitives de Classication, p. i.
33
This aspect of Durkheims divergence from Kant is explored in W. Schmaus,

Rethinking Durkheim and His Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2004.
34
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University

Press, 1977, 45.
35
Ibid.
36
In particular, in the 1763 paper, Attempt to introduce the concept of negative

magnitudes into philosophy, in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770,
trans. & eds. D. Walford & R. Meerbote, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1992, pp. 203-241.
37
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. & eds. P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1998, A70/B95. The category corresponding to innite
judgement is limitation.
38
Aristotle, De Interpretatione, trans. H. P. Cooke, in The Loeb Classical Library: Aristotle

1, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1938, chap. 7.
39
These, of course, are not equivalent. Denying Socrates is beautiful does not imply
that he is uglyhe may be neither. For an invaluable comprehensive review of
the nature and fate of Aristotles account of negation see Laurence R. Horn, A
Natural History of Negation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989, especially
chapters 1 & 2. Thus Horn points out that for Aristotle there is strictly speaking
no external, propositional negation as such, but two syntactically and semantically
distinct types of internal negation, ibid., p. 21. Much of my general orientation
towards the changing role of negation in the history of logic here owes much to
his analysis.
40
In the Encyclopaedia Logic Hegel describes the rst negation as that in which only
the determinacy of the universal predicate is negated: The rose is not red implies
that it does have some colourobviously some other colour, which when identied would be just another positive judgement (G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia
Logic: Part I of the Encycopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zustze, trans.
T. F. Geraets, W. A. Sutching & H. S. Harris, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1991, 173).

41
The member of the Durkheim school who most explicitly pursued the issue of
spatial polarity in primitive classication systems was Robert Hertz in his classic
paper on the role of right-left polarity, Le Prminence de la main Droite: tude sur
la Polarit Religieuse, Revue Philosophique, vol. 68, 1909.
42
See, for example, the quote above at footnote 31.
43
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, New York, Dover, 1956, p. 269.
44
I develop this point is developed in Hegels Hermeneutics, Ithaca, Cornell University

Press, 1996, chap. 9.
45
Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 268.
46
R. B. Brandom, Making It Explicit, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1994.
47
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. G. Simpson. New York,
The Free Press, 1933. Durkheims use of the metaphors of mechanical and organic
should not be confused with the rather different (and in some ways, reversed)
uses to which they were put by romantic social theorists in Hegels time, and on
which Hegel drew.
48
G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge,
49
Ibid., 175.
50
Ibid., 187 Anmerkung.
51
52
Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 187, translation modied.
53
Ibid., 61 Zusatz.
54
Ibid., 174, Zusatz.
55
Ibid., 189 Anmerkung.
56
57
Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 180.
58
Ibid.
59
60
Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 457.
61
Hegel appeals to Aristotelian gure of thought thinking itself (from Metaphysics,
Cambridge University Press. 1991, 174 Zusatz.
book 12) at the conclusion to his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

62
63
See especially the important works of Robert Pippin (Hegels Idealism: The Satisfactions
of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989 and Idealism
as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997)
and Terry Pinkard (German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2002). I have argued for a similarly post-Kantian
reading in Hegels Hermeneutics.
204 Paul Redding

64
F. Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegels Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom, Cambridge,

Harvard University Press, 2000.
65
An earlier version of this paper was presented at a seminar on Hegel and

Social Critique at the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) annual
conference, December 2004, at Macquarie University, Sydney. I wish to thank other
participants at the session, and in particular, Jay Bernstein, John Grumley, and
Simon Lumsden for helpful feedback, as I do also an anonymous referee for Critical
Horizons.
Simon Lumsden
Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative:
Jean-Luc Nancys Reading of Hegel1
ABSTRACT
This paper examines Jean-Luc Nancys interpretation of
Hegel, focusing in particular on The Restlessness of the
Negative. It is argued that Nancys reading represents a
signicant break with other post-structuralist readings of
Hegel by taking his thought to be non-metaphysical.The
paper focuses in particular on the role Nancy gives to
the negative in Hegels thought. Ultimately Nancys reading
is limited as an interpretation of Hegel, since he gives
no sustained explanation of the self-correcting function
of reason.
KEYWORDS: Hegel, Nancy, Reason, Negativity, Poststructuralism
I.
Heideggers interpretation of Hegel exerted
a powerful inuence on the way the key
gures in post-1968 French philosophy interpreted Hegel. Deleuze, Lyotard, Levinas, and
Derrida all, to varying degrees and in different
ways, interpreted Hegels thought as the pinnacle of the philosophy of presence. That interpretation has ranged from conceiving his
project in terms of an economy of totalisation
(Derrida), to seeing his thought as effecting,
through negation, opposition or contradiction
206 Simon Lumsden
the complete reduction of the empirical and singularity to mediated conceptual relations (Deleuze). What characterises all these interpretations of
Hegel is that they consider his project to be an essentially consumptive enterprise: consumptive of otherness, the empirical, difference and so on.
Throughout the career of Jean-Luc Nancy there has been a consistent engagement with the full spectrum of Hegels thought: religion, political philosophy,
ethical thought, philosophy of mind and Spirit and his logic. The early
concern with Hegel in The Speculative Remark2 and all the subsequent essays,
chapters and comments on Hegel recently culminated in a short work: Hegel:
the Restlessness of the Negative.3 In contrast to most of the other signicant
gures in what has come to be known as post-structuralism, Jean-Luc Nancy
has adopted a far more nuanced reading of Hegels thought. Rather than
reading sublation [Aufhebung], dialectic, negativity and reason as weapons in
the armoury of Spirits or the Concepts self-satisfaction, Nancy considers all
these notions through the lens of the negative. From this perspective these
central and inuential notions are in fact disruptive, restless and open. Rather
than focusing on Hegels speculative project as Spirits reconciliation with
itself, Spirit should, he argues, instead be seen as restless and genuinely postmetaphysical. There is no foundation to thought, no given; everything has
always already begun and is in motion. Understood in this way, he says:
Hegel is the opposite of a totalitarian thinker.4 Thought, Spirit, self and
meaning are all constantly being revised in the ongoing labour and turmoil
of their self-relation. Nancys style shares little in common with the stylistically restrained world of Hegel scholarship, nevertheless his overview of
Hegel, by shunning both the crudely metaphysical view of Spirit and rejecting the dialectic as the tool of totalisation, is in harmony with much of the
leading scholarship in Germany and the English speaking world.5 In both
cases they place at the centre of Hegels post-Kantian credentials his rejection
of the given.
Nancy has written extensively on loss: of community, of a foundation for
knowledge, of sense and so on. Despite the pervasiveness of this theme in
his writing he is not seeking a new unity or reconciliation, but rather he sees
in the very idea of loss something of the movement of thought itself. In
Hegels thought he nds the rst thinker to embrace alienation as the mark
Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative 207
of the liberation of human thought from the given. Hegels thought explicitly
engages with and embraces the instability of thought. Rather than seeing that
instability in the service of a presupposed plan, which is how the dialectic
had often been represented, Nancy presents the power of the negative as
thoughts self-transformation. Thought is constantly unsettled, it rethinks its
ground and is aware that thought itself is groundless, because reason itself
is the exigency of the unconditional.6 Reason in this case cannot appeal to
anything beyond itself for justication, but this does not mean that reason
has somehow then become the already expressed and satised absolute, rather
it means that reason must explain its own self-determining capacity. In Hegels
case there is a self-consciousness that this process is innite, that thoughts
self-grasping is its own self-surpassing.
This paper examines the self-surpassing character of Hegels thought. It
situates Hegels expression of the movement of thought in relation to Nancys
view of the negative and his idea of sense. It is argued that Nancy gives a
persuasive and evocative account of how Spirit transforms itself. The movement of Spirit and thought is possible only because of two key features of
Hegels thought: the rejection of the given and the way Hegel overcomes the
concept-intuition dualism. Ultimately however, despite Nancys focus on
the negativity of thought, he is incapable of explaining both reasons selfcorrecting capacity and why Hegel conceives freedom as self-determination.
II. Modernity at Home with the Negative

Nancy argues that Hegel is the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world
since he liberates sense (a notion about which we shall have something to
say shortly, but which provisionally can be understood as meaning) from the
religious bond of a community.7 It might be argued that the Enlightenment
achieved the conceptualisation of this liberation much earlier. For Nancy,
however, the Enlightenment liberates sense and knowledge from the strictures
of religious orthodoxy and parochialism only to re-inscribe it again in the
nite totality of reason. While reason is presented as the saviour from prejudice,
the dogmatism of its rational method presents reason as an end in itself.
Whatever might be ones reservations about this as an interpretation of enlightenment reason, the innovation of Hegels thought, and why it represents a
208 Simon Lumsden
shift from the circumscribed domain of pre-Enlightenment communities, is

that knowledge cannot be considered, from the Hegelian perspective, as
meaningful totalities of reason or religion.
Hegel separates sense and knowledge from a nite, yet total organisational
system. Changes of knowledge within these systems are neither able to be
conceived as grounded in a transcendent domain nor by the internal coherence
of these knowledge systems. By collapsing the uniformity of reason and homogeneous traditional community as sources of meaning the criteria for grounding
the experience of self and world are thrown open, accordingly the uniformity
of community gives way to society. Civil society marks the emergence of a
society which knows itself as separated from itself.8 Hegel shifts the focus
from understanding itself to changes in collective self-understandings. Civil
society with its competing interests and representative institutions cannot
sustain any claim to the givenness of its meanings and values. Civil society
represents a self-consciousness of the instability of the way things come to
get their meaning.
What Hegel calls knowledge or science and absolute knowing, opens
modernity as the age of the world that can no longer posit the relation to
sense or truth as either immediate or mediate.9 Hegel transforms the notion
of truth by incorporating the process of truth-making itself into the very idea
of thought. His thought exposes the specic ways in which things come to
be meaningful. He examines the ways in which the categories that allow
experiences are developed. His thought opens modernity and thinking itself,
since he realises that none of our objects, procedures, knowledge and so on
are ends in themselves. For Nancy, Hegels rejection of any appeal to the
given exposes us to a present that is unstable, as no ideal is posited for the
future and there is no nostalgia for the past to deliver a system of readymade meaning. In the modern world Hegel says: Spirit has not only lost its
essential life: it is also conscious of this essential loss, and of the nitude that
is its content.10 Modern society has lost the form of life that could be reconciled
with its faith and that allow it to identify unquestioningly with the norms of
its community.
Pre-modern society is characterised by the unreective manner in which its
subjects were at home in their world. They existed in a natural harmony
expressed in religion, culture and art. The idea of returning to this harmony
lost in the fall or returning in the aftermath of the emergence of modern society to some perceived unied world such as Hellas or a nature untainted by
alienation has been a persistent motif in modern cultural life. Reconciling
humans and world or even reconciling humans and the transcendent has
been a persistent theme of philosophy, and it is a metaphor that is central to
Hegels thought. While Hegel preserves the idea of what can be loosely translated as being at home [bei sich], in Hegels hands that quest because it embraces
the negative is not nostalgia. At rst sight it seems that the idea of home and
the destructive power of the negative seem incompatible. The way in which
this apparent tension can be reconciled is articulated clearly by Nancy. Hegels
idea of self, Nancy remarks, nds itself in its ordeal and by way of its restlessness, not in the solace of edifying discourse.11 Rather than reaching a
point at which the self is reected to itself in the world, the alienated self
instead nds itself at home in the very instability of thought itself. It does not
nd itself pre-empted in a metaphysical given. How this takes place is best
exemplied by exploring the way in which Hegels account of the conscious
subject in the Phenomenology of Spirit transforms itself through its attempts to
give an account of its knowledge of itself and world.
III. Selfhood and Negativity

Early modern attempts to conceive the character of selfhood consistently conceive it as an isolated individual. From Descartes to Locke a reective method
is employed to capture this individual idea of self. This reective method
involves the mind attempting to take notice of its own activity. The preferred
method of the foundational quest of early empiricism and rationalism was
limited to a self-focus, to an examination of ones own mental activity which
in turn was to provide a secure footing for knowledge, either by presenting
the appropriate faculties of the mind or by grounding knowledge on an indubitable rational fact such as the cogito.12 With Kant that entire strategy is cast
into doubt. The empiricist and rationalist accounts of knowledge and selfidentity were polarised between the diversity of representations given by the
senses and a unifying rational subject. Cognition rather than being grounded
on either receptivity or spontaneity came to be considered in Kants critical
writings as two aspects of the same knowing. Kant argued there is a continuity between representations, the content of representations and the subject
doing the experiencing. The synthetic activity that makes experience possible
210 Simon Lumsden
is a form of self-awareness that allows us to know that what is being experienced is our own. The unifying condition of experience Kant termed the
transcendental unity of apperception.13
Hegel in general is sympathetic to this strategy, in particular to the idea that
a central feature of any relation to an object or any experience requires a unifying self-relation. They differ in the status they give to the conditions that
are constitutive of experience. What Hegel objects to, among other things, is
the subjective character of the categories.14 Those categories (as well as notions
like autonomy) ought instead to be conceived in terms of a broader notion
Spiritrather than the spontaneity of the single subject. The categories have
to be objective if thought is not to be isolated from world. If they cannot be
shown to be objective we are lead straight back to the dualism of empiricism
and rationalism. It is not our concern here to examine the ways in which
Hegel recongures Kants transcendental categories. For our purposes, examining Nancys interpretation of Hegel, and in particular how he interprets
negativity in Hegels thought, it is useful to present briey how the natural
consciousness, the protagonist of the Phenomenology, unpacks, through its
experience, the conditions that allow its experience. Through this an increasingly complex picture of those conditions and categories is described.
From Hegels Jena writings onward his strategy had been to recongure the
character of our self-relation such that the conditions of knowing come to be
understood as self-determined. The path consciousness takes through the
Phenomenology is described most famously as the way of the Soul which
journeys through the series of its own congurations as though they were
the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for
the life of Spirit.15 This path of self-knowledge, in the case of the Phenomenology,
is not able to be limited to an inquiry of the self by the self. Consciousness
can only understand itself by seeing itself as other; in so doing it recognises
that its sense of self is the result of a very complex set of relations (intersubjectivity, family, Spirit, morality, religion, language and so on). It is only
when it understands itself in terms of these conditions that it will achieve
nally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really
is in itself.16 This completed experience of itself does not leave the individual
I intact. The natural consciousness comes to understand itself in relation to
and in fact in the [external] determinations that make possible its comprehension of itself and the world.
The Phenomenology evolves by a process of self-examination, and though this
is not the way natural consciousness itself experiences each moment of the
text, nevertheless, the movement is at the hands of the natural consciousness.
What natural consciousness dogmatically asserts as the truth of the object is
shown to be limited. The natural consciousness itself corrects its own truth
claims; in the correction what was taken to be true is sublated. This process
builds an increasingly comprehensive account of the way in which consciousness experiences objects. What the Phenomenology will show is that the
meaningful relation of consciousness to the world is only possible because
consciousness is implicitly self-transcending. Consciousness and its relation
to itself and its objects, is determined by a conceptual horizon that necessarily transcends the singularity of consciousness. The path of the Phenomenology
leads consciousness beyond itself.
This negative and self-transcending movement of Hegels account of the conscious subject is emphasised in Nancys reading of Hegel:
The Hegelian subject is not to be confused with subjectivity as a separate
and one-sided agency for synthesizing representations, or with subjectivity
as the exclusive interiority of a personality. . . . In a word the Hegelian subject is in no way the self all to itself. It is, to the contrary . . . what (or the one
who) dissolves all substance.17
The character of its self-relation is one of dissatisfaction with the conditions

that mediate and allow its experience. In order to examine and verify these
conditions they must be broken apart from the whole and then appropriated
explicitly by consciousnessthis is the labour of the negative. Nancy embraces
this self-transcending character of consciousness: self is precisely without
return to self; self does not become what it already is: becoming is becoming
being outside of selfbut such that this outside, this ex-position, is the very
being of the subject.18
Two issues emerge from this passage: rstly it is clear that the metaphysical
picture of Hegel is completely abandoned by Nancy and the second is the
role that negativity plays in abolishing any conception of the absolute as
212 Simon Lumsden
given. For Nancy, the chapters of the Phenomenology disclose, in various forms
or shapes of consciousness, increasingly complex forms of self-relation.
Consciousnesss self-relation and its judgements of experience come to be
mediated through community, art, religion, language and so on. Hegel does
not begin the Phenomenology by attempting to delineate what the self or consciousness is. It is only with the progressive unfolding of what appears to
be external to consciousness that its self-relation is in fact understood. The
Phenomenology as we have seen moves forward by a process of consciousness
examination of its claims to know. Consciousness is transformed in this
process: it will no longer see itself as a subject engaging with an object that
is purely other. In comprehending both itself and the conditions for its knowing
relation to the world, consciousness is itself transformed. We can only gesture
toward understanding the way in which consciousness relation to itself and
the world are re-congured. What is at issue in this paper is the manner in
which the Phenomenology moves, in particular the role of negativity in that
movement. The trajectory of the Phenomenology involves a dislocation and
reconguration of the conscious subjects self-relation, such that consciousness
cannot be conceived as a self all to itself.19 For Nancy this disassembling
and unpacking undermines the stability of selfhood and this instability is its
experience.
IV. Experience
Nancy in the Experience of Freedom20 inects his account of experience with a
clearly Hegelian sensibility. In that work experience is conceived as trying
the self at the selfs border, the immediate testing of the limit which consists
in the tearing apart of the immediacy by the limit.21 Experience on this view
is understood as self-surpassing and self-examination. Conceived in this way
experience serves as a summary of the movement of the Phenomenology expressed
in the previous section. The transition from one position to another involves
nding the truth of the rst point in the other, so that experience is a constant
unsettling of thoughts and the conscious subjects own ground. This movement of constantly retreating into the ground and re-establishing the ground
is the work or labour of the negative. On Nancys reading, Hegel explicitly
distances his project from one that appeals to knowledge or faith. What Hegel
calls knowledge is no longer positioned in relation to the given but rather
is open to the instability of becoming. . . . The point of the present is neither

to be believed nor known it is to be experienced.22 The truth of thought shifts
from being grounded on the sensible content or the revelation of God or faith
to a notion of experience that opens consciousness to what is other to it and
in the process unsettles its own ground.23 The unsettled character of experience is expressed in the description of it in the Phenomenologys preface:
Experience is the name we give to just this movement, in which the immediate,24 the unexperienced, i.e. the abstract, whether it be of sensuous [but
still unsensed] being, or only thought of as simple, becomes alienated from
itself and then returns to itself from this alienation, and is only then revealed
for the rst time in its actuality and truth, just as it then has become a
property of consciousness also.25
Consciousness, once it tries to reect on either its knowing or its own self, is
driven beyond itself. It can, for example, only make judgements about or
reect on objects in the universal medium of thought. When I think about
what I am as a self, I reect upon my singularity, I am aware that I occupy
space and time. In this reection I experience myself, but in so reecting my
immediacy is eliminated, because in this reection I am communing with
and through the mediated conceptual realm of thought. This realisation is
unsettling as my singularity appears to be dissolved in the mediations of
conceptuality, but the realisation of the necessary relation of my thought to
the universal penetrates into both how meaning is necessarily framed and
results in a constant revision of ones self-understanding. The drive to understand itself collapses the limited platforms of self-understanding by which
consciousness had characterised experience, and this leads to constant revision
of its self-understanding.
Whatever is conned within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own
efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting entails its death. Consciousness, however, is
explicitly the Concept of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond
itself . . . Consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands; it spoils its
own limited satisfaction.26
214 Simon Lumsden
Consciousness wants each new shape of consciousness to be The Truth, but

it cannot rest with that new truth and simply accept this as true, as thought
troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia.27 Thought
and the categories that are the conditions for consciousnesss experience are
representative of Spirit, but they also constitute the subjects self-relation. The
conscious subjects experience is advanced by thought, because thought is
not simply the singular subjects but is part of Spirit. In this sense as Nancy
comments thought must take the self out of itself.28
V. The Negative
The history of philosophy might be understood as successive attempts to
express the absolute in various guises: the thing in itself, God, that all is
one, determinate nature and so on. The shapes of consciousness expressed
in the Phenomenology can be understood as those various attempts to think
the absolute, and the various chapters of the Phenomenology and especially the
preface all demonstrate various failures to think the absolute and thereby the
failure of reconciling self and world, through religion, the faculties of mind,
the correct tools of epistemology or scientic method and so on. All these
approaches are motivated to overcome the self-other relation. In Hegels case
this problem is overcome by conceiving the absolute as the self-originating
and self-differentiating Spirit.29 The crudely metaphysical reading of Hegel
largely conceived this self-producing spirit as able to reconcile mind and
world by reverting to a pre-Kantian metaphysics. On this view, Spirit can be
self-producing and self-differentiating because it is the expression of some
kind of divine intelligence.30 Nancy like much of the best scholarship on Hegel
in recent years completely distances his account from any metaphysical view
of Hegel that considers Spirit, thought or the concept as an expression of
some kind of spiritual, natural or rational given. Reason cannot appeal to a
transcendent realm of ideas such as a Platonic idea or a thing-in-itself; it must
instead be conceived as determining its own norms by virtue of a self-correcting
capacity. While Nancy would not refer to this movement as self-correction,
since his concern is with the openness of the movement of thought, the feature
that Nancy takes to be central to thoughts and Spirits self-producing and
self-differentiating capacity, a capacity that does not appeal to a metaphysical
foundation, is the negative.
One of the persistently critical readings of Hegel takes his thought to reinscribe instability in a dialectical system of contradiction and opposition. In
Difference and Repetition, for example, Deleuze presents Hegels dialectic as
replacing difference with a logic of mediation and double negation. Otherness
is transformed through a mediated relation into the image of a self-identical
subject or is dissolved as a determination of Spirit. All difference is appropriated to establish identity. Hegels account of difference, on this view, because
of the logic of the dialectic, excludes multiplicity.31 The dialectic is the annihilator of all difference and the subject comes to nd itself in and through
the other because Hegel presupposes its identication with the whole. Spirit
in this case is a giant coil of determinations rolling themselves out over time
in which the self slowly alienates itself and then through the dialectical
manoeuvres recovers the whole by seeing itself as an expression of the whole.
The self progresses to full self-consciousness only by a kind of metaphysical
tyranny of recognition in otherness.
Nancys account of the dialectical movement could not be more different: to
know oneself . . . is to be, concretely before the insufciency and incompletion
of the self, and by this very lack, to be in relation to the other . . . it is to be
already in movement, to become.32 What has been of concern here is to show
that the conception of consciousness that emerges in the Phenomenology
cannot be conceived as an individual, enduring entityconsciousness is both
self-producing and determined from without. The way in which consciousness
apprehends what is other to it is the key to understanding the relation of
consciousness to its conditions. It is in understanding the manner in which
consciousness grasps its objects that consciousness comprehends its own
self; only then are the determinate aspects of its relationship to itself and
other discernible. The subjects self-relation is continually re-established
through the other as the other is inscribed in the very conditions that allow
self-awareness. From the start, the subjects self-examination is inscribed with
the other as intersubjectivity. The self occupies a place in which its self-world
relation is constantly re-negotiated because as Nancy puts it: the world of
separation is that world in which the terms of a relation of senseterms such
as nature gods or communityare no longer given.33 Because of the preeminence of the dislocating power of the negative, sense is open and constantly transforming.
216 Simon Lumsden
We have seen the essential way in which Nancys reading of Hegel brings
out the relation between self and negativity. It is the energy of this subjects
investigation of its self-relation and knowledge claims that unfolds the determinations of thought and transforms the subject itself. The way I have described
the movement of the Phenomenology above, in particular the way in which
the character of human self-relation is expanded, tries to bring out the negative
character of consciousnesss journey. Through its experience consciousness
comes to understand the conditions of its self-consciousness and the categories
of its thought not as a faculty of mind or mental activity but rather as a selfrelation that always involves conditions, categories and so on that are largely
determined from without, by the play of forces that constitute Spirit. Its selfrelation is stripped of its straightforward identication of subject and object.
What emerges from Nancys reading of Hegel is that the restlessness and
force of the negative is the central feature of human thought and selfhood.
As will be discussed below, Nancys account of the negative ignores what is
for Hegel the unique quality of modern self-consciousness: that it comes to
be identied with a new way of considering reason. Reason does not have a
methodologically regulative role, but rather is the self-correcting capacity of
the concept of Spirit and the Idea. The motor of this self-correcting capacity
is the negative and it is intimately tied to the subjects own attempt to make
sense of itself and the world.
VI. Sense and Thought

