{"title":"William E. Walling and the Pragmatist Foundations of Proto-Western Marxism: A Re-Evaluation and Critique","authors":"Paulo Antunes","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70047","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article reevaluates Walling as a neglected precursor to American Western Marxism, arguing that his 1912–1914 trilogy synthesized Marxist theory of his time and Deweyan pragmatism into a distinct “pragmatist conception of history.” Born into “aristocracy” yet radicalized, Walling's unique trajectory—as a co-founder of the NAACP and critic of Second International orthodoxy—shaped his approach: a rejection of deterministic scientific history in favor of instrumental, presentist analysis limited to recent generations. Although his work anticipated Western Marxism's cultural turn and superstructural focus, it also embodied tensions between materialist foundations and pragmatist subjectivity. Through critical engagement with Walling's contradictions—his Deweyan compromise, Nietzschean anti-historicism, and idealist leanings—the article reveals the limits of his project. Ultimately, Walling's legacy lies in his paradoxical role: a bridge between Second International economism and later Marxist humanism, whose flaws illuminate broader challenges in adapting Marxism and its readings.</p>","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 3","pages":"321-330"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70047","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148909837","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}
{"title":"At the Margins of the Modern State","authors":"Alessandro Ferrara","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70066","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 3","pages":"428-429"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148910015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why We Shouldn't Trust Institutions: Critical Theory and the Case for Radical Distrust","authors":"Zohreh Khoban","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70058","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Low and declining levels of trust in public institutions—organizations such as universities, hospitals, museums, courts, and parliaments that are established and operated by the state to serve the public interest—are often perceived as a threat to democracy. For example, past studies have found that distrust in government institutions decreases compliance with government regulations, respect for the law, and conventional modes of political participation (see Levi and Stoker <span>2000</span>). This decline has, in turn, been assumed to erode the vitality of democracy and undermine democratic processes (see Dalton <span>2004</span>). Many researchers, opinion makers, politicians, and public officials have thus diagnosed a “political trust crisis” (see van der Meer <span>2017</span>).</p><p>However, a lack of support for public institutions need not be detrimental to democracy. Democracies emerge from a distrust of powerful elites (Warren <span>2018</span>), and distrust has been argued to prevent the wealthy from ruling in their own interests and to help secure popular control (Allard-Tremblay <span>2015</span>). Furthermore, prior studies have established that trust in political institutions is relatively low in established democracies and that in recent decades declining or fluctuating trust has been accompanied by relatively high and stable support for democratic principles (van der Meer <span>2017</span>). Work in this area has suggested that this indicates political vigilance (Rosanvallon <span>2008</span>) or the rise of the “critical” citizen who is dissatisfied with democracy because they have high democratic aspirations (Dalton <span>2005</span>; Norris <span>1999</span>, <span>2011</span>).</p><p>The “critical” and “vigilant” citizen has come to be accepted as a resource for democracy. A range of factors explains their distrust, including growing cognitive and civic skills, evolving self-expressive values, and the failure of the state to match the public's expectations regarding democracy and policy performance (see Norris <span>2011</span>). Krishnamurthy (<span>2015</span>) makes the case that distrust can serve democracy by protecting minorities from tyranny. However, to the best of my knowledge, the theoretical framework of distrust as a resource for democracy has not considered structural power and structural injustices as grounds for distrust. The literature has overlooked the fact that public institutions (including democratic institutions) uphold and reproduce structural power relations that constantly need to be identified and criticized to deepen democracy.</p><p>This article introduces a new layer to the discussion of how institutional distrust can bolster democracy. Drawing on theories of radical democracy and applying a critical theoretical perspective to the relationship between trust and democracy, I argue that the main requirement of institutional trust—confidence in the benevolence and competence of institutions—is di","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 3","pages":"380-390"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70058","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148909835","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}
{"title":"Weaving Political Identities: Jean-Luc Nancy, Empedocles, and (the Later) Plato","authors":"Benjamin Hutchens","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70020","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Since Anaxagoras offered us a homoeomeric view of substance, Empedocles a conception of a principled blending of elements, and the Plato of <i>Theaetetus</i>, <i>Sophist</i>, <i>Statesman</i>, and <i>Philebus</i> a robust conception of blending (properties, syllables, and kinds), Western metaphysics has been perplexed by the problem of mixture: What can be combined? Does it maintain its essence when mixed? Is there a limit to the number of combinations? Can things of different kinds mix? Does the mixture form a unity? Does the notion of mixture challenge our idea of kinds, and indeed, objects, themselves?