Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory最新文献

Otto Kirchheimer and militant democracy 奥托·基希海默和激进民主

IF 1.2

Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2024-10-07 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12763

Benjamin A. Schupmann

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The sense of direct action 直接行动的感觉

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Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2024-09-27 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12766

Clinton Peter Verdonschot

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Adam Smith's inquiry into the nature and causes of the death of nations 亚当·斯密对国家灭亡的性质和原因的探究

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Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2024-09-17 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12760

Ryan Patrick Hanley

{"title":"Adam Smith's inquiry into the nature and causes of the death of nations","authors":"Ryan Patrick Hanley","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12760","url":null,"abstract":"The year 1776 saw the publication of two of the Enlightenment's landmark texts: Edward Gibbon's multivolume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Adam Smith's multivolume Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Each was the work of an erudite scholar deeply learned in ancient and modern history. Each reflected its author's intimate conversance with the 18th century's leading theories of political economy and moral philosophy. And each in time would launch an intellectual revolution in its particular branch of social science. Yet for all this, the two works also share a further, less well appreciated similarity: both are inquiries into the causes of the decline and demise of nations.Today we tend to associate this inquiry with Gibbon more than Smith. The Smith we have come to know is a theorist of growth and “the natural progress of opulence” and not a theorist of decline (WN 3.1).1 Yet while his insights into growth undeniably constitute his most recognized contribution to the emergence of modern political economy, reading Smith exclusively as a theorist of growth can lead us to miss the sophistication of his inquiry into the causes of national decline. What follows thus reverses the causal arrow that has led other scholars to read Gibbon by way of Smith's influence (e.g., Pocock, 1999, pp. 309–329, 2003, pp. 372–399), and instead revisits Smith through the lens of Gibbon's key political problem in order to bring to the fore Smith's understudied inquiry into the causes of national decline and fall.The chief benefit of this reading lies in how it clarifies an underappreciated paradox at the core of Smith's project.2 At the heart of this paradox lies Smith's understanding of the necessary tension between national opulence and national power. Put simply, Smith taught that national opulence is ultimately inimical to national power; the paradox, in short, is that the very growth that political economy seeks to promote ultimately proves counter to the nation's political interests.3 Thus even as “the great object of the political economy of every country, is to increase the riches and power of that country” (WN 2.5.31), Smith repeatedly would argue that the discrete project of increasing a country's riches subverts the discrete project of increasing a country's power. Smith furthermore believed that this paradox was both natural and necessary. This is especially clear in the way he frames the paradox in his lectures on jurisprudence: “it must happen that the improvement of the arts and commerce must make a great declension in the force and power of the republic in all cases” (LJA iv.81; italics added). Or again: “wherever therefore arts and commerce engage the citizens, either as artisans or master tradesmen, the strength and the force of the city must be very much diminished” (LJA iv.85; italics added). ","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"184-197"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12760","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143581549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Homo mimeticus, Wayward lives, and The biology of adversity and resilience: Early life adversity and the politics of fabulation 猿人，任性的生活，以及逆境和恢复力的生物学：早期生活的逆境和制造的政治

IF 1.2

Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2024-09-05 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12762

Kevin Ryan

{"title":"Homo mimeticus, Wayward lives, and The biology of adversity and resilience: Early life adversity and the politics of fabulation","authors":"Kevin Ryan","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12762","url":null,"abstract":"At the heart of the science of early life adversity—past and present—is the discursive power of “age.” As a measure of time, age operates not only to separate childhood from adulthood but also to conjure fictions that anchor the temporality of Western modernity, meaning developmental time as the normative gauge of progress and improvement (Ibrahim, 2021, p. 30). The way that early life adversity is narrated today can help us to grasp the extent to which the present continues to move “in the wake” (Sharpe, 2016) of this temporality. As to the question of why this matters, I would simply add the word “still.” The approach to critical inquiry that Horkheimer and Adorno exemplify in their Dialectic of enlightenment (2002), for example, which is comparable to Foucault's archaeology of knowledge (2002, 1972), still matters. What these thinkers share is an attitude of refusal—a refusal to settle for the world as it is, hence the need to take up a critical relationship to the present and to ourselves. If we can grasp how we have come to be who and what we are as subjects, then it might be possible to be otherwise, thereby cracking open a new world from within the shell of the old. This is what Foucault had in mind when he characterized critique as a “historical ontology of ourselves,” meaning an “attitude” that engages critically with the present (1984, p. 49). It has to be said, however, that Horkheimer and Adorno's present was not quite the same as Foucault's, and his present is not ours. So, context changes, yet the questions that critical theory poses endure: What stands in the way of a transformative politics, and how might critical theory respond?As I aim to show in this article, the contemporary science of early life adversity runs the risk of sustaining the power relations that are entangled in the temporality of Western modernity (which is not to suggest that all associated researchers and practitioners are culpable; this is surely not the case)—power relations that traverse not just childhood and adulthood, but also class, gender, and racialized inequalities. Reading Nidesh Lawtoo's Homo mimeticus and Saidiya Hartman's Wayward lives together offers a critical response to this situation, but there is a “but,” and this concerns Lawtoo's way of figuring an “anti-mimetic” mode of resistant agency.In what follows I present a three-way dialogue (of sorts), by thinking between and across Lawtoo, Hartman, and the contemporary science of early life adversity, which will be presented as NEAR science, encompassing Neuroscience, Epigenetics, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Resilience. I caution against the move that Lawtoo makes in aligning the figure of Homo mimeticus to NEAR science, arguing that Hartman's method of “critical fabulism” affords greater critical traction in teasing out of the radical potential of mimesis as a way of thinking a p","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"169-183"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12762","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143581534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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The external world and the future of political theory 外部世界与政治理论的未来