The dualism of concept and intuition is arguably the single most important
conceptual division that post-Kantian philosophy sought to reconcile. Kants
thought had tried to reconcile the division between empiricism and rationalism arguing that intuition and the intellect were separate components of
a single knowledge. The intuitive component of cognition was responsible
for the reception of sensory information. The intellect shaped that sensory
manifold into meaning. For post-Kantian German idealism, this division of
responsibilities produced a fundamentally divided knowledge, since it was
still based on a division of mind and world. The crudely metaphysical reading of Hegel argues he resolved this dualism by reverting to a pre-Kantian
metaphysics, which effectively denied the intuitive by presenting the conceptual determinations that constitute the world and allowed human experience
of the world as the expression of a monistic spirit. In opposition to this view,

Nancy argues that Hegel preserves something like intuition but it is stripped
of its association with a given objective reality delivered through the senses.
There is considerable debate in the literature about exactly how to understand intuition once the nature of its opposition to conceptuality can no longer
be considered dichotomous.34 What is important for our understanding of
Nancys non-metaphysical reading of Hegel is that thought and the true cannot rely on something given to ground them, they are as Nancy describes
them wholly immanent: the world is only this world, it has no other sense . . .
(. . . it does not itself have a sense that would bring it to an end).35
The term sense has a technical meaning in Nancys thought. It is designed
to conceive of a non-metaphysical process of meaning creation; it evokes the
conceptual, intuitive and affective quality of thinking. Sense is also the term
he uses to translate Hegels central term Concept. The term sense is adopted
from Hyppolites interpretation of Hegel.36 In Hegel: The Restlessness of the
Negative and in Nancys other writings sense, echoing Hyppolites use of
the term, expresses the process of meaning creation in a way that does not
simply reduce sense to pure concepts, but includes the relation between sensibility and thought. His notion of sense attempts to think through meaning
at the level of Spirit. It evokes the movement of the negative and the self and
the meaning produced through that movement.
We can analyse this concept [of sense] as signication, understanding, meaning, and so forth. But what is implied, articulated and exploited in all these
analyses . . . cant simply be the concept of something that would stay put,
set within an exterior reality, without any intrinsic relation to its concept.37
The crucial feature of sense is that it grasps itself as sense, and is in fact produced in this very grasping itself: what makes sense about sense, what makes
it originate is that it senses itself making sense. . . . sense apprehends itself,
grasps itself as sense.38 There is in this way no surplus to sense, there is no
object as thing-in-itself that a concept is trying to express the truth of: its
concept and reference are indissociable.39 Sense is the self-consciousness of
the selfs and thoughts meaning making and sensing capacity and is the production of meaning and sense itself. Sense, as with Hegels Concept, refers
to the central philosophical distinction between sensibility and intelligibility.
218 Simon Lumsden
The Concept (and sense) preserves the tension between concept and intuition
and allows them to penetrate from one into the other.40 Nancy prefers the
notion of sense to Hegels Concept because it maintains the sensibility and
affectivity of the intuitive and the sensible while (as in the phrase: x makes
sense) it can also mean the conceptual or discursive. Sense does not collapse
intuition into concept but involves the constant movement of one into the
other. That tension is central to thoughts self-advancement or self-production.
In order to understand this self-transforming capacity of sense (or of thought
and the Concept in Hegels terminology), the key features of the dialectical
movement, the features that give them their characteristic restlessness, have
to be sketched: reason and the understanding. This will also help us to see
ultimately the limitations of Nancys project of taking the heart of Hegels
project to be governed by the negative. For Nancy, the movement of sense is
achieved by thinking the limits of its meaning, pulling apart claims to know
and to understand. Thinking requires that it touches on its own limit and
its own singularity.41 In Hegels technical language it is the understanding
[Verstand] that pushes the limit, it holds a position and asserts its truth. It
functions as an abstract understanding that categorises and holds onto a position until the bitter end. But the limit of the understanding is that while it
can explore a determination of thought or a claim to know in detail and with
conviction, it cannot see the limit of its claim. It is reason that reconciles
differences and functions as the motor of thoughts self-correcting capacity.
Reason is, at least in part, the source of the instability, as it is dissatised with
any claim to know. Reason can only be dissatised because it appeals to determinations or signicances that are beyond the limits of the posited position.42
It is this movement that reason effects that gives Hegels texts (and Spirit)
their characteristically self-correcting quality. The self-correcting capacity of
reason is however ignored by Nancy.
Nancy conceives sense, and by implication Spirit, as a domain of meaning
or meaning potential that can be appealed to or drawn from through the
dynamism of the negative, through its constant self-transformation. Thinking
relates to itself through the other but its self-producing and self-discriminating
capacities cease once the other is identied with the same. This identication
is never complete as there is part of sense that resists, reinstates [sense], and
opens it once again.43 That part of sense is, as we have seen, reason. Nancy
provides a progressive account of the restlessness of the negative and a persuasively non-metaphysical reading of Hegels speculative project. Hegels
idea of thought, Nancy remarks, consists in passing into the element of the
speculativewhich designates for Hegel the relation of ideality to itself insofar as it wrests itself away from every given.44 However, the crucial issue is
exactly why reason is dissatisedwhy thought moves forward, why does
it wrest itself away from every given? What remains difcult to determine
on Nancys account is why the various positions held and the determinations expressed come to be seen as insufcient and how they are then redetermined.
Nancy contrasts his interpretation of sense with the traditional view of Hegel:
Hegel has often been read as if he exhibited the auto-development of an
anonymous subject or reason, foreign to us, the big other of an autistic self.45
The truth revealed by the movement of the negative should in contrast to
this view be understood as one in which truth nds or happens upon itself
as us.46 The absolute, truth and sense only have sense between us, precisely because of the unrest of the self. The self hovers outside of itself with
others and between us: the absolute is this self-transforming instability.
Nancy concludes that the absolute is in the passage of sense: as the interval of time, between us, in the eeting and rhythmic awakening of a discrete
recognition of existence.47 The absolute is meaningful only because of us
and for us and in the movement of and between selves: Each with others,
each near the others: the near of the absolute is nothing other than our near
each other.48 In this case the movement of sense is achieved not because of
some given character of reason but is embodied in the restlessness of the self
and the self-other relation; what is between us is the sharing of singularities
in movement.49 The consequence of this unrest is a persistent questioning
of the xity of our claims to know. That movement involves exposing us to
ourselves, dislocating ourselves and our self-certainty.
What this account leaves unexplored is the way in which the transformation
of sense or the Concept is actually achieved. Nancy is clear that the movement
of sense involves overcoming limits, which means mediating and collapsing
determinations. He remarks that sense is not given: it is the demand that it
be given. . . . Sense must interrogate itself anew . . . it must make demands on
itself, call to itself, ask itself, want itself, desire itself, seduce itself as sense.50
220 Simon Lumsden
However, without some kind of criteria for establishing the grounds of the
evaluation or the interrogation, then the reective capacity of Spirit and of
ourselves is restricted to a recognition of the restlessness of the negative. This
fails then to establish the concrete ways in which, for Hegel, reasons role is
that of evaluating our concepts, norms and commitments.
Nancy gives a more comprehensive picture of Spirit and experience than
those for whom Spirit is really nothing more than the normative commitments
that we hold ourselves to and for which others also make us accountable.51
Spirit and reason are more than an intersubjectively constituted process of
commitment making, nevertheless an important part of the sociality of sense
and Spirit is giving reasons and holding each other to account for our actions
and our reasons. What we need from Nancy is more than just the realisation
that we are part of an ungrounded Spirit but that this realisation involves
a developmental trajectory that appreciates the full implications of selfdetermination: how we come to understand ourselves in terms of those rules,
conditions and so on that we have deliberatively, that is intersubjectivity
determined. Nancy does claim that [Freedom] is indeed autonomy, but the
law it gives itself is precisely itself: it therefore gives itself the law to have
no law.52 In Nancys case he associates the law with the understanding and
freedom with the negative. In so doing he divides the understanding and
reason. Hegels notion of a self-determining subject is bound to both these
notions. This restricted interpretation of autonomy, as the rejection of the
given, betrays the fundamental limitation of Nancys Hegel interpretation.
Autonomy and freedom are more than expressions of a self-transformative
power, that transformation involves commitments to laws and norms and
those commitments are mediated through our relations with others and institutions. This is where Hegel differentiates himself from Kant as the self-determining subject is on Hegels account unable to be conceived in isolation from
its sociality, indeed self-determination is only possible with the emergence of
civil society and modern forms of government. The Concept is developed in
and through social and institutional relations. The norms that dene our selfunderstanding, as Nancy makes clear, cannot reect some grand divine being
but are developed through a complex and self-evolving set of relations that
are always more than we can say of them and that is why things keep transforming.53 Nevertheless, how we come to consider ourselves in the specic
ways that we do is because of determinate weaknesses in previous claims,

for example, as to how freedom should be considered and how it is practically realised. In order to understand ourselves we need a story that explains
why we come to take those earlier claims and realisations of freedom to be
insufcient.
In Nancys case freedom is identied exclusively with the movement of the
negative, he remarks that freedom is the position of negativity as such.54
But Hegelian freedom must involve more than recognising that nothing is
given, it must be understood as self-determining. One needs a story as to
why one comes to identify with certain norms as adequate, why one would
act as if one were their author and so on. Nancy does not give an account of
the determinate path by which we come to understand ourselves in the specic
ways that we do and why we act freely only if we act as if we were the
authors of those laws, even though in Hegels case that identication and
authorisation is mediated through social relations and democratic institutions.
Without an account of the complex process by which norms are rejected,
modied and transformed by reason and then embodied in our actions,
Nancys restless negative runs the risk of making the negative another version
of a metaphysical Spirit. In Nancys examination of the negative, how things
come to be re-determined or rethought and the commensurate changes in
self-understanding that result from this process are left unexplained beyond
asserting that their source is the negative. What is needed is more than an
examination of the instability of thought. If the role of reason is neglected in
the transformation and openness of sense then the negative that Nancy takes
to be the dening feature of Spirit takes on a strongly ontological value that
threatens to undermine the very revival of Hegel that he wants to effect.
Notes
1
The research project of which this paper is a part was funded by an Australian
Research Council post-doctoral fellowship. Thanks to a reviewer from Critical Horizons for their detailed and insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
J.-L. Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Hegels Bon Mots), trans. Cline Surprenant,
Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001.
J.-L. Nancy, Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith & Steven Miller,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
222 Simon Lumsden

4
Ibid., p. 3.
See, for example among those writing in English: Robert Pippin, Hegels Idealism:
The Satisfactions of Self Consciousness, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989
and his Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1997; Terry Pinkard, Hegels Phenomenology: the Sociality of Reason, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1994 and Paul Redding Hegels Hermeneutics, Ithaca,
Cornell University Press, 1996.
Nancy, Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative, p. 23.
Ibid., p. 3.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 14. This is a point that is reiterated in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert
Richardson & Anne OBryne, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000. There he
describes Hegels transformation of the idea of truth as the truth of the event
beyond every advent of meaning p. 162.
10
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University

Press, 1977. Volume 9 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. by H.-F. Wessels & H. Clairmont,
Hamburg, Meiner, 1988, (PhG 7/7). German page numbers follow paragraph
numbers from the English translation.
11
Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 4.
12
See Pippins discussion of this issue in Hegels Idealism, especially chapter 4.
13
Robert Pippin has been instrumental in understanding Hegels project as continuing

the Kantian critical tradition. See his Hegels Idealism.
14
G. W. F. Hegel. The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences, trans. T. F. Garaets, W. A. Suchting & H. S. Harris, Indianapolis, Hackett,
1991, 42.
15
Hegels Phenomenology, 77/p. 60.
16
Ibid.
17
Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, pp. 4-5.
18
Ibid., p. 57.
19
While I cannot discuss this issue here, one can see the similarity between this issue
and the way Nancy recongures Heideggers notion of being-with [mitsein] in The
Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
Press, 1991.
20
The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald, Stanford, Stanford University

Press 1993, experience itself, because it neither gathers nor produces anything: it
decides its law and its transgression p. 85.
21
Ibid., p. 87.
22
23
Ibid.

24
The immediacy of the object, in the beginning of sense-certainty, is something that

consciousness always keeps as a standard to be nally expressed, but it is simply
not possible, as the course of the Phenomenology shows, to account for this immediate experience.
25
Hegel, Phenomenology, 36/p. 28 (trans. amended).
26
Ibid., 80/pp. 62-3.
27
Ibid., 80/p. 63.
28
29
Hegel, Phenomenology, 15/p. 12.
30
For a contemporary version of this interpretation of Hegel see Paul Guyers

Absolute Idealism and the Rejection of Kantian Dualism in the Cambridge
Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
31
Hegel betrays and distorts the immediate in order to ground his dialectic in that
incomprehension, and to introduce mediation in a movement which is no more
than that of his own thought and its generalities. Difference and Repetition, trans.
Paul Patton, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 10.
32
33
Ibid., p. 4.
34
See for example, Terry Pinkard German Philosophy 1760-1860, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2002; Sally Sedgwick, Hegel, McDowell, and Recent Defences
of Kant, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 31, pp. 229-247.
35
36
Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor & Amit Sen, Albany,
State University of New York Press, 1997, see in particular p. 20.
37
Nancy, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks, Stanford, Stanford University Press
2003, p. 5.
38
Ibid., p. 92.
39
Ibid., p. 5.
40
41
Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 5.
42
Nancy captures this movement of reason well in remarking that to think mediation
is to think the impossibility of keeping determinations isolated in Hegel: The
Restlessness of the Negative, p. 52.
43
Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 6.
44
45
Ibid., p. 76.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid., p. 78.
224 Simon Lumsden

48
Ibid., p. 79.
49
Ibid., p. 78.
50
Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 93 (my emphasis).
51
See for example Robert Brandom, Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegels Idealism,
European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 7, 1999, pp. 164-189.
52
53
For a more detailed discussion of this issue see my Satisfying the Demands
of Reason: Hegels Conceptualization of Experience, Topoi, vol. 21, no. 1, 2003,
pp. 41-53.
54
Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, p. 68. the truth of sense is the afrmativity of the restlessness of the negative: its insistence in itself, without renunciation or evasion, its praxis, and the conatus of its being ibid., p. 31.
Peter Schmiedgen
Polytheism, Monotheism and Public Space:
Between Levinas and Arendt1
ABSTRACT
In this paper I argue that the Levinasian opposition
between the violence of the production of identity and
self-presence and its undermining in a charitable disburdening of the self for the sake of the monotheistic ethical other, is unable to provide all the resources required
for a politically motivated critique of the present. As a
critique of Levinas almost Manichean opposition between
identity and difference, I argue, by appealing to the
Arendtian model of public space, that Levinas underestimates our capacity to build and open up societal spaces
within which a non-violent polytheistic political difference can proliferate. The identity of the built and legislated can constitute a non-violent stage upon which
discursive political differences are played out.
KEYWORDS: Levinas, Arendt, Monotheism, Polytheism,
Public Space
In polytheist systems . . . even a god, no matter how
powerful, cannot be sovereign; only under the assumption of one god (one is one and all alone and evermore
shall be so) can sovereignty and freedom be the same
(Hannah Arendt).2
Monotheism signies . . . human kinship, this idea of a

human race that refers back to the approach of the Other
in the face, in a dimension of height, in responsibility
for oneself and for the Other (Emmanuel Levinas).3
226 Peter Schmiedgen
Between Levinas and Arendt

One of the contested issues raised by the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas is
whether or not we can understand ethics to be an adequate ground for politics.
Related to this is the further question of what sort of politics such an ethics
would imply. I argue in this paper that with the rise of the monotheistic political fundamentalisms that currently dominate the contemporary political
scene, we should be careful before we commit ourselves to a politics grounded
on the language of Levinas ethical monotheism. My argument here is concerned not so much with the question of whether or not Levinas ethics presupposes, or requires a theological foundation, as Jacques Derrida and Alain
Badiou argue, but rather with the idea of monotheism as a founding metaphor
for the just life.4 I will argue that we would do better to conceptualise politics and indeed justice itself, in terms of a polytheistic metaphor such as that
to be found within the Arendtian model of public space.
Further to this, I will argue that the commitment which one nds in Levinas
ethics to a charitable giving to the other is not a commitment which has an
obvious critical potential in the world of late modern economic rationalism
which we inhabit. Indeed it would seem that it is most often the foot soldiers
of economic reform themselves who now espouse the language of individual
charitable giving to the other. This turn towards the charitable and indeed
also in many cases the return to the religious provision of charity, is one of
the very symptoms of the dismantling of the welfare state itself. However,
as Zygmunt Bauman has pointed out in recent reections upon Levinasian
ethics, there does not appear to be within our world any great motivation
for the rich and powerful to be charitable.5 The powerful may speak the
language of religious monotheism, but they do not fear going to hell as their
mediaeval precursors did. Most often we do not feel ourselves to be traumatised
by the other, hostage to the other, or responsible for the widow, the orphan and
the stranger. The turn to charity is the return to a world in which the weak
and the poor are simply at the random mercy of the strong and the wealthy
and in which monotheism seems to encourage not a spirit of mercy, but rather
one of violence, aggression and the suppression of political differences.
I intend to develop this argument between monotheism and polytheism
as grounding political metaphors by articulating the argument between the
Polytheism, Monotheism and Public Space 227
respective models of production and labour, and hence also of the habitation
of sites and places which one nds in Levinas and Arendt. From Levinas
perspective, the act of bearing witness to the monotheistic ethical other
by charitably giving is understood to be the inversion of the identitarian
logic of the production of place. In comparison, for Arendt production is
understood to be the condition of the possibility of a reciprocal public, political
polytheism.
My central thesis is that we will better understand both the political limitations
and potentialities of Levinas conception of the ethical violence of world production, and hence also of Levinasian ethics itself, by interpreting it within
the framework, or against the background of, the more internally differentiated
Arendtian analyses of the relations between production, world and mutual
intersubjective appearing.
I would argue that Levinas understanding of production provides a good
analysis of the subjective experience of societies and subjects dominated, or
largely dominated, by exchange and consumption. Nevertheless this Levinasian
analysis does not capture the full emancipatory potentialities inherent
within production understood as production of the inhabited environment
in particular. In contrast with Arendt, Levinas lacks a strong appreciation of
the capacity of production to provide the conditions of possibility for a kind
of en-worldedness within which non-violent reciprocal, public intersubjectivity
is possible.6 It is just such a space of non-violent mutual recognition that
Arendt gives an account of in terms of the political and public space of appearing. The Arendtian space of public appearing is an en-worlded plural political space, in contrast with the a-symmetrical relation to the singular other
that is the primordial mode of encountering ethical exteriority from a Levinasian
point of view. However, I am also concerned with the debate regarding the
distinctions between those modes of being-in and constituting-a-world, or
producing-a-world, and discursive or public, political activity. For Levinas,
there is a distinction between labour as a primarily non-discursive activity
and asymmetrical prophetic discourse, whilst for Arendt, there is a distinction
between labour, work and interaction. Although work, for Arendt, is a form
of human activity that fashions the built space of public appearing, the primary
focus for her is interaction, understood as political and hence discursive and
reciprocal action.
For both of these thinkers production or labour alone will never be sufcient
to ground an account of our humanity. For both of them the anthropological
account of the human being as a self-expressive labourer or worker is inadequate as a way of grounding an account of the individuality or singularity
of the individual.7 In the case of Arendt, the expressivist labour anthropology
of Marx is re-conceptualised as the condition of possibility of reciprocal political action rather than as the completion or end of the unfolding of human
potentiality.8 However, Levinas also brings this conception into question in
the name of the a-symmetrical ethical relation to the other understood both
as hospitality and prosaic ethical discourse. The encounter with the other
either fulls and redeems the products of labour, or brings their ownership
into question and causes their charitable dispersal for Arendt and Levinas
respectively.
Overall these differences can be articulated in the following way. One nds
here a contrast between the polytheism of Arendtian democratic public political
intersubjectivity and the monotheism of Levinasian ethical intersubjectivity
with its concentration upon the face or the saying of the singular other. Either
the work of building and legislating is fullled in the enactment of a polytheistic democratic plurality, or it is brought into question by the voices of
the singular others who come from beyond its borders.9
My discussion here will take the following form. To begin with I will discuss
labour and work as modes of production and, then, following from this, discuss the public sphere of exchange, understood as an experientially impoverished, socially constructed sphere of immanence that Arendt posits upon
the ground of work. Finally, I will discuss political action, which Arendt
understands to be the mode of enactment of political difference within built,
or worked public space itself. This idea provides Arendt with the means of
overcoming both the reduction of the sphere of public appearing to nothing
more than an economic sphere and the Levinasian turn towards a radical, or
theological other. It can be understood to open up an immanent intersubjective transcendence as a ground of critique.
Labouring Bodies, Working Hands and the Durable World

