Tradition Of Critical Theory Research Articles

Reconstructivism

In this paper I express enthusiastic solidarity with Axel Honneth's inheritance and transformation of several core Hegelian ideas, and express one major disagreement. The disagreement is not so much with anything he says, as it is with what he doesn't say. It concerns his rejection of Hegel's theoretical philosophy, and so his attempt to reconstruct Hegel's practical philosophy without reliance on that theoretical philosophy. This attitude towards Hegel's Science of Logic – that it involves a “mystification” of essentially practical notions - has been typical of the Critical Theory tradition since Marx, and is disputed here. It also helps to raise the large issue of the proper understanding of the relation between theoretical and practical philosophy. The implications of ignoring the Hegelian understanding of this dependence of the latter on the former are further developed.

Alienation

Purpose– This study aims to re-examine the concept of alienation, particularly from the perspective of existential psychology. While research interest continues to centre on links between human resource management (HRM) and organizational performance, such as in studies by Beeret al.(1984), Huselid (1995), Becker and Gerhart (1996) and Guest (2011), there is a growing interest in individual attributes such as employee well-being in addition to organizational performance, as mentioned in studies by Macky and Boxall (2007), Wood and de Menezes (2011) and Guest and Conway (2011). In this paper, we focus on issues related to the individual, and in doing so we suggest that HRM theory needs further development, as pointed out by Guest (2011).Design/methodology/approach– This is a paper in the tradition of critical theory that draws on both classical and modern research in the business and psychology literature. It outlines the development of the concept of alienation from its classic articulation by Marx through to the perspective offered by existential psychologists such as Blauner (1964). How alienation, thus, defined might manifest in the workplace is then discussed, as are its links to other concepts associated in the literature with positive and negative work experiences is presented.Findings– We argue that alienation needs to be addressed at two levels, namely, at the systemic level, in terms of factors external to the individual such as work and organizational systems and processes, and in terms of factors internal to the individual’s “state of mind”. We offer strategies for management to consider counterbalancing the negative effects of residual feelings of powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation and self-estrangement that systemic change is unable to eliminate.Originality/value– The paper refocuses attention on the individual within the context of HRM, the effects of alienation and other outcomes of positive and negative work experiences such as work engagement and job burnout.

Anerkennung und Abhängigkeit

Abstract Recently, a number of critical social theorists have argued that the analysis of social relations of unfreedom should take into account the phenomenon of self-subordination. In my article, I draw on Hegel’s theory of recognition to elucidate this phenomenon and show that recognition can be not only a means of self-realization, but also of subjugation. I develop my argument in three steps: As a first step, I reconstruct the idea of social pathologies in the tradition of Critical Theory. In the course of this reconstruction, it becomes clear that the analysis of social pathologies should focus on the binding force of recognition. As a second step, I reinterpret Hegel and show that a close reading of the relationship of lordship and bondage can help us to understand how a subject can become bound by recognition. As a third step, I make an attempt at reactualizing Hegel’s idea. Following Sartre’s analysis of anti-Semitism, I outline three stages of how subjects can gradually come to subordinate themselves and become entrapped in social relations of unfreedom such as race, class or gender.

Herrschaft begreifen: Anerkennung und Macht in Axel Honneths kritischer Theorie

Abstract Axel Honneth frames his contribution to the tradition of critical theory as an attempt to do justice to both the structures of social domination in contemporary Western societies and the practical resources for their overcoming. This paper assesses how well Honneth’s critical theory, which centers on the notion of the struggle for recognition, accomplishes the first of these two tasks. I argue that Honneth has yet to offer a fully satisfactory analysis of domination because his recognition model is unable to make sense of modes of subordination that function without producing any struggle.