IF 1.2

Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2024-09-04 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12761

J. Mohorčich

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Making sense of critical theory's economic gap 理解批判理论的经济差距

IF 1.2

Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2024-09-04 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12758

Lillian Cicerchia

{"title":"Making sense of critical theory's economic gap","authors":"Lillian Cicerchia","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12758","url":null,"abstract":"This paper responds to the call in social philosophy to retheorize or reconceptualize the economy. For at least 40 years, social philosophy has displaced “the economy” as the site of social theory and normative argument. Today, philosophers are trying to work their way back into a critique of political economy, given the increasing centrality of political-economic processes to what scholars are referring to as a “polycrisis” in contemporary political experience (Tooze, 2018). I argue that a central obstacle to reviving this form of social criticism is that a range of philosophers and social theorists remain committed to a Weberian view of how the economy fits into social life that perpetuates this displacement effect. My position will be counterintuitive to many, as it is common to think that it is Marx's influence on critical theory, not Weber's, that does so by narrowing one's scope of concern. By contrast, I claim that reconstructing Marxian structuralism is what is needed, but on pragmatist rather than functionalist grounds.The steps in my argument are as follows: First, I focus on what is known as critical theory, descending from the Frankfurt School, to show that this tradition has always had a problem regarding how it conceptualizes the economy, how it incorporates that conception into social theory, and, therefore, how it evaluates it. In brief, “the economy” as such is a conceptual and normative weak point. It is not, nor has it been, straightforwardly the central object of social analysis. This lineage inherits from Max Weber the idea of instrumental reason to its detriment, which is what—counterintuitively—displaces the economy from view. Second, I depict Weber's view of the economy as a fork in the road for social theory to illuminate an alternative, and I argue that what is known as the “pragmatist turn” in social philosophy is a promising, yet insufficient way of realizing this alternative. Finally, I propose a view that I call structuralist pragmatism to bring classical Marxian insights into a pragmatist framework.I will begin with some explanation for my starting point since social philosophy has come under increasing pressure to justify its methodology with respect to what lineages of thought it does or does not bring to bear on a theoretical problem. As I am writing about the economy, one may want to know why I begin with the usual suspects in German critical theory rather than more subterranean strands of thinking within or outside Europe. Indeed, I imagine that, say, neither analytical Marxist nor decolonial thinkers would prefer to rehash the Frankfurt School's theoretical influence. Nonetheless, my reason is agenda-setting: There is a way of conceptualizing and evaluating the economy that emerged from this tradition that shapes a terrain of inquiry and how theorists try to intervene on it. In brief, I want to explain why and how the concept of instrumental reason displaces political-economic thi","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"83-96"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12758","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143581404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Philanthropy and democracy: Two kinds of authority 慈善与民主：两种权威

IF 1.2

Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2024-09-04 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12759

