Arguing Over Participatory Parity: On Nancy Fraser's Conception of Social Justice

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Over the last decade, Nancy Fraser has been developing a comprehensive and incisive critical social theory, one that, to use Marx's phrase, can further the "the work of our time to clarify to itself (critical philosophy) the meaning of its own struggles and its own desires"1 or, to use Max Horkheimer's conception, would count as an adequate interdisciplinary social theory with emancipatory intent.2 What then are the requirements for an interdisciplinary social theory, one critically oriented towards emancipation? First and foremost it must offer a theory of society, that is, some description and/or explanation of why social and institutional structures, cultural understandings, personality structures and the like have taken the particular shape they have today. More than a mere sociology or social psychology or combination of their results, however, a critical social theory also needs some kind of account of what emancipation means. Or, at the very least, some kind of account of the normative standards it evokes in denouncing various institutional formations, social expectations, cultural understandings, and the rest as non-emancipatory, oppressive, repressive, subordinating or whatever terms of negative assessment are going to be used. Finally, of course, as anyone who is familiar with reading critical social theory from Germany in the last thirty years will be well aware, a critical social theory also requires a fair amount of philosophical reflexivity about the standards of evidence it uses, the procedures it uses to investigate contemporary society, the ways it goes about justifying its normative standpoints, and so on. In other words, an interdisciplinary theory with emancipatory intent is supported by at least three kinds of reflection. First, is the more or less comprehensive social theory that gives us an empirically accurate picture of our contemporary situation, of "the meaning of our time's struggles," as it were. second, is some account of why certain of "our time's desires" are worthwhile desires, desires that point us toward the right struggles-we need an account of the normative standards employed in comprehending contemporary society. Third are the requirements of "critical philosophy clarifying our time to itself: critical social theory needs a philosophically reflective account of its own methodological procedures and standards of rationality. There is however a fourth desideratum any critical social theory must meet. We might call this, for lack of a better word, "perspicacity." That is to say, the struggles and wishes of the age that the theory picks out as important, the way in which it analyzes contemporary social formations, its particular analytic lens on the present, have to somehow insightfully illuminate the important social conditions, social changes, and social actors that we ought to be attending to. To put the perspicacity requirement in another way, the social-theoretic, normative, and methodological tasks of critical social theory can't become so overwhelming and hyper-reflexive that they overshadow, in the end, the question of whether that critical social theory picks out important practical issues. No matter how accurate the empirical social theory, no matter how unassailable the normative framework, no matter how cogent the methodological self-understanding of the theory, if, at the end of the day, that critical social theory doesn't tell us something insightful and practically useful about the actual struggles and wishes of our actual age, then it has missed its target. I believe that Nancy Eraser's critical social theory fulfills the first three tasks as well as other contemporary social theories, and I would contend that it better fulfills the requirement for perspicacity than others, giving a more insightful theory of the social world we find ourselves in and of the prospects and avenues for progressive change of that world. However, rather than try to vindicate that judgment here, I will leave that task to you, the reader of her recently co-authored book with Axel Honneth. …