</p><p>These questions become more complicated when one looks not at abstract objects but at actual cultures and persons. Jean-Luc Nancy has written extensively about “identity” in language and metaphysics, with perhaps the most focused study being his work titled “Identity and Trembling.” Addressing identity in the Hegelian system, Nancy explores the internal and external relations that constitute what is identified. He describes a number of operations (or functions) performed by what is identified on itself and that it performs on itself by means of itself. Differences constitute what is identified. What is identified, what identifies, that by means of which they are related, and how they are different from one another—these are all differents that constitute identity. What is identified makes a difference by introducing these differences into being. We might especially pay attention to the identity objects that are identical have, as well as their difference. This identity, which makes identical things identical, Nancy says, is “indifferent”: it is not different from anything. Only such an identity can make another identity “different” from another. All objects with an identity “have” this indifferent identity. Only something capable of actively relating to itself can be identical in this sense. Then it is capable, one might say, of being open to differences that are not merely aspects of itself (Nancy <span>1993</span>: 9–11). In this creative interpretation of Hegel, Nancy learns that these formal aspects of identity and difference are inadequate for understanding singularity, plurality, or what he calls “being-singular-plural.”</p><p>Such a sterile, formal notion of identity, as he understands it, excludes everything of importance to him. The matter of purification and mélange/mêlée is addressed in a less rigorous essay titled “Eulogy for the Mêlée” and later in his <i>Identity</i>. In these works, Nancy has offered a much celebrated ontology of “being-singular-plurality,” an effort to balance an emphasis on what one might call a radical singularity more basic than any identity, and a plurality that is not reducible to some quantitative multiple. It is a singularity without essential ingredients or necessary conditions, parts without either sum or whole, a changing plurality of relations and trajectories without identity: an “identity” t","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 2","pages":"185-193"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203121","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}
{"title":"Social Critique and Psychoanalysis? Problems, Variants, and the Critique of Suffering","authors":"Simon Heyny","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 2","pages":"234-244"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148202974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy, , Talia Mae Bettcher University of Minnesota Press, 2025","authors":"Jules Wong","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70054","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 2","pages":"306-308"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148202978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making AI Work: A Critical Theory of AI Production","authors":"Rosalie Waelen, Jean-Philippe Deranty","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70053","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In 1930, critical theorist Max Horkheimer described modern society as a skyscraper, in which each level represents a different social layer (<span>1978</span>, 66–67). Horkheimer explained that the top of the skyscraper is occupied by the capitalists, right below them are wealthy landowners and those with powerful jobs, followed by professionals like professors and engineers. Further down the tower are craftsmen, grocers, and farmers. Down the bottom, “the unskilled and the permanently unemployed, the poor, the aged and the sick.” Even below that, “we encounter the actual foundation of misery on which this structure arises,” Horkheimer writes, arguing that the existence of modern capitalist societies is based entirely on the exploitation of this majority world. In “this house of present-day mankind,” he concludes, its basement “is a slaughterhouse, its roof a cathedral, but from the windows of the upper floors, it affords a really beautiful view of the starry heavens.”</p><p>Through an analysis of the ways in which AI workers are misrecognized, this article shows that the AI industry resembles the skyscraper that Horkheimer described. Horkheimer wrote that those on the top floors of the skyscraper would be “dizzy” if they were to look down and see the foundation of misery on which their comfort zones are built. By mapping the entire production chain of human labor that is needed to make AI work and by highlighting all the harms and wrongs that arise along that production chain, the article aims to make the reader dizzy.</p><p>Recent research and reports have pointed to various forms of hidden human labor involved in AI development—such as data annotation, content moderation, or other types of “microwork.” This research stems predominantly from the fields of law, sociology, and economic geography. However, so far, few scholars have approached the topic of AI labor in an all-encompassing manner, by considering <i>all</i> the different types of human labor needed to make AI work, that is, AI's entire production chain (noteworthy exceptions being Crawford and Joler <span>2018</span>; Fuchs <span>2014</span>; Muldoon, Graham, and Cant <span>2024</span>). Furthermore, while plenty have already emphasized that certain forms of AI labor are performed under precarious and exploitative conditions, the literature on this topic still lacks in-depth normative theorization. Under what conditions a labor practice can be called precarious or exploitative, and when and why these issues can be deemed unjust, are not self-evident matters from the viewpoint of ethics and social philosophy. This article therefore seeks to contribute to existing literature on AI labor, not only by drawing a comprehensive map of AI labor and its associated harms and wrongs but also by bringing forward a critical theory approach that helps us to better understand the injustices of the different harms and wrongs occurring along AI's long production chain.</p><p>The critique of AI labo","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 2","pages":"285-296"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70053","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203011","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}