Levinas post-phenomenological analyses posit an account of labour and
dwelling as an egoistic taking possession of both the social and natural worlds.
This labouring-as-taking-possession-and-interiorising can be understood as

a movement of both individual and social totalisation.10 This is a movement
in which a-symmetrical ethical difference is effaced by the imposition of both
an economy of private, familial, or national property rights and reciprocal
exchange relations. The effacement of difference theorised by Levinas corresponds to the kind of identity thinking that Adorno and Horkheimer theorise
in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. I will argue that Arendts work helps us to
identify some of the limits of total critiques of intersubjective reciprocity such
as those to be found in Levinas and Horkheimer and Adornos works.11
For Levinas, there is a radical opposition between the reciprocity of this
totalised network of economic exchange relations and the a-symmetry of the
ethical giving which brings it into question.12 In Arendts work one nds, by
contrast, a social ontology that posits an intra-societal eld characterised, at
least potentially, by the enactment of difference within the open identity of
a symmetrically structured public intersubjectivity. Public appearing as political appearing is, for Arendt, a kind of difference founded on, and manifested
within, a shared legal and architectural, or built, identity. In Arendts terms,
non-violent intra-societal relations of mutual non-economic interaction are
possible. Hence, an immanent political transcendence, rather than a radical
ethical transcendence of the constituted social order is also possible.
For Levinas, production is essentially a totalising act of imposing economic
identity at the cost of ethical difference.13 However, for Arendt, who has a
more differentiated categorisation of human productive activity, labour (the
rst mode of production which she discusses) is that which we must do in
order to full basic human needs and hence the needs of the private realm
and life alone.14 Work (the second mode of production), on the other hand,
is the means by which we construct a durable world and impose form upon
life understood as a sphere of mere repetition.15 It is within the durable sphere
produced by work that the polytheistic identity within difference of political
intersubjectivity can ourish. It is in relation to both the account of work and
also of action, that one can see Arendts categories as providing a framework
for a critical interpretation of Levinas less internally differentiated categorical
framework.
For Arendt the body is the locus of repetitive biological life that transpires
within the private realm, and which labour caters to. Working hands are the
means of moving out of this sphere and of transcending its needs towards
the realm of public appearing, which is the context for either exchange or
non-economic self-enactment. In contrast to Arendt, for Levinas both body
and hands remain caught up within and constitutive of economic interiority
alone, and do not allow any transition to a reciprocal public intersubjective
realm other than the realm of economic exchange. For Levinas there is only
either the closed grip of labouring hands or the open-handedness of ethical
giving or teaching. For Arendt, though, one must distinguish between the
labouring body, working hands, and the public political body that appears
before others and which enacts and constitutes the self.
The labour of the body is at the lowest level of the hierarchy of human activities that Arendt distinguishes in her social ontology. According to Arendt,
we do not engage in the activity of labour to produce things that will have
a long lasting life within, or as constitutive of, a world. Rather we engage in
labour in order to eliminate our hunger and satisfy our basic biological needs.
Such labour is understood by Arendt to be unproductive since it leaves nothing
behind. Whatever labour produces is produced simply in order to be consumed
and as such labour is a process of devouring. Labour is that which we do in
order to produce our daily bread, but not in order to manufacture the table
at which we eat. In this sense, labour, correctly understood, produces nothing
but life. It is the means by which life alone is produced and reproduced. Such
life and nothing more is marked by an over-arching repetitiveness. Life is
cyclical and characterised by an eternal recurrence of the same events. Following
from this, labour is also to be understood as a cyclic and repetitive process.
Levinas posits that production in general is always nothing more than a
process through which I and we take possession, consume and impose a totalising and repetitive Odyssean identity upon it as well as those who are around
us.16 In Arendt, this totalising repetition is characteristic of only one of the
forms of productive activity and indeed of only the least of these forms.
Levinas account of the violence of taking up and en-worlding a place and
of the exchange that follows from such productive activity is only an account
of the repetitive violence of production directed towards nourishing life alone,
rather than an account of the highest potentialities of production. Such labour
is production directed towards satisfying the needs of only our bodies and
life alone, and not towards making possible the greatest possible articulation
of our humanity as it is embodied in the enactment before each other of our
irreducible differences.
When we make the transition to the next level of productive capacity according to Arendt, we nd a strong contrast with the stark Levinasian opposition
between the open handedness of generosity and giving, and the repetitive
and Odyssean closed handedness of production and exchange. Arendt argues
that work is not simply a mode of taking-possession, getting-a-rm-gripupon, or consuming-as-functionalising, but also the condition of possibility
for the construction of durable entities and also to some extent a means of
self-expression.17 Just as labour can be understood to be that activity which
leads to the making of the bread that we eat, so work also issues in the table
upon which we eat and, more generally, in the whole plurality of durable
works. It is these very use objects (rather than the objects of consumption
produced by labour), which form the continuing framework of the various
intersubjective and public worlds that we inhabit. It is the collectivity of these
various entities and their relations that constitutes a home for us in the midst
of the repetition of the natural process of life itself and the contingency of
the actions of the others around us. This collectivity also constitutes the
background against which we are able to enact both our freedom and our
individuality.18
The Public Space of Appearing: Political Polytheism and

Individual Difference
Such networks of worldly entities do not simply, in Arendts terms, establish
the privacy of a private dwelling, or as I have suggested above, an internally
undifferentiated collective dwelling as they appear for Levinas. They also
open up indenitely plural, public spaces. The world opens up for us because
there is a eld of things between us. The world is between us in just the
same way in which the table is.19 The works that the worker produces are
the things that divide us, and the world is best understood as an in-between.
This network of things relates and separates us at the same time, rather than
simply relates to us in a totalising way. For there to be a public realm we
must be both distinct and yet also available for communication.20 From this
point of view works of art are not the greatest possible expressions of the
self, as the romantics would have us believe, but merely the most enduring
elements of the public stage.21 And so the public space of appearing is not
exemplied solely by the closed grip of possession, or by the open hands of
giving. Most exemplary of such shared public space is for Arendt the architectural space of the market place.
However, Arendt also notes that public space cannot only be a market place
as a sphere of exchange; it can also be a political space. In contrast to Levinas,
who understands the public sphere of the producing subject solely as a sphere
of exchange and instrumental or totalising activity, for Arendt it is also possible
to approach the other with the loosened grip of the political actor without
doing violence. Indeed one might say that this is a grip that is able to gather
the other and the others, rather than simply either effacing the other for its
own sake, or effacing itself for the sake of the other. This approach is the
moment of communication and interaction for Arendt. In approaching the
other and others in the public space of appearing we speak to the other and
hence convey ourselves to the greatest extent possible. In beginning to speak
in the public space of appearing we enact our singularity and manifest our
capacity to begin anew. Indeed we only lapse into violence when we cease
to speak and simply instrumentally engage the other and reason as homo faber
would. The Arendtian notion of work, then, is that of an activity that does
not so much simply appropriate and take possession of, but rather open up.
Working is opening a space and indeed taking possession of a space that
many can share at once.
In this sense, public space need not simply be the space of exchange and conspicuous consumption as it so often is for us. The public plaza may be a space
within which one shows off ones wealth; and yet it can also be a space within
which we act before the others as individuals rather than simply being either
commodities (labour power), consumers of commodities, or those who bring
commodities to exchange and sell. For Arendt the singularity of the self, the
other and the social plurality is enacted in a shared visual and auditory space
opened up by working, a space that is the built and legislated city.22 The public space of appearing is for Arendt a stage upon which we enact the selves
we may be remembered for. It is upon this public stage that we both man-
ifest our presence to others and indeed constitute ourselves as the selves who
we are.
The Levinasian conception of the other is as an agent of dispersal, that is, as
causing the charitable dispersal of that which we have taken possession of
in producing it and by so doing, bringing into question the right of possession of the producer over his or her products. In contrast, for Arendt, there
is a sense in which political action is the fullment of production. For her,
production can be understood as the condition of the possibility of either a
totalising effacement of difference (the reduction of the public space of appearing to a space of exchange alone), or the opening up of a space within which
difference and singularity can be both expressed and nurtured.
The public space of appearing, for Arendt, makes possible a symmetrical and
polytheistic intersubjectivity, in contrast to the a-symmetrical ethical monotheism of Levinas. The Arendtian model of public appearing posits a form of
intersubjectivity that always has a single centre, but never an absolute centre. In other words, there are many voices. Democratic seeing and being seen,
hearing and being heard, always ows from person to person within the
gathering of those who enact themselves before each other within this public
space of appearing. Such democratic political appearing is both irreducibly
intersubjective and irreducibly plural.23
In other words, and drawing on Arendts work, production can also be understood to be a means of dening the boundaries of a world within which a
polytheistic political plurality, rather than simply an egoistic economic identity, can unfold. From this perspective, the city is an architectural, legislative
and geographical space that does not violently show a total world or total
identity, but which rather opens a space within which a differentiated world
can happen in between social and political actors. We ought not to inhabit
the ethical space of the desert within which one wanders, as Levinas says,
adoring God in a transportable temple, without any certainty of encountering the other, and without any certainty of a world being spun between the
actors in question.24 The life of the city as well as the life of the nation state
need not simply be marked by the imposition of economic identity without
difference. It can instead make possible the very enactment of those differences,
which constitute us as the individuals who we are within the incomplete,

and evolving identity of the city itself.
To be sure Levinasian categories help us to understand the underlying dynamic
of an egoistic economic rationalism that reduces us to nothing more than economic entities, however they do not provide an account of the potentialities
of a completely fullled production. However, the other of this pathologically
egoistic world is not the a-symmetrical ethical other to whom we relate when
we charitably give, or the theological other by whom we are prophetically
taught. We have grounds for both hoping for and striving to bring about the
immanent, plural intersubjective other of the social worlds we inhabit as well.
However, I would like to mention a few closing words about the limits of
the symmetrically intersubjective Arendtian position just outlined and also
of symmetrically structured intersubjectivity in general. Despite the rather
pro-Arendtian argument I have established here, it is clear that the Arendtian
space of publicity/privacy, regardless of the ways in which it opens up a
non-violent political space, can nevertheless itself be understood to be in certain respects a Levinasian dwelling.
Even though the many-eyed and many-eared Arendtian democratic collectivity has no centre, and in that sense could be inclusive of all those within
the city who choose to enact themselves within it, it does have boundaries.
It is enacted within a particular and nite identity that is the result of both
production and action. These boundaries of the spaces of appearing are dened
most obviously through work as the architectural space of public appearing
and also through the creation of a legislative framework for political and
legal action.25 In literal terms, one might say that it is the boundaries of the
city that delineate these limits, as well as the distinctions between public and
private and hence political and a-political spaces and also the non-political
spaces beyond the city. There is a potential for egoism and violence inherent
in every instituted intersubjective order that distinguishes both the public
from the private and the citizen from the non-citizen. The public space of
appearing is never common to all and sundry, but rather only to very specic
groups. The groups in question are both those who are able to withdraw into
the warmth and security of a private realm when they leave the light of the
public realm (the property owners and hence the shareholders in the state
enterprise), and also those who have the privilege to be understood as singular individuals rather than simply as types, or as social problems (like
the homeless, the single mother, the asylum seeker) when they are within
it. As much as every common is a space of inclusion it must necessarily also
be a space of exclusion.
As I have argued, even though Arendt is not committed to a totalising
particularism of exchange, her understanding of political plurality is nevertheless inadequate without an attendant account of those who it may and
often does exclude. I would suggest (without developing it here) that there
is also a creative and critical tension between the political polytheism of
Arendt and the ethical monotheism of Levinas as captured through his idea
of gifting. The dimension of exclusion can be seen as the tension between the
reciprocal intersubjective action which, I have argued, fulls production, and
the prosaic, fragmented and prophetic discourse of the singular (if not theological) other who interrupts and brings into question political action and
discourse enacted within the instituted realm of appearing. The gifts that we
have to offer, and ought to offer the other are not only the gifts of material
sustenance and moral accountability, but also ones of positive rights themselves. Our a-symmetrical responsibility to the other is in the end also a
responsibility to include the other and to give the other the gift of participation within the polytheism of reciprocal political intersubjectivity itself.
Notes
1
I would like to thank the reviewers of Critical Horizons for their editorial suggestions and comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago & London, University of Chicago
Press, 1958, pp. 234-5.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Innity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania, Duquesne University Press, 1969, p. 214.
Jacques Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan
Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978; Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay
on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, London & New York, Verso,
2001. See in particular Chapter 2, Does the Other Exist?
Zygmunt Bauman, The World Inhospitable to Levinas in Philosophy Today,

vol. 43, no. 2/4, Summer, 1999, pp. 151-167.

6
Which might be compared with civil society (Hegel, The Philosophy of Right), the
public sphere (Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), or the
Benjaminian urban crowd, depending upon ones theoretical commitments.
Whether the self-expression in question is that of the individual or the group, the
great artist, or proletarian labour.
On the relationship between Marxs and Arendts categories see for example, Bikhu
Parekh Hannah Arendts Critique of Marx in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the
Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill, New York, St Martins Press, 1979.
In using the term polytheism as the social and political opposite of monotheism
I am harking back here to some extent to Nietzsches contrast between polytheism
and monotheism in The Gay Science. See section 143, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay
Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage Books, 1974.
10
Levinas, Totality and Innity, pp. 156-162. That this is a movement that can be
understood in both collective and individual terms is particularly suggested by
the analyses of roots and rootedness that one nds in Simone Weil Against the
Bible, Difcult Freedom, p. 137. Also A Religion for Adults Difcult Freedom,
p. 23. Both texts in Difcult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990. It is clear that not only the individual but also the collectivity may have roots in this sense.
11
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming, London, Verso, 1986.
12
Levinas, Totality and Innity, pp. 171-172.
13
On money and economy in Levinas, see for example, The Ego and the Totality,
pp. 38-39, where Levinas tells us: The egos relationship with a totality is essentially
economic. Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Duquesne University Press, 1987.
14
See Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 88, 98, 115.
15
See Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 94, 136-139.
16
For the distinction between Abrahamic wandering and odyssean repetition see,
for example, Levinas The Trace of the Other in Deconstruction in Context: Literature
and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986,
p. 348. On Ulysses see also Levinas, Totality and Innity, p. 27.
17
Although there is ambiguity in Arendt over whether we ought to understand

as an example of action the founding and framing of the basic legal order within
which we might come to appearance, for the sake of my discussion here I will
follow her account in The Human Condition. Even if one wishes to assert that the
framing of constitutions is a manifestation of action, there is still a distinction
between such framing and the action that transpires within this framework. But

it is also evident that the idea of work is more general than the idea of collective
legislative acts, which is at the centre of Arendts concerns in On Revolution. See
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1990. But also
Seyla Benhabib Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition
and Jrgen Habermas in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun,
Cambridge, MA, & London, UK, MIT Press, 1999.
18
Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 134.
19
Ibid., p. 52.
20
The opposite of such relating and separating is the collapse into the warmth and
friendship of the pariah which Arendt also notes in On Humanity in Dark Times
Thoughts about Lessing in Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, Harmondsworth,
Penguin Books, 1973, pp. 19-21.
21
Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 167-168.
22
In using this term I am gesturing away from Arendt and towards Henri Lefebvre.
Lefebvres account of the city as a work in progress, or oeuvre, rather than a completed product as such would be a useful complement to the Arendtian model
here. The city is at its best a collective and on going self-articulation. See Henri
Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. & eds. Eleonore Kofman & Elizabeth Lebas,
Oxford, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 1996, pp. 65-6, 75-7. This incompleteness and
vagueness of the city as designed and legislated is also brought out in the work
of Michel De Certeau. In Walking in the City De Certeau analyses the ways in
which the random walking of pedestrians is in fact an inscription of their individuality upon the face of a city organised for no one in particular. Michel De
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley, California,
University of California Press, 1984.
23
And so one can say with some justice that Arendtian democratic space is a decentred space, just as indeed the discursive space of Habermas discourse ethics is a
space that both requires and tends to produce decentred subjects.
24
Emmanuel Levinas, Difcult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand, London, Athlone, 1990,
p. 22.
25
That we should be concerned about the ways in which built and legislated
environments both allow others to appear and indeed also manipulate the ways
in which these others are enabled to appear for each other is more than conrmed
by Foucaults many investigations of the power dynamics of just this eld of
relationships.
Robert Sinnerbrink
From Machenschaft to Biopolitics:
A Genealogical Critique of Biopower
ABSTRACT
This paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault
and Agamben. It shows how Heideggers reections on
Machenschaft or machination pregure the concepts of
biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucaults
account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism,
and a critique of Agambens presentation of biopolitics
as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality. Foucaults ethical turn within biopolitical governmentality, along with Agambens messianic gesture towards
a utopian community to come, are questioned as political responses to biopower regimes.
KEYWORDS: Biopower, Biopolitics, Modernity, Heidegger,
Foucault, Agamben
The concepts of biopower and biopolitics have

become increasingly prominent in recent political thought, particularly within the European
tradition of social and critical philosophy.
Here one can mention Foucaults rst volume
of The History of Sexuality,1 Agambens appropriation of Foucaults concept of biopolitics
in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,2
and the recent deployment of the concept of
the biopolitical in Hardt and Negris critique
of global capitalism, Empire.3 The theoretical
240 Robert Sinnerbrink
signicance of the concept of biopolitics undoubtedly lies in its synthesis of

processes such as the technological manipulation of our biological existence,
the management of biological life as a resource, and the administration of
human populations as the objects of social and political power relations. While
Foucault is the rst to develop an explicit concept of biopolitics, one can certainly nd precedents in modern thought where the increasing politicisation
of the biological life of human beings is taken to be a dening characteristic
of technological modernity.
In what follows I present a genealogical critique of the concept of biopower,
commencing not with Foucault but rather with Heidegger. I argue that one
can nd an important anticipation of the concept of the biopolitical in
Heideggers Nietzsche lectures of the 1930s and 40s, and in his posthumously
published Beitrge or Contributions to Philosophy.4 Foucault and Agamben, the
most important theoreticians of biopolitics, appropriate this Heideggerian
theme of a convergence between biological existence, technology, and sociopolitical power relations, but submit it to quite different conceptual transformations. Foucault retains a more Nietzschean perspective on biopower as one
pole of the biopower/disciplinary power regime characteristic of modernity,
yet turns in his later (post-1976) work to subsuming biopolitics to the problematic of governmentality, turning to analyses of classical liberalism and
contemporary neo-liberalism as systems aimed at the bio-social management
of the population.5 Agamben, by contrast, presents a more Heideggerian perspective in conceptualising biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of the
history of Western political rationality commencing with the Greek division
between zoe and bios (biological life and social existence). Politics is grounded
in the tension between bare life and sovereign power, a process culminating
in the state of exception becoming the norm. The camp, Agamben claims,
thus becomes emblematic of the biopolitical condition of modernity.6
This metaphysical narrative of a biopolitical essence grounding Western political rationality, so I shall argue, generates similar difculties for Agamben as
it did for Heidegger. There is a tension within the biopolitical paradigm
between the ontic level of social interaction and the ontological level of historical world-disclosure, without a clear sense of the relationship between
these levels of analysis, or how to specify the practical-normative dimensions
of life within biopolitical regimes. The responses to biopower proposed by
From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower 241
Foucault and Agamben present us with starkly opposed alternatives: either

to acknowledge the ethical practices of freedom within neo-liberalism understood as a rational system of regulative biopower; or to challenge biopolitical
nihilism by gesturing towards a messianic overturning of law that would
heal the breach between bare life and politics and redeem humanity within
a utopian community to come.
Heidegger on Machenschaft (Machination)

Heideggers meditations on the essence of modern technology present an
important, if neglected, starting point for reection on the concepts of
biopower and biopolitics. Indeed, in his nal interview, Foucault made the
intriguing remark that [m]y whole philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger, leaving obscure the ultimate signicance
of Heidegger in Foucaults work.7 Agamben too is indebted to Heidegger,
politicising Heideggers history of Being into the history of the biopolitical
ordering of bare life.8 Yet Heidegger barely mentions life in the best known
of his writings on technology (The Age of the World Image and The Question concerning Technology). Nonetheless, I want to argue that Heidegger
pregures the convergence of technological ordering, biological existence,
and enhancement of power, that are constitutive of the concepts of biopower
and biopolitics.9
This preguration of the theme of biopower is most apparent in Heideggers
Nietzsche lectures, particularly his 1939 lecture course on The Will to Power
as Knowledge.10 It is also articulated in sections of Heideggers posthumously published Beitrge zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy), written between 1936 and 1938.11 Here I shall conne myself to reconstructing
Heideggers anticipation of the theme of biopower from scattered remarks
in these texts, emphasising the connection between biological life, technology, and politics in modernity, and suggesting that the roots of more recent
conceptions of biopolitics can be found in Heideggers critique of the metaphysics of modernity.
At various points in Heideggers Nietzsche lectures, one can nd clear anticipations of his later meditations on modern technology as en-framing or
Ge-stell (the complete disclosure of beings, including human beings, as a
totality of resources). During the 1930s, Heidegger discusses machination

or Machenschaft (rather than en-framing or Ge-stell) as dening the representational and productionist model of disclosing beings in modernity.12
Machination or Machenschaft denes the modern world-interpretation in
which entities are disclosed solely as representable for a subject and as objects
of theoretical comprehension or practical manipulation.13 Departing from the
ordinary sense of machination as human plotting or contriving, Heidegger
emphasises the ontological sense of Machenschaft as referring to making (poesis, techne), which in turn points to a more basic conception of beings as
make-able, indeed as self-making.14 Entities come to be understood as makeable, either of their own accord or else according to a technical procedure.
This line of thought begins with the Christian conception of the ens creatum
and God as causa sui, and culminates with the modern causal conception of
the natural self-production and technical re-production of beings. In this
respect, Heidegger contends, the mechanistic and the biological ways of
thinking are always merely consequences of the hidden interpretation of
beings in terms of machination.15
For Heidegger, modernity is blind to Machenschaft, to the simultaneous
objectication and subjectication of beings, including human beings in
their social existence, a process that taken together denes technological
nihilism:
Be-ing [Seyn] has so thoroughly abandoned beings and submitted them to
machination [Machenschaft] and lived-experience [Erleben] that those illusive attempts at rescuing Western culture and all culture-oriented politics
must necessarily become the most insidious and thus the highest form of
nihilism.16
As Heidegger will later make explicit, the result of this technological nihilism
is the thoroughgoing quantication and objectication of all reality, a process
that human beings initially appear to master but which involves, on the contrary, our reduction to human resources instrumentalised within the technological ordering of world.17
What of Life within this dire diagnosis of modernity? Life, according to
Heideggers reading of Nietzsche, is above all concerned with maintaining
itself and being perpetually secured in its constancy [Bestandes].18 Modern
Western humanity is dened by its quest to understand human life as the

securing of its own permanence [Bestandsicherung seiner selbst],19 which in
turn generates an understanding of beings as permanence [Bestndigkeit]. This
securing of human life and of nature as a stockpile of resources [Bestand]
involves a new conception of knowledge, truth, and practice. Within the
modern age, the meaning of truth is transformed into that of the securing
[Sicherung] of beings in their perfectly accessible disposability [ausmachbaren
Machbarkeit].20 Beings as a whole are dened in terms of their accessibility,
disposability [Machbarkeit], malleability [Machsamkeit], and produce-ability by
way of unconditioned planning, securing, and calculating.21 Machination
or Machenschaft describes this modern horizon of world-disclosure in which
all beings show up as make-able, everything is do-able, and even human
beings begin to show up as part of the ordering and securing process of
life-enhancement.
Modernity is thus for Heidegger the age of machination or technological
nihilism. It is the age of the reduction of beings to manipulable resources and
of human beings to subjects establishing their unconditioned hegemony over
all sources of power on the face of the earth.22 It is the age in which not just
society but Life itself is totally mobilized according to self-posited goals
or values dedicated to the sheer expansion of power and valued purely
according to their estimated use-value.23 Modern Western humanitys selfimposed will to master life and our own nitude results in the promulgation
of worldviews (Nazism, Americanism, Stalinism) dedicated to the sheer
expansion of power and the instrumentalisation of human beings and of
beings in general.
In short, Heidegger engages here in a withering critique of the socio-political dimensions of the instrumentalisation of Life in modernity. In a striking
anticipation of the biopolitical ordering and management of human social
existence, Heidegger writes:
Whatever beings in their individual domains may be, whatever used to be
dened as their quiddity in the sense of the Ideas, now becomes something
that the self-instauration [of human beings] can reckon with in advance, as
with that which gauges the value of every productive and representative
being as such (every work of art, technical contrivance, institution of government, the entire personal and collective order of human beings).24
This calculative ordering and management of human social, cultural, and