Sociology and the critique of neoliberalism

Neoliberalism’s project of making the market the model for all modern freedoms means that critique needs to be able to unmask the distortions and to weigh the costs of its cultural appropriations and resignifications. This diagnostic/evaluative task presents a seeming challenge to the sociologist who is also answerable to scientific purposes that demand objectivity and impartiality. This article investigates two very different attempts to grasp this nettle. It contrasts Peter Wagner’s proposal to reclaim critique as ‘an essential feature of the social sciences’ with Axel Honneth’s call for a reinvigoration of the ‘sociologizing dimension’ of a critical theory tradition. It is argued that neither approach is fully adequate to the challenges set by neoliberalism. The final section of the article suggests that to demonstrate the efficacy of sociology’s contribution to a critique of neoliberalism we need to review the relationship between theoretical reflection and everyday thinking and permit the former to do more analytic/evaluative work.

Western Approaches

The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics is a fabulous but depressing genealogy of the modern study of International Relations (IR). The book is impressively comprehensive in content, It is complex in design. It exposes the self-serving dogmatism which have always marked mainstream IR literature. While admiring the scholarly qualities of the book, this review wonders if its critical exposure is excessive? Is there any scholarly approach in IR which is not crippled by its comprehensive condemnation? Does this book, which is written in the European tradition of Critical Theory, ultimately become a victim of its own sweeping criticism of the Western canon?

Feminism, Modernity and Critical Theory

The relationship between modernity and normativity is central to the project of critical theory, and yet this relationship has come under increasing pressure in recent years, in particular from postcolonial critics. For feminist critical theory specifically, the demand to rethink the relationship between modernity and normativity can be seen as coming simultaneously from two different directions: both from the direction of a feminist theory that strives to be genuinely inclusive of the perspectives and experiences of all women, including those in the global South, by developing an intersectional analysis of the cross-cutting axes of racial, gender, and imperial domination; and from the direction of a critical theory that can only be truly critical if it can take on board a postcolonial perspective. And yet rethinking the relationship between modernity and normativity poses serious problems for certain prominent understandings of feminist critical theory. In particular, insofar as the normative perspective of critical theory is dependent upon a particular understanding of modernity that is tied to a developmental, progressive reading of history, and insofar as this very perspective is called into question in postcolonial scholarship, the taking on board of a postcolonial, anti-racist and anti-imperialist feminist perspective seems to threaten the very normativity of critical theory. In this paper, I explore these issues by: first, sketching the relationship between modernity, normativity, and feminism in the work of the two major contemporary representatives of the Frankfurt School critical theory tradition, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth; second, exploring how this relationship is recapitulated in the work of feminist critical theorist Seyla Benhabib, despite her attempts to address intersectional and postcolonial feminist concerns; and finally, by way of a conclusion, briefly considering what follows for feminist critical theory once we rethink the relationship between modernity, normativity and feminism.

Precarious work and Australian labour norms

Casual employment in Australia is more prevalent than temporary work in most European nations, and casual employees have fewer rights and entitlements than comparable temporary employment categories in Europe. Yet, despite Australia’s long history of industrial activism and political representation of labour, there are fewer examples of social or political movements in Australia resisting precarious work than in Europe. This article provides a partial explanation of this puzzling lack of social resistance to casual employment. It begins from the idea, developed by the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory, that economic systems can create or sustain norms that conceal their more harmful social effects from public view. It then uses conceptual categories drawn from critical social theory to show how individual and social costs of casual employment have been overlooked or ‘reified’ in the workplace and in public political discourse. The study is based on existing qualitative research and on a new analysis of attitudes to work and economic organisation in Australian public discourse.

Is All Reification Forgetting?: On Connerton’s Types of Forgetting

Drawing upon the Frankfurt School Critical Theory tradition, I offer a defence of Connerton’s version of collective forgetting against recent detractors. This defence, however, is qualified and pertains strictly to geography and material culture aspects of collective forgetting. In this respect, the paper argues that models of individual and collective memory must attend to the historical forces that combine to (re)produce a particular environment, and further, they should consider the subsequent role the reproduction process plays on triggering moments of recollection or collective memory actions. To explicate this claim, I draw upon a Marxist inspired account of the labour process to show that variations in types of consciousness are related to particular modes of production. It is my intent to explicate Connerton’s theoretical reasoning such that readers from diverse backgrounds are better informed about his underlying set of assumptions. In this respect, this paper aims to contribute to advancing a political economy of memory.