Matthieu Debief

{"title":"Philanthropy and democracy: Two kinds of authority","authors":"Matthieu Debief","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12759","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12759","url":null,"abstract":"In 2000, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation tackled an issue concerning the American education system: unsatisfactory high school graduation rates and college entry rates, especially in urban school districts (Ravitch, 2011). Between 2000 and 2008, this foundation donated more than $2 billion to 2600 schools across 45 US states. Bill and Melinda Gates's aim was clearly spelled out: they saw the K−121 education system as “obsolete”2 and in need of drastic reforms (Ravitch, 2011). The Gates Foundation's leaders observed that some schools in the United States could host up to 4000 or 5000 pupils, leading to the neglect of a portion of students who needed extra attention. Based on contemporary research and already-existing movements in civil society,3 they concluded that smaller schools were the key to students’ success.In a context of public budget cuts, not many school boards could refuse a multimillion-dollar philanthropic donation. Hence, the Gates Foundation started to distribute money all over the United States, tying its gifts to conditions that would promote an effectiveness-based conception of education. At first, schools were asked to restructure and split themselves into independent units of no more than 400 students. Later, performance-based pay for teachers and national-standards tests, serving as effectiveness yardsticks, became mandatory for funding.Although this system benefited some schools, it created more problems than it solved in the great majority of cases. For example, the fragmentation of large schools into small autonomous units increased conflict and competition for resources and deprived students of a significant range of activities that were only provided in larger institutions. Praised in the beginning, the Gates program was sharply criticized in 2005 when the first evaluations came out. In 2008, the foundation's directors recognized the bad start of their program and mostly put the blame on the lack of receptivity of the schools they helped or on teachers’ lack of competence. A few months later, the foundation decided to all but shut the program down.In a democracy, there are good reasons to believe that the making of collectively binding decisions about such public goods as school infrastructures, education programs, and teachers’ salary should be carried out by citizens or people who speak in their name. However, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's case shows a sense in which some people or organizations, by virtue of their private resources, have an additional and sometimes larger say on such questions. This raises the question whether the logics of democracy and philanthropy are compatible. The question is more pressing because philanthropic donations are generally tax subsidized, representing therefore a redirection of public money (Pevnick, 2013) toward aims likely to advance donors’ personal interests.Poli","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"33-46"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12759","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143581403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Indeterminacy between phenomenology and social ontology: The tension in Claude Lefort's theory of democracy 现象学与社会本体论之间的不确定性：克劳德·勒福特民主理论中的张力

IF 1.2

Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2024-09-03 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12765

Roger Ventura Cossin

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Disillusioning ideology: From empty reference to flawed world-disclosure 幻灭的意识形态：从空洞的提及到有缺陷的世界披露

IF 1.2

Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2024-09-01 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12764

Michael Schwarz

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To walk the walk: Why we need to make things personal in public deliberation 以身作则：为什么我们需要在公共讨论中把事情个人化？

IF 1.2

Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory Pub Date : 2024-04-17 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12747

Markus Holdo, Zohreh Khoban

{"title":"To walk the walk: Why we need to make things personal in public deliberation","authors":"Markus Holdo, Zohreh Khoban","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.12747","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-8675.12747","url":null,"abstract":"Critical reflection and awareness-raising are nowadays part of many people's everyday lives: At workplaces and organizations, in relationships, in the media, and best-selling books, people are increasingly discussing what it means to treat each other as equals, how not to be racist, and the many ways that we still exclude or marginalize people based, for example, on gender, ethnicity, abilities, age, class, sexuality, or religious views. These conversations are not easy to have. They often proceed on a very general level, without naming names, without getting upset, and without confrontation. We are accustomed to discussing in this way: What matters is not the personal story but the general patterns; not our experiences and how we feel about them, but the objective facts and arguments; not our failures to live up to ideals and beliefs, but what some abstract “we” still need to work on. Not making it personal is supposed to ensure that everyone can feel comfortable to speak and be heard regardless of their personal history and how they live.In democratic theory, this understanding of collective reflection as a “rational discussion” has been a central part of how scholars approach the realm of public deliberation. In Habermas’ famous phrase, participants in deliberation are supposed to respond only to the force of the better argument instead of giving importance to the status and power of the person speaking (Habermas, 1975, 1984). While a critical component in early work on deliberation, this view has now been criticized by countless scholars (see Curato et al., 2019; Holdo, 2020b). Feminist and critical theorists, not the least, have argued that this idea obscures how, in the real situations in which deliberation takes place, people's views and ways of expressing themselves are always embodied—that is, always shaped by their particular locations and experiences (Hayward, 2004; Holdo, 2015; Olson, 2011; Young, 1996, 2000).Today, many deliberative theorists acknowledge that our ways of communicating—including both speaking and listening, both expressing something and considering it—in part reflect culture and social hierarchies. This is typically seen as an argument for a more inclusive approach to the type of expressions that should be accepted in deliberation. Thus, deliberative scholars have come to embrace emotions, testimony, greetings, rhetoric, and storytelling as additions to the earlier ideal of rational discussion (see Bächtiger et al, 2018; Elstub, 2010).The criticism against the early ideals of deliberative theory can, to a certain extent, be seen as a critique of a norm of disembodied objectivity: that we ought to listen and respond to what is being said while disregarding who is saying it. Emotions, testimony, and storytelling are all modes of expression that bear witness to who we are and what w","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"97-109"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.12747","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140693359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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