political existence is a manifestation of the nihilism of Western modernity.
The modern age of machination is dened by the disclosure of beings as disposable resources, and of human beings as subjects whose subjectivity is
grounded in this very ordering of Life as resource. Modern self-empowering
subjectivity is fullled in the calculability and manipulability of everything
that lives, in the rationalitas of animalitas.25 Life itself, not to mention human
life, becomes the object of rational calculation, planning, and ordering.
Let us summarise this brief discussion of Heideggers anticipation of biopower.
The concept of machination or Machenschaft presents an ontological interpretation of the way beings are disclosed in modernity as representable and
manipulable resources. Central to machination is the reduction of beings and
human beings to resources to be managed, optimised, enhanced, and produced (through technical and social means, Nietzsches breeding). Finally,
this self-perpetuating process of power enhancement operates beyond the
purview of individual subjects since it denes the horizon of intelligibility
that discloses the world itself in terms of machination.
Together, these features of Heideggerian Machenschaft dene the nihilism of
technological modernity. They also anticipate central aspects of Foucaults
concept of biopower and Agambens concept of biopolitics. As we shall see,
both Foucault and Agamben submit this Heideggerian theme of machination to signicant transformation. For all his anticipation of the biopolitical,
however, Heidegger does not explicitly connect the biological existence of human
beings with the operation of power in modernity, nor does he articulate machination as a specically political phenomenon. Machination describes an ontological account of the way beings are disclosed and rationally ordered in modernity.
While Heidegger hints at the signicance of life, understood as will to power,
as an element of power and technological control, this connection becomes
explicitly articulated only with Foucaults conception of biopower, to which
I now turn.
Foucault on Biopower
During the mid 1970s Foucault turned his attention to the analysis of power
understood as ensembles of strategic, corporeal, productive, and reversible
relations operating throughout the social eld, from the micro level of social
interactions to the macro level of institutional and social practices.26 Modern
regimes of power function in a manner that goes far beyond traditional models of sovereignty or of state power, and hence demand a concrete and historically specic analysis of their functional effects and systemic operation.
Foucault thus identied two related dimensions of modern power: a disciplinary power exercised upon the bodies of individuals through techniques of
training, surveillance, spatial distribution, examination, and normalisation;
and a regulatory biopower exercised upon the biological existence of a population grasped as an object of management, administration, and control. The
contrast is noticeable in the transition from the analysis of disciplinary power
in Discipline and Punish (1975) to the new concept of biopowerpower exercised on the biological life of the populationin the rst volume of the History
of Sexuality, La Volont de Savoir (1976).
Rather than provide an exhaustive survey of the development of Foucaults
thinking, here I wish only to outline Foucaults concept of biopower as presented in the last chapter of La Volont de Savoir and in the 1976 Collge de
France lectures Society must be Defended (particularly Lecture Eleven of
March 17, 1976). I shall then briey discuss the connection Foucault discerns
between biopolitics and governmentality, which culminates in his later
interest in neo-liberalism as a biopolitical form of governmental rationality
oriented towards the efcient management of populations of rationally motivated economic agents.27 My focus will be on how Foucault transforms the
concept of biopower in an ontic, rather than ontological, direction, providing
a Nietzschean genealogical perspective on the historically specic techniques
of biopower applied to human populations. This Nietzschean genealogical
moment, however, gives way to Foucaults later interest in neo-liberalism as
a regime of governmentality grounded in a biopolitics of populations.28 This
turn towards liberalism as a form of modern governmentality provides essential background, I suggest, for understanding Foucaults ethical turn during the 1980s towards the care of the self as a practice of freedom.
Foucault commences his analysis in the chapter Right of Death and Power
over Life by indicating the transition from a pre-modern regime of sovereign power, dened as the power of the sovereign to decide life and death,
to the modern regime of power over life (the power to make live and to let
die).29 Since the seventeenth century (in respect of disciplinary power), and
the latter half of the eighteenth century (in the case of biopower), the manner in which power operates upon both individual bodies and populations
in Western societies has undergone a dramatic shift. Rather than suppress,
constrain, or destroy, power now operates to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimise, and organise the forces under it.30 The sovereign exercise of
the power of inicting death is transformed into the regulatory power to
manage life, to administer, optimise, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise
controls and comprehensive regulations.31 In short, modern power develops into an anatomo-politics of the human body, organised through disciplinary
techniques aiming at the optimisation of the bodys capabilities, forces, usefulness, and docility; and it develops into a biopolitics of the population, a regulatory power centred on the species, the body imbued with the mechanics
of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes.32
Foucault identies a number of important features of biopower that distinguish it from disciplinary power. 1) Biopower takes as its object the population rather than the individual body, a multiplicity of human beings as a
biological species subject to conditions such as propagation, births and mortality, health, illness, and disease, life expectancy and longevity, risk and security, management and control. 2) Biopower functions in tandem with different
relevant bodies of knowledge such as demography, statistics, studies of fertility, morbidity, epidemiology, illness, mortality, public health and hygiene,
urban planning, and so on. And 3), biopower develops distinctive techniques
or technologies of power, discursive practices of including forecasts, statistical estimates, overall measures of long-term trends, and so forth. As Foucault
remarks in his lectures, for biopower to function properly security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to be optimise a state of life.33 Biopower, in short,
is a power of regularisation designed to optimise the socio-biological capacities of a living multiplicity of human beings.
One might be struck here by the afnities with Heideggers Machenschaft,
the disclosure of beings as resources to be ordered, regulated, and controlled.
Nietzsches metaphysics of life as will to power, as rendered by Heidegger,
is transformed into Foucaults historicist analysis of biopower exercised upon
the biological life of human multiplicities. Nietzsches grosse Politik is trans-
gured, via Heidegger, into Foucaults biopolitics of the population. At a

general level of conceptualisation, Foucaults conception of biopower nds
a precursor in Heideggers diagnosis of machination in modernity, now
applied to the biological existence of human multiplicities. While commentators such as H. Dreyfus and T. Rayner have remarked upon the afnities
between Heidegger and Foucault in this respect, I would suggest that it is
nonetheless the differences that are more signicant, since they point to
important ways in which Foucault challenges the Heideggerian diagnosis
of modernity.34
There are three points I would like to make concerning the relationship
between Heideggerian Machenschaft and Foucaultian biopower. First, biopower
refers to the exercise of regulatory power over the biological existence of the
population, rather than a more generalised reduction of beings to a totality
of calculable resources. For Heidegger, biopower would be just one specic
ontic manifestation of the deeper ontological condition of generalised machination
in modernity.
Second, Foucaults biopower is not an ontological concept grounded in a
meta-narrative of the history of Being (coinciding with the beginning and
completion of metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche). Indeed, Foucault explicitly rejects any teleological narrative of historical development (including
the inverted Hegelianism of Heideggers Verfallsgeschichte of the forgetting
of Being).35 Instead Foucault presents a Nietzschean genealogy of concrete
social practices more adequate to the specicity and complexity of modern
power relations.
Third, Foucaults concept of biopower is no longer connected with any explicitly Nietzschean/Heideggerian account of the nihilism of modernity, whether
as the devaluation of life-afrming world-interpretations or the forgetting of
Being in the epoch of modern technology.36 Moreover, the late Foucault moves
beyond the critical paradigm of biopower/biopolitics, originally presented
as a complement to disciplinary power, and embraces a more neutrally
descriptive account of political liberalism and neo-liberalism as biopolitical
systems of governmentality aimed at the management of populations.37 This
turn towards a biopolitical understanding of neo-liberalism is then supplemented by Foucaults more well-known ethical turn, which now posits a
Nietzschean/late modernist conception of the subject freely engaging in practices of ethico-aesthetic self-formationthe very conception of the subject
earlier put into question in Foucaults analysis of disciplinary society.38 The
earlier critical sense of biopower as a complement to the regime of disciplinary power gives way to a neutrally descriptive account of liberalist regimes
of governmental socio-bio-management that allow for non-political forms
of ethical self-fashioning.39
Finally, although Foucault talks of technologies of power, this is at the decidedly ontic level of concrete social practices, assemblages of bodies, discourses,
institutions, and systems of norms. In Foucaults analyses, technology is
reduced from the Heideggerian ontological level of world-disclosure to the
explicitly ontic level of organised techniques of power (deployed through
regimes of knowledge, truth, normativity, and processes of subjectication).
This shift from an ontological thesis concerning the technological ordering of
life to a historically specic analysis of the biosocial management of populations
generates a much more precise theorisation of how systems of power actually function in modern societies. In this respect Foucaults concept of biopower
can be understood as an historically oriented transposition of the Heideggerian
theme of machination to the level of the biological life of human populations.
For all the increase in historical specicity, Foucaults concept of biopower
raises questions of its own. What of Foucaults conation of biopower and
biopolitics? Foucault consistently uses these terms as synonyms for the regulation of the life of populations.40 The sense of politics at issue here is descriptive rather than normative: an account of how the biological life of populations
is managed and controlled in contemporary social and political regimes rather
than how these regimes may be the site of practical contestation and social
struggle. In other words, Foucault appears to use politics here in the restricted
sense of what Jacques Rancire has called the police, precisely the reduction
of politics to socio-economic management that has supplanted politics in
the proper sense (the antagonistic demand for universal equality and justice)
within modern liberal democracies.41 Foucaultian biopolitics has little to do
with politics in the sense of an antagonistic struggle or a normative dissensus
within an unjust social and political order. It may be more precise, therefore,
to speak of biopower in a descriptive sense, to describe the functional biomanagement of the population, and to reserve biopolitics in the normative
sense for forms of political contestation, driven by the experience of injus-
tice, that are manifest in social struggles against dominant forces structuring
biopower regimes. Such a distinction is absent in Foucaults analyses.
Be that as it may, to this objection one might point to the possibility of a
Foucaultian biopolitics of local strategic interventions. As Foucault tirelessly
repeated, within any eld of social power relations there can be no exercise
of power without a corresponding form of resistance. Power is coextensive
with resistance and presupposes the recognition of subjects as free, as having
the capacity to effect actions upon the actions of others.42 What kind of
resistance, then, could we say is exerted in relation to the regulative effects
of biopower?
One possibility might be to take Foucaults enigmatic remarks about another
economy of bodies and pleasures as gesturing towards sexual sub-cultural
practices resistant to prevailing forms of biopower.43 But this would be to
burden a very specic form of sub-cultural practice with a hopelessly enormous task (resisting the bio-socio-economic management of the population).
As Agamben observes, even the body and pleasure can be regarded as
functional elements of systems of biopower rather than sites of a utopian, or
rather heterotopian, resistance.44 Another possibility might be to take various
movements concerned with, for example, euthanasia, abortion, AIDS activism,
animal rights, radical environmentalism, the anti-GM lobby, and so forth, as
disparate examples of the multifarious forms of social and cultural resistance
to contemporary biopower. For all their signicance, however, it is very
difcult, to see how such disparate interest groups could form a coherent
form of resistant politics apart from the most eeting coalitions loosely
bound by mutual self-interest.
Indeed, in keeping with the paradigm of political liberalism, the struggles
between such competing interest groups can certainly challenge particular
aspects of the socio-bio-management of the population; but they do not
challenge the fundamental basis of the prevailing socio-economic order. They
do not raise particularist claims to the level of the impossible demand for
universal equality and political justice made by those suffering injustice
within exclusionary regimes. In this sense, Foucaults conation of biopower
with biopolitics accurately reects the collapse of the properly political
sense of biopolitics into a (liberalist) governmentality oriented towards sociobio-management of the population.
Drawing on Axel Honneths criticism, one could also argue that Foucaults
concept of biopower presents the systemic operation of power in respect of
population regulation, but that it fails to provide any real account of the
action-theoretic perspective of individual or collective agents capable of resisting biopower regimes.45 Here one must ask what is the specic injury, harm,
or injustice suffered by subjects subjected to regulatory biopower? We need
an account of why the efcient management of the socio-biological life of
human beings might also deform, dissolve or destroy our possibilities for
corporeal agency, or cultural and social self-denition. Lacking such an account
we are left with only an intuitive, under-theorised sense of what strategies
of resistance might be necessary or justiable in response to contemporary
biopower regimes. And this remains a desideratum of any critical theory of
society that claims to be more than a neutral description of the power mechanisms within neo-liberal biopower regimes.
To sum up, Foucault transforms the Heideggerian theme of machination into
an historical analysis of the operations of modern biopower. But Foucault too
echoes some of the difculties encountered in Heideggers approach. We
remain at the systemic level of population management, detailing various
techniques of social control, without providing any action-theoretic perspective
on how biopower is traversed by an antagonistic struggle between social
agents. Nor do we nd any normative account of why the neo-liberal biosocial
management of the population might be something to criticise, question, or
reject. To be sure, the disturbingly violent aspects of biopower are obvious
in the case of Nazism as the most brutal biopolitical regime in history. But
here too Foucault echoes Heidegger, as does Agamben, in reducing the historical, economic, and political distinctions between Nazism, Socialism, and
liberal-democracy to the formal universality of biopower as a regulatory
power over life.46
As I earlier mentioned, Foucault soon abandoned the theme of biopower in
favour of the problematic of governmentality, dened as forms of political
rationality oriented towards the conduct of conduct. He then turned his
attention in the late 1970s towards the problems of security, territory, and
population management within the history of classical liberalism and contemporary neo-liberalism.47 This turn from the critical diagnoses of disciplinary and biopower as forms of bio-social management of docile bodies to
political rationalities of governmentality working in tandem with various

ethical practices of freedom suggests that Foucault, at least for a time, regarded
neo-liberalism as providing an adequate form of the bio-socio-management of the
population. At the very least, Foucault abandons the more explicitly political
analysis of biopower in the mid 1970s in favour of his celebrated ethical turn
during the 1980s, a turn reecting the abandonment of a critical-theoretical
perspective on biopower in favour of a genealogical exploration of the
aesthetico-ethical practices of self-fashioning that might be available within
liberal democracies.
Apart from theoretical and political objections one might have to Foucaults
account of neo-liberal governmentality, Foucaults analysis of biopower
raises another question. Should biopower be regarded as a contingent feature only of modern political States, in particular of liberal democracies?
Or is biopower immanent within the (teleological) history of Western political rationality commencing with the Greeks and leading to the merging of
totalitarianism and liberal democracy? This is precisely the question that
Agamben poses, rejecting Foucaults sequential historical analysis of the
supersession of sovereign power by biopolitical governmentality, and arguing instead that biopower, exercised upon bare or naked life (la nuda vita)
of human beings, discloses the inner truth of the history of Western political rationality as such.
Agamben on Biopolitics
Agambens eclectic synthesis of Foucaultian biopower, Benjaminian messianism, Schmittian decisionism, and the Heideggerian critique of modernity
is the most sophisticated recent theorisation of biopower/biopolitics as dening the origin and telos of Western political rationality. Agamben develops
this analysis in Homo Sacer, a text conceived as a response to the bloody
mystication of a new planetary order.48 He commences the third part,
devoted to The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern, with a contrast between Foucault and Arendt. The later Foucault analysed biopolitics
but maintained his theoretical focus on processes of subjectivisation, and
thus failed to confront the relationship between biopolitics and totalitarian
states, above all the role of the concentration camp.49 Arendt, on the other
hand, squarely confronts the decisive political questionthe origins of
totalitarianismand even points to the link between totalitarian rule and the
rise of the concentration camp; but she fails to discern the importance of
biopolitics for understanding the nature and function of totalitarianism.50 That
two such important political philosophers failed to connect biopower with
totalitarianism clearly shows the difculty of the problem at hand.
Agamben thus seeks to analyse this connection between biopower and totalitarianism from the perspective of the concept of bare life [nuda vita]: the
human being reduced to natural life, a being abandoned by law who is
thereby exposed to sovereign violence, a being who can be killed with impunity
by the exercise of sovereign power but not sacriced. Life that cannot be
sacriced yet may be killed is sacred life.51 The fundamental political problem
of modernity, for Agamben, is to understand the intimate relationship between
sovereign power and bare or naked life, the deadly symbiosis between biological existence and political control. For Agamben, the state of exception
(the suspension of law and right) has increasingly become the norm in modernity, governing all of us as potential homo sacers abandoned by law and
exposed to sovereign violence. This disturbing feature of the exercise of modern sovereign power makes redundant all political theories grounded in
human rights or principles of justice, since these remain blind to the essentially biopolitical foundation of modern political rationality and social-historical existence.
While Agamben appropriates Foucaults concept of biopower, he also confronts
the question I posed in the previous section. Is biopower a phenomenon peculiar to Western modernity? Or is biopower the secret origin and destiny of
Western political rationality from the Greeks onwards? Foucault opts for the
former, a Nietzschean genealogical approach to biopower as a contingent
development of the history of Western political rationality. Indeed, Foucault
even remarks that the rise of biopower is prompted by the inability of sovereign models of power to govern the economic and political body of a society that was undergoing both a demographic explosion and industrialization.52
Similarly, in the History of Sexuality Volume I, Foucault describes the crucial
role of biopolitics in the development of modern capitalism. Inverting Weber,
it is the operations of biopower, rather than the spirit of Protestantism, that
provided the optimisation of bodily capacities and management of the population necessary for the economic and social development of capitalism.53
On this issue Agamben parts company with Foucault. Far from situating
biopower as a contingent development of Western modernity since the
Enlightenment, Agamben ontologises biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality from the Greeks to Auschwitz. In so
doing, Agamben reinscribes the logic of biopower within a Heideggerian
metaphysical narrative of the origin of biopolitics in the difference between
zoe and biosexposed naked life and recognised socio-political lifeand the
ambivalent category of the sacred, of sacred life, as articulated in Roman law.
This originary biopolitics is elaborated and intensied by the paradoxical
logic of exception, analysed by Carl Schmitt, which grounds politics in the
ungrounded sovereign power of suspending of law and right through the
imposition of a state of exception.54 Finally, the explicit politicisation of bare
life and normalisation of the state of emergency concludes with the exercise of sovereign-biopolitical violence, most brutally in the death camps of
Auschwitz, but also manifest in contemporary avatars of bare life (the refugee,
the enemy combatant, the overcomatose patient, the human being reduced
to experimental resource, and many others).
In this respect Agamben implicitly rejects Foucaults failure to provide a critical account of the neo-liberal governmentality of biosocial population management, arguing that liberal democracy represents an even more subtly
pernicious form of biopolitical control sharing many afnities with totalitarian biopolitical regimes. Indeed, twentieth-century totalitarianism, Agamben
claims, has its ground in this dynamic identity of life and politics, in the
politicisation of life and treatment of a natural given as a political task.55
In this sense, Agamben takes biopolitics to be fundamental to the origin and
development of Western political rationality as such, and not simply, as
Foucault had argued, representing an historical specic formation superseding
earlier sovereign models of power.
For Agamben, biopolitics thus delineates the metaphysical destiny of the
West, the ontological grounding of modernity. To understand the political
space of modernity we must grasp the fundamental role of biopolitics, along
with the increasing symbiosis between state and the various functionaries of
biopower, the jurist, the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest.56
This means rethinking the political history of modernity (including phenomena as disparate as the declaration of human rights, National Socialist
eugenics, and contemporary debates over legal and medical denitions of

death) as grounded in the operations of biopolitics and its dark shadow
thanatopolitics. It also means rejecting theories of political right grounded in
principles of justice or equality, which miss the fundamentally biopolitical
grounding of the modern social and political global order. Indeed, modernity, according to Agamben, must be understood through the increasing normalisation of the state of exception, and the generalisation of the biopolitical zone
of indistinction, that which confounds the opposition between zoe and bios,
bare life and political life, exclusion and inclusion, life and death.
For these reasons the biopolitical paradigm of modernity is not the city but
the camp, the biopolitical space of exception and zone of indistinction par excellence. We should not hear the rumble of war behind the civic peace, as Foucault
claimed, but rather see the outline of the concentration camp behind the hospital ward, the detention centre, or the humanitarian intervention. Echoing
Heidegger, Agamben too emphasises the metaphysical sameness uniting the
Nazi concentration camp with the asylum seeker detention centre, the
Auschwitz survivor with the overcomatose patient. Agamben thus amplies
Heideggers notorious remarkdeleted from the published 1955 version of
the essay The Question Concerning Technologythat modern industrialised agriculture is in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in
gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the starving of nations,
the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.57 For Heidegger, all of
these are instances of technological en-framing, machination taken to a nihilistic extreme. For Agamben, all are instances of the politicisation of naked life,
with the camp, the space that maintains bare life in a state of inclusive exclusion, now representing the biopolitical paradigm of modernity.
It is tempting to suggest that Agambens thesis on the biopolitical essence of
modernity represents a kind of quasi-Hegelian Aufhebung of the Heideggerian
thesis concerning technological ordering of beings, and the Foucaultian thesis concerning the exercise of biopower upon populations. From this point
of view, Agambens meditations on biopolitics temper the overly formalist
character of Heideggers diagnosis of the nihilism of machination by appropriating the historically particularist approach of Foucaults genealogies of
biopower. While tempting, however, this account must be modied by acknowledging the vital role of Arendt, Schmitt, and Benjamin in Agambens theory
of biopolitics.58 It must also recognise Agambens powerful critique of the

theory of rights, and his criticisms of the failure of political philosophy to
produce an adequate comprehension of the philosophical and historical
signicance of Auschwitz.59
Having said that, however, I want to suggest that Agamben nonetheless does
transform the Foucaultian concept of biopower/biopolitics in a more Heideggerian direction, emphasising the ontological signicance of biopower as a
dening feature of modernity, and characterising biopolitics as both the source
and the culmination of the history of Western political rationality. Indeed politics, according to Agamben, therefore appears as the truly fundamental
structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which
the relation between the living being and the logos is realized.60 The politicisation of bare life, which reaches its violent apotheosis in modernity, is the
metaphysical task par excellence in which the very meaning of the humanity of living human beings is decided.61 Politics is metaphysical and metaphysics is political: metaphysics and politics are related in the sense that
human beings attempt, through language and thought, to separate and oppose
themselves to our own bare life, yet maintain themselves in this relationship
through the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of life within the political
community.62
The distinction between modernity and antiquity thereby collapses: modernity simply executes the metaphysical-biopolitical task of producing the
human both as natural life and as political being. Thus Western politics,
Agamben remarks, is a biopolitics from the very beginning: politics has
always been biopolitics, which means that every attempt to found political
liberties in the rights of the citizen is, therefore, in vain.63 In vain, Agamben
argues, because the fundamental activity of sovereign power is not to enshrine
and uphold rights, but to produce, and then optimise and manage, bare life
as the originary political element and as threshold of articulation between
nature and culture, zoe and bios.64
Agambens provocative theses on biopolitics deserve more conceptual elaboration and critical scrutiny than I can attempt here.65 Nonetheless, in summary form we can characterise Agambens transformation of Foucaults
concept of biopower/biopolitics as follows. Foucaults concept of biopower
is transformed into Agambens conception of biopolitics, where the latter is

understood to provide the ontological and historical conditions of political
rationality as the exercise of sovereign power (the sovereign ban or inclusion by exclusion) over bare life. Human beings are transformed into homo
sacer, human life that is abandoned by law and exposed to sovereign violence; hence human beings become the living objects of biopolitical management, control, or destruction in the name of life. In modernity, the gure
of homo sacer enters a zone of indistinction in which the bare life of the concentration camp survivor, the Versuchsperson (experimental (human) subject),
camp inmate, refugee, overcomatose patient, all merge as exemplars of the
biopolitical exercise of sovereign power, the universalisation of the state of
exception. This chilling extension of the biopolitical control to all levels of
social and biological existence might indeed suggest such a zone of indistinction, the sheer reduction of human beings to living material for biopolitical
manipulation. At the same time, one should acknowledge that Agamben does
have a positive response to modern biopolitical capture. It is to evoke a
Benjaminian messianic politics that gestures towards the possibility of a
new form-of-life, one that might provide the ground for a coming politics
over and against the bloody nexus of sovereign violence and biopolitics.66
Whatever the prospects of messianic politics, Agambens claims concerning
the biopolitical foundations of modernity, I want to argue, share strong afnities
with the Heideggerian metaphysical critique of modernity: the development
of metaphysical nihilism commencing with the Greek division between zoe
and bios, culminating with the camp as the most explicit manifestation of the
biopolitical essence of modernity. To be sure, Agamben appropriates the
Foucaultian aspect of specic genealogical analysis of biopower as immanent
in various social-political institutions; but he then grounds this analysis
in Heideggerian ontological thesis concerning the biopolitical essence and
destiny of Western political being.
Foucault, for his part, moved away from the systemic perspective of disciplinary control and biopolitical management, modifying his critical-theoretical
perspective in favour of a more neutral analysis of neo-liberalism as a biopolitical system of governmentality. For the later Foucault, liberalism involves
forms of political rationality oriented towards the efcient management of
the life of the population, but that also afford a non-political space for indi-
vidual ethical self-formation and practices of freedom. In doing so, however,

