-
The third Ukraine: A case of civic nationalism Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-03-09 Yaroslav Hrytsak
To some extent, the current Russian-Ukrainian may be described as a conflict between two visions of nation, respectively, ethnic and civic models. Putin believes that a language defines a nation. In his understanding, since many Ukrainians are Russian speakers, they are Russians. His perception of Ukraine is anachronistic. He has failed to notice Ukraine's radical transformation since it gained independence
-
From empire to nation: Management of religious pluralism in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Salim Çevik
The transition from empire to nation-state poses challenges in managing religious and ethnic pluralism. Empires, characterized by hierarchical structures and diversity, contrast with nation-states, which aim for uniformity and unity. As empires modernize administratively, they grapple with different approaches to pluralism. While Habsburgs were more in favor of a federal plurality, the Romanovs pushed
-
Political friendship, respect, community: Hannah Arendt’s de-materialization of Aristotelian political friendship Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Alex Cain
In this article I demonstrate how Hannah Arendt both appropriates and transforms Aristotle’s view of political friendship. I argue that the brief discussion of Aristotelian political friendship in The Human Condition relies on an earlier de-materialization of Aristotle’s work on friendship. This de-materialization of Aristotle’s view of friendship allows Arendt to discuss Aristotelian friendship as
-
Mimicking myths of menopause. A critical phenomenological perspective on ageing and femininity in fiction TV shows Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Marjolein de Boer, Annemie Halsema
This article offers a critical phenomenological analysis of prevailing myths of menopause. By drawing on Simone de Beauvoir's conceptions of myths that essentialize existence, we have analyzed contemporary TV series in which menopause is portrayed. We identified the following myths of menopause: the myth of the liberated woman, the unnesting (s)mother, the old, ugly, and sexless witch, the mild, wise
-
Nominalism, materialism, and history Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Timothy Hinton
This article addresses two explanatory gaps in Althusser’s late work. One has to do with the relation between nominalism and materialism; the other engages the relation between Althusser’s later materialism and a broadly materialist approach to history. In the first part of the article, I develop a response to the problem of nominalism that makes use of Hobbes’s nominalism and Deleuze’s concept of
-
Does Richard Rorty have ‘anything to say to blacks’? Greater cruelties, lesser cruelties and the permanence of racism Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Nathan W Dean
Richard Rorty does have something ‘to say to [Black Americans]’ and to their racially conscious nonblack allies in the sense that his understanding of liberalism, his prophecies about the future and his urgent appeals to the American Left all paint a picture of a white middle class fully prepared to make life increasingly miserable for Black Americans unless it is ‘protected from catastrophe’. Rorty
-
Judith Butler and future generations: Transtemporal relationality, generational trouble and future-oriented ruthless critique Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Michael Reder, Simon Faets
Radical theories of democracy deal only marginally with climate impacts. Judith Butler is part of this tradition and has worked on ecological issues in recent years. She might help contribute to beginning to close this gap. In this article, some of her theoretical elements will be explored in order to critically discuss whether and how climate impacts can be understood philosophically within the framework
-
Rescuing justice and stability Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-02-03 Paul Weithman
Though John Rawls's treatment of stability has received less attention than other parts of his work, it promises help in understanding how liberal institutions can reproduce themselves under non-ideal conditions like ours. But stability in Rawls's sense seems to depend ineliminably on society's justice, and Gerald Cohen powerfully criticized the connection Rawls drew between the two. Cohen contends
-
Toward a universalistic theory of political obligation: A post-structuralist approach Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Giorgi Tskhadaia
Developing a plausible theory of political obligation is crucial for understanding our current political lives or constructing new ones. However, it proved to be hard to arrive at a theory that is universalistic and logically consistent. Without adherence to certain universalistic principles, such as freedom and equality, one might be tempted to justify individuals’ allegiance to authoritarian regimes
-
Literature and the legacy of Empire: Approaching Turkey’s post-imperial condition through Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Johanna Chovanec
How does literature engage with the legacies of Empire? This article examines how imperial decline and nation building are reflected in textual production after the First World War. With Turkey as a case study, it focuses on the post-imperial narrative as a form of narration dealing with the experience of imperial loss, political contingency and possibilities of national belonging. I argue that Turkey’s
-
Towards a decolonial political theory: Thinking from the zone of nonbeing Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Charles des Portes