{"title":"Brutalism","authors":"Kris F. Sealey","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70043","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 2","pages":"300-302"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148202960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Retrieving Eros: The Place of Nature in Feminist Critique of Capitalism","authors":"Helene Aarseth, Rebecca Lund","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70032","url":null,"abstract":"<p>After being out of vogue for some time, historical materialist theories of social reproduction are currently experiencing a revival (e.g., Bhattacharya <span>2017</span>; Ferguson <span>2020</span>; Federici <span>2020</span>). One of the major protagonists of this reengagement is Nancy Fraser. In her recent contributions, Fraser extends and strengthens feminist conceptions of the institutionalized split between the production of life and the optimization of profit. She provides new conceptions of how this contradiction, originally institutionalized as a gendered division of work, takes new forms and deepens in the course of capitalism's development. By analyzing this split in terms of expropriation rather than exploitation, Fraser (<span>2014a</span>) turns to the structural forces that drive this institutionalized split: capitalism's compulsion to maximize profit and, in the process, “diminish and extract” the sources it depends on—socio-reproductive activities being one of these sources. In short, the “capitalist economy simultaneously relies on and tends to destabilise its own social-reproductive conditions of possibility” (Fraser and Jaeggi <span>2018</span>, 35; see also Fraser <span>2014a</span>).</p><p>An important inspiration for this theoretical shift, moving from exploitation to expropriation, comes from ecological thinking (Fraser and Jaeggi <span>2018</span>, 11). The idea that nature's living organisms and ecosystems must replenish their life-sustaining capabilities enables Fraser to claim that there is a structural contradiction inherent in capitalism. Implicitly, then, she relies on a materialist notion of “necessary conditions” that, while shaped by historical processes, also poses limits to commodification and profit-optimization (Fraser <span>2014b</span>). When capitalism extracts resources that undermine nature's ability to self-replenish, its underlying contradictions manifest as a crisis. Fraser expands upon this logic to encompass polity and social reproduction of human subjects, human relationships, and their environments in her notion of dialectical contradictions. Yet, while accepting that an <i>external</i> “nature is an indispensable precondition for both social life in general and commodity production in particular” (Fraser <span>2014b</span>, 552), Fraser appears hesitant to engage with notions of <i>inner</i> human nature as an indispensable precondition for the “production” of human subjects.1 Apart from a brief reference to Adorno and Horkheimer's (<span>1997</span> [<span>1947</span>]) notion of nature “which ‘bites back’” in her dialogue with Rahel Jaeggi (Fraser and Jaeggi <span>2018</span>, 135), she avoids materialist notions of the human subject, where emotional mediation of inner drives and the external environment is a crucial component.2 Instead, she turns to relational conceptions of subject-formation linked to neo-Hegelian, Bourdieusian and Foucauldian theory to develop her conception of socio-repro","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 2","pages":"245-253"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148202985","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}
{"title":"The Aggrieved Subject: Culture Wars and Recognition Rights","authors":"Andrew Fagan","doi":"10.1111/1467-8675.70028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.70028","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Across the world presently there is a great deal to feel aggrieved about. Rising poverty and inequality expose many people within even many of the world's most affluent societies to lives of entirely preventable precarity and insecurity.1 Within and across many of the poorer and more politically unstable parts of the world, the lives of hundreds of millions of people are severely blighted by absolute poverty, armed conflict, political repression, and increasingly uninhabitable environments. Global warming and climate change adversely impact a great many lives in a multitude of ways.2 The interminable conflict between Ukraine and Russia has been punctuated by Vladimir Putin publicly contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons against NATO states.3 The effective lack of legal restraints upon Israel's retributive response to Hamas’ murderous attack of October 7, 2023 provides further evidence of the profound limitations of international law, even as a liberal democratic state allegedly perpetrates genocide against the Palestinians. 4 We have only very recently emerged from a devastating global pandemic in which, according to the World Health Organization, over 7 million people died and the financial costs of which continue to adversely impact many states.5</p><p>Disorder and crisis extend to affect many rights-based liberal democracies. A large gross domestic product (GDP) and established liberal democratic institutions offer limited and increasingly tenuous protection against external and internal mayhem. Thus, trust in government is declining sharply across the nation-states of the OECD.6 Many voters in many ostensibly liberal democratic states are increasingly drawn towards overtly authoritarian political parties and candidates who brazenly proclaim their illiberal commitments (Mounk <span>2019</span>; Muller <span>2016</span>). A growing number of liberal democracies have been and continue to be governed by openly authoritarian leaders, thereby raising the question of how much longer we may be able to label many of them as genuine liberal democracies7 (Freedom House <span>2024</span>). A growing number of people feel increasingly insecure and pessimistic about the future, which adds to and compounds widespread disenchantment with the liberal order amongst broad cross-sections of society (Ipsos Mori <span>2023</span>), Donald Trump's re-election as US President in 2024 provides the most eye-catching and arguably most consequential example of liberal democracy's descent into authoritarianism (Langfitt <span>2025</span>).</p><p>The palpable sense that our rights-based liberal order is in turmoil contrasts sharply with an earlier liberal triumphalism, which marked the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. According to many influential scholars, commentators, and political actors at the time, the implosion of liberal democracy's principal ideological adversary confirmed the moral legitimacy of the rights-","PeriodicalId":51578,"journal":{"name":"Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory","volume":"33 2","pages":"202-212"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8675.70028","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203088","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}