Foucault severely undermines the critical character of his analysis of modern
power and subjectivity, such that it is difcult to reconcile his earlier analysis
of disciplinary-biopower with the later turn towards ethical practices of selfformation within neo-liberal forms of governmentality.
Agamben, by contrast, subsumes both liberal democracy and totalitarianism
as related manifestations of the biopolitical fracture dening the condition
of modernity. This fracture originates with the Greek schism between zoe and
bios, which institutes politics by the inclusive exclusion of zoe from bios within
the sovereign space of the polis. In so doing, Agamben transposes the properly political dimensions of biopowerthe forms of resistance, social struggle,
and normative challenges to biopolitical controlinto a messianic politics that
invokes not only a (non-Marxist) Benjaminian messianism but also a (postpolitical) Heideggerian Gelassenheit. Agambens messianic politics confronts
biopolitical nihilism by awaiting, much like Heidegger, the truth-event of
being that would overturn law in its totality and ground an utterly new
human community, thus redeeming the torn relationship between law and
life, politics and being, dening the history of Western political existence.67
In so doing however, Agamben retreats into a gestural, ontological politics
that seems vastly removed from the ontic politics of normative contestation
and social struggles.
To conclude, we can identify three movements in this stylised genealogy of
biopower. Heideggerian Machenschaft or machination describes the generalised
instrumentalisation and control of beings, human beings, and biological life,
denitive of the nihilism of technological modernity. Foucaultian biopower
refers to the specically modern (Western) emergence of regulatory and normalising power over the biological life of populations, culminating in political
neo-liberalism as the prevailing form of biopolitical rationality. Finally,
Agambenian biopolitics suggests a kind of synthesis of these moments,
transforming the Heideggerian meta-narrative of Being into a meta-narrative
of biopolitics. The latter takes the exposure of bare life to sovereign violence,
exemplied by the camp, as manifesting the fundamental ontological structure of Western political modernity, a parlous condition that can only be overcome through a messianic overturning of existing law and politics in favour
of a utopian community to come.
The problem with all three accounts is that they each, in different ways, evince
a tension between ontological and ontic levels of analysis. This tension emerges,
as we have seen, in explicating the relationship between the ontological aspects
of biopower as the ground of politics in modernity, and the ontic dimension
of specic social practices and collective political action within historically
specic biopower regimes. Despite its breathtaking historical sweep, the biopolitical paradigm displays a marked loss of specicity in its analyses of contemporary biopolitical phenomena. Universal and particular dimensions of
biopower (or ontological and ontic levels) collapse into each other such that
there is no substantive difference between, for Heidegger, mechanised agriculture and Nazi concentration camps, or for Agamben, between the Muselmann,
the refugee, and the overcomatose patient.68 The metaphysical articulation of
the concept of biopolitics, in sum, generates a kind of conceptual short-circuit between ontological and ontic levels of analysis that renders inoperative
a genuinely political conception of biopower.69 We are left with biopolitics
in the sense of bio-policing or bio-management in Foucaults account of the
biopolitical governmentality of neo-liberalism. Or we remain within Agambens
biopolitical nihilism in which all distinctions between biopolitical phenomena
and regimes are subsumed within a generalised zone of indistinction. This
condition of biopolitical nihilism, in turn, can only be redeemed by a messianic event of historical and political transguration, by the radical overcoming of the originary ontological breach between politics and being.
Foucault and Agamben leave us with a stark alternative: either to take the
ethical turn towards practices of freedom compatible with neo-liberalist governmentality, or accelerate biopolitical nihilism in the hope that a messianic
overcoming of the breach between bare life and sovereign power will institute a redeemed human community. In short, afrm pragmatic practices of
ethical self-formation, or prepare for the messianic overcoming of biopolitical
domination. These alternatives, however, seem partial and inadequate.
Foucaults turn to ethics and liberalism underplays the political urgency of
confronting societies of biopolitical control; this is a point not lost on Deleuze
and taken up by Hardt and Negri in their neo-Marxist version of biopolitical production.70 Agambens despairing account of biopolitical nihilism, on
the other hand, overemphasises the ontological sameness of biopower regimes,
and retreats from concrete politics into a metaphysical messianism prophetically gesturing towards a utopian community to come.
What my brief genealogy of biopower and biopolitics suggests, then, is the

need to nd a path between these alternatives. We should retain the Foucaultian
emphasis on a critical analysis of biopower without acquiescing to an ethical accommodation with neo-liberalism. And we ought to afrm Agambens
profound questioning of the biopolitical foundations of modernity without
succumbing to a utopian metaphysical messianism. We also need to question the Heideggerian metaphysical critique of modernity that has profoundly
marked both Foucaultian and Agambenian conceptions of biopower and
biopolitics. Finally, this genealogy suggests the need to restore the experience
of injustice, the suffering of human beings, to any philosophical account of
biopolitics, and to articulate political responses to biopower that go beyond
ethical acquiescence and metaphysical longing.
Notes
1
See M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert

Hurley, New York, Vintage, 1980, pp. 135-157; M. Foucault, Society Must be
Defended Lectures at the Collge de France 1975-76, eds. M. Bretani & A. Fontana,
trans. D. Macey, London, Penguin, 2003, pp. 239-264. See also the course resumes
for Security, Territory, and Population and The Birth of Biopolitics in Foucault,
Ethics. Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow,
trans. R. Hurley, London, Penguin, 2000, pp. 67-71 and pp. 73-79.
G. Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen,
Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 119-188; Agamben, Means Without
Ends. Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti & C. Casarino, Minneapolis & London,
University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
M. Hardt & A. Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA, & London, Harvard University
Press, 2000, pp. 22-41 and pp. 364-367.
M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics,

trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1991;
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad & K. Maly,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999.
See in particular, M. Foucault, Governmentality in The Foucault Effect. Studies

in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller, London, Harverster/
Wheatsheaf, 1991, pp. 87-104, and the helpful introduction by C. Gordon, Governmental Rationality: An Introduction, in The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality,
pp. 1-52, which provides an overview of Foucaults Collge de France lectures
dealing with security, territory, population, governmental rationality, and

neo-liberalism. See also T. Lemke, The Birth of Bio-Politics: Michel Foucaults
Lecture at the Collge de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality, Economy and
Society, vol. 30, no. 2, May 2001, pp. 190-207, for a thorough exegesis of Foucaults
hitherto unpublished 1979 lecture on German and American neo-liberalism.
6
G. Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 119-188. See also Agambens most recent reections
on the history of the state of exception as a paradigm of contemporary government: G. Agamben, State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 2004. For more detailed discussions of Agambens biopolitics see the collection of articles on Agamben in Contretemps 5, December 2004.
Cf. Heidegger was always for me the essential philosopher. . . . But I recognize
that Nietzsche prevailed over him. . . . I tried to read Nietzsche in the fties, but
Nietzsche by himself said nothing to me. Whereas Heidegger and Nietzschethat
was the philosophical shock! M. Foucault, The Return of Morality, Michel
FoucaultPolitics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984,
p. 250.
See Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pp. 59-61, and Agambens
remarks on the biopolitical basis of Heideggers involvement with National Socialism,
pp. 152-153.
We should note in passing that these concepts should not be conated, as happens
with Foucault, or used synonymously for both Foucault and Agamben, as I shall
argue presently.
10
See M. Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as

Metaphysics, trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi, San Francisco, Harper
& Row, 1991.
11
M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad &

K. Maly, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999.
12
We should note briey the difference between Heideggers earlier conception of

Machenschaft and his later, post-metaphysical conception of Ge-stell. Machenschaft
includes humans as productive beings or representing subjects, while Ge-stell
conceives of human beings as resources caught up in the totalising technological
disclosure of reality.
13
Machenschaft means that interpretation of beings as re-presentable and re-presented,

which includes beings as accessible to intention and calculation as much as
brought forth through pro-duction and execution. Heidegger, Contributions to
Philosophy, p. 76.
14
Ibid., p. 88.
15
Ibid., p. 88.
16
Ibid., p. 98.

17
See M. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology in The Question Concerning

Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1977.
18
Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume 3, p. 61.
19
Ibid., p. 62.
20
Ibid., p. 174.
21
Ibid., p. 174.
22
Ibid., p. 175.
23
Ibid., p. 175. The reference is to Ernst Jngers concept of Totalmobilmachung; Jnger

was a profoundly important source for Heideggers thinking on technology, nihilism,
modernity, and Nazism. See M. Zimmerman, Heideggers Confrontation with Modernity.
Technology, Politics, Art, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 46-112.
24
Ibid., p. 176.
25
Ibid., p. 181.
26
See M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, Pantheon,
1977, and The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. For a defence of
Foucaults account of productive power and its relationship to the subject see
P. Patton, Foucaults Subject of Power in The Later Foucault. Politics and Philosophy,
ed. J. Moss, London, Sage Publications, 1998, pp. 64-77.
27
For a more detailed reconstruction of Foucaults concept of biopolitics and the

theme of governmentality see M. Dean, Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern
Society, London, Sage Publications, 1999.
28
See Lemkes discussion of Foucaults analysis of the pre-WWII German Ordoliberalen and the American Chicago School, a movement enormously inuential
on contemporary neo-liberal economic rationalism. T. Lemke, The Birth of BioPolitics: Michel Foucaults Lecture at the Collge de France on Neo-Liberal
Governmentality. Economy and Society, vol. 30, no. 2, May 2001, pp. 190-207.
29
Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, pp. 135 ff.
30
Ibid., p. 136.
31
Ibid., p. 137.
32
Ibid., p. 139.
33
Foucault, Society Must be Defended Lectures at the Collge de France, 1975-76,

p. 246.
34
See H. Dreyfus, Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault International Journal
of Philosophical Studies, 1996, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1-16 and T. Rayner Biopower and
Technology: Foucault and Heideggers Way of Thinking, Contretemps 2, July, 2001.
Both Dreyfus and Rayner emphasise the afnities and shared way of thinking
evinced by Heidegger and Foucault but also overlook the important ways Foucaults
analyses of power-knowledge and subjectivity are implicitly at odds with

Heideggerian Seinsdenken, and, conversely, how Heidegger would have found
Foucaults Nietzschean genealogy far too ontic and nihilistic (forgetting the question of Being).
35
See Foucaults criticism of Heideggerian ontology as a questionable gure of

the modern episteme that reinvokes a return to originary being in response to
the retreat of man. Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, Vintage, 1970, pp. 328-335.
36
While the young Foucault (in Madness and Civilisation) did irt with a neo-Nietzschean
aesthetic afrmation of the harbingers of a post-nihilistic age to come (Hlderlin,
Nietzsche, Artaud), the mature Foucault drops any such crypto-eschatological
metanarrative underpinning his critical diagnoses of modernity. The same cannot
be said of Agamben, as I shall argue presently.
37
See Foucault, Governmentality, in The Foucault Effect, pp. 87-104, and also
M. Dean, Chapter 5, Bio-Politics and Sovereignty and Chapter 6, Liberalism,
in Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, pp. 98-130.
38
Lemke notes that Foucaults analysis of neo-liberalism links it with the rise of
technologies of self oriented towards an ethic of entrepreneurialism and the
minimalisation of political governance by the state: Neo-liberalism encourages
individuals to give their lives a specic entrepreneurial form. It responds to stronger
demand for individual scope for self-determination and desired autonomy by
supplying individuals and collectives with the possibility of actively participating
in the solution of specic matters and problems which had hitherto been the
domain of state agencies specically empowered to undertake such tasks. Lemke,
The Birth of Bio-Politics: Michel Foucaults Lecture at the Collge de France on
Neo-Liberal Governmentality, p. 202. As an instance of such technologies of the
self, Lemke points to the rise of the self-esteem movement in the United States,
which applies neo-liberal rationality to the distinction between public and private,
heralding a revolutionnot against capitalism, racism, the patriarchy etc. but
against the (wrong) way of governing ourselves p. 202. We recognise here a
familiar instance of the orthodox neo-liberal ideology that has become hegemonic
within Western liberal democracies. What is surprising is Foucaults uncritical
analysis of these new forms of neo-liberal ideology as interesting new developments in modern governmental rationality and technologies of the self.
39
In this respect, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, reject Foucaults ethical turn and follow instead Foucaults pre-1976 emphasis on the critique of disciplinary society,
extending this to a critique of biopower within contemporary societies of control. See G. Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies in Negotiations, trans.
M. Joughin, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 177-182. See also Hardt

and Negris attempt to restore a materialist basis to Foucaultian biopolitics, Chapter 2
in Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp. 22-41.
40
What does this new technology of power, this biopolitics, this biopower that is
beginning to establish itself, involve? Foucault, Society Must be Defended, p. 243.
41
See J. Rancire, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose, Minneapolis,
z ek, The Ticklish Subject. The Absent
University of Minneapolis Press, 1999; S. Zi
42
See M. Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism
Centre of Political Ontology, London & New York, Verso, 1999, esp. pp. 187-205.
and Hermeneutics, H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1983, pp. 208-226.
43
Cf. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality
ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures. Foucault, History of Sexuality
Volume I, p. 157.
44
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 187.
45
See A. Honneth, The Critique of Power. Reective Stages in a Critical Theory of Society,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
46
As an example of this formalist generality, compare Foucaults claim that Nazism

makes more explicit the basic operation of biopower to be found in most political states: The nal solution for the other races, and the absolute suicide of the
[German] race. That is where this mechanism inscribed in the workings of the
modern State leads. Of course, Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign
right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But this
play is in fact inscribed in the workings of all States. In all modern states, in all
capitalist States? Perhaps not. But I do think that . . . the socialist State, socialism,
is as marked by racism as the workings of the modern State, of the capitalist State.
Foucault, Society must be Defended, pp. 260-261. In quasi-Hegelian fashion, racism
is presented as a strategy of power that reconciles the biopolitical imperative to
manage life with the sovereign power to inict death in the name of the biological
preservation of the race. Important elements of Nazi ideologysuch as antiSemitism and the Judaeo-Bolshevist conspiracyare lost in this account.
47
See the recently published 1978 Collge de France lecture course, Scurit,
Territoire, Population, Paris, Seuil/Gallimard, 2004.
48
49
Ibid., p. 119.
50
Ibid., p. 120.
51
Ibid., p. 82.
52
Foucault, Society must be Defended, p. 249.
53
Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume I, p. 141. This quasi-Marxist moment in

Foucaults genealogical analysis, however, is undercut by the more Nietzschean,
even Heideggerian, moments that foreground the contingent birth of biopower as
an ungrounded event of disclosure.
54
Citing Schmitts dictum Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception,

Agamben argues that the biopolitical threshold of modernity is crossed once the
state of exceptionthe transformation of political and social beings into bare or
naked lifebecomes the norm, dissolving the form of state power and consolidating the biopolitical capture of bare life. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 11 and pp.
15-29.
55
56
Ibid., p. 122.
57
Heidegger included this passage in a draft version of the Origin of Technology

essay, delivered on December 1, 1949. It was rst cited by W. Schirmacher in Technik
und Gelassenheit, Alber, 1983, p. 25. For an interpretation of Heideggers remarks
see J. Young, Heidegger, Philosophy Nazism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1997, pp. 171 ff.
58
See the essays on Benjamin, Heidegger, and Deleuze in Agambens Potentialities.

Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford, Stanford University
Press, 1999. Agambens essay on Deleuze, Absolute Immanence, concludes with
the call for a genealogical inquiry into the term life and provides a genealogical
diagram contrasting transcendent (Kant, Husserl, Levinas and Derrida) and immanent (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault) philosophies of life. Agamben,
Potentialities, pp. 238-239. The mediating gure in Agambens genealogy of philosophies of life is none other than Heidegger, conrming my claim that the genealogical critique of biopower/biopolitics must begin with Heidegger (and Heideggers
reading of Nietzsche).
59
See G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, trans.
D. Heller-Roazen, New York, Zone Books, 1999.
60
61
Ibid., p. 8.
62
Ibid., p. 8.
63
Ibid., p. 181.
64
Ibid., p. 181.
65
For detailed, and contrasting, discussions of Agambens biopolitics see C. Mills,

Agambens Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life
and B. Neilson, Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism, both
in the Giorgio Agamben issue of Contretemps 5, December 2004.
66
C. Mills, Agambens Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy

Life Contretemps 5, December 2004, p. 42. Mills argues that critiques of Agamben
generally miss the Benjaminian messianic dimension of his work in which
[Agamben] argues for the total overturning of the condition of abandonment,
understood as imperfect nihilism, as the necessary condition for redemption
from biopolitical capture p. 42. The question is whether messianic politics is
an adequate critical response to, or metaphysical retreat from, the normalisation
of the state of exception in biopolitical modernity.
67
G. Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt, Minneapolis, University of

Minneapolis Press, 1993.
68
As J.-P. Deranty has argued, this is a political instance of the infamous Schellingian
Absolute that devours all concrete differences, the theoretical and political night
in which all cows are black. See J.-P. Deranty, Agambens Challenge to Normative
Theories of Modern Rights, Borderlands, vol. 3, no. 1, 2004.
69
Compare S. Critchleys Levinasian criticism of the blockage of the passage

between ethics and politics in Derridas deconstruction and Nancys work on
community. S. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 2nd ed., Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Library, 1999.
70
See note 39.
Paul Patton
Foucault, Critique and Rights
ABSTRACT
This paper outlines Foucaults genealogical conception
of critique and argues that it is not inconsistent with his
appeals to concepts of right so long as these are understood in terms of his historical and naturalistic approach
to rights. This approach is explained by reference to
Nietzsches account of the origins of rights and duties
and the example of Aboriginal rights is used to exemplify
the historical character of rights understood as internal
to power relations. Drawing upon the contemporary
externalist approach to rights, it is argued that the normative force of rights can only come from within historically available moral and political discourses. Reading
Foucaults 1978-1979 lectures on liberal governmentality in this manner suggests that his call for new forms
of right in order to criticise disciplinary power should
be answered by reference to concepts drawn from the
liberal tradition of governmental reason.
KEYWORDS: Foucault, Critique, Rights, Power, Externalism,
Liberalism, Governmentality
In several versions of a comparison with

Kants What is Enlightenment? Foucault
endeavoured to spell out his conception of
philosophy as a certain kind of critique. In
effect, he offers three distinct but overlapping
characterisations of critique. In his 1978 talk
to the Socit Franaise de Philosophie, What
is Critique?, he dened critique in terms of
268 Paul Patton
a concern with not being governed, or at least with not being governed so
much or in particular ways.1 In a 1983 lecture at the Collge de France, published as Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution, he dened critique as
the problematisation of the present. The critical philosopher asks: What is
happening now? And what is this now which we all inhabit?2 In contrast
to the quest for conditions of possibility that led to the analytic of truth outlined in Kants rst critique, this question pointed towards an ontology of
the present moment in history. Finally, in an essay rst published in English
in 1984, What is Enlightenment?, he dened critique as the concern to nd
points of difference or exit from the present. More precisely, he dened his
own practice of genealogical critique as the attempt to identify contemporary limits to present ways of thinking and acting in order to go beyond them.
In these terms, Foucaults critique asks: in what is given to us as universal,
necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints?3
Despite the variations between these denitions of what he refers to as the
critical ethos of modernity, all three texts reiterate the difference between the
kind of critique practised in Kants major works of that name and Foucaults
preferred model of critique. Kant inaugurated the kind of critique that interrogates the legitimacy of possible modes of knowing or looks for universal structures of all knowledge (connaissance) or of all possible moral
action.4 Although What is Critique? does point to the historical importance
of appeals to natural law as one of the ways in which limits were set to the
right to govern, Foucaults own practice of critique deals not with universal
structures but with particular, evental or event-like congurations of power
and knowledge. These include the dispositifs of madness, punishment, sexuality or government that emerge at a particular time and place and on the
basis of particular, contingent, historical conditions which enable them to
operate within a given social context. For this reason, What is Critique?
insists on the pure singularity of the modern systems of punishment and
sexuality and denies that these may be criticised by appeal to any foundational or pure form.5 What is Enlightenment? seeks to establish a link
between the limits described in genealogical terms and specic transformations underway in the present rather than any universal tendencies of
society or history.6
Foucault, Critique and Rights 269
This preference for the particular over the universal, for the event-like character of both the systems of power and knowledge through which we are
governed and the forms of contestation to which they give rise, appears to
rule out any appeal to right or to rights, since these are typically understood
to rely upon universal features of human nature or the human condition.
Foucault is well known for his reluctance to rely upon any such universalist
concept of human nature or human essence. By contrast, the predominant
approach to the nature of rights in contemporary moral and political philosophy supposes that these inhere in individuals by virtue of some universal
rights bearing feature of human nature, such as sentience, rationality, interests
or the capacity to form and pursue projects. In this manner, for example, Alan
Gewirth argues along Kantian lines that the capacity to form and pursue projects ensures that all humans have a right to freedom and well being since
these are necessary conditions of such agency.7 My aim in this paper is to
argue that the apparent tension between the particularism of Foucaults preferred form of critique and the universality supposedly implied by the appeal
to rights disappears once we abandon the universality condition and understand rights as historical and contingent features of particular forms of social
life. I argue that not only is this way of understanding rights implicit in
Foucaults historical and naturalistic approach but that it nds support in
elements of the externalist understanding of rights defended by a number
of Anglo-American political philosophers. In contrast to the attempts to ground
rights in a particular feature of individual human beings, these theorists take
the view that whether or not a body (individual or collective, personal or
corporate) possesses rights will depend on facts about how that body is able
to act and how it is treated in a given social milieu.8
Despite his reticence with regard to concepts of human nature and despite
the initial impression that genealogical critique is inconsistent with appeals
to any kind of right, Foucault makes frequent use of the concept of right. For
example, in What is Critique? he denes critique as the movement through
which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power
effects and to question power about its discourses of truth.9 In interviews
and political essays, he often called for new forms of right or for reliance
upon rights that are not yet widely recognised or established. For example,
in a 1982 interview on the issue of gay rights, he advocated the creation of
270 Paul Patton
new forms of relational right that would recognise same sex relationships.10
In a 1983 interview on Social Security, he endorsed the idea of a right to the
means of health and also a right to suicide.11 Finally, in a 1984 speech in
support of non-governmental organisations attempting to protect Vietnamese
refugees being attacked by pirates in the Gulf of Thailand, he spoke of the
right of international citizens to intervene in matters of international policy
hitherto reserved for governments. He further suggested that the suffering
of individuals founds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who
hold power.12
How are we to make sense of such appeals to right in Foucaults political
interviews? How can such appeals avoid the charge that they contradict the
explicit particularity of critique as he describes it? I think there are at least
three essential elements of an adequate answer to this question. First, we
must appreciate that Foucaults ontological commitment to the view that all
social relations are power relations does not disqualify him from appealing
to a concept of right. Second, we must acknowledge that the manner in which
Foucault historicises and therefore particularises discourses of right is also
consistent with appealing to rights in particular contexts. Third, drawing
upon the argument of one of the externalist theorists of rights mentioned
above, we must understand the normative force of rights claims as derived
from historically available discourses of right.
Rights and Power