This article offers to outline a direction for a decolonial political theory based on Aimé Césaire’s and Frantz Fanon’s thoughts. In doing so, I will first discuss some work of comparative political theory that could be associated with an attempt to decolonize political theory. Rather than a systematic critique of these works, this article aims to outline some of their limits from a decolonial perspective
-
Borders, states, and armed conflicts in Europe and Northeast Asia since 1945: The moral hazard of great-power encroachments Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-01-20 Mark Kramer
This article discusses the significance of international borders in Europe and Northeast Asia during the Cold War (1945–1989) and after. Using the concept of ‘moral hazard’, the article examines what happens when great powers frequently violate the borders of neighboring countries without suffering adverse repercussions. Norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity are viable only if large countries
-
Introduction to special issue on book symposium Populism and civil society: The challenge to democratic constitutionalism (2022) by Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Regina Kreide
Populism and Civil Society: The Challenge to Democratic Constitutionalism (2022) by Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen is an important book that addresses a widespread and ominous phenomenon around the world: The challenge of populism. This book forms a symposium by renowned authors which gathers commentaries on Arato and Cohen’s book. From different points of view, comments, suggestions and queries are put
-
Habermas and the mutations of the public sphere Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Douglas Kellner
In this article, I argue that concern with the public sphere and the necessary conditions for a genuine democracy can be seen as a central theme of Jurgen Habermas's work that deserves respect and critical scrutiny in the contemporary moment, when throughout the world liberal democracies are in crisis. My study intends to point to the continuing importance of Habermas' problematic of the public sphere
-
Conclusion: The challenges of pseudo-nationalism and the lessons from intellectual history Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2024-01-02 Mark Lilla
This article questions whether past experience with nationalisms rooted in history, language, custom and religion will be much of a guide to pseudo-nationalisms that arise in a globalized age with increasingly ‘liquid’ societies.
-
The owl of Minerva and the dialectic of human freedom: A heterodox reading Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-05-06 Bernardo Ferro
In the preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel compares the philosopher’s work to the flight of the owl of Minerva: just as the latter begins only with the fall of dusk, so too is philosophy boun...
-
Three theories of separation: Kelsen, Schmitt and Pashukanis and the historical development of the legal form Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Matthew Bolton
This article examines the different approaches to the relation between law, state and economy in the works of Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt and Evgeny Pashukanis. It begins with Kelsen’s depiction of l...
-
Liberalism and the problem of domination Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-04-26 Volker Kaul
We can distinguish two liberal paradigms that stand in opposition to each other. Liberalism as non-domination seeks to eliminate identities resulting from domination and oppression and hindering th...
-
Does contemporary recognition theory rest on a mistake? Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-04-21 Paul Giladi
My aim in this paper is to argue, contra Axel Honneth, that ‘the summons’ (Aufforderung), the central pillar of Fichte’s transcendentalist account of recognition, is best made sense of not as an ‘i...
-
The humanism of critical theory: The Frankfurt School’s ‘realer humanismus’ Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Alice Nilsson
Theodor Adorno has been quoted as responding to the Humanist Union stating ‘I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls it...
-
Legitimizing political power from below. A reinterpretation of the founding myths of Thebes, Athens, and Rome as a critique against private and public violence Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Marina Calloni
What do we mean when affirming ‘the powerful return of the state’? Do we have in mind the jus ad bellum employed by aggressive states, or are we thinking of the duties that a state has towards its ...
-
Defending rights. Between parliaments and courts Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Giuliano Amato
In principle, it should be for the Courts, which are not majoritarian institutions, to stand for the rights, even more for the new rights, that are minoritarian by definition. How far can the Court...
-
From resistance to transformation – The journey to develop a framework to explore transformative potential of environmental resistance practices Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-03-31 Mengmeng Cui, Daniele Brombal
Standing in front of perhaps the most crucial decade of the future to come, when mankind has just experienced three years of global pandemic, a raging war, extreme climate events and mass extinctio...
-
Against insular liberalism: Sayyid Qutb, illiberal Islam and the forceless force of the better argument Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Marilie Coetsee
Political liberals claim that liberal polities may legitimately dismiss the objections of ‘unreasonable’ citizens who resist political liberals’ favored principles of justice and political justific...
-
Marcuse’s critique of technology today Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-03-17 Andrew Feenberg
Marcuse was the face of the Frankfurt School during the 1960s and '70s. His eclipse led, among other unfortunate consequences, to the disappearance of his critique of science and technology. That c...