Is All Reification Forgetting?: On Connerton’s Types of Forgetting

Drawing upon the Frankfurt School Critical Theory tradition, I offer a defence of Connerton’s version of collective forgetting against recent detractors. This defence, however, is qualified and pertains strictly to geography and material culture aspects of collective forgetting. In this respect, the paper argues that models of individual and collective memory must attend to the historical forces that combine to (re)produce a particular environment, and further, they should consider the subsequent role the reproduction process plays on triggering moments of recollection or collective memory actions. To explicate this claim, I draw upon a Marxist inspired account of the labour process to show that variations in types of consciousness are related to particular modes of production. It is my intent to explicate Connerton’s theoretical reasoning such that readers from diverse backgrounds are better informed about his underlying set of assumptions. In this respect, this paper aims to contribute to advancing a political economy of memory.

Natural law and critical theory: Bringing rights back in

This paper re-assesses the significance of the idea of ‘right’ in the tradition of critical theory. Focusing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, especially their confrontation with totalitarianism, it addresses their conceptualization of rights, their engagement with the philosophies of right created by Kant and Hegel, and the ambivalent place of Marx in their thinking about rights. My argument is that critical theory turned to natural rights in response to the perceived difficulties positive sociology had in confronting the barbarities of fascism and Stalinism. Critical theory steered a path between philosophies of right that acknowledged the idea of right within an unacceptably naturalistic frame of reference, and a sociological consciousness that de-natured the idea of right at the cost of its devaluation. Arendt and Adorno both confronted the contradictions of an age in which the rights of the individual were elevated as a supreme value while individuality was subjected to the forces of technological and economic determination. Both understood the barbarism of their times in terms of the disintegration of mediations between freedom and determination. Both recognized the gulf that separates the concept of rights from the material interests, inequalities and prejudices concealed behind them. And both drew on the critical substance of natural right theory to distinguish between the critique of rights, which has as its end their revaluation, and the trashing of rights, which serves to reinforce their devaluation. I argue that there is much to be gained, in terms of our understanding both of rights and of critique, from critical theory’s engagement with the natural law tradition.

Communicative Power and Ideology in Popular Music

Music constitutes communities in an aesthetically distinct way because it relies so centrally on bodily innervations. Such bodily innervation resonates with cognition and affective life and creates communities of listeners and producers. Following Theodor Adorno’s critical theory of music, however, we must distinguish these musical communities within the political economy of late capitalism. I examine this communicative power of music by considering Adorno’s critique of popular music in the political-economic context of the “informatization” of popular music under post-Fordism. Informatization has changed popular music production and consumption in important ways, but I seek to demonstrate that Adorno’s critique of music can still help us understand these changes. I emphasize the community constitutive power of music and I consider the non-Culture Industry form of heavy metal music as resistant music in the Adornoian critical theory tradition.

Activist political theory and the question of power

Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency is, first and foremost, a manifesto for an approach to political philosophy*what Ypi calls ‘activist political theory’*and can, I think, be best understood as an attempt to disturb analytic political philosophy from its ‘dogmatic slumber’ and motivate its movement towards the tradition of critical theory. In the first section of this commentary, I will lay out the grounds for this view. Having thus sketched an account of the point and purpose of this text, I will then focus on the relationship of both the methodological and the (illustrative) substantive arguments on global justice to the question of power. At a methodological level, I will argue that Ypi does not take the significance of power sufficiently seriously as an issue for political theory with emancipatory intent. With regard to her substantive arguments concerning global justice and state power, I will argue that she does not adequately address the character of power as a positional good because the analysis does not operate at the fundamentally appropriate institutional level of analysis. (Published: 4 July 2013) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 6 , No. 2, 2013, pp. 85-91. http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/egp.v6i2.21316

Talking Like a Book: Exception and the State of Nature in Benjamin and Molière

Walter Benjamin confides to his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal that “I sometimes think about writing a book on French tragedy as a counterpart to my Trauerspiel book,” noting that his “plan for the latter had originally been to elucidate both the German Trauerspiel and the French tragic drama in terms of their contrastive nature.” However, to do so “something must be added” that the book he wrote failed to supply. The aim of this essay is twofold: to reconstruct what Benjamin might have said about French classical tragedy and to identify the mysterious addition. Why does the effort to “elucidate” the two forms “in terms of their contrastive nature” demand a supplement? What would the supplement have been, and how might it illumine Benjamin's own project as well as tragedy and Trauerspiel? My hypothesis is that Benjamin remains silent on these points because he was temperamentally and philosophically unable to think them through. Benjamin's focus on tragedy is itself an indicator of this psychic resistance. Benjamin clearly assumed that, whatever deeper features of German tragic drama a contrast with the French version might bring to light, Trauerspiel constitutes a sovereign law unto itself, whose wider metaphysical as well as historical authority needs no argument. As a result, his interpretation of the nature of French tragedy inevitably would have confirmed his core theses about the German baroque, a fact that in turn draws attention to what Benjamin truly needed to add to both accounts: the perspective of comedy.I propose, then, to counter Benjamin's argument by exploring the ways in which comedy challenges the underlying metaphysics to which tragedy appeals. To this end, I argue that the greatest tragedy of the French classical age is its greatest comedy, Molière's Dom Juan, ou le festin de pierre. Reading Molière's play alongside French and German tragedy reveals not only how deeply both versions of the “mourning play” are implicated in the political ideology of royal absolutism but also the availability of a quite different model of social and political association grounded in the historical ontology of modernity against which absolutism sets its face. In addition to opening new sightlines on seventeenth-century tragedy and comedy alike, the result raises questions about the metaphysics underlying both Benjamin's thought and the tradition of critical theory from Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Weber down to Benjamin's rivals and epigones, Adorno, Schmitt, and Agamben.

Money or Life: Metaphors of Georg Simmel’s Philosophy

This essay by the influential post-war German cultural theorist Hans Blumenberg was published originally in German in 1976 in a collection of studies on Simmel’s aesthetics. Renowned as the author of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), Work on Myth (1979), Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960) and other major writings, the essay showcases Blumenberg’s unique approach to metaphorical figuration in the languages of philosophy and philosophers. Here Blumenberg considers how money stands as Simmel’s ‘proto-metaphor’ for Life in the latter’s nascent Lebensphilosophie. The very phenomenon that might seem most opposed to Life and to ‘higher’ ‘spiritual’ values is also the phenomenon that most dynamically unlocks life’s plenitude of creative forms – even as it threatens constantly to destroy this plenitude through effects of reification and objectification. As Blumenberg reads Simmel, Life itself turns out to be pure circulation, sociation, and interactivity, an endless cycle of extensions and intensifications of value emerging through processes of social exchange. The essay forms a striking counterpart to the many seminal readings of Simmel in the German critical theory tradition from Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer to Habermas.

Foucault, Rights and Freedom

As dominant liberal conceptions of the relationship between rights and freedom maintain, freedom is a property of the individual human subject and rights are a mechanism for protecting that freedom—whether it be the freedom to speak, to associate, to practise a certain religion or cultural way of life, and so forth. Rights according to these kinds of accounts are protective of a certain zone of permitted or valorised conduct and they function either as, for example, a ‘side-constraint’ on the actions of others or as a ‘trump’ over governmental or community goals. In such accounts, of course, the emphasis is placed upon the forms of power against which rights protect the individual, whether that be the trespasses of others or the overweening attentions of the state. Such accounts famously do not themselves take much account of the multiple ways in which rights also function as forms of power, often delimiting the courses of action that a putative rights-holder can take and affecting the manner of its exercise, indeed often in the very name of freedom itself. Of course, there is a sizeable critical literature which does address itself to these kinds of question, most notably from the radical traditions of Marxism and critical legal theory, which see rights in terms of the relations of production, consumption and exploitation that they establish between legal subjects. For various reasons, Foucault has not figured as prominently in critical discussions of rights. Here I do not propose to enter into debates surrounding Foucault’s engagement with, or failure to engage with, law as an object of study, nor with the emergent literature on Foucault’s deployments of rights, indeed even of human rights. Rather, what I want to do in this paper is to articulate and defend the view that through a reading of Foucault’s work, both on rights and on power relations more broadly, we can discern an understanding of the political ambivalence of rights. For Foucault (and for some of the post-Foucaultian scholars whose work I shall address, below), rights are both political tools for the contestation and alteration of mechanisms of power and simultaneously mechanisms of inscription, both disciplinary and governmental, which work to conduct those who rely upon them. Far from being an unproblematic tool for the protection of the subject’s freedom, rights emerge in this account as conflicted and ambivalent mechanisms. In the first part of this paper I develop a Foucaultian account of rights along these lines and then hope to illustrate it by reference to several examples, from the constitution of gender and cultural identity via rights to the figure of the refugee, whilst in the final part of the paper I make a return to the idea of freedom in Foucault’s work and link the view of rights developed herein to a certain conception of freedom in his work.

Between Psychoanalysis and Political Philosophy: Towards a Critical Theory of Political Myth

This paper focuses on a specific aspect of political imaginaries: political myth. What are political myths? What role do they play within today's commoditized political imaginaries? What are the conditions for setting up a critique of them? We will address these questions, by putting forward a theory of political myth which situates itself between psycho analysis and political philosophy, in line with the tradition of critical theory that many still associate with the name of the Frankfurt School. We will first discuss the notion of political myth by illustrating the contribution of both disciplines to its understanding and then, through a discussion of the notion of social unconscious, we will apply this analysis to a contemporary example of political myth, that of a clash of civilizations.

The fallacy of the service economy: a materialist perspective

PurposeThe purpose of this article, which is based in the tradition of critical theory, is to present a number of reasons for preserving a strong production economy given that the aim of the nation state is to work for improved competitive advantage.Design/methodology/approachThe critical theory approach is used in this paper.FindingsThe paper is also an attempt to show why a majority of Western countries have defended the transformation from a predominant production economy to a service economy by explaining the shift as a result of class interests, using new class theory. It argues for why a materialist perspective in economic theory is relevant today.Research limitations/implicationsThe Western world should focus more on the production economy and less on the service economy.Originality/valueTo the author's knowledge, no other paper has gathered as many arguments on the issue before.

Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

DAOISM AS CRITICAL THEORY

Classical philosophical Daoism as it is expressed in the Dao-De-Jing and the Zhuang-Zi is often interpreted as lacking a capacity for critique and resistance. Since these capacities are taken to be central components of Enlightenment reason and action, it would follow that Daoism is incompatible with Enlightenment. This interpretation is being refuted by way of developing a constructive dialogue between the enlightenment traditions of critical theory and recent philosophy of action from a Daoist perspective. Daoism's normative naturalism does neither rest on a primitivist call for a return to the past, nor does it suggest future-directed activism. By way of reconstructing its descriptive, explanatory and emancipatory dimensions, it is shown that Daoism constitutes an alternative form of critical theory. In contrast to future-directed purposive action or blind rule-following, Daoism's key normative concept of "wu-wei" emphasizes effortless non-calculative responsiveness in the present. Drawing on recent insights in the philosophy of action, a reconstruction of wu-wei allows to conceive of a promising form of emancipatory agency.