Nietzsches genealogical account of the origin of rights and duties provides
a precedent for understanding rights in terms of relationships of power, or
perceived power, between individuals and collective agents. On the basis of
the broad view of power as the capacity of individual or collective agents to
act in certain waysthe same view that is implied in Foucaults denition
of power as action upon the actions of others13he advances the hypothesis
that these originate as recognised and guaranteed degrees of power. My
rights, he argues in Daybreak 112, are that part of my power which others
have not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve.14 The
reasons that might lead others to wish me to preserve a part of my power
will vary according to whether or not those others are stronger than I am. In
the case in which rights are derived from a stronger other party, these might
be simply conceded where the other enjoys such a superuity of power that
they do not mind what the weaker party does. Or rights might be extended
on the basis of particular economic or political interests as in the case of the
rights of conquered peoples or the rights of slaves.15
In the case where the relevant others are not obviously stronger, the basic
civil rights that we associate with modern democratic political communities
might be supposed to follow from one or other of the mutually benecial
range of reasons which are typically taken to justify entering into the social
contract. Others might choose to respect a right to non-interference in my
pursuit of my projects in expectation of my respecting a similar right on their
behalf, or they might do so because to not respect my right to non-interference
would lead to perilous and potentially costly struggle, or they might do so
in order to maintain my power and the possibility of my allegiance with them
in opposition to hostile third parties. Nietzsche sums up this kind of reasoning by suggesting that the part of my power that others wish me to preserve is that part which they undertake to respect through their own prudence
and fear and caution.16
In contrast to the individualism of much of the liberal traditions approach
to rights, Nietzsches suggestion that rights are that part of our power that
others wish us to preserve reminds us that rights essentially involve the ways
in which individuals and groups are allowed to act, or are acted upon by
others in a given social context. In this sense, he offers an externalist account
of rights in the manner dened by Darby. Whereas individualist approaches
tend to treat rights as inherent properties of individuals which then set limits to the power of others, Nietzsche treats rights as a matter of relations
between individual and collective bodies, including the relations between
rulers and ruled. Rights are essentially dened as effective rights, in the sense
that they only exist when particular powers or degrees of power are recognised and guaranteed by other agencies.
Further, what rights there are in a given social milieu will also be a function
of beliefs about such things as the actual or legitimate capacities of particular agents, or the purpose of particular ways of acting or being acted upon.
Nietzsche points to this doxastic dimension of rights and duties in suggesting
that these are properly understood as a consequence of the relationship
between the sense of agency or feeling of power of the parties involved rather
272 Paul Patton
than their actual power. The rights of others, he says, constitute a concession
on the part of our sense of power to the sense of power of those others.17
Since this sense or feeling of power crucially involves beliefs about the power
of the agents involved, it follows that the rights of others and our duties
towards them relate to what they and we believe lies within our respective
powers, and to what they and we believe ought to lie within our respective
powers, rather than what actually does so. In short, Nietzsches analysis of
rights in terms of the sense of power of those involved implies that the historical existence of rights will be determined in part by the beliefs and values
that effectively orient the actions of particular agents.18
Nietzsches conception of rights as recognised and guaranteed degrees of
power implies a strongly historical understanding, not only of the origin of
rights in relations of power, but also of the manner in which these may be
transformed, even to the point of disappearing, as power relations change.
It follows from the dependence of rights upon relations of power that when
the power relationships involved in maintaining a given regime of rights
undergo signicant alteration then old rights can disappear and new ones
come into existence. The disappearance of the rights of slave-owners, like the
disappearance of many of the rights which husbands formerly held over
wives, or the dismantling of the forms of legal apartheid that existed in colonial countries, may be seen to be in part the effect of such changes in relations of power. The contemporary emergence of new rights such as the right
of individuals to suicide, or the right to hold state ofcials to account for war
crimes, or the right of intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states
when the basic human rights of citizens are at stake, may also reect wider
changes in social power relations. Moreover, in accordance with the general
principle of Nietzsches genealogical method that the purposes that governed
the emergence of an institution or social practice may be quite different from
the purposes that it currently serves, we can appreciate the possibility that
rights that emerged in one historical context may take on a very different
political signicance in another context.
Consider the example of Aboriginal legal rights to land and other traditional
resources. These rights came into being in the context of British colonial law
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As well as legal rules relating to the constitutional status of colonies and the applicability of English
law, this body of law included rules governing the status of native peoples,
their laws and customs and their entitlement to their traditional lands. Together
these rules formed a body of unwritten law known as the doctrine of Aboriginal
rights.19 This doctrine was elaborated entirely within the unequal power
relations between colonisers and colonised. It provided a means to ensure
stable property relations and to manage relations between indigenous and
settler populations. It embodied rights granted by the colonial authorities in
the interest of effective colonial government. At the same time, since these
were colonies governed by law, the legal doctrine of Aboriginal rights provided one of the few available peaceful means through which colonised peoples could act to recover something of their traditional land and way of life.
Once taken up in the late twentieth century context of changed beliefs about
the relative cultural superiority or inferiority of peoples and cultures and the
undesirability of discrimination on racial and cultural grounds, these same
legal rules acquire a new critical potential for reconguring the relations
between colonised and colonisers. In this context and accompanied by a resurgence of Indigenous cultural and political activism, the political valency of
the rights they embody is radically altered. From being an instrument of colonial rule the doctrine of Aboriginal rights has become a means by which
colonised peoples can reassert a degree of economic and political control over
their lands. In the changed context of an industrial economy in which access
to natural resources has become crucial, it has allowed the elaboration of new
legal rights and led to the development of new legal mechanisms to protect
Indigenous interests in land or in the pursuit of other activities that previously would not have given rise to legal rights. For this reason, common law
Aboriginal rights have become the subject of extensive jurisprudence in countries such as Australia and Canada since the nineteen-seventies. This jurisprudence demonstrates the kind of historicity and internality to power relations
that is highlighted by Nietzsches externalist conception of rights.
Considered historically, we can see the discourse of Aboriginal rights as exemplifying what Foucault calls the rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses.
It has undergone a strategic reversal in a manner that parallels the late twentieth century reversal of nineteenth century pyschiatric and legal discourses
about homosexuality.20 His 1975-1976 course, Society Must Be Defended, treats
discourses of political right in a similarly historical manner. For example,
in his lecture of 14 January, in the course of explaining why the juridical
274 Paul Patton
theory of sovereignty continued to function as an ideology of right long

after it had ceased to represent the effective mechanisms of government, he
points to the manner in which this theory of sovereignty served both defenders and critics of monarchical power during the political struggles from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and eventually underwrote the democratisation of sovereign power:
On the one hand, the theory of sovereignty was, in the seventeenth century
and even the nineteenth century, a permanent critical instrument to be used
against the monarchy and all the obstacles that stood in the way of disciplinary society. On the other hand, this theory, and the organisation of a
juridical code centred upon it, made it possible to superimpose on the mechanism of discipline a system of right that concealed its mechanisms and
erased the element of domination and the techniques of domination involved
in discipline, and which, nally, guaranteed that everyone could exercise
his or her own sovereign rights thanks to the sovereignty of the State.21
Another example of this tactical polyvalence of discourses of right occurs in

the lecture of 21 January. In the course of describing the general features of
the discourse of social relations as a form of war, which he repeatedly refers
to as the rst historico-political discourse in postmedieval Western society,
Foucault points out that this was also a discourse of right. The adversarial
subject asserts or demands a right that is grounded in history and that takes
a different form from the universality associated with sovereign juridical right:
These are singular rights, and they are strongly marked by a relationship of
property, conquest, victory, or nature. It might be the right of his family or
race, the right of superiority or seniority, the right of triumphal invasions, or
the right of recent or ancient occupations.22 This historico-political discourse
of right appeared in England at the end of the sixteenth century, where it
served both bourgeois and aristocratic polemics against absolute monarchy.
It reappeared in France at the end of the seventeenth century, where it served
the French aristocracy in their struggle against absolute-administrative monarchy. Finally, it re-appeared in social Darwinian and eugenic discourse in the
late nineteenth century.23 One of the strategic purposes served by the discourse of the rights of civilised races, which Foucault does not discuss, was
to deny rights that more tolerant colonial administrations had previously
granted to Indigenous peoples.
Rights and Normativity

Nietzsches qualifying phrase recognised and guaranteed degrees of power
refers us back to the systems of belief and value that provide normative
justication for particular rights. Even so, the objection will be made, this
only takes the beliefs and values that sustain particular rights into account
in an historical and descriptive manner. It does not tell us why certain ways
of treating others, or certain ways of being treated, should be considered matters of right rather than mere matters of fact. This is a problem for purely
externalist accounts of rights since a distinctive and important feature of
rights claims is that they function normatively as relatively insistent or
peremptory moral considerations.24 To say that someone has a right to something is to say that they have a particular kind of entitlement such that others are under an obligation to provide or at least not to prevent their obtaining
it. Yet there appears to be nothing in the externalist conception of rights that
accounts for this normative force of the appeal to rights.
A standard response within contemporary moral and political philosophy is
to argue that rights only exist if an acceptable moral argument for them can
be provided. Many philosophers believe that if something is a moral right
then it has always been a right, even if people have failed to recognise this
right, or failed to extend it to others (typically those they believe to be inferior beings such as savages or women) because of mistaken beliefs about
them. While they are happy with the idea that institutional rights evolve over
time in response to changing beliefs and attitudes, they think that to believe
that moral rights are subject to historical change is to confuse rights with
mere beliefs about rights, or to confuse the object of moral philosophy with
that of historical sociology. This view relies upon an implicit distinction
between institutional or legal rights and the underlying moral rights that nd
expression in legal form. It accords with the language of discovery commonly
employed in speaking about rights.25
It also provides a clear rationale for the critical function of appeals to rights,
since one of the reasons frequently given for drawing a distinction between
legal or institutional rights and moral rights is that we often criticise laws
and other institutions for not recognising rights, or for recognising rights that
they should not. The criticism of laws and constitutions for their denial of
276 Paul Patton
civil rights to minority groups is taken as evidence that there are rights that
exist in some sense outside of or apart from their legal enactment.26 Similarly,
the fact that there are cases in which we would agree that the rights of individuals or groups have not been respected, even though they were treated
in accordance with the law, is taken to imply that rights exist independently
of their institutional expression. In this manner, it could be asserted in 1987
that . . . black South Africans have the moral right to full representation even
though this right has not been accorded legal recognition, and in saying
this we mean to point to the right as a moral reason for changing the legal
system so as to accord it recognition.27
However, this way of explaining the critical function of appeals to rights
comes at a cost since it leads to a conception of moral rights as insensitive
to historical circumstances. Speaking about human rights, Gewirth provides
an extreme statement of the view of those who believe that, since the acceptability of a moral argument has nothing to do with the actual beliefs of individuals, there is a sense in which, if a particular right exists, then it must
always have existed:
The existence of human rights depends on the existence of certain moral
justicatory reasons; but these reasons may exist even if they are not explicitly ascertained. Because of this, it is correct to say that all persons had
human rights even in ancient Greece, whose leading philosophers did not
develop the relevant reasons. Thus, the existence of moral reasons is in
important respects something that is discovered rather than invented.28
Such an a-historical conception of rights is implausible because it pays no

attention to the conditions of something being an effective moral right in a
given society at a given time. In so far as we now accept that Indigenous
people have a moral right to their traditional lands and ways of life, it is
implausible to suggest that this right always existed and that people were
simply ignorant or unaware of their existence. In the Australian context, given
what we know about the theories of property entitlement, racial hierarchy
and the conditions of civilisation that were common in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and given what we know about the levels of ignorance
with regard to Aboriginal culture, it beggars belief to say that Aboriginal people had an effective moral right to their land at that time. Of course there
were dissenting moral views, but the overwhelming weight of public opinion was informed by versions of the terra nullius principle, under which the
supposed cultural inferiority of Aboriginal people denied them any justied
entitlement to their lands or ways of life.29 By contrast, such prejudicial beliefs
have become more difcult to sustain and justify in recent years. The commitment to equality has become stronger and more extensive. As a result, it
makes sense to say that new moral rights have come into existence, just as
old ones have disappeared. It is important to acknowledge that there has
been real moral change on these issues, because this has been the result of
considerable intellectual, moral and political effort on the part of many people, but also in order to remain open to the possibility that there will be such
moral change in the future. An explicitly historical concept of moral rights,
as well as the forms of their legal and institutional expression, reminds us of
what is required to bring this about.
We therefore need to nd a way to navigate between the equally unappealing alternatives of an a-historical foundationalism and a historical externalism that deprives rights of their normative force. At this point, some of the
arguments of recent externalist theorists of rights may help us to make sense
of rights in a manner consistent with Foucaults historical approach. These
theorists offer a range of different formulations with regard to precisely which
facts about the social milieu are relevant for the existence of rights. Darby
suggests that institutional respect for the behaviours in question is required
for them to be considered rights. Rex Martin offers a looser characterisation
in describing rights as established ways of acting or established ways of
being acted toward, ways of being treated.30 All agree, however, that a further condition is necessary in order to account for the normative dimension
of rights: in order for an established way of acting or being acted upon to
constitute a right it also must be justied in moral terms.
This additional requirement immediately raises the question what kind of
justication is necessary for an established way of acting to constitute a right
and what such justication amounts to. Darby limits his denition to the
claim that rights are socially recognised ways of acting or being acted upon
that are justied in terms of some substantive moral theory or other.31 While
recognising that this calls for further specication of what might constitute
an adequate moral theory, he presents it as a virtue of his account that it
278 Paul Patton
leaves open the question what kind of moral theory might provide an acceptable justication. However, this response leaves out something important
from an historical point of view. Darby supposes that the moral force of rights
derives only from their being supported by some form of moral argument,
independently of historical questions about the availability of such argument
to actually existing agents. By contrast, Martin argues that it is not sufcient
that there be some form of moral justication for the right in question: the
justication must also be accessible to agents on the basis of their actual moral
and other beliefs. His reason is that the moral force of rights claims implies
that they involve some normative direction of the behaviour of agents, for
example that others must provide or at least not impede our access to the
good in relation to which we have a right. For this to be the case, however,
the reasons for such normative direction must be available to the agents
involved. In this manner, Martin interprets the normatively binding character of rights to mean that people can only be supposed to have duties of
which they are or could in practice become reectively aware:
For obligations or duties that cannot be acknowledged in a given society,
or that cannot be shown to follow, discursively, from accredited principles
of conduct which are at least reectively available to persons in that society, cannot be regarded as proper duties which could normatively bind conduct in that society.32
On this view, if the acknowledgment of something as a duty is blocked by

beliefs about the incapacity or unworthiness of those to whom the duty would
be owed, then there is no duty. This is arguably what occurred in relation to
those colonised peoples who were considered to be, in the words of one member of the Privy Council, Lord Sumner, so low in the scale of social organisation that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be
reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilised society.33 By
contrast, if there is now widespread agreement that Indigenous people have
a right to exclusive possession of their traditional lands, this is because the
depth and complexity of the relationship to land in Indigenous cultures is
better understood and because they are now counted among those who are
entitled to things that are of deep cultural signicance to them. In this sense,
there is real moral change and a genuine historical dimension to the existence of rights.
Foucaults appeals to particular rights or to particular forms of rights, I suggest, may be understood in the manner of Martins condition for the normative force of rights, that is, as appealing to historically available discourses
of right. Consider his 1984 comments uttered on the occasion of the creation
of an international committee to act in support of Vietnamese refugees. He
argues that the right of private individuals to effectively intervene in the
sphere of international policy and strategy is a new right that has emerged
within the power relations between governments and governed.34 As we
would expect in the light of the historical conception of rights outlined above,
his comments point to two distinct kinds of conditions of the emergence of
this right.
First, he points to the role of NGOs such as Amnesty International, Terre des
Hommes, and Mdcins du Monde in the creation of this right. Not only their
existence but also their relative independence of governments constitute novel
elements in the eld of international policy and strategy. These organisations
and the international citizenry they represent possess sufcient organisational
and nancial power to give them access to news media, and therefore signicant
political leverage over governments. This gives them the power to act in support of those who are poorly governed or, as in the case of stateless refugees,
not governed at all. The fact of being appointed by no one renders explicit
this independence of governments and it is for this reason that Foucault says
that it constitutes the right of these private international citizens to speak
and to act.35
Second, he points to the role of widely accepted beliefs about the role and
purpose of government in providing moral leverage. It is the fact that we
are all members of the community of the governed, he argues, that makes
us all parties to an international citizenship and that obliges us to always
bring the testimony of peoples suffering to the eyes and ears of governments.36 This new right arises partly because governments of all persuasions
believe and would have others believe that they are concerned for the welfare of their citizens. It is because the governed accept that their welfare falls
within the sphere of governmental power that governments have a right to
act in this regard. Conversely, to the extent that governments rely on this
shared belief to justify their actions, they thereby make themselves accountable for their action or inaction. This mutually accepted relationship between
280 Paul Patton
governors and governed is one of the conditions that enables governments

to be held responsible for the suffering of citizens and allows the emergence
of a duty on the part of the international citizenry to speak out against abuses
or derelictions of power. Of course, widely accepted views about the undesirability of unnecessary suffering provide another background condition of
the moral force of the claims advanced on behalf of the refugees.
Foucaults 1978-1979 lectures provide further support for the suggestion that
the normative force of rights can only be derived from historically available
discourses of right. Although this course was entitled Birth of Biopolitics,
it focused on a particular form of governmental reason, namely liberalism
and its post-World War Two neo-liberal variants. As he explained at the outset, the analysis of liberalism undertaken in these lectures was directed at the
forms of rationalisation and reection on the techniques of government rather
than its justication in political philosophical terms. However, while the question of the legitimation or justication of political power is put to one side,
this is not in order to deny the existence or the efcacy of normative or juridical concepts. Rather, it is in order to explain what form these took and how
as a matter of fact the practice of government was justied within the particular forms of governmental rationality available during particular historical periods. In this sense, Foucaults approach to the normative bases of
political power parallels Martins approach to the normative force of particular
rights.
The rst and second lectures of this course address the question of legitimation obliquely by contrasting reason of state and modern liberal governmentality with respect to the limitation of political power. For the former, the
only limitation on the domestic exercise of sovereign power was the law and
associated notions of right, including the natural rights of individuals. For
the latter, by contrast, the new science of political economy provided a different kind of intrinsic limit to the exercise of political power, namely the
question of what it was useful for government to undertake, given its aims
and given the self-regulating character of the economic process on which the
achievement of those aims depended. Foucault acknowledged that this was
a limitation of fact rather than right, even if law will nd itself one day
under an obligation to transcribe this limitation into rules which should not
be transgressed.37
In the second lecture on 17 January 1979, he returned to the question of how

this limitation would be presented in juridical terms. Within the framework
of liberal reason, he asks, what is the basis and legitimate extent of public
law (droit public)? He suggests that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, two ways of answering this question were followed. The rst, which
he calls the revolutionary, juridico-deductive path, sought to arrive at the
limits to the legitimate functions of government on the basis of a theory of
the originary or natural rights of individuals. This was the path followed by
the American Declaration of Independence, by Rousseau, and by the French
revolutionaries. Foucault summarises it as the attempt to delimit the powers
of government on the basis of a conception of the rights of man, by way of
an understanding of the constitution of sovereign power.38
The second path was the one followed by English radicalism at the end of
the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. It began not with the
rights of man and government but with the practice of government and with
the question of what it was useful or futile for government to undertake. In
practice, this turned into a calculus of interests since it was the concept of
interest that linked the liberal concern with self-regulation markets and the
utility of public policy. Government now aimed at increasing both the forces
of the state and the well-being of its citizens, and at achieving this through
the free operation of the market, thereby ensuring that individuals are governed as little as possible. The justication and the limits of government are
henceforth understood in terms of a complex interplay of individual and collective interests.39 Foucault suggests that, while the utilitarian conception has
been dominant, both the revolutionary theory of human rights and the radical theory of human interests remain active and available forms of legitimation and limitation of government throughout the modern period. Moreover,
these correspond to two distinct but interrelated concepts of freedom: a juridical concept based on the imprescriptible rights of individuals and a utilitarian concept based on the necessary independence of the governed from those
who govern. It is for this reason, he points out, that the contemporary problem of human rights can take either the juridical form of basic rights or the
utilitarian form of afrming or demanding independence on the part of the
governed.40 As we saw above, in his comments in support of humanitarian
intervention to assist refugees, Foucault relies on this utilitarian principle of
the independence of the governed in asserting the right of private individuals
282 Paul Patton
to intervene in matters of international policy. This points to an important

feature of his history of governmentality and indeed of his practice of genealogical critique in general. To the extent that he inquires into the emergence of
present conceptions of the nature and limits of government, he cannot be
supposed to speak from a purely external and descriptive position. Since
genealogical critique aligns itself with specic transformations underway, it
inevitably relies upon particular normative choices available within the present.
Conclusion
At the end of his lecture of 14 January 1976, in a passage that is often quoted
and equally often misunderstood, Foucault calls for a new form of right that
would be emancipated from the principle of sovereignty and that would serve
as an effective discursive weapon against disciplinary power. It is worthwhile
examining more closely this passage since it is ambiguous with regard to
whether Foucault invokes this new form of right in a purely normative, and
universalist, or a purely descriptive, and particularist, sense. He poses the
question of appropriate discursive means of resistance to disciplinary power
in concrete normative terms. What do we do in real life when we want to
object to the effects of disciplinary knowledge and power? We invoke the
rights of citizens that are, he suggests, derived from sovereign right. As a
result, we nd ourselves in an impasse: having recourse to sovereignty
against discipline will not enable us to limit the effects of disciplinary power.41
The recourse to sovereign right in this context is ineffective because of the
way in which forms of sovereign right function in concert with disciplinary
mechanisms as part of the general apparatus of power in modern society. In
other words, the basis of Foucaults criticism of the recourse to sovereign
right appears to be descriptive and historical rather than normative. It is on
this basis that he offers the following conditional advice: if we are to struggle against disciplines, or rather against disciplinary power, in our search for
a non-disciplinary power, we should not be turning to the old right of sovereignty; we should be looking for (ce vers quoi il faut aller) a new right that
is both anti-disciplinary and emancipated from the principle of sovereignty.42
Heading for might be a better translation than looking for, but however
we translate this sentence there remains an ambiguity at the heart of the
strategic imperative expressed. Some commentators take him to be suggesting
that we need a new form of right capable of providing normative opposition

to disciplinary power, while at the same time denying that his work provides
any basis for such universalistic theory of right.43 In contrast, I suggest that
we can read the sentence at once both in a descriptive and in a normative
sense. It is descriptive in suggesting that we should be seeking out other
forms of right that already operate in our present. It is normative in the sense
that these should provide effective counter-arguments to the techniques,
justications and goals of disciplinary power.
Foucaults 1978-1979 lectures on the successive forms of liberal discourse on
government provide some indication of the kinds of right that might full
these requirements. The utilitarian theory of government elaborated in the
course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries clearly provides a conception
of political right that is emancipated from the principle of sovereignty in that
the basis of government is not sovereign individual right or social contract
but rather the interplay of individual and public interests. This conception
of government accepts that the independence of the governed, and therefore
their freedom, is a condition of ensuring the maximal satisfaction of interests. At the same time, however, the manner in which economic liberalism
and disciplinary techniques were combined in Benthams utilitarian theory
of government suggests that the independence of the governed does not by
itself provide a sufcient counterweight to disciplinary power. On the contrary, a classical liberal understanding of society required disciplined and
obedient subjects of economic processes. For an effective counter to the techniques of disciplinary power, it may be necessary to make use of concepts of
autonomy and responsibility that are more prominent in neo-liberal theories
of government, as Foucault does in his 1983 interview The Risks of Security.
In the course of this interview, he reafrms his belief that all human relationships are relationships of power and that they always entail certain risks.
Among the risks mentioned, however, are the perverse effects of social security systems that serve to maintain forms of dependency. In this context,
Foucault acknowledges a legitimate demand for a form of social security that
allows exibility in our relations with others and ourselves while ensuring
each of us real autonomy.44
In short, if it is correct to say that Foucaults recourse to notions of right must
always be understood in the historical and local sense outlined above, then
284 Paul Patton
perhaps we should accept that the normative bases of the critique of disciplinary power must come from within the liberal tradition of governmental
reason to which he devoted these last years of his own political reection.
This does not imply a global endorsement of neo-liberal governmentality, nor
does it rule out the possibility that this particular form of governmental reason might undergo transformation or that new forms of right might emerge.
However, it does imply that appeals to new rights or new forms of right will
always rely upon concepts that may be found within or derived from existing discourses of moral or political right. Critical appeals to new rights or
new forms of right will always be incremental and experimental. In the terms
of Foucaults denition of critique in What is Enlightenment? they will
always involve working on the limits of what it is possible to say and to do
within a given milieu, in order to identify and assist ways in which it might
be possible and desirable to go beyond those limits.
Notes
1
M. Foucault, What is Critique? in What is Enlightenment? ed. J. Schmidt, Berkeley

& Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1996, 382-398, p. 384.
M. Foucault, Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution, trans. C. Gordon, Economy

and Society, vol. 15, no. 1, 1986, pp. 88-89.
M. Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984,

Volume 1, Ethics, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley and others, New York, The New
Press, 1997, p. 315. This essay was rst published in ed. P. Rabinow, The Foucault
Reader, New York, Pantheon, 1984.
Foucault, What is Critique?, p. 393; What is Enlightenment?, p. 315.
Foucault, What is Critique?, p. 395.
Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, p. 316.
A. Gewirth, The Epistemology of Human Rights in Human Rights, eds. E. Paul,

F. Miller and J. Paul, Oxford, Blackwell, 1984.
D. Darby, Two Conceptions of Rights Possession, Social Theory and Practice,

vol. 27, no. 3, 2001, p. 387. See also Darby, Unnatural Rights, Canadian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 1, 2001, pp. 49-82; Rights Externalism, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, vol. LXVIII, no. 3, 2004, pp. 620-634; R. Martin, A System
of Rights, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993; L.W. Sumner, The Moral Foundation of
Rights, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987.
Foucault, What is Critique?, p. 386.