-
“Unpacking state-society relations in the urban space: What are the Limit(s) of compromise?”. The dilemma about answering such a question and some recent Venetian experiences Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Silvio Cristiano
Confronted by answering a complex question such as ‘What are the Limit(s) of Compromise?’ when ‘unpacking State-Society Relations in the Urban Space’, some problematising thoughts are offered to fu...
-
Book Review: A glitch in the matrix: Vivek Chibber and the cltural turn Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-03-18 Katie Ebner-Landy
Chibber’s The Class Matrix and Confronting Capitalism aim to rescue class from the cultural turn. Rather than thinking that mass media mollified the working class, he suggests we re-investigate cap...
-
Supplication as violence: The provision of institutionalized care and the essence of giving Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-23 Prashan Ranasinghe
This article casts its attention on acts of supplication in institutional settings. The article focuses upon institutions geared towards the provision of care, that is, sites that are designed to p...
-
History, critique, experience: On the dialectical relationship between art and philosophy in Adorno’s aesthetic theory Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-22 Justin Neville Kaushall
In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that, in modernity, art and philosophy are reciprocally dependent upon each other for legitimation and critical force. This claim has puzzled scholars and provoke...
-
The symbolic work of political discourse. Populist reason and its foundational myth Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-19 Javier Toscano
This article locates Ernesto Laclau’s populist reason as a point of departure to understand the contemporary democratic logic and its so-called ‘excesses’. It argues that, even if resourceful, Lacl...
-
Embedded agency: A critique of negative liberty and free markets Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Senem Saner
The concept of negative liberty as non-interference is operative in the concept of a free market and stipulates that market relations remain outside the purview of social control. As a purported se...
-
From agonistic to insurgent democracy Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Lorenzo Buti
This article uncovers an internal tension within theories of agonistic democracy. On the one hand, as radical pluralists, agonistic democrats want to institute a ‘symmetrical’ political scene where...
-
“For whom the bell tolls”? A ‘vulnerability-responsibility’ model based on democratic and ‘dignified’ transactions” Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-10 Subrata Mitra
The welfare state, once seen as the best institutional response to people in need, has steadily come under pressure, as much from shrinking state capacities as from neo-liberal advocates of individ...
-
On militant democracy’s institutional conservatism Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Patrick Nitzschner
This article critically reconstructs militant democracy’s ‘institutional conservatism’, a theoretical preference for institutions that restrain transformation. It offers two arguments, one historic...
-
Understanding and evaluating populist strategy Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-07 David Jenkins
Populism describes those strategies which actors endorsing populist ideas must use in order to be considered populist. Typical populist strategies include the hijacking of state institutions; the d...
-
The politics of the invisible: Post-truth’s instrumental use of transparency and Arendt’s ‘nobody’ Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Sanem Yazıcıoğlu
One of the most significant difficulties that we encounter today in the post-truth era is in constructing a reality in the gap between deceptive pre-given facts and how we experience them in our li...
-
How to feminist affect: Feminist comedy and post-truth politics Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Jana McAuliffe
Under the shifting epistemic and political norms of post-truth politics, the conditions of feminist solidarity and agency are increasingly threatened. This article argues that feminist humour provi...
-
Can the “real world” please stand up? The struggle for normality as a claim to reality Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Maren Wehrle
In this paper, I show that a phenomenological concept of normality can be helpful to understand the experiential side of post-truth phenomena. How is one’s longing for, or sense of, normality relat...
-
Fact versus feeling: What post-truth scholarship can learn from the feminist phenomenology of affect Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Erica Harris
Although it is a relatively new phenomenon, the most popular descriptions of post-truth operate within the boundaries of the classical dichotomy between emotion and reason that dates back to Plato’...
-
The world in a Geranium pot: Female paranoia and love of detail in Schor, Beauvoir and Arendt Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Noga Rotem
Might paranoia bear some promise, not only danger, for democratic theory and politics? To suggest that we should treat paranoia with anything but disdain today, in the age of Q anon and other white...
-
(Post-)Truth, populism and the simulation of parrhesia: A feminist critique of truth-telling after Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Mareike Gebhardt
Following tropes of light and dark in Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘The Hill We Climb’, the article explores, from a feminist perspective, who counts as a truth-teller. Against the backdrop of Hannah Arend...
-
Truth queens and gallows humor Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Bonnie Honig
How can truth be used to fight disinformation without reproducing the “reveal”—oriented or secret-constituting epistemology of the closet, as Eve Sedgwick described it in the Epistemology of the Cl...