10
M. Foucault, The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will in Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, Volume 1, Ethics, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley and others, New York,
The New Press, 1997, pp. 157-162.
11
M. Foucault, The Risks of Security, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume

3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others, New York, The
New Press, pp. 365-381.
12
M. Foucault, Confronting Governments: Human Rights, in Essential Works Volume

3, pp. 474-475. For more detailed comment in this speech, see P. Patton Power
and Right in Nietzsche and Foucault, International Studies in Philosophy, vol. XXXVI,
no. 3, 2004, pp. 54-58.
13
M. Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Essential Works, Volume 3, p. 341.
14
F. Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1982, p. 67. Nietzsches analysis of the origin of rights and duties is analysed
further in Patton, Power and Right in Nietzsche and Foucault, pp. 47-51.
15
See F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 49-50 (Para 93: Of the rights
of the weaker). In his lecture of 21 January 1979, Foucault points to another
scenario in which rights are conceded to the governed in the interest of a form
of governmental reason articulated in terms of political economy. Here, individual
freedom is conceived in terms of the necessary independence of the governed
rather than in terms of a set of fundamental juridical rights. See Naissance de la
Biopolitique: Cours au Collge de France 1978-1979, Paris, Gallimard/Seuil, 2004,
p. 43.
16
Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 67.
17
Nietzsche, Daybreak, p. 67.
18
I. Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1986, suggests a quadripartite structure of rights along four axes: subject,
substance, justication and purpose of the relevant entitlement. Like Foucaults
characterisation of regimes of exercising power over others or over the self, this
schema allows us to envisage change along each of the four axes. Thus, we can
see that the disappearance of many of the rights of husbands over wives came
about in part because of the political empowerment of woman, but also because
of challenge to the beliefs about sexual difference which sustained social practices
in relation to the family and sexual division of labour. Or we can see the (still contested) emergence of rights to abortion and suicide, as in part as a consequence
of changing views about the nature and value of human life.
19
B. Slattery, Understanding Aboriginal Rights, The Canadian Bar Review, vol. 66,
no. 3, 1987, p. 737.
286 Paul Patton

20
M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley,

London, Allen Lane, Penguin, 1979, pp. 100-101.
21
M. Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France 1975-76,

trans. D. Macey, New York, Picador & London, Penguin, 2003, p. 37. See also the
rst lecture of Foucaults 1978-9 course Naissance de la Biopolitique, pp. 13-15 where
he summarises the manner in which, from the end of the sixteenth and beginning
of the seventeenth century, law conceived in various ways served as the universal
principle for establishing limits to the power of the State.
22
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 52.
23
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, pp. 49-50.
24
Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights, p. 12.
25
For example, in relation to the recent history of Indigenous rights lawyers

and historians often speak of the acknowledgment that Aboriginal people possess
certain rights or the recognition of those rights by the law. See J. Chesterman and
B. Galligan, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 193, 199.
26
J. Feinberg, cited in L. Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory, Second

Edition, Fort Worth, Texas, Harcourt Brace, 1998, p. 269.
27
Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights, p. 13.
28
Gewirth, The Epistemology of Human Rights, p. 000.
29
In the sense that I use the term here, the principle of terra nullius refers to an organising principle of Australian law and society rather than a legal doctrine. It refers
to all of the ways in which the laws, culture and society of Indigenous peoples
were regarded as inferior to European ways.
30
Martin, A System of Rights, p. 41.
31
Darby, Two Conceptions of Rights Possession, pp. 407-408; Unnatural Rights,

p. 68.
32
Martin, A System of Rights, p. 78.
33
Re Southern Rhodesia 1919 AC 211, pp. 233-234.
34
Foucault, Confronting Governments: Human Rights, Essential Works, Volume 3,
35
Foucault, Confronting Governments: Human Rights, Essential Works, Volume 3,
36
Ibid.
37
Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique, p. 6.
38
In other words, in clear and simple terms, this procedure consists of departing
p. 475.
p. 474.
from the rights of man in order to arrive at the delimitation of governmentality

in passing through the constitution of the sovereign, Foucault, Naissance de la
Biopolitique, pp. 40-41.

39
40
41
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 39.
42
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, pp. 39-40.
43
R. Mourad, After Foucault: A New Form of Right, Philosophy and Social Criticism,
vol. 29, no. 4, 2003, pp. 453, 456.
44
Foucault, The Risks of Security, Essential Works, Volume 3, p. 366.
Notes on Contributors
Craig Browne teaches in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at
The University of Sydney. He works in the area of critical social theory. His
research interests include social change, processes of global transformation,
subjectivity, intersubjectivity and perspectives on democracy. He is currently
working on a comparison of pragmatist notions of creative democracy with
ideas of democratic creativity in contemporary French social and political
thought. Recent publications include Civil Solidarity and Social Struggles
in Cultural Citizenship and Globalisation, eds. W. Ommundsen, M. Leach and
A. Vandenburg, Hampton Press, 2005, and Castoriadis on the Capitalist
Imaginary, in Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand), forthcoming.
Jean-Philippe Deranty is a Lecturer of Philosophy at Macquarie University,
Sydney (Australia). He has translated Hegels rst lectures on the philosophy
of right (Droit Naturel et Science de lEtat, Paris, Vrin, 2002) and written a
number of articles and reviews on Hegels political philosophy and aesthetics, the most recent being Hegels Social Theory of Value, The Philosophical
Forum, 2005. His other research interests are in contemporary continental
thought. He has published a number of articles on Jacques Rancire and
Giorgio Agamben. His current research focuses mainly on the theory of recognition, with his latest publication Injustice, Violence and Social Struggle. The
Critical Potential of Honneths Theory of Recognition appearing in
Contemporary Perspectives in Social and Critical Philosophy, eds J. Rundell, D.
Petherbridge et al. (Brill, 2005). He is completing a book on Axel Honneth to
be published by Brill in 2007.
John Grumley teaches in the Philosophy Department at The University of
Syney. He publishes primarily in contemporary critical theory and theory of
modernity. Amongst recent publications are Culture and Enlightenment: Essays
for Gyrgy Mrkus (Ashgate, London, 2002) and Agnes Heller: Moralist in the
Vortex of History (Pluto, London, 2005).
290 Notes on Contributors
Pauline Johnson teaches in the Sociology Department at Macquarie University.

Her new book titled Habermas: Rescuing the Public Sphere will be published
by Routledge in 2006. Recent publications include an essay titled Romantic
and Enlightenment Legacies: Habermas Postmodern Critics in Contemporary
Political Theory. Pauline is beginning work on a new research project that will
focus on issues around the structural transformation of the intimate sphere.
Genevieve Lloyd is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of
New South Wales. Her main areas of research are history of philosophy
especially seventeenth century philosophyphilosophy and literature, and
feminist philosophy. Her publications include: The Man of Reason: Male and
Female in Western Philosophy (Methuen and University of Minnesota Press,
1984; 2nd edn. Routledge, 1993); Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy
and Literature (Routledge, 1993); Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinozas
Ethics (Cornell University Press, 1994); Spinoza and the Ethics (Routledge,
1996); Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present, (with Moira Gatens),
(Routledge, 1999); Spinoza: Critical Assessments (edited collection), 4 vols.,
(Routledge, 2001); Feminism and History of Philosophy (edited collection),
(Oxford University Press, 2002).
Simon Lumsden teaches Philosophy at the University of New South Wales.
He has published on German idealism, phenomenology and poststructuralism. Among his articles are Fichtes Striving Subject, Inquiry, 47, 2004,
Deleuze, Hegel and the Transformation of Subjectivity, The Philosophical
Forum, 2002, and A Subject for Hegels Logic, International Philosophical
Quarterly, 2000. His current research is concerned with the development of
self-consciousness in German Idealism and the critique of the subject in
Heidegger and Poststructuralism.
Shane ONeill is Professor of Political Theory and Head of the School of
Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queens University, Belfast,
Northern Ireland. He has published numerous articles and essays on a range
of topics in critical social theory and political philosophy. His books include
Impartiality in Context: Grounding Justice in a Pluralist World (SUNY Press, 1997)
and (as co-editor) Reconstituting Social Criticism: Political Morality in an Age of
Scepticism, (Palgrave, 1999). His main project at present is to develop a critical theory of ethno-political conict.
Notes on Contributors 291
Paul Patton is Professor of Philosophy at The University of New South Wales

in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Deleuze and the Political (2000), editor
of Between Deleuze and Derrida (with John Protevi, 2003), Political Theory and
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (with Duncan Ivison and Will Sanders, 2000),
and Deleuze: A Critical Reader (1996). His current research interests are in political philosophy, especially at the borders of poststructuralist and contemporary
liberal political theory. Recent publications include Foucault in Political
Thinkers: From Socrates to the Present, eds. David Boucher and Paul Kelly
(Oxford University Press, 2003), and After the Linguistic Turn: Poststructuralist
and Pragmatist Political Theory, to appear in The Oxford Handbook of Political
Theory, eds. John Dryzek, Bonnie Honig and Anne Phillips (Oxford University
Press, 2006); Agamben and Foucault on Biopower and Biopolitics to appear
in On Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli
(Stanford University Press, 2006).
Paul Redding teaches Philosophy at the University of Sydney. His main
research interests are in German idealism, pragmatism, and the role of emotion
in practical and evaluative reason. He is the author of Hegels Hermeneutics
(Cornell University Press, 1996) and The Logic of Affect (Cornell University
Press, 1999), and is currently completing a book on the relations between the
German idealist and analytic philosophical traditions.
Emmanuel Renault teaches Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Suprieure,
Lyon (France). Amongst his books are: Marx et lIde de Critique (Presses
Universitaires de France, 1995), Hegel. La Naturalisation de la Dialectique (Vrin,
2001), Mpris Social. Ethique et Politique de la Reconnaissance (Editions du Passant,
2nd edition 2004), and LExprience de lInjustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de
lInjustice (La Dcouverte, 2004). He is also the editor of Philosophie de la
Nature, Revue Epistmologiques (with J.-J. Szceciniarz, 2002), and O en est la
Thorie Critique? (with Yves Sintomer, La Dcouverte, 2003). He is currently
completing a book on social suffering.
Peter Schmiedgen is currently teaching at Macquarie University. His main
research interests are in the areas of phenomenological and post-phenomenological social philosophy and critical theory. His most recent research has
centred around the critical potentialities of Levinasian ethics. His latest publication, Abraham and the Flaneur: Levinas, Benjamin and Urban Space
has just appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Philosophy Today.
292 Notes on Contributors
Robert Sinnerbrink is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department of Macquarie

University. His areas of research interest include the relationship between
critical theory and post-structuralism, social philosophy, Hegel and Heidegger,
history of aesthetics, and philosophy of cinema. Recent publications include
Recognitive Freedom: Hegel and the Problem of Recognition in Critical
Horizons (2004), Cinematic Ideas: On David Lynchs Mulholland Drive in
Film-Philosophy (2004), and Heidegger and the End of Art in Literature and
Aesthetics (2003). He is currently completing a book, Understanding Hegelianism,
on the signicance of French and German Hegelianism for contemporary
social philosophy.
Nicholas H. Smith teaches Philosophy at Macquarie University. He is the
author of Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity (1997) and Charles
Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity (2002). He is the editor of Reading
McDowell: On Mind and World (2002).
Index
abstraction 12, 57, 138, 140, 145, 148, 159,
107, 109, 112116, 125, 145, 147, 210,

220, 262, 283
189
action
communicative
11, 65, 83 n. 18, 97,
154, 156158, 177

historical
102
individual
76
instrumental
political
136 n. 25
Baynes, Kenneth
Beck, Ulrich
170
belief
52, 110
92
1113, 141, 153158, 160162,
164, 167169, 173, 178 n. 35

strategic
226, 235
Baker, Gideon
Bauman, Zygmunt 226, 235 n. 5
purposive-rational
social
Badiou, Alain
76, 85 n. 58, 112
6668, 75, 78, 187, 189190, 194,
275276, 279, 283

Benhabib, Seyla
Adorno, Theodor W.
2, 82 n. 5, 89, 102,
Agamben, Giorgio
16, 239241, 244,
5, 82 n. 1, 83 n. 27,
179, 254, 264, 291

Bernstein, Jay M.
179 n. 38, 236 n. 11
19 n. 10, 65, 82 nn.
4, 7, 910, 85 n. 72, 237 n. 17

Benjamin, Walter
96
59 n. 14
biopolitics
98 nn. 7, 17, 204
1517, 239241, 243,
249258, 259 n. 2, 260 nn. 6, 89, 262
245246, 248258, 260 n. 6, 261 n. 27,
n36, 263 nn. 44, 48, 264 nn. 5455,
263 n. 40, 264 nn. 58, 6566, 280,
5960, 6567, 289, 291
291
agreement 37, 83 n. 18, 157, 169, 278

Alejandro, Roberto
135 n. 4
Alexander, Jeffrey P.
103, 115, 117 n. 11
anthropology 11, 57, 67, 7980,
biopower
3, 1416, 239241, 244259,
262 n. 39, 263 nn. 40, 46, 264 nn. 53,

58, 291
Bloch, Ernst 19 n. 8, 46, 48, 58 n. 2, 59
153155, 157, 159164, 168, 170, 177
nn. 6, 8, 11, 6465, 68, 77, 82 nn. 3, 8,
n. 16, 179 nn. 4041, 228
83 n. 26, 85 n. 68
Arendt, Hannah
28, 225, 227233, 235,
235 n. 2, 236, 236 nn. 8, 1415, 237

nn. 17, 18, 2022, 251, 254
Aronson, Ronald
46, 58 n. 4
art 21, n. 30, 91, 102, 186, 208, 212

Auschwitz
4, 16, 2829, 253255,
264 n. 99
body 2, 13, 74, 161163, 167, 172176,

180 n. 50, 187190, 201 n. 28, 229230,
246, 249, 253, 269
Bohman, James
82 n. 17, 135 n. 13
Borradori, Giovanna
27, 3132, 42 n. 3,
43 n. 21
Bourdieu, Pierre 1214, 76, 85 n. 61,
autoimmunity 56, 3435
183188, 190192, 195198, 200, 200
autonomy 15, 4950, 58, 66, 77, 95, 101,
n. 4, 201 nn. 89, 11, 1415, 17, 201
294 Index
nn. 1819, 2224, 28, 202 nn. 2829,
31, 203 nn. 51, 5657, 59, 62
Brandom, Robert 194, 203 n. 46, 224
n. 51
Crapanzo, Vincent 68, 77, 81, 83

nn. 2425, 85 nn. 66, 70, 86 n. 82
Critchley, Simon
critique
Bronner, Stephen E.
96, 98 n. 8, 99
nn. 23, 25, 111
265 n. 69
14, 78, 1012, 1415, 1718,
20 nn. 20, 23, 4546, 48, 5657,

58 nn. 1, 5, 6365, 6971, 7375, 7779,
Browne, Craig 3, 7, 59 n. 5, 60 n. 28, 86

n. 80, 289
87, 89, 91, 93, 96, 98 n. 14, 103104,

106107, 109110, 127128, 137,
Buhr, Manfred
48, 59 n. 11
139140, 144146, 148150, 150 n. 3,

151 nn. 11, 15, 152 n. 24, 153154, 156,
camp 15, 240, 251, 254, 256257
158, 160162, 169, 173174, 184186,
capitalism
191, 199, 225, 228229, 239241, 243,
6, 63, 72, 8081, 106,
108110, 239, 252, 262 n. 38

Caputo, John D.
Caney, Simon
56, 60 nn. 25, 27
136 n. 21
Castells, Manuel
84 n. 34
Castoriadis, Cornelius
265, 267270, 282, 284, 290291

genealogical
136 n. 24
Chesterman, John and Gallingan, Brian

286 n. 25
Darby, Derrick 21, 271, 277278, 284

n. 8, 286 n. 31
Day, John Patrick 46, 58 n. 4
Dean, Mitchell
Cohen, Ira J.
85 n. 60
communication
3031, 36, 71, 96, 111,
121, 128, 131133, 157158, 161,

163164, 169, 174, 178 n. 24, 179 n. 44,
231232
237 n. 22
Dejours, Christophe
179 n. 39
Deleuze, Gilles
21 n. 30, 205206,
215, 258, 262 n. 39, 264 n. 58, 290291

134, 145
136 n. 23, 139, 147, 163, 172, 193,
deliberative
206208, 212, 215, 239, 241, 255,
liberal
257258, 265 nn. 67, 69, 279

consciousness
66, 108, 138, 220
65, 8081, 9397, 101, 104116,
248, 250251, 253, 257, 262

radical 137140, 145, 148
140
representative
philosophy of
89, 290
risk 76
consensus
5, 261 n. 27, 262 n. 37
De Certeau, Michel
democracy 10, 31, 120, 125, 128129,
community 1516, 6566, 123, 132134,
moral
15, 269
immanent 11, 97, 104, 112, 114, 154
63, 7778, 81, 84
n. 45, 85 nn. 65, 67, 69, 71, 289

Chandler, David
251, 255256, 259, 262 n. 39, 264 n. 58,
democratisation
105, 253
9, 64, 67, 110, 119, 121,
130, 274
83 n. 18, 144, 147
contingency 13, 5355, 231, 292

Cooke, Maeve
202 n. 38
Cosmopolitanism
8081, 119
4, 6, 2324, 37, 40,
Deranty, Jean-Philippe
23, 1112,
150 n. 1, 153, 265 n. 68, 289

Derrida, Jacques
36, 23, 2526, 30,
3236, 3841, 56, 133, 136 n. 26, 205,

226, 235 n. 4, 264 n. 58, 265, 291
Index 295
Diogenes the Cynic
37
discourse
ethics
124, 137, 139145, 148150, 151 n. 11,

152 n. 28, 160161, 164167, 171172,
80, 97, 228, 237
principle
67, 80
rational
174176, 183185, 190, 198, 208214,

216, 220, 222 n. 20, 223 nn. 24, 53, 227,
7, 197
242, 248, 259
theory 7, 10, 19, 63, 6568, 8081,

104, 107, 134
distribution
facticity 107, 139
34, 7577, 79, 106, 111,
121, 127128, 134, 152 n. 16, 245

domination
12, 50, 108, 139140,
156157, 187, 258, 274

Douglas, Peter
179 n. 38
Dreyfus, Hubert 247, 261 n. 34, 263 n. 42

Dubiel, Helmut 82 n. 6
Durkheim, mile
1213, 183184,
Feinberg, Joel
Feminism
286 n. 26
114, 290
Feuebach, Ludwig 11, 155, 160

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 290
Fink-Eitel, Hinrich
esh
60 n. 35
159, 161, 166, 175176,
181 n. 58
Foucault, Michel
13, 1418, 19 n. 1, 21
187192, 194195, 197198, 200
n. 32, 23, 24, 184, 200 n. 6, 237 n. 25,
n. 4, 201 n. 13, 202 nn. 3233, 203
239241, 244259, 259 nn. 1, 5, 260
nn. 41, 47
nn. 7, 9, 261 nn. 2629, 3334, 262

nn. 3539, 263 nn. 40, 4243, 46, 5253,
ecological
154, 159, 162, 168169, 178
economy, political
73, 92, 158, 196, 280,
285 n. 15
264 n. 58, 267270, 273274, 277,

279284, 284 nn. 12, 6, 285 nn. 1015,
18, 286 nn. 2025, 2728, 287, 291
Enlightenment 16, 18, 19 n. 1, 2325,

27, 2932, 3742, 82 n. 7, 101, 103, 113,
115116, 199, 207208, 229, 267268,
284, 289290
environment 125, 130, 132, 153,
167168, 170, 174176, 185, 227, 237
n. 25, 249
Frank, Manfred
8, 13, 20 n. 28, 150
n. 1, 151 n. 7, 152 n. 26, 156, 177

nn. 1112, 178 n. 34
Fraser, Nancy 9, 19 n. 4, 83 n. 30, 85
n. 76, 127129, 135 nn. 1617, 136
n. 20, 152 n. 26
freedom
3, 56, 13, 15, 31, 47, 63, 68,
equality 3, 5, 910, 20 n. 21, 6566, 70,
7071, 74, 9192, 106, 117 n. 13,
96, 108, 116, 119, 125126, 130131,
119121, 123, 125126, 129133,
133134, 151 n. 9, 196, 201, 248249,
145146, 199, 204 n. 64, 207, 212,
254, 277
220221, 222 n. 20, 225, 231, 236 n. 10,
essentialism
9, 58, 124125
event 2, 46, 2324, 26, 2829, 3235,
237 n. 24, 241, 245, 251, 257258, 269,

281, 283, 285 n. 15, 292
39, 41, 50, 73, 97, 158, 202, 230,
French Revolution
257258, 264, 268269
Fromm, Erich
experience
12, 1012, 29, 63, 66, 68,
6971, 74, 7677, 79, 91, 102, 114, 121,
17, 24, 66, 91, 281
46, 58 n. 3, 82 n. 3
fundamentalism
45, 3031, 42, 226
future 67, 13, 25, 3233, 3536, 39,
296 Index
4142, 47, 51, 5658, 6465, 70, 74,
150 n. 3, 151 nn. 8, 13, 16, 152 nn. 20,
7678, 81, 102103, 107108, 110112,
24, 153162, 164, 167170, 177 n. 5,
133, 191, 208, 277
179 n. 38, 236 n. 6, 237 nn. 17, 23

Hage, Ghassan
Garrett, Catherine
83 n. 28, 84 n. 35
Gehlen, Arnold
11, 155156, 159
Gewirth, Allan
269, 276, 284 n. 7, 286
n. 28
81, 83 nn. 24, 29, 84 nn. 51, 57,

85 n. 61
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio
239, 258, 259 n. 3, 262 n. 39,
Giddens, Anthony 74, 76, 84 nn. 4748,

85 nn. 59, 62
Gilligan, Carol
152 n. 25
Godfrey, Joseph J.
46, 57, 58 n. 4, 59
n. 6, 60 n. 34
good life
58 n. 5, 7576, 79,
85 n. 69
Harvey, David
83 n. 24
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
8,
1214, 87, 8895, 97, 168, 172, 183185,
17, 58, 69, 79, 146
globalisation
265 n. 67
Harrison, Paul
35, 30, 6364, 67, 6970,
190200, 202 nn. 34, 40, 203 nn. 43, 45,

4748, 52, 6061, 204 n. 65, 205212,
7274, 81, 111, 119, 121, 129131,
214, 215217, 219221, 221 n. 3, 222
133134, 135 n. 2, 138, 289
nn. 6, 1011, 14, 222 nn. 17, 22, 223
governmentality 239240, 245, 247,

249251, 253, 256258, 261 nn. 2728,
262 nn. 3738, 267, 280, 282, 284, 286
n. 38
nn. 52, 54, 236 n. 6, 290292

Heidegger, Martin
5, 16, 21 n. 31,
239244, 246247, 250, 254, 257258,
group 54, 196, 198, 234, 236, 271, 276

afliation
123124
interest 30, 249

social
nn. 25, 2835, 40, 42, 233 n. 44, 224
Guyer, Paul
130132
202 n. 37, 223 n. 30
Habermas, Jrgen
nn. 1718, 34, 264 nn. 5758, 290, 292

Held, David and McGrew, Anthony
9, 119120, 122, 141142, 155
transnational
259 n. 4, 260 nn. 7, 1011, 13, 261
311, 13, 19 nn. 12,
14, 20 n. 20, 23, 2526, 3032, 39, 41,
135 n. 2
Heller, Agnes
11, 83 n. 18, 155, 289
Henrich, Dieter
178 n. 34
Hippolyte, Jean
223 n. 36
Hlderlin, Friedrich
Honneth, Axel
236 n. 9
13, 912, 19 n. 2, 20
4950, 54, 59 n. 14, 60 n. 20, 63, 6567,
nn. 1819, 23, 58, 60 n. 35, 63, 67,
68, 7072, 8081, 82 nn. 9, 11, 13, 14,
7980, 83 nn. 21, 30, 85 nn. 7376, 86
17, 83 nn. 1820, 22, 23, 84 nn. 33,
n. 79, 98 n. 19, 99 n. 22, 111, 118 n. 31,
3638, 40, 86 nn. 78, 80, 87, 8997, 98
128129, 136 n. 20, 140, 151 nn. 7, 11,
nn. 12, 4, 910, 13, 15, 20, 99 n. 24,
152 n. 26, 153156, 158161, 163173,
101105, 107116, 116 n. 1, 117 nn. 2,
177 nn. 1, 34, 7, 911, 13, 1618, 178
5, 78, 14, 2425, 2728, 3334, 120,
nn. 23, 2730, 32, 37, 179 nn. 4042,
133, 134 n. 1, 136 nn. 22, 26, 137148,
250, 263 n. 45, 289
Index 297
Horheimer, Marx 89, 179 n. 38, 229,
236 n. 11
institution(s)
144, 149, 151 n. 8,
158159, 180 n. 48, 193, 199200,
hospitality 4041, 228
208, 220221, 243, 248, 256, 272, 275,
Hudson, Wayne
278
84 n. 56, 179 n. 38
human being 1112, 1617, 25, 2728,
interaction
5, 12, 49, 89, 92, 122,
38, 5051, 159164, 167170, 175176,
153, 157160, 162, 164, 166175, 178
228, 240244, 246, 250253, 255257,
nn. 24, 31, 194196, 227, 229, 232, 240,
259, 260 n. 12, 269
245
human capacity 51, 57, 160161

humanism
45, 167168, 175, 184
intercorporeity 153, 175176, 180 n. 46,

181 n. 58
intersubjectivity 1112, 1415, 87,
I (personal pronoun)
absolute
90, 92, 153154, 160164, 166,
8, 31, 33, 36, 8890, 149,
152, 193, 198, 207208, 211, 214, 219,

223 n. 30, 233, 263, 264 n. 58, 265
n. 68, 270, 274
169172, 174, 176, 177 n. 11,

179 n. 44, 210, 215, 220, 227229,
233235, 289
intuition
acquisition of 13, 161162, 195

constitutive dimensions of
12, 15, 183, 190192, 207,
216218
167, 223,
290291
Jameson, Frederic
Idealism, German
216
identity 7678, 83 n. 18, 91, 114115,
82 n. 2
Jay, Martin
118 n. 35
Joas, Hans
20 n. 23, 69, 84 n. 31, 154,
122125, 128, 132, 140, 165166,
156, 159161, 165167, 170, 177 nn. 1,
171172, 176, 178 n. 37, 195, 215, 225,
4, 7, 10, 13, 18, 178 nn. 23, 28, 30, 32,
229230, 233234
179 n. 42
ideology 72, 96, 101, 106, 179 n. 38, 262

n. 38, 263 n. 46, 274
imaginary
immanence
9, 69, 80, 97, 228
individuality 192, 228, 231, 237 n. 22

inequality 3, 5, 9, 65, 96, 108, 130131,
134, 201 n. 23
64, 73, 79, 81, 127129, 134,
910, 70, 124, 138139, 148
experience of
79, 140, 142, 144145,
148150, 259
feeling of
212213
justice
democratic
142143
119, 121, 125
distributive
egalitarian
141, 143, 168, 249250

social
judgement 88, 141, 143, 188,

190192, 196, 198, 202 nn. 37, 40,
capitalist 7, 7173, 75, 81, 289
injustice
Jnger, Ernst 261 n. 23
73, 127128
9, 49, 107, 115, 119120,
128, 134
international
theory of
justication
25, 37
9, 140, 146148
4, 1011, 17, 4546,
4950, 52, 5457, 66, 79, 94, 139,

141142, 144, 148150, 155, 173, 194,
298 Index
196, 207, 275, 277278, 280281, 283,
Levitas, Ruth
285 n. 18
liberalism
Kant, Immanuel
1, 6, 12, 2325, 3031,
36, 3940, 42, 42 n. 1, 43 nn. 20, 26,
critique of
59 n. 8, 83 n. 18
18, 239
neo-liberalism
16, 18, 6970,
4546, 48, 58 n. 1, 78, 89, 91, 93,
239241, 245, 247, 250251, 256258,
183185, 190192, 199, 202 n. 37,
260 n. 5, 262 n. 38
209210, 220, 223 n. 34, 264 n. 58,

267268, 284 n. 2
political
122, 146, 247, 249
Lieutaghi, Pierre 181 n. 57
kantianism
life
15, 16, 115, 159, 170, 199, 208, 210,
Neo-Kantianism 184, 197, 199, 200 n. 4
229231, 241247
Post-Kantianism
bare 15, 240241, 252256
Kearney, Michael
knowledge
199
74, 84 n. 49
1, 31, 89, 156157, 160, 162,
biological
chance
240241, 248, 257
109, 122123
165, 196198, 206210, 212, 216, 241,
democratic
243, 246, 248, 261 n. 34, 268, 290
ethical
122, 138
13, 193
Kolakowski, Lesek 116, 118 n. 39
everyday 7, 186, 194
Knight, J. and Johnson, J.
form(s) of
Kymlicka, Will
135 n. 13
135 n. 11
good
labour
15, 50, 68, 7074, 79, 8990, 92,
9, 13, 110, 120121, 139,
155, 190, 208

17, 58, 69, 79, 146
human
243, 256, 285
157158, 172173, 197, 206, 211212,
modern
196, 209
227232, 236 n. 7, 285 n. 18
natural
213, 255
Lacan, Jacques
248, 289
political
language
nature and
154, 157, 161, 184, 210
intersubjectivity and
210
social
5051, 58, 138, 151, 161, 193,
199, 269
way of
world
common
273
modern
rule of
65, 194
154, 160162,
law
love
67
94, 121, 254
public
37, 273, 277

96
79
Lowenthal, Leo
67, 104107, 145, 273
Lefebvre, Henri
237 n. 22
Lemke, Thomas
260 n. 5, 261 n. 28,
262 n. 38
Levinas, Emmanuel
117 n. 9
Lukcs, Georg 87, 159, 184

Lumsden, Simon
3, 1415, 204 n. 65,
205, 290
Lyotard, Jean-Franois
15, 205, 225233,
6, 19 n. 9,
60 n. 17, 152 n. 28, 205
235, 235 n. 3, 236 nn. 10, 1213, 16,

237 n. 24, 264 n. 58, 291
Levi-Strauss, Claude
192
Machenschaft (machination) 1516, 239,

241244, 246247, 257, 260 nn. 1213
Index 299
MacIntyre, Alasdair
Mannheim, Karl
50, 59 n. 15
84 n. 32
Marcel, Gabriel
48, 57, 59 n. 10, 60 n. 30
Marcuse, Herbert 82 n. 3, 103
morality 91, 93, 190, 193, 210

Morris, Martin
103, 117 n. 13
Mourad, Ronney 287 n. 43

Mythopoetic thought 13, 183188, 197199
Mrkus, Gyrgy 98 n. 14, 179 n. 40

Mrkus, Maria R. 103, 117 n. 10
Martin, Rex 277278, 284 n. 8, 286
Nancy, Jean-Luc
205206
nation-state
nn. 30, 32
Marx, Karl
92, 9495, 97, 98 n. 21, 145,
151 n. 15, 155156, 172, 179 n. 40, 187,
1415, 20 n. 29,
9, 121, 130131
nature 1112, 27, 153155, 157159,

161165, 167170, 179 n. 38, 180 n. 56
needs
197, 228
materialism
156, 158160
Matustk, Martin B.
114, 118 n. 36
Mead, George Herbert 11, 159, 177
emancipatory 103, 113116

human
229
negative, the
1415, 21 n. 30, 151 n. 11,
192, 202 n. 36, 205207, 209, 211212,
n. 20, 178 n. 25
meaning 34, 2728, 73, 77, 83 n. 18,
negativity 1315, 205207, 209212,
216218, 222 n. 9
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
214221
1112,
216, 221
153154, 173176, 179 n. 44,
Neilson, Brett 264 n. 65
180 nn. 4546, 48, 50
Neiman, Susan
metanarrative
metaphysics
257, 262 n. 36
14, 199, 203 n. 61, 214,
216, 241, 246247, 255

Mills, Catherine
misrecognition
264 nn. 6566

167, 172
critique of
post-
251, 256, 259
71, 76, 119
political
33, 38, 42 n. 4
neo-conservative
71
Nietzsche, Friedrich
16, 59 n. 7, 236
n. 9, 240242, 247, 259 n. 4, 260

nn. 7, 10, 262 n. 36, 264 n. 58, 271, 285
nn. 1417
modernity
late
4, 19 nn. 56, 2629,
256 n. 66, 257
94, 97, 114
theory of
92
Western 243244, 252253, 257

monotheism 15, 225226, 228, 233, 235,
nihilism
16, 241244, 247, 254, 256258,
261 n. 23, 265 n. 66

norms
45, 1415, 17, 41, 50, 67, 104,
106107, 110111, 119, 139, 155, 168,

208, 214, 220221, 248
Nozick, Robert 135 n. 7
Nussbaum, Martha
126, 135 n. 12
236 n. 9
Objectication
moral
Offe, Claus
agents 278
principles
progress
10, 140
24
242
74, 84 nn. 33, 36, 46
Okin, Susan Moller

openness
135 n. 10
5, 5657, 175176, 214, 221
300 Index
ONeill, Shane
3, 9, 59 n. 14, 119, 135
n. 6
political theory 8, 1011, 81, 93,

138139, 148
order
politics
international
political
129, 131, 134
121, 130
transnational
world
2, 11, 41, 52, 64, 101, 107108,
110112, 115, 121, 125, 127, 129133,

137139, 145, 173, 226, 240242,
130, 132
56, 3739
248249, 253, 255258, 264 n. 65, 265

nn. 66, 69
polytheism
Parekh, Bikhu
236 n. 8
15, 225228, 231, 235, 236
n. 9
parity, participatory 127, 129, 196
positivism
participation
postmodernism
66, 73, 79, 94, 109, 129,
139, 161, 235

3, 14, 1618, 21 n. 34, 223
n. 31, 261 n. 26, 267, 285 nn. 12, 14

perception
45, 53, 68
poststructuralism
pathology 45, 3132, 69, 79

Patton, Paul
95, 157
159160, 164166, 171,
174176, 179 n. 42, 180 n. 55, 210
power
205
12, 1318, 93, 96, 104109, 113,
132133, 151 n. 11, 158, 196, 237 n. 25,

240241, 243253, 255258, 261 nn. 26,
34, 263 nn. 40, 46, 264 n. 54, 267275,
279284, 285 nn. 1214, 18, 286 n. 21
phenomenology 11, 77, 89, 194, 209216
pragmatics
157
Phillips, Anne
production
71, 109, 111, 156, 186, 225,
135 n. 10, 291
philosophy
227231, 233235, 242, 258
critique of
moral
23, 151 n. 15
79, 275
normative
political
104105, 110111, 120, 130, 133,
93, 137138, 168
148149, 228, 232, 236 n. 6
23, 17, 9194, 137138, 145,
148, 150, 255, 275

postmetaphysical
postmodern
social
public sphere 45, 9, 11, 24, 31,
rationalisation
206
5253
23, 14, 18, 153, 163
transcendental 89, 91, 93

Pieper, Joseph
48, 57, 59 n. 10, 60 n. 32
Pippin, Robert B.
14, 19 n. 11, 98 n. 3,
203 n. 63, 222 nn. 5, 1213

Pinkard, Terry 14, 19 n. 11, 203 n. 63,
222 nn. 5, 34
54, 90, 92, 94, 148, 158,
199, 280
Rancire, Jacques
Rawls, John
94, 122, 135 n. 3, 137139,
145, 147
Rayner, Tim
247, 261 n. 34
rationality, reason
communicative
instrumental
plurality 15, 30, 116, 228, 231233, 235
practical
Plutarch
15, 31, 80
37
31, 67, 80, 94, 96,
157158
Plessner, Helmut 11, 155, 161162

pluralism
137, 150 n. 2, 152
n. 27, 248, 263 n. 41
2, 29, 65, 157, 170
10, 67, 140
reciprocity 80, 229

recognition
Index 301
ethics of
12, 153155, 163164,
168170, 173, 178 n. 31

political
social
18, 108111, 117 n. 23, 152 n. 23
8, 112, 119, 154, 168169
reciprocal
106, 199
Schmitt, Carl
253254, 264 n. 54
science
167
natural
struggle for
theories of
Scheuerman, William E. 94, 98 nn. 12,
63, 67, 156, 163, 166169

11, 80
social
Re, Jonathan
5253, 60 n. 18
Rehg, William
59 n. 14
157, 163, 180 n. 46
reconstructive
90
4, 13, 69, 80, 129, 155, 157,
162, 196197
secularisation
3, 5
reication
96
Sedgwick, Sally 223 n. 34
relativism
95, 197, 200
self
religion
26, 3031, 48, 123, 193, 197,
200, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 236 n. 10

Renault, Emmanuel
3, 1012, 20
nn. 17, 2022, 151 n. 15, 152 n. 19, 178

nn. 26, 31
139140
197198, 207208,
215217
51, 107, 116, 167, 169
self-reexivity 31
responsibility 28, 97, 235, 283

25, 93, 110, 262 n. 38, 268
rights
self-relation
5758, 206, 210212,
214216
self-understanding 54, 9192, 94, 115,
cultural
109
208, 213, 220221
externalist accounts of
14, 17, 267,
269271, 273, 275, 277

106, 146147
human
67, 7980, 130, 132, 134,
individual
17, 286 n. 25
political
2728, 165, 190, 195, 206208,
September 11
36, 19 n. 6, 2326,
2836, 3840
Shklar, Judith
106, 109, 125
individualist accounts of
126, 135 n. 12
214221, 223 n. 24, 224 n. 54
252253, 272, 276, 281, 285 n. 12

Indigenous
Sen, Amartya
sense
formal
social
n. 38, 285 n. 18
self-consciousness
self-realisation
republicanism
revolution
3, 79, 123, 164, 171172, 197,
212217, 219, 225, 230, 232, 245, 262
Sitton, John
271
10, 147
1011, 145147
Skhole
13, 186
Slattery, Brian
critique
Rorty, Richard
eld
6, 49, 5456, 59 n. 13, 60
285 n. 19
social
romanticism 101
nn. 2124, 29, 36, 68, 83 n. 26
151 n. 11
108, 110, 118 n. 30
12, 17, 67, 204 n. 65
186, 245
integration
1213, 106, 154, 156, 163
life 5051, 58, 138, 151 n. 10, 161, 183,

Sartre, Jean-Paul
scepticism
178 n. 36, 184
8, 51, 5354, 94
Schapiro, Ian
285 n. 18
193, 199, 269

movement 1, 11, 95, 102, 114, 147,
155, 158, 168
302 Index
philosophy 23, 14, 18, 153, 163
psychology 154, 163164, 173
relations
69, 144, 176, 194, 221
reproduction
80, 154, 157158
subject
critique of
modern
199, 208209, 216, 242
suffering
situation
1011, 139145, 147, 149
bodily 167
struggle
81, 156, 248249, 257
human
theory 2, 12, 50, 6365, 6768, 82, 92,

139, 153154, 156160, 162, 166, 168,
173
social
28, 120, 259

68, 120
Sumner, Leonard W.
nn. 24, 27
socialisation
12, 105, 154, 160161, 166
society
system
social
civil
92, 104105, 131, 138, 148,
193196, 199, 208, 220, 236 n. 6

imaginary institution of
multicultural
72, 77, 81
70
symbolic
187, 201 n. 18
theory 67
welfare 109
80
risk 7, 6364, 76, 81
terra nullius, doctrine of
sociology 13, 97, 196, 275
terrorism
solidarity 55, 65, 7981, 86 n. 80, 169,
theology 7, 77
194
tolerance
sovereignty 40, 67, 81, 121, 131, 225,

245, 262 n. 37, 274, 282283
space, public
5, 15, 24, 3032, 39, 41,
147150, 225228, 231234, 237 n. 17

Spinoza, Benedict de
34, 7576, 264
n. 58
spirit 8, 1315, 8792, 168, 185,
194195, 198200, 206210, 214218,
220221, 252
state
constitutional
66, 104106, 120,
130132, 134
democratic
modern
24, 31, 40, 116
totalitarianism
tradition
121, 198199, 263 n. 46
226
277, 286 n. 29
34, 23, 2932, 34, 130
251253, 257
1113, 15, 18, 4546, 50, 78,
80, 83 n. 20, 86 n. 80, 91, 97, 98 n. 10,

105, 122, 155, 159160, 163, 168, 172173,
183, 192, 222 n. 13, 237 n. 17, 239
critical
1, 2, 101
liberal
267, 271, 284
liberal democratic
114
transcendence
69, 72, 80, 228229
transcendental
80, 89, 91, 93, 156,
184185, 197, 210

transformation
66, 94, 97, 104, 110
welfare 68, 7072, 96, 106109, 138,
23, 5, 14, 17, 38, 6365,
6869, 75, 7880, 90, 102103, 108, 121,

129132, 134, 141142, 144, 146147,
150, 155, 158, 199200, 207, 218221,
240, 255, 268, 282, 284
Stengers, Isabelle
Stoics
278, 284 n. 8, 286
77, 85 n. 64
24, 37, 47, 192
stoicism
37
unconscious
78, 185
universalisation, principle of
145, 256
Index 303
universality 10, 94, 140141, 144, 147,
250, 269, 274
Whitebook, Joel
82 n. 9, 103, 117 n. 12,
178 n. 37, 179 n. 38
unthinkability 3233
Winnicott, Donald W.
76, 160, 171
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 184

validity 34, 17, 31, 51, 67, 83 n. 18,
9394, 97, 144, 156
world
disclosure 240, 243, 248
Vasta, Ellie and Castles, Stephen
order
56, 3639
84 n. 50
Violence
2, 47, 91, 102, 127, 187, 213,
225227, 230, 232, 234, 252253, 256257
Young, Iris Marion
9, 127129, 135
nn. 5, 9, 15, 136 nn. 1819, 151 n. 12
Von Uexkll, Jacob 180 n. 51
Young, Julian
Wallerstein, Immanuel
Zimmerman, Michael E.
zek, Slavoj 263 n. 41
Zi
Walzer, Michael
7273, 84 n. 43
20 n. 21, 135 n. 8, 151
n. 9
261 n. 23
Zournazi, Mary 60 n. 28, 7576, 83
Weber, Max 92, 190, 252

Wellmer, Albrecht
264 n. 57
81, 82 n. 7, 86 n. 81
nn. 24, 29, 84 n. 54, 85 n. 64

Zurn, Christopher
177 n. 16

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Critique Today

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Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty,

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith

In one of the nal texts written before his

2 Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith

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Critique, September 11, and Social Hope

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view, can be analysed with reference to the pathology of communicative

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Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory 7

8 Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith

German Critical Theory Today

Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory 9

10 Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith

Whereas ONeill argues from within the Habermasian framework, Emmanuel

Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory 11

12 Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith

approach captured by the motto of the humanisation of nature, meaning

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within the family, leading to the acquisition of specic dispositions, can be

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Lumsdens critical reading of Nancys Hegel, for example, resonating with

Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory 15

a way of overcoming the concept-intuition dichotomy by thinking spirit as

16 Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith

examines the preguration of Foucaults conception of biopower in Heideggers

Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory 17

philosophical and political understanding of Foucaults recently published

18 Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith

Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory 19

M. Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in Ethics. Essential Works of Michel Foucault

See N. Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reections on the Post-Socialist Condition,

See S. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy,

New York, Routledge, 1997.

G. Borradorri, Philosophy in a Time or Terror: Dialogues with Jrgen Habermas and

J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington

See, for example, R. Pippin, Hegels Idealism. The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness,

As developed in Habermas Between Facts and Norms: Toward a Discourse Theory of

S. ONeill, Critical Theory, Democratic Justice and Globalisation, p. 120 below.

20 Robert Sinnerbrink, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Nicholas Smith

Ibid., p. 121 below.

See A. Honneth, Moral Consciousness and Class Domination: Some Problems in

E. Renault, Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice. A Critique

E. Renault, Radical Democracy and an Abolitionist Concept of Justice, p. 144

See in particular Merleau-Pontys lectures on the philosophy of nature, Nature,

P. Redding, Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory,

P. Redding, Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory,

M. Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, trans. S. Wilke and R. Gray, Minneapolis,

Critique, Hope, Power: Challenges of Contemporary Critical Theory 21

Deleuzes remark is representative of an inuential current of post-structuralist

See M. Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au Collge de France 1978-1979,

P. Patton, Foucault, Critique, Rights, p. 283 below.

Ibid., p. 284 below.

There are some events that take on a symbolic

on Kants political essays to develop philosophical responses to the event

Providence Lost: September 11 and the History of Evil 25

signrevealing a tendency towards moral improvement in the human race

that, to go back further in the modern history of the idea of Providence. Im