-
Refusing post-truth with Butler and Honig Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Clare Woodford
This article argues that although post-truth is understood to pose a particular misogynistic threat to feminism, we cannot assume that feminists should simply oppose post-truth. The way the post-tr...
-
The shadow of the eco: Denial and climate change Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Elissa Marder
This article argues that climate change puts excessive demands on the psyche. The omnipresent specter of climate change and global warming cannot be processed by individual psyches because there is...
-
Self-esteem and competition Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-01-21 Pablo Gilabert
This paper explores the relations between self-esteem and competition. Self-esteem is a very important good and competition is a widespread phenomenon. They are commonly linked, as people often see...
-
Power and normativity: Rainer Forst on noumenal power Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Tim Heyssse
According to Rainer Forst, a critical theory of power must break with the tendency of political theorists to conceive of power in opposition to normativity. Appropriately, Forst proposes a noumenal...
-
Brothers in arms: Adorno and Foucault on resistance Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-01-13 Giovanni Maria Mascaretti
This article offers a comparative exploration of the practices of resistance Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault champion against the structures of modern power their enquiries have the merit to ill...
-
Whose time is it? Rancière on taking time, unproductive doing and democratic emancipation Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-01-13 Michael Räber
This essay argues that an alternative conception of time to that underlying the ideology of productivism and growth is not only possible, but desirable. The creation of this time requires what I re...
-
Reconsidering the ethics of cosmopolitan memory: In the name of difference and memories to-come Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-01-13 Zlatan Filipovic
Departing from what Levey and Sznaider (2002) in their seminal work ‘Memory Unbound’ refer to as ‘cosmopolitan memory’ that emerges as one of the fundamental forms ‘collective memories take in the ...
-
Beyond emergency politics: Carl Schmitt’s substantive constitutionalism Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-01-12 Mariano Croce, Andrea Salvatore
This article problematizes the recent comeback of the exceptionalist jargon as it is conjured by both critics and sympathizers. While in the last decades governments across the globe had recourse t...
-
‘Taking politics seriously: A prudential justification of political realism’ Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Greta Favara
Political realists have devoted much effort to clarifying the methodological specificity of realist theorising and defending its consistency as an approach to political reasoning. Yet the question ...
-
Understanding the democratic promise of the city Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2023-01-07 Verena Frick
Looking at current theoretical approaches to democracy and the city, this article deepens our understanding of the democratic relevance of cities. It suggests four ideals of the democratic city whi...
-
The made and the made-up Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2022-12-30 Steven L. Winter
Truth is an ethical relation. Facts, whether descriptions of the physical world or of historical events, are necessarily mediated by our frames of reference. This contingency opens a space for disa...
-
All power to the imagination: Sartre and Castoriadis Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2022-12-20 Gavin Rae
Despite Jean-Paul Sartre and Cornelius Castoriadis placing the imagination centre stage in their respective conceptual theories, little work has been done to bring them into conversation on this is...
-
‘Kant, Realism, and the Theory of Ideals’ Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2022-12-19 William Levine
What role do normative ideals play in politics? Since Rawls, many political philosophers have advocated what they take to be a Kantian answer to this question. Normative ideals organize and guide p...
-
Searching for the fourfold in critical discourse analysis Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2022-12-13 Ejvind Hansen
This article argues that late Heidegger’s analyses of the Fourfold can be used as a methodological starting point for discourse analyses. It argues that the Fourfold points out elements or foundati...
-
Social ontology in metaethics Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2022-12-13 Gloria Mähringer
This article enriches discussions about the metaphysics of normative facts with conceptual resources from social ontology that metaethics has neglected so far: the resources of Haslanger’s critical...
-
Anti-vaccination as political dissent – a post-political reading of Yellow Vests’ accounts of Covid-19, vaccines and the Health pass Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Ingeborg M. Bergem
This article theorizes the connection between political distrust and conspiracy theories through a post-political framework. Following Luc Boltanski’s focus on the critical capacities of ordinary a...
-
An epistemic alternative to the public justification requirement Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Henrik Friberg-Fernros, Johan Karlsson Schaffer
How should the state justify its coercive rules? Public reason liberalism endorses a public justification requirement: Justifications offered for authoritative regulations must be acceptable to all...
-
Freedom and dialectics: On the critical theory of Moishe Postone and Theodor Adorno Philosophy & Social Criticism Pub Date : 2022-11-04 Anke Devyver
This article examines the relation between the critical theory of Moishe Postone and the philosophy of Theodor Adorno. While the former is clearly influenced by the latter, these influences